Planting Your Future

NEW DEMANDS from a dynamic global economy, continued decline in the quality and availability of natural resources, and the unprecedented challenges of climate change are just beginning to take their toll on the U.S. food system. That’s the starting point of Laura Lengnick’s book Resilient Agriculture, Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate (New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada, 2015), which she researched and wrote in what seem now like the halcyon days of 2013-14, when the Obama administration’s responses to the challenges of climate change had begun to build some momentum, however slow. Now, with the U.S. government taken over by the corporate interests who profit from All Things Unsustainable – to the point of completely denying the irrefutable man-made contributions to global warming – her book takes on more urgency than ever.

Ironically, it argues that we can change our farming ways without governmental assistance, an approach that seemed amusingly maverick until Jan. 20. Now it’s absolutely vital if we want to continue to eat well even as the waters rise.

Lengnick visited 25 farmers across the United States, choosing those who had been in that business for at least twenty years, noting that many of them were fourth- or fifth-generation families working the soil.

The Great Plains, for example, is a major source of feed grains and cattle, but higher temperatures and greater rainfall has challenged third-generation Kansas farmer Gail Fuller to move to a no-till approach in order to reduce erosion (and save on fuel costs). He also stopped raising livestock – it was thought that cows “were too destructive to soils and the damage they caused by trampling farm ground couldn’t be fixed without tillage,” as he explained. But his erosion continued. He blamed that on his focus on corn and soybean production, so he added cover crops, increased crop rotation, and brought back the cattle, with the goal, as Lengnick explains, of “keeping a living root in the ground at all times.”

Thoughts on Fuel Saving

Guest Blogger Dept.: Robert Benchley returns with, well, thoughts on fuel saving, which are most appropriate as we enter autumn. Mr. Benchley has been doing heroic service here imparting his wisdom about topics I’m too bashful to cover.

                                                                                                   

CONSIDERABLE SPACE HAS BEEN GIVEN in the magazines and newspapers this winter to official and expert directions on How to Run Your Furnace and Save Coal—as if the two things were compatible. Some had accompanying diagrams of a furnace in its normal state, showing the exact position of the arteries and vitals, with arrows pointing in interesting directions, indicating the theoretical course of the heat.

I have given some time to studying these charts, and have come to the conclusion that when the authors of such articles and I speak the word “furnace,” we mean entirely different things. They are referring to some idealized, sublimated creation; perhaps the “furnace” which existed originally in the mind of Horace W. Furnace, the inventor; while, on the other hand, I am referring to the thing that is in my cellar. No wonder that I can’t understand their diagrams.

For my own satisfaction, therefore, I have drawn up a few regulations which I can understand, and have thrown them together most informally for whatever they may be worth. Any one else who has checked up the official furnace instructions with Life as it really is and has found something wrong somewhere may go as far as he likes with the results of my researches. I give them to the world.

Jardin à la Française

From the Food Vault Dept.: I ran the review below on this blog a decade ago as the sidebar to another piece from the same Metroland issue. I noted that this review visit was in the company of a stranger, someone who had won the privilege of a review meal with me at some arts auction to which I foolishly agreed to donate the event, and we had absolutely nothing to talk about during the course of the meal. So I never mentioned her in the piece. Chef-owner René Facchetti sold the business a year after this review appeared, his successors didn’t seem to get more than a couple of years out of it, and it became Capitol House and the Patroon House before getting repurposed into a business office. It also emerged since then that this was one of the kitchens where celebrity chef Damon Baehrel trained, although Baehrel’s obsessive pursuit of the image of a complete autodidact keeps him from acknowledging that debt. Here, again, is my 1987 review of Chez René:

                                                                                                  

NERO WOLFE, the detective of literature who combined investigative genius with a passion for fine food, never permitted talk of business at table. It’s a splendid policy and one that, really, is so easy to follow when you sit down to dinner as a celebration.

It’s probably the most ritualized activity of the day and deserves whatever fanfare can be invited around it. You mad microwavers, you who are “too busy too cook”– you’re too busy to dine.

Chez René is a lovely home in Glenmont, little altered save for the large professional kitchen added onto the back. Seating is in one of many small rooms for a truly intimate feel; service is discreet and ever watchful.

