Retrospective …

As has been noted here previously, Malcolm usually has iTunes playing in the background. One favourite playlist is the folk music of the early ’60s.

Today, in shuffle-mode, that brought into close proximity the Slightly Fabulous Limeliters album from 1961 (still in the catalogue), and several works from the Malvina Reynolds song-book.

Malvina Reynolds:

Malvina Reynolds was born Malvina Milder on August 23, 1900, to a Jewish socialist immigrant family in San Francisco, California. Her parents ran a tailor shop together and their home was filled with political discussion and meetings. Due to her parents’ opposition to the first World War, Lowell High School denied her a high school diploma, but her teachers at Lowell helped her get into the University of California at Berkeley anyway. There she earned both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, and later, in 1938, her Ph.D. in Romance Philology. Jews and women had a harder time getting good jobs then than now, and throughout the Depression and following years Malvina was unable to find a college teaching position.

She worked at this and that, in 1934 marrying carpenter and labor-organizer William ‘Bud’ Reynolds and having a daughter in 1935. In the late forties (which were also her late forties) Bud and Malvina worked together on progressive political campaigns and she performed at folk music events in the Los Angeles area, along with Earl Robinson and other musicians active in Peoples’ Songs (whose Bulletin was a forerunner of Sing Out! magazine). She had been writing the occasional popular or political song since her late thirties; by her fifties, she had increased her output and added children’s songs to the mix. By the time the folk protest movements of the 1960s came along, she had honed her skills and was ready to take on the issues of the day: civil rights, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and the right of workers to organize. Overall she wrote hundreds of songs, some of great beauty and many displaying a sense of humor and wit that has endeared her to performers and listeners from Helsinki to Tokyo. Malvina Reynolds died on March 17, 1978, with gigs on her calendar.

Ah, yes! The Land of the Free, where all are equal … until they deviate from the political views ordained by the likes of the Tea Party movement.

Apart from Little Boxes, if  you’ve never heard of Malvina, check out the writing credits on Morningtown Ride:

on Turn Around (there’s one that pricks the eye of every father of daughters):

or What Have They Done to the Rain?:

and Magic Penny:

What seems to be a comprehensive listing of Malvina’s titles is here. Really cultured souls might also remember her as Sesame Street’s Kate.

Back to the Limeliters

The Limeliters originally, and as they appear on the Slightly Fabulous album, were Lou Gottlieb, Glenn Yarborough and Alex Hassilev.

Gottlieb’s witty links and intros, in a faux-professorial tone, worked admirably with the black-jacketed, roll-neck sweatered, Gitanes-puffing pseudo-intellectuals who frequented those folk venues.

One of the songs on that second Limeliters album is Vikki Dougan.

That one is credited to “Cal Grigsby”, who in life were Malvina Reynolds and Lou Gottlieb.

Another posterior view

Vikki Dougan was just another bit-part actress, figure model, celeb-column regular, and all-purpose arm-candy — until she did a shoot (around 1957) for Esquire magazine. She took along a dress which made the most of her best feature. One exposure (right) from that shoot was syndicated.

This was a prime-cut for “Cal Grigsby”:

Vikki, turn your back on me,
Come on, darlin’ just for me!
‘Cause there’s somethin’ so appealin’
That your eyes are not revealin’!
Oh, Miss Dougan, you’re for me!

Other girls who approach me,
Are beautiful, gorgeous and gay!
But you’re so-gosh-darn more invitin’
Going the other way!

Vikki, baby, you really move me
In those far-out clothes,
But don’t it get chilly flyin’ home at night
When that cold tail-wind blows?

Flagging down

Slugger O’Toole has a daily feature by John Baucher, under his alias “Moochin Photoman”. Baucher regularly produces highly-telling images from the streets of Belfast, saying far more than any word-picture.

Today’s is this:

Baucher captions this as: Seriously, though, where is the respect?

Vexillology

Malcolm likes that word. He suspects this may well be the first time he has had the opportunity to deploy it. It means “the study of flags“.

There must be, somewhere, a learned thesis on the sociology of flags: socio-vexillology, if one must invent the sub-discipline. Malcolm hasn’t stumbled on that exegesis yet. For which he is grateful.

Flags are intended to be unifying: since that means “us” against “them”, they are therefore causes of division. Nowhere more so than in Northern Ireland. There the rival flags are demarkation lines, Proddy dogs and papes marking territories. They so love their flags, the two sides adopt Israeli and Palestinian flags as surrogates.

This raises issues:

• Is the Irish tricolour of greater socio-psycho-vexillological importance than its reverse image as the flag of the Ivory Coast?
• Does Ulster protestants’ enthusiasm for the Dutch football team stem from lingering recognition of King Billy’s continental mercenary army? Or is it a visceral addiction to orange shirts?
• Why should the surest way to have a letter published in the Times or the Telegraph be to observe the national flag being flown upsidedown?

Brenda to call on President Mary?

There is some speculation that one obstacle to the proposed State Visit to Ireland involves the display of the British flag. This was even a difficulty at the time of Edward VII’s 1903 royal visit. The solution was to use Bertie’s racing colours (purple and scarlet: conveniently, those also of his great-grand-daughter). This tit-bit crops up in Joyce’s Ulysses:

– Well! says J. J. We have Edward the peacemaker now.
– Tell that to a fool, says the citizen. There’s a bloody sight more pox than pax about that boyo. Edward Guelph-Wettin!
– And what do you think, says Joe, of the holy boys, the priests and bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in his Satanic Majesty’s racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the horses his jockeys rode. The earl of Dublin, no less.
– They ought to have stuck up all the women he rode himself, says little Alf.
And says J. J.:
– Considerations of space influenced their lordship’s decision.

That might be derived from a letter W.B.Yeats wrote to the United Irishman (1 August 1903):

Sir—I read in the English Times of July 25th this description of the room prepared for the King’s reception at Maynooth: ‘The King’s room afforded a very pleasant instance of the thoughtful courtesy of his hosts; for by a happy inspiration hardly to have been expected in such a quarter, the walls were draped in His Majesty’s racing colours, and carried two admirable engravings of Ambush II and Diamond Jubilee…

Slugging it out

Malcolm, predictably, is cynical about all such historico-socio-psycho-vexillological debate. Even so, he posted to that Slugger O’Toole thread with a economico-historico-socio-psycho-vexillological observation.

In acknowledgement of Moochin Photoman’s original point he appended a headline:

My name is mud

It’s a piece of cloth, for heaven’s sake. Don’t worship it. It’s a disposable commodity.

Meanwhile, in the world of commerce, the usually- and appropriately-distressed Union Flag (yeah: respec’ — I gave it capital letters) has never been so popular for furnishings et al. A prime reason for that is the (rival) Stars-and-Stripes has entrenched rights in the US legal Code (titles 4 and 36), which lay down how the flag can be shown, used and not used, and how it can be disposed of with appropriate dignity. All of which ensures that elsewhere it is symbolically burned with remarkable frequency.

Half the bars I (occasionally) frequent in the tri-State region seem to display a small hardwood box containing a carefully-folded flag with an inscribed plaque. Almost inevitably, it flew for a few hours over the 9/11 site.

Similarly, there’s the small fragment of the old Lansdowne Road turf decaying on the Irish Club wall, here in London. Now that is worth the reverence.

Malcolm in the first person!
At long last! Never say Malcolm Redfellow’s Home Service lacks innovation!