You can sing Sinatra Stuff, Can't you?
Posted by Pete Dizozza on 12/19/2003, 4:13 pm
"You keep saying you got something for me, something you call love but confess..."
Lee Hazelwood.
Both Frank and Tony Bennett began with these almost generically pleasant voices.
Tony Bennett doesn't strike me as psychotically maintaining his career. His smoking just created his now unmistakable voice, and his general pleasantness shines through.
I think the velvet fog describes the also pleasant Mel Torme voice (I like his recording of "Again").
Apparently, Frank hurt his voice singing and he needed to turn to acting, after appearing to great hilarity in MGM musical films. I saw some parts of some of them. Maybe, amazingly, he started in a classic, On the Town with songs mostly by Leonard Bernstein and Comden and Green ("New York New York a helluva wonderful town not to be confused with "Wonderful Town," by Bernstein, Comden and Green with, currently, Donna Murphy, live, which is probably very wonderful indeed.)
The mgm film of Jerome Kern songs, Til The Clouds Roll By, features his rendition of "Old Man River." So funny... "lands in jaillllll --- no breath --- I gets weary ...." that is a funny event.
stupider was anchors aweigh, the one with gene kelly dancing with one of those terrytoons.
So without a heartthrob voice, frank needed a film career without singing and the getting of the role is the robert evans godfather movie horror scene of the producer with the horse's head. (Another italian descent singer plays the frank role in the film. They say he knocked up who, Ava Gardner?)
The book, From Here to Eternity, was followed by a book about an author who had just written a big hit novel, From Here to Eternity, and was trying to write another. It's called SOME CAME RUNNING, and its film has a wild Shirley MacLane cameo, and Dean Martin as the sidekick to the author, portrayed by the actor who was formerly the skinny obnoxious victim killed by marty Borgnine in the prior acadamy award winner of the downtrodden bored militia stationed at pearl harbor.
It's like Norman Mailer following Naked and Dead with Deer Park... the film is the return of debonair Sinatra (directed by Vincent Minelli). James Jones wrote those books..
Frank pulled Manchurian Candidate after Kennedy's murder, yet he actually played the oswald role in Suddenly.
Sinatra recorded mostly great songs. In fact, that's his phenomenon.
He slowed down songs while increasing the speed of the beat beneath them.
Also, the slidy gruff vocal quality, under his obsessive control, became innovative, microtonal....
Finally, at that low point in his treasured career when Nelson Riddle's orchestra announced his new voice like a sunrise and he declaims,
"I've got the world on a string, sitting on a rainbow," the only good thing, the one reason to lift him (and us) out of the depths of despair is that song.
As for that once ubiquitous song of songs, New York New York, remember: Frank Sinatra is a singer who chose to highlight the most important of ampersands... Aaaaaaaaaannnnnnd.
Friday, December 19, 2003
Monday, August 18, 2003
Do you hear the song of a music box? It sounds the hope of ice cream.
There isn't a melody I have heard as many times as this one.
It plays through once then plays again. It blurs my sense of reason.
It's up to me to concentrate but still I blame that ice cream truck.
And even the blackout could not deter the call of Mr. Softy.
The silence around it helped isolate its musical invasion.
That's why I'm glad when this ice cream truck leaves.
-- as for turning out the lights every now and again. Yes!
There isn't a melody I have heard as many times as this one.
It plays through once then plays again. It blurs my sense of reason.
It's up to me to concentrate but still I blame that ice cream truck.
And even the blackout could not deter the call of Mr. Softy.
The silence around it helped isolate its musical invasion.
That's why I'm glad when this ice cream truck leaves.
-- as for turning out the lights every now and again. Yes!
Monday, July 07, 2003
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
News flash. In keeping with the karaoke mood, Diana and I were singing, My Eyes Adored You (So Close and Yet So Far), and there, in front of us, another tragedy, the event of which was substantially over, its after-effects reverberating into mere everyday occurrence, UNLESS YOU TELL ME OTHERWISE. WHAT HAPPENED HERE?
We were experiencing the transitory stillness of 5PM Saturday becoming sunny and warmer, walking along Irving Place to the car to go to Connecticut again, this time to Greenwich to attend a piano concert of children, ages 8-10, the students of one particular piano teacher, one particular student being Diana’s nephew.
The last time, last summer, (June 6, 2002) we were going to Liam’s wedding, a similarly radical separation from our day-to-day existence. Driving along route 54 we came upon a doe, its side smashed by the front of a car zipping round the bend. At first stunned, it popped into life to run wild, frothing, bleeding, red innards escaping from it rump, bashing walls and fences, finding its way down the valley to the shade and the water, Diana ready to take in the entirety of the deer’s internal disruptions. We prolonged our experience of the agony, basically until the deer disappeared down the hill never to be seen again. The other car drivers assured us they would call the ambulance. We were late for the wedding. With much difficulty, we I extricated ourselves.
