From the Lewis Carroll Blog: "Alice's Theme": Music & Lyrics by Danny Elfman

Over at the blog Mrs Eley-Nelson & I keep up for the Lewis Carroll Society of North America (all of which is about to move to be integrated with the Society's new website, so watch for the White Rabbit), here's my delightful post today gently ribbing Mr Danny Elfman's lyrics:

_____________________________________________________

Danny Elfman's soundtrack to Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland will be released on CD (an ancient kind of optical disc used to store digital audio) next Tuesday, March 2nd, and there's some short clips at the Amazon store if you desire a teaser. I couldn't help noticing the opening song - with children's voices singing "Oh, Alice, dear where have you been?" - and I found the complete lyrics at a blog called cinemusic.net. I'll include them with that website's charming introduction:

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp as Elijah Wood The Mad Hatter begins pissing off prickly Lewis Carroll purists on March 5, 2010 in theaters everywhere in eye-popping 3D. Lending musical support is Burton’s constant composer Danny Elfman, AKA film music’s most awesome red head.

Threaded throughout the score is an original song penned by Elfman, called “Alice’s Theme”, and it opens up the Disney Records score album due in stores on March 2 (obligatory Amazon link). Here’s a sneak peek at the song’s lyrics (thanks to the supremely talented LD for these)…

“Alice’s Theme”

Music and Lyrics by Danny Elfman

Oh, Alice, dear where have you been?

So near, so far or in between?

What have you heard what have you seen?

Alice, Alice, please, Alice!

Oh, tell us are you big or small

To try this one or try them all

It’s such a long, long way to fall

Alice, Alice, oh, Alice

How can you know this way not that?

You choose the door you choose the path

Perhaps you should be coming back

Another day, another day

And nothing is quite what is seems

You’re dreaming are you dreaming, oh, Alice?

(Oh, how will you find your way? Oh, how will you find your way?)

(There’s not time for tears today. There’s no time for tears today.)

So many doors – how did you choose

So much to gain so much to lose

So many things got in your way

No time today, no time today

Be careful not to lose your head

Just think of what the doormouse [sic] said…Alice!

Did someone pull you by the hand?

How many miles to Wonderland?

Please tell us so we’ll understand

Alice…Alice…Oh, Alice

(Oh how will you find you way? … Oh, how will you find you way?)

Sing along!

I've never met a prickly Lewis Carroll purist, let alone a pissed-off one, but I would presume they're easily decapitated with a vorpal sword. Or defenestrated with a defibrillator.

Anyway, if you are not familiar with Mr. Elfman, he is the film composer and long-time collaborator with Mr. Burton, the man wrote the iconic music for Batman, The Simpsons theme, and those wonderful songs for The Nightmare Before Christmas. He has done less-than-stellar work for some of Mr. Burton's more recent mediocrities. Elfman is often mocked in the classical world for basically having a team of composers do his work for him, although I sometimes feel this criticism is harsh. (After all, Renaissance painters employed whole crews of apprentices, Dale Chihuly has a studio to manifest his glass-art masterpieces, and George Gershwin didn't do the orchestrations for Rhapsody in Blue (free round of drinks if you can name the composer who did!) Art is not always the product of an agonized solo genius, sometimes she can be more of an architectural designer, et cetera, especially in the film music world. Thus ends this parenthetical rant.)

As dear to my adolescent heart as Elfman's music for The Nightmare Before Christmas is, there's many cringeworthy lyrics (e.g., "I wish my cohorts weren't so dumb / I'm not the dumb one / You're no fun / Shut up! / Make me!") I would pay a large sum of money to hire William Shatner to read the lyrics to "Alice's Theme" as a beat poem accompanied by bongos and upright bass (as he did for Sarah Palin's verbiage). In conclusion, Mr. Elfman should hire a real librettist.

Department of the Shisha: Disney's Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar

I'm happy someone has a perfect video on youtube of the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Disney's Alice In Wonderland. It's one of the great smoke-ring-blowing shisha moments in American movie history; or, should I say, one of the only ever hookah-smoking moments in American movie history. I love that mouth, which looks like the same genius animator who did the Queen of Hearts & Peter Pan's Red-Man-Reds. And the dialog from this scene is fairly loyal to Carroll's original, with its philosophical logic about identity & growing-up, &c:


UPDATE: I mentioned the (blatantly racist) Red-Man-Red scene from Peter Pan above, but there's also a great peace-pipe smoking moment in that scene too:

From the Lewis Carroll Blog: Faryl in Wonderland

Once again, from our reportage at the Lewis Carroll Society blog, reposted here for your convenience:

_______________________________________________________

For those of you who like your pop-classical overproduced and over-enunciated, hot tweenage British singer Faryl Smith is releasing her second album (quick on the heels of her first album Faryl, which was the fastest-selling "classical" album of all time.) Wonderland, due on November 30th, is "loosely based on Lewis Carroll's novel", according to this evening's Evening Telegraph.

"[Alice in Wonderland] is one of my favourite books," says the former Britain's Got Talent contestant. "It's so dreamy and playful."

Keep watching after the musical clip, the second video is Miss Smith personally announcing Wonderland. It's important to put all this in its proper cultural context, and remember that in the 2000's, hyper-sexualized images of underage girls in popular music was standard and should be judged against the backdrop of the norms of the times.

Originally posted here.
Follow @AliceAmerica on twitter.

