Letters from Radio Quotidia Lost and Found 2

Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 12. This month’s theme Lost and Found, 13 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from a studio in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while.

Today we deal with teenage love as well as love in old age. Let us start in the maelstrom of hormones turbocharging the adolescent brain that finds expression in all sorts of media from the ubiquitously crude anatomical scrawls on the doors and walls of public toilets to the sublime lines of William Shakespeare’s deathless drama: Romeo and Juliet.

Between the dung-pit of the former and the sunlit pinnacle of the latter, you will no doubt be able to slot in many examples of your own.  Listen to the Bard now: Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs./Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;/Being vex’d a sea nourish’d with lovers’ tears./So says the grandiloquent Romeo, but Juliet effortlessly surpasses his efforts at expressing love- as found here, Give me my Romeo, and, when I shall die,/Take him and cut him out in little stars,/And he will make the face of heaven so fine/That all the world will be in love with night,/And pay no worship to the garish sun./

In a previous Letters from Quotidia I recounted a poem I used with year-nine teenage students purportedly written by an Australian girl named Merrill Glass whose boyfriend had gone off to Vietnam.  Whether true or apocryphal, it had a powerful effect on my classes, Remember the time you lent me your car and I dented it?/I thought you’d kill me…/But you didn’t.//Remember the time I forgot to tell you the dance was/formal, and you came in jeans?/I thought you’d hate me…/But you didn’t.//Remember the times I’d flirt with/other boys just to make you jealous, and you were?/I thought you’d drop me…/But you didn’t.//There were plenty of things you did to put up with me,/to keep me happy, to love me, and there are so many things I wanted to tell/you when you returned from/Vietnam…/But you didn’t.//

The song I offer as a study in teenage love has two godparents: First, Wordsworth, who defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity. In writing this song I was recollecting, in wine-assisted tranquillity, how I felt as a teenager caught a maelstrom over the developing relationship with my girlfriend- who is now my wife- ineffable proof that even miserable sods like me can strike it lucky.  Second godfather, Thomas Hardy, who was 72 when he began to write some of the most moving love poems to his wife Emma.  Now- deluded as I may be about a lot of things- I’m not about to compare myself to these giants! Here is From Your Spell I wrote when I was 72- like Hardy- and there I will leave the comparison! [insert song]

The final song of this episode is one I never imagined I would write, as I was speculating about it all those years ago.  I was a callow youth with pimples and pretensions. Hey Joe, knocked me sideways when first I heard it, and Purple Haze knocked me completely out of the park! In that summer of 1967, I went into a music store to buy Hendrix’s first LP, and the strangest thing happened: the girl behind the counter tried to talk me out of making the purchase! Something prompted her to attempt to save me from…who knows? I bought the LP after a brief tussle, and I have no ill after-effects to report more than 55 years later.

The B side of Purple Haze was 51st Wedding Anniversary and I had just started going out with my girlfriend, later to be my wife, and remember puzzling about what such an anniversary would be like for me, for us. I don’t need to puzzle any more as that very anniversary occurred on 3rd July 2022. Here is the song I wrote to mark the occasion- Our 51st Wedding Anniversary Song. [insert song] Next month’s episode features the lyrics of Robert Hunter and A. E. Housman, each writing about our sublime celestial satellite, the moon. And as proof that they are  wordsmiths of quality- they don’t reach for the rhymes June or spoon either!

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.

Letters from Radio Quotidia Lost and Found 1

Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 11. This month’s theme: Lost and Found, 13 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from our studio in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while.

Robinson Jeffers in his poem The Epic Stars presents a modern take on the battle between light and darkness, The heroic stars spending themselves,/Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle,/They must burn out at length like used candles;/And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes./There is the stuff for an epic poem-/This magnificent raid at the heart of darkness, this lost battle-/We don’t know enough, we’ll never know./Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted.//

Oh happy Homer, indeed! In the Christian Era, the battle between light and darkness is framed as a struggle between Lucifer and his fallen angels championing the darkness and Jesus with His mother and disciples leading the forces of light. A recurring trope in folk tales and literature is that of a tempter seeking to recruit another soul by blandishments and inducements. The Faust legend is well-known featuring in the plays by Christopher Marlowe and Goethe, as well as Thomas Mann’s epic novel.

The devil quotes scripture for his own ends as we know and I can imagine him quoting The Latest Decalogue by Arthur Hugh Clough, Thou shalt have one God only; who/Would be at the expense of two?/No graven images may be/Worshipp’d, except the currency:/Swear not at all; for, for thy curse/Thine enemy is none the worse:/At church on Sunday to attend/Will serve to keep the world thy friend:/Honour thy parents; that is, all/From whom advancement may befall:/Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive/Officiously to keep alive:/Do not adultery commit;/Advantage rarely comes of it:/Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,/When it’s so lucrative to cheat:/Bear not false witness; let the lie/Have time on its own wings to fly:/Thou shalt not covet; but tradition/Approves all forms of competition. In my treatment of the story, the tempter takes the guise of an old man hitchhiking. He performs no marvels but merely plants the seeds of despair where he can in his travels around the world. Do guard against his blandishments as you listen to A Brief Encounter, [insert song]

The premium placed on the value of feminine beauty kicks in earlier and earlier it seems- a sweet spot of the two decades between fifteen and thirty-five? Lamentably, fewer women than men older than this remain in esteem in Western culture. Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss,/This world uncertain is./ Fond are life’s lustful joys-/Death proves them all but toys./None from his darts can fly-/I am sick; I must die./Lord Have mercy on us. The opening stanza of Thomas Nashe’s, In Time of Pestilence, is as striking today as when it was penned towards the end of the 16th Century. Beauty is but a flower,/Which wrinkles will devour./Brightness falls from the air;/Queens have died young and fair;/Dust hath closed Helen’s eye:/I am sick; I must die./Lord, have mercy on us. 

Sex and Death- as always, a heady mixture- and one supplied in copious quantities by artists down the centuries. The Pre-Raphaelites lapped it up. Founder of the movement, William Holman-Hunt, painted the Lady of Shallot entangled in her magic tapestry’s web as Sir Lancelot passes by outside singing Tirra Lirra. 

The Awakening Conscience, painted fifty years before, makes for an interesting comparison; there, too, is a mirror, a window and a beautiful woman depicted, but here, she’s on her lover’s lap as she gazes, transfixed out of the window. As I look from one painting to the other, I am, inexplicably reminded of those beauty pageants for pre-teens where mothers primp and preen their pre-pubescent daughters for the cattle-call. The song Universe of Blue, which follows details the future life of such a little one. [insert song]

Next week’s songs shine a light on two of the ages of love-young love coiled about by extravagant metaphors and love in old age which features, rather, a cement mixer!

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.

Letters from Radio Quotidia Last Things 5

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Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 5. This week’s theme Last Things, 12 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while.

I used to froth and fume over macro stuff like injustice, destruction of habitat and general hypocrisy as well as micro stuff like personal regret, ageing and general dissolution.  For me, T. S. Eliot set the scene for this sort of navel-gazing with his world-weary Sweeney Among the Nightingales, written in 1918 where his protagonist relaxes in a low bar somewhere in South America, Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees/ Letting his arms hang down to laugh.

One of the ladies of the establishment makes her play, Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees/Slips and pulls the table cloth/Overturns a coffee cup. An air of diffuse menace pervades the poem as, The waiter brings in oranges/bananas figs and hot-house grapes. The stars above are veiled by cloud and Sweeney hears nightingales sing near a convent as they sang millennia ago when Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon in his bath.

In his masterly 1920 poem, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, the protagonist sighs, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,/ I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;/ I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,/ And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker. Oh listener, let’s not forget the kicker, And in short, I was afraid. And I ask myself: When did I become such a pusillanimous poltroon?

