Rhababerbarbara

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This video is in German, but you'll enjoy it whether you speak German or not.

I hope you enjoy your time with the barber, barmaid, and barbarians at Barbara's bar.

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For Sunday: "O Fortuna," from Karl Orff's "Carmina Burana"

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If you have a reasonable knowledge of serious music, or movie music, this will make you laugh (and even if you’ve seen this video before; it makes me laugh every time I see it).

The lyrics are in medieval Latin. But people have been puzzling over them ever since Karl Orff set them to music sixty years ago.

Well, now you know what they’re really saying.

Gopher tuna!

Bring more tuna!

Statue of big dog with fleas!

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For Sunday: Ginger Rogers sings "We're In The Money" in Pig Latin

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As a movie buff, I always stand and salute whenever any of the “Gold Diggers” movies of the 1930s come on the air. I DVR them and play them over and over again.

This is from the first (and best) of them: “Gold Diggers of 1933.”  It opens with a cheerful song – “We’re In The Money,” a renunciation of the Depression – and ends with a very downbeat musical number, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” very sad indeed.

Not your usual movie.

Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, and Joan Blondell are featured, as well as some names that aren’t so well remembered: Warren William, Guy Kibbee, Aline MacMahon, Ned Sparks.

For me, one of the most astonishing things in this excellent movie is in the first sequence: Ginger Rogers singing “We’re In The Money” in Pig Latin.

Watch and be amazed.

For Sunday: Tim Tebow reads "Green Eggs and Ham"

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Sometimes we need a relief from the difficulties of our everyday lives. We need something deeply silly to help us escape.

So: here’s Tim Tebow, who is Christian but delectably cute, doing a dramatic reading of Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham.”

With hand gestures, yet!

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For Sunday: "Island Magic," from Leonard Bernstein's opera "Trouble in Tahiti"

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This is the best scene (I think) from Bernstein’s early opera “Trouble in Tahiti,” in an excellent staging / performance, with Dawn Upshaw singing the lead.

If you can't make out the lyrics, you can find them here. They’re hysterical.

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For Sunday: Cat Stevens sings "Peace Train" (1976)

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Cat Stevens has always been one of my favorite singer/composers. His first five albums were bliss. He became a little more hit-and-miss after that, but I still find something to listen to on every album.

Cat, born of Greek parentage in England, has been on a long journey: he was a Buddhist for a long time, then Baha’i, and now Muslim. He even changed his name to Yusuf Islam (though Cat Stevens wasn’t his real name either; he was born Steven Demetre Georgiou).

He has always been unapologetic about voicing his beliefs. He got into trouble some years ago for mixing himself up with the whole Salman Rushdie / fatwa thing.

But there has always been a freshness and purity in his music. And he is often strangely profound, and he is also often powerfully spiritual.

This song (in live performance in 1976) is all of the above: fresh, pure, profound, and spiritual. And I still find it powerfully moving.

Ev’rybody jump upon the peace train.

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For Sunday: "I Hate People," from "Scrooge"

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“Scrooge” was an interesting movie. (I know it’s a Christmas movie, but the heat of summer makes me long for midwinter.) It had some decent songs, and a couple of great characterizations (Dame Edith Evans as a starchy grandmotherly un-Dickensian Ghost of Christmas Past, and Kenneth More as a huge Dickensian Ghost of Christmas Present).

This song is one of my favorites. I sing it to myself, under my breath, on most workdays, a little.

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For Sunday: Three Dog Night sings Laura Nyro's "Eli's Coming"

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Laura Nyro wrote some dynamite songs in the 1960s.

This is one of them.

This is a performance of one of them by Three Dog Night on a TV show in 1969, with the kinds of video blandishments we thought were neat in those days.

Eli’s coming!

Hide your heart, girl!

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For Sunday: Vampire Weekend performs "Diane Young"

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From their brand-new album: Vampire Weekend’s song “Diane Young.”

Think about the title. But not too long.

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Isabella Rossellini

You almost certainly know Isabella Rossellini. You know her from her old Lancome ads, or her terrifically creepy performance in “Blue Velvet,” or her role as Jack Donaghy’s ex-wife on “30 Rock,” or her voice-over performance as Homer Simpson's agent when he becomes an outsider artist. 

She is also the star of two clever little web series called “Green Porno” and “Seduce Me.”

These are series of short films in which she dresses as animals: squid, earthworms, ducks, lobsters, bedbugs.  She acts out their life-cycles and (most specifically) how they have sex. 

She wears the most outrageous pantomime outfits, which are anatomically correct but completely unshocking.  She explains her premises: “If I were a shrimp,” she says, “when I am young, I would be a man.”  And she is a cute young shrimp, in a shell, with a mustache.  “But when I am older, I become a woman . . .” She removes her mustache and her outer shell, and suddenly she’s a nubile young female shrimp.

She wears penises as necessary. Her whale penis is enormous. Her barnacle penis is even more so.

She is funny and intense. She’s one of those celebrities I’d like to know in person, because she seems so sympathetic and intelligent.

I bet she and I would have fascinating conversations about the sex-life of the squid.

