"Mein Kampf" with YouTube

Looking back at so many posts both here and at El Pollo Real, I'm struck by how often embedded videos become disabled over time making the posts nearly unitelligable. As I suggested long ago, YouTube, instead of killing creativity, should make copyrighted clips freely available at a nominal fee.

Here is an old post of mine -- one which still gets my eyes misty -- full restored:

Buried At Sea

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Here are the full lyrics for A Pair of Brown Eyes (1985) by The Pogues. See if you can follow the two narratives. It's about a drunken encounter of two men in a pub--one young and the other much older. The plot is easier to follow with the indentation separating the two first-person points of view:

One summer evening drunk to hell
I sat there nearly lifeless
An old man in the corner sang
"Where the water lilies grow"
And on the jukebox Johnny sang
About a thing called love
And it's "how are you kid and what's your name?"
And "how would you bloody know?"

In blood and death 'neath a screaming sky
I lay down on the ground
And the arms and legs of other men
Were scattered all around
Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed
Then prayed then bled some more
And the only thing that I could see
Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
But when we got back, labeled parts 1, 2, 3
There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
For a pair of brown eyes

I looked at him he looked at me
All I could do was hate him
While Ray and Philomena sang
Of my elusive dreams
I saw the streams, the rolling hills
Where his brown eyes were waiting
And I thought about a pair of brown eyes
That waited once for me
So drunk to hell I left the place
Sometimes crawling sometimes walking
A hungry sound came across the breeze
So I gave the walls a talkin'
And I heard the sounds of long ago
From the old canal
And the birds were whistling in the trees
Where the wind was gently laughing
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
A rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
For a pair of brown eyes

For the longest time (30 years!) the lyrics confused me. First, I didn't understand that two different men were having a dialog about the same thing. In this sense, it's a bit like Neil Young's "Old Man." Second, I didn't understand that the older man had not only been through a horrific wartime experience but that he too had lost a woman. The older man says:

And the only thing that I could see
Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
But when we got back, labeled parts 1, 2, 3
There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me

I used to think that he was talking about literally finding a pair of disembodied brown eyes, or maybe a survivor with brown eyes who then vanished when he came back to "label (body) parts one to three." Rubbish. The soldier's memory of a woman with brown eyes back home got him through the horror. But when he returned from the war, she had left. This triggers the younger man who too had once had a woman with brown eyes. The younger man leaves the pub, hating the older man. 

I wanted to subtitle this post "When the artist betrays his own meaning." Just look at the video released by The Pogues to promote the single: 

linky

Utter rubbish. It's all Thatcher Derangement Syndrome and Big Bad Government. Why couldn't they have been truer to the meaning of the song?

It’s just about a guy getting pissed at a bar 'round here. He’s getting pissed because he’s broken up with this bird and… you know how it is when you just go into a pub on your own to drink and it’s really quiet and you get this old nutter who comes over and starts rambling on you. So this old guy starts on about how he came back from the war, the First World War. Or the Second. One of them anyway. And he tells him about the ship he had out there and how he got out and came back and this girl had fucked off with someone else, a girl with a pair of brown eyes. Which is the same situation as the young guy sitting there listening to all this rubbish and the juke box playing Johnny Cash and Ray Lyman and Philomena Begley, classic London juke box tracks. And in the end he gets to the stage where he says fuck it, and he goes stumbling out of the pub and he walks along the canal and starts feeling really bad, on the verge of tears, and he starts realising that the old guy has had a whole fucking lifetime of that feeling, going through the war and everything, but his original reaction is to hate him and despise him. I’m not saying he goes back and starts talking to him but you know… ~ Shane MacGowan link

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link in case the video doesn't play

I love the sound of the pedal steel guitar.

The lyrics are crystal-clear and need no transcription. I'm surprised that the song didn't chart well at the time of its release (1992). Instead, "War Of Man" did better. Neil Young is at his best when he sings about things he loves rather than about what he hates, like war. The temptation to moralize gets the best of him as it does me.

The video shifts backwards in time about mid-way through, as if Mr. Young were reliving a younger version of himself and his wife. One benefit of growing old with the same person is that you can remember younger days together.

Question for the audience: Linda Ronstadt sang backing vocals on this track...is that her in the video?

I'm a little late with this post...I should have posted it under the eclipsed harvest moon a couple weeks ago. Oh well, it's a lovely song and there will be other Harvest Moons.

Christmas Dinner Redux

The one that never was.

link

How to top saying that it was John Huston's career-topping last movie?  The best of better films? A labor of love for a beloved writer?

My revision of that scene would be a metaphor for the old Althouse crowd. One by one they self-identify like guests at a dinner party that never really happened in real life.

The context was Irish -- as certain as Joyce was constrained to what he knew best. But, the theme is universal and cuts across literary media.

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"Pure And Easy" was supposed to have been the opening song in Pete Townshend's second concept album (after "Tommy") called "Lifehouse." But the project never gelled. Instead he gave us the album "Who's Next" and if you listen closely to the very end of the very last song -- "The Song Is Over" -- Townshend included the dying gasp of "Pure And Easy:"

Lyrics for "Pure And Easy" follow after the jump.