Theodor Storm

Earlier this week a learned friend and colleague of mine asked me if I was familiar with the fiction of Theodor Storm, the nineteenth-century German lawyer, man of letters, and committed advocate of the removal of his native Schleswig-Holstein from Danish hegemony.

Although this name rang a distant bell, in due course I had to be reminded of his light-hearted way with titles, such as Im Nachbarhause Links (In the Neighbor’s House on the Left), that capricious novello of 1875 which has been described as “a study of the eccentric and miserly Frau Jansen, with flashbacks to her childhood and early youth, revealing that the old lady was always a repulsive miser.”

This natural comic flair was already evident in Waldwinkel: “Richard, saddened by years as a political prisoner for his liberal views and by the unfaithfulness of his wife, lives withdrawn from the world. He has taken Waldwinkel, a remote house in the woods, to pursue his botanical studies. Chancing to visit an old friend, a judge, when the latter is presiding over the case of a man who is eventually convicted of indecent behavior in respect of his [the man’s] beautiful ward Franziska, Richard is so struck with the victim that he engages her to help his old housekeeper, and to make sketches of his botanical specimens. He falls in love with Franziska and feels able, with her at his side, to face the world again and take up a chair in botany. However, just before the day fixed for their wedding, Franziska elopes with a young forester.”

If you liked Waldwinkel, you’ll love Wenn die Äpfel reif sind (When the Apples Are Ripe), “a humorous tale of a lovers’ moonlit rendezvous, interrupted by a boy stealing apples.”

One detects a strain of slapstick in Der Herr Etatsrat (The Dyke Administrator): “Sternow is a clever dyke administrator, but completely amoral. He wastes his evenings drinking with callow students and bellowing lewd songs, always attended by his factotum Käfer. The Etatsrat’s two children are utterly neglected. The son, Archimedes, is a good mathematician but kept at home to help his father, and, when Sternow at last relents and sends him off to university, it is too late: Archimedes works, but also drinks excessively, undermines his health, and dies of a fever. Phia, the daughter, leads an utterly solitary life. The scheming Käfer takes advantage of this lonely girl, and in due course she dies shirtly after giving birth to a stillborn child.”

True, German humor does require some perseverance. Fortunately, we may gain certain insights from a useful compendium sifted and arranged in 1903 by Mrs. Minna Sophie Marie Baumann Downes. It is entitled German Wit and Humor (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs and Co.), and the following teaser (p. 7) will demonstrate its immense value:

“A Good Shot”

A man passing through a forest saw an old blind bear. A young bear, whose tail was in the old bear’s mouth, led him. The man took his gun and shot the bear’s tail off. Then he took hold of it, and led the blind bear for two miles to market at Stuttgart.

I am told that this one still elicits loud guffaws from Saarland to Brandenburg, and from Lower Saxony to Bavaria.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Among the most moving of all the great protest songs of the 1960s, and one which is still regularly performed by Joan Baez, bless her, among many others, is the old Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson classic, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (1961):

Where have all the flowers gone? / Long time passing / Where have all the flowers gone? / Long time ago / Where have all the flowers gone? / Girls have picked them every one / When will they ever learn? / When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone?.../ Taken husbands, every one / When will they ever learn? etc.

Where have all the young men gone?... / Gone for soldiers, every one… etc.

Where have all the soldiers gone?... / Gone to graveyards, every one…

Where have all the graveyards gone?... / Covered with flowers, every one… / When will we ever learn?

According to tradition, Seeger was inspired by a Cossack folksong he came across in the novel And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) by Mikhail Sholokhov, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. Some time after he read the book, but well before its author hit the jackpot in Oslo, Seeger came across a few lines he jotted into his notebook, “Where are the flowers, the girls have plucked them. Where are the girls, they’ve all taken husbands. Where are the men, they’re all in the army.”

The song simply followed from that, and the final verses were added later, a reflection of the deepening crisis in Vietnam. Its circular structure reinforces the memento mori aspect, even if, these days, one might balk a little at the cheerful typecasting of young girls hoovering up all those flowers, not to mention all the young men in turn snaffling the young girls, “every one.” However, let’s not get too carried away with current sensitivities about gender politics.

Lately I thought of this song not because of any recent performance, nor even any resonances with what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan—though I guess these are pretty powerful.

