Saturday, August 28, 2004
IN MEMORY OF MILLER
This week-end at the Twinwood Air Field and Arena, Clapham, Bedfordshire, England, thousands of devotees of the music of Glenn Miller will gather to enjoy the “2004 International Glenn Miller Festival.” I wish could be there, for rather personal reasons.
It has been sixty years since Glenn Miller stood on this exact spot in the Control Tower at the air base wherein the “Glenn Miller Museum” is now located. Miller and an R.A. F. friend flew from this air field on their final flight.. He and and his pilot friend had a plan which would enable him to rejoin the Glenn Miller Band which had already shipped out across the English Channel and were awaiting his arrival arrival in Paris to begin a totally new phase of their sterling musical careers
The night Glenn Miller “disappeared” was a strange one for me and the group[I happened to be with that night in London. I was a member of an 18-piece dance orchestra which had been formed at the 467th Bomb Group, station, Rackheath, Norfolk County, a few miles north of Norwich, England. Our group was called the “Airliners” directed by Lt. Rex Floyd at the time and we, that very night, appeared on stage at the “Queensbury Club “ in London where the Glenn Miller Band appeared as the musical sensation of that wartime era.. The promoters had asked guest G.I. dance bands from various bases to do shows nightly and we were one of the bands invited. We, naturally, were proud to have been chosen ”to fill in” for musicians we all admired. It was an honor, we knew, and the mystery of Miller's “disappearance” had in it a memory with special meaning to each of us in our band which was widely known as “The Airliners in the East Anglia counties.
Miller is still known and emulated in England. Glenn Miller celebrations have been held annually in Norwich and it became an annual festival last year. That was when it was centered at Twinwood - much larger, two-days long and with more show and exhibit areas. Seven bands played in concerts at the 2003 Glenn Miller Festival - mostly in the Miller tradition - and the fact that the festival is back to entertain new records crowds – for three days of concerts, dances, shows, and musical entertainments, indicate it will be there many years to come. This year again features the “Bill Baker Band” which is the official RAF orchestra for Twinwood. Then, there is “Syd Lawrence and his Orchestra”, “ Chris Smith and String of Pearls orchestra”, along with the fabulous “Sticky Wicket Swing Band.” “John Miller and his Orchestra” will also be featured The maestro will be performing at the same site where his uncle – Glenn Miller – entertained troops sixty year ago.
The always growing Glenn Miller Museum will be open, there will be special aviation displays and demonstration performances of authentic jitterbugging, jiving and other dance form as well as fashions of the “the war time years.” Photograph collections will be on display and there will sufficient foods and social amenities available to assure of an enjoyable stay in the Clapham,
Bedfordshire area.
I assume the festival will end Monday evening with the same feature which closed the show last year. While the bands play medley's of “Miller music”, there was a dramatic flyover of Lancasters and Spitfires filling the sky with other memorable sounds. One again, Glenn Miller Festival will end, I suppose, as it did last year - with not a single dry eye to be seen anywhere!
A.L.M. August 27, 2004 [c610wds]
Friday, August 27, 2004
MUG SHOTS
How is it, I wonder, possible for Passport and Drivers' License photographs to remain so consistently poor?
No one I know seems to think their “this is me” identification photo resembles their actual physical appearance.
Subjects universally, it seems, think they are getting a bad deal, and many wonder why it has to happen at that point which is about as “official” as any photograph for which we pose, other than those who become candidates for prints used to decorate “Wanted” bulletins on post office walls. That's the official one, I suppose, so that makes our driver's mug shot and those on our travel papers merely “semi-official” because they are required by legal writing somewhere in the musty legalese tomes.
Annual awards are not given for the Best Photographer of the Year in either category - driver's permits or passports documents, so there is not a waiting line of potential students waiting patiently in line to undertake such specialized branches of cinema graphic lore and portraiture preparation techniques. That takes some of the artistic thrill out of being such a photographer, and, as a result the managers of the card granting area, usually turns the job over to the first person who passes through the area looking for food vending machines. They like to pull levers, push buttons, crank handles - so they will work happily at taking pictures for half and hour or so before they get hungrier. I'd swear the girl who took the shot for my driver's license - the one of the bent over, crabby-looking character, unshaven, wrapped in a thick, plaid lumberman's jacket and in need of a hair cut or two, had been waiting in line just ahead of me for an hour. To back up that theory, I noticed, too, that her terse, verbal instruction told me to say: “Cheese!” Real photographers prefer subject that you say:“Money!” Either way you get that same ghoulish smile on cracked, wavering lips hats pleases such pix makers.
“OK. Next!”