As a kid in Aruba, I explored caves and abandoned phosphate mines, snorkelled over reefs patrolled by barracuda, where conger and moray eels lurked, built rafts, and launched out, oblivious of dangers, into the Caribbean Sea, accepted dares to leap off roofs and run buck naked along the beach road as people at the Esso Club gaped. Today, fear masquerades as apathy- I don’t want to do that, go there, meet them, or talk to you. I watch myself become more careful: careful not to drive too fast, careful not to drink or eat too much, careful not to give offence- and I hate myself for it.

I hope that somehow gravitational waves rippling through space-time will somehow shift the mirrors of my soul infinitesimally so that I can see reflected someone still recognisably me but somehow altered for the better, and braver, as I find the words to express, with more confidence than I presently possess, the truth about things that matter, and that I may be able to fashion the notes to sing a better tune rising from middle C. [insert song]

The final song for this theme is called The Hill and inspired by a poem of the same name by Edgar Lee Masters, an American poet writing in the late 19th-early 20th Century. Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,/The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?/All, all are sleeping on the hill./One passed in a fever,/One was burned in a mine,/One was killed in a brawl,/One died in a jail,/One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife—/All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill./

I identified with Fiddler Jones when first I wrote episode 2 of Letters From Quotidia. I find that, now, years later, that identification is even stronger! And he gets pride of place, here in the final stanza of The Hill Where is Old Fiddler Jones/Who played with life all his ninety years,/Braving the sleet with bared breast,/Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,/Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?/Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,/Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,/Of what Abe Lincoln said/One time at Springfield.// [insert song]

We introduced the month with Thomas Hood’s November and it’s in keeping with the theme of Last  Things that we bid adieu to this month with the final lines of Hood’s poem, I remember, I remember,/The fir trees dark and high;/I used to think their slender tops/Were close against the sky:/It was a childish ignorance,/But now ’tis little joy/To know I’m farther off from Heav’n/Than when I was a boy.// In two days’ time on December 2nd, I’’ll present the theme for that month-  Lost and Found.

 Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.

Letters from Radio Quotidia Last Things 4

Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 9. This month’s theme is Last Things, 13 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from our studio in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while.

You are more likely today to find a sorcerer’s apprentice than one for actual trades! In Australia, those men, who enter apprenticeships to become plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, and a host of other trades that construct the protective carapaces in which we exist are designated “tradies” and they have an honoured place in the pantheon of occupations in this land that was dismissively labelled a bricklayer’s paradise in the 1960s. Post pandemic and the shortage of these tradespeople persists.

We can’t comfortably categorise tradies as petit bourgeois. Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “the petty bourgeois is spiritless…devoid of imagination… he lives within a certain orbit of trivial experiences as to how things come about, what is possible, what usually happens. This scornful depiction owes more to the prejudices of the philosophical Dane’s affluent middle-class upbringing than any thoroughgoing analysis.

It seems to me that human progress has been accomplished by men and women looking at how things come about, what is possible and what usually happens. From pre-historic times, the work and innovation of stonemasons, carpenters, toolmakers, and metalworkers have added to the utility and aesthetics of human existence. From classical times, the ingenuity of plumbers, shipbuilders, aqueduct engineers and road makers has ensured the spread of civilisation.

Modern times owes much of its definition to electricity on demand and now, the sparkie joins the ranks tradespeople who keep our lives on its comfortable track. Think of the last time your toilet was blocked, or there was a power outage, or the ceiling leaked or if this happened at once- as it might in the aftermath of a storm. Then, you, too, would be anxiously calling those who would fix the problems.

I heard about the protagonist of the song when the members of the folk band I was playing in were talking about big drinkers we had encountered during our working lives. Paddy is based on a sheet-metal worker from inner Sydney during the boom times of the mid-70s who grafted alongside my brother-in-law Jim, the mandolin player in the group, Banter. [insert song]

I wrote the next song after driving past the steelworks at Port Kembla during the change of shift late at night in 1977. The context: I had been at a group practice in Windang at the mouth of Lake Illawarra and, having had a few drinks, deemed it preferable to wait until later that night before returning home near the university in Wollongong.

