I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NICHOLAS PHAN-3 by Britten (Field Recordings, November 20, 2013).

This was 2013’s last Field Recording [Britten Goes Back To Brooklyn With Nicholas Phan].

In addition to providing some powerful vocals and introducing many (including me) to Benjamin Britten’s more down to earth songs, this Field Recording also provides a lot of historical information.

Composer Benjamin Britten, whose 100th birth anniversary falls on Nov. 22nd [2013], is so deeply associated with his native England that he’s on a new 50-pence coin issued by the Royal Mint. This British cultural icon felt so strongly his music should be of a particular place that he set down roots in the seaside town of Aldeburgh, England and stayed there for nearly 30 years until his death in 1976. But he had a surprising two-year sojourn living far from home — in a boisterous, bohemian group house in Brooklyn.

Coaxed to the borough in 1939 by a friend, poet W.H. Auden, Britten and his longtime partner, tenor Peter Pears, moved into 7 Middaugh Street in Brooklyn Heights (an address long claimed by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway). Their housing situation there could only fairly be described as bohemian. Along with Auden, the house’s revolving cast of residents included novelist Carson McCullers, composer and writer Paul Bowles, and burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee.

So in hopes of evoking something of that 1930s Brooklyn boho vibe, we invited an extremely fine young American tenor Nicholas Phan (pronounced “paan”), who’s become a champion of Britten’s vocal music, to return to Brooklyn on Britten’s behalf, accompanied by harpist Sivan Magen. We shot this Field Recording at 70 Fox House, a communal house in the Fort Greene neighborhood not all that far from where Britten and Pears lived and made their own art.

Amazingly Britten was still writing in the 1970s, and he made arrangements for these in 1976.

Witty and surprising, these songs are full of odd — but beautifully moving — harmonies and textures. It’s a perfect match for Britten and Brooklyn.

The first, “Lord! I married me a wife” is as funny as the title suggests.  Phan sings with great passion and exasperation: “I married a wife, she made me work in the cod rain and snow.”

“She’s like the swallow” is a prettier song with lovely harp playing to accompany it

“Bird Scarer’s Song” is a very different piece, with fast plucked harp that sounds more like piano than a harp and Phan singing aggressively and, yes, frighteningly.  With a big “Ha!” at the end.

[READ: November 5, 2018] “Backpack”

I have enjoyed several of Tony Earley’s stories, but I see that he hasn’t had a piece published in the New Yorker in several years.

Well, this one was great.

It is set up with something specific in mind.  John goes to various stores, buys several slightly questionable items, pays cash, and then heads home.

John is a professor, happily married for decades with a daughter just out of college.  But it is clear he is up to something.

From the items you can kind of imagine what he has planned. It is clear he is going to do harm to someone–either himself or someone else.  And when his wife leaves for the day, John shaves his head and shaves his beard (except for a Fu Manchu mustache), puts on sunglasses and a pirate bandanna and assumes the identity of Jimmy Ray Gallup.

He knows his teeth are too white, and his hands prove to be too soft to truly be a degenerate, but not many people look at him that closely.

He buys a bus ticket and heads away from him with no wallet, no phone, just some money.  Oh and all of the things he bought in a backpack and a surprisingly heavy toolbox.

He gets on the bus and a woman with small child invites him to sit next to them.  He wanted to be anonymous, but it was rude to refuse.  So he puts down his stuff, she puts her feet on the toolbox, and they get to know each other.  Well, she gets to know Jimmy, anyhow.

They are travelling from North Carolina.  The bus stopped in Hickory, and Morgantown, and Marion, and Jesus H Christ, Old Fort.

The girls’ name was Carmen.  Her daughter was named Adele.

They had gone to Fayetteville to surprise Brandon, Adele’s father who was stationed at Fort Bragg.  But when they arrived they learned that Brandon was dating someone else and she was six months pregnant.

While Carmen is talking, John is thinking about his wife and daughter and how nervous they must be.  As they pass the exit to Cullowhee he thinks back to how they first met at Western Carolina University.

At the two-hour layover in Ashville, they bonded even more, sitting together and eating vending machine food.  They continue into Tennessee where she admits she never loved Brandon and then takes off his sunglasses to see what Jimmy really looks like (he hadn’t taken them off yet).  She says he doesn’t “look like him.”

They eventually get into Indiana.  Jimmy reveals his is going to Lake Superior.  He’s never seen any of the Great Lakes before. But as he sits there with Carmen and Adele he realizes that he doesn’t want to go through with his plan.  He just doesn’t have the energy.  So Carmen invites him home with her.

She introduces Jimmy to her sister who gives him the third degree.  Carmen offers that he can sleep on the waterbed with her, but Jimmy turns her down, says he’s just tired.

The next morning Carmen’s sister gives him the inquisition, but he comes up clean.  Nevertheless, she wants this guy out of Carmen’s life.

That night, Carmen wants to learn little bit more about Jimmy, so she finds his wallet.

There’s about ten different ways this story could go, and I was intrigued by the way it did.