The passport person at my local governmental official in charge of preparing such papers said I would have to get a small “passport photo” from the photographer's studio-shop. I don't know how they do it, but some of the best photographer's on planet Earth can come up with the lousiest looking likenesses imaginable, if it is for passport publication purposes. They use their elegant studio equipment, of course, but time spent doing such a menial task is next to nil or just below it.
Does anyone you know like his or her identification photograph? Where you work, or where you play - does the ident card or badge pic you show or wear look like you or some one else you'd rather not know if it can be arranged.
A.L.M.. August 26, 2004 [c472wds]
Thursday, August 26, 2004
UP, UP AND AWAY.
We build in some strange ways.
Up, for instance.
The ultimate purpose of building is so that we can escape the effects of adverse weather conditions and the minimize our chances of being exposed to such dangers. Plus more recent, new ones.
In so doing, we often add to such peril by reaching into higher, faster air currents or by needing increased structural support underneath it all to hold the massive upward thrust steady.
I would suppose the need to do so stems all the way back to the Tower of Babel in Biblical times and a need Man has felt all along - a desire to be up there with his God. Or, more precisely, that he may appear to be more godlike rather than bound to the relative flatness of Earth. I wonder if the same feeling has caused man to climb high and higher mountains in a semi-secret effort to stand side-by-side with his God.
One might think that, after the experiences of 9-11-01 some serious thought about building super-high buildings might be seriously considered. It was, for a short time, but the desire to construct a higher than ever ever building again on the site of the blasted Trade Towers in New York City proved to be the driving force behind any construction effort in spite of all the memorial edifice pretense.
When we witness the total devastation the average hurricane can spread along our coastal areas and well inland at time, one of the first things we think about is rebuilding where we should not have built so intensely to start with many years ago. A scattered, rather space population relative to the potential loss might make better sense than using fewer real-estate square inches and piling more and more on top of what is added each time around on reconstruction. It seems far easier to do that and raise flood insurance ,rent cal or purchase fees to make up for the potential difference ....fix it, in other words so "no one really loses any money". We should be more careful about building and re-building along risky coast lines, other waterways - rivers, lakes and even small streams. It is amazing how many people occupy areas of land public ally acclaimed as "Flood Plain Areas." Many business firms and commercial ventures play the same flood-insurance hide and seek...."now you see it; now you don't" magic game.
We also build and re-build ramshackle instant slums in areas which have been drained of all potential hope of success decades ago, often in “downtown” areas we also call “historic” sites which should have been erased from city maps long ago and redone as public parks or parking lots.
We have, in recent years, taken to building shopping arenas in barn-like roofed units surrounded by parking lots on all sides. Just how this craze will terminate is yet to be discovered, but it will probably have something to do with sheer shopper' s fatigue. What enterprise firm is even now developing a campaign designed to take advantage of the extended amounts of walking shoppers are now expected to do as routine?
We are constantly being admonished to build a better world, but the plans by which we are to work are not yet available. We are still ad libbing the old architectural tunes we played in ukulele times.
Where are our creative builders?
A.L.M. August 25, 2004 [c573wds]
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
WHICH WAY?
I find a rather large accumulation of talk cluttering today's news sources about “basics”.
They are enduring qualities which are also referred to quite often as the “old fashioned values” found in “the good life” lived, it seems, in the past. I meet people quite often who extol an era they once knew, or heard of, in which social, moral and spiritual ties solidified relationships in the finest ways and, always, far better than anything being does today.
So much of this talk remains just that - “talk”. Too often the nostalgia elements place it all in the past and it comes as a shock to find the very same principles apply today as well. That point arrives when we hear ourselves thinking “we have got to go back to the basics!”
But that can be a danger point, too. When anyone claims it essential that we go “back” to anything, I cringe inwardly. Returning to actions of the past scares me – no end.
I can understand that we might reflect, for a moment, or what has been tried in the past and may consider trying it one more time. It did not work or we would not be facing the situation in its present form.
To consider “going “back to the basics” to be essential action to be taken is an act of self-deception. It is, however, quite common to hear such views bandied about when a change is to be made. It is, in truth, not a time to go back to anything but, rather, a time to advance - to try new avenues of venture and inquiry, and, if it helps, to call it an act of “strategic withdrawal“ enabling us to set up new routes of attack on the problem. Going back admits defeat, mistrust, imperfection, half-way efforts and lack of concentration of power for good over that of evil.
Think of the number of problems facing our nation today Some are relatively new and others aged and still unsolved in relation to the use we make of them today. They have been, in many instances, been. Used, altered,modified and bent to meet the needs of a specific era, but they remain in need of changes to keep up to date.