Instead it was when, in my reticule, I came across another version that must surely go down in the annals of recorded music, and even of stage performance, as one of the most stupendously weird covers of any song ever to be voluntarily committed to magnetic tape. I refer, of course, to the 1973 cabaret rendition, “Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind,” by the iconic but by then rather elderly Marlene Dietrich. At the time it was aptly remarked by Clive James that, even as the great diva shimmied carefully downstage, center, at the New London Theatre, Drury Lane, to the wild applause of devoted fans, the pelts of innumerable small white animals, of which the train of her fur was composed, were evidently still leaving the dressing room.

Setting to one side the matter of Marlene Dietrich’s preferred but gravelly lower register, in the surviving footage her delivery is as clipped as the German translation of the lyrics leans towards the peremptory. She also seems very sleepy. In fact, notwithstanding the loose, open strumming of the acoustic guitar and gradually building café-orchestra accompaniment—together with some zippy, if slightly leaden upward key-changes—in Marlene Dietrich’s hands the song is handled not so much as a rumination on impermanence, love, death, and the futility of warfare, but rather as one might imagine some not particularly senior official appearing before the Düsseldorf town council to defend the imposition of a higher rate of land tax.

Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind. / Wo sind sie geblieben? / Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind. / Was ist geschehn? / Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind. / Mädchen pflückten sie geschwind. / Wann wird man je verstehn? / Wann wird man je verstehn? etc.

Mind you, if Marlene Dietrich had ever put in an appearance in such an unpromising forum—as far as I am aware, as a matter of principal she rarely set foot in Germany after taking American citizenship in 1939—I have no doubt she’d have brought the house down anyway. As James remarked, generally the quality of her later performances was for loyal audiences a foregone conclusion, but I think they are still worth listening to, and not only for a chuckle. And it’s also true that she did look amazing, right to the very end. Check out her final, extraordinary cameo appearance opposite David Bowie in David Hemmings’s fine motion picture Just A Gigolo (1979). She was by then seventy-seven years old.

The Kookaburra II

David Sedaris’ article in the current issue of the New Yorker actually takes in the childhood memory of singing with his sister a version of the Kookaburra song, and being punished by his irritable father for doing so. I suppose it would be fair to say that most Australians above a certain age (at least mine) must have sung that song in its original version, namely a delightful four-part round that was written in 1932 by Marion Sinclair, a schoolmistress at Toorak College, of which my grandmother was an alumna, and one of my sisters-in-law still is.

Miss Sinclair entered her composition in a fund-raising competition run by the Girl Guides’ Association of Victoria, and won. The song was first performed in 1934 in the presence of Lieutenant-General the Rt. Hon. Lord Baden-Powell, G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O., K.C.B., and Lady Baden-Powell, G.B.E., at a jamboree in Frankston (above) It was meticulously reported shortly thereafter in the Argus (January 4, 1935, p. 7), and thence spread across the globe—though not necessarily as a four-part round. However, I remember quite distinctly singing it in this form as a rather fetching treble temporarily seconded to some ad hoc choir, perhaps that of Millear House, on speech day at Grimwade House, with the late Miss Kathleen James at the pianoforte.

Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree, / Merry, merry king of the bush is he; / Laugh, Kookaburra! Laugh, Kookaburra! / Gay your life must be.

Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree, / Eating all the gum drops he can see; / Stop, Kookaburra! Stop, Kookaburra! / Leave some there for me.

Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree, / Counting all the monkeys he can see; / Stop, Kookaburra! Stop, Kookaburra! / That’s not a monkey. That’s me

Kookaburra sits on a rusty nail, / Gets a boo-boo in his tail; / Cry, Kookaburra! Cry, kookaburra! / Oh how life can be.

The concluding stanza, I suppose, reflects a degree of gloom arising from that ghastly experience of the Great Depression, from which nobody at all in Australia was spared.

Note the earliest (and correct) form of words: The kookaburra sits on, and not in, the old gum tree, a subtle distinction, certainly, but one that gives that muscular bird a slight hint of dominance, as befits the king of the bush designation that follows in the next line. Incidentally, in this context I have no idea what a boo-boo is. I doubt if it has anything to do with the parish of Boo Boo in the county of Courallie, which is in the Shire of Boolooroo, roughly half way between Narrabri and Moree in northern New South Wales, a few miles east of the Newell Highway (149° 56ʹ E, 29° 54ʹ S, to be precise). Nor, I think is it anything to do with the boobook, as the subtle brown owl we called the mopoke is more properly known. In any case boo-boo, n., is not yet listed in the O.E.D., or the otherwise impeccable Australian National Dictionary, so I shall certain make a point of speaking to the editors about this.