Of course, I forgot all about the nightshift change at the Port Kembla steelworks, which at that time employed almost 30,000 workers. And it seemed to me that every man jack of them were converging on the entrances to the starkly-lit steelworks with the gantries, conveyors, latticework of pipes and stacks whose skeletal outlines were brightly floodlit as I slowed to a crawl hoping to avoid a collision with the crush of cars entering and leaving the plant under a wash of sodium lights that rendered the rained-on-road a smear that I squinted to make out.

When I got home, shaken, I sat with my guitar and thought about the men who worked in that place and the kids I taught at Warrawong High School who were the children, for most part, of the immigrant workers who came to Australia seeking a better life. So, I wrote the song I called The Furnaceman.  [insert song]

I dedicate the song to those workers and their kids who were a large part of my life in the years 1973-1978. Next week, I’ll bring the theme of Last Things to a close with two contrasting songs: a spray about environmental vandalism and an elegiac ballad.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.

Letters from Radio Quotidia Last Things 3

Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 8. This week’s theme is Last Things, 12 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. On September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 lifted off from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 41 sixteen days after its twin, Voyager 2, for a stupendous mission to chart the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond- that continues to this day.

The golden record affixed to the spacecraft does not include details of human atrocities but instead images of the beauty and variety of life on earth as well as our cultural treasures. From the world of classical music, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven and Blind Willie Johnston and Chuck Berry from the realm of popular music.

For some, the journeys and voyages have been both within and across the surface of the globe. Marco Polo, whose travels to China and back to Venice encompassing 24,000 kilometres and twenty-four years are remarkable and were influential in whetting the appetite of Europeans for exploration- but little is known of the interior changes wrought in the man who set out as a youth of seventeen years and returned as a middle-aged forty-one-year-old dignitary.

However, someone who travelled a comparable distance in time and space but who leaves an account which deals with what is within- from a time thirteen hundred years before Marco Polo set out on his journey- is the towering figure of St Paul. The song is about him- but not only him, because I mash him up with another outstanding character from world history, contemporaneous with the apostle of the Gentiles; St Peter- you know, the guy who denied his leader- how many times? 

Was there ever such an inauspicious start for a world religion? St Paul: such an intrepid traveller; such an obstinate adversary; such an eloquent interlocutor; such a fine explicator of the nature of belief and love and, above all, he had the quality that my mother said all true men should have: the ability to endure, whatever comes. So intertwined are the stories of Peter and Paul that, in this song, I ascribe Peter’s Quo Vadis moment to Paul, as well. Heretic! I hear the guardians of holy text screech. But then, maybe none of them has ever been in the grip of furor poeticus where the madness of composition dictates form and content rather than any rigid adherence to orthodoxy. [insert song]

People can be unpleasant. Wasn’t it Satre who said- Hell is other people? Yeah, sometimes I feel like that- Give me a dog any day! To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace. Milan Kundera. Or: Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. Mark Twain. 

Every dog will have his day, and my last pet, a miniature fox terrier, we named Maggs after the Peter Carey character who, in turn, was based on the Charles Dickens’ character Abel Magwitch from Great Expectations. For ten years Maggs kept the family company before succumbing to heart problems. But even at the end he would stick his nose under the gate and welcome me home in the evening. And this was particularly healing after a day enduring meetings with those whose joy in life was the sound of their own voices.

Our grief for the dog was real. On his final day, I recall sitting on the back step listening to his laboured breathing, watching the stars come out, stroking his bony head and recalling Gerard Manly Hopkin’s Spring and Fall: Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving/Now no matter child the name/Sorrow’s springs are the same/Ah as the heart grows older/It will come to such sights colder/It is the blight man was born for/It is Margaret you mourn for. [insert song]

Thankfully, I no longer have to suffer through any more meetings- surely, with emails, the biggest waste of time in the workplace. Next week, I present two songs about Australian workers.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.

Letters from Radio Quotidia Last Things 2

Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 7, 13 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. The theme this month is Last Things.

