Gloomy Sunday / Holiday

To close out the year, we offer Pál Kalmár with the original 1935 recording of the notorious Szomorú vasárnap (Gloomy Sunday), with music by Rezső Seress and lyrics by László Jávor:

The narrative of Ilona Péterné Koncz's video tells a fanciful, fast and loose version of the song's story* which is already quite a doozy (Here is another version of it; yet another is here):

Having dropped out of school as a young man, Rezső Seress one day came across a traveling circus. He applied to Mr. Bruno, the circus director, saying that he wanted to be an artist.  He broke into the public consciousness with the song "Another Night" composed in 1925. It sold sixteen thousand copies.

In 1935, László Jávor, a reporter for the evening journal "8 O'Clock", approached him with a poem he had written entitled "Sad Sunday", and asked if he would put it to music. Seress took the job but had a very hard time getting it done even though the poet continually pestered him. He finally debuted the song one night at the Forum Café, having paid a student from the Academy of Music 5 Pengő [roughly $16.25 in today's dollars] to transcribe musically what he whistled to him since Seress didn't know how to score music but composed his songs just by whistling them.  Jávor published the sheet music to no response from the public.  Seress was bitter about the failure and would have forgotten about Sad Sunday but for the appearance of newspaper accounts of a maid  who had committed suicide and left the lyrics of Sad Sunday to be found as her suicide note.  A week later, a ministerial apprentice shot himself in the backseat of a taxi and next to his farewell letter lay the sheet music of Sad Sunday!

On November 7, 1935, the journal "8 O'Clock" referred to the song as a Killer hit, and it could not have gotten a bigger response.  The following week it would be written up in Swiss, Italian, American, German and French newspapers as the Anthem of Suicides. It was sung on stage that fall at the [Berlin?] Olympics, and in 1936 it became a hit in America for Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra among others.

Meanwhile,  in Hungary because he was Jewish and could perform in fewer and fewer places, the composer's situation had become miserable.  At the outbreak of the war in 1941, he was marched to  a labor camp, in conditions that caused his kidneys to deteriorate, but - as he himself later recounted - his life was saved by an SS officer who knew his songs!

After the war, he played the piano at the Kispipa bar on Acacia Street in Budapest still living in abject misery while he was rumored to have $370,000 in royalties waiting for him in an American bank that could not be transferred until Hungary paid reparations for its role in the war.  His act was a must-see, but [in isolated, postwar Hungary at the uncomfortable and obscure Kispipa], he struggled for success.  As was said about attendance at his performances: There was always room on the plane.  He could have performed at Carnegie Hall, where even Oscar Peterson would have had to bow down to recognition by audiences of Seress as the most famous Hungarian songwriter; but he would remain in Hungary even in '56 when the borders opened. He continued to play at Kispipa, where he was seen by celebrities such as the Prince of Wales, the Shah of Iran, Spencer Tracy, Benjamino Gigli, Arturo Toscanini, and Otto Klemperer who called Seress "not just a musician - but a genius".

However, his songs were officially banned after 1949. He lived like a beggar in his Dob Street apartment, where he listened to recordings of Sad Sunday every day, in English, French, Chinese, Danish and all sorts of exotic African languages. At the age of 69, he was fed up with everything, and as if struck by the doom of his most famous global hit, the old suicide anthem,  he jumped off the balcony of his apartment. Though he survived the fall, he must have been very anxious to die because while recovering at the hospital he succeeded in strangling himself with the wire by which his plastered leg had been raised.

By other accounts, Seress, a communist by philosophy, had originally written his own lyrics for the tune which he had called Vége a világnak (The world is ending) in response to the precarious political situation brewing in Europe at the time (1933), and it was Jávor who was tasked to tone it down with a more upbeat suicide theme.

Jávor's lyrics in Hungarian (Note: Not all lyrics are heard in the video.  The song is truncated before the end of the second verse and the truncated clip is then repeated twice):

Szomorú vasárnap száz fehér virággal
Vártalak kedvesem, templomi imával
Álmokat kergető vasárnap délelőtt
Bánatom hintaja nélküled visszajött.
Azóta szomorú mindig a vasárnap
Könny csak az italom, kenyerem a bánat.
Szomorú vasárnap.
Utolsó vasárnap, kedvesem, gyere el
Pap is lesz, koporsó, ravatal, gyászlepel
Akkor is virág vár, virág és koporsó
Virágos fák alatt utam az utolsó
Nyitva lesz szemem, hogy még egyszer lássalak
Ne félj a szememtől, holtan is áldalak.
Utolsó vasárnap.
Ősz van, és peregnek a sárgult levelek
Meghalt a földön az emberi szeretet
Bánatos könnyekkel zokog az őszi szél
Szívem már új tavaszt nem vár, és nem remél
Hiába sírok, és hiába szenvedek,
Szívtelen rosszak és kapzsik az emberek.
Meghalt a szeretet.
Vége a…

The above in English: 

Sad Sunday with a hundred white flowers

I was waiting for you, my dearest, with temple prayer

Dreaming of a Sunday morning

My sorrow has returned without you.

Since then, Sunday has always been sad

It's just my drink, my bread is grief.

Gloomy Sunday.

This last Sunday, my dearest, come to me

There will also be a priest, a coffin, a funeral home, a mourning cloth

You can also expect flowers, flowers and coffins

My journey under flowering trees is my last

My eyes will be open to see you again

Don't be afraid of my eyes; they will bless you from death.

Final Sunday.

It is autumn and the yellowed leaves are wilting

Human love has died on earth

The autumn wind is sobbing with sad tears

My heart is no longer waiting for a new spring and is not hoping

I cry in vain, and I suffer in vain,

People are heartless bad and greedy.

Love is dead.

Finally…

And it's got a beat you can dance to!  As alluded to in the video, on the global spread of rumors of the song's potency, it made appearances in languages the world over.†   Two American versions debuted in 1936-- a more faithful translation of Jávor's lyrics by Desmond Carter, recorded first by Paul Robeson, and a less strictly literal version (with an "it was all a dream" bridge to provide some relent from the gloom) by Sam M. Lewis, made famous later by Billie Holiday's utterly enthralling 1941 recording of it in particular.

Sunday is gloomy my hours are slumberless
Dearest the shadows I live with are numberless
Little white flowers will never awaken you
Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you
Angels have no thought of ever returning you
Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?
Gloomy Sunday
Gloomy is Sunday with shadows I spend it all
My heart and I have decided to end it all
Soon there'll be candles and prayers that are sad I know
Let them not weep let them know that I'm glad to go
Death is no dream for in death I'm caressing you
With the last breath of my soul I'll be blessing you
Gloomy Sunday
Dreaming, I was only dreaming
I wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my heart dear
Darling I hope that my dream never haunted you
My heart is telling you how much I wanted you
Gloomy Sunday

If you need a lift or a reason to live after the above (and who wouldn't?), how about Confidence Man's Holiday?:

Zest for living supplement:

~~~~~

* Please note, unspeakable (as heck) does not endorse the video's version of the song's story.  The translation is provided for the curious. 

† Certain types of Hungarians (you know the type because they're everywhere in every culture) will tell you, as if they could somehow know, that you can only understand Gloomy Sunday in Hungarian which they think is a way of saying that there is something extraordinary and exclusive about how their own Hungarian brain interacts with Hungarian lyrics-- a way of claiming glory for themselves for someone else's work-- glory that you as a non-Hungarian cannot ever be privy to.  It's a Hungarian thing!  You wouldn't understand!  But what they are really saying, in order for that to be true, is that Hungarian poetry is provincial.  Not universal.  Limited in scope and application. Which would be pretty pathetic if true, but having some experience with Hungarian lyrics and poetry and literature, I can assure you as you suspected all along, that's pure horse shit!

A world of difference

Imagine what life would be like in a best case scenario.

I spend so much time being unhappy with the way things are and the way they appear to be going that I usually forget to visualize an alternative.  Any impulse that I have on my own to dream about a better future usually times out on the question of how to get there.  It has finally dawned on me that it doesn't always have to matter.  Suppose the pathology of capitalist neoliberalism has been exposed and died in the sunlight. Suppose the problem of billionaires and the tyranny of elites is solved.  Suppose in the weakening of the walls of our current prison, revolution breaks out and the good guys drop their numerous petty differences, combine forces and prevail as one powered purely by a mighty and righteous fury.  Maybe Marxist socialism is the outcome; maybe anarcho-syndicalism; maybe government of by and for the people.  These are but trivial details in the best case.

I have some ideas about how things could be different.

For starters, no one profits from someone else's disadvantage.  That is considered a wrong.  Never mind how in this new world the attitude that most people have always had that people ought to be decent to each other has become the one subscribed to-- just rest assured that in the best case scenario, the edge seekers, the thieves of the commons, the billionaire free-loaders on the backs of others are not given oxygen to survive.  One gigantic headache and eyesore on the cultural landscape vanished-- poof!

As for material comforts, we are motivated not by want but by need.  This is how we are all fed, clothed and sheltered.  It is how children, the old and those who can't care for themselves are cared for and how sickness is cured.  This is how we start to heal our planet. The details aren't important.  This is my fantasy and I have the luxury to declare that. What matters is that we work hard enough to ensure we all have what we need and then the rest of the time we are free to lead enriching lives pursuing what we want-- and what we want is not limited to what we can buy.  Work is the least interesting part of the best case scenario, but it happens because we must work to fulfill needs.  There are no bosses. Work is done when work is done (as much as possible by human guided machinery).  Most time is spent living.

Our representatives want for us what we want for ourselves.  This is because they are selected from the entire population at random by lottery to serve single, relatively short terms at every level of whatever "government" there is, including the executive and the judiciary.  They are us.  For that matter, sortition might be useful for any number of critical functions -- we could all benefit from having a truly randomly selected periodically purged and replenished constabulary, emergency response force and defense, for instance.  

People still make mistakes in this new world.  Mistakes are more naturally forgiven and forgotten.  People still disagree and annoy each other, but in the absence of competition for basic needs, the stakes of everything are scaled back to their appropriate proportions.  Maybe opinions are less tailored to antagonize.

Wrongs still occur-- at worst, isolated outbursts of civilizational recidivism are attempted periodically for instance and have to be dispatched with a decisive communal rejection-- but the day-to-day transgressions of one party against another are not punished, they are to whatever extent possible forgiven,  and if they are unforgiveable, they are righted.  Eventually, the impulse to conquer  is seen for what it is: a sickness that in its most pathological, incurable state nevertheless requires the patient to be cared for in well tended sanitariums that keep us safe from them and them safe from themselves.

This leaves time for us to be as deep, as curious, as creative, as passionate, as industrious, as empty of thought, as transgressive, as energetic, as hedonistic, as individual, as ridiculous, as wise or as stupid as the occasion calls for.  And no one is going to harsh the occasion with intrusive presumptuous cultural shaming nonsense.  My best case may vary from yours but the two of them can and do co-exist.  And it's beautiful.

Dreaming of better ways is vital.  And for the moment, it's still legal and it's still free.

A Tangerine By Any Other Name

Did you ever wonder whatever happened to tangerines?  I did.   Tangerines were one of my favorite fruits as a child from way back even before Vietnam was a dominant part of the American consciousness.  I lived in an eternal present, so if there was a cycle to their abundance it escaped me.  It seemed to be a perpetual choice.  They seemed to be part of my regular consumption, the final course of a bag lunch-- the reward for toughing it through a liverwurst sandwich, say-- throughout my formative years.  Their fading from my diet was gradual, so much so that I can't say with any certainty when they dropped from the menu for me, but certainly by the time I was married in the 80's, when I ever thought to look for them, they were nowhere.  When my daughter was young, we never seemed to find them at the supermarket either, and when I’d lament about it, the tangerines that my wife would bring home from her excursions in an attempt to assuage me were not the same.  They were basically oranges.  They recalled to my mind the fruit with the portmanteau sounding name of tangelo that seemed to have at some point usurped the tangerine in my bag lunches of the 70s-- an unsolicited, unwelcome and poor substitution.  If those still exist, who cares?  What happened to tangerines?   

What I remember were small fruit, easy to peel, almost seedless.  Sure every year around the winter solstice, my daughter had clementines from Spain which were similarly small and easily peelable, but those were clementines.  Now there are Halos, which we’ve started buying regularly. Eating those I started to think, “Hmm, these seem a lot like the lost fruit of my youth called a tangerine.”  But the bag they come in calls them mandarins.  

When I spoke out loud about this to my wife, her memory from childhood in the same era as mine but in a different region of the country, was of the orange-y like “tangerines” that were hard to peel and pulpy and nothing like the tangerines of my childhood.  She got annoyed with me for carping about it.  But the more I experienced Halos, the more convinced I was that they were a close cousin of the tangerine if not exactly the same thing.  And really, how could something so yummy and satisfying disappear from the face of the earth with no fanfare at all?

So I googled it and sure enough, the term tangerine is nearly interchangeable with both mandarin oranges and clementines.  Some sites-- wikipedia for instance-- refer to a tangerine as a kind of mandarin.  Others refer to a mandarin as a kind of tangerine.  Thank goodness we have the internet to clear it up for us.  

I still don’t know why as children we called them tangerines but today they’re called clementines or mandarins-- marketing must somehow be involved-- but at least that mystery is solved to my satisfaction.  You’re welcome! 

Hurry Up & Wait

I frequently wonder if I am living in the same universe as everyone else.  Is the world going to hell in a hand basket or is it me?  Is everything meaningless now or is it me?  Is nothing sacred;  is there nothing to hope for;  does the arc of history not really bend toward justice or is it just me?  I hope it's just me, but my hope is thin.

Having plenty to do to occupy my mind and, as often as possible, to amuse myself to excess, I can usually ignore the decrepit state of my universe, but Twitter has a way of snapping me to.  This is never more true I find than when some current event reminds people of the deep conflict between those who thought that the greatest evil in the presidential election of 2016 was Donald Trump and those who thought the greatest evil was voting for either of the 2 likely winners.  Those who didn't vote at all (41% of the eligible adult population) can generally hold their peace and don't seem to be blamed (much) (nor should they be) by either side of that eternal debate.  It's the much smaller but more disproportionately visible online cohort of Jill Stein stalwarts who are blamed by and who blame the anti-Trump left when some blameworthy event happens.*

In general the sky did not fall because Donald Trump won in 2016.  He used executive power mainly to undo the modest environmental and diplomatic accomplishments of his predecessor as well as to intimidate the vulnerable with threats of eviction, but his exposure of the froth at the heart of our power structure was arguably a service.  For all of his bluster and show and the real pleasure he gave and took in owning his haters, real action was too real to be part of his agenda.  As clownish as Trump's response to COVID was, Joe Biden's lackluster performance for the duration of his turn at the helm of the crisis so far has betrayed the reality that matters of public health and apocalypse may have a life of their own that politics-as-usual can barely touch.  Certainly Trump's graceless reluctant exit aside, if there are two areas in which he caused real damage, they were his gift of the treasury to his class in the form of massive tax cuts at the end of his first year, and the murdering of any hope of reversal of conservative precedents or protection of human rights on the part of the federal judiciary with the selection of 3 young reactionary Supreme Court justices and 28% of all currently sitting Federal judges-- a success rate in his 4 years well above average compared to his 3 most recent predecessors over each of their 8 years.

Each milestone in the progress of Trump's domination of the Supreme Court  has reliably caused the conflict between anti-Trump and pro-Stein partisans to flare.  The latest has been the long expected imminent dismantling, nearly 50 years after Roe v Wade was decided, of the scant remaining Federal protection of a woman's right to abort an unplanned, dangerous or unwanted pregnancy.  The end of this protection will immediately mean that in half of the united states, caregivers who perform abortions, and the women who seek them will be subject to prosecution,  imprisonment, and-- who knows really-- perhaps worse. Of course the poorest most marginalized women will be impacted the most, but it's foolhardy to think that even a more well-off citizen of an anti-choice jurisdiction who travels to terminate a pregnancy in a state where it's still allowed (for the moment) will not ultimately be vulnerable to the whims of any ambitious two-bit DA with the power to prosecute her. None of this would have been possible without a Senate in which, thanks to a constitutional requirement that each state regardless of its population have equal representation, 50 percent of the body represents less than 40% of the population.  Never mind what the majority of Americans actually want; minoritarian meanness has been enshrined.†

So assuming you think this is a tragedy for the left (let alone for women,  for America, for democracy, for freedom), are Jill Stein 2016 supporters culpable in the erosion of civil liberties by letting Trump happen, or were Hillary Clinton voters responsible by virtue of their complicity in Hillary Clinton's failed campaign to forestall a Trump victory?  

While my views about all of this have mellowed a bit since peak-irascibility in the earlier part of the previous administration, I continue to find myself preoccupied with the implications of this rift when it comes to prospects for meaningful change that we want.    I have come to see the 2 sides as exemplary of 2 dispositions toward the progress of leftist ideals in replacing the status quo which both agree has got to go.  The Jill Stein side (and others who were perhaps actively indifferent to either likely outcome of 2016) could be viewed as being disposed to "accelerationism"-- letting the capitalist system implode on its own and presumably leaving an opening for the building of a socialist future.  Those who voted unsuccessfully to prevent a Trump win might be termed to have a more "incrementalist" disposition-- a strategy of working within the system to effect -- eventually-- socialist change.  Although the "incrementalist" strategy did not prevail in 2016, neither did the "accelerationist" outcome result in socialism.  2020 was in some ways a replaying of this dynamic, with a different outcome, but still no socialism.  

The rightist intellectual underpinnings of accelerationism as a political philosophy help explain the openness of that contingent of the left to forming alliances on the right in contrast to their contemptuous attitude toward aligning with the incrementalist left.  The antipathy is mutual.  But while left "accelerationism vs. incrementalism" is the rift that keeps on rifting, I seriously doubt there are a great number of intellectual adherents of either strategy on the left.  I don't doubt that they exist, but my suspicion is that for most of us, it is not a philosophical commitment but rather a matter of temperament, personality, personal history, taste, capacity to hope, supply of patience, even whimsy that determines which side a person is going to be on at any moment. 

Let me be clear, it's not that I believe in incrementalism, or that I prefer a leisurely stroll to a revolved society.  I simply don't trust that a societal breakdown would resolve to an improved state.  If I were a gambler, my money would be on repressive fascism as the victor of that contest.  To think otherwise takes a faith that I do not have, or at best a lack of concern about the outcome that I cannot muster.  For change that materially benefits people's lives to happen, the prison of my sense of prudence dictates that the surest direct route to it is through systemic change which experience shows happens relatively incrementally-- in fads, fashions, cultural breezes, laws-- when it happens at all.  A lifetime of disappointment has taught me that the forces that power our current system's endurance in spite of its decrepitude should never be underestimated-- incrementalism demonstrably staves off incremental rightist regress as often as it advances leftist progress.   It could be argued that incrementalism takes a bit of faith as well, but speaking as an accidental incrementalist, I can attest that it's not faith but merely compulsion, and at best a faint hope that given natural attrition and changes in circumstances (it's happened before-- March 2020 for instance), sands could shift under the power structure enough that government for the people could make some reappearances-- although no doubt success most often takes the form these days of full throttle dystopian fascism being mitigated one more day.

It sounds so lame when I say it out loud, but ultimately that is my point. My obsession with this topic of late does not stem from any desire to persuade to my point of view. § My only point of view is that we need change.  I think I agree with the accelerationists (of the left; not of the right) on what that change should be like.  Neither of us knows how to get there-- nothing has worked yet-- but may we please take stock in the numbers of us who will do anything to make it happen. 

~~~~~

* By the anti-Trump left I of course do not mean those who to any degree blame Clinton's general election loss to Trump on Bernie Sanders’ remarkably successful primary challenge.  Those are the Clinton true believers.  I'm talking about the Clinton-voting nose holders, most of whom had been Bernie Sanders supporters.  This is a distinction the Jill Stein partisans do not always make.

† It's encouraging that there is a contingent of activists openly expressing their intention to educate about modern means of flouting anti-choice legislation by the use of abortifacient medications.  Protection is not guaranteed, but the fostering of a spirit of active contempt of a Law of the Land that is increasingly contemptible is to be applauded.

§ And by the way, to anyone who can explain why incrementalism is an obstruction to getting people to what they want in a way that accelerationism isn't, don't antagonize me.  Convince me!