Do this:

(1) Go here.

(2) Scroll down to the link that says “Northwest Passage.”

(3) Read what Lileks says.

(4) Click on the link, which will cause your computer to download an mp3 file containing Woody Herman’s 1946 recording of “Northwest Passage.”

(5) Crank up the volume really loud.

(6) Enjoy yourself.

Optional extra-credit assignment:

(7) Read “Elegy for the Woodchopper,” the chapter about Herman in A Terry Teachout Reader.

On one leg of my delightful recent vacation (about which more soon) I was close enough to the northern border to be able to listen to CBC Radio One, where I heard an installment of a miniseries called “50 Tracks”. Proceeding one decade at a time, the show’s host Jian Ghomeshi and his guests are picking the fifty essential songs of the 20th century. Last week’s show covered the 1980s, which yielded:

1. “Billie Jean” [Michael Jackson]

2. “With or Without You” [U2]

3. “Message” [Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five]

4. “Fight the Power” [Public Enemy]

5. In a tie, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” [Joy Division] and “When Doves Cry” [Prince]

The runners-up were Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran.

Now, I’m a child of the 80s, and it’s the popular music from this decade that stirs up the strongest raw feeling in me. The music I love from these years, and the music I hate, rings up equally high readings on the nostalgia meter. All of it, the good and the bad, sounds affectingly like my life once upon a time. Somebody, I can’t remember who, said “memory is the key to everything, but with it comes nostalgia, which is the key to nothing,” a dictum I sort of loathe but grudgingly credit–although, then again, I don’t think my own attachment to nostalgia is an illusion that it will unlock or illuminate anything. To flip-flop yet some more, maybe nostalgia is the key to lists like this. In other words, it’s the key to something–just not something meaningful.

It turns out that “essential” is a tricky criterion to pin down, though not a bad one if you take it, as I do, as connoting influence and quality in roughly equal parts, along with a soupçon of, you know, je ne sais quoi (this is where the nostalgia comes in). By these standards, there’s nothing on the Radio One’s 1980s list that absolutely begs to be lopped off, and yet it’s an oddly unsatisfying laundry list. Is it trying to be too representative? Is it too focused on including essential artists at the expense of great songs? Surely Michael Jackson and Prince need to be there, but the panelists’ cases for including these particular songs from their respective 1980s oeuvres carried a whiff of compromise and overthinking, as though the songs were bundles of abstract qualities that needed to be checked off.

And though it may be awfully lowest-common-denominator of me, I have to question how Joy Division ended up in the top 5 while Duran Duran, a single well-chosen chord of whose music elicits a positively Pavlovian response in everyone I know who hit 16 during the 80s, didn’t make the cut. A friend raised the similar question of Madonna (if she cracked our list, we agreed, it would be with “Material Girl”).

And so the CBC’s list does its proper work: starting some good snarling brawls. (OK, I’m not much of a snarler, but you get my drift.) Feel free to send some fighting words. I’ll also accept predictions for the top five from the 90s, a decade that sounds altogether fuzzier to my by-then-post-teenage ears. I’ll go ahead and shoot the fish in a barrel that is “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but beyond that I’m stumped.

Cinetrix is recommending to New Yorkers a BAM film series that starts today, I Can Hear the Guitar: Selected by Olivier Assayas. You should, of course, always heed the Cinetrix’s directives. Much like Dr. Science, she knows more than you do. But in this case even more than usual.

The series slate includes a movie I adore and long to see again, Assayas’s own Cold Water. Alas, it’s a hard movie to get your hands on. Originally made for French television as a sort of after-school special pour sophisticates, it’s a compact, eloquent, and utterly affecting little mood piece. Here’s BAM’s pr

“Men are all either dates, potential dates, or date substitutes.”

Whit Stillman, screenplay for Metropolitan

I went to six shows presented by the New York International Fringe Festival over the weekend, and they were all good, every last one of them. Alas, I can’t tell you which ones just yet, because I’ll be reviewing them in this Friday’s Wall Street Journal. But I can say that the festival runs through Sunday, and that if you live in or near New York, you’d be well advised to check out at least a few of its offerings.

The New York Times has already reviewed a number of Fringe Festival shows (their selection criteria, by the way, look to be about as random as mine), and two of their favorites will also be figuring prominently in my column on Friday, so you might want to check out their theater page and see if any of the recommendations ring your bell.

For more information on the Fringe Festival, including synopses of and photos from all 200-plus shows, go here and start browsing. I can’t promise that you’ll hit the jackpot, but I did it six times in a row, which ought to count for something.

Just because I haven’t been blogging doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading blogs. Here’s some of what I gleaned in the past couple of weeks:

– David Raksin, Jerry Goldsmith, and Elmer Bernstein, three of the most important film-music composers of the twentieth century, all died recently. I marked their passing by writing a piece that will run in The Wall Street Journal as soon as a hole opens up. In the meantime, Alex Ross posted thoughtful comments on their deaths, which can be found here, here, here, and here. I especially like this one:

“Sounds like a film score” is the put-down of choice for tonal orchestral music. “Serious” composers are supposed to suffer neglect in their lifetimes, with the gratitude of posterity their invisible reward. The my-time-will-come mindset was especially widespread in the twentieth century, with composers believing that if they invented a new sound or came up with a “big idea” they would win their place in history. The result was a great deal of superficially difficult, emotionally disposable music, whose ultimate historical value is now very much in question. By contrast, it seems certain that in a hundred years people will still be talking about Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, Goldsmith’s Chinatown, Raksin’s Laura. They have gone down in history, because they found a way to make their music matter.