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For Sunday: "Bimbo's Initiation" (another Max Fleischer cartoon)

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This is another Betty Boop cartoon. It’s got the same dreamlike animation as the others I’ve posted recently, and is definitely creepy in spots. But it’s worth watching.

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For Sunday: Trixie Friganza does her "Bag o' Tricks"

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My friend Apollonia told me about Trixie a long time ago, and I never forgot the name. Trixie (born Delia O’Callaghan in Grenola, Kansas) was a vaudevillian, a singer and comedienne and musician. She was a powerful supporter of women’s rights also: go read about her and it will make you proud. (Trixie was a nickname, which she kept because she always hated the name “Delia.” “Friganza” was her mother’s maiden name. When an interview asked her about the name, she said “I didn’t marry it,” and this was considered a borderline-scandalous thing to say. My goodness, how times have changed!)

This is Trixie’s gift to later generations: a Vitaphone film recorded around 1930. The first few minutes are audio only; around halfway through, we get the full Trixie, complete with her solo on the double-bass.

Enjoy.

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For Sunday: the Kinks sing "Village Green Preservation Society"

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This song goes out dedicated to two of my friends:

-         Joanne, in Connecticut, who (literally) introduced me to the Kinks one dark evening in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1978;

-         Oma, in England, who actually lives in an English cottage.

All together now:

We are the Village Green Preservation Society,

God save Donald Duck, vaudeville, and Variety.

We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society,

God save strawberry jam and all its different varieties.

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For Sunday: the Three Stooges swing the alphabet

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I have been a Stoogeophile since childhood. I like nothing better than watching Moe poke Curly in the eye and yank Larry’s hair.

 

 

Here’s their only real musical number: the very wonderful alphabet song from “Violent is the Word for Curly.”

 

 

All together now:

 

 

B – A – bay –

B – E – bee –

B – I – bicky-bye, B – O – bo,

Bicky-bye bo bicky-by boo, bicky bye bo boo!

 

 

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For Sunday: Paul Evans sings "Seven Litttle Girls"

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Here’s a song I remember very clearly from my childhood, performed by its writer, Paul Evans. It was often on the radio in the early 1960s; it’s what you call a “novelty hit.”

 

 

Listen to it until it gets stuck in your mind, as it’s still stuck in mine, after fifty years.

 

 

Keep your mind on your driving,

Keep your hands on the wheel;

Keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead;

We’re having fun

Sitting in the back seat,

Kissing and a-hugging with Fred!

 

 

 

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For Sunday: Toto's "Africa," sung by Perpetuum Jazzile

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I love this song. This is a jazz group in Slovenia (Perpetuum Jazzie!) doing it a cappella.

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

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For Sunday: Olive Oyl does the Broadway Samba

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This is a very nice Popeye cartoon from 1944. It’s more of a Road picture a la Bing Crosby and Bob Hope than the usual slugfest; Bluto (who’s in wonderful voice) and Popeye do a beautiful duet, and then they meet the ravishing Carioca incarnation of Olive Oyl, who sings (in Portuguese and English) the “Broadway Samba.”

 

 

Ole!

 

 

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Salt, and MSG, and lead: Joe Jackson sings "Everything Gives You Cancer"

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I read lots of different publications. I read Reader’s Digest, which is very cheerful, but is also very conservative. I also read Mother Jones, which is unashamedly liberal. I read the Atlantic, and New York Magazine, and the Financial Times . . .

 

 

Well, I tell you, it’s exhausting.

 

 

It’s especially exhausting to figure out their takes on various issues.

 

 

Salt, for example. Reader’s Digest recently excerpted an article from the New York Times (!) which showed that maybe salt isn’t as bad as we’ve been bad as we’ve been led to believe.

 

 

To be sure: any nutrient, in excess, is bad for you. But how much is too much much? We’ve been told over the last few decades that we eat too much salt, and it’s killing us: hypertension, heart disease, kidney disease.

 

 

Except maybe the research studies aren’t supportive of this.

 

 

O dear!

 

 

Monosodium glutamate? Also not necessarily a killer, according to a British book I read recently. (Of course, they said that salt was the real villain.)

 

 

And a recent article in Mother Jones found widespread lead poisoning in urban areas, which seemed to correlate to areas of elevated crime, etc.

 

 

Sing it, Joe Jackson!

 

 

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For Sunday: Elvis Costello sings "New Amsterdam"

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I’ve loved Elvis Costello since the 1970s. This song, from his “Get Happy!” album in the 1980s, is one of my favorites. The melody is wonderful, and the lyrics are amazing.

 

 

Note: this song might or might not be about Elvis’s love/hate relationship with New York City (try thinking of NYC as the woman he’s singing about; it kind of makes sense).

 

 

But who knows?

 

Enjoy.

 

 

 

New Amsterdam has become much too much

When I have the possession of everything she touches

Can I step on the brake to get out of her clutches

Can I speak double Dutch to a real double duchess

 

 

 

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For Sunday: the Gap Band invites you to board the “Party Train

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This is a cute little song / dance video from the 1980s. I like the different kinds of dancing, and the way it shows all kinds of people: black people, white people, Buddhist monks, children, adults, policemen, bodybuilders, crazy Uncle Sams on roller skates.

 

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