From the Lewis Carroll blog: "The Lewis Carroll Society of Brazil all over this series of tubes"

As you might already know, I've been blogging for the Lewis Carroll Society of North America at lcsna.blogspot.com--, an extension of the "From our Far Flung Correspondents" section of Knight Letter, the society's magazine, which Mrs Eley & myself have been hired on to help edit. I would like to occasionally re-post some of the Lewis Carroll blogging over here on itwaslost.org, if that's alright with you, it's alright with me, as these two websites get different traffic. And this one should interest our lovely seguidores brasileiros:

___________________________________

Attention Portuguese-speaking Lewis Carroll readers! The Lewis Carroll Society of Brazil has several colorful blogs and websites with a bottomless rabbithole of books, links, art, tudo Alice. Look at all of these edições Brasileiras de Alice no país das Maravilha listed on the dizzying alicenations.blogspot.com. (The groovy cover to the left is from a 1974 edition with ilustrações by Brazilian artist Oswaldo Storni.)

Their second blog, for "deeper research with more articles and images", is at brasillewiscarroll.blogspot.com. This one is also expansive, and both sites have some English (always demarcated by stylish italic pink text). I've long been a fan of reading websites in translation using the various cyborg cyberspace interpreters at our disposal, and the Sociedade has provided an occasional easy link to do so. For instance, if you desired to read Myriam Ávila's Alice e Macunaíma, you could feed it thru Google Translate like so. This occasionally creates interesting sentences like: "Such people, the girl significantly calls 'obnoxious' (meaning 'antipodal'), are Anglophones, even though they walk 'upside down'." (Both websites, unfortunately, include all or most of their posts on their homepage, so they can take a long time to load on slower computers.) There is also an impressive cache of art and illustrations on these two blogs, like the large one that I'm putting at the foot of this post, which comes with the following pink italicized explanation:

Marina Peliano once was my little sister. But she ate any strange cookie and so suddenly she grew turning trapeze artist, sweet maker and art student, artist growing too. I asked her to do some drawings inspired on Alice and she followed the adventure. I found really beautiful her Alices who look like her. I remember now the letter of the writer Paulo Mendes Campos to his daughter when she was fifteen: "This book is crazy. The meaning is in you."

From the Lewis Carroll Society Blog: Portmanteaus on This American Life

Mrs Eley & I are slowly starting our new gig as editors for one of the sections at the Knight Letter, the magazine from the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. I'll also be blogging for them at lcsna.blogspot.com. Here's a re-print of my inaugural post over there:

_______________________________________

Lewis Carroll was not mentioned by name, nor was the word 'portmanteau' ever dropped, but Humpty Dumpty's spirit lurked around the September 13th, 2009, episode of This American Life (#389 Frenemies). Starting at 29:45 in the episode, Ira Glass interviews lexicographer Erin McKean, whom he had asked to research the word 'frenemy'. She found the first attempted coinage by gossip columnist Walter Winchell in 1953, who wrote "how's about calling the Russians our 'frenemies'?", although the word didn't really take off till decades later.

Their conversation, transcribed, starting at 32:00 in the episode:

Glass: Wait, are there other words like this, where they sound alike, and then they get smashed together into one word?
McKean: Oh, it happens, like, all the time. I mean, think, there's, like 'guesstimate', right? And that's from 1936.
Glass: Do you have another one?
McKean: I love this one, and people say this one all the time with a little thrill of thinking they're the first person ever to say it: You know, that someone is entering their 'anecdotage.'
Glass: I've never heard that. So you get old, and then you start telling your anecdotes, and that's it?
McKean: Right, and I think the central part, is that you start telling the same anecdotes over and over again.
Glass: Right. You got another one?
McKean: Lots of people think that they are the first person to create the word 'linner'.
Glass: Linner?
McKean: Linner is that meal you must have between lunch and dinner.
Glass: That just makes me feel mad at somebody, hearing that...

(They go on to discuss the word 'slanguage' and lexical gaps.) The lexicographer and the radio host condescend a bit to these enthusiastic amateur wordsmiths, but they're far from being the first people to think they've coined a clever portmanteau. Mark Burstein quotes from James Atherton's The Books at the Wake, when he discusses the creation and later development of word-smashing techniques from Carroll to Finnegans Wake:

It must have astonished [James] Joyce, that avant-garde innovator, proud of his Irish nationality, contemptuous of the Church of England, and confident of his own originality, to find that he had been forestalled in so many of his discoveries by a mid-Victorian Englishman in minor Anglican orders.

Of course, Humpty Dumpty doesn't claim to have invented the practice, nor any of the portmanteaus of which he is the master. And back to Ira Glass, it's a shame they didn't get into the history of "smashing together" words, but it's interesting to learn that part of a lexicographer's job is to let people down when they learn they didn't invent words like 'anecdotage'.

-originally posted here.

Shisha Department Presents: Hookah in Hip-Hop No. 1

The Department of the Shisha, special sub-department of Hubbly-Bubbly in da Hizzly-Hopply, presents a limited edition series of Hookah in Hip-Hop. First, this version of Three Six Mafia's "Smokin on the Dro" was youtube user waambat's final project for an electronic media class! It's long overdue that Lewis Carroll's caterpillar made his debut as a shisha-puffing rapper.


(Thanks to a tweet from @PeteButta, retwatted by @samamidon)

The MC Pseudo-Dionysius / Gold Diamonds song "Hillelujah" (lyric "Hallelujah, pass the nargileh / smoke it like you mean it, now take off your z-cup.") is HERE.