The title of my 12/11 posting “Er ist der Schönste in Berlin” (‘He is the most beautiful (man) in Berlin’) is an echo of the line “Es war das Schönste auf der Welt” (‘It was the most beautiful (place) in the world’) in the “Bilbao-Song”, about Bills Ballhaus in Bilbao (‘Bill’s dance hall / beer hall in Bilbao’), from the 1929 Berlin musical comedy Happy End by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.
(#1) You can listen to a Lotte Lenya performance of the song here
(For the purposes of this posting, the letter Z standing on its own is an abbreviation for the surname Zwicky.)
More family bulletins from Switzerland, starting with the musicians Salome Z, Conrad Z, Peter Z, Stefan Z, and Benjamin Z, from my 11/27 posting “The two Salome Zwickys of Zürich”. These will take us to Spain and, incidentally, to linguistics. With, of course, the obligatory trip to Mollis, in canton Glarus.
A week of death, punishment, and destruction. This week: deaths on M W F, punishment on Tu, destruction on Th.
(#1) John Cleese as the host on Monty Python’s “It’s Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” show
Hello again, and welcome to the show. Tonight we continue to look at some famous deaths. Tonight we start with the wonderful death of Genghis Khan, conqueror of India.
Well, acually, today, the 4th, is Frank Zappa (1993). Friday, the 8th, is John Lennon (1980). And Wednesday, the 6th, is Wolfie M. himself (1791). Tomorrow, the 5th, is Krampusnacht, when the Christmas demon Krampus punishes naughty children (the night before St. Nicholas rewards the good ones, on his feast day). And Thursday, the 7th, is Pearl Harbor Day, the anniversary of the Japanese bombing of the naval base in Honolulu, which brough the United States into World War II.
It starts with a Zippy strip from July 1st, featuring the Maple Donuts shop on Historic Lincoln Highway in York PA (and, incredibly, it will end with singings of the Negro National Anthem; in between, there will be firearms):
(#1) Maple Donuts, featured a number of times in Zippy strips
It might not be an accident that the strip appeared a few days before America’s great patriotic holiday, Independence Day / the Fourth of July. To see why, we need to look at the actual Maple Donuts store.
That will take us, on the one hand, to the adjoining coffee shop; and, on the other hand, to proud, unapologetic assertions of identities.
Yesterday, the posting “The two Salome Zwickys of Zürich”, about the musical and medical careers of Salome Zwicky. I didn’t touch on the complex resonances associated with the name Salome there — so now some onomastic (and musical) musings.
News you can sing!
Passed on by Virginia Transue, this story from the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield MA:
52 years ago (Nov. 29, 1965) the Berkshire Eagle printed a little article about two young men being fined 25 bucks for dumping trash. Little did we know at the time that the incident, which ran on page 25, would become the basis for Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant. Here’s our original story from 1965:
(#1) The genesis of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”
Yesterday Google Alert led me to information about two women named Salome Zwicky in Zürich: the first to turn up was a soprano, performing in concerts in the Zürich area and on several recordings; the second was (Frau) Dr. med. Salome Zwicky (or Zwicky-Beck), Leiterin des SingStimmZentrums Zürich und Spezialärztin für Hals-, Nasen-, Ohren- Heilkunde und Phoniatrie (Stimm- und Sprachstörungen) — a specialist in disorders of speech and the (singing) voice, with a clinic in Schlieren (a few miles west of Zürich).
Zwicky is a very common surname in Switzerland, especially German-speaking Switzerland, but Salome is an unusual personal name, and the chances that there are two different Salome Zwickys in Zürich, one a singer and one a doctor specializing in (among other things) disorders of the singing voice, would be minuscule.
So: only one Salome Zwicky, who has managed to combine her musical and medical lives.
It’s Thanksgiving Eve — or as some commercial folk now have it, Black Wednesday — which this year is November 22nd, St. Cecilia’s Day, a day to celebrate music (coverage here in a 11/21/11 posting, “Saint Cecilia”), but also JFK Assassination Day.
For Black Wednesday, I ordered a new bed, a floor sample at 50% off (technically, it’s a Christmas present to me), a firm and handsome replacement for my rather broken-down 40-year-old veteran.
The unfortunate concurrence of St. Cecilia and JFK comes by every year, always close to Thanksgiving, triggering a deeply uncomfortable mixture of emotions. Music is a balm:
When darkness comes
And pain is all around
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down
(About memory and my life, not much about language. Some oblique references to (fondly recalled) mansex, but nothing graphic.)
The context is the Enhance Fitness classes at the Palo Alto Family Y, for which the instructors use playlists of (dance) music as background for our exertions. Last Tuesday, we sweated to a series of British Invasion hits (from the 1960s), among them “Bang a Gong (Get It On)”, which produced in me a powerful wave of pleasurable recollection — of a time in the Queens Club, an after-hours gay dance club below the Queens Hotel in Brighton, Sussex. Oh my, oh my, oh my. Forty years ago, but oh so sweet.
Two cartoons, one (a Galley Slave cartoon by Christopher Weyant in the New Yorker of 5/14/01), explicitly about four-part harmony; and one (today’s Zippy) alluding to the Ink Spots and so to their silky four-part harmonies: