Goin’ on a tiger hunt

I guess I should mention in case things go haywire in the next nine or ten days that I won’t be here — haven’t been for almost a day now, actually, I think. It’s all ghost posts for the next week and some odd days.

I’m taking my hips on a gold road trip to the Old Home. It will bring good and bad. I will be stopping at several points along the way there and back for some painful purposes, and at other times for what I hope will be crazy-joyful occasions of reunion.

The only way out is through.

(Geneen Roth.)

This quote puts me in mind of a memory that is tied closely to the trip I am about to make. A long time ago, when I used to live where I am going, my aunt — the one who is a nun, not to be confused with my bereaved aunt who is reading Kubler-Ross and about whom I talk all the time, nor my chic deaf aunt who lives on a cliff — used to sing to me this song called “Goin’ on a tiger hunt,” some variant of which you have doubtless been taught in church youth group or some scout camporee or perhaps by a cartoon. Animaniacs was surprisingly educational at times.

If this picture of a little girl making a wish on her birthday candles some fifty years ago does not make you accuse the room of being dusty you have no soul. I hope every one of her dreams came true and she has lived a long and happy life.

The main thing of the song — which sitting on the steps of my grandparents’ house by the highway singing with my aunt is one of my happiest memories — was this syncopated repetitive chorus whenever the hunter would encounter an obstacle. You would chant back and forth while clapping rhythmically, “Goin’ on a tiger hunt. * But I’m not afraid. * Cause I’ve got a gun. * And bullets at my side. — What’s that up ahead?” and Aunt B would respond, “A tree! / Tall grass! / A fence! / Mud!” Then you must say,

Can’t go over it * (can’t go over it)
Can’t go under it * (can’t go under it)
Can’t go around it * (can’t go around it)
Gotta go through it.

And then you would delight in making squelching noises for mud, slidey hand sounds for grass, creaking like a gate, etc. *

You went with delcious slowness through the first part of the song, forgetting really in the process that your whole job in this call-and-response game of foley artistry is to hunt a tiger and catch him with bullets all while not feeling fear, and then suddenly when you asked “What’s that up ahead,” Aunt B would shout, “THE TIGER!” and your heart would pound and you’d hastily run backward through all of your previous sound effects trying to go as fast as possible while keeping in the proper order and lastly mimic the final sound of the slam of the gate behind you. Then you would say, “But I’m not afraid.”

In Girl Scouts we played it as “Going on a Squeegee Hunt” and we just skipped the guns and bullets part. I’m not sure what a-changing times lead to the substitution of the made-up “squeegee” monster for the visceral image of the tiger — whether it was less scary than the tiger or whether it was less encouraging of poaching a potentially endangered species — but in any case I feel like with the whitewashing the song lost its sizzle.

I am going on a tiger hunt, and I am afraid, and I do not have a gun, nor bullets at my side. But I cannot go over, under, or around what comes next — I will go through what painful obstacle stands in my way because that is simply the only choice I have. Which, as that is the case, it can only be meant to be and I therefore have double reason to persevere.

I must maintain this mindset. Wish me luck.



*For the tree, I believe we said, “Gotta climb it,” the only deviation in the song’s demandingly strict meter — why not just omit the tree in favor of a thing which might be gone through? It is scarcely true that you cannot go around a tree, and climbing it is the same as going over it. Really the only thing in the words of the chorus that you can not do when faced with the tree in this song — besides obviously the impossibility of going through it as is evidenced by the replacement of “go through it” with “climb it” — is tunnel under it, but even that is only for lack of time or machinery. You technically could go under it as well as around and over it. “Through it” is wholly out, and thus it destroys the fundamental message of the repetition of the chorus. A puzzling lyric.

Has anyone ever been taught to chop it down? Get back to me if you have. Now I’m ten kinds of curious.

Langston Hughes Month: “Songs”

“November Under Light.” Sam Haskins, November Girl (1966).

I sat there singing her
Songs in the dark.

She said,
“I do not understand
The words.”

I said,
“There are
No words.”

— Langston Hughes, “Songs.”

A beautiful and true sentiment.

Langston Hughes Month: Quiet Girl

I would liken you
To a night without stars
Were it not for your eyes.
I would liken you
To a sleep without dreams
Were it not for your songs.

–Langston Hughes, “Quiet Girl”

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: “Queen-sized” edition*

via artvandelayed on the tumblr.

Anyone can see,
Nothing really mattress,
Nothing really mattress
To me.
(anywhere the wind blows…)

*Queen-sized. Oh, what a terrible pun.

Music Moment: Laura Marling

Laura Marling – New Romantic
This song was my introduction to Miss Laura Marling, a charming little singer-songwriter from the UK who, like a brownie, uses her adorable pixie looks to fool you in to thinking the sprightly tune you’re listening to doesn’t have some of the darkest, wittiest lyrics you’ll ever hear from someone so young.

I know I said I loved you
but I’m thinking I was wrong,
I’m the first to admit that I’m still pretty young,
and I never meant to hurt you
when I wrote you ten love songs
About a guy that I could never get
’cause his girlfriend was pretty fit
and everyone who knew her loved her so.
And I made you leave her for me
and now I’m feeling pretty mean,
but my mind has fucked me over more times
than any man could ever know.

The track came out a bit ago, but I still predict that song will get more famous pretty soon here, rather than less so. Even though it is the likelier in my opinion for regular radio airplay, it seems the label has put more time in to marketing the next tune here, “My Manic and I.”

Laura Marling – My Manic and I
“My Manic and I” has the sultry minor key bluesiness of Dusty Springfield, a very “If You Go Away” mood with this kind of waltzy-pirate dirge beneath, but then the purity of the vocals and the subject matter make you switch gears and draw comparisons to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” (Miss Marling, I am totally picking up what you are putting down and I do believe there are also clouds in my coffee now and again.)

I get the feeling that whoever this song is about, it’s the same jerk who inspired “The Man Sings” and some of the lines in “New Romantic.”

Oh, the gods that he believes never fail to amaze me.
He believes in the love of his god of all things, but I find him wrapped up in all manner of sins;
the drugs that deceive him and the girls that believe him.
I can’t control you, I don’t know you well, but these are the reasons I think that you’re ill.
I can’t control you, I don’t know you well, but these are the reasons I think that you’re ill.

Here is the very creative video for the track.

I realized these Music Moment posts tend to run really long because I like music way too much, and can’t bear to only give you half the story on someone I think is really special, so click here to keep reading about marvelous and devilishly witty little pixie Laura Marling, hear more streaming mp3s and see more adorable pictures.