Just Blow a Raspberry

BEDAZZLED, the Faustian comedy feature by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, delighted me instantly, though I soon started thinking that this part or that part was dated or awkward or embarrassing. Oddly, as time went by and I got older--two things that occurred simultaneously--the awkwardnesses seem to have hit closer to the mark than I knew, and the dated aspect becomes the perfection of a period piece. In short, the good bits keep getting better and the weak ones either do or become unimportant, and what's left is one of my generation's classics.

Dudley Moore, aka Stanley Moon, is a diner cook in love with the unattainable waitress Margaret Spencer (Eleanor Bron, who I remember best from HELP). Stanley is approached by George Spiggot (Peter Cook), who being Lucifer the Lord of the Underworld offers George seven wishes. Seven chances to win the amazing Margaret, and any one of them should do it, right? Stanley lets himself be convinced: his original sin. The movie shows us the relationship between these two men, with Margaret as a pawn We never see her internal world, and most of her time is spent in scenarios concocted by George in order to ruin Stanley's wishes, and her role is akin to that of another castaway playing a part in a dream sequence on Gilligan's Island. 

George also manages the seven deadly sins, each personified by an actor. Raquel Welch as Lust lights up the screen with a broad Southern accent. He also takes Stanley with him on some of his rounds, which consist of a series of petty annoyances against people (and perhaps animals), because it's his job, as he explains to Stanley at some length. God makes him do this, in a pretty direct way. It's not George's fault. Nothing ever is. (I knew a George.) 

A favorite scene of mine has the two men dressed in white and showing up at an elderly woman's house. George says that they're the Fruney Green Eyewash men, and if she has five bottles of Fruney Green Eyewash in her home, she will win a tidy little prize. Of course she doesn't, but George encourages her to nip to the chemist and bring them back, and he'll pretend they were there all along. After she goes off on her bike, George raids her fridge and eats her raspberries and cream. Stanley complains, but has some too. Anyway, George offers, it's all her fault because she wanted to lie about the eyewash. 

Speaking of raspberries, the deal is that Stanley can end any wish and go back to status quo by blowing a raspberry. George's preferred magic words are "Julie Andrews!" but he can substitute. The scenarios of Stanley's wishes, egged on by George's devilish suggestions, are the formal set pieces of the movie, and they get more and more exacting as Stanley endeavors each time to make THIS one George-proof. Witness ye now my favorite, a self-contained "Ready, Steady, Go!" parody on a show called "Going, Going, Gone!" Stanley has wished for fame, and he has wished to win the heart of the fair Margaret (I love the moment when she's watching Stanley on the stage and is suddenly transfixed by Stanley on the monitor.). 

So Stanley goes on, singing a song written by Dudley Moore, and everything goes according to plan for a while.

 

 

It's the ultimate (as Dudley could well deliver, and often did) in its field, and its field is NEEDINESS. You will never hear a needier pop song, more baldly delivered. Watch the choreography. Then note the exact opposite of all fo it in the follow-up, also by Dudley, delivered by the guy who just couldn't help being tall and handsome and cold.

(Incidentally, Bongwater covered "Bedazzled," the song, gender-flipped and hilariously camp. Recommended.)

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A Timely Tip

Playing piano at Minicon about 15 years ago. Photo by Tony von Krag.

When you're learning to play a piece--on the piano, in this case--it's helpful to learn the melody by humming or whistling or la-la-la-ing. This piece of advice from my father, a piano teacher, has turned out to be very useful recently. Makes me wish Dad had told me years earlier. Or at all.

