marco

OK so while we're having hot discussions about Spotify, let me say a few things this way: 

If you refuse to listen to me over at Spotify (I totally understand by the way. They only pay me .003 of a penny each time you stream a song there, that's nearly criminal) you can get my songs completely free many places. I make a tiny bit of money at some of these when you listen for free, and other places I get nothing, but racking up "hits" helps me feel heard, to be sure. 

http://www.reverbnation.com/modemandguitar

and

http://www.soundcloud.com/atizine 

are some good places to start. 

Some of my electronica work is over at https://soundation.com/group/SoundDesignAnswers/tracks?page=2

And if you want to actually buy some of my songs, you can still go to amazon or itunes. When you listen to snippets before buying there I get a tiny bit too. Perhaps more than at spotify, I'm not actually sure. I haven't checked lately. 

And frankly, the best place to listen to my songs where I'll recover many pennies instead of .003 of a penny is over at TikTok. 

Yes, the place mainly driven by teenagers and preteens dancing the Carlton, Orange Justice and the Jerk. Maybe if we're lucky they'll start reviving the Locomotion, Electric Boogaloo, Charleston and Jitterbug or something right? 

We've come a long way from Paula Abdul's choreography, and Janet  Jackson's for that matter; but where to? Ouch. I don't think I like  where we've gone to. 

All women, men and children  throughout the entire 14 minutes and 20 seconds looked 100% possessed.  And you know what other-peoples' world ethicities I have to compare them  to? There is no other group I can find to compare this with. 

But North Korea. 

Yes I know there were attempts to give a Latin feeling, and even an  African one, or a Colombian one and now a Lebanese one. Sort of. But it  was never fully there. I hate saying this, it felt North Korean! 

If you don't believe me, compare for yourself. A hypersexualized version of a Pyongyang propaganda performance. 

North Korea children playing the guitar.   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl6f_XwMhMM
 

Concert marking North Korea's 70th anniversary  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GntyBJE0ht8
 

Shakira & J. Lo's FULL Frito-Lay Super Bowl LIV Halftime Show  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pILCn6VO_RU
 

I think maybe they should  just ditch the pretense next year and have the whole thing take on a  Jerry Springer theme. If there even pretends to be music, let it just be  a bunch of background mood stuff. :P 

marco 

Wow, I've finally had some decompression time to begin reflecting on last weekend's four gigs. 

Lead guitar in the orchestra pit of a performance arts magnet high school's Fall musical. 

What a thrill! 

We were a 6-piece band supporting the actors who presented 14 of Harry Chapin's hit songs. They acted out all the story telling arcs that Chapin's songs are known for. 

Each performance was better than the last since we'd only been rehearsing in full from the Sunday prior. 

So the final performance was Saturday night. First of two sets went great. And then the director gave the cast their intermission notes including this thought: 

"I don't want anyone to get too nervous but members of the Harry Chapin Foundation are here in the audience and some of them might be Harry's family." Well we made several mistakes during the next song or two but it went OK overall. We ended strong and got somewhere between a 2/3's or 7/8's Standing O. 

As I said, what a thrill! 

One of the best gigs I've had in many years. 

_______________________________________________

Here's what the Hartford Courant said promoting it: 

https://events.courant.com/events/view/443230/14_songs_the_genius_of_harry_chapin.html

Yes there's Redundant Song, Hate A Song, Arms Song, Verseless Song, and Song Song.

Of all of them, most are talking about my "Song Song," lately. So I guess I should paste up lyrics.

I'd always hoped the bots and search engines would do it for me!

hehehehe.

Cheers, marco frucht songwriter, guitarist, poet and van driver.

I got a song I wrote today Thought up the music the other day Came with the words and the chorus line

I got a song it goes like this Sounds kinda country with a little bit o' soul a little too mellow for rock and roll

I got a song I wrote in school Right in the middle of English class Added the music the following day

Here is my chorus line Not too bright but it's catchy Listen to my chorus line Daddy Addy Oop Op Ay...

I got a song about politics Buerocrats and all them pricks All about how they get their kicks!

I got a song about sour grapes Kinda people who make you hate Just when you feel like callin' it quits

[ CH ]

I got a song about hating guts Kinda people who drive ya nuts Just when you feel like beatin' 'em up!