Diana entered the mind of the deer.
Why aren’t people more careful? It’s a hot afternoon. The deer are coming from the forest, crossing the street to gain access to the lake. The poor deer become so thirsty then, pow, (This reminds me now of the fantastic moment in “my cousin vinny,” when Marisa Tomei relates to the deer encountering the deer hunter.)
In the months that followed, Diana and I acquired and developed various ailments from the physical and emotional strain we assumed from the event. It looked as if we had finally recovered when…
This time, Saturday, May 17th, 2003, eleven and a half months later, as we were walking to the car, we came upon a pretty girl who had just smashed a glass menu frame, a table, some flowerpots, having bent the wrought iron fence enclosing the outdoor dining of the cursedly stupefying Sal Anthony’s. Yes, it’s 55 Irving Place and the unknown girl dropped herself off the fourth floor window ledge of a colonial historic building with floor to ceiling bay windows enclosed by more of that historic wrought iron fencing.
The New York Times reported the very next day about the Street of Irving Place and its history. It’s Samuel Ruggles Place, but he felt like naming it after Washington Irving while he was, in 1830, developing Gramercy Park into the delightful enclave that it remains to this day.
It’s as if her gesture of dropping in on siesta time, as an obscene heap, without a care for her blue underwear, was a non-issue after the fact, and before the fact she was apparently dangling her legs over the ledge, not thereby garnering the dramatic attention associated with people trying to stop her, but to some lucky recipient, perhaps a 75 year old smoker suddenly obscenely rejuvenated with his 24 year old girl heart, she was a harvest.
Bellevue can bring her back to life, and they did, pow, to keep those organs alive, awaiting transplant permission from her parents. Just her brain was dead.
The real monster falls crashing to the floor, gets up and walks away, and is he or she ever mad!
After the piano recital, we went to Cabrini, then to Bellevue in search of her (Saturday evenings at the Emergency Rooms tend to be quiet.).
That night I dreamt that rather than stopping us at the door, the nurse let us in. Ms. Unknown was brain dead, all right, smiling and chatting away, saying hello and, I am NOT a baby, as she slithered off the bed to the floor, her reddened membranes exposed as she shrunk smaller and smaller. The nurse came in, to reattach life support, reminding us again, her brain is dead.
Diana entered the mind of the girl. She was so alone sitting indecisively on the ledge, her legs dangling over, and then, after smashing the table, the plant pots and the wrought iron fence, people came from everywhere to surround her.
The police and ambulance quietly arrived within 10 minutes of our arriving there, blocking traffic and dispersed. A street-fair along Third Avenue was winding down. We rushed through the traditional traffic of I95 to get to Greenwich. The Sal Anthony maitre ‘d suggested we send condolences care of the super at 55 Irving Place, apt 1A.
We were experiencing the transitory stillness of 5PM Saturday becoming sunny and warmer, walking along Irving Place to the car to go to Connecticut again, this time to Greenwich to attend a piano concert of children, ages 8-10, the students of one particular piano teacher, one particular student being Diana’s nephew.
The last time, last summer, (June 6, 2002) we were going to Liam’s wedding, a similarly radical separation from our day-to-day existence. Driving along route 54 we came upon a doe, its side smashed by the front of a car zipping round the bend. At first stunned, it popped into life to run wild, frothing, bleeding, red innards escaping from it rump, bashing walls and fences, finding its way down the valley to the shade and the water, Diana ready to take in the entirety of the deer’s internal disruptions. We prolonged our experience of the agony, basically until the deer disappeared down the hill never to be seen again. The other car drivers assured us they would call the ambulance. We were late for the wedding. With much difficulty, we I extricated ourselves.
Diana entered the mind of the deer.
Why aren’t people more careful? It’s a hot afternoon. The deer are coming from the forest, crossing the street to gain access to the lake. The poor deer become so thirsty then, pow, (This reminds me now of the fantastic moment in “my cousin vinny,” when Marisa Tomei relates to the deer encountering the deer hunter.)
In the months that followed, Diana and I acquired and developed various ailments from the physical and emotional strain we assumed from the event. It looked as if we had finally recovered when…
This time, Saturday, May 17th, 2003, eleven and a half months later, as we were walking to the car, we came upon a pretty girl who had just smashed a glass menu frame, a table, some flowerpots, having bent the wrought iron fence enclosing the outdoor dining of the cursedly stupefying Sal Anthony’s. Yes, it’s 55 Irving Place and the unknown girl dropped herself off the fourth floor window ledge of a colonial historic building with floor to ceiling bay windows enclosed by more of that historic wrought iron fencing.
