When The Moon Sings

17/11/2024

https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/54592

I threw a book against the wall this week.
Let me be more specific. It didn’t actually hit the wall, but the door of the closet in my office. It bounced once and landed beside the previously sleeping dog. The dog’s head je**ed up, first looking at the book and then at me. That look reminded me of those glares that my father gave me when I was a child, after I’d committed some childhood breach of commonly accepted behavior. Then I retrieved the book and the dog went back to sleep.
I have lived through exciting and significant times, and books about them appear with disturbing frequency. The frequency is disturbing because they construct narratives about events that I witnessed, narratives that bear little relationship to the things I experienced. Their publishers allege that they are non-fiction, but a jury of their peers might decide otherwise.
Sometimes they are written by others who lived through the same period, but more often, the writers hadn’t quite outgrown wetting diapers when the event occurred, if they were that developed. The books string together unrelated events in a specific time period, using logic that is currently fashionable, to prove some point dearly beloved of the author. They usually get their facts wrong, emphasize the negligible, and reach general conclusions that have no relationship to the era or the events. The book was one of those.
Why read those things if they are so disturbing? It’s something like social media. It’s full of observations and information that don’t mean anything, with a fair proportion being dead wrong. But occasionally, somebody posts something that is both meaningful and accurate, a pearl that might justify the mountain of oyster shells I had to go through to find it.
Dave Maraniss has written quite a few of those. Maraniss is Pulitzer-winning reporter and editors who has written a number of books about sports or political personalities – his books on Jim Thorpe, Vince Lombardi, and Roberto Clemente are fascinating portraits. But his book on Detroit is a fine example of that kind of explanation.
Maraniss was born and grew up in Detroit. His love for the city of his youth shines through every page. Titled Once in a Great City, it describes the Detroit of the 60’s, when he was old enough to understand the dynamics and while the city still boomed. The Detroit of the 60’s was a vital part of the country. American-made autos still ruled the road. Detroit’s mayor, Jerome Cavanaugh, had influence well beyond city boundaries, and Motown became an influential source of American music. Not that long before, Charles Wilson had declared “what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” The claim was more persuasive when applied to Detroit in general.
The rise of Motown has always attracted attention. Why would Detroit be a major source of music? It didn’t have the heritage of Nashville or New Orleans or Chicago, nor the critical mass of Los Angeles or New York. Motown was well-run and collected a remarkably brilliant set of acts, but how did it come to be in Detroit?
Maraniss tells us in a short paragraph:
First, because of the auto plants and related industries, most Detroiters had steady salaries and families enjoyed a measure of disposable income they could use to listen to music in clubs and at home. Second, the economic geography of the city meant that the vast majority of residents lived in single-family houses, not high-rise apartments, making it easier to deliver pianos and find room for them. And third, Detroit had the egalitarian advantage of a remarkable piano enterprise, the Grinnell Brothers Music House.”
The Grinnell Brothers made piano ownership easy and affordable, which is why they get special mention.
None of that fully explains the brilliance of the Motown performers and operation, of course. That shine depended on the talent and dedication of those people, many of whom made great and little-known contributions besides performance. But the economic background that Maraniss cites provided a platform from which that brilliance could develop and shine.
Since the mid-19th Century, most analysts of human behavior have pointed to economics as the basis for a culture. Economics, that measure of disposable income that Maraniss writes about, caused music, but it also causes art and literature. It also causes scientific discovery, medical advances, and the promotion of just and equitable societies. The things that make life worth living can be constructed on that same economic platform.
Almost everyone understands the economic basis, because almost everyone has a very limited amount of that disposable income, and some have none at all. Threats to the economic basis, real or imagined, cause the most violent societal reactions.
Nothing proves the point like the lack of that income. Sixty years on from the events Maraniss records, the advantages of Detroit have withered away, starting with the automobile industry. Detroit’s experience has been duplicated by many other places in the industrial Midwest, what we commonly refer to as the Rust Belt.

