Tag Archives: paul simon

genna gardini – goodbye to rosie

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For Rosemary Lombard (and Paul Simon)

This girl and this man sing together.

They are sitting on these steps,
which for them, which for me,
must also in some way be a stage,
scrim set and defined by a door shut behind
the camera’s squint squiz,
the gap between her space and his
grouted and flat,
locked like a spine snapped
between wings.

Complicating the exit.

It is early in the morning.
He has been asked to come and play music for,
no, with children. On television. On these stairs
which lead to the sort of porch (I write stoop)
that he has lately been avoiding.
But today he hovers near it, near her,
and says, and stops himself from saying,
that it was a brownstone (in my tongue,
a town house) like this where he’d first met his wife,

who tipped into him as stiff and iceless
as the drink he couldn’t buy her then.
He thought she would open up
as if an elevator in the building of conversation,
a device he could ride from across to sides
without ever having to construct a scaffold himself.
I’d say lift. He was wrong.
She divorced him a year before.
Now his problems are like his hair, parted.

He is 38.The girl is seven (or six).
They’ve asked her to come and sit,
to come and sing with him.
She says hello, ducks her head.
Small animal, small pump of blood
and possibility. She is made
of corduroy, he thinks, soft,
unmalleably furrowed. Without zip.
He can appreciate her wholeness,

he is weary of it.
He himself feels fetched,
feels stitched from thin material,
worrying at the connections.
You can see the marks of the alterations
he made, let others make, on his ancient guitar,
whose strings knot and flay where he has pulled at them.
This does not seem beautiful to him.
He won’t ever get another.

The song is about an event he refuses to explain
to the girl,
so he tries to only pronounce words like
“mamma” or “pyjama”,
leaving them placed sweet,
as if icing on a cake,
praying “Let her life lick past it”,
when, suddenly, she yells,
“Dance! Dance! Dance!”

The man is concerned, he interrupts her,
but she tries again, when the lenses turn,
this time pointing at him while humming,
“Look! I can see the bird!”

Two decades later, a friend will post this
link to my Facebook wall.
And I’ll think, “She wasn’t wrong at all!”
And I’ll think, “I’m nothing like you.”

—
This poem was first published on AERODROME. Thank you, Gen, for permission to post it on Fleurmach (and obviously for writing it! xx).

marie laforêt – la voix du silence

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A cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” on Laforêt’s Album 3 (Disques Festival, 1967). The video contains footage from the film, The Graduate (1967), in which this and other Simon and Garfunkel songs feature prominently during pivotal montage scenes.

down by the schoolyard

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Paul Simon and a wonderfully spunky child in improvisational counterpoint on the Muppet Show in 1977. Thank you to Genna Gardini for reminding me about this awkward, amazing moment. Read more on the Muppet Wiki.

Simon later would stress the concept of rhythm itself communicating a deeper message, and his earlier writing also demonstrates his dedication to making a deceptively simple rock and roll song embody a unified, total package in which each part must complement the others. “If you take a song that has some rhythm to it…and I don’t get the rhythm right… then the song doesn’t seem real.” With the right rhythm, though, “the listener gives up his defense. You’re willing to entertain a number of ideas, you’re having that good a time.” Rhythm, he said, “is good for lyrics that express emotion. And in allowing emotion to speak, rhythm connects us in anger or in love, to others.” Again, Simon stresses that the artist must communicate, and the songwriter´s communication must appeal to a sense well beyond that of the five recognized senses, a sense of rhythm innately found in songwriter and audience alike.

paul simon and wes anderson go cuckoo in april

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From Sounds of Silence, Simon and Garfunkel’s second album, released on January 17, 1966. It had also appeared prior to this on a UK-only release, The Paul Simon Songbook, in August 1965.

The song bears a structural resemblance to a traditional English rhyme, “Cuckoo, cuckoo, what do you do?”, a phenology of the Common Cuckoo from April to September:

Cuckoo, Cuckoo, what do you do?
“In April I open my bill;
In May I sing night and day;
In June I change my tune
In July far far I fly;
In August away I must.”
Cuckoo, Cuckoo!

This choral version of the rhyme was featured on the soundtrack to Wes Anderson’s 2012 film, Moonrise Kingdom:

on the fetish function of the same old music – a conversation, 2-3 march 2009

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A conversation about recorded music and nostalgia that arose on another blog with which I was involved for over half a decade. It’s no longer there now, but the discussion is interesting enough to deserve a repost, I feel.

aryan kaganof says:

i notice that many people of my age just give up listening to new music and go back to what they know (what they knew)
but it’s wonderful to keep on discovering
perhaps people who stop listening to new music don’t love the music but merely love their youth
so they want to keep on being reminded of their youth
the youth that for them is already over
and that the music now symbolizes
and this of course makes them very old!

helgé janssen says:

and again you have given that totally insightful take on why people listen to music from their youth
this has perplexed me for sooooo long….
i have known that they are obviously stuck (i’ve seen it happen before my very eyes and as young as 19!)
but i had never thought of it this way
this throws enormous light on the entire process!!
for quite obviously there comes a cut-off point
from which their youth no longer ‘happened’
so they pay for their compartmentalizing, categorizing and (worse) their lack of imagination!!!