Consider “Education” – everyone's business. The there is “Economics” - calling for specialists in various fields. How about War and/or Peace? What should we be doing about “Space Travel? Space Settlement?” Another one: what can we do to bring down “Medical Costs” of all kinds. If you want to make up as list of your very own., start for example, with “Railroads” and other forms of travel or consider what power source we are going to have available after we use up our fossil fuel stocks.
You can't go back to find the solutions for that which we need. Forward is the direction required and that which is basic to our every need is, in fact, that element we call “faith” knowing that goodness will endure as we work for it.
A.L.M. August 23, 2004 [c517wds]
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
BG MUSIC
Are you one of those people who “dislikes” background music?
There are some who insist they actually “hate” the recorded music foisted upon them when they make a telephone call and have to wait for “the next product consultant available”. They take their frustration out on all types of recorded music far too often, all music that is used to add interest to the dull moments of our daily routine. We are led about by music far more than we realize and owe musicians a debt of gratitude for helping to maintain a measure of sanity in our conduct most of the time.
The delayed telephone calls is only one example of such encounters which can cause us to regret that notes where ever set to stave or quavers to clefs. Some doctors add to the multiple miseries of such ailments as the common cold by piping channels of FM music into their waiting rooms. I don't think they plan it so intentionally, but the music chosen often matches the dates on the mangy magazines lying on tables and chairs about the room.
It is all intended to be there to provide acoustic activity to any blank space in the sound pattern of our modern day. Silence is not, in our day, as “golden”as it is once said to have been. Today silence is quietness; inactivity, an indication of everything being at rest instead of working.. Silence is the sound of nothing doing what it does so well – nothing. That means it is a mark of loss of of potential wealth had those moment been properly put to use. Background music keeps you from realizing all that sort of thing and feeling guilty about leaving a few moment blank. BG music does, then, improve one's opinion of one's self at critical moments.
We are led through our lives by the sounds of music.
Some people awaken to music as an alarm clock each morning using their local radio station as a electronic rooster. I, myself, am of an older school, and still, prefer waiting until I awaken naturally. I then, try to find some excuse or trying the stay abed, only to having them knocked down quickly by Mother Nature.
Listen to some of that “get up” music the radio people have used so successfully for years. So much of it has been so successful for so long because so many sleepers can take just so much of any one thing and they get up to cut the radio off or turn it to news of the latest version of age-old crimes redone. BG music beats an “alarm: sound any day, I would say so don't knock it till you've tired it. The best music to “get up by” should never be your favorite type of music – that will only put you back to sleep again. Chose the acid rock tune you detest the most if you really want to get roused up ....realizing, of course, when you do so, you will also be awakening the entire neighborhood in general.
This past week someone brought in a videotape copy of the movie: “Gone With The Wind.” The family watched it one evening. You will recall, it is a bit lengthy so that meant they were up well past usual bedtimes. Then, Sunday one of the TV channels ran the entire thing and they got hooked on it and stuck with it to “see if it ended the same way.”
It did. I listened to much of it and paid major attention to the sound track. ...to the background music which is skillfully used to lead the viewer all over the emotional map.
Often it is the music which echoes what has just been said, underlines it or put it in frilly italics Or, it anticipates what is now going to be said. It will stop breathlessly with tense, rasping, brassy tone before you even hear the spoken words – pained, caustic tones when needed or, in total contrast, soothing caresses done with strings, flutes and reeds.
Try it yourself. Listen to a good movie and try not to watch it in the usual way. Avoid the visual aspects. Using it only as points of reference to learn what the musical score has already done, is doing or will do. Learn to appreciate BG music.
A.L.M. August 22, 2004 [c737wds] .
Monday, August 23, 2004
SWIFT BOAT TO...
Remember the old song “Slow Boat To China?”
It is passe, of course, and “Swift Boat To Viet Nam” is now steadily part of the news. Wherever you turn, you hear about “Swift Boats.”
It all happened a third of a century ago, but the term “Swift Boat” is a key word in today's events and, strangely enough, many people are insisting they have never known the term until this past week.
The series of television spots now running in some areas are not something new in spite of the fact that Kerry people seem to be seeing and hearing about them for the first time. Just about every point that the advertisements are now making downgrading the Kerry “war hero” status claimed by the Democratic Party was made public months ago.
Just about every facet of the material as used in the series of spots now running was graphically displayed on C-Span in a special, nation-wide program which ran for a good hour and a half shortly after John Kerry indicated his campaign would be based primarily the “war hero” theme. Many seem to feel that was inevitable because he had no other platform on which he could base a run for the office. It was plain enough at that time - months ago - to see that a last-minute drive to unseat Kerry would be a part of the current campaign near the end of it all.
