The Celestial Monochord

The Moon and Tom Waits: Part 1 of 2

Tom Waits in wine country.

In 1999, I made a partial list of references to the Moon in Tom Waits songs. Since then, I've seen a few others do the same, but I don't think a complete list has ever been made. I estimate it would be about 100 entries long — averaging over 3 lunar references every year for more than 3 decades.

Below is only about 40% of the known references. I don't know whether you can make it through this, but I hope it will vividly convey the way Waits returns to the Moon, over and over, sort of turning it around in his mind to see it from as many different angles as possible.

The moon's all up, full and big — apricot pit in an indigo sky.

You wear a dress, baby, and I'll a tie, and we'll laugh at that old bloodshot moon in that burgundy sky.

Outside another yellow moon has punched a hole in the nighttime.

Looks like a yellow biscuit of a buttery cue ball moon rollin’ maverick across an obsidian sky.

The moon's a yellow stain across the sky.

November only believes in a pile of dead leaves and a moon that's the color of bone.

The Moon is a cold chiseled dagger and it's sharp enough to draw blood from a stone. He rides through your dreams on a coach and horses and the fence posts in the moonlight look like bones.

And then they all try to stand like Romeo beneath the moon cut like a sickle, and they're talkin' now in Spanish all about their hero.

The moon's a silver slipper, it's pouring champagne stars.

Every time I hear that melody, something breaks inside, and the grapefruit moon, one star shining, can't turn back the tide.

I know I'm gonna change that tune when I'm standing underneath a buttery moon that's all melted off to one side (Parkay). It was just about that time that the sun came crawlin' yellow out of a manhole at the foot of 23rd Street and a dracula moon in a black disguise was making its way back to its pre-paid room at the St. Moritz Hotel.

Everything has its price. Everything has its place. What's more romantic than dying in the moonlight?

The Moon ain't romantic, it's intimidating as hell.

Cheater slicks and baby moons, she's a-hot and ready and creamy and sugared and the band is awful and so are the tunes.

It's 9th and Hennepin, and all the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes, and the moon's teeth marks are on the sky like a tarp thrown over all this.

The moonlight dressed the double-breasted foothills in the mirror, weaving out a negligee and a black brassiere.

Just then Florence Nightingale dropped her drawers and stuck her fat ass half way out of the window with a Wilson Pickett tune and shouted "Get a load of this!" and gave the finger to the moon.

Now the moon's rising, got no time to lose — time to get down to drinking and tell the band to play the blues.

And Zuzu Bolin played "Stavin' Chain" and Mighty Tiny on the saw threw his head back with a mouth full of gold teeth and they played "Lopsided heart" and "Moon over Dog Street."

I like to sleep until the crack of noon, midnight howlin' at the moon, goin' out when I want to, and comin' home when I please.

They be suckin' on Coca Colas and be spittin' Day's Work until the moon was a stray dog on the ridge and the taverns would be swollen until the naked eye of 2 a.m.

I talked baseball with a lieutenant over a Singapore Sling, and I wondered how the same Moon outside over this Chinatown fair could look down on Illinois and find you there — you know I love you, baby.

It's funny you know, cause every now and then — yeah, every now and then, when the moon's holding water, they say old Joe will stop and give you a ride.

Wasted and wounded, it ain't what the moon did — I got what I paid for now.

I never saw the east coast until I moved to the west, I never saw the moonlight until it shone off of your breast.

And the evening stumbles home with his tie undone, and the moon sweeps 7th Avenue as usual. You lie awake at night, you remember when ...

Well, Jesus gonna be here, he's gonna be here soon. He's gonna cover us up with leaves, with a blanket from the moon.

You gotta roll out the carpet, strike up the band, break out the best champagne when I land. You gotta beat the parade drum, hit all the bars — I want the moon and stars!

I got the moon, I got the cheese, I got the whole damn nation on their knees.

My eyes say their prayers to her and sailors ring her bell, the way a moth mistakes a light bulb for the moon and goes to hell.

I'll wait beneath a blood-red moon, a blood-red moon, a blood-red moon, 'neath a blood-red moon. I'd rather die than part from you.

My baby ripped my heart out with every turn of the moon.

Every night the moon and you would slip away to places where you knew that you would never get the blues. Well, now whiskey gives you wings to carry each one of your dreams, and the moon does not belong to you.

There's a golden moon that shines up through the mist, and I know that your name can be on that list. There's no eye for an eye, there's no tooth for a tooth, I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth.

