I like this anecdote I came across somewhere on the Web: Simon and Garfunkel recorded their first folk album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, in 1964, but it only sold a few thousand copies. They figured their career was probably over, but, unbeknownst to Simon and Garfunkel, their record label had added electric guitars to the song "The Sounds of Silence" and released it as a single. They had just moved back in with their parents and were sitting in Simon's car, wondering what to do next, when they heard the song come on the radio, and the DJ said it had gone to No. 1. Simon turned to Garfunkel and said, "That Simon and Garfunkel, they must be having a great time."
How exciting, as exciting as exciting discount guitars would be to someone who's been saving up their pennies to buy a top quality guitar and then finds that it's been reduced in price...now he can afford to buy some music as well!
Paul Simon visited Dunedin recently, and performed at the new (nearly new) Stadium, which is the pride and joy of some of the citizenry. I didn't go. Couldn't afford to go. Haven't been able to afford to go to any of the concerts the Stadium has hosted, except the free one which the Otago Daily Times put on to celebrate it's 150th Anniversary. Ah well. At least Paul Simon and I were in the same town briefly.
Showing posts with label simon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label simon. Show all posts
Friday, May 31, 2013
Friday, April 19, 2013
Being random, as the blog's title implies
1. My wife and I were outside this morning in the sun chopping down the upper half of the holly hedge that separates our house from our neighbours' place. It was a beautiful morning. We then spent nearly an hour around 1pm talking to my son and his wife in the States, on Google's equivalent of Skype, went to go outside and found it was pouring with rain. Since then the temperature's dropped considerably and we're now trying to get the house warm. After all the fine weather we've had any cold day comes as a bit of a shock.
2. A friend lent me a copy of Edmund Gosse's book, Father and Son, a couple of weeks or so ago. I'd heard of this book over the years, but never got round to reading it, even though it has some status amongst the English classics. What an odd book! Gosse was the sun of Philip Henry Gosse, who was a famous zoologist in the 19th century, around the time of Darwin. He was also a Puritan Christian, as was his wife - the mother of Edmund: she died of breast cancer when Edmund was still under ten years old. Philip married again, a few years later.
The book is supposedly the factual memoirs of Gosse as a child, and of his relationship with his father, who, according to the book, was virtually a recluse, and a very rigid Christian. (Gosse's mother was as puritanical as her husband, according to Gosse junior.) The book claims to be fact, but later biographers of both father and son have found a good deal of fiction in the writing. It's very much the view of a man who has cast his parents aside along with his religion, but in writing about it he colours the characters of his parents - his father in particular - in such a way as to make the reader recoil from them. Knowing that Gosse's writing is more biased than not is quite helpful in reading the book: you see how he shows himself as the one treated somewhat unjustly, when in fact this was apparently less than the truth. He also, perhaps unwittingly, shows himself as rather pompous and quite class conscious. Those who are lower than him in the social scale are written about in such a way as to show that Gosse despises them - it's not just what they do, it's how the author describes them. For example, in describing John Brooks, a poor man who doesn't do the right thing according to Gosse's lights: John Brooks was a heavy dirty man, with a pock-marked face and two left legs... I'm not sure how Brooks manages to have two left legs, but doesn't it immediately make you feel he's something of a monster?
I'd got to a point with the book where I thought I wouldn't finish it, but I will. However, Gosse has lost my sympathy quite some time ago!
3. I'm currently learning lines for the play, The Sunshine Boy, in which I'm playing Al. He has a substantial enough part, but it's nothing like as long as that of the main character, Willie. There's a great deal of humour in the play, and it'll go across well with an audience. The line-learning has kind of interrupted my latest attempt to learn Psalm 119 (the longest in the Psalmody). It's a tough psalm to learn, but I'm making slow progress on it. I'm also singing with the Sunny Side Up group tonight, at one of the retirement villages, and I'm revising words and music for that as well. So the brain is getting quite a work out at present!
2. A friend lent me a copy of Edmund Gosse's book, Father and Son, a couple of weeks or so ago. I'd heard of this book over the years, but never got round to reading it, even though it has some status amongst the English classics. What an odd book! Gosse was the sun of Philip Henry Gosse, who was a famous zoologist in the 19th century, around the time of Darwin. He was also a Puritan Christian, as was his wife - the mother of Edmund: she died of breast cancer when Edmund was still under ten years old. Philip married again, a few years later.
