Industrial Country

December 22, 2012 • 7:21 am

by Greg Mayer

As my postscript to Country Music Week, I submit for your approval Johnny Cash’s 2003 cover of “Hurt” by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, perhaps the only “Industrial Country” song ever. It is a solemn meditation on mortality and loss. [Link to video updated on 2019 09 26.]

Cash’s feeling and phrasing are haunting and moving. The video, directed by Mark Romanek, who also did videos for Nine Inch Nails, contrasts scenes of Cash as he sings in 2003, with scenes of his youth and powerful middle age, and footage from the closed and decrepit “House of Cash” museum*. Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash, hovers in the background, as if she were a concerned, but powerless, guardian angel. It is made all the more poignant by the fact that within nine months both June and Johnny were dead. June’s ethereal presence in the video is eerily evocative of what Johnny later said about her while performing shortly after her death (and shortly before his own):

The spirit of June Carter overshadows me tonight with the love she had for me and the love I have for her. We connect somewhere between here and heaven. She came down for a short visit, I guess, from heaven to visit with me tonight to give me courage and inspiration like she always has.

“Hurt” was Cash’s last hit before he died: it charted in the UK, and on both country and modern rock charts in the US. The song and the video won numerous awards, including a Grammy and a CMA, and has made many lists of all-time great songs/videos by both rock and country media in the US, Australia, and the UK. Last year the UK’s NME named it the greatest video ever. Upon watching the video, Reznor said he felt “tears welling, silence, goosebumps.”

To finish off my coda to Country Music Week, I want to present something by Emmylou Harris, whom a number of commenters have asked for, and who was one of the favorites of Jerry’s and my late friend and colleague Ken Miyata. (Ken, as many WEIT readers will recall, named a new species of frog for Jerry.) Ken was a great fan of country music. At the time he was finishing his Ph.D. thesis, it just so happened that Emmylou was making an appearance at the Harvard Coop (which had at the time a large music department). Ken went down and got his thesis signed by her, making his Ph.D. thesis one of the few theses signed by a distinguished committee of academic examiners and by a country music star.

In choosing an Emmylou Harris selection, I wanted a piece Ken would have known, and picked “In My Hour of Darkness“, a song she wrote with Gram Parsons in 1973. It’s theme is a natural continuation from “Hurt”. Also, her collaboration with Parsons, a former Byrd, highlights the close historical connection between country and rock, a connection which seems not as widely appreciated as it might be. This is the album version, with backing vocals by Linda Ronstadt.

*The Cash estate has announced plans for a new museum, including many items from the House of Cash, to open in Nashville.

Caturday felid duo: the cat with 17 lives, and Brad Pitt channels Henri

December 22, 2012 • 5:06 am

From the Guardian comes the sad but ultimately inspiring tale of The Bear. Yes, that’s this black moggie’s full name, complete with the article. If you’re an ailurophile, you simply must read the whole essay by Tom Cox. If you have kids, read it aloud to them.

Here are three paragraphs to whet your appetite:

He was originally found in a plastic bag on the hard shoulder of a motorway, along with several of his siblings. Since then, his fur has all fallen out due to a flea allergy then all fallen out again due to an allergy to flea treatment medicine. He’s withstood carbon monoxide poisoning, had a hole ripped in his throat by a feral challenger, developed asthma, lost chunks of both ears, gone awol for almost six weeks in south London, moved house a dozen times, and been rather brutally given his marching orders on countless occasions by Biscuit, my nextdoor neighbours’ cat, whose Last Of The Summer Wine affection he pines for.

. . . The Bear is, by some distance, the most polite cat I have ever met. He has never to my knowledge started a fight with a contemporary, or made any cliched or obnoxious demand for attention. He is the only feline I have ever known who signals his hunger not by cursing, miaowing or using my leg as a scratching post, but by nodding subtly towards the food cupboard. I found him with his first ever dead mouse not long ago, but I suspect one of the others had killed it and, having mistakenly thought it was still breathing, he’d moseyed over with the intention of reading it some elegiac verse as a send-off.

. . . “Wow, man,” said my hippie pal Michael, who once looked after The Bear for a few weeks. “When I first cuddled him, that was intense. I’ve not felt anything like that before.” I knew precisely what he meant.

The Bear
The Bear: “Can you tell me why I am a cat, please?”

The Bear is getting older and less mobile, and won’t be with Cox much longer, but it’s a beautiful piece on an amazing cat.

And the author?

Tom Cox is the author of Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man and Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/cox_tom.

Moar of The Bear, looking pugilistic.

