soundcloud - my music - god bless the child

Godbless  by  user1620611

The above is by me.  It's the famous Billie Holiday tune.  Last year, I read Donald Clarke's  Billie Holiday, Wishing on the Moon a loosely organized biography with extensive interview transcripts from people who knew her, transcripts Clark inherited from someone who had started the interview process shortly after her death.  It's a great read, but not a happy one.  She was a force of nature, and the world didn't treat her well.

One of the main contributors was Jimmy Rowles, the great pianist.  He's probably not much remembered.  Here's his picture:

The Death of Rythm and Blues

Bart’s CD Cellar in Boulder is closing.  Apparently it hasn’t been independently owned for awhile.  Whoever they were sold out so a chain and the chain is having bank problems.  Even though Bart’s remains profitable it couldn’t be saved or corporate couldn’t be bothered.

Barnes and Noble moved to its new “super store” but the CD section is maybe 20% of its non-super self.  (The department has been cut in half but is still kind of decent.)

There’s a lot that could be said about this and Don Pareles says a lot of it in today’s Times.  But I don’t see how anybody can earn a living in the music business – anywhere on the food chain.

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I just read this by Alex Ross.  More interesting than the Times and closer to the bone.  But I'm less optimistic than is he.

Pleasures of Proust

I’m not sure I’ve accomplished much, but I am certain that getting three people started on Proust counts for something.  I’ve been randomly re-reading and just finished the account on the narrator’s grandmother’s death, which is the first section of Part II of The Guermantes Way.  It’s only 31 pages long.

Now Remembrance of Things Past  is certainly not an easy read and getting started is something of a long haul.  Seemingly hundreds of pages elapse before anything happens, including the famous madeleine.  Unfortunate, perhaps, because Swan’s Way is actually the most conventional novel of the group.

In any case, Proust has a reputation for being obscure, hieratic, tenebrous, gloomy, perverted and metaphysical in the worst way.  Yet after reading the section on the grandmother’s death, harrowing as it is, the term that came to mind was Mozartian.  Or maybe de Ponteian.  The ensemble effects and the acute characterization of the different social classes, the telling details, the deftly drawn supporting characters,  the phenomenal craftsmanship, the humor and pathos all could come right out of Figaro.  As could the exceptional tact and delicacy of sentiment.

Proust, like Wagner, whom he admired, is not generally amenable to being excerpted.   The notion of time become space is central both.  Likewise, both achieve their greatest effects by making us wait and both are unreasonably demanding of our time.

But if you want to get a sense of the humble, domestic pleasures of classical narrative to be found in Proust’s great work, check out the mere 31 pages I’ve selected for your consideration

The above image is the cover of "Paintings in Proust" which includes reproductions of all the (real) paintings discussed in the book.  It went out of print almost immediately - I suspect the London publishing house had financial trouble.  But it's available now for around $30.  Buy it.

The uninitiated should know Proust knew a great deal about painting and wrote about it extensively in his book.  The "unreal" paintings are those painted by his characters.