The Kookaburra

There is a slightly odd piece in the current issue of the New Yorker in which David Sedaris describes an intimate encounter not so long ago with a tame kookaburra over lunch in Daylesford, Victoria. Reading this I was immediately transported to the weatherboard house at Metung, where, in the very early morning, perched high in the branches of the enormous ghost gum that overhangs the boat-shed, a pair of extremely competitive kookaburras occasionally woke us up with a loud impromptu performance. I’ve always thought “laughter” a poor analogy for the distinctive cry of that muscular bird the kookaburra—except for those scarily over-emphatic, tooth-baring, rapid-fire, ack-ack-style baboon-screeches occasionally uttered by seasoned cocktail party-goers slightly too shrill in their grimly determined sociability. In fact it wasn’t only the kookaburras that unleashed a noisy dawn chorus. Between their limited engagements I recall waking up in the morning to the far more mellifluous song of the pied currawongs, the butcherbirds, the Australian magpies, the bellbirds, the aptly named whipbirds, the honeyeaters, the scratchy-sounding wattlebirds, the noisy miners, the fairy martins, maybe even the subtle mopokes (known more properly, I gather, as the southern boobook, or Ninox novaseelandiae), and very occasionally a rather perplexed and disoriented-looking king-parrot, or else a sulphur-crested cockatoo. Meanwhile, gazing out across the back lake, where we fed kitchen scraps to the seagulls, I always found it hard to take my eyes off the pelicans, those majestic, stately, yet grunting survivors of some antediluvian epoch, or else to keep track of the lissome cormorants after they dived energetically for fish. From time to time, against the evening sky, high above the line of scrubby dunes that separate Bass Strait from the lakes, you could spot a lone sea eagle wheeling hungrily. I have no idea what they sound like.

Jackson Hole, Wyo.

On the front page of this morning’s New York Times there is an upbeat story emanating from a conference of the world’s central bankers that is going on just now in the exceedingly expensive seclusion of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “The prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good,” says the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke (my italics).

It is reported also that sales of houses in America leaped by 7.2% in July; that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen 45% since March; that several foreign governments have lately reported quarters of greater growth than was previously anticipated; that the prices of oil, copper, and gold have all risen; that the Governor of the Bank of Israel—who he?—thinks it is reasonable to assume that the worst of the crisis is behind us, while an investor who rejoices in the name of Laszlo Birinyi, Jr., president of a thing called Birinyi Associates, is quoted as saying, “This is a bull market,” and adds that he is therefore investing in large banks, industrial and technological corporations such as 3M and Apple, as well as good old American steel. How nice.

Sometimes the only conclusion you can reach is that senior bankers, economists, and wealthy businessmen think the rest of us are as stupid as we are gullible. Perhaps they are right.

Certainly, what they are not quite so keen to emphasize just now in Jackson Hole, Wyo., is that unemployment in America was 9.4% in July (approx. 14.5 millions, not counting the farm sector), and is certainly going to get worse before it gets better, albeit at a slower rate. The new administration’s current estimate of the ten-year deficit has had to be revised upward from $7 trillion to $9 trillion, which amounts to 69% of this year’s United States G.D.P.—roughly $13 trillion—in other words a medium- to long-term debt so colossal, so overwhelming, that it is simply impossible to imagine how it will ever be repaid.

It is not simply that the United States Treasury can no longer reflate the world economy, as it has regularly done in the past. Rather it is that in a few years’ time, and for the first time in several generations, we may easily face the specter of a United States Treasury default. (The last time was in 1933.) Obviously there is nothing that President Barack Obama or his administration or the present congress could really have done to prevent this, because the alternative, i.e. no radical intervention at all, would have been far, far more catastrophic, indeed literally unthinkable.

But where are we getting the money that will permit us to pursue this dangerous course? The answer is wholly frightening: (1) Partly we are expecting the surplus countries such as China, Russia, India, the oil states of the Middle East, and so on, to participate in the monthly U.S. Treasury bond tenders, knowing full well that whenever these mature the dollars they retrieve will by then be so devalued by the effects of inflation, and so reduced in political clout that the entire exercise could yet become virtually meaningless. And in that event, how will we persuade those great states to keep on buying our bonds? (2) At the same time, we are printing money, lots and lots of money, enough money as is needed to shore up the gap between what is raised through the sale of bonds; what is saved by the not particularly drastic reduction in public spending, and (3) what else we can borrow from whoever is now in the happy position of being able to lend—an exceedingly unsavory mob, the kind of people your mother always warned you to avoid.