The events in the book run from autumn 1962 to spring 1964, and they include difficult decisions and dangerous situations as well as a sense of the positive characteristics of that time. Maraniss sees the seeds of the current problems in the details of that past time – likely, part of the rationale for writing the book may be to understand that progression.
That’s useful, even for non-historians. The sixty years since those events have seen a multiplication of problems for Detroit – they didn’t happen overnight. The restoration of Detroit’s vitality will require understanding how it happened. And how it happened must include economic factors, social factors, political factors and a wealth of others. There are no simple solutions, because the problems are not simple.
But all of those factors are built on economic revival. Without it, talent remains undeveloped, society becomes more confrontational and less just, and the ability to maintain a population erodes. If the book provides a lesson in that, the lesson is applicable far beyond Detroit city limits. Those who ignore it do so at their own peril.

When the Moon Sings Share Tweet Email 4:39pm Rain Falls by David Helpling on Sleeping on the Edge of the World (Spotted Peccary) 5:01pm My Bells by Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra on Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra (Verve) 5:08pm Cinema Paradiso (Main Theme) by Charlie Haden/Pat M**h...

14/11/2024

According to the Brides publication, "By the seventh year (anniversary), you've no doubt learned to take things in stride." This show ends the seventh year that the moon has sung on WRUU; next week, we start year eight. The show usually features the best of recently released quieter music, but this time, P. T. Bridgeport will play some of the music that inspired the creation of the show in the first place. From the Soapbox, he reflects on Detroit, a place he has never lived and only rarely visited. Join us for a special edition of When the Moon Sings. Listen to WRUU 107.5 FM in Savannah and globally @ wruu.org.

10/11/2024

https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/54500

We call them triggers now, things that cause a rush of emotion. Sometimes they are words or ideas, sometimes objects. Usually, triggers result in negative emotions, but sometimes, they release a mixture of feelings. I ran into one this week, and it was more a detonator than a trigger, a big red button that resulted in an explosion.
There he is, on the cover of the album, the picture focused his thumb, pointing up in the foreground. The top half of the thumb is painted blue with a white star, the bottom half with red and white stripes. The album is American Pie and the singer, Don McLean. Once, I owned that album and more than once, I replaced it because the copy had been overused.
It sold very well when it came out in 1971, an anomaly for that year. Music had rushed past folk into folk rock and even more modern forms, and Don McLean was resolutely a folk singer, albeit an uncommonly good one. If the year 1971 is a blank slate for you, the title song tracks the development of rock and roll, and reflects the pessimism that many felt in that era. It’s quite a good one, and listeners sat with copies of the lyrics and tried to catch all of the references.
But one song doth not an album make. Another song from the album also attracted attention, and over the years, it has arguably become more popular than American Pie. That song is McLean’s tribute to Vincent Van Gogh, called Starry Starry Night. That’s the song that caused the explosion.
Van Gogh’s works never really became ignored, but recently interest has been higher than normal. In Atlanta, they have been turned into an immersive experience. Sophisticated projection technology paints the walls with them, making visitors feel like they are in the scene. I’ve not seen it, and Van Gogh did some paintings I’m not sure I’d want to be a part of.
But several years ago, I attended an exhibit of the actual paintings, including some of his best known. The gallery was awash with people. A long queue that resembled a bread line during the Depression led to the exhibit room, and nobody entered until somebody in the rooms left. People clustered thickly around each canvas, closely watched by a cadre of guards. That sort of event has become more familiar lately, with crowds and crowd control providing a persistent distraction to what they were displaying. For the Van Gogh exhibit, it didn’t matter. The paintings spoke eloquently above any distraction. To that point, I hadn’t connected with his works; after that, I thought I got the idea.
McLean has said that he wrote the song after reading a book about Van Gogh. Perhaps we read the same book – I’ve delved into a few biographies too. He channeled the experience into a reflective piece of lyrics accompanied by good music. I stored the information in my now leaky memory and left it to compost.
The idea of leveraging a creative work to create another one occurs pretty commonly. The practice frequently fails on a commercial level and almost always on a creative level. Exceptions exist – Tom Stoppard creatively turned Hamlet on its head for the play “Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” a classic on its own. Mostly the idea works only for milder entertainments. With the Christmas season approaching, you might get the idea if I said “Pa-Rum-Pa-Pum-Pum.” The Christmas story has been told from every character’s viewpoint, except possibly the main character. There are several books that tell the story from the viewpoint of the donkey.
Creating a classic by crossing the boundary from visual to audio happens as rarely. Opera and ballet have made attempts for hundreds of years; the theater, movies, TV and even video games take the leap more recently. Hollywood has produced several stunning movies with stunning scores – John Williams and a handful of others have done several. But while they capture the emotion of a scene, they cannot capture what’s happening visually in detail.
But Williams and the others rarely use lyrics and lyrics have served McLean very well indeed. His lyrics for Starry Starry Night evoke the paintings. If you’ve every seen Van Gogh’s paintings on exhibit, you can probably name the pieces that McLean thought of when he wrote the lyrics. Lyrics, at their best, become a form of poetry – they leap off the page when read as they do to the ear when sung. That’s not something that happens every day.
Last week’s hearing triggered those emotions, even though I own the song and have heard it several times, maybe in the hundreds. That’s unusual too. But I am a fan of rabbit holes, so I looked up the song on the video site on my computer. He has made a newer version, backed by the group Home Free, which is very good company.
Like all of us, McLean has aged. The boyish grin and looks have matured into an older version. Like all of us who have gone through the aging process, his vocal power is not what it was, and the group fills in nicely. He was a skilled guitarist and still is, and the music blends smoothly with those lovely lyrics.
Van Gogh is likely to stay with humankind for some time to come. His way of seeing things provide a fresh perspective, but one that grounds itself in reality. He did that in a hyper-romantic period, when that only reluctantly gave way to portrayals of real life. He was one of the few that pointed it in that direction.
McLean’s work has that same grounding. American Pie was nothing less than a history of rock and roll. Another song, Castles In The Air, casts a critical eye on those structures at a time when most music was still busy with their construction. He also indulged in the romantic, both in covers and in And I Love You So, which several singers covered. At the ripe old age of 27, the year after Vincent, he wrote Dreidel, a song that tries to parse the meaning of life. The song seems more accurate every year.
Perhaps that devotion to what is real and true is what allows music and lyrics to intersect with art.