On a rainy weekday evening I met a guest under the awning and entered this wonderful embassy of old-fashioned France; our hostess was costumed in the colorful garb of that country.

Chef René Facchetti has been running the restaurant for over 12 years. “I was born in Brittany,” he explains, “and I trained there and in Paris. I’ve worked on the Riviera and the Cote Basque, among other places.”

Double Your Pleasure

From the Record Shelf Dept.: The reason for this reissue is explained in the text. I’m just not certain if it truly ran in Metroland, the Albany-based alternative weekly for which I wrote for many years. I have copies of the 1999 issues in a box in my attic, but I’m not motivated at the moment to go searching. What if I don’t find the piece in any of the issues? Better to confidently speculate. If it ran, it would have been on or about the date I’ve credited below.

                                                                                            

THERE’S NO GETTING AROUND the inferior sound of very old recordings, but legendary stories describe alternatives. The Heifetz and Toscanini recording of the Beethoven violin concerto is dry and muffled, but it’s said that a warm-sounding version exists. And then there’s the problem with the 1939 Heifetz-Feuermann recording of the Brahms Double Concerto.

Back in the days of 78s, longer works needed side breaks every four minutes or so, and these were agreed upon by the engineer and performers before recording began. Thanks to a misunderstanding at the Brahms session, the first movement’s side breaks weren’t correctly engineered. Rather than re-record the movement, RCA Victor’s engineers dubbed the 78 masters before pressing copies, with a resultant deterioration in sound. Every issue since then, including vinyl and CD, includes a surfeit of noise and a lack of clarity.

But the session’s producer kept test pressings of the originals, and these were transfer engineer Mark Obert-Thorn’s source for the current release. The difference in sound is remarkable. Orchestral nuances suddenly appear, and the soloists themselves have a far nicer edge to their sound.

The Copland Legacy

From the Classical Vault Dept.: I’ve been covering the Bard Summerscape series for enough years that some of the earlier programs I’ve attended are starting to fade into the memory mists. Which is why it’s nice to discover a piece like the piece below, reminding me of a visit I made there sixteen years ago.

                                                                                       

THE JOY OF BARD’S ANNUAL SUMMER MUSIC FESTIVAL is the concentration of music and people relating to the year’s chosen composer. This year, Aaron Copland got the much-deserved limelight, opening a window on the state of American music throughout the last century.

Aaron Copland

As in past years, the final summer concert last Sunday featured the American Symphony Orchestra in a rip-roaring program the like of which you’ll never find in a mainstream concert series. Copland’s brassy Symphony No. 3 was the centerpiece, but the rarely performed Third Symphony by Roger Sessions also was on the program, a work that practically insists that you dislike it upon first hearing.

Which may say more about we as listeners than about Sessions as a composer. True, his later music resisted the pursuit of populist approval, but it rewards the educated, open-minded listener with an experience of emotionally satisfying complexity. His four-movement Symphony No. 3, which dates from 1946, opens with a Molto agitato movement that explodes in your face with slashing gestures that soon coalesce into a remarkable soundscape, highlighted by solo violin over horn chords.

Theater of Pain

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Thirty-five years after the piece below appeared, Bread and Puppet Theater is still active, still based in Glover, Vermont. The Annual Domestic Resurrection Circus is no more, but you’ll find plenty of info about current activities on the group’s website. I’m aggrieved to note, however, that of the four contact venues listed at the end of the piece, only the first-named remains.

                                                                             

YOU HAVEN’T HEARD OF PETER SCHUMANN? You’re not alone. He doesn’t have much truck with the news media, and has rusticated himself in a tiny Vermont town away from the attention of the various cities.

But his Bread and Puppet Theater, when it’s at home in August, fills the town with spectators every August for the Nineteenth Annual Domestic Resurrection Circus (like Jack Benny’s age, the anniversary number never changes), weekend circus of celebration. Otherwise, Schumann is touring throughout this country and Europe, an itinerary that brings him to Page Hall at the downtown SIJNYA campus Tuesday, Sept. 9 at 8 PM for a special benefit performance.

“The Hunger of the Hungry and the Hunger of the Overfed” is being presented in support of the Interfaith Partnership for the Homeless, a group that provides shelter and services for the homeless in Albany.

They couldn’t have found a better enthusiast than Schumann, who has been using his theatrical sensibility to kick up political fusses for many years. He was one of Manhattan’s first guerilla theater performers, working solo on the streets of the Lower East Side in the early 1960s, even as he was trying to place his avant-garde sculpture into museums. Many of his street shows were done with “crankies,” a mural wrapped like a toilet roll and unwound to a narration. He took on subjects like rent strikes and rat control.

Sit Down!

With Labor Day upon us again, let's revisit a classic song performed by Mordecai Bauman and the Manhattan Chorus.

A Scrap of Curious History

Guest Blogger Dept.: Mark Twain published surprisingly little about the abolitionist cause, which had been a heated subject in his childhood home. However, a possibly unfinished manuscript he wrote in 1894 addressed the topic square on. It was published in Harper’s shortly after Twain’s death, edited, rather drastically, by Twain’s literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine, and reprinted in the same form in the 1917 book What is Man? And Other Essays. Here’s the piece in something closer to its original form.

                                                                                  

MARION CITY, on the Mississippi River, in the State of Missouri—a village; time, 1845. La Bourboule-les-Bains, France—a village; time, the end of June, 1894. I was in the one village in that early time; I am in the other now. These times and places are sufficiently wide apart, yet today I have the strange sense of being thrust back into that Missourian village and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived there so long ago.

Last Saturday night the life of the President of the French Republic was taken by an Italian assassin. Last night a mob surrounded our hotel, shouting, howling, singing the “Marseillaise,” and pelting our windows with sticks and stones; for we have Italian waiters, and the mob demanded that they be turned out of the house instantly—to be drubbed, and then driven out of the village. Everybody in the hotel remained up until far into the night, and experienced the several kinds of terror which one reads about in books which tell of night attacks by Italians and by French mobs: the growing roar of the oncoming crowd; the arrival, with rain of stones and a crash of glass; the withdrawal to rearrange plans—followed by a silence ominous, threatening, and harder to bear than even the active siege and the noise. The landlord and the two village policemen stood their ground, and at last the mob was persuaded to go away and leave our Italians in peace. Today four of the ringleaders have been sentenced to heavy punishment of a public sort—and are become local heroes, by consequence.

Beethoven’s Five

From the Classical Vault Dept.: I remember this concert well. The aged audience at Memorial Chapel was usually given to odd coughs and eructations, but at some point during the first sonata, the geezer two rows back sneezed with enough velocity that I felt it on the back of my neck. Followed by more sneezes. Too self-conscious to change seats mid-piece, I waited it out but – too late! – came down with the flu a few days later. Is it any wonder I trust no-one in the age of Covid?

                                                                               

AS PIANIST WU HAN pointed out during last Sunday’s Union College concert, we’re fortunate to have a wide chronological spread of Beethoven’s five cello sonatas. The first two, written when the composer was 25, show the first stirrings of rebellion in the context of fairly well-behaved classical pieces.

David Finckel and Wu Han

The third, which is the most famous of the three, dates from the time of the fifth symphony, fourth piano concerto and the “Ghost” Trio. The last two are the work of a 45-year-old who had lost his hearing and was about to begin work on his ninth symphony.

Which meant that we were able to enjoy a program that was at once a panorama of Beethoven’s styles and an intimate exploration of the sound of cello and piano, in the able hands of David Finckel and Wu Han, whose many visits to the Union College Concert Series have made them audience favorites.

They have long ago demonstrated the degree of technical mastery that makes all effort transparent. Add to this that Finckel played the cello parts from memory, and you can understand that the music itself would not be an issue. What we were there to witness was their unique interpretive stamp.

Boot Camp Blues

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Here’s a memory-lane piece that reminds me of folks in the area theater community who became friends, and one – the immensely talented Doug de Lisle – who died far too young. As productions reawaken, here’s a reminder of who was doing what 34 years ago.

                                                                                

COMMUNITY THEATER is often more of a collaboration between audience and actors than professional productions: you find yourself rooting for your neighbors to pull off the difficult masquerade onstage without too many flubs or departures from character. In Doug de Lisle's production of “Biloxi Blues,” which opened Friday evening at the Albany Civic Theatre, there are uncommonly long stretches where no such silent cheering is needed: the worthy cast acts with bravura assurance, and the only intrusions upon your suspended disbelief come from the author.