When the moon is broken and the sky is cracked, come on up to the house.

When the weathervane's sleeping and the moon turns his back, you crawl on your belly along the railroad tracks.

Well, the smart money's on Harlow and the moon is in the street.

The Moon fell from the sky — it rained mackerel, it rained trout.

The moon in the window and a bird on the pole, always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal.

That’s the way the market crashes. That’s the way the whip lashes. That’s the way the teeth gnashes. That's the way the gravy stains. And that's the way the moon wanes.

Thank You Mr. Sagan

 

THANK YOU, MR. SAGAN

Oh, it's nice to return
to the twentieth century
blockaded from invasion
and lame radio shows
about how Jesus
loves the athletes,
his rich children,
who can achieve
so much with a cleat.

In The Letters To
The Mount Wilson Observatory,
every day blazed
with irresistible keys
brandished by real citizens
with big sensitive heads
compelled to tell us
the almighty resided
in the Orion Nebula
or that humans used
to live on the moon
until it melted.

Oh, please can we
all be muscular
hummingbirds,
jeweled fools
beating our wings
at gaps in what passes
for understanding
in a vestigial wind.

The world is not
a polyphonic monster.
If possible, may we
refrain from eavesdropping
on erudite ancestors?

Consider what we've done
to virgins, toasting on an open fire
or hosting that obsession with reptiles,
all sacred and chicane. Humans
are a moony crew, a ship's list.
Still lost but stalking the location
of a true galactic home.
Neither frozen, nor crackpot,
not noble, not alone.

 

-----

 

This poem contains a reference to an online exhibit of very eccentric letters received from the general public by The Mount Wilson Observatory.

My heartfelt thanks to Minneapolis poet Jennifer L. Willoughby for today's entry of The Celestial Monochord. Contact me for copyright and other information on this poem and this poet's work.

 

1969 and the Moon LandingPart 1: M*A*S*H

The first major Hollywood movie to use "the f-word" was Robert Altman's M*A*S*H. It was hard enough to get this past the studio, but the word was spoken by a gung-ho, frat-boyish soldier, whose buddies were smoking marijuana on the sidelines. Released during the depths of the Vietnam War, it was not exactly the kind of depiction of Our Troops people were used to seeing on-screen. It is said, though, that many state-side soldiers found a way to go AWOL from their bases for a few hours to see the film.

While editing M*A*S*H after filming was complete, Altman was disappointed in the results. He thought something was missing, and eventually decided the film needed a kind of Greek chorus — a detached voice that could comment on the action. So, he sent a camera crew back out to film many dozens of shots of a loudspeaker on a pole, and then he dubbed the 4077's camp announcements over this footage. It was just what he was looking for.

One of those shots of the loudspeaker has a gibbous moon in the background. According to the DVD's "special features," that shot was taken the night Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first moon landing. There are people up there on that moon, behind the camp's loudspeaker in the movie M*A*S*H.

I wan't really there in 1969, so it's not easy to imagine the impact M*A*S*H must have had on its first audiences (the more familiar TV series doesn't help). What it must have meant for that moon landing to drop into the middle of 1969 is even harder to reconstruct. After all, when is it ever possible to grasp the mood of an entire nation in any year — much less America in 1969?

John Prine said recently, "If you want the big picture, you need a really small frame." That shot of the 4077's loundspeaker with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the background sometimes rests in my mind for a long time, like a shrine for contemplation or like some kind of worry stone.

Part 2

Two Hundred Planets

When I was a kid, being stuck with just the Sun's nine planets drove me half mad. Astronomers suspected there were planets circling other stars, but the brute fact was that nobody knew. The uncertainty made my skin crawl.

Carl Sagan made matters worse by vividly fantasizing about a future in which you could thumb through an "Encyclopedia Galactica," a catalog of known worlds and civilizations. He wondered, ominously, what our entry would say.

Well, the first "extrasolar planet" was discovered about 10 years ago, and today something like 20 new planets are announced every month. Within a few weeks, the total number of known planets will hit 200. It's almost impossible to keep up with these announcements (especially since a few don't pan out and are later withdrawn).

The May issue of "Sky and Telescope" reports that a planet recently found circling a pulsar has a mass of 0.0004 that of Earth's — that is, it's basically just an asteroid. The rate and variety of discoveries is going to do nothing but accelerate, and fast. We'll have our own page in an "Encyclopedia Galactica" sooner that Carl thought.