I wrote about it at the time and wondered how it could be that such material was so openly discussed in unusual detail on C-Span. That tape, after this fracas is all over, will be a collector's item ands it will be run many times showing what was happening well in advance of the time the material was used in the campaign. It was not a surprise at all. It was natural outgrowth of series of crass misjudgments made in formulating the original plan for John Kerry to run for the office. Planner ,no doubt, considered that , while Kerry could run on a “war hero” - even his attainments surpassed those of George W. Bush which had served through National Guard membership of a rather sketchy nature. It was also deemed possible because William Clinton, a man with no military experience whatsoever as well as anti-war group associations, had been elected by the American people to serve as the Commander-in-Chief of our Armed Forces. One such a premise, the campaign was set underway.
The real message of the Veteran's Against Kerry spots do not dwell entirely on the nature of the awards he received,but note his active affiliation, even some leadership, of anti-war protesters. Deception has been proved to be a part of his dramatic throwing away of his military medals. He accusations of gross criminal activities by U.S. troops in Viet Nam in testimony before Congressional committees stands as an inexcusable affront to our National Guard and each of the branches of military service. All, he testified, were guilty of torture, disfigurement of natives, brutality - and he spoke as a as witness to such war crimes committed by members of the various American military forces.
I hear this morning that John Kerry is entering legal proceedings to stop the use of the Veteran group's spots. In accusing Bush of backing them and paying for the ads, he is, I would say, searching for any a way at all out of this dilemma - one which was so plainly indicated as being sure to happen months ago.
The election is being decided this week. Now, I feel, is the critical moment when Americans will decide which way they will go. I cannot be sure of either way. I know which I favor, but I also have the record of some strange things we have done in the past so neither way is going to come as a surprise.
A.L.M. August 21, 2004 [c661ds]
Sunday, August 22, 2004
TOMORROW'S HEIRLOOMS
We watch the well-done “Antique Road Show” - the American version – on TV and some of imitators, and, quite often, I marvel at the value placed on rather common articles. The items evaluated often dated from not too many years ago, in many cases, and that can be bit shocking as one grows older.
Trivia is treasure in the mind of the eager, searching antique-seeking people I meet. The better ones, too, seem to come from families who, in their heyday, lived, one might say, below the mean average economic level of their time. The true antique seeker is a person who, for generations, had to do without the very things which seem to be so essential for them to enjoy life in those days.. The “better off” social and economic levels had such items, used them and, even now, think of them as common, rather than as special, much-desired items today.
Antique seekers, both professional and amateur, are given to chasing rainbows in the form of dream of what life would be like if such and such an items could be found. The quality of such things may vary greatly. I have witnessed deceit on more than one occasion, to, not maliciously done but through a convenient occasion of need. . A local antique gatherer I knew had on display in his kitchen a particular piece which he called a “kitchen cabinet” and I knew where he got it. The item was in the home of an aged old colored lady whom we knew as “Aunt Ebby” - short for “Elizabeth”. I used to see it when we called at her house to see what she needed in the way of firewood, coal oil, food supplies and other needs. She was fine old lady who had served various families up and down our road for many years. Her house was little more than a shack or shanty - one room with a wooden partition out from one wall which marked off the area she called her kitchen. There was was narrow front door on the wide wall and a double bed pretty much filled the living space. A box-like chest and two,odd, hand-me-down chairs. Along the inside of the kitchen partition stood her “kitchen cabinet”. I recognized it at once when I saw it in a collector home a year or two after Aunt Ebby's death.
One of Aunt Ebby's sons Clarence had build neat shelves on the partition wall on which they kept kitchen needs. In a creative week, shortly before his death in a rock quarry accident, that son had added boards as wide as he shelves to each end of the shelves on the wall. To those he added two boards across the front for two shelves which he hinged them at the ends. They opened as a door to show the shelves. He duplicated that same feature across the bottom two shelves He hinged a large board over the center it folded down a desk-like fold-down in front of the center trio of shelves. He nailed discarded pieces of decorative, do-dad porch molding to each of the doors a grab-on handles. To finish it all off, he burnt designs in each handle with a hot iron of some sort.
Mounted on the original partition wall for a backside, Aunt Ebby's kitchen cabinet stood in the new owner's fine home. Scrubbed, waxed and shiny, it look good . .I think of it as one antique which came to exist out of sheer, poverty-nurtured need and it was made with love and a deep desire of a young, black boy to provide his mother with a fine cabinet she needed.
I have not seen the collector for many years and wonder if the piece has been sold and re-sold. I cringe when I imagine it turning up as an item on “Road Show” some evening and I hear the price it might bring at a sale. Aunt Ebby is gone. Her boy, Clarence, too. Only that kitchen cabinet remains telling of their ever having been among us.
A.L.M. August 21, 2004 [c690wds]
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