Catholics will tell you that the four last things are: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. The first death recorded in Genesis was also the first crime: fratricide, when Cain killed Abel. Interesting, from the point of view of a contemporary audience, is the paucity of detail surrounding that murder.

Basically, all we are told is that God accepted Abel’s offering over Cain’s. Cain gets in a snit. Then they go out into the field where, in the words of the King James Bible, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and slew him. That’s it. Nothing more. The aftermath is more detailed, of course. When God enquires after Abel, Cain replies with the famous line: Am I my brother’s keeper?

God then condemns Cain to roam the earth as a fugitive and a vagabond, unable to till the ground as it has drunk the blood of his brother. When Cain complains that he will be a marked man, God replies: Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

So, originally the mark of Cain was divine protection! Fratricide has been a feature of legend, history, and society from this time: In The Antigone, by Sophocles, Eteocles and Polyneices kill each other by stabbing one another through the heart; Romulus kills Remus and founds the city of Rome- setting the stage for lots of family killings down through the centuries. In Hamlet, Claudius kills his brother, the king to grab the throne and Queen Gertrude.

At about the same time as the composition of Hamlet, it was not a recipe for long life to be the brother of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. In the reign of Mehmet III, upon the birth of a male heir to the throne, nineteen of his brothers were strangled with silk cords and buried with their father. In contemporary popular culture, Michael Corleone kills his brother in The Godfather, Part Two and, in Disney’s The Lion King, Scar kills his brother Mufasa. I wrote the first song of this episode for a TV show I was pitching to Ulster TV but left to return to Australia before it could be progressed- another still-born project, alas, but The Mark of Cain remains. [insert song]

In a cartoon from the sixties by Ron Cobb, entitled Progress, the upper panel shows two cavemen brandishing bones at one another. Then, dividing the upper panel from the lower, is the word Progress. The lower panel shows two men in suits; one has a pistol with which he has just shot his rival dead. The concluding song of this episode, also called Progress, inserts a few more panels between the cave-dwellers and suit-wearers of the Cobb cartoon, outlining the long history of warfare culminating in nuclear Armageddon.

But progress, in the few short years since I first published the song in May 2021 has delivered a new nightmare to trouble our slumbers. Artificial Intelligence will either usher in a Nirvana with humans achieving immortality within the next 20 years, if you believe the cheerleaders for this technology, or, as the Cassandras prophesy, the technology, having become sentient and taken control of the requisite means of production, will surreptitiously decide that we are superfluous to the future and devise our demise by, for instance, manufacturing myriad nanobots that will be introduced into the environment and infiltrate our bodies, every living human body on earth, and at a predetermined time, these little engines of death coursing through our bloodstream and brain will simply activate and cause every member of our species to…deactivate. [insert song]

The flamboyant Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde declared at a technical college in Dublin in 1872, Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more. Mmm, but maybe not more AI development until we actually learn how to rule ourselves. Just a thought.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.

Letters from Radio Quotidia Last Things 1

Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 6, 15 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the microphone. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. Two days into another month, and time to unpack the theme Last Things.

A theme that fits November: as English poet Thomas Hood (1799-1845) observed- No sun – no moon! No morn – no noon – No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day. No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member – No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! – November. Of course, this sentiment properly belongs to the Northern Hemisphere, particularly the smoggy environs of Victorian London, but that’s OK- we’ll go with that as I relax here in the sunny gardens surrounding Radio Quotidia where butterflies, bees and birds abound amidst the various flowers and fruits as I prepare for our first program of the month.

My first selection for this theme is a song I wrote many years ago when I was affected by seasonal affective disorder while living in Ballymena during November in the mid-1980s. The resultant song, An Impervious Wall, prompted a post in Letters From Quotidia, episode 108 in July of 2021. Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,/And to whom I was like to give offence./Something there is that does not love a wall, that wants it down.

