The first time was 3.5 years ago to the day.
I can only take full credit for about sixty percent of that time.
But anyway, now is all that matters and
this is where and when it begins again.
***
Last episode, it was the cover artist that mattered. This time, the original writer. I don’t care about Frank Sinatra or Doris Day. This time, it’s Cole Porter, and that other guy too. I’m so happy, now, and I’m sure somehow of this transformation:
Tell me why should it be you have the power to hypnotize me?
Let me live ‘neath your spell (and)
do do that voodoo that you do so well.
The oracle says that it was first performed on November 14, 1929, which would make the present year its 90th anniversary.
Or the very first day of something else.
***
Which as it happens is a Thursday, but my Friday, and so the very best part of the week. Normally I can leave before dusk, but there were grunting chores keeping me, and so not only did I depart in the dark, but there was no more long-form news on the radio. It had moved past the considering of all things, yea even past the maundering of the marketplace, and onto a programme called Swingin’ Down The Lane.
Guessing, that’s Memory Lane, with an additional reference to swing music. A form which, saith the oracle, “dominated in the 1930s and 1940s”, which explains the memory part. “The trend away from big band swing was accelerated by wartime conditions and royalty conflicts”.
War. War never changes.
Idly attributed to U.S. Grant, but covered by Fallout.
At any rate, yes, the show played Porter’s song as voiced by some songstress who wasn’t Doris Day. It’s very rare that I would be in a position to hear it. But very common for me to be thinking about hypnotic transformation, voodoo spells.
How much overlap is there between Porter’s feeling for such words and my own? There is no way to know, but his Parisian parties “were extravagant and scandalous, with ‘much gay and bisexual activity, Italian nobility, cross-dressing, international musicians and a large surplus of recreational drugs'”.
I’ve never been to Paris and as far as I can remember I’ve never held a party for anything. Poverty? Introversion. Probably a deficit in the required elegance too.
I haven’t held recreational drugs in quite awhile, mostly due to a lack of will to do what it takes interpersonally to access those marketplaces.
If I lived 15 miles east instead of 15 miles north, that would not be so. The man who poured my coffee today said that over there, a crackhead was arrested next door to him for trying to sell his girlfriend’s three-year-old car for USD $200, in order to buy a large surplus of recreational drugs.
The crack guy next door to the coffee guy is the opposite of Cole Porter, and maybe I am too.
The song ended as I was pulling into the driveway. The announcer gave no details, not even the name of the song, which is:
You Do Something To Me.
And it is so. Not that you hypnotize per se. But you are the audience, and I can’t help but be affected. Am I mystified? I don’t believe so, but I don’t know everything, and that should be made clear from the very, very restart, and my hope is that there will be no more need for restarts until such time as everything, everything never stops.