Last Resort

I'm having all kinds of problems finding place to start writing about Santa Cruz. I excuse myself because this is a traumatic era and my keyboard has a shift key that's sort of sticking and I'm troubled because of intestinal worms and possible mental decay and a long list of other life details to draw my attention from this project. I am not leaving Guatemala until this project has a substantial progress. It's a life goal and involves dramatizing something that is rarely understood. But not in the normal Oggy fashion, which I'm about to delve into, but in a Russia style, embracing the vast opera, the homeless cast of dereliction and emotional refugees, detailing the dirt beneath their nails, the meek expressions they have, all evidence of a broken spirit. Some were not adult children, some had surrendered to circumstance. Some were passing through and some were students of humanity but had elements of all the above. I considered writing the entire thing as a first person recollection, an indictment of myself and my past to shove it down the throats of the reader, brutalize and humiliate them, pull no punches in my attempt to injure those whose stultifying ignorance made them look like wounded cows next to an electric fence with their mouths gaping and chewing cud with flies nesting near their eyes while my brethren were led to slaughter. Motherfucking impotent cunts, my disdain has no words and that's the problem. Because I witnessed the homeless holocaust and smug elite pissed on their graves with no knowledge of anything except their own hidden shame, I have to find better words. I'm dealing with bread dead people, horses without eyes plodding toward some mystical carrot and my ordinary essays will not have an impact with that kind of idiot. I need to step up the game beyond anything I've written before because I don't want to preach to the choir; I want to burn the church down. Metaphorically, of course.

How does one do that? And there are so many anecdotes that I've reflected on in misery and self-loathing nostalgia. I will share one with you in order to move ahead with this madness.

The Bells of St. Mary

The Bells of St. Mary's
Words by Douglas Furber
Music by A. Emmett Adams
1937 1917

Key: F major

This illustration looks like it's from 1750, and that's not the right church.

The range on this song is beyond my comfort level so I'll spare you a vocal version. The problem will be comparing this published sheet music with the version Bing Crosby sings 7 years hence in 1945 in the movie of the same name with Ingrid Bergman. That version totally drops the 6/8 sea shanty introduction, jumps right to the Refrain...and changes those lyrics too. I'm trying to avoid songs made famous by Bing Crosby and even though this song predates him, Crosby made the song famous at the end of WWII as Father O'Malley showing up at a Catholic school and charming the sister in charge (Bergman). I don't want to analyze these movies but I will point out that in 1944 Bing Crosby first appeared as Father O'Malley in Going My Way, and won a best actor Oscar. That's high praise for a lounge singer. As near as I can determine this role was the perfect match for Crosby's public persona; O'Malley is kind of a fallen angel, he dresses in street clothes, drinks, plays golf, hardly seems devout and seems to be pining for the girl he left behind when he joined the priesthood. It's a strange role and the only way I can describe him is like Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, except in a priest's robe. He seems to wander the earth looking for trouble and then solving everything with charm and a song before drifting back off to another adventure. Well, 1944's role was so good they immediately put him back in action with Bells of St. Mary in 1945 and that's where he sings this song I found in my box of dusty music. It is interesting to note that I watched an unrelated movie of Bergman's at cine club in Mexico. Me and three Mexican men watching a grainy version of Stromboli (1950) in Castilian, Spanish in some kind of Italian dialect with Spanish subtitles, Directed by Roberto Rosellini. I had no idea what was going on and I kind of fell into a trance, nodding off like an old man, until the lights came up and I had almost no idea where on earth I was. Maybe a Mediterranean Island, maybe Labrador, Texas, Mexico, Ecuador. It had all blended together and I was truly lost and forlorn, speechless. Well, Bergman and Rosellini were married to other people at the time, and that didn't stop them from having children together, first a son and then twin girls, one named Isabella, the other named Ingrid, and getting divorced from their respective spouses and getting married...and this scandal was, in Bergman's words, exacerbated by the fact American audiences had "Seen me as a nun and thought I was pure, but I am only a woman." I had wondered what she was talking about at that time...and now I know...she's talking about her 1945 role as a Sister Mary Benedict at a troubled Catholic school opposite Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary's, which is the title of a song written in 1937 by two blokes from England. Well, she fled Hollywood for Italy and had to stay there about 10 years until American standards eroded to the point it was acceptable to applaud a harlot and temptress.

Patriots Finally Win Their 4th.

Pats fans have watched two superior Patriots teams lose in the Superbowl and tonight a slightly inferior team beats their equal. I don't want to analyze this game but it should reinforce the notion that anything can happen. The game could've been decided by a bunch of plays. The game is 60 minutes long and the first minute is as important as the last minute but we usually only remember the last minute. But because the first minute is as important as the last there really can never be a single play that decides the game. All sports fans have this law taught to them and some refuse to learn it. The Bill Buckner play will haunt Red Sox fans but it took 10 innings to get to that point and lots of pitches, lots of plays. Jim Rice gets thrown out at the plate. Schiraldi pitches his third inning of relief for the first time of the year, after two innings of horrible pitching. Clemens fails on three sac bunt attempts. Oh, I wrote a book about this topic which is mostly unreadable nonsense, but it gave me some closure on the event. If we could do things differently then it's possible the one play we'd change wouldn't be the one everyone talks about. It might be some play in the 2nd quarter that was critical. They are all important plays and it's a team sport and there's always a next season to redeem yourself.

Hard On The Mind

After my recent rant about the lack of modern protest songs I could hear people thinking "What's stopping Oggy from writing a protest song of his own?" Mainly, my point is that there are quality singers and musicians and producers with abundant current event material who are opting to continually beat down the topic of sex and dancing and 'boo hoo my boyfriend cheated on me'. I accept that eight of ten songs on an album can be about those topics. yes. But what the fucking hell is wrong with y'all? not 10 out of 10! Please can you write one or two songs every two years about politics, AIDS, ebola or somehing that shows your public school education was not totally squandered on keeping you out of jail.

Well, I am not as talented a performer as Bruno Mars. That's the issue. So me writing a song about the rain forest and Bruno Mars writing the same song are not the same.

Pastel Orgasms: A Review of Music from 1985

It's interesting that I wrote a review of music from 1984 almost exactly a year ago as part of my nostalgic obsession. It's one thing to research music from 1943 and write essays and play songs by artists I never listened to previously and even artists my parents never listened to and possibly artists my grandparents never heard of. Obscure artists from 1936 or 1925 or 1904. I like that as a project to expand my appreciation of pop music and to develop the skills of research and cross referencing so that I might sound like I know what I'm talking about. Ok. But it's a totally different deal to write about music that I grew up with, and it's an even bigger deal to write about music that was released when I was a Freshman in High School. And it's an even bigger deal to write about music that was released at what could be considered the peak of American pop music in the '80s. I claim it peaked in 1985 because I only see a decline in originality and eclecticism and creativity from 1986 on. It was like artists in 1985 didn't listen to the radio at that time or didn't care. Nothing sounded derivative in 1985, but in 1986 I detect a certain tired approach. In fact, I will not write reviews for music years past 1989 because commercial decisions were made that undermined the entire output and led to Rock Bottom, otherwise known as the Gin Blossoms. 

Allow me to digress...