My camera has been taken from me, I have no fancy phone device with which to replace it. I can say that it has rained every day FOREVER, at least a little drizzle. Where is the sun? The leaves are all either a. green or b. yellow. Where are the crimsons, the vermillions, the intense oranges? What are some other words for the color orange? I know it’s cheesy when I do that, but I like to do it anyway. Just once in a while.
This is an autumnal song, but don’t you know, I NEVER knew it had Tolkien references in it because I was not a LOTR geek. Only realized it mentions Mordor and Golem after Hubby told me.
This is from last year, mid-October, a little later than today’s date, and before our Halloween-weekend snowstorm which took so many of our oaks and maples. This is taken on the campus of The Hartsbrook School, my kids’ old Waldorf school. Not bad, hunh? But you can see this was my old water-spot-on-the-lens camera.
Here, you can really tell that it’s later in the season. The Holyoke Range, October 2011:
I know this seems like a summer song, but like any good summer song worth its salt, it goes a little deeper and ends up being about more than just sunshine and fluffy clouds.
You may be getting the idea that I’m a huge Sinatra fan. I’m not. I’m pretty ignorant of a lot of his work and of the bands and musicians that backed him. I don’t like a lot of what he did. I do like that he’s called The Chairman of the Board and let’s face it, he has lasting popularity because he had charisma up the wazoo, could really turn a phrase, and was one of the greatest singers of our time (not that we ever have to chose in these contrived “greatest” contests).
You know I’m not for sappy without substance, so I love Ella Fitzgerald doing it, don’t much care for Sinatra, like Sara Vaughan (dozens more people sang it). And Lotte Lenya? She’s in her own category and in my sacrilege opinion, easy to make fun of because of that accent, just like we used to make fun of my mom because she couldn’t say “pants”–it came out sounding more like pents. Any female German torch singer cannot escape a comparison to Lily von Shtupp either. But don’t feel too bad for making fun of Germans. Trust me, we’re allowed to give them their comeuppance for decades to come.
I really love Lou Reed doing this (from the 1990s album Lost in the Stars whose greatest track is probably Tom Waits’ version of “What Keeps Mankind Alive?”).
I apologize to any of the purists among you, but as Hubby just said to me, “Weill was a communist and a Marxist, do you think he stuck to tradition?” I won’t speculate on what artists do and don’t do in reality even if they espouse certain ideas. Not to mention that once you align yourself to any one cause or affiliation, you are rather stuck, ja?
You can see from the lyrics that the song is actually pretty dark. Reed deletes some of the most beautiful lines, adds his own and turns it joyous and poppy.
September Song
lyrics, Maxwell Anderson; music, Kurt Weill
When I was a young man courting the girls
I played me a waiting game
If a maid refused me with tossing curls
I’d let the old Earth make a couple of whirls
While I plied her with tears in lieu of pearls
And as time came around she came my way
As time came around, she came
When you meet with the young girls early in the Spring
You court them in song and rhyme
They answer with words and a clover ring
But if you could examine the goods they bring
They have little to offer but the songs they sing
And the plentiful waste of time of day
A plentiful waste of time
Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn’t got time for the waiting game
Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I’ll spend with you
These precious days I’ll spend with you
twinklysparkles 