Meanwhile, our reserves of gold bullion (approx. $11 billion); foreign exchange (approx. $63 billion), and the so-called strategic petroleum reserve (approx. $67 billion) don’t amount to much more than peanuts compared with what we owe, and that’s not taking into account the $931 billion in accumulated U.S. consumer credit card debt (a figure not much less than the whole sum of Third World debt—$1.3 trillion), and the fact that we are wearing not only a vast budget deficit, but a trade deficit also.

It is hard to see how the action of the printing presses alone will not cause such inflationary pressure that the centralized interest rate mechanism and even a far tighter, better regulated monetary policy may be insufficient to hold it in check. When you plunge your foot on the accelerator so hard, it follows that eventually you’ll have to hit the brake pedal even harder. Naturally, all this puts at risk the dollar’s long-term trustworthiness as a reserve currency for the whole world, let alone its attractiveness as a plain, straightforward, ordinary old investment.

It is also stated in Jackson Hole, Wyo., that such growth as is now cautiously predicted will be for the time being “job neutral,” in other words the unemployed may expect to remain unemployed until further notice; and that, not surprisingly, consumer spending will remain sluggish, in other words that this could therefore actually impede recovery and growth. Notwithstanding the fact that we have thus far spent ourselves into oblivion, the economists want us to start spending again, and borrowing too. But the banks, meanwhile—never hesitating to leap headlong into the comforting, capacious skirts of Mama Treasury, as they always, always do—have packed up their bat and ball, and are presently sulking, refusing to play in the next innings of the game in which they so grievously and so recklessly hurt themselves, and, incidentally, the rest of us. Not since before 1947 has there been a contraction of credit. And a further 300 American banks will close this financial year.

As well, you do have to ask yourself, in a nation besotted with cars, clogged with 140-odd millions of car-dependent motorists and served by no public transportation system worthy of the name that might offer any viable competition with it, how on earth was it possible for the United States automobile industry to fail? In spite of these enormously favorable conditions such a gruesome failure must surely raise questions of basic competence, and numeracy.

So in the present economy the word “crisis,” is wholly inadequate. This is a catastrophe, a calamity, a disaster that is far, far worse for America and the world than anyone has yet been prepared to acknowledge. The positive noises coming out of Jackson Hole, Wyo., are merely the latest and possibly the most offensive examples of spin, maybe even self-deception, because no serious policy-maker does not yet understand that (a) phase two of the slump could very easily be just around the corner (with very little prospect of additional, gigantic sums of public money being made available to soften the impact), and (b) unless we willingly embrace a completely new and adequately representative global structure of economic and political power, there is a very good chance that we will not recover at all. Such are some of the views expressed not long ago by the Hon. Paul Keating, and I agree with every word.

The only glimmer of hope is that you and I, the ordinary American consumer, collectively constitute 16% of global consumption, and it is therefore in everybody else’s interest to keep us solvent. However that may not always be the case. The middle classes are on the rise in many other parts of the world, and are on the whole cannier, better educated, less fat, and far, far less complacent and indebted than we are.

The principal question therefore is: What will we negotiate with our new partners to replace the old G8, the old I.M.F., the old World Bank, and indeed the old Bretton Woods agreement? Where will the new international financial center be? I fear Washington, D.C., may no longer be acceptable to many of the relevant parties; and it is hard to see anywhere other than Washington, D.C., being at all acceptable to Washington.

Before this happened, we and our chums in the G8 were already debtor nations—six of us carrying public liabilities greater than 60% of G.D.P., two encumbered with more than 100% (Italy at 103%, and Japan at 170%) while Britain has done well to keep them down to 47%, while Russia carries only 6.8%.

However, thanks to monetary policy as loose and ill-fitting as an XXL jellaba, most of us were standing passively by while, in the international financial hub of New York City, the banks tossed vast sums of cheap, borrowed money into the ever greedier hands of millions who could never even qualify for an ordinary mortgage.

We are essentially still the same, however the principal difference is that we now have a debt incalculably more enormous—indeed, it would be more accurate to say that the debt has us, and has us by the throat.

