Paestum is a ruin near Naples, Italy. It dates to the seventh century BC. It was founded as a Greek colony, originally named Poseidonia. It coasted pretty good for 1400 years or so, until it was abandoned. They started digging it up in the 1800s. It got a good going over from invaders from Hannibal to Hitler, but there are lots of stuff still standing.
The Università degli Studi di Salerno has made a neato computer reconstruction of Paestum, and joined it at the hip with a kind of perfection in music –Ancient Airs and Dances by Respighi. Of course, it only has 48 views on YouTube, because Justin Bieber isn’t in it. But it’s pretty good anyway.
Hot sensible women. Even Marilyn Monroe took a run at the look and feel of it, wearing capri pants and a turtleneck, and holding one of her umpteenth husband Arthur Miller’s books upside down while lounging on a couch.
The fifties and pre-hippie sixties are always portrayed as stultifying for women in the current culture. I dunno. Blossom Dearie could really play and sing, and did, right until she died. She was plenty sophisticated. An urban fixture. Coquetteish and serious in turn. Midge was just a character in Vertigo, but movie characters reveal archetypes as well as any pop culture thing does. She was a bohemian in a garret and had the audience murmuring to themselves that Jimmy Stewart oughta ignore the brassy broad and towers and settle down with Barbara Bel Geddes and her squirrel-hair brushes. Serious was a kind of fun then.
The lyrics of that song are wry:
Peel me a grape, crush me some ice
Skin me a peach, save the fuzz for my pillow
Talk to me nice, talk to me nice
You’ve got to wine and dine me
Don’t try to fool me bejewel me
Either amuse me or lose me
I’m getting hungry, peel me a grape
Pop me a cork, french me a fry
Crack me a nut, bring a bowl full of bon-bons
Chill me some wine, keep standing by
Just entertain me, champagne me
Show me you love me, kid glove me
Best way to cheer me, cashmere me
I’m getting hungry, peel me grape
Here’s how to be an agreeable chap
Love me and leave me in luxury’s lap
Hop when I holler, skip when I snap
When I say, “do it,” jump to it
Send out for scotch, boil me a crab
Cut me a rose, make my tea with the petals
Just hang around, pick up the tab
Never out think me, just mink me
Polar bear rug me, don’t bug me
New Thunderbird me, you heard me
I’m getting hungry, peel me a grape
There you go, guys. That’s the Cliffs Notes to forty years of subscriptions to Cosmo. Make it so, and get your own Marilyn Monroe to read your book upside-down on your couch.
The Israelites was the first reggae song I can recall hearing. It came out the same year as the Beatles’ White Album. All sorts of things used to come out of the radio back then. Wonderful things. Odd things. Music got to be big business later on, so the whole process got roped and branded and leveled out quite a bit.
Desmond Dekker and Leslie Kong wrote The Israelites, and there’s Desmond singing it in the video. Desmond’s clothes have obviously been placed in his wardrobe by his enemies. Leslie Kong sounds like a pretty tough name for a guy, but he’s been dead since I was in eighth grade, so I guess he wasn’t built for the long haul. Anyway, it’s a marvelous piece of backwards backbeat.
It was the Jamaican version of Louie Louie, in that no one could agree on what the hell the lyrics were. Here’s as good a guess as any:
Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
so that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
So that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
My wife and my kids, they are packed up and leave me.
Darling, she said, I was yours to be seen.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
Shirt them a-tear up, trousers are gone.
I don’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
After a storm there must be a calm.
They catch me in the farm. You sound the alarm.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
Poor me, the Israelite.
I wonder who I’m working for.
Poor me, Israelite,
I look a-down and out, sir.
I remember how profoundly exotic that song sounded coming out of the radio the first time I heard it. It was backwards and sideways and their accents didn’t register as any I’d heard. It was a message from outer space, only warmer.
Dull people are more interesting than interesting people, generally.
These fellers aren’t putting on a phlegmatic act, as far as I can tell. They might be mugging for the camera for all we know; catch them on a regular day and they’d be cigar store Indians.
Businesses, even businesses that are interesting to people who aren’t customers like these boatbuilders, need sober and industrious people to take risks and stick to business. I grow weary of lamebrain pitchmen. Make something people want, and make money at it, and don’t fold your tent in the night five minutes after your first profit. Then you’re a businessman.
The random floes of life bumped and ground in the wake of the broken berg of everything. All was rimed with a frost. Breath revealed itself to the world, an empty bubble of words you didn’t say, passing away unheard. The earth was covered with a paste of dirt and snow that couldn’t decide if it was liquid or solid.
The police were there to watch you commit your crimes, and you watched them commit theirs in their turn. A light on at night was a burglary. A letter put in a box might go anywhere or nowhere, so you tended to say nothing to nobody.
Everyone wanted to be somewhere else, but there was nowhere else. The world had stopped spinning. The shops were full of a peculiar kind of nothing that you couldn’t afford and didn’t want anyway. People danced in disco terrariums and bumped against the glass that fronted the street like goldfish, surprised every time to see the same life outside. They had money for drugs to make them as uneasy as a sober person.
There were bars on the windows and flames licking around the mansard while hands reached out for escape while other hands reached in for the warmth. The fire died for want of fuel and the hands were all withdrawn.
The meters stood drunkenly at attention and shouted nothing but VIOLATION at pedestrians. Yes, we know, we muttered, and trudged on into the endless dusk.
Month: September 2012
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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