I got the beat

For most of us older than 50, the words "tin pan alley" or "Brill Building" conjure up small rooms filled with songwriters and composers trying their hardest to create music that would resonate forever in the memories of listeners.

The emergence of singer-songwriters diminished the industry of professional songwriting, though, of course, it never disappeared, and still flourishes in places like Nashville and Los Angeles.

It was a surprise to me to learn about a new version of tin pan alley. In a small, but exceedingly professional studio next to the film company where I work, a composer of "beats" works diligently to create the backdrop over which modern hip-hop artists lay their raps. Doc Ish, who is becoming something of a sought-after beat master in the hip-hop world, lays down beats in the South End of Hartford, and just scored a hit with the beat and hook for Eminem's latest single We Made You.

Tonight at ArtFarm's Sonnet Slam, a fundraiser to help accumulate funds for this summer's production of The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare in the Grove, I recited Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun...") over a custom beat created by Doc Ish for the occasion. When I read the poem to him and requested the beat I found myself beginning to explain the Shakespearean couplets.

"I get it," he said to me, and then paraphrased Shakespeare's poetic sentiment.

I should have known that someone who deals with poetry all day long wouldn't need me to explain Shakespeare to him.

The wisdom of youth

I'm in a business that relies on new and ever-changing technology, and I learned years ago that if I wanted to know something about a new device, I had to find someone 20 years old or younger to explain it to me.

So, that's why I find websites like Wesleying so valuable.

Here's what I learned today - there's a website which records and distributes for free, recorded works of literature, which are in the public domain. You want to listen to Dickens or Proust, librivox.com is for you.

The one piece of advice I have for students is this. Don't put off your reading because you hope to listen to War and Peace over the weekend. When I was an undergrad, two of my floormates waited until the weekend before finals to "read" four major Shakespearean tragedies. They checked some LP recordings of the plays out of the library, and listened to the plays, intended to be spun at 33 rpm, at 78 rpm. Which means that Iago sounded like Alvin the Chipmunk, and Othello like Alvin's brother Theodore. As I recall, they both flunked the final.

Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Macbeth's confusion as his kingdom crumbles put's one in mind of a current administration ("It is a tail told by an idiot"). In fact in the current "staging" of Macbeth in a summertime grove at Middlesex Community College by Artfarm, Dic Wheeler, as the porter, makes the reference specific. When someone knocks at the door, Wheeler first suspects it is an incompetent president, and the a criminal vice-president, and then the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

It was a lovely night for a bit of Shakespeare, complete with gallons of stage blood, some trendy camo-clad witches chanting "double, double, toil and trouble," and a pre-death nightmare dance by Lady Macbeth herself.

The large crowd appreciated the imaginative production set under a gorgeous summer sunset. While one might suspect the Macbeth story to be a bit frightful for a summer festival, the power of Shakespeare's universality reminds us that amibition, power, fear and the violence it spawns, are something the human race, tragically, has not grown out of.

It dropeth as the gentle rain from heaven...on my friends

Shakespeare's Portia claimed: "The quality of mercy is not strained..."

Perhaps George W once read The Merchant of Venice, or maybe, once, he at least adjusted some venetian blinds.

Whatever the case, he seems to take Portia's words to heart. Issuing mercy to his good friend, Scooter Libby, despite the fact that he has said, "I respect the jury's decision," it's unlikely that our plucky president is suddenly going to respect the rule of law now. And so, he has shown mercy, because, as Portia says: "It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

Unfortunately, this mercy did not seem to be available to the 131 prisoners Bush signed execution orders for when he was Governor of Texas.

He's likely making up for lost time. That makes 130 pardons for friends, political associates, donors, cronies...now, where did I put Jack Abramoff's number?

Creepy Joe does "the bustling Iraq market walk"

from McLatchy:

Then Lieberman walked in, wearing a pair of sunglasses newly purchased from an Iraqi market that the military had taken him to in southeast Baghdad. He'd been equipped with a helmet and flak vest when he toured the market, which he described as bustling.

And.

Next to him, Spc. Will Hedin, 21, of Chester, Conn., thought about what he was going to say.

"We're not making any progress," Hedin said, as he recalled a comrade who was shot by a sniper last week. "It just seems like we drive around and wait to get shot at."

But as he waited two chairs down from where Lieberman would sit, Hedin said he'd never voice his true feelings to the senator.

"I think I'd be a private if I did," he joked. "It's just more troops, more targets."

Maybe Joe could share some useful information with them, like how he avoided military service when there was a draft by using three deferments.

Or using his Yale credentials, maybe he could share a quote from Shakespeare's Falstaff, from Henry IV, Part 1:

Tut, tut, good enough to toss, food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.