Truly spoken, Robert Frost. In Edwin Muir’s poem, The Castle, the besieged look unconcernedly from the turret walls surrounding the fortress at the foe half a mile distant confident in the knowledge of their ample provisions. But There was a little private gate,/A little wicked wicket gate./The wizened warder let them through. And why? Our only enemy was gold,/And we had no arms to fight it with. The Great Wall of China is stupendous to look at but failed miserably in its purpose of keeping out determined invaders, who simply rode around it or had its gates opened by traitors.

The Berlin Wall failed, and one may surmise (indeed, hope) that similar walls still in place around the world, will ultimately fail, too. Walls made of unobtanium would be the ideal of oppressors throughout history. Such a wall would be impervious to any agency- but it’s out of reach in our material world. The only place such walls may be forged are in the furnaces of the dogmatic mind. Is there anything in this universe more adamantine than the certitude of the religious bigot or political ideologue? [insert song]

What is it about them…Photographs. I mean- the older sort- printed on special paper and placed in albums or behind frames or in glossy magazines, not the digital imposters that feature grinning, gesticulating loons having such a hell of a good time all of the time that they can barely maintain continence. There goes that old man yelling at clouds again!

Susan Sontag, in 1977, wrote that the proliferation of photographic images had created in people a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world around them; and this, mind you, thirty years before the iPhone amplified that to include an overwhelming, self-absorbed narcissism. For some, a photograph is more precious than any material treasure. In wildfires, the family photo album is taken ahead of the silverware.

Although, I must admit that technology enabling images to be saved to the cloud may consign future albums to the flames. The idea for the song originated in the aftermath of the bombing of the Abercorn Restaurant and Bar in central Belfast on Saturday 4th March 1972 where innocent shoppers were caught in the blast which killed two young women and injured 130 leaving many with horrific wounds. Such loss, such evil. The Silver Frame imagines a photograph discovered twenty years after a tragic loss, in the aftermath of the Holocaust: precious, irreplaceable, unrepeatable. [insert song]

Next week, two songs, the first looks at the first crime recorded in Genesis and the second tracks human progress from the primitive missiles of wooden spears to the slim tubes of ballistic rockets delivering Armageddon.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.

Letters from Radio Quotidia the Blues 5

Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 5 of The Blues, 12 minutes of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the helm. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. As I say, the theme this month is the Blues.

Six months ago, I wrote this in a previous post: are you old enough to remember the first Terminator movie? Released in 1984 (and does that year ring any bells for you?) It tells of the point, in the year 2029, when the Artificial Intelligence systems of the time interconnect, become prescient, decide that we- as a species- are superfluous to requirements and, now merged as Skynet, immediately inflicts nuclear Armageddon on the human race. Just shy of forty years later, this is not a distant sci-fi dystopian tale but a pressing possibility for our near future.

ChatGPT and similar programs are presently shaking up the zeitgeist as workers, artists, writers, and the administrative and managerial classes wonder if they will still have meaningful jobs in the near future. Even in Quotidia, the tremors have been felt. I asked Bing’s AI bot the following question: Me: Can you put together a short article… about St James Infirmary...

Bing  AI: Sure! Here’s a short article about St James Infirmary, …St. James Infirmary Blues is an American jazz song of uncertain origin. It has been suggested that it is based on an eighteenth-century traditional folk song called “The Unfortunate Rake” (also known as “The Unfortunate Lad” or “The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime”) about a soldier who uses his money on prostitutes and then dies of venereal disease. The American version of St James’ Infirmary is along the same theme but puts the song into third person…I hope that helps. Me: Thank you, I will credit you for this when I publish it on my podcast. Bing AI: You’re welcome! I’m glad I could help. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask. Good luck with your podcast! 😊

It took Bing just seconds to churn this out whereas I would have spent the guts of an hour on the same task.  It’s amazing how far we have come in a short six months. And it’s not good news at all. I find YouTube almost unwatchable because of the plethora of AI produced programs complete with artificial spoken commentary! I wonder what the digital landscape will look like six months from now. So, before the bots take over everything, here’s my rendition of St James Infirmary, a suitably doleful yet defiant blues lament in the face of fate. [insert song]

Daddy was a jazz singer in the rain, Mama got wet was the first line that just popped into my head one day as I was noodling on my guitar in 1981. Was this an unconscious referencing of duBose Heyward’s with mammy and daddy standing by which finishes his classic lyric to Summertime featured in episode 2 earlier in the week? Maybe. I carry a lot of stuff around in my head: snippets of poetry, lines of songs, quotations from the Bible, a lifetime’s perusal of books and paintings- all the detritus of a liberal arts education (which, of course, includes a lot of science stuff, too).

