Oh My (Chinese) Darlin'!

A couple of weeks back I was watching a Chinese film, Quitting (Zuotian - 昨天 - trailer here), a really great semi-documentary about a young actor coming out of drug addection in 1990s Beijing. There's one scene where all the young cool folks are hanging out together, celebrating the protagonist's birthday, and they start singing a song to the tune of the old American gold-miner's lament, "Oh My Darling, Clementine".

I rewound the movie so I could type out the subtitles:

wish you longevity
as long as a pine tree of the Southern Mountain
may you have good fortune
as much as the endless water in the Eastern Ocean

I emailed a bunch of Chinese-American friends to find out if they knew anything about this version of "Clementine" —and whether it was a specific "birthday song" used, perhaps, in place of the ubiquitous, but technically still copyright-protected "Happy Birthday To You"? But nobody'd heard aything about it.

Interestingly—getting back to copyright—The Beatles' music plays a significant role in the plot of Quitting, but makes no appearence on the soundtrack—it's all Chinese rock (which works quite well—even in the scenes where you're watching the main charactar listening to a Beatles album on his headphones ... actually, the whole film is accessible but also again and again visually, sonically, and conceptually arresting).

In any case, I wonder when the "Clementine" melody made it back to China ... obviously Chinese immigrants were an important of Gold Rush (and post-Gold Rush) California ... perhaps it made it back soon after it was written (in the 1880s, but based, perhaps on a song from the 1860s). Most likely it arrived much more recently. But I like the idea of a former Chinese "Miner '49er" making his way back to China in his old age (long as the pine on the Southern Mountain), bringing the song from Gold Mountain.

Music Notes

Though I've already posted on M.I.A., her second album, Kala, is out this week, complete with a wonderful Mobutu-print-inspired cover. She did a lovely live session at KCRW a couple weeks back — I was beside myself when she launched the first song, "Bamboo Banger" with a half-cover of Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner" (though omitting the part about driving to the Stop-N-Shop). I also loved a line from her second song, "Hussel", that went more or less, "I put people on the map / who've never seen a map". And I can't tell whether her off-pitch singing is a sort of casual swagger or an homage to the semitonal wonders of South Asian (and particularly South South Asian) singing styles. Probably both.

Rounding out music news: Josh Ritter has a new album, e'en edgier than the last but sounding quite good from what I've heard. I'll have to get it sometime.

And two recent indie-rock discoveries: Vampire Weekend (think Paul Simon's Graceland with a punk-pop sensibility), and Bishop Allen (I heard their song "Castanets" on the KEXP podcast and thought, "wow, what a great song!"; then looked up the band name and thought, "wow, they're named after one of my favorite-named Cambridge, MA streets!", then looked at who was in it and thought, "wow, I used to work in the same office as the lead singer! we used to nod hello!").

The Mississippi Line

In one of Walker Percy's novels (Lancelot, I'm pretty sure), the narrator mentions a 19th century duel that was fought on an island in the Mississippi river so as to be outside the jurisdiction of any state. The theme resurfaces later on in one of the meant-to-provoke questions in Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: Why didn't anyone ever write a novel about rafting down the Hudson River? The answer, if any, has to do with the statelessness of a border-river: you're neither in one place or the other, passing by without necessarily entering.

Of course, no islands in the Mississippi are truly without jurisdiction—there's always a dotted line on some map. But the current dotted line's often quite fascinating. Below's a particularly jigsawed stretch south of Vicksburg. Some of the jogs are reminders that rivers change course from time to time (hence too the beautiful-from-above filigree of oxbow lakes). But I'm not sure the dotted line always follows a former river-course either.

Various Positions

A few weeks ago my father surprised me with a garage-sale gift: an old Oscar Schmidt Autoharp. Since then I've sporadically been figuring out how to play it ... the basics of which are more involved than I'd supposed. First, there's the matter of deciding how you want to hold and strum it. Here are some examples, with my own made-up titles for 'em:

A) The Mirror. I discovered this video during a fruitless attempt to find a recording of Jimmy Carter reading some of his poetry. The consolation prize, as you'll doubless agree, was more than worth it. Note the left-handed strumming, which is easiest given a tabletop-layout, but feels just wrong since I already play cello and guitar in the standard poses.

B) The Bridge-Strummer. Difficult on my particular harp, which has the maximum amount of buttons/keys, narrowing the target era quite a bit. Still, can't argue with June Carter Cash:

C) The Crossover. Just plain awkward:

D) The Upright Reverse Half-Piano Hug. This is the one I've settled on. Earl Scruggs and Mother Maybelle Cash.

Sabbath Poem: The Poor Poet

"The Poor Poet", by Czeslaw Milosz. I spent way too long trying to find the Polish original, but no luck. I love the subversion in this poem: beauty emerging despite the poet's ill motives, the tension between cynicism and hope.

Life Imitates Lure

Yesterday's Folha de S. Paulo ran this science-article teaser on the cover ("Science—On a piece of paper, an insect discovered during the expedition—Expeditions to the Amazon encounter dozens of unknown species"):
Here's the article it refers to (in Portuguese, so for me skimming it was, blah blah forest blah biodiversity blah blah species blah). But that insect photo's amazing. It looks so fake, especially the fiber-optics-looking tail brush, which makes it look like one of those hand-tied fly fishing lures. Life imitates art imitating life? (except without the causality).

Exuberantly Bad Design Knows No Era

Usually for me the coolness, quaintness, or otherness factors make just about any book over 100 years old look good to me. But not this one—it's an affront to taste you'd think would only have been possible with desktop publishing and free fonts. All that bad typography, and set by hand (and the heavy frames continue on every page).

Dog Provides Example of Concentration

Martin Luther, Table-Talk, May 18, 1532:

When Luther's puppy happened to be at the table, looked for a morsel from his master, and watched with open mouth and motionless eyes, he [Martin Luther] said, "Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog watches the meat! All his thoughts are concentrated on the piece of meat. Otherwise he has no thought, wish, or hope."

I finally finished the Vintage Spiritual Classics* selection of Martin Luther's writings. This was one of the end-bits that stuck with me. Incidentally, the dog was called Tölpel.

* For some reason there's no obvious list of all the editions in this series to be found with a quick search, even from Vintage (they list reading guides for a few). Actually, I'm generally surprised by the poor design/content of the Vintage site, given how well-done and -chosen their books tend to be. I guess it's better than having a great site but publishing trash.

Sabbath Poem: Praise

"Praise", by R.S. Thomas.

Flamingo Bones

Wandering around Google Books this week I found this great engraving of a flamingo's skeleton, from On the Anatomy of Vertebrates, by Richard Owen (London: 1866). I should flip through the rest ... I'm sure there are plenty of other great engravings. But this composition I liked how the long neck inscribes a near-perfect quarter-circle, which looks wrong and stilted but still graceful.