When the Moon Sings Share Tweet Email 5:00pm WRUU-FM by Live 5:00pm A Rose After Dark by Tom Barabas on Romantic Rhapsodies (Soundings of the Planet), 1998 5:07pm Questions solitaires… by Roman Nagel on Questions solitaires… – Single (Universal GMBH), 2024 5:11pm As It Happens by Bob James & E...

07/11/2024

When The Moon Sings: November 9, 2024; 5-6 pm. Tom Barabas, Bob James, and Hermanos Gutierrez provide some of the music for this edition. From the Soapbox, P. T. Bridgeport stands at the intersection of visual art and audio art, quite an unusual crossroads. Join us. Listen to WRUU 107.5 FM in Savannah and globally @ wruu.org.

03/11/2024

Many thanks to Professor Rose Metts for coming on the program to talk about turtles, China, and the teaching of literature and composition. Here's a link to the chat:

When the Moon Sings Share Tweet Email 5:00pm WRUU-FM by Live 5:01pm As I Walked Out (Arr. for String Quartet by the Danish String Quartet) by Danish String Quartet on Keel Road (Deutsche Grammophon), 2024 5:01pm Love Song (After JE) by Max Richter on In A Landscape (Decca), 2024 5:06pm Clear Moon, Q...

31/10/2024

When The Moon Sings: Saturday, November 2, 2024; 5-6 pm. This time, some music from the Danish String Quartet and Max Richter. Professor Rose Metts visits with P. T. Bridgeport to discuss her book, A Turtle's Tale, and to talk about some of her experiences while teaching at Savannah State University. Join us. Listen to WRUU 107.5 FM in Savannah and globally @ wruu.org.