So until every one of us learns to save more, spend less, and repay or merely adequately service our mind-boggling debt; and until we successfully persuade the surplus countries that they stand to gain a very great deal from spending more, and saving less, there will, there can be no end in sight.

Indeed, we may well remember the current cheerfulness of those donkeys, those blinkered fools currently talking up the prospects of Wall Street, not to mention the overpaid mandarins just now taking their leisure in Jackson Hole, Wyo., as engaged in perhaps the most spectacular case of rearranging deck-chairs since that regrettable incident involving the R.M.S. Titanic.

The Beret

Last winter I lost my beret. I have no idea where I left it, or what has happened to it, but it is gone. This was no ordinary beret. Hamish gave it to me for Christmas in 1975, while we were staying with the Francis Tuftons, and he was an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge. It was a black woolen second- or even third-hand St. John’s Ambulance Brigade beret with slender leather trim, emblazoned inside the crown with the Maltese cross and certain other armorial bearings of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. Over the years these gradually began to wear away, but this splendid article of apparel nevertheless performed its simple function with 100% effectiveness and utter reliability for no fewer than thirty-three years, gradually adapting itself also to the size of my aging head, and varying amounts of hair. Apart from the beautiful Tissot wristwatch Mum and Dad purchased for me in Basel on the same holiday—that went in 1999 when I was cleaned out by burglers in Adelaide—I cannot recall losing anything else of greater sentimental value. It brings to mind a remark Dennis Potter once made to Melvyn Bragg, which, paraphrased, adapts itself perfectly to the situation: “I’ve lost my beret, oh my god, I’ve lost my beret…oh, the beret-ness of that beret, and the lostness of that loss.” Dennis Potter was talking about the experience of losing something when you are a child, but I reckon there are times when it applies to adults with equal if not greater force—much as we like to pretend that certain material or worldly possessions do not matter to us quite so much as they actually do. For several months I couldn’t bear even to think about trying to replace my beret. However, at this time of year, when with stony dread we await the gruesome onset of fall, then the outrageous atrocities of the next winter, you have no choice but to reach for headgear. So lately I have been trawling on-line. I have with increasing frustration visited countless virtual purveyors of hats, but although the world is awash with berets, I cannot find just the right one. They are either too broad, too snug, too foppish, too furry, the wrong color, or else hitched to some irritating selling point such as “genuine Basque,” or else ridiculously expensive. However, I have not yet given up.

Angus

One of the trying aspects of living in America for the time being is that when local persons learn that my Christian name is Angus, they regularly respond with “Angus, you mean like the beef? Ha, ha, ha…” The reference, here, is to the Black or Aberdeen Angus breed of hornless cattle, which was developed through the first half of the nineteenth century from beasts native to the Scottish highland counties of Aberdeenshire and Angus, and successfuly transplanted thence to the New World. Touching though it is when people laugh so heartily at their own jokes, this form of crude free association is not usually applied to me at home in the Commonwealth of Australia, where Angus cattle are also plentiful. Nor does it ever crop up on my frequent visits to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Further, I have noticed that a good number of other American persons, to whom the Christian name of Angus is entirely unknown, assume that what I want to say is “Agnes,” and respond accordingly—and, if we are on the telephone, sprinkle our conversation thereafter with the respectful “Ma’am.” Being a man of the world, and entirely comfortable with gender issues, I really don’t mind this at all, and am careful only to correct the culprits if I sense that to allow their confusion to continue beyond a certain point might cause them discomfiture, awkwardness, or embarrassment. Moreover, I am quite used to it, because for years and years at Melbourne Grammar School entrenched bullies such as the appalling Simon Cameron made a habit of addressing me as Agnes, confident in their belief that this would cause me pain. They were quite wrong, because the beatings were far, far worse—and I have always been most fortunate in having what used to be called “bottom,” in other words a good deal of psychological ballast, much of it inherited. Anyhow, the delightful Agnes is not nearly so bad as what the spell-check portion of a now thankfully obsolete version of the Microsoft Word program used to suggest to my colleagues on the staff of the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, viz. that, wherever it appeared, my full name should be altered to “Anus Tremble.”’ Let us assume that my tactfully worded letter of protest to Mr. Bill Gates went astray, or was more probably forwarded to their attorneys for filing and/or future reference.

