The night I first visited Handel
He was naked except for one sandal.
His minion, Agrippa,
Likewise wore one flipper.
Such greatness cares nothing for scandal.
Of course it would not be Christmas without a Messiah concert, even if the new mutant coronavirus requires the event to be held in a specially-equipped field hospital so that everyone infected during the performance can receive first-class treatment from the very moment the ‘Amen’ begins to fade.
It seems that the culprit was Carla,
Who cleaned up the funeral parlor;
Or was it Luigi,
Who wielded the squeegee
Backstage in Milan at La Scala?
NOW BRING ME A CHANA MASSALA.
If today’s bulletin is some kind of post-mortem report, it will strike most sensible readers as annoyingly non-committal. What is certain, however, is that an habitual devourer of carry-out meals runs an enhanced risk of succumbing to food-poisoning; so we should perhaps be more grateful to the Carlas and Luigis of this world, who busy themselves with janitorial hygiene that benefits each and every one of us.
Please note, your saxophonist, ‘Baz’,
With his ear-splitting urge to play ‘jazz’
Is required to abstain
Or else Take the A Train …
To Alaska, if not Alcatraz.
Who wants to live in a world whose free-spirited exponents of improvised music can be threatened with exile to a notorious penitentiary, solely for practising their art in places where others might overhear? Not I. Surveillance is a scourge, aural fascism a tyranny. And the intolerant voice of this bulletin appears to be upset as much by the would-be musician’s hipster sobriquet as by the unruly racket the neighborhood is nightly obliged to endure.
The last time I met Edvard Grieg
Was during the recent Blitzkrieg.
I found myself yawning
Throughout his piece, ‘Morning’,
But blamed it on battle fatigue.
The Norwegian composer’s melodic gift has won him few admirers. What a tragedy, hindsight hints, that he didn’t team up with Vera Lynn, to produce work of lasting cultural resonance that could assuage the griefs of this most ghastly epoch in human affairs. Too late now, of course, since the Warbling Dame’s recent promotion to be the Archangels’ Sweetheart. [See also here]
Though Alison Gross is a witch
She clearly has Absolute Pitch,
Screaming perfect Top Cs
At the sky and the trees
While her body lies dead in a ditch.
In many countries today the loudest voices are indeed those of the departed; their noisome legacy is routinely summarised in resonant soundbites whose catchiness masks, for many, the emptiness of their achievements.
We beheld an old Burgher of Calais
Who’d come, without clothes, to The Ballet.
When they called him immoral
He said, ‘Do not quarrel
With me: take it up with my valet.’
As ever, the challenge to a wealthy pervert’s idiosyncrasy is brushed aside, and the onus of explanation – and inevitable blame – falls on the shoulders of his hapless factotum.
My postcard to Wole Soyinka
Said ‘How d’you like Rodin’s “The Thinker”?’
‘Not as good as “The Dunce”,’
He responded at once
(I got the same answer from Glinka).
It’s encouraging, of course, to receive fresh evidence of empathy-across-time between writers and musicians, but it’s unsettling to discover that both spurn a sculptural masterpiece in favour of a work so definitively substandard that not a single art historian bothers even to mention it. Yet it sounds like a statue for our time, when so many forcibly-emptied plinths stand ready to accommodate images of some contemptible thick-head, should such a person come to public attention.
Please note that your godfather, Geir,
Though scarcely a social pariah,
Has a squint and a hump
That make decent folk jump
So we’re slinging him out of the choir.
‘Decent folk’ … what a world of repugnance and shame that nauseating phrase brings up. If we all boycotted ensembles where such a term is used in earnest, choral singing would cease overnight. No bad thing, you might retort. But that end must not be accomplished by marginalising the Geirs and quasi-Geirs in our society … who are legion.
In this movie, a lone paratrooper,
Flying blind through a wartime pea-souper,
Comes down in the dark
Near the edge of Hyde Park
On the head of the drummer, Gene Krupa.
16 October is indeed the date that Gene Krupa died, but not in the decade, nor the manner, suggested above. As a pitch for a biopic, therefore, its chances might seem slight … though, being extremely short and requiring no set whatever, it might prove attractive to a studio with very limited cash.
Guess the kettle has run out of cream
And the kitten’s got sick of the steam.
I used to convulse
At the throb of your pulse:
Now I dance to a different dream.
To live outside the law you must be honest, as our Great Poet saith. But it’s not easy to live outside the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which wants us to believe that organised systems tend towards chaos, unless energy is fed in to sustain their structure. Today’s bulletin – not written by me, but slipped under my door by the lovely Angharad – is intended to show me that her vital energy has not ebbed, but is rather being directed elsewhere. I conclude, however, that what has actually ebbed is her ability to organise metaphors convincingly. Unless she mixed those lines up on purpose in a cruel attempt at parody.
Please note that your stepson, Francisco,
Is banned from this evening’s Class Disco.
When everyone queues
To kiss Mrs Hughes
A normal-sized child will get his go.
Modern-day teachers show commendable dedication, generosity and imagination in devising bonding exercises, early in the academic year, that will incline their young charges to warm to the grade school experience. This tersely-worded bulletin, however, gives the receiving family insufficient sense of their unfortunate stepchild’s infraction. Is he too large, or too small, to join his new class buddies in Inappropriate Touching with their tutor?
My brother had trained his bonobo
To play a few tunes on the oboe.
I bought my baboon
A good contra-bassoon
Yet that night she eloped with a hobo.