27/10/2024

https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/54144

Every now and then. I run into a person, usually born in this century, who wants to talk about literature of the previous century. That’s fine – I did read some, though I am no authority. When a group decides to discuss 20th Century literature, sometimes they ask us veterans of that era to name the greatest novelist. Nobody will ever answer that question satisfactorily.
Richard Condon’s name doesn’t come up in those discussions. He never achieved the stature of a Fitzgerald or a Faulkner or a Hemingway, and I’m not sure how well read his works are today. His works were lively, contemporary to his time, and his plots highly unlikely. His most famous novel was The Manchurian Candidate, which most people know as cinema, not literature. As happens all too frequently, Hollywood may have missed the point of the book in the movie.
Condon wrote dense sentences that wrapped their clauses around each other until the end, which was totally unpredictable from the beginning. His novels required staying alert, which may be too much for many readers. His plots required attention too. I read two or three of his works – I frequently felt a pulling sensation on my leg. Sometimes he seemed deadly serious and others, he was surely dipping his pen into the river we call the human comedy. That’s the part that cinema misses – his written words have a wink and a grin behind them than never appear on the silver screen.
He wrote twenty-six books, mostly novels. Many of them were prefaced by quotes from the Keener’s Manual, a book he made up as a context for his labyrinthine plots. He never actually wrote the Keener’s Manual – he just manufactured quotes from it, short epigraphs that hinted at the thinking behind the book.
Perhaps the text of the Keener’s Manual would have looked much like Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. Condon was deeply suspicious of power and its exercise, usually resulting in greed and corruption. He started writing in the mid 1950’s and ended in the mid-90’s, a time when such suspicions had been validated repeatedly. The name of the manual hints at the content. Keening is loud lamentation, usually performed at a funeral. In theory, keening is a spontaneous burst of emotion over the death; but some countries practice it as ritualistic – they have professional keeners, people paid for those emotional outbursts. Condon understood the practice as well as the theory, and writing quotes from a manual supposedly for it probably amused him greatly.
He called his first novel The Oldest Confession and began it with this quote:
The Oldest Confession
Is one of Need,
Half the need Love,
The other half Greed
If you missed the movie The Manchurian Candidate, you may know Condon through another film, Prizzi’s Honor. Condon wrote four novels about the Prizzis, a Brooklyn-based Mafia family with personal politics and ideas that might be a microcosm for national ones. Condon seems fond of the Prizzis, perhaps as a more straightforward version of national politicians. In two of his other novels, a character appears that bears a strong resemblance to Richard Nixon.
That’s a lot of information on Richard Condon, and it may look like I think he should be considered as one of the greatest novelists of the 20th Century. I don’t. He is not quite enough of a stylist to measure against his better peers, and his plots are wildly improbable. Again, his intent is always uncertain. Often enough, I see his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. I don’t know whether I am supposed to laugh or cry. True, his era was full of real-life events with the same problem, but uncertainty characterizes real life, and some people read novels to escape it.
But two things bring Condon to mind. The first is that he might be in the conversation if he had actually written The Keener’s Manual rather than devising quotes from it. Here are a few other observations – first, from Death of a Politician:
This is my body
Up for sale,
This is my conscience
Deadly pale,
This is my sanity
Price tag peeping.
These are my people
Why are they weeping?
Then from Prizzi’s Glory:
Seeking good fortune
As we rise from the mud,
‘Tis often we’re paid
From a purse filled with blood.
And finally, my all time favorite, from Any God Will Do:
Interest is the key to life,
Interest is the clue,
Interest is the drum and fife
And any God will do.
Whether you agree with them or not, these are perceptive observations, worthy at least of discussion and perhaps even more. And the second thing that brings him to mind is that his quotes haven’t just aged well, they have become even more acute than when they were written.
The quote from Any God Will Do seems especially relevant now. It explains, at least in part, the psychology that led to murderous mobs that have dotted recent history. It responds to the totally abhorrent plague of mass shootings the country has endured. We ask why, as if there were some answer. Maybe any answer will do – it’s just an excuse for the will to commit an outrage. It is the psychology of having redoubled your efforts once you have lost your way, and can be applied to many current phenomena, especially in this, an election year.
Reality seems to have become Condon-esque, with improbable situations and low comedy leading to moments that may have dire consequences, not unlike husband-and-wife contract murderers who were given a contract on each other. And like a Condon novel, the main plot swims in a sea of trivia that obscures the progression until the climax is on you.
The well-matured have a game we play called What Would They Think? It’s simple: take a personality no longer around and imagine what they would make of the current day. What would Walter Cronkite think of the news business? How would Mort Sahl or Walt Kelly respond to the current election personalities? What would Stan Musial think of Shihei Otani, or Bill Russell think of Victor Wembanyama? Now we can add Richard Condon to the list. What would he think of the current political climate?
I’m convinced he would say, “I told you so.”