Sound

Assisted by the vastly learned Richard Warren, I have been systematically working through the extraordinarily rich collection of rare early sound recordings in the collection of the Sterling Memorial Library here at Yale, gradually assembling a representative program to offer through headphones to visitors to our forthcoming Edwardian Opulence exhibition. I wish the relevant laws of copyright would allow us to make this program more widely accessible on CD, possibly even include it in the catalogue, but outside the university I am afraid this will be prohibitively expensive, and administratively unachievable thanks to the relevant provisions of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act 1998 (U.S. Public Law 105–298). Nevertheless, it has been a fascinating task, not least because of those moments of genuine surprise when an occasional tic or habit of British speech or pronunciation stands out as completely different not merely from “received pronunciation,” as it is now known, but from any other even vaguely recognizable variant. I do not speak of those relatively familiar locutions that were discernable at least until fairly recently in the voice of H.M. The Queen, e.g. gawn awf for “gone off,” crawss for “cross,” lawst for “lost,” Awstralia for “Australia,” or sawft for “soft,” though these are plentiful and charming. When Somerset Maugham said petrol he laid exactly equal, seesaw emphasis on both syllables, of which the second was pronounced exactly like “doll”—with an especially short, clipped “o.” E. M. Forster, meanwhile, said articulayte for “articulate” (the adjective); motionliss, useliss, chickin, and Athins (Greece), for “motionless, useless, chicken, and Athens,” as well as sincewity, weeweeniss, mystewiousniss, and murmewing—though naturally these were caused by a slight speech impediment. He also enunciated very carefully the “p” at the beginning of “psychology.” Describing an Ethiopian dignitary at the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary in Westminster Abbey in 1911, Vita Sackville-West later recalled watching this person with “rurl fescinairtion,” more particularly his “high yepple green hyet” with a “lahrn’s mane wined a-rind it” because, she said, every time he turned his head, the lion’s mane tickled “the neauze of his next-daw nebba.” And in a broadcast recorded in 1935, Max Beerbohm makes the perplexing aside: “Mayfair and Westminster and St. James’s were grand, of course, very urban, in a proudly unostentatious way...They were places of leisure—of leesure, one might almost have said, in the old-fashioned way.” Old-fashioned? Presumably he meant late Victorian, or even earlier. And in the scratchy old phonograph recordings Nellie Melba made for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company in the comfort of her drawing-room in Cumberland Terrace (ca. 1904), you can clearly hear the voice of the sound engineer from behind a screen give the diva her cue by shouting “Go!” when the clunky recording apparatus was successfully set in slightly arduous motion. Incidentally, the purpose of the screen was to enclose the equipment, and keep the wax of the cylinder well heated and comparatively soft, to avoid creating a harsh whistle in the track. Some engineers were evidently better at doing this than others. At any rate, the knack here is to demonstrate what, if any difference the extraordinary proliferation of sound recording (and motion pictures, for that matter) made to the visual culture of Edwardian Britain, and why we should care. However, I am working on it.

The Mural II

News of the demise earlier today of Kim Dae-jung, sometime President of South Korea—from what is described in Seoul as “multiple organ dysfunction syndrome,” in other words death—has once more focused attention on the anonymous artist responsible for those murals north of the border. Let us call him the Master of Pyongyang. This painter has evidently been active since at least before 2000, when, pursuing the so-called “sunshine policy” of engagement (햇볕 정책, Haetpyŏt chŏngch’aek), Kim decided to meet Kim, and was duly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. At length the other Kim reneged on his promise to pay a return visit to Seoul, a quid pro quo for which Kim is rumored to have paid Kim sums amounting to $500 million (about 750 times more than the 4 million Swedish kronor forked out by the Nobel committee), so the rapprochement fell rather flat. The crashing breaker mural we saw earlier is generally used for formal portrait photograph opportunities, Kim with Kim, Kim with President Vladimir Putin, Kim with President Bill Clinton, and Kim with whomsoever Kim can persuade to pay an occasional visit. The lunch mural, for want of a better title, strikes an altogether different chord—that of an evacuated spring-blossomy babbling-brook alpine hinterland glorious people-scape, in which the principal technical challenge for the artist was to crank up the volume of the foliage and the foreground blossoms, whilst reining in the waters, because for obvious reasons the plash and gurgle of cataracts can be counterproductive at lunchtime. However, in striving to achieve an appropriately soothing effect by suffusing the waters with a sort of pale milky blush of eau de nil, the better to slow them down, even warm them up a bit, most unfortunately the Master of Pyongyang creates the impression here not of a glacial burn or torrent fed by thawing snow, but rather the cloudy, acrid run-off from some unseen nuclear research facility a little way upstream. I gather this is what Kim, the Kims, and the South Korean delegation were laughing about so heartily in this charming informal group photograph.

