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Have you tried rebooting? And Melanie, in memoriam

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

There’s new Parlando stuff coming. Indeed, there would already have been a new piece with words by Emily Dickinson this week if it wasn’t for a couple of issues.

Issue #1 was with a new, upgraded Macintosh computer system which handles most of the complicated recording stuff I do for this Project. After working beautifully the night before, the next day it was nearly unusable. I first noticed the mouse wasn’t working well — or a times, at all. I use wired mice, as I’d have no patience with Bluetooth gremlins — but still and all, maybe that mouse had gone bad? I swapped in an old one (I’m a packrat of old computer stuff, so I had a spare handy). Mouse back to working. But then the keyboard was nearly unusable, being extremely balky at registering keypresses. It was so bad that logging in again after rebooting the Mac was a challenge.*  Keyboard dying too? Tried a different keyboard. Same deal. I even tried booting the Mac into MacOS safe mode, which for some reason caused a kernal panic with a crash dump rather than completing a boot into that version of the operating system that’s a fall-back stripped to just the basic stuff. Was my new system demonstrating an internal hardware issue? Besides the nearly unusable keyboard, the whole system was slow, even though the system monitor showed plenty of resources available.

I wondered how much time would be wasted getting warranty service or restoring my complicated music creation environment. And then I noticed that my Time Machine backup drive was no longer mounted — or recognized as a drive in Disk Utility either. Would a warranty replacement Mac be able to transfer my stuff back from that backup? The last Time Machine backup was logged early that morning, then nothing as it had no drive to back up to. Additional worries: that drive might have checked out for good.

There’s a large overlap in musicians with folks involved with computer technology, but since that Venn diagram convergence is much slighter for poetry, I’ll cut to the solution.**  At some point I power-cycled the powered USB hub that holds most all the USB stuff that my kind of music production needs: two software protection dongles, two MIDI interfaces, a little plastic piano keyboard, an audio interface, that Time Machine hard drive, and a charger cable for my MIDI guitar. Mind you, the mouse and keyboard were plugged directly into a USB port on the Mac itself, not into this hub. And —

Everything returned to working normally. How a USB hub plugged into a different USB port from the one used for the mouse and keyboard could all but disable them, as well as causing the other issues, is beyond my knowledge level.

Large, powered USB hubs are not a common in-stock item in local stores, but just in case the issue with mine might return, I ordered a spare. It would be at a will-call desk the next morning. I’d pick it up along with my weekly major grocery run.

Issue #2. A member of the household awoke in clear emotional distress and was unable to talk about it. I thought it best to stay home. I told them I loved them and would be here if they needed me. I spent much of the day worried and concerned, but puttering around in case there were any needs that would emerge. By the middle of the afternoon they were better and talking (though not about the issue that had struck them earlier). They asked for their favorite take-out quesadillas.

I made a quick trip and grabbed the spare hub and that requested late lunch. Issues. Problems. Things don’t always work, sometimes they shut down and don’t tell you why. My late wife worked as a mental health therapist before her mortal illness. I worked decades in hospitals, then another couple of decades in IT. Some people think poetry is difficult, that it taunts you with its obscurity. Maybe so, but life does that too. Spares are difficult for us human beings. We wear and wear-out the ones we have for the most part, learning to use what we have at hand.

I would return to my studio space this morning to continue Parlando Project work. I’d read the night before that the songwriter Melanie had died, I learned of her death in a modern way that somewhat famous strangers have their fortunes told now: by folks speaking their name in past-tense on social media. As I was awaking, with my aim to record at dawn, I read a post by one of those I follow mentioning that they had a favorite Melanie song: “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma.”   Myself? My favorite Melanie is likely her cover of the Rolling Stones “Ruby Tuesday,”  or maybe even her big hit fronting a gospel group, “Candles in the Rain.”   But “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma”  is a fine song, maybe better than you remember it, if you remember it.

I sat at the mics alone, and I decided to sing that song before recording a new Parlando Project piece. In the moment I found it to be about folks attempting to fix you, or make you fit with them and their expectations or needs. That’s not always bad. That’s not always good — which is what this song feels.

This is a video as it’s my understanding that if any appreciable streaming occurs (unlikely with my fame and impeccable musicianship) that the rights owners would be paid by YouTube. Back soon with that Emily Dickinson song-setting.

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*Yes, I worked in IT. Yes, I’m capable of asking myself “Have you tried rebooting?”

**Early in the days of home computers, SF author Jerry Pournelle had a monthly column in Byte magazine which aimed to cover the emerging field of personal computing, but more often than not, it instead dealt with some problem with a computer system in his household. In the early days of BBSes and dialup online services, there’d be lot of chatter about how this guy who got paid to write about stuff in a glossy magazine didn’t know some detail that was sure to have caused his problem right away. Best as I can figure, something inside the hub itself was “stuck” and no amount of unplugging the USB cable from the Mac, or plugging the devices in an out from the hub, helped until the hub’s own power supply was cycled.