When the Moon Sings Share Tweet Email 5:00pm WRUU-FM by Live 5:04pm MoonDial by Pat M**heny on MoonDial (Modern Recordings/BMG), 2024 5:10pm Once Upon Another Time by David Wahler on Blue Rose (David Wahler), 2023 5:15pm For the Palms (feat. Gregoire Maret) by Lee Ritenour & Dave Grusin on Brasil (C...

24/10/2024

When The Moon Sings: Saturday, October 26, 2024; 5-6 pm. This time, the quiet hour features music from Pat M**heny, David Wahler, and Snorri Hallgrimsson. The run-up to the election brings the author Richard Condon to P. T. Bridgeport's mind - he explains from the Soapbox. Join us. Listen to WRUU 107.5 FM in Savannah and globally @ wruu.org.

19/10/2024

https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/54043

We are a few short weeks from our annual celebration of bite-sized candies. Savannah decorates and decorates lavishly for Halloween. It probably has to do with the city’s reputation as a retirement community for ghosties, goblins, and long-legged beasties, but whatever the cause, it is the announcement that the year is turning late. Soon the holidays will be on us, with all of the freedoms and responsibilities that go with that time of year.
The evenings have cooled off, and mornings feature temperatures that we haven’t seen since February. The temperature of sea water has cooled to below 80 too. Each of these things indicate that it is autumn.
Autumn is the season for disassembling the preparations you made for a late summer hurricane season. Start drinking some of the 12 cases of water, move 36 or 40 rolls of toilet paper from the emergency cabinet to the pantry, and stop researching inland motels that might be out of the evacuation zone.
But not this year – no, we’re not doing that yet. The weather wizards predicted a long hurricane season and that has come to pass. Most years, we’d be trying to find the right balance of orange and purple for outdoor decorations. This year, we look up the the trees and try to calculate limbfall angles and velocity.
We have justification. There are still atmospheric whirlygigs floating around the ocean. The last few have confined themselves to the mid-Atlantic, but here’s another one, not quite mature, lurking between the Barbados and Cape Verde, trying to decide which path west to take. And we have already encountered some of the by-products of storms like this. Storms like Helene always seem to take their anger out on the trees
For people who spent their youth in the city, trees have a strange, nearly magnetic attraction. They live, where much of the city skyline is inert, a stage set designed for masses of people. Their irregularity defies the real or attempted plane geometry of the streets and buildings. In groves, they seem to provide a sense of shelter, a place where the inner self might emerge. Forests simply are – they allow disappearance from public view, they require no sweeping, they contain shy creatures whose sight might lift the spirit.
For those people, living the dream would include heavily wooded properties. Like most dreams, reality intrudes in the attempt to realize them. Private property does need to be swept and pruned and maintained. Owned trees have two options; proprietors can do the work themselves, or they can wait for a hurricane to come through and do it for them.
The hurricane called Helene came in through the back door – it swept up from the Gulf rather than piling in from the Atlantic. Back door hurricanes cause less damage, because they must travel over land before they reach us, which disorganizes them. The eye of Helene never came near us, travelling inland instead, but this time, it made no difference. Helene was too large and potent to dissipate nicely after she reached the shore. We expected winds of perhaps forty miles per hour. The weather gauges around town recorded bursts of half again as much and more.
Such winds affect both natural and artificial trees – the poles that hold electrical and cable lines. Some bend until they break, but others twist in the wind until they shatter. Since most trees root shallowly in our nutrient-poor soil, they may uproot completely. Helene saved her most vigorous bursts until around three in the morning, which meant that residents woke up to the remains, without electricity or communications.
Helene did vigorous yard work. She swept leaves and needles into shallow piles, added to small branches not strong enough to withstand brisk winds. She pruned tree limbs that had aged or grew out awkwardly. She culled dozens, maybe hundreds of pinecones that reached their dropping age. Many of the limbs she reached were above comfortable cutting height. It was an impressive feat.
The dog of the property is an outstanding digger. But he only digs where I do not need holes. Helene had the same problem. I appreciated the work she did, but she deposited the remains clumsily, such as on the roof of the house. Bigger, heavier things fell to the ground, but the roof looks like someone tried to camouflage it against air attack.
It took two weeks to rearrange Helene’s work, and vigorous participation by noble and active neighbors. We built a pile in the circle about eight feet high and thirty feet around. Somewhere around two thirds of the wrack was from my property. Three days after the storm a thirty-footer fell rather tardily. We are now at approximate normal though that’s a rather fuzzy term.
All of which is to say that we were fortunate. Many suffered more than we did, and many had fewer resources and less noble neighbors. Streets flooded, trees were ripped up whole, power lines festooned the streets. We were inconvenienced, not devastated. And we are anxious to leave it at that.
Savannah decorates lavishly for Halloween, and the main parts of the decoration seems to be inflatable figures. If the weather turns circular, inflatables will morph from cartoon horrible to actually horrible, to say nothing of plastic cobwebs and the trees they generally hang in.
Not all signs are bleak. Hurricanes feed from warm water and our current ocean temps have sagged to the mid-70s. perhaps the places where these things spawn will cool off as well. But a hurricane in the fright season will mix too much reality with the social background behind chocolate miniatures and the dreaded candy corn. The social fabric will require more mending than we can arrange before the real holiday season appears.
Weather, despite the ideas of some of the more colorful political figures, is beyond our control. We must adapt to it. We can do so successfully or sulkily. Darwin suggests vigor. I hope that we never mix hurricanes with Halloween, but it never seemed possible years ago. This year it does. How very strange.