The New York Times reported the very next day about the Street of Irving Place and its history. It’s Samuel Ruggles Place, but he felt like naming it after Washington Irving while he was, in 1830, developing Gramercy Park into the delightful enclave that it remains to this day.
It’s as if her gesture of dropping in on siesta time, as an obscene heap, without a care for her blue underwear, was a non-issue after the fact, and before the fact she was apparently dangling her legs over the ledge, not thereby garnering the dramatic attention associated with people trying to stop her, but to some lucky recipient, perhaps a 75 year old smoker suddenly obscenely rejuvenated with his 24 year old girl heart, she was a harvest.
Bellevue can bring her back to life, and they did, pow, to keep those organs alive, awaiting transplant permission from her parents. Just her brain was dead.
The real monster falls crashing to the floor, gets up and walks away, and is he or she ever mad!
After the piano recital, we went to Cabrini, then to Bellevue in search of her (Saturday evenings at the Emergency Rooms tend to be quiet.).
That night I dreamt that rather than stopping us at the door, the nurse let us in. Ms. Unknown was brain dead, all right, smiling and chatting away, saying hello and, I am NOT a baby, as she slithered off the bed to the floor, her reddened membranes exposed as she shrunk smaller and smaller. The nurse came in, to reattach life support, reminding us again, her brain is dead.
Diana entered the mind of the girl. She was so alone sitting indecisively on the ledge, her legs dangling over, and then, after smashing the table, the plant pots and the wrought iron fence, people came from everywhere to surround her.
The police and ambulance quietly arrived within 10 minutes of our arriving there, blocking traffic and dispersed. A street-fair along Third Avenue was winding down. We rushed through the traditional traffic of I95 to get to Greenwich. The Sal Anthony maitre ‘d suggested we send condolences care of the super at 55 Irving Place, apt 1A.
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Friday, March 28, 2003
Is this where I assemble the silliest strings of words? I suppose so. This is called, "A Union of In-Laws" and draws from a suggestion I received from another and refers to a wall street journal on-line extra editorial by, well, here goes.
On March 24th, 2003, echoing the title of Leni Reifenstal's 1938 Olympics film, Triumph of the Will, Peggy Noonan announced, with the invasion of Iraq, that we are witnessing the triumph of activism over fatalism (Among the actions not taken, consider: Saddam's sons, George's daughters, we never saw any efforts to bring together these perfect couples, and the possibility of solving with a wedding, in the tradition of the great rulers, any conflicts of interest with a union of in-laws. Can anyone suggest other actions?) Well, don't just stand there. We must do something, but let's
do it for a purpose
'cause to later find a purpose
is a steeper uphill struggle
than the purpose set in place
at the outset.
Hey, what WAS that at the outset? Is there reason behind the action?
We have to do something.
We cannot just stand here.
Fatalaties when activism
triumphs over fatalism
escalate to numbers
we can count in yonder galaxy.
What's at stake, enlightenment?
That comes to all in time.
On March 24th, 2003, echoing the title of Leni Reifenstal's 1938 Olympics film, Triumph of the Will, Peggy Noonan announced, with the invasion of Iraq, that we are witnessing the triumph of activism over fatalism (Among the actions not taken, consider: Saddam's sons, George's daughters, we never saw any efforts to bring together these perfect couples, and the possibility of solving with a wedding, in the tradition of the great rulers, any conflicts of interest with a union of in-laws. Can anyone suggest other actions?) Well, don't just stand there. We must do something, but let's
do it for a purpose
'cause to later find a purpose
is a steeper uphill struggle
than the purpose set in place
at the outset.
Hey, what WAS that at the outset? Is there reason behind the action?
We have to do something.
We cannot just stand here.
Fatalaties when activism
triumphs over fatalism
escalate to numbers
we can count in yonder galaxy.
What's at stake, enlightenment?
That comes to all in time.
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Burl Ives appeared in a TV musical version of Bluebeard.
-------------------------
I go out for the day. See you tonight,” he told his redeemer, his beloved bride. And he added a warning, “Go in all rooms but one.” His words echo those of our most famous God, you know the one, who said (It’s just the just of it.) to his most God-like creations, “I leave you in paradise; eat from all trees but one.”
What do you expect Bluebeard’s bride to do? What do you and I want and wait for you and I to do?
Remember that his beard repelled most women, but her soul was sensitive, and his eyes gained her trust. She loved him and accepted his love for her. And we know from experience, from those nights by the fire, hers was a premium brand of love, on which they rise to new heights of awareness. Her empathy, surely, matches his toward her,
But she broke trust when she googled him, or rather;
When she entered the forbidden room, she found corpses, and she knew. Her husband is a killer, who insulates himself from the feeling of his prey. He is a coward nourished by the fears of his prey. He is a man who willingly causes what in the end must come to all.