Doug de Lisle   

Neil Simon wrote the play as the middle of an autobiographical trilogy; following its successful Broadway run it has burst upon the local scene. ACT’s is but one of many that have played or play in the area; if you plan to see just one, see this one.

We have a collection of characters in boot camp, including our simple Simon hero, Eugene Jerome, played by Robert Weidert with a very authentic Brighton Beach dialect and just the right kind of Harold Lloyd-ish innocence.

The cheerful problems of Sergeant Bilko’s day, when TV-writer Simon trained for this kind of sit-com, have been replaced with the more explicit stuff we now expect from the barracks. And it’s funnier.

Gregory Bradley, as the pushups-happy drill sergeant, is rather more youthful than we’d expect this career man to be, but he otherwise gives a splendid performance as he goes up against the half-dozen recruits bunking with Eugene.

By Any Other Name

From the Food Vault Dept.: I’m delighted to see that the Rose and Kettle is still holding strong, having weathered the pandemic (so far) in its off-the-beaten path location. Ownership has long since changed since I wrote the below review: it’s now under the aegis of chef-owner Matt Begley, who has cooked there since 2010 and bought the place two years later. Dana Spiotta and Clement Coleman now inhabit the Syracuse, NY, area; Spiotta’s novel Wayward was just published to the usual great acclaim, and Coleman, when he isn’t working as chef at that city’s Otro Cinco, creates thoughtful, original music.

                                                                                   

EVEN THE TOWN’S NAME strains credulity. Cherry Valley sounds absurdly nice or ironically Bates Motel-ish – but it’s a charming village with a Revolutionary War-era history that has welcomed the likes of Willa Cather and Allen Ginsburg. “The rumor is that there’s lithium in the water,” says Dana Spiotta, so maybe the name is appropriate.

Photo by B.A. Nilsson

Spiotta and her husband, Clement Coleman, own and operate The Rose & Kettle, maintaining a moniker used by a former owner but adding a fine-dining philosophy that centers around fresh, locally obtained ingredients.

Which is a recurring theme in these reviews of late. As it should be. As the mighty maw of Monsanto threatens to envelop all mega-farm fields, replacing heritage produce with frankenfood (even as it populated groups like the FDA with its own former employees), we have to depend on small-farm foodstuffs for purity.

Boulanger at Bard

 YOU CAN ARGUE that Stravinsky or Schoenberg was the most influential classical-music figure of the 20th century, but they vie for the limelight only because they’re men. It was a woman who cast the longest shadow, and the Bard Summerscape celebration of Nadia Boulanger paid a long-overdue tribute even as it only scratched the surface of her profound effect on the music world.

Nadia and her sister, Lili, were musical prodigies, born to a composer who won the Prix de Rome in 1836 and fathered the girls when he was in his seventies. Feeling a burden of family responsibility, Nadia entered the Paris Conservatoire when she was ten and won many prizes there by the time she was 17 – although the Prix de Rome eluded her. She soon decided to forego composition and devote herself to performing and teaching.

The younger Lili went on to win that prize at the age of 19 – the first female to do so – but intestinal tuberculosis would end her life when she was 24. Nadia then became the caretaker of her sister’s legacy even as she became the incredibly important musical pedagogue that we remember today.

The Bard Music Festival planned a Boulanger celebration for 2020, but it suffered the fate of all such events that year. The 2021 version recaptured the glory of the past such festivals, but with a slightly muted feel as we remained masked and, when possible, distanced, vaccination certificates in hand. But, as director Leon Botstein would note in a passionate speech he made towards the end of the Festival, gathering in person to share the experience of live music is a vital act of community, bridging those gaps imposed by politics and media.

Sign Language

From the Computer Vault Dept.: Not only was the piece below written 26 years ago, I also have practically no memory of writing it, so assembly-line was my process of cranking out technology pieces back then. The technology herein described is laughably ancient, but I still have the “Hands Off” coffee mug described – and its label remains firmly intact.

                                                                                       

THE PROBLEM: You run a small retail business, you want to post the store hours on the door, and you don’t want to hang some cheesy paper sign that will get yellow and dog-eared in a week. What do other retailers do? They hire a sign painter. Or post a supplier-sponsored sign with a garish ad. Or, worst of all, put up one of those boards whose letters are all but guaranteed to fall out over time.