I have been reprimanded (hounded, even) about a ‘misanthropic tone’ that supposedly suffuses this poetical blog. ‘Has mankind accomplished nothing you would consider celebrating?’ writes one disenchanted correspondent. Well, it has: the admirable Great Ape Project has urged that chimps, bonobos and other such anthropoids should be accorded the same basic rights as human beings (exactly which human beings remains open to question). And no less a territory than The Balearic Islands extended personhood rights to the Great Apes as long ago as 2007 (one of that tribe holds temporary sway in my home country). But – cf bulletin #222 here at My Dog Errol – such envelope-stretching can come at a terrible price.
We’ve not seen a great deal of Piers;
He hasn’t come this way for years.
The reason he states
Is the size of the weights
That he’s tied to the hairs in his ears.
We’ve not seen a great deal of Layla.
She’s given her heart to a sailor.
She’s renting her spine
To a colleague of mine,
And the rest still remains with her gaoler.
We’ve not seen a great deal of Chalkie
Since he walked, on his hands, to Milwaukee
Where he teaches guitar
At The Conservatoire,
So he claims. But I guess that’s a porky.
A little suite of patterns or exemplars for those who need to craft excuses explaining why they no longer visit people they were friends with in High School (it’s too, too bourgeois, after all, to persist in blaming the Covid crisis for our insularity and self-absorption).
The postcard I sent Seamus Heaney
Asked ‘Have you been watching The Sweeney?’
‘Good luck, and get lost,’
Was his simple riposte
(The same as I got from Puccini).
Here we find a further instance of post-life coincidence, where two masters of different arts, from different countries, and from different times, are united in a single opinion which – though manifestly dismissive – is expressed with endearingly musical alliteration, and a paradoxical wit. [See also here and here]
’Twas the opening night of Peer Gynt,
The show that made Ibsen a mint.
I remarked, ‘It’s quite long …
Maybe cut Solveig’s Song?’
But he scowled, and did not take the hint.
I forget which circle of Hell is reserved for hangers-on who imagine celebrity ‘creatives’ might profit from their two-cents’ worth of Philistine advice. Ibsen, and his composer Grieg, were wise to ignore the present cloth-eared recommendation, and the narrator was lucky not to get his big head kicked in. [See also here]
My card to the poet John Dryden
Asked, ‘What of the sea-god, Poseidon?’
‘A bit of a nonce,’
Was his simple response
(I got the same answer from Haydn).
Dryden, ‘Glorious John’, died some 320 years ago, yet this does not preclude his responding, in dreams, to a postcard from a fan. More remarkable, perhaps, is that Haydn – whose earthly life did not overlap at all with Dryden’s – should turn out to echo the latter’s downbeat assessment of a celebrity nymph-molester. [See also here]
The day I joined Phi Beta Kappa
I was kicked down the stairs by Frank Zappa;
I think it was him
Though he’d been to the gym
And was looking uncommonly dapper.
Here our unfortunate narrator is subjected to a cruel assault, on a day that should have been notable for quite different reasons. The wounded ego is naturally keen to recast the humiliation as an encounter with a musical idol, yet the fantasy it supplies casts the object of his veneration in an unsavoury – and wholly improbable – light.
The last time I spoke to Fats Waller
He asked me to lend him a dollar;
I think it was him
Though he looked rather slim
And was clearly no stranger to squalor.
In this episode of our Impostor Syndrome explorations it seems unlikely that the interlocutor is an impersonator, as his replications of the intended ‘impersonee’ are so slipshod. By the same criteria, however, it can scarcely be the real Fats Waller either, which leaves the reader in something of a quandary.
The last time I spoke to Bob Dylan
He asked me to spell ‘Enniskillen’.
I think it was him
Though he looked somewhat prim:
It might have been Harold MacMillan.
The real Dylan can be antagonistically oblique when subjected to unwanted attention, yet the facial demeanour reported here feels inauthentic. Arguably a stalker of celebrities, and an impersonator, are not far apart on the fanboy spectrum. In this piece we examine the predicament of the former, when confronted by a (probable) specimen of the latter.
Your audio typist is Juno:
She hums only music by Gounod.
You’ll implore her to cease
But the din won’t decrease:
She doesn’t know any words you know.
Irrepressibly tuneful and sentimental, the Frenchman’s compositions are the last thing one wants to be reminded of at any time, least of all in a lockdown-defying office. Every memo I dictate for typing begins ‘For fuck’s sake Juno, change the bloody record, can’t you?’ … but the poor girl just hasn’t the linguistic sophistication to oblige.
Hats off to my patient Aunt Joan
Who taught me to play the trombone,
Or rather, she tried,
Dropping hints from the side
While I bobbed up and down in the Rhône.
No amount of patience on an instructor’s part will produce measurable progress in a pupil unless the overall circumstances are conducive to pedagogy. The informal teaching scenario here, and the diffident mode of inculcation, would garner scant praise from those who are paid to criticize professionals at work.
Onstage, in the unmatching shoes
A songwriter murders the blues.
My neighbour’s huge feet
Pound an unmatching beat.
One bullet. But which should I choose?
It’s tough enough living in a culture that tolerates second-rate musicians and audience extroverts with bad timing. But, worse still, an archaic constitutional right – to go armed – puts these irritating people’s lives in undeserved jeopardy.
A small ad. I saw in The Mail:
‘Mechanical Weasel for sale.
Can whistle the theme
From Pick the Wrong Team,
And tries to beat time with its tail.’
Today’s parents, terrified of their children venturing out of doors, continue to bolster our consumer culture by the purchasing of trashy toys, exemplified by the patronising, unnatural design of this unwanted item, which pays half-hearted homage to some self-evidently worthless TV show.
My postcard to Cardinal Newman
Asked, ‘What does it mean to be human?’
‘It means “Knowing You’ll Die”’
Was his simple reply
(I got the same answer from Schumann).
This kind of thoughtful feedback from historical figures is somehow heartening, even if their message is occasionally rather bleak.