Odds & Ends: News/Humor (with a "Who Lost the Week?" poll)

I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in "Cheers & Jeers".

OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.

CHEERS to Bill and Michael in PWM, our Laramie, Wyoming-based friend Irish Patti and ...... well, each of you at Cheers and Jeers. Have a fabulous weekend .... and week ahead.

ART NOTES — an exhibit of works by the famed music photographer Jim Marshall, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Johnny Cash shows entitled The Prison Concerts: Folsom And San Quentin— will be at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, California through February 24th.

 Johnny Cash: 1968 prison concerts

THE OTHER NIGHT in Rachel Maddow’s A-block segment, she recounted the 1973 confirmation hearings of the choice that Nixon made for his last attorney general, Sen. William Saxbe (R-OH) — noting that he was a lame-duck maverick, with some colorful quips and gaffes. But she left out his most colorful quip:

Nixon's claims that he knew nothing of the Watergate coverup were like ... "the man who plays piano at a bawdy house for 20 years … and says he doesn't know what's going on upstairs."

WHAT GROUP is most hostile to the #MeToo movement? Republican women over the age of 65.

THURSDAY's CHILD is named Gloria the Cat— who was found (in a locked carrier) in a British Columbia landfill, is being treated for fleas, building up her weight and will soon be up for adoption.

    Gloria the Landfill Cat

IN A REVERSAL of other places: big cities in Australia want fewer new arrivals … whereas small rural communities want more: hoping they can offset the population decline that threatens many outback settlements with extinction, as birth rates fall and youngsters head for cities.

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Thank you, @Delta! https://t.co/ne7y8PdQlA

— John Lewis (@repjohnlewis) January 18, 2019

FRIDAY's CHILD is a Taiwanese kitteh who — after a man felt he could no longer care for (due to mobility problems) — placed him in a cardboard box for express mail to a local animal shelter ... which he has been fined nearly US$3k for.

  Taiwanese mail-order cat

BRAIN TEASER — try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC.

HAIL and FAREWELL to the photographer Walter Chandoha— estimated to have taken over 90,000 cat photos — who has died at the age of ninety-eight.

BROTHER-SISTER? — White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley— who was grilled on Friday by Bill Hemmer of Fox about the Buzzfeed report ….

Hogan Gidley (b. circa 1976)

……. as well as your-friend-and-mine, Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA).

Sen. Joni Ernst — born 1970

...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… a reporter for the Guardian called her the Godmother of Hip— and certainly the poet and lyricist Fran Landesman was a free spirit of the first order (calling herself the Poet Laureate of Lovers and Losers). She has at least two entries in the Great American Songbook (one of which comes in vogue each April) and others known to cabaret society. For that alone, she deserves a remembrance.

Born in 1927 as Frances Deitsch in Greenwich Village, she studied at Temple University and then at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, initially working in the fashion industry (her father was a dress manufacturer). The call of the saloons of the Beat Generation led to her in 1949 meeting Jay Landesman, publisher of the (short-lived) Neurotica magazine, which published Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac, among others.

Kerouac tried serenading her (with Ginsburg on bongos) to no avail ... as Fran married Jay, going on to an unconventional sixty-one-year marriage, with two sons (one a journalist and the other, Miles Davis Landesman, becoming a musician). ‘Unconventional’ as in a very open marriage, as she alluded to in a 1979 poem Semi-Detached:

We each have a side that's as free as the air,

And people don't see the side that we share

Our set-up is sweet. There isn't a catch

The secret is living semi-detached

Her journalist son Cosmo cringed when as a child (during the mid-60’s) they attended Parents’ Night at school: “They arrived looking like two hippies who had failed the audition for the musical ‘Hair.’ ”

   Jay & Fran (in the 1950’s)

Shortly after their marriage, they made the first of two major relocations in life: the first to Jay's hometown of St. Louis (not to Fran’s bohemian liking). Once there, Jay and his brother opened a nightclub (called the Crystal Palace) in the Gaslight Square section of town … which became a destination for future stars (including Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, Phyllis Diller, the Smothers Brothers and an eighteen year-old Barbra Streisand). Another was Lenny Bruce — who became quite close to Fran, suggesting “Let’s you-and-me go on the road, send Jay a little money each month”.