But it’s sort of strange, considering my decades-long love of the Blues, that I’ve written only one Blues song! Perhaps a reticence to appropriate from a culture so different to my Irish one? I don’t know. In my search of a way to conclude this brief essay in the blues, I was asked by Bing AI if I wanted it to generate a blues poem. Curious, I said yes, and Bing AI responded,

Okay, here is a blues poem that I generated for you. I hope you like it. I got the lockdown blues, baby I got the lockdown blues /I can’t go out and see my friends/ Or buy myself some new shoes/I’m stuck inside this tiny room/ I’m stuck inside this room/ The only thing that keeps me sane Is listening to some tunes/But music can’t replace your touch/ But music can’t replace your touch/ I miss you more than words can say/ Oh baby, I love you so much//

Yeah, Nah! Look, anyone out there wishing to set AI’s words to music- be my guest! Cynics among you may conclude that I prefaced my own Blues composition with AI’s feeble effort so that Still On The Move will not suffer too much in comparison to the truly great songs covered elsewhere in this Blues month from Quotidia.[insert song]

In November, commencing in two days’ time, I will present a series of programs about Last Things.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.

Letters from Radio Quotidia the Blues 4

Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 4 of The Blues, 15 minutes, give or take, of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the helm. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. As I say, the theme this month is the blues.

And we’ll start with a guitarist, Albert King, who was a bit of an enigma, maybe even a little bit shady. This guy stood well over 6 foot tall and weighed in at 250 lbs, drove a bulldozer for his day job, stole B. B. King’s nickname, blues boy, and had the audacity to call his guitar Lucy, knowing that BB called his Lucille! Oh, and he claimed to be B.B. King’s brother. B.B. later said: He called his guitar ‘Lucy,’ and for a while he went around saying he was my brother. That bothered me until I got to know him and realized he was right; he wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in the blues.

Now B.B. King I revered from my mid-teens in the mid-sixties.  When he sang, nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jivin’ too! I was hooked. I was one of the many teens of that era that sought out the genuine American art form that was the blues, in the wake of our heroes hailing from Britain: the Beatles, of course, and the Stones, who this month are releasing the first album in 18 years- and don’t you love their single from that album- Angry?– yeah, you may talk about  angry old men but Mick, Keith and Ronnie were laughing as they launched Hackney Diamonds with Jimmy Fallon in London last month.

But back to the sixties- there was also John Mayall, Cream, and  the original Fleetwood Mac among many others, and let us not neglect the land of my birth- Ireland producing Rory Gallagher with Taste and Van Morrison with Them. I used to play Born Under a Bad Sign on my first electric, a Burns short-scale jazz guitar when I was in residence at Trench House- to the annoyance of those benighted souls who did not appreciate the Blues. That guitar, as I previously mentioned, I ended up pawning to pay my rent arrears when I moved out for bedsitter land in Belfast the following year. Here is my version of Albert King’s Born Under a Bad Sign that knocked me out when I first heard it in 1967. [insert Song]

I’ve always admired the Blues for its refusal to descend to mawkish sentimentality in the face of the challenges thrown up by society and the world at large. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is the matter, ever-changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe does not need finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance. So says, Zora Neale Hurston (born in 1891, who died in 1960): part of the Harlem Renaissance she was a contrarian to say the least, a deeply conservative Republican, but militantly atheist daughter of a Baptist preacher father, this  anthropologist, author, and filmmaker produced a considerable body of work but ended her life in poverty and obscurity like so many talented African American artists.