The Bear (a cat)

*****

Finally, as alert reader “bric” pointed out in a comments, Brad Pitt, every woman’s heartthrob, has produced a commercial for Chanel that looks for all the world like a parody of Henri.  The only difference is that Pitt doesn’t speak bad French.

Here, then, is Brad Pitt the Existentialist Hunk, selling perfume:

h/t: Harriet

Say it ain’t so, Christiane!

December 21, 2012 • 8:33 pm

UPDATE: this is on now, so anybody sees this, report in.  The most recent snippet indicates that the show is trying to show that the “Great Flood” happened. Now there’s evidence of a very rapid rise in the level of the Black sea about 5600 BC when the Mediterranean breached the Bosphorus, but the rapidity of that “flood” was controversial, and it certainly wasn’t the worldwide flood described in Genesis. Perhaps it was the source of that myth, but let’s see how ABC presents it.

_____________

Few journalists have impressed me like Christiane Amanpour, famous for her pull-no-punches reporting and bravery under fire while reporting on war. She started with CNN, but is now working for ABC, too.

So, given her reputation, what the bloody hell is she doing reporting on the miracles of the Bible? Yep, this Friday at 9 pm on ABC, Amanpour will investigate the veracity of the Good Book.  The dire preview here asks questions like, “Did Noah’s Flood happen?”, “Where is the Garden of Eden?”, and “Where is the Ark of the Covenant?”

I hope the answer to the first question is “NO!” and to the other two, “Nowhere!”.  But somehow I don’t think that will be the case.  Some reader please watch it and report back; I don’t think I can bear to see Amanpour’s reputation go down the drain.

Screen shot 2012-12-19 at 9.05.31 PM

h/t: Tommy R

Adam Gopnik writes on gun control again

December 21, 2012 • 9:57 am

Adam Gopnik is still (and uncharacteristically) really angry about the lack of gun control in the U.S., and the slaughter it engenders. He had an eloquent piece on it in The New Yorker the other day, but has decided to write again on the topic.

His empassioned new piece, “The simple truth about gun control,” is even better; it is, in fact, one of the best things I’ve seen on the topic. Here’s only one paragraph, a deft response to those who say (as a way of keeping guns), that we should go slow, examine the problem carefully, realize its complexity, and, above all, not react reflexively to this tragedy.

That’s all hokum.  We don’t need so many guns in this country, and we certainly don’t need semiautomatic weapons. We need to regulate guns the way they do in England.

But I digress: here’s a section of Gopnik’s new piece:

So don’t listen to those who, seeing twenty dead six- and seven-year-olds in ten minutes, their bodies riddled with bullets designed to rip apart bone and organ, say that this is impossibly hard, or even particularly complex, problem. It’s a very easy one. Summoning the political will to make it happen may be hard. But there’s no doubt or ambiguity about what needs to be done, nor that, if it is done, it will work. One would have to believe that Americans are somehow uniquely evil or depraved to think that the same forces that work on the rest of the planet won’t work here. It’s always hard to summon up political will for change, no matter how beneficial the change may obviously be. Summoning the political will to make automobiles safe was difficult; so was summoning the political will to limit and then effectively ban cigarettes from public places. At some point, we will become a gun-safe, and then a gun-sane, and finally a gun-free society. It’s closer than you think. (I’m grateful to my colleague Jeffrey Toobin for showing so well that the idea that the Second Amendment assures individual possession of guns, so far from being deeply rooted in American law, is in truth a new and bizarre reading, one that would have shocked even Warren Burger.

And do read Toobin’s piece mentioned above. It shows how the toxic combination of the National Rifle Association and the odious Antonin Scalia changed the meaning of the Second Amendment from allowing guns for a militia to allowing guns for everyone.

h/t: Krishan

Moar Ediacara – the rangeomorphs of Mistaken Point

December 21, 2012 • 7:24 am

by Matthew Cobb

I just realised that the perfect counter-point to yesterday’s post about the Ediacara is this excellent Palaeocast podcast with Dr. Alex Liu of the University of Cambridge, who has been studying one of the best-known Ediacaran fossil formations, at Mistaken Point in Newfoundland. This link to the podcast will also take you to a set of fantastic photos by Dr Liu.

You should also read this great post on Mistaken Point by Tony Martin from his terrific blog Life Traces of the Georgia Coast.

The Ediacaran rocks are named after Ediacara in Australia, but there are a number of other key sites around the world that yield bizarre and enigmatic fossils. Mistaken Point – a deep tropical sea bed 565 million years old – is particularly important as it contains many fossils of rangeomorphs. Rangeomorphs look vaguely like ferns, but a) they show a fractal-like structure that is utterly different from a fern and b) they were (apparently) found in the deep ocean. This latter point indicates that they could not have photosynthesised and were therefore probably some kind of animal. With their high surface-area to volume ratio, they could have been osmotrophs, directly absorbing carbon, or perhaps they were some kind of early cnidarian, like a sea pen.