When the Moon Sings Share Tweet Email 5:00pm WRUU-FM by Live 5:00pm Facta est deserta by Shards on By Keiran Brunt & William Byrd: Byrd Song (Erased Tapes Records), 2024 5:06pm Hymn for the Pacific Rim (Of the Father’s Love Begotten) by Eugene Friesen on The Essential Collection (787340 Records DK...

17/10/2024

When The Moon Sings: Saturday, October 19, 2024; 5-6 pm. Music for the quiet hour comes from The Shards and William Byrd, Olivia Belli, Julian Lage, and Lambert, with Ralph Heidel. From the Soapbox, PT conjures up the scariest Halloween ever, and tries to guess how likely it is. Join us. Listen to WRUU 107.5 FM in Savannah and globally @ wruu.org.

13/10/2024

https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/53893

Many thanks to Andy Hall for coming over to chat about Georgia Color, the plein air event in Savannah next week. Here's a link to the chat: https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/53893

10/10/2024

When The Moon Sings: Saturday, October 12, 2024; 5-6 pm. On this edition of the quiet hour, Andy Hall and P. T. Bridgeport will chat about the Georgia Color Plein Air Contest and Exhibition, to be held in Savannah starting October 17th. Luke Howard and Taka Nawashiro will provide some recorded music too. Join us. Listen to WRUU 107.5 FM in Savannah and globally @ wruu.org.

06/10/2024

I know a radio station host who will be there.

06/10/2024

https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/53833

Many thanks to Tania Sammons and Jimmy Butcher for coming on the program to talk about the art of tattooing and the current show at the Ships of the Sea Museum. Here's a link to the archived show - click on the tattoo arrow to get the interview.

When the Moon Sings Share Tweet Email 5:00pm WRUU-FM by Live 5:01pm First Ride by Eugene Friesen on The Essential Collection (787340 Records DK), 2018 5:01pm De Ushuaia a La Quiaca (2024 Remaster) by Gustavo Santaolalla on Ronroco (2024 Remaster) (Nonesuch), 1998 5:58pm Hymn by Craig Armstrong on Pl...

03/10/2024

At long last, I was able to publish the interview with Marc Thomas. Thank you, Mark, for coming to chat, and I hope to see you at Marc's book launch for Talking to the Machines and Other Poems
Saturday, October 5 beginning at 2:30 pm at Clearing House Savannah, 134 Houston Street (on Greene Square)

When the Moon Sings Share Tweet Email 5:00pm WRUU-FM by Live 5:01pm Drops of Light by Jordi Forniés & Stepan Svestka on Hela Nokto (Decca), 2024 5:01pm La Crosse by Pat M**heny on MoonDial (Modern Recordings/BMG), 2024