The book is supposedly the factual memoirs of Gosse as a child, and of his relationship with his father, who, according to the book, was virtually a recluse, and a very rigid Christian. (Gosse's mother was as puritanical as her husband, according to Gosse junior.) The book claims to be fact, but later biographers of both father and son have found a good deal of fiction in the writing. It's very much the view of a man who has cast his parents aside along with his religion, but in writing about it he colours the characters of his parents - his father in particular - in such a way as to make the reader recoil from them. Knowing that Gosse's writing is more biased than not is quite helpful in reading the book: you see how he shows himself as the one treated somewhat unjustly, when in fact this was apparently less than the truth. He also, perhaps unwittingly, shows himself as rather pompous and quite class conscious. Those who are lower than him in the social scale are written about in such a way as to show that Gosse despises them - it's not just what they do, it's how the author describes them. For example, in describing John Brooks, a poor man who doesn't do the right thing according to Gosse's lights: John Brooks was a heavy dirty man, with a pock-marked face and two left legs... I'm not sure how Brooks manages to have two left legs, but doesn't it immediately make you feel he's something of a monster?
I'd got to a point with the book where I thought I wouldn't finish it, but I will. However, Gosse has lost my sympathy quite some time ago!
3. I'm currently learning lines for the play, The Sunshine Boy, in which I'm playing Al. He has a substantial enough part, but it's nothing like as long as that of the main character, Willie. There's a great deal of humour in the play, and it'll go across well with an audience. The line-learning has kind of interrupted my latest attempt to learn Psalm 119 (the longest in the Psalmody). It's a tough psalm to learn, but I'm making slow progress on it. I'm also singing with the Sunny Side Up group tonight, at one of the retirement villages, and I'm revising words and music for that as well. So the brain is getting quite a work out at present!
Thursday, April 04, 2013
The Sunshine Boys
I've been offered a part in the Repertory Society's coming production of The Sunshine Boys, a play by Neil Simon. I'd heard this was in the offing three or four weeks ago, and got a copy of the play to read. It's very funny, sometimes in a kind of aggressive way, and the three main characters are great to play. I'm doing Al, who doesn't appear till the second scene. He's the bête noire of the main character, who's being played by Bert Nisbet. Bert's character is onstage for a great deal of the play - even when he's not onstage, he has lines that he has to fit in from offstage. I'm relieved that I have several sections of the play when I get a break - and time to cram up on my next lot of lines, no doubt!
Apropos of this, I've been memorising Psalm 119 over the last few weeks - it's a slow process, because there isn't a kind of narrative flow to the psalm. The sometimes seemingly random statements - which use the same words over and over in different ways - don't easily connect to one another in the brain, so you have to have all sorts of links to keep track of things. The part in the play is a piece of cake to learn by contrast with Psalm 119, so in a way I've been doing some mental exercises in preparation. However, it's also the longest part I've ever learnt, I think, and will be kind of tough to deal with.
I was in a play last week on the life of Rosalie Macgeorge, the first missionary to leave New Zealand from the Baptist Mission Society. I had only around twenty-five lines in the play all up, and for once I was word-perfect. My aim is to be word-perfect in this play too, because I feel that if you don't get the words right, not only does it do a disservice to the author, but it also makes it harder to remember whether you've got the line quite in its proper shape. The brain delights in muddling those who don't learn things exactly (it can muddle those who do know things exactly). It may seem picky to want to learn the thing perfectly, but I know from experience that if I don't I'll have trouble at some point in the performances.
Apropos of this, I've been memorising Psalm 119 over the last few weeks - it's a slow process, because there isn't a kind of narrative flow to the psalm. The sometimes seemingly random statements - which use the same words over and over in different ways - don't easily connect to one another in the brain, so you have to have all sorts of links to keep track of things. The part in the play is a piece of cake to learn by contrast with Psalm 119, so in a way I've been doing some mental exercises in preparation. However, it's also the longest part I've ever learnt, I think, and will be kind of tough to deal with.
I was in a play last week on the life of Rosalie Macgeorge, the first missionary to leave New Zealand from the Baptist Mission Society. I had only around twenty-five lines in the play all up, and for once I was word-perfect. My aim is to be word-perfect in this play too, because I feel that if you don't get the words right, not only does it do a disservice to the author, but it also makes it harder to remember whether you've got the line quite in its proper shape. The brain delights in muddling those who don't learn things exactly (it can muddle those who do know things exactly). It may seem picky to want to learn the thing perfectly, but I know from experience that if I don't I'll have trouble at some point in the performances.
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