There is only one ending to the story. She escapes to live another day, and Bluebeard, exposed, forthwith, is destroyed.
My variation is to say, feel free to explore all of my rooms, my papers, my website, and then watch me squirm as I try to defend what are clearly rotting corpses with my initials carved into them. I leave myself exposed, not out of honesty, but out of awareness that only truth is easy.
No one cares where no one goes, unless to consider my candidacy.
How could you allow the wolf to lead you down the garden path.
Do the wolf and the granddaughter ever save each other?
Let it be known, Bluebeard’s secret starts with an empty room, which he gradually fills with the corpses of the faithless, the independent minded fighters who refuse to obey him.
That’s his problem and he rots in it.
In our search for self-understanding, we allow ourselves to be misunderstood.
copyright 2003 Peter Dizozza ------------------
-------------------------
I go out for the day. See you tonight,” he told his redeemer, his beloved bride. And he added a warning, “Go in all rooms but one.” His words echo those of our most famous God, you know the one, who said (It’s just the just of it.) to his most God-like creations, “I leave you in paradise; eat from all trees but one.”
What do you expect Bluebeard’s bride to do? What do you and I want and wait for you and I to do?
Remember that his beard repelled most women, but her soul was sensitive, and his eyes gained her trust. She loved him and accepted his love for her. And we know from experience, from those nights by the fire, hers was a premium brand of love, on which they rise to new heights of awareness. Her empathy, surely, matches his toward her,
But she broke trust when she googled him, or rather;
When she entered the forbidden room, she found corpses, and she knew. Her husband is a killer, who insulates himself from the feeling of his prey. He is a coward nourished by the fears of his prey. He is a man who willingly causes what in the end must come to all.
There is only one ending to the story. She escapes to live another day, and Bluebeard, exposed, forthwith, is destroyed.
My variation is to say, feel free to explore all of my rooms, my papers, my website, and then watch me squirm as I try to defend what are clearly rotting corpses with my initials carved into them. I leave myself exposed, not out of honesty, but out of awareness that only truth is easy.
No one cares where no one goes, unless to consider my candidacy.
How could you allow the wolf to lead you down the garden path.
Do the wolf and the granddaughter ever save each other?
Let it be known, Bluebeard’s secret starts with an empty room, which he gradually fills with the corpses of the faithless, the independent minded fighters who refuse to obey him.
That’s his problem and he rots in it.
In our search for self-understanding, we allow ourselves to be misunderstood.
copyright 2003 Peter Dizozza ------------------
Monday, March 10, 2003
Hi, Tightness!
Hi, Taughtness!
Now that you've tightened me, what can you teach me?
Naught have I taught you.
How thoughtless,
Why think so?
'Cause I'm here to hype you.
Then I'm here to haunt you.
hit it.
Blow tropic wind,
Fill the air
With sound vibes, with light vibes, with solids, with liquids.
Thank you, O content provider. You're bill I'll pay monthly.
Stromboli Meets Snagglepuss by Peter Dizozza
Hi, Taughtness!
Now that you've tightened me, what can you teach me?
Naught have I taught you.
How thoughtless,
Why think so?
'Cause I'm here to hype you.
Then I'm here to haunt you.
hit it.
Blow tropic wind,
Fill the air
With sound vibes, with light vibes, with solids, with liquids.
Thank you, O content provider. You're bill I'll pay monthly.
Stromboli Meets Snagglepuss by Peter Dizozza
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
All right, so the computer takes time re-establishing itself and its programs fight one other; it can process massive calculations, store them and translate them into familiar colorful sounds and images. It's my responsibility and a welcome one to catelogue and draw from the catelogue, even as I create new material.
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
'm getting blogged down just turning the computer on and off, loading up programs and shutting them down, moving files rather than using them. I threw away many papers and letters over the weekend and now I will attempt to follow their pathway to mulshland.
I'll take one task at a time, preferrably a new one. This is my journal essay moment, typing into a foreign repository. The doors are caving in, the computer's confiscated. Watch out you with your clicking and typing and seeing what is there to be seen, for the criminial indictment surprise.
Such affirmative action as that taken with Pete Townsend is for purposes of communication only. The punishment, after all, is contained within the crime.
I'll take one task at a time, preferrably a new one. This is my journal essay moment, typing into a foreign repository. The doors are caving in, the computer's confiscated. Watch out you with your clicking and typing and seeing what is there to be seen, for the criminial indictment surprise.
Such affirmative action as that taken with Pete Townsend is for purposes of communication only. The punishment, after all, is contained within the crime.