Ordinary Music

In my never-ending quest for a wide, thin layer of knowledge of all sorts so I can annoy the hell out of anyone within earshot, this week I revisited a short piece of classical music. It was written by Johann Pachelbel a few hundred years ago, but never quite caught on at the time and remained obscure. A pity because it is quite hummable.

Obscure, that is, until 1980, when Robert Redford decided to direct his first movie, which was called Ordinary People and was an excellent film. The soundtrack of the movie featured Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major and made it a flat-out hit. Go figure.

Whenever it shows up on radio I will still pause and give it a listen. Beautiful.

But … there’s more. I learned that many pop songs have been written which were based on this tune. It’s not unusual for a pop composer to rip off the classics, but sooooo many? Here’s a nice British guy named David Bennett, to give us a little education.

Quite a little talker, isn’t he? But interesting.

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No rain that amounts to anything for more than a month now. Everything in town that isn’t watered is crispy. ‘Twas not the best year to have a large bunch of tomato plants, perhaps, they are thirsty little devils. But the first fruits are now ripening.

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I’ve not been a fan of Nikki Haley’s. She left me behind when she joined the Cluck team, and it doesn’t help that she is a member of a political party presently in thrall to its most rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth faction. But at a political event this past week she gave a compassionate and thoughtful response to a serious question.

The question was:

“You said on TV that women who get abortions should not be put in jail and should not be subject to the death penalty. But how exactly should women who get illegal abortions — women like me — how do you specifically think we should be punished?”

And Haley’s answer was:

“In order for us to have a federal law, we’re going to have to have consensus. What does that consensus look like? Can’t we all agree that we don’t want late-term abortion? Can’t we all agree that we want to encourage more adoptions and good-quality adoption so that children feel more love, not less? Can’t we all agree that doctors and nurses who don’t believe in abortion shouldn’t have to perform them? Can’t we all agree that contraception should be accessible? And can’t we all agree that a woman who gets an abortion should not be subject to the death penalty or get arrested? That’s where I think we start — we start, and we do it with a level of respect. No more demonizing this issue. We’re going to humanize this issue. I had a roommate who was raped in college. I wouldn’t wish on anyone what she went through, wondering if she was OK. Everybody has a story. Let’s be respectful of everybody’s story, and let’s figure out what we can do together instead of sitting there and tearing each other apart.”

I couldn’t agree more with her – “No more demonizing this issue”.

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Went to see the movie Oppenheimer this week. It did not disappoint. Christopher Nolan directed the film. It’s amazing, but he has managed to put together a body of work that contains no comic book characters at all. Who knew you could do that?

I know that we aren’t done with the comic-book franchise movies yet. That point will be announced by a film title something along this line: Donald Duck versus the Fantastic Four – Quackalypse!

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A woman with a stronger moral compass than most of us passed away this week. Sinead O’Connor has died at age 56. Hers was a unique voice that often cut through the hypocrisy and deliberate blindness that we use to keep ourselves comfortable. In 1992 she became famous (or infamous depending on your point of view) for her performance on Saturday Night Live, a brave performance that harmed her career and caused her to be banned from the show.

Here is that SNL moment.

When she tore up the picture of the pope, the child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church had already been roaring for five years in Ireland, but America had been sleeping through it all, and was still able to be shocked at a photograph being torn. Of course we learned that O’Connor was right, that there was a world of children whose lives were being damaged, all around us. A world so large and so repugnant that at first we couldn’t believe its size and its horrors.

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For me, there is a song of hers that could be her epitaph if music could somehow be inscribed on a stone. It is from the musical Evita.

Brings a tear every time.

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I mentioned the movie Oppenheimer. It is a full-bore three hour sensory assault on the viewer’s brain, one where you are rarely given a moment to relax and compose yourself. The soundtrack is a mixture of music that is recognizable as such, along with a bewildering cacophony of clanks and hammer sounds and boots stomping and I have no idea what else, banging around in those surround speakers.

Christopher Nolan doesn’t love linear moviemaking, where one scene neatly segues into the next. In fact, there isn’t a single good segue in the entire three hours. He goes back and forth in time and memories and imaginations and events and somehow the bomb gets built and dropped off. We are spared all but a filmy suggestion of how dreadful it all was at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We went with friends, and while we each said that we liked it, all four brows were furrowed when we exited the theater. The group conclusion was that we had experienced something extraordinary, but we weren’t quite sure what it was. That we should see it again was our concluding advice to one another.

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But, and here is the cautionary note, they still pressed the button when the time came.

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