At the club, Fran began to write songs with the house pianist Tommy Wolf, and the visiting British pianist George Shearing became a fan of the duo, recommending their songs to other performers. Fran Landesman’s most famous lyrics were based upon T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — with its iconic opening “April is the cruelest month” — and when added to the music Tommy Wolf composed, it became Spring Can Hang You Up the Most— which has been performed over the years by Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Rickie Lee Jones, Sarah Vaughn, Julie London and most popularly by Ella Fitzgerald. As noted, it has become a perennial song each April.

This song was part of a musical play entitled The Nervous Set— written by the Landesmans and Tommy Wolf — that was about the Beat Generation and centered on Greenwich Village. It was a smash hit in St. Louis, Missouri in early 1959, and moved to Broadway later that year … with one of the cast members a twenty-eight year old Larry Hagman (six years away from I Dream of Jeannie) portraying a character modeled upon Jack Kerouac. Yet the play closed after only twenty-three performances, despite positive reviews about the musical numbers.

Tommy Wolf left to pursue a career on the West Coast, and recommended to the Landesmans the actor/singer Bob Dorough— later of Schoolhouse Rock fame who died just a few months ago. He agreed to star in a musical adaptation of the Nelson Algren book A Walk on the Wild Side— about down-and-outers set in a brothel that touched upon sex and suicide … which flopped in the St. Louis of the early 1960’s, despite the success of one particular song that Fran and Bob Dorough had written, Nothing Like You— that Miles Davis recorded. (The book was later successfully made into a feature film).

In 1964, with their nightclub faltering, the Landesman family moved to London, England — where the only person they knew was the comedy star Peter Cook (who had just brought his play Beyond the Fringe to a smash Broadway run). He was able to introduce them to the Beatles and his partner Dudley Moore, whose more serious songwriting she wrote lyrics for. The Landesmans lived in England for the remaining forty-seven years of their lives.

Fran Landesman c. 1970’s

In her later years, Fran turned to books of poetry as previously alluded to (Bette Davis is supposed to have memorized her poem Life is a Bitch with the line “First love makes you itch, then it dishes you the dirt”). In 1994, she made a third major musical partnership with the much younger Welsh-born pianist Simon Wallace— and produced another three hundred songs, many of them with spoken words by Fran, rather than being sung.

As her sight began to fade as this decade began, she had to rely more on memorizing her poems, rather than reciting them. In 2011, just a few months after her husband Jay died at the age of ninety-one, Fran Landesman died at the age of eighty-three. When asked how she’d want to be remembered, her reply was: “It was a good life, but it was not commercial”.

… and in more recent years

Her other most famous song (and also from that 1959 musical The Nervous Set) was Ballad of the Sad Young Men— performed by Rod McKuen, Petula Clark, Roberta Flack, Rickie Lee Jones, Miriam Makeba, Boz Scaggs and Steve Lawrence among many others.

The version I want to feature — and the vocals are not the best on this — was one by the English folk revival guitarist Davey Graham— whose DADGAD tunings were copied by many folk musicians and whose She Moved Through the Fair was the model for Jimmy Page’s later instrumental White Summer. I find Davey’s odd vocal style capturing this song’s pathos more than other silky-smooth versions.

Sing a song of sad young men Glasses full of rye All the news is bad again Kiss your dreams goodbye

All the sad young men Sitting in the bars Knowing neon nights Missing all the stars

All the sad young men Drifting through the town Drinking up the night Trying not to drown

All the sad young men Singing in the cold Trying to forget That they're growing old

All the sad young men Choking on their youth Let your gentle light Guide them home tonight All the sad young men

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