Art and Science on "Morning Edition"

NPR's Morning Edition has been airing a series exploring the intersections between art and science. It's had some fine moments, and it's definitely worth listening to on the web. Probably my favorite segment was on Louis and Bebe Barron, pioneers of electronic music in the 1950's.

An apparently eccentric husband and wife team, the Barrons found ingenious ways to get crude 1950's-era electronics to make strange noises. Frequently, they would deliberately push circuits beyond their limits, creating various whirrs, whistles, and pops as the circuitry fried — that is, they made instruments that made music through self-destruction.

The home page of the series reads like a kind of Dream-Jobs-Only classifieds section.

Acony Bell

Time the Revelator (CD cover detail)

Gillian Welch wrote a song about a flower she calls the Acony Bell. Like most of Welch's songs, it's great — beautifully performed and written. The lyrics describe the flower in terms so detailed and specific, they remind me of the kind of formal botanical descriptions you find in guidebooks and taxonomic encyclopedias.

The flower itself has always been elusive. Early attempts by botanists to study it were frustrated by the fact that the flower is rare, hard to grow, and is found naturally only in a small geographical range way up in the mountains running through Tennessee, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. The plant was so elusive that it was eventually "discovered by a man who didn't name it, named for a man who didn't see it, by someone who didn't know where it was," according to an article in Harvard Magazine.

In a way, Gillian Welch has added another chapter to this long history of confusion. My first attempt at Googling the flower was frustrated because its name is usually spelled Oconee Bell, not Acony Bell as Welch had it on her CD. To help you along in your own research, here's some information about the Oconee Bell, also known as Shortia galacifolia.

Well it makes its home amid the rocks and the rills
Where the snow lies deep on the windy hills
And it tells the world "Why should I wait?
This ice and snow's gonna melt away."

J. Dan Pittillo @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database

 

Dark Was The Night: Candles

Night used to be dark — really dark. When the sun went down, you pretty much couldn't see your own hand in front of your face, unless there was a moon in the sky, a display of aurora, or lightning. Or you could get light from some kind of open flame. To accept this as fact is easy enough, but to imagine it as a reality is hard for people living in the 21st century.

Consider the problem of trying to imagine living by candlelight. Candles used to be made of tallow (essentially animal fat) and bee's wax. Both cast a dim, yellow, flickering light. Sometimes a tallow candle would spatter hot fat on someone nearby.

The first major challenge to deep darkness at night was from gaslight in major cities, made possible by late-19th century coal and oil refining. To respond to the challenge presented by the great steadiness and brightness of gaslight, the candle industry developed the paraffin candle, which produced much brighter, whiter, and steadier light than wax or tallow candles ever did.

But paraffin is a byproduct of the same refining technology that produces gaslight. So the candle itself has been modernized to respond to the challenges of technology.

If you want to imagine life before Night was banished, it won't work to simply light some candles and turn off all your lights (don't forget the VCR display and the clock radio and the light from your neighbor's porchlight leaking into your windows!). The candles you're likely to be usings are already modern lighting techology.

Amazing Cat Facts

In honor of Ralph, visit the Animal Humane Society, or just check out some amazing cat facts. They are some pretty cool little buggers, them cats:

The worlds fattest cat was a neutered male tabby named "Himmey" When Himmey died of respiratory failure he weighed a whopping 46 lbs 15.5 ounces! He had a 15 inch neck, was 38 inches long, and had a 33 inch waist.

Worlds Most "Prolific" Cat was a tabby named "Dusty" gave birth to 420 documented kittens in her lifetime.

Cat's urine glows under a black light.

In ancient Egypt, killing a cat was a crime punishable by death.

Hunting is not instinctive for cats. Kittens born to non-hunting mothers may never learn to hunt.

Cats sleep 16 to 18 hours per day.

Besides smelling with their nose, cats can smell with an additional organ called the Jacobson's organ, located in the upper surface of the mouth.

Cats can't taste sweets.

The average cat food meal is the equivalent to about five mice.

Cats cannot see in complete darkness but they can navigate by sound, smell, and the sensitivity of their whiskers.

"Einstein Was A Pig"

Somewhere around 1998, a book about Einstein appeared that (according to the evening news) detailed his relationships with women, showing that he was a fairly lousy husband and father.

The woman I was dating at the time said, "I knew it! Einstein was a PIG!"

"Well, in that case," I thought to myself, "I guess objects with mass can travel faster than the speed of light."

We split up a week or two later — purely coincidentally, as I recall.