I like what I said, but I wish I’d said that, too.

– Tobi Tobias was at the Mark Morris performance on which I bailed out at intermission
because of exhaustion. In lieu of what I might have written, read what she wrote:

From the start, Morris has gone in for nonconformity when it comes to the bodies he chooses to animate his work. Instead of selecting for uniformity and conventional notions of a physical ideal, he has regularly assembled a miniature motley society of the small, the stocky, the lushly ample, the tall-and-skinny beanpole type, the delicate, the blunt, and, yes, a few whose ballet teachers may have had high hopes of placing in one of those finalists-only classical companies that go by their initials. The flat-footed and those whom the gods of turn-out have not favored have their place with Morris, as do the fresh and frank American girl and the sultry glamour girl (Betty and Veronica, if you will), the beach hero and the fellow into whose face the beach hero kicks the sand. And of course the company has always been multi-ethnic–so thoroughly so that, simply by appearing, it defies tokenism, demonstrating that there are an infinite number of ways to be Caucasian, black, Asian, or a mix thereof….

– Speaking of Mark Morris, guess who has a stalker? Me! If only I knew what she looked like….

– A reader sent me a link to a cool on-line short story which is sort of about one of my
all-time favorite actors:

That night I dream about Robert Mitchum. I’m in the middle of the street. Old Tucson or something. And he’s walking toward me obscured by this swirling sand. He’s also singing. I can make out the words to “Thunder Road.” I can see the black cowboy boots but I can’t quite make out his bohunky face. He’s maybe twenty yards away before the wind begins to die down. And then I see him. It’s Mitchum all right, and he’s still singing. I can’t move. My feet won’t obey my brain. I want to run. Because Mitchum is wearing a dress. One of those Gunsmoke Miss Kitty numbers. Ostrich plumes and fishnets. Ultima II Sexxxy Red lipstick on his thick lips. He stops in front of me. A spaghetti western moment. And then he says, “Pucker up.”…

– Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt on Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, in TLS:

Sometimes it seems as though I can never get away from him: “Tell me, you are a Canadian pianist, known as a Bach specialist, and winner of the international piano competition held in his memory

A serious amateur painter I know sent me this stream-of-consciousness paragraph describing her decision to embark on a new canvas:

God, there’s nothing on TV. I wish I could just do something fun to cheer myself up. I could just walk down to the corner and get some french fries and doughnuts. That’s what I used to do to cheer myself up…but that doesn’t work anymore, remember? Oh yeah, that’s right. Hey, I have an idea. How about painting? That’s it!! But I can’t possibly do that right now, not with my room being so messy–I don’t deserve to paint. Wait a minute, that’s not right! I do deserve to paint, whether my room is clean or not. Hmm…I know…I’ll go wash the dishes and call it even. Okay, good, I feel better having cleaned the dishes. Maybe I should just go ahead and start cleaning my room while I’m at it. No, the idea was to treat myself to something fun. Okay, I’ll do it! But can I really actually just start painting, just like that? Sure, why not? No reason. What’s stopping me? Nothing. Well…okay then…here I go!!!

I don’t mind admitting that I’ve written more than a few pieces in my lifetime that got started in more or less the same way.

Now and then it would vanish for hours from the scene,

But alas, be discovered inside a tureen.

Edward Gorey’s books constitute a micro-genre unto themselves. They don’t belong to any preexisting category, and they contain their own subgenres. One of my favorite of these subgenres is the Crashing Creature story, which to my recollection consists of two works, “The Osbick Bird” and “The Doubtful Guest” (pictures and full text here). The first of these begins:

An osbick bird flew down and sat

On Emblus Fingby’s bowler hat.

It had not done so for a whim

But meant to come and live with him.

Similarly, the antihero of “The Doubtful Guest” appears unannounced one night. It has come to stay.

When they answered the bell on that wild winter night,

There was no one expected–and no one in sight.

Then they saw something standing on top of an urn,

Whose peculiar appearance gave them quite a turn.

All at once it leapt down and ran into the hall,

Where it chose to remain with its nose to the wall.

It was seemingly deaf to whatever they said,

So at last they stopped screaming, and went off to bed.

It joined them at breakfast and presently ate

All the syrup and toast and a part of a plate.

Through the middle of the story we hear of the Guest’s habits, none of them charming (with the possible exception of “peeling the soles of its white canvas shoes”). And the ending reveals that there is no end:

It came seventeen years ago, and to this day

It has shown no intention of going away.

Which is all by way of saying that I’m feeling a bit like the Doubtful Guest around the blog these days: moody, moochy, and mute. But all this is about to change. More blogging imminently. Doubtless.

UPDATE: I know what you’re wondering: any visuals on the Osbick Bird? The best pic I can find, (darkly) hilariously, is on a coffee mug that you can purchase for a measly $7 from the Funeral Consumers Alliance (scroll down). They also offer a Gashlycrumb Tinies mug and a Gorey refrigerator magnet reading “Matters of Life and Death Inside.” Can’t say they don’t have a sense of humor.