I got a song I'll sing for you Only if you got a minute or two If you don't then be on your way

[ CH ]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kOEmdkGOD24

So much about Dorothy Day and Eugene O'Neill being friends —
Why has no one written a book about this friendship??

I ask this rhetorically.




She’s with her buddy Eugene O’Neill — the Eugene O’Neill — in a bar called the Hell Hole. O’Neill, with "bitter mouth" and "monotonous grating voice," is reciting one of his favorite poems, Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven”: I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; / I fled Him, down the arches of the years. By way of response, Dorothy sings “Frankie and Johnny.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/a-saint-for-difficult-people/513821/




Once a place known as a hangout for thugs, the Golden Swan had added
bohemian writers and radicals to its community of patrons. Late in
1917 a young Dorothy Day became one of its clientele — she had turned
twenty on November 8. Another patron was the playwright Eugene
O’Neill. Several decades later, when The Golden Swan was no more,
O’Neill used his memories of it as the setting for his play “The
Iceman Cometh.”

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/national-cw-e-mail-list/ijv0YWG5HEg



discussion of Dorothy's relationship with Eugene O'Neill, where he talks of Dorothy as being one of the models for the character of Josie in "Moon for the Misbegotten." I think Christine Ell was the principal model for that character but probably Dorothy was another. In 1973 I took Dorothy to see the legendary performance on Broadway starring Jason Robards and Coleen Dewhurst; it was overpowering. After-wards, Dorothy and I went to a nearby diner for coffee and during our conversation she said that she thought it was a "religious play." I held my tongue but I thought to myself: "Yes, it's all about guilt, remorse and shame, the very things that religion has always trafficked in." Both O'Neill and his brother Jamie, on whom the character Robards played was based, were serious alcoholics. Dorothy, in spite of some "prodigious" drinking at the Hell Hole, was not. She once said to me, regarding her drinking, "When you stay up all night you have to have something to keep you going" and she resented Malcolm Cowley's remark in "Exiles' Return" that she "could drink them" (the gangsters) "under the table" at the Hell Hole. When O'Neill was dying in the Sheaton Hotel in Boston in 1953 Dorothy asked Cardinal Cushing to go to his bedside but he had died.


https://personalist.livejournal.com/65109.html




Twenty year old Dorothy Day is a reporter - and a suffragette.  She is also part of a New York
socialist group that meets to drink and discuss.  It includes Eugene O'Neill.  The group is free-
thinking and free-acting.  The pregnant Dorothy has an abortion and moves away from New York

https://www.catholicenquiry.com/all-docman-links/hearing-god-s-call/76-film-review-session-7-entertaining-angels/file



Dorothy Day recounts the day when she and O’Neill witnessed O’Neill’s friend Louis Holliday inject enough heroin to kill himself in a Greenwich Village bar in 1918. The incident affected both Day and O’Neill deeply. Soon after Holliday’s death, Day left the Village and became a nursing student, and Eugene left for Provincetown. The death haunted O’Neill all his life.

https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/oneills-dark-passage



Back in New York, she hung out in the Village, went to work for another socialist magazine, The Liberator, and spent time with Eugene O'Neill, who recited for her the poem "The Hound of Heaven." She stumbled into St. Joseph's church, the oldest Catholic Church in Manhattan, and later recalled, "I seemed to feel the faith of those about me and I longed for their faith." Instead, she fell in love, got pregnant, had an abortion and worked as a nurse. Then she got married, went to Europe and got divorced. Hungry for the experience of life, her own existence seemed without ballast or direction.

http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/people/dorothy-day.html


Shaughnessy rounds out this study with a poignant epilogue focusing on O'Neill's funeral and an extended meditation by Dorothy Day, a close friend of O'Neill's in earlier days but one whom he never saw after her conversion to Catholicism.

http://www.eoneill.com/references/x00970.htm


The letter from W. Somerset Maugham includes Sheaffer’s typed comment. His letter to Dorothy Day has Day’s responses jotted in the margin.
http://www.eoneill.com/cc/highlights/index.htm
http://www.eoneill.com/cc/highlights/items/020/s020.htm