eva spook says:

ah so what is it then when you listen to music from times before you’re born? i’m now listening to blind blake…i’m beyond old, i’m digging into previous lives to feel alive again

cherry bomb says:

ha! that’s where i’m at too, eva… i’m listening a lot to wax cylinder recordings, caruso, world war one torch songs… that are hardly even a record of what happened in those three minutes that somebody sang into that funnel. drowned in scratches and static, devoid of bass timbre, they sound nothing like what the actual performance must have. i think the palpable ephemerality is what attracts me. it *is* about feeling alive. the voracious desire to live lives i am not living comes into it too, i think. only listening to contemporary stuff is terribly restrictive!

music does have a fetishistic quality: part of this lies in its power to transport you temporarily outside of the confines of spacetime. while it is playing, music gives you the immediate abiity to alter present-tense context radically; whether to propel yourself into the future, or zoom back into a dark and sordid or halcyon past, back into the arms of an ex-lover, or be transported out of your body and into a vacuum beyond everything. you just close your eyes and press play.

we all love nostalgia: saudades, real or imagined – one of the most easily accessible sources of a sense of meaningful connection, paradoxically because it’s in the absence of the original context and referent, which intensifies the desire for that inaccessible experience, real or imagined.

i reckon people who listen to the ‘same old music’ simply lack a vivid enough imagination to meaningfully access worlds of possibility not tied securely by memory to their previous experiences, to repetition. the “same old songs” are invariably hits that they heard a billion times on the radio, that they kissed girls to, that played at rugby matches, that their dad played in the car on road trips (hands up those who were kids in the south african ’80s that don’t have a special place in their hearts for paul simon’s graceland album?)…

i am forever trying to understand what makes the few handfuls of songs that really stick in those jukebox playlists stick. songs from the likes of creedence clearwater revival, iggy pop, counting crows, bowie, the clash, green day, soft cell… what is the lowest common denominator? they are not all well-written songs with catchy riffs. they are not all from the same era. there are songs with very weird content for the average homophobic barfly to groove on. “holly came from miami, f.l.a… shaved her legs, then he was a she…” there are songs which really, truly suck (e.g. any of the bombast by nickelback!). are they there due to an inane feedback loop: there because they have been there for years, and they have been there for years because they happened always to be there? or is it something innate about the content? i don’t know.

here’s a good example of a song that has been an instant ‘classic’ from the day it came out: “mr jones” by the counting crows:

i have always hated this whiny song, yet it has never stopped playing in pool bars and at supermarkets and weddings. why??? listening to it now – and actually listening, rather than blocking it out, as i always have done – i am struck by how eloquently the lyrics fake meaning in a non-threatening way… a warm, fuzzy yearning with no uncomfortable aftertaste. the simply strummed guitar lends a soothing, ersatz familiarity. “have you ever seen the rain?” by creedence clearwater revival (another one of those jukebox standards) is remarkably similar.

i don’t think people given to listening to “the same old music” necessarily think about how old they are at all, or how life was better back when that song came out (though that is undoubtedly a common dronkverdriet thought). yes, they do feel connected to the past through it. but i don’t reckon this is necessarily examined. i reckon the familiarity mostly just makes them feel warm and comfy and vaguely meaningful. it makes them feel like they belong when everyone is singing along with them in unison. it goes down well with the beer. and that’s what the main function of music is for them. it’s pretty simple. “ah yay! i love this song! this place is cool. want another jagerbomb? let’s go dance!”

“i was down at the new amsterdam staring at this yellow-haired girl
mr. jones strikes up a conversation with this black-haired flamenco dancer
she dances while his father plays guitar
she’s suddenly beautiful
we all want something beautiful
i wish i was beautiful
so come dance this silence down through the morning
cut maria! show me some of them spanish dances
pass me a bottle, mr. jones
believe in me
help me believe in anything
i want to be someone who believes

mr. jones and me tell each other fairy tales
stare at the beautiful women
“she’s looking at you. ah, no, no, she’s looking at me.”
smiling in the bright lights
coming through in stereo
when everybody loves you, you can never be lonely

i will paint my picture
paint myself in blue and red and black and gray
all of the beautiful colors are very very meaningful
grey is my favorite color
i felt so symbolic yesterday
if i knew picasso
i would buy myself a gray guitar and play

mr. jones and me look into the future
stare at the beautiful women
“she’s looking at you.
uh, i don’t think so. she’s looking at me.”
standing in the spotlight
i bought myself a gray guitar
when everybody loves me, i will never be lonely

i want to be a lion
everybody wants to pass as cats
we all want to be big big stars, but we got different reasons for that
believe in me because i don’t believe in anything
and i want to be someone to believe

mr. jones and me stumbling through the barrio
yeah we stare at the beautiful women
“she’s perfect for you, man, there’s got to be somebody for me.”
i want to be bob dylan
mr. jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky
when everybody loves you, son, that’s just about as funky as you can be

mr. jones and me staring at the video
when i look at the television, i want to see me staring right back at me
we all want to be big stars, but we don’t know why and we don’t know how
but when everybody loves me, i’m going to be just about as happy as can be
mr. jones and me, we’re gonna be big stars…”

“yesterday, and days before, sun is cold and rain is hard,
i know; been that way for all my time.
til forever, on it goes through the circle, fast and slow,
i know; it can’t stop, i wonder.”

mick says:

ah mz bomb – your opinions on this and that are both eloquent and exciting, which is a purdy rare combo, purdy, and rare. chi in.

eva spook says:

thanks to the internet and the loss of my cd collection many years ago ( all of them stolen)… not only can’t i listen to the music of my youth, but addictive myspace (among others) make it pretty much impossible not to find and hear new music on a daily basis… i hear new and exciting music every single day…

for this entry i did a little search to the music that warps me back in time and because i lack imagination i will just post the link: