Reasons To Be Happy

A few discoveries have kept a smile on my face lately. Cole Porter and Clifford Brown and The Ink Spots. Cole Porter is songwriter with a ridiculous number of huge hits. His style and lyrics and cohesion would make Elton John and Bernie Taupin jealous. I especially like Let's Do It, which I heard in the movie Midnight in Paris because Owen Wilson's character goes back in time each night to 1928 when Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein and Picasso and Porter were all in Paris. Anything Goes is pretty good too. I knew he was a big name but his output was incredible because it seems he was writing a complete stage musical every few weeks and all these big hits are songs from those stage musicals.

I've been listening to Clifford Brown, jazz trumpeter from mid '50s. one of the fathers of cool jazz. If I'm going to listen to trumpet Jazz then it's going to be Clifford Brown.

And The Ink Spots are a quartet who performed When The Swallows Come Back to Capistrano in 1940. I don't think it gets any better than this. Cole Porter is equally as good but they are both at the top of the scale.



Lastly, I'm into Eubie Blake. He wrote the music for Memories of You. His parents were former slaves and he plays piano like he invented it.

When The Swallows Come Back To Capistrano

When The Swallows Come Back to Capistrano
1940
Written by: Leon Rene
Key F Major
4/4

I left the lyrics alone for this one because it's got a melody in the Pat Boone range that I don't want to destroy. The melody is enough to get the idea of the song. A girl left a guy and the guy is comparing her to the birds.
I first picked this out because it was WWII era tune that I want to compare to modern music that will be listened to when people want to talk about WWIII era music. I should point out that this specific piece of sheet music is from around 1940. It is not a reissue when Pat Boone made it famous 17 years later, but I can't isolate the exact year Russ Morgan and his Orchestra "The Morgan Manner" recorded or performed this. Morgan was popular along with Guy Lombardo at this time but he didn't score a notable hit with this song. Many artists recorded it and all the sheet music used the same blue background with the cave swallow on the front. Only the inset was changed which makes me wonder if the arrangement inside was different. This arrangement involves this upper register melancholy piano introduction. Do all the arrangements look like this? I wonder if other sheet music had different arrangements of if they all had identical music but the picture changed. That would be an interesting research project. I can count about 8 different reissues of this song with different artists and I know they didn't all record it in 1940. So Russ Morgan, Dinah Shore, The Ink Spots, Bobby Byrne, Shep Fields, Gray Gordon, Frankie Masters...I don't think they all performed this song in a single year. No. So, this song was released as sheet music every time someone else recorded it. They aren't going to change the copyright because that can stay the same but one artist might record it in 1941 and another in 1942 and they simply put a different picture on the cover. I would be surprised if there was a different arrangement too. Very surprised but I can't find a recording or a date for any of the artists. I know Glenn Miller recorded this in 1940 but he's not featured on any of the sheet music samples. And all these other artists don't have a recording, which makes sense because only Glenn Miller had the dough to record a big band. I don't know. It must be in the general area of WWII but I don't know exactly when this sheet music was printed.

Great melody here with easy on the fingers chords. F Bb, Eb, C7. And there's one little passage in A major so the flavor changes. I messed that part up the first time so I had to sweeten the tempo get another chance at it, but it really belongs in the 'lonesome me' tempo range. This song and Once in A While are all I need to know. I can fake the shit out of these songs.

Jinxed

Arctic Wolf Related Media

There's an Arctic wolf at 3:30.

I count about 5 distinct shots of an American Flag, which is noteworthy not only because it is really trite jingoism, but it's also misleading since the Alaskan Arctic isn't being contested and the Arctic that has "potential for development" is not America. But by imposing the flag on digital landscapes they are suggesting Ellesmere Island is America. It's not. It's Canadian. But with multi-national corporations in political power like Exxonmobile and Chevron, flags are interchangeable. For all I know some of these video shots are of Antarctica.

In the 2009 movie Avatar a group called "The Resources Development Administration" is what is on the planet Pandora searching for a rare metal called unobtanium. The year is 2154 and I forget how it's explained that in a mere 150 years we either locate a nearby planet named Pandora (how did we miss it?), or develop interstellar travel...all in the aim of finding resources since Earth has been depleted. I think if you left on the fastest rocket ship available at this very moment you would not arrive at the nearest solar system for 19,000 years. So that would be the year 21,015. Good luck booking a round trip ticket for something like that. This raises the same kind of question raise by the recent movie Interstellar, namely, if humans can develop civilizations in space then why is Earth needed? Also, if a self-supporting environment can be manufactured then why does it have to float around in space? Why not leave it on Earth? Maybe the cartoon sequel to Avatar will answer these questions. The movie did nothing for me because I'm not 13 year old anymore and cartoons are only cool when I eat LSD at the same time. The $400 million price tag on the movie also made me sick when it was attached to a movie that 'raises environmental awareness'. That's just phony bullshit propaganda. Avatar absolutely is a generic 'moral transformation' story reused a dozen times. Avatar was different because it's mostly animation or animatronics or advanced rotoscoping and also live action. I would recommend Watership Down (1978) or Silent Running (1972) if you want to raise your awareness about anything.

Avatar was also released as I was starving to death in Laconia. I had to sneak in through an open emergency exit door in order to watch it in an empty theater during a blizzard. I wanted to see what counted for an "environmental awareness movie" in 2009 and of course it horrified me. The fact I was at that very moment hung up on my own environmental quest to see the Arctic Wolf, a quest that I believed was a stronger and more original concept with compelling sub-plots...but had a promotion budget of $0, really irked me. Cameron gets $400 million to fill the pockets of computer geeks sitting behind animation computers in the Superfund site known as San Jose...and he's calling himself an eco-activist. I'm trying to physically visit the Arctic wolf to save the future of humanity while wearing recycled pants and I'm called a lunatic. Really depressing scenario. I felt like Travis in Taxi Driver (1976) at the porn theater.

If I just had $1000 I could've left Laconia and driven a snowmobile to Labrador.


Well, this Arctic Potential Report is something that 'The Resources Development Administration' would produce. Gleaming faces with comforting sounds and misappropriated wildlife images. American flags. Gross.

And of course the nail in my neck is the image of the Arctic Wolf, the object of my quest in 2009-2012, being used casually like the animal was happy to assist in propaganda designed for the destruction of its homeland.

This is an unavoidable development. The Arctic has been exploited for 100 years and with the complete loss of Summer ice sheet in a few years the onslaught will commence. California got 8% of the average snowpack this past winter. The wolf in this video will be gunned down, seals slaughtered. All for oil to serve 8 Billion meat puppets and their pets.

Wolf Quest Part VIII: Why Wolves?

I left off in Part VI once I managed to get the van started again near Mont Groulx and instead of wisely turning around and driving south, I pushed all my chips into the middle and headed north on the only road in all of northern Quebec, Route 389. Labrador City lay like a gleaming emerald on the horizon and maybe if I could sort out all the problems with the van then I could continue the quest further north to Ellesmere Island where I would see the Arctic wolf with my own eyes. But this is a good chance to explore why wolves became the goal of my quest.

Recall that it was on Puta Lobo in Baja California that I had a vision about a trans-continental journey during the dark economic recession caused by land hungry financial consultants. Puta Lobo probably is dedicated to a coyote, not a wolf, as Puta Coyote doesn't have the same ring to it. But coyotes, not wolves, are what live in the desert. I thought, if I've never visited Labrador, the only political boundary in North America that I've yet to visit, then I should have a good reason. And the wolf quest started to take shape. But it actually started earlier than that.