You and I know better. We harness the computer, which already has better typesetting ability than any sign painter. And when you use Roland Digital Group’s Stika—a compact hybrid plotter and stencil cutter—and SignMate, the included software, those signs are made from sturdy, colorful vinyl.

The uses go way beyond “Open Daily” signs. If you already have a printing or sign-making business, this technology puts words and pictures in unusual places. Think of any situation where you can’t easily print directly onto a surface: a car door, a filing cabinet, your computer case.

Paper labels aren’t visible enough or won’t withstand the weather. Vinyl is colorful. And this gadget cuts letters up to 2 inches high.

The stuff adheres tightly. I made up some lettering for a coffee mug, and it’s been through the dishwasher a couple of times already with my “Hands Off” label intact. SignMate lets you reverse the image for use inside a window, and by using a special transfer tape, you can iron a label onto a T-shirt.

With a Songbird in My Heart

OFFENBACH’S “LA PÉRICHOLE” offers a terrific mezzo-soprano role, if you don’t mind appearing drunk and morally dubious, and Isabel Leonard shines as the title character in the pared-down version presented as part of the Glimmerglass Festival’s on-the-lawn season this summer.

William Burden and Isabel Leonard
Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival

Reworked here into a much shorter piece, it’s moved from Peru to an equally exotic setting: New Orleans. But this is operetta, and this is from the composer who practically created the genre that starred Gilbert & Sullivan and birthed an American musical comedy cousin. So what’s most important is to have fun, and take nothing too seriously.

There’s trouble from the start (there has to be), with a penniless performing couple realizing that they’re probably not going to earn enough to eat on this particular day – even though their opening duet is marvelous. But who ever recognizes such talent in a seedy bar, even one with the improbable moniker “The Muses.”

Vest-Pocket Verdi

THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL continues its pandemic-wary season with another 90-minute version of a popular opera, in this case Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.” It usually has a running time of about two and a half hours, if you don’t count intermission, so this means lopping about an hour off the piece.

Michael Mayes, Kameron Lopreore,
Gregory Kunde, Ron Dukes, & Latonia Moore
Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival

And it’s also a kind of hybrid performance, with the orchestra playing in the theater and the performance itself on an outdoor stage. So there’s no conductor’s entrance and no chance for an opening round of applause. And, in this opera, there’s not even an overture, so we’re launched right into the opening number, which in this case is the top of Act Two, the mighty “Anvil Chorus,” rendered without apparent onstage metalworking.

But you can’t get too fancy what with the lean casting. We have only a handful of Romani in the encampment, and those singers do double- and triple-duty as soldiers and nuns. This production focuses more on the principals than the ensemble numbers, so, staying in the second act, we start right off with Azucena’s story.

Listen to the Women

From the Classical Vault Dept.: There’s been a struggle for recognition that women in the arts have been waging for far longer than current events might suggest, and the Albany-area chamber ensemble L’Ensemble was fighting the good fight at least 35 years ago, when my review that follows was written. (And here’s another Beach-centric review.)

                                                                                        

IS IT STILL NECESSARY to highlight the work of female composers with all-women’s-work concert programming? L’Ensemble artistic director Ida Faiella still finds it difficult to secure the sheet music of some of the stuff she likes to sing and play - so, yes it is.

Amy Beach

Enlightenment usually requires something of a revolution, but the exploration of music by women requires that no shots be fired - this one can be fought with bows.

“Women’s Work” was the title of a program that opened L’Ensemble’s eighth summer season at a converted barn in Washington County. The concert yesterday afternoon had fine weather (a novelty worth reporting this week) as the artists presented the music of four significant composers.

Amy Beach, condescendingly known for years as Mrs. H. H. A., already has a reputation among the cognoscenti, and a recent recording of her Violin Sonata in A Minor has brought some deserved attention to that piece. There is no reason why this sonata should not appear on any recital as a substitute for the overplayed ones of Brahms and Franck: it is easily the match of the better-known works.

The performers, violinist Barry Finclair and pianist Sean Gallagher, achieved the partnership this piece requires. Not only is the music skillfully crafted, it also boasts a keen sense of the sound of the individual instruments.