She embodies the blues- no self-pitying here. I’m not sure if she was familiar with the song that closes this episode, Sittin’ on Top of the World, but I reckon she would have approved of its approach to life. It  is a country blues song written by Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon. They were core members of the Mississippi Sheiks who recorded it in 1930. Vinson claimed to have composed the song one morning after playing at a white dance in Greenwood, Mississippi. Sittin’ on Top of the World has become a standard of traditional American music. The song has been described as a simple, elegant distillation of the Blues. In 2018, it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or artistically significant. Here’s my version of the song. [insert song] Now a bonus track, Oh Pretty Woman, another gem from Albert King’s repertoire

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.

Letters from Radio Quotidia the Blues 3

Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 3 of The Blues, 12 minutes of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the helm. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. The theme this month is the blues.

But today, it is turned blood-red with two tales of murder inflicted by one intimate partner on the other. Found in various music genres, the murder ballad horrifies and fascinates equally. The horror is rooted in our abhorrence of the act that cannot be taken back- extinguishing a human life for whatever reason. The fascination often arises from our recognition that there but for the grace of God go I. Who among us has not seen red at a real or perceived betrayal of one we loved or trusted implicitly?

In early December 1966 I saw Jimi Hendrix on the popular UK music show, Ready Steady Go performing Hey Joe. Hendrix was in a different league to the guitar-slingers of the time: an exotic black god dressed in plumage that would make a troupe of tropical parrots dowdy in comparison. His piratical swagger and pyrotechnical display of blazing fretboard magic ensured that all the British rock establishment came to pay homage. Here’s my version now, which makes no attempt to duplicate Hendrix’s guitar lines but rather adopts a more country blues vibe: [insert song]

Overwhelmingly, it’s men who are the killers in this scenario, but they don’t have a monopoly on such murders. The femme fatale is a literary trope- developed by men I would suspect- to shift the blame of the consequences of amorous entanglements onto the woman who uses her charms which are really magical spells to entrap her male victim into making disastrous choices. However, that is a bit of a digression. The song I wish to cover next depicts a murder ignited by a jealous rage. It has a long history having been recorded by at least 256 artists since the early 20th Century according to my muse, Wikipedia.

I refer to Frankie and Johnny. The song was inspired by one or more actual murders. One of these took place in an apartment building located at 212 Targee Street in St. Louis, Missouri, at 2:00 on the morning of October 15, 1899. Frankie Baker a 22-year-old woman, shot her 17-year-old lover Allen Britt in the abdomen. Britt had just returned from a cakewalk at a local dance hall, where he and another woman, Nelly Bly, had won a prize in a slow-dancing contest. Britt died of his wounds four days later at the City Hospital. On trial, Baker claimed that Britt had attacked her with a knife and that she acted in self-defence; she was acquitted and died in a Portland, Oregon mental institution in 1952.

Other instances of this particular scenario exist, of course, where the killer receives the penalty that has been around since the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu was promulgated some four thousand years ago where, if you take someone’s life, you forfeit yours. I listened to a few of the more popular of the 256 recordings of the song and IMHO the version recorded by Jimmie Rodgers in 1929 is by far and away the best. I read somewhere that Bonnie Parker of Bonnie and Clyde fame had all his records- figures! Here I try to keep close to the spirit of the Jimmie Rodgers original by utilising banjo, fiddle, guitars, and vocals in a bluegrass-country blues fusion, but I don’t, and count yourselves lucky here, attempt to recreate the yodelling! [insert song]

Next week, you can thank your lucky stars that you are not like the protagonist of the first song on offer where he laments, if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all. And if you find yourself saying, Snap! My commiserations. The second song is another country blues composition. And if, like the title, you tell me you’re sitting on top of the world– commiserations likewise. To conclude and to give you pause should your mood be especially dire, may I recommend Dorothy Parker’s poem Resume,  Razors pain you;/Rivers are damp;/Acids stain you;/And drugs cause cramp./ Guns aren’t lawful;/Nooses give;/Gas smells awful;/You might as well live.//

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.