Went to See the Gypsy

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

In discussing last May how much fun it is to perform Bob Dylan songs I mentioned that when Dave Moore and I get together to play we often throw in a Bob Dylan song along with our own music. Last month* we finally got together after a long break due to Covid-19 and other infirmities, and as per that tradition the next to last song we played was a Dylan number.

Dave has been extraordinarily prolific with songs over the past few years, so it’s most often I who bring the Dylan to the table. Hipster-wannabe that I am, I often like to cast a wide net for the less-covered or celebrated Dylan songs. This time it was “Went to See the Gypsy”  off of Dylan’s little-remembered New Morning  LP of 1970.

At the time it came out New Morning  seemed important, as Dylan had stumbled badly with his previous record Self-Portrait.  Self-Portrait  seemed to many a lackadaisical record about being lackadaisical, and those many weren’t having that in the turbulent and searching summer of 1970. Think about this: that LP was released almost exactly a month after nine college students were shot and four died on a Midwest college campus. Of those four dead, two were protesting what seemed a widening war in Southeast Asia and two were somewhat distant onlookers between classes. A few days later two more students were killed at Jackson State in the South. The average youthful Dylan fan was less likely to be interested in tunes about all the tired horses in the sun at that moment.

So, less than six months later this other Dylan album, New Morning,  came out. In retrospect it wasn’t really a return of the fiery prophet of Sixties Dylan, but a lot of rock critics had made their bones considering that earlier Dylan style and made the best of what they had in it. One song, and one song only, could be parsed as if it was in that style “Day of the Locusts,”  a protest tune about getting an (honorary) degree from an Ivy League university while that year’s crop of “17 Year Cicadas” chirped their Dada chorus. Maybe some college students dug that one.

With the passage of time, New Morning’s necessity to rehabilitate the great songwriter’s reputation has lost its utility. Dylan has had at least two greater “return to greatness” moments since then, easily supplanting the importance of New Morning.  And of course the measure of the artist over such a long and important career makes bumps in the road disappear in the trailing dust. Though little thought of now, New Morning  is what it may have been intended to be, a much better record of relaxing with the mundane and interrogating it.

“Went to See the Gypsy”  is about nothing happening, a topic that many of the fraught students of 1970 would eventually need to come to grips with, and maybe it fits this second summer of Covid-19 too. The singer goes to meet the undefined titular “gypsy,” who maybe only figuratively that (the word derives from a now considered pejorative term for the Romany ethnic group). I think that character title is used to convey someone exotic and transitory. There may also be a suggestion that the gypsy could be a fortune teller, as many songs that Dylan would have known would have made explicit. The meeting is a big nothing. The two have a nighttime greeting in a hotel room (transitory housing), and then the singer has to go to the hotel’s lobby to make a call. Modern people, sit down in a circle around the fire, and let the old ones speak of this: in those days you couldn’t text anyone if you were running late or you had to get some info or agreement, you were required to go to a place where there where iron-clad telephones chained to a wall that took coins to accomplish that.

In the lobby an attractive girl (“dancing,” intimation of transient movement) begins to do a hype man spiel about the gypsy. How much time passes? We don’t know. Does the singer try to make time with the girl or vice-versa? The song doesn’t say. It only says that dawn is approaching (often the signal to end a song or poem) and the singer returns to the gypsy’s door, which is open and the “gypsy is gone.” The door being open is a telling detail, as it indicates that this wasn’t some planned leaving. The gypsy rushed out or was rushed out by someone. The singer returns to the lobby, the dancing girl is gone. Was she part of some planned distraction? We don’t know. The song ends with the singer instead “watching that sun come rising from that little Minnesota town.”

Now this song all could have happened in a little Minnesota town. One thing that many non-Minnesotans think about Dylan’s home in the Iron Range was that it must’ve been some ethnic Northern European monoculture, which it wasn’t in the least. Personally, I’ve always thought this final scene is a poetic jump cut, and that Dylan’s final sunrise is times and miles away from the events before in the song, but that’s just me.

In summary, a song about things just happening that keep things from happening. Your fortune won’t get told, nor will the mysterious guru tell you what to do, you won’t get to go through the mirror, and a pretty girl may have her own agenda.

Here’s today cover version of Bob Dylan’s “Went to See the Gypsy” Alas, there’s a couple of typos in the captions that flash by. I blame working too late.

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Musically this is me on electric guitar with Dave playing some soft reed organ sounds at first. After those tracks were laid down live, I decided it’d been too long since I had done a full orchestral arrangement, and so after the fact I did just that and had the orchestra instruments come in partway in the song to represent the potential big something that hovers out of reach over this non-event story. I know dawns in little Midwestern towns, far from the chance of Las Vegas, gurus, or those who can tell one’s fortune. There you make your songs and self, yourself.

I should be back shortly with the song we did right after this one, a Dave Moore original.

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*This same session produced “The Poem, ‘The Wild Iris,” “The Dragonfly,”  and “I Am Laughing in the Dark Underground”  that have already been presented here.