As it happens, I got this pointer from my sister, to whom Dad told it decades ago. Dad tried twice to teach me and we apparently came up with a mutual unspoken deal where I'd struggle by myself for years and he'd occasionally offer me a suggestion that would usually prove useful, though not as useful as learning to finger, or acquiring basic harmony knowledge. After I finally started spending my own money for lessons, Mr. Diebel (I expect his proper title was Dr., but I never heard it used or requested) patiently addressed the worst of my deficiencies, ignoring my utter helplessness from his friendship with Dad. Dad once asked him what the main thing was he'd taught me, and Diebel answered by putting five fingers on his arm and saying "One, two, three, four, five." When I came to him, I acquired most notes by moving my hand. When we moved out of state a year or so later, I was about where a second or third-year student might be, provided nobody asked any theory questions, including "what key is this in?"

Fortune and decision brought me to theory. First, I noticed the existence of the Irish jam on Cathy's campus and started going. I tried playing my tiny backpack keyboard, but it was nigh inaudible in the room full of fiddlers and accordionists. I brought my accordion in (never learned the bass notes) and sight-read on that for a while before buying a five-octave keyboard with full-sized keys I could play. That led to a feeling of obligation toward those chord names over the tune sheets we used, and I started filling in, first with just the roots of the chords, then block chords, and finally comping. That's when a light bulb in my head said "You should take theory now, before you graduate." So I took four semesters off my art major and just took the sequence, not even for credit. I had some questions early on which my teacher answered by having me sit in on the aural training class concurrent with the theory cycle. 

I figured I knew enough theory from osmosis that I could start the class without a semester of "this is your finger and this is a note," and I was almost wrong but got through it with a simple trick I've mastered of clenching my entire head and keeping it that way until a problem seems to solve itself. The theory homework had the side effect of teaching me legible musical writing, which worked out because I also started writing some pieces of music in the same format we used in the jam. The class and sessions are the best musical education I've received, and I wish I'd done it decades earlier. 

I was talking to a couple of friends in the group (dang! I have friends here.) about playing outside the sessions to do other kinds of music. Suddenly, people started getting Covid and parts of society shut down, including all campus activities like ours (mostly peopled by non-college folks). My friend and I exchanged mp3s for a while, then started meeting under extremely careful conditions. After two years and change, we pick up new pieces pretty quickly (the tough ones take longer), often making our own non-virtuoso arrangements for the purpose. That's when Martha mentioned the bit about humming.

Who knows if I could have taken music theory earlier? I had one theoretical sort of class in Georgia but was trying to do math and computers and art. Would I have shrugged it off like my first (and second) lessons? Would Dad's pointer have taken root if he'd told it to me himself? Who sawed Courtney's boat? 

I'm taking away from this exactly what I'm getting: a tip that makes it even easier at a time when it's continually getting easier. With any luck, I'll get up to Michigan in the Fall and have a chance to show Dad how my playing is going, and mention that I'm using his tip. There's some baggage lying around that I don't feel like picking up. It'd just slow me down anyway, and nothing in it's of any real value. 

Left foot. Right foot. Am I there yet? 

Repeat.

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A Window In Time

For alt-text, see third note below. Picture might enlarge if you click on it. This is as big as I can get it before it takes over the page.
 

One day in 1969, I was taking photography as an 8th-grade elective for a semester. I had the use of Mom's Kodak Bantam, which used 828 film (eight exposures? EIGHT?). It occurred to me that I could take a picture of the view from our living room window and save it forever!

That's probably Mark standing on what they called "a treehouse," wood nailed up in squared-off shapes. There's Roxy, their pony, visible behind the doghouse of Lady, the least fortunate collie ever, trust me. There's the swingset and the full-size tree they put in there.

There's the back yard where the boys would drive the "old" pickup around and around when they were too young to go on the road.* There's acres of pasture** where cattle sometimes grazed, and I found one of our cats dead.

There's the first leg up the hill, and the notch where we'd first spy the glint of our yellow bus coming around the mountain. We knew exactly how much time we had to get to the end of our gravel driveway. There's Spring Canyon Dam. The Swimming Gorilla. Horsetooth Mountain.

Confession: I had to fix the negative, which was torn clear down into Horsetooth, and the image there now is something I did in Photoshop to make it less glaring.