An Evening at Maxine's

Among my most treasured possessions is a set of classic recordings, each and every one of which was lovingly compiled for me years ago on cassettes from the original gramophone records in the collection of my elder brother Hamish. Lately I had them transferred to CD, so now I can savor them afresh. There is a hint of the remedial instinct at work here, and a gentle nudge from Big Brother towards the specialist taste of the café concert transplanted to Nashville, Tenn., South Gippsland, and Brunswick Street, Fitzroy—also, come to think of it, New Orleans, La., Broadway, Hollywood and San Francisco, Calif., Pinewood Studios and Broadcasting House in London, and Paris, France.

Here, for example, is the playlist for An Evening at Maxine’s, Vol. 1: (1) Charles Aznavour, “The Old-Fashioned Way” (Aznavour/ Garvarentz/ Hirschhorn/ Kasha); (2) Telly Savalas, “Who Loves Ya, Baby?” (Cacavas); (3) Sophie Tucker, “Stay At Home, Papa” (Tucker); (4) Chad Morgan, “The Fatal Wedding” (Morgan); (5) Delia Derbyshire, Dick Mills, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Theme music for Doctor Who (fragment) (Grainer); (6) Julio Iglesias, “Pensami” (Grever/ Belfiore); (7) Dolly Parton and Porter Waggoner, “Jeannie’s Afraid of the Dark” (Parton); (8) Percy Faith (above) and his orchestra, Theme music for A Summer Place (Steiner); (9) Hank Williams, Jr., “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” (Williams); (10) Sons of the Pioneers, “Chant of the Wanderer” (1941); (11) The Swingle Singers, Jazz Voice Transcription of the Fugue in D Minor (Bach, from The Well-Tempered Clavier); (12) Lyle Lovett “She’s Leaving Me Because She Really Wants To” (Lovett); (13) Jerry Lee Lewis, “Cold, Cold Heart” (Williams); (14) Unattributed arrangement of the theme music for The Third Man (Karas); Unidentifiable cover of “(There’ll Be) Peace in the Valley (For Me)” (Dorsey); (15) Dolly Parton, “Wings of a Dove” (Parton); (16) Henry Mancini and his orchestra, “The Pink Panther Theme” (Mancini); (17) Mitzi Gaynor, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” (original cast recording) (Rodgers and Hammerstein); (18) Glen Campbell, “Honey Come Back To Me” (Webb); (19) Kingston Trio, “Them Sand Pickers” (Mason Williams); (20) Cab Calloway and his orchestra, “Minnie the Moocher” (Calloway/ Mills); (21) Petula Clark, “Il faut revenir” (1966); (22) Unattributed poolside music (“I love the sweet Maori girl”); (23) Commander Cody, “Truck Drivin’ Man” (Fell); (24) Freddie Fender, “The Wild Side of Life” (Carter/ Warren); (25) Tanya Tucker, “Pride of Franklin County” (Tibbles/ Keith); (26) Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, “The Lonely Bull (El solo toro)” (Lake); (27) Linda Ronstadt, “The Tattler” (Cooder/ Titelman); (28) Status Quo, “Wild Side of Life” (Warren/ Carter); (29) Dwight Yoakam, “Smoke Along the Track” (Rose/ Helms); (30) Patsy Cline, “Crazy” (Cline/ Nelson), and (31) Fragment of an unattributed cover of “Aloha ’Oe” by Lydia Lili‘u Loloku Walania Wewehi Kamaka‘eha, better known as Queen Lili‘uokalani of the Hawaiian Islands.

Is there, I wonder, a common thread that wends its way through this programme of hits? What lessons has my brother set before me with such thoughtfulness and unabashed eclecticism? The country and western and occasional gospel elements are unavoidable, as is the recurring focus on the clash between, on the one hand, machismo and, on the other, redoubtably independent-minded women, above all the astonishing Sophie Tucker. This makes for considerable Sturm und Drang. Yet consider also the tenderness, the subtlety, the lightness of touch exhibited by Charles, Julio, Glen, Telly Savalas (especially), not to mention The Sons of the Pioneers, and Her late Majesty Queen Lili‘uokalani. An unusual combination, perhaps, but one would expect nothing less from Hamish the Magnificent.