Brunch with Bubbly

From the Food Vault Dept: Here’s one of my earliest restaurant reviews, from the days when Metroland had no budget for meals, so we asked for a freebie in exchange for the article I’d write. Fortunately, we got away from this fairly quickly. My companion on these excursions was photographer Drew Kinum, whose work unfortunately survives in my archives only as crappy photocopies of newsprint.

                                                                                       

MY HEART GOES OUT to all who work a Sunday-brunch shift. In my salad days as a waiter, I suffered through the Saturday night to Sunday morning turnaround, when it seems there’s barely enough time to brush your teeth before you have to go on the floor again.

Photo by Drew Kinum

And, oh, how I coveted the eye-openers the patrons downed by the bucket – libations I needed much more than the wide-awake customers.

Not that, as a customer myself, I fail to seize the hair of the dog that’s traditionally offered with
brunches: When a chilly bottle of Cordorniu was brought to our table at the Parc V Café last Sunday, I was first in line for the bubbly.

Lensman Drew (“The Ballad of Lensman Drew” – sounds like a Robert W. Service poem) is very familiar with the place, having done some previous photo work for the Parc V, and had already been through much of the menu on previous visits. I haven’t seen the place since the remodeling two years ago.

Power and Authority

From the Classical Vault Dept.: These hot, moist summer days put me in mind of just a such a day thirty-five years ago, when my wife and I journeyed to a park in Schoharie County that shared space with a power-generating dam. That’s where we heard a fine concert by the ever-resourceful Catskill Conservatory Chamber Players, as I explain below.

                                                                                            

OUT ON ROUTE 30, just past Blenheim, there is a state park on a reservoir used by the New York State Power Authority as a pumping station. Beside the park, the authority has a visitors center that features a done-over barn equipped with literature and displays to explain just what it’s doing in the big concrete buildings visible beside the lake.

NY Power Authority Visitors Center

Saturday there was electricity of a musical kind generated in the barn as the Catskill Conservatory Chamber Players gathered for a concert that featured the premiere of Conservatory founder Carleton Clay’s new woodwind quintet.

There seems to be some antipathy between classical music and air conditioning or so it seemed last weekend. The noisy fans in the barn were shut off for the performance and the stage lights were hot but, as Schoharie County Arts Council president Janet Brennan observed when introducing the players, at least this concert wasn’t being rained out – as was the case with outdoor events that evening.

Staying Sharp

From the Vault Dept.: Here’s a piece I stumbled across while seeking something else on the internet, reminding me that somem of the goodies strewn across its fabulous breadth years ago may still be there to haunt you. This appeared on a Metroland magazine blog.

                                                                                           

I AM TRENDY only by accident. Sometimes I’ve been in a place for years and the retro-seekers catch up. (Hats, for example.) Sometimes we arrive independently. It seems that I am no longer as alone in my passion for the Blackwing pencil as I was when its manufacture was ended. The choice of many illustrators from the 1930s on, it also attracted a fan base of writers (Steinbeck among them) and composers (Bernstein, Sondheim).

They are now manufactured by Palomino, and I have stocked up. I like to draft the stories I write by hand. As Sondheim points out, the soft pencils need frequent-enough sharpening to keep you from drowsing. And the sharpener itself is an impressive two-stage affair in which you first achieve a rough-hewn cone, then, in the second hole, hone it to a potentially lethal point.

I can’t say that it’s improved my writing. But it feels good to get away from the computer every now and then.

– Metroland Tech Life Blog, 17 September 2015

Grandma

WHAT DO WE KNOW about H. W. Hanemann? That he lived from August 8, 1895, to September 2, 1968. That he wrote the screenplay for “Flying down to Rio,” as well as “The Great Jasper,” “Rafter Romance,” and “The Meanest Gal in Town,” all from the 1930s, but only the last-named offering the – what’s the opposite of “timeless”? Whatever it is, that’s what describes Swedish-dialect comedy of El Brendel. We know that Hanemann wrote books, and that two of them are “As Is, a Book of Miscellaneous Revelations” (1923) and “The Facts of Life, a Book of Brighter Biography.” And that he wrote songs, many of them spoofs of past-century weepers. The songs appeared in “Judge” magazine, and were collected in a volume titled “Heart-Wrecking Songs.” The most enduring of them seems to be the one performed below, which I first heard in a lively Spike Jones version.