sunday tune: betty carter - 'spring can really hang you up the most'

Remember that old song “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”? Betty Carter gave it an aching rendition at her club dates back in the Eighties, when my wife and I were living in New York. You know the party’s over, she sings, “when you keep praying for snow to hide the clover.” Fran Landesman, an associate of the Beat poets, wrote the song. According to her obit in the Times, the song “sprang from Ms. Landesman’s asking jazz musicians to put T.S. Eliot’s phrase ‘April is the cruelest month’ into their own words.”

Christopher Benfy, 'The Torments of Spring.' NYR Daily, 3/7/2019.

spring, recomposed

'Spring,' from Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons. Richter says:

As a child, I fell in love with it [The Four Seasons] ... It's beautiful, charming music with a great melody and wonderful colors. Then, later on, as I became more musically aware — literate, studied music and listened to a lot of music — I found it more difficult to love it. We hear it everywhere — when you're on hold, you hear it in the shopping center, in advertising; it's everywhere. For me, the record and the project are trying to reclaim the piece, to fall in love with it again.

In another interview, he describes the process as 'writing through it anew – similarly to how scribes once illuminated manuscripts – and thus rediscovering it for myself.'

Finding this video was a lucky hit, loving as I do time-lapse videos of things blooming and the sun moving across the sky. And given snow on the ground here and more snow to come, I am in the right frame of mind for images of speeded-up spring paired with spikily familiar/unfamiliar music.

'minds - and winds'

*

A Pang is more conspicuous in Spring
In contrast with the things that sing
Not Birds entirely – but Minds –
And Winds – Minute Effulgencies
When what they sung for is undone
Who cares about a Blue Bird's Tune –
Why, Resurrection had to wait
Till they had moved a Stone –

Emily Dickinson, ca. 1881. Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, via The Morgan Library.

* 

Félix Vallotton: The Wind, 1910. The National Gallery of Art.

imaginary outfit: easter brunch

We are stepping out for dosas and cardamom coffees as fuel for this afternoon's festivities: watching basketball, baking the world's tiniest ham and hiding plastic eggs filled with baby carrots for the dog to find.

the real thing

Your miserable premature spring has finally turned into the real thing, confirmed by the calendar, but what a sad look it wears, especially after its promising beginnings that now seem so far back in the past. The air is moist and almost black, and sharp with chill; the magnolia petals flatten and fall off one after the other onto the half-frozen mud of the ground where only a few spears of sickly green grass have managed to lift their heads. All this comes as no surprise, it is even somewhat of a relief, and better than the dire sequel that those precocious moments seemed to promise, cataclysms instead of the ominous hush that now lies over everything. And who is to say whether or not this silence isn’t the very one requested so as to be able to speak? Perhaps it seems ominous only because it is concentrating so intensely on you and what you have to say.

John Ashbery, 'The System'

Via The Paris Review.

vanitas vanitatum

All the Flowers of the Spring
Meet to perfume our burying:
These have but their growing prime,
And man does flourish but his time.
Survey our progresse from our birth—
We are set, we grow, we turne to earth.
Courts adieu, and all delights,
All bewitching appetites!
Sweetest Breath and clearest eye
Like perfumes goe out and dye;
And consequently this is done
As shadowes wait upon the Sunne.
Vaine the ambition of Kings
Who seeke by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.

John Webster, 1623.

as short a spring

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.

Poem: Robert Herrick (1591-1674). Music: Benjamin Britten (1913-1976).

spring trumpeters

Daffodil cigarette card in the collection of the NYPL.

first flowers

1320

Dear March — Come in —
How glad I am —
I hoped for you before —
Put down your Hat —
You must have walked —
How out of Breath you are —
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest —
Did you leave Nature well —
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me —
I have so much to tell —

I got your Letter, and the Birds —
The Maples never knew that you were coming — till I called
I declare — how Red their Faces grew —
But March, forgive me — and
All those Hills you left for me to Hue —
There was no Purple suitable —
You took it all with you —

Who knocks? That April.
Lock the Door —
I will not be pursued —
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied —
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come

That Blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame.

Emily Dickinson

to spring

From 1936. 

Soon, soon, soon. Spring can't be stopped!

thaw

The little boy, when he heard that they were going to see the ice break up, wanted to come with them. Rosa lifted him up. 'No, you cannot come,' she said. 'It is too far away for you. I shall tell you about it when I come back.' The child gravely put his hands to her face. 'No, you will never tell me,' he said. Eline tried to hold back the girl, and told her that it was too far away for her as well. 'Nay, I want to go far away,' said Rosa.  She put on an old cloak, and a pair of scabby furred gloves that belonged to her father, and went out with Peter.

As they came out of the house they saw that the snow was gone from the fields, but that all the same the world was lighter than before, for the air was filled with blurred, resplendent clarity. It almost blinded them. They strove to get up their eyelids against it. To all sides they heard the sound of dripping and running water. The walking was heavy, the melting snow made the road slippery. Peter set of at a quick pace, and then had to wait impatiently for the girl, who in her old shoes slid and stumbled on the path. She caught up with him, warm with the exertion, and giddy, like himself, with the air and the light.

He stood still. 'Listen,' he said, 'that is the lark.' 

Isak Dinesen, 'Peter and Rosa' from Winter's Tales.

Claude Monet: The Thaw at Vétheuil. 1880. Oil on canvas. 60 x 100 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

Icicles in stereo, found here.

frazil ice

Frazil ice: a harbinger of spring. I want to plan a trip out west to see this in person someday.

Thanks to my father-in-law for sending this video my way - it's pretty jaw-dropping. Definitely worth watching in full screen.