Stalked by the Northern Lights

Often, great displays of the Northern Lights (aurora borealis) do insane things. Several times, over many years, they seemed to hover directly over me, personally. They swirled wildly overhead, as if they knew where I was standing. Looking straight up, I saw:



I never understood how this could be ... until one night, standing under a great display, puzzling very hard over the problem, it hit me. It felt like a Nobel-Prize-worthy discovery. ah-HA!

Imagine you're lying on your back on the floor in somebody's living room, looking up at a set of lace curtains. The curtains to either side of you will fall down in straight lines to your left and right. But directly above you, you'll see a complex, maybe S-shaped curve, surrounded by lines radiating from a point above your head. If you move to another spot along the curtains, you'll see the same thing, due to perspective.

NASA photos taken looking down from Earth orbit aboard one of the Space Shuttles confirm that this is pretty much what's actually happening:

The Oldest Story Ever Told

The stars of the Big Dipper look nothing like a bear. But ancient cultures all over northern Asia — from Scandanavia to Siberia — did see them as a bear. Even the Greeks saw them that way. More strangely, a number of Native American cultures have traditions of seeing these stars as part of a bear narrative.

It's hard to confirm, but the image of these very un-bear-like stars as a bear may well have crossed into North America with the migration of humans over the Siberia-Alaska land bridge during the last Ice Age. If so, this story, this metaphor, is one of the oldest acts of imagination we know.

Note, also, that one of the first signs that the genus Homo had begun to have a kind of imaginative life is the appearence of burials deliberately using bear iconography and bones to lay the dead to rest — the so-called "Bear Cult" of Europe.

I first read about it in an article in Sky and Telescope in the 1980s, but a good article is now online at The Discovery Channel, Canada.

Corn Stalks and the Milky Way

My momma done told me ... when I was a boy ... that when she was growing up on a Wisconsin farm, the corn would grow so fast in late summer you could hear it grow — it was noisy. Being a suburban kid, and a born skeptic, I didn't believe her at first. An April Fool's joke?

She explained that at the height of the growing season, little fibrous strands on any given stalk of corn will snap on occasion, maybe once a week or so. But when you have a whole field of many thousands of stalks of corn, the field crackles like a campfire.

So, in that Wisconsin farmhouse, late at night in the dog days of summer during the Depression, with the windows of her bedroom wide open, she used to fall asleep listening to the corn grow ... crackling, crackling, all night long.

This was a lesson in statistics: very rare events happen all the time. I thought of it years later, reading how radio astronomers map our galaxy.

The vast, star-forming clouds in our Milky Way Galaxy's spiral arms are mostly made of hydrogen atoms — simply, one electron circling one proton. They both spin on their axes like tops, usually in parallel directions. But very rarely, the electron will flip and spin in the opposite (or anti-parallel) direction from its proton. When this happens, the atom emits a light wave at a wavelength of 21 centimeters — a radio frequency.

It only happens to a given hydrogen atom every 10 million years or so, but because our galaxy contains trillions of hydrogen atoms, it happens everywhere, all the time. So radio astonomers can map the galaxy, because the Milky Way softly hums with radio noise, all night, all day, for billions of years.

Sundogs and Sweet Angles

Sundogs (and Sun)

Astronomy has always been my first love, so people sometimes ask me what causes sundogs, rings around the sun or moon, light pillars, etc. I used to say, "Uh, it's ice crystals." That seemed to satisfy most people. But when I read the book "Rainbows, Halos, and Glories," I learned what it really meant — how, exactly, ice crystals cause the various spots, arcs and rings you see in the sky from time to time. Suddenly the whole sky really came alive for me all over again.

Sundogs are the colorful spots you sometimes see on either side of the sun:


  Sundog                Sun                Sundog

       *                      O                      *
______________________________________ horizon


They're caused by ice crystals shaped like hexagonal plates — like thick-ish stop signs, miniaturized. These little hex plates fall through the air with their faces parallel to the ground. So, picture billions of tiny quarters made of ice, all falling either "heads" or "tails", not standing on the edge.



As they fall, the sun reflects off their faces and edges, and also passes through them making prismic colors (or not), depending on the angle of the sun and the angle from which you view them. There's one particular angle that's really sweet — an angle at which the sunlight passes horizontally right into the edge, along the plate's face, and with the plate rotated "just so". At that angle, the ice crystal passes a nice rainbow through itself.