1

One thing the Mistaken Point biota were not, however, was terrestrial. And here’s a further indication: a trace of an animal, about 1cm wide, moving along the sea-floor from left to right (Tony Martin’s pal Paleontologist Barbie is there for scale):

Caption and photo from here: "A surface trail, probably made by a < 1 cm wide animal moving along the seafloor about 565 mya. The animal moved from left to right, which is indicated by the crescentic ridges inside the trail, which open in the direction of movement. The crecentic ridges in the interior of the trail may represent marks where the basal disc of a anemone-like animal pushed against the surface as it moved. Even more interesting, the arrow points to an oval impression, which may be a resting trace that shows the approximate basal diameter of the tracemaker. What was the tracemaker? It’s currently identified as a small anemone, which is based on modern traces. Neoichnology rules! (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken at Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, taken from here.)"
Caption and photo from here: “A surface trail, probably made by a < 1 cm wide animal moving along the seafloor about 565 mya. The animal moved from left to right, which is indicated by the crescentic ridges inside the trail, which open in the direction of movement. The crecentic ridges in the interior of the trail may represent marks where the basal disc of a anemone-like animal pushed against the surface as it moved. Even more interesting, the arrow points to an oval impression, which may be a resting trace that shows the approximate basal diameter of the tracemaker. What was the tracemaker? It’s currently identified as a small anemone, which is based on modern traces. Neoichnology rules! (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken at Mistaken Point, Newfoundland)”

Martin Brasier, author of the marvellous Darwin’s Lost World (highly recommended) has recently published an article (Open Access! Hooray! – pics below taken from here) in which he has tried to show how rangeomorphs grew, by looking at hundreds of fossils. Here are some examples of what he’s been looking at, followed by his model for how a couple of these life-forms may have grown. By focusing just on the ‘architecture’ (his term) of the rangeomorphs, he and his colleagues think they have provided a new framework for classifying these organisms.

 

 

3

4

 

Finally, here’s Brasier from a few years back advertising his excellent book and briefly explaining how he got hooked on pre-Cambrian rocks and their importance for our understanding of evolution:

 

 

Country music week: Day 6

December 21, 2012 • 5:11 am

One more day to go.

“Man of Constant Sorrow” is an old country song, which, according to Wikipedia, was first recorded by Dick Burnett, a “partially blind fiddler from Kentucky.” A later version, recorded in 1928 by Emry Arthur, can be heard here.

The song has changed a lot over the years, and the most familiar version is the one appearing in the 2009 Coen brothers movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” In that movie it was called “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,” supposedly recorded by the “Soggy Bottom Boys,” who were, in reality, Dan Tyminski, Harley Allen, and Pat Enright. That version won a Grammy and a Country Music Award.  I find it immensely more appealing than the original version.

Here are Tyminski (b. 1967) and some others, whom I can’t identify, singing the version you may have heard. If you know of  Alison Krauss and her band Union Station (I’ve posted on Krauss before), you’ll know Tyminski, who’s in the band.

Michael Martin Murphey (b. 1945) had one crossover hit, but it was a huge one, “Wildfire” (1975), a haunting song about a horse, a dead woman, and a “killing frost.” Dave Barry included it in his hilarious Book of Bad Songs (read it!), but I don’t think the song is bad at all; in fact, I like it a great deal.  And this version by Murphey is one of the most compelling live renditions of any folk or country song I know. Yes, I know that calling it “country” is a stretch (sue me), but at least Martin wears country clothes when he sings it.  The piano introduction and coda are superb:

“San Antonio Rose” is one of my favorite country songs, written and first performed by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys in 1938 (listen to their version here). Since then it’s been recorded many times, one of the best versions being Patsy Cline’s. But to my mind, the best (and swingingest) version is the duet by Willie Nelson (b. 1933) and Ray Price (b. 1926, and currently fighting pancreatic cancer).

Oh hell, I’ll put up Patsy Cline’s version, which has a great modulation near the end:

Cat contest ends in ten days

December 21, 2012 • 4:44 am

Now that we didn’t die, I’m giving a reminder that Jan. 1 is the deadline for the “humiliate your cat” contest, whereby you use a piece of paper (or other creative devices) to change your cat’s face.  Here’s an example, but I’ve shown a few others, too, e.g.,

catbag

 

There are only about a half-dozen entries, so your chances of winning an autographed copy of WEIT are not insubstantial. If you have a moggie, you’ll be home for the holidays with ribbons, paper, and all sorts of useful things. . .