And there's our huge sky, always a canvas for extravagant white clouds that passed from the west and north mostly. One day I realized why: No trees, huh. How about that.

Special bonus: the lighter rectangle floating behind Mark shows the reflection in the glass of the kitchen window on the east side of the house. Hello, little window!

So, darn. It really worked, and it still works. I wish to award myself a point. Where's the chalk?

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* Footnote: When I worked for RMFRES in 1980, I had occasion to visit the photo department at CO State U, and they had an aerial shot that must have been from right about 1969. You could clearly see the oval track in their back yard. rrr-RRRRR-rrrr!

** Feetnote: I referred to exactly this sort of terrain recently in a reminiscence of stepping out of a car in like 2004 onto ground like that and feeling like I was FINALLY HOME again, because the bottoms of my feet felt right at last.

 *** ALT TEXT for the photo! I can't find a way to do it here, but here's what I used for alt-text at Twitter, where most of this originally appeared earlier this morn... afternoon. 

"A black and white view looking west at the Front Range foothills of northern Colorado. In the near ground, scraggly trees, the neighbor's fence, a doghouse, a pony's back visible above the doghouse, a garage with a kid standing on a homemade construction of some sort at the south end. Acres and acres of mostly bare prairie with a long-unlived-in house visible just before the first hill. Spring Canyon Dam connects two hills, holding in Horsetooth Reservoir (named for the notch-shaped hill 3/4 of the way across the hilltops). Clothesline. Swingset."

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From The Record Canister

We used to have a canister which might have originally held potato chips, but which was about 8" across, making it suitable for a stack of 45s and kiddie 78s. At a point in my life at which I had less control, I turned left and they turned right, and I never saw or heard them again, but my mind's ear provides replays of them, nestled in with the ringing.

One of the more peculiar of these kiddie disks was on the flip side of "Tattle-Tale Duck" ("Tattle-tale, tattle-tale, quackity-quack! / He tattles in front and he wiggles in back! / So watch your step, / You're out of luck / If you get caught by the tattle-tale duck!"), with the mild title "Ducks On Parade." 

It doesn't seem to be online. I checked, but you check as well. Sometimes I miss things.

Unlike most of the songs I'd hear in this enigmatic stack of clues to the greater world (such things would come my way, and I'd puzzle over their meaning as I labored to get the words right) this one had no lyrics. It was a pure instrumental, and if I'm any judge, it was made up on the spot. The instrumentation eludes my mental track, but the underall obbligato was a rhythmic quacking sound. Not a real quack, but a quacking sound. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was obviously a toy duck of the sort Lucy Van Pelt might have pulled around in a desultory fashion in a 50s Peanuts strip. And I'm not sticking my neck out very far by boldly asserting that someone had a wheeled duck toy and put it on one of the turntables in the studio and held it while the table turned, producing a quasi-quack-quack track.

And heck, that's really the interesting bit, right there. The melody is a series of tentative beginnings of phrases.

Doo.
Dooby dooby doo.
Dooby dooby doo; dooby dooby doo; dooby dooby doo.

(repeat a note higher; keep fumfering with it, and eventually back out more or less the same way)

It didn't have to be long. A 5" 78 record isn't good for much more than a minute, if that. So I guess either someone was screwing around with the ducky and the producer said "Let's record it," or else they were sitting around desperate for one more side that day, and the guy at the turntable said "How about this?" and put the duck on, and then the piano guy made up this tune, and eleven minutes later, they'd recorded it and mastered it and gone out for drugs.

You'll let me know if you find it, won't you? I haven't heard it in over fifty years. I mean, outside of  my head. Also, if you happen upon it, I'd really like a copy (even just audio) of the ~1970 ad for Clearasil or Noxzema that has the obnoxious "I am an Acne Pimple!" song that haunts my inner ear, where it threatens to overturn my balance.
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