Towards a certain direction in the sky, all the crystals that happen to be in this orientation "light up" that part of the sky. The direction works out to be about 22 degrees to the left and right of the sun:



     *         22deg         O         22deg         *
_______________________________________


It turns out that various other angles are also "sweet" for different reasons. And ice crystals can have different shapes — for example, hexagonal cylinders, like pencils — which, in turn, creates a huge variety of wild arcs and rings and spots, which you can see if you are both lucky and alert.

Visit Les Crowley's beautiful site on Atmospheric Optics or read "Rainbows, Halos, and Glories."

John Johanna's Telescope

There's nothing explicitly about science in the songs on The Anthology of American Folk Music, even though I've named this science/music blog after an illustration on The Anthology's cover.

The closest thing to an exception I can recall is Kelly Harrell's "My Name is John Johanna," a song about what a rotten place Arkansas is ( ... alleged to be). After listing the horrors he witnessed there, the singer vows that if he ever sees Arkansas again, it'll be through a telescope.

It's a funny line to me, I suppose partly because I'm used to thinking of telescopes as a way of overcoming distance, not of enforcing it.

For lyrics, see Page 1 and Page 2.

Dreaming of the Hillbilly Blues

In the early stages of my ... condition, I had a CD changer that held six CDs. I'd put the entire Anthology of American Folk Music on repeat, place a speaker next to my pillow (since the original 78s were in mono, one speaker would suffice), and just let The Anthology seep all the way deep down into my skull while I slept, soaking the reptilian core of my brainstem, all night long, every night, for months. After a while, I expected Amnesty International to break down my door.

The next CD I bought after The Anthology was Dock Boggs' 1960's recordings. I brought it home, put it on the stereo, and when "New Prisoner's Song" came on, I burst into tears, just sobbed openly for a while ... until I suddenly thought, "My musical tastes have CHANGED." Maybe it was like admitting to yourself for the first time that you're gay — realizing you're someone other than who you thought you were. I mean, what should I tell the wife? The judge will surely side with HER! You should really be careful what music you mainline directly into your subconscious.

Years later, I hit the bunk in the army barracks at American Banjo Camp, at 2 in the morning, a little whiskey in me, after five hours of jamming and listening in on jams ... fiddles, guitars, accordions, two doghouse basses, three dozen banjos. I slept like the dead, so deep and contented, drifting off with the sound-memory of old-time music so bright and benevolent and everlasting inside my head ... Brilliancy Medley, June Apple, Sally in the Garden, Ducks on the Millpond, Whiskey Before Breakfast, Soldier's Joy, Sail Away Ladies, Liberty, Devil's Dream ...

 

Well May the World Go

Of course, maybe it's me ... I can't help but hear Pete Seeger's “Well May the World Go (When I’m Far Away)” as at least two songs in one. Is the narrator of “Well May the World Go” about to die? Or is he an astronaut? After all, Seeger based the song on an old Scottish tune (maybe a sea chantey) called "Weel May the Keel Row," which bids a bon voyage. Was Seeger thinking of death or space travel when he decided “The World” would somehow stay behind?

To my ears, “Well May the World Go” is a fine anthem for NASA’s manned space program. The song’s aims are like those of the program I thought I knew as a youngster – to reintroduce us to our own planet as a beautiful place, to collapse vast distances, to wish the world well. NASA still seems to want to be seen this way, and many of its employees are kids like me who never fully grew up. “Well May the World Go” still lurks somewhere in the gaps of NASA’s bureaucracy.

So why not really adopt the song as an official anthem? The trouble, from NASA’s point of view, would not just be that Pete Seeger has always been a proud resident of the blacklist and a sworn enemy of American missiles. The still bigger problem would be that the song is too apt. The manned space program has come to be haunted by Death, always there on the buffalo side of the coin. Many of us already think the risk to human lives and the measly return on investment make the manned space program a dinosaur.

The song could also be seen as reflecting the fact that the policy has turned its back on the world and its needs "when its far away." Instead of needing a new song, the Bush administration, to make the obvious quip, should consider naming its outlandish Mars program “No Planet Left Behind.”

Chorus
Well may the world go
The world go, the world go
Well may the world go
When I'm far away

Well may the skiers turn
The swimmers churn, the lovers burn
Peace may the generals learn
When I'm far away

(Chorus)

Sweet may the fiddle sound
The banjo play, the old hoe down
Dancers swing round and round
When I'm far away

(Chorus)

Fresh may the breezes blow
Clear may the streams flow
Blue above, green below
When I'm far away

(Chorus)

— Words by Pete Seeger/Stormking Music, Inc.