A Little Touch of Libertango in the Night

The tango originated in the 19th century Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay, and spread to the rest of the world soon after that. It was based on ancient African dance forms, and the word “tango” comes from the Niger Congo. Most historians say the tango really took hold in the brothels of Buenos Aires. Certainly the overtly sexual energy of the dance tends to lend credence to the idea.

I am absolutely insane about the Argentine tango. It should not be confused with ballroom tango, which developed in European and American ballrooms, and uses different music and styling, with more staccato movements and characteristic “head snaps.” Phony and ugly, to my mind.

Tango music is traditionally played by a sextet, known as the orquesta típica, which includes two violins, a piano, a double bass, and two bandoneons (handheld accordions).

A revolution in tango came in the 1950s with the work of Ástor Piazzolla. He is widely considered the most important tango composer of the latter half of the twentieth century. A formidable bandoneonist, he continuously performed his own compositions with different ensembles. He is known in Argentina as “El Gran Ástor” (“The Great Astor”).

Piazzolla incorporated elements from jazz and classical music, morphing the traditional tango into a new style called Tango Nuevo. The style brings new forms of harmonic and melodic structure into the traditional tango ensemble and includes the fusion of electronic and acoustic sounds.

In 1974 Piazzolla did an album called Libertango, featuring the song by the same name. The title is a portmanteau merging “Libertad” (Spanish for liberty) and “Tango,” symbolizing Piazzolla’s break from classical tango to Tango Nuevo. In 1999 the renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma did an album called Soul of the Tango, and this video has become the definitive performance of the piece:

This past week, one of my favorite television shows, So You Think You Can Dance, featured the Argentine tango—and Piazzolla’s “Libertango”—danced by Brandon Bryant and Janette Manrara.

Now, a quick note about the title of this post. It has nothing whatever to do with tango music. In 1973, American songwriter, singer, pianist, and guitarist Harry Nillson did an album called A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night

, which was itself a reference to a line from Shakespeare’s Henry V. It’s one of my favorite albums ever. EVER. Performing a selection of pop standards by the likes of Irving Berlin, Gus Kahn, and Sylvia Fine, with the help of Sinatra’s old arranger, Gordon Jenkins, Nillson did a crazygood version of “Over the Rainbow” and a version of “Makin’ Whoopee” that is simultaneously hysterical and touching. My favorite track: “It Had to be You,” the only recording to feature Cole Porter’s banned lyrics. The BBC made a documentary of it, which is preserved on YouTube. I’ve linked them together into a single Playlist for you.

What I Do During the Day

The past few days have been pretty hectic, job-wise. In between editing a couple of books, supervising the other designers, writing sample advocacy letters for people to contact their members of Congress, and shepherding the first book of a new imprint through the printing process, my boss told me about a major new lobbying campaign that was suddenly on the front burner because the legislation in question (a) is on a fast track to passage, and (b) is pretty damaging to health freedom advocates.

Quick background: For many years I’ve been working for a great guy named Hunter Lewis. He co-founded Cambridge Associates, a global investment firm whose clients include many research universities and charitable organizations. He serves on boards and committees of fifteen non-profit organizations—not to mention the World Bank. And he casually drops bits of information about phone conversations he had with the Vice President, totally without any pretension. He’s written books on the related fields of economics and values, as well as numerous magazine and newspaper articles.

Most of the work my work for Hunter over the years has been for his publishing company, Axios Press, which publishes an interesting mix of economics, travel, history, philosophy (including religious philosophy), and ethics. He’s recently started Praktikos Books, which will all be on natural health or how the FDA is a horrible agency that needs to be restructured from the bottom up. The book we just got off to the printer was our first in the Praktikos imprint.

Hunter also co-founded the American Association for Health Freedom, which is a 5019(c)(4) non-profit working to ensure the rights of the consumer to have access to any kind of healthcare—mainstream or alternative—they wish, and the rights of the practitioner to treat patients without government interference. I edit, and sometimes write, their weekly newsletter, and increasingly I edit their press releases, advocacy materials, and their letters going to Congressional leaders and local government policymakers.

The legislation that’s just been introduced in the House of Representatives is HR2749, which  is meant to be a food safety bill but is really an excuse to give the FDA tremendous power and control, including punishing anyone who breaks their rules with ten-year prison sentences and up to $7.5 million in fines. And “breaking the rules” might be as innocuous as a cereal manufacturer talking about how it can lower cholesterol, or a cherry producer talking about how cherries help reduce inflammation: if the statement hasn’t been approved by the FDA, it’s a violation, and if this new bill becomes law, there are major consequences.

So Hunter tells me about this while he’s on vacation in Wyoming, and says we need to launch the campaign, and would I please make it the focal point of this week’s newsletter (this is Saturday and the newsletter deadline is Monday) and oh, by the way, we’ll need to place a full-page ad in Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill that reports all of Congress’s legislative and political maneuvers. Then he says he’s going to be traveling for the next several days, and oops, forgot to mention that AAHF’s executive director will be on vacation beginning Tuesday.

So we have an administrative assistant / marketing director, a legislative aide who’s leaving the organization, an intern, and me—the Peanut Gallery. Somehow we get the ad booked and I pare down the newsletter and rewrite it for a Congressional audience and design the ad. And now it’s in today’s paper—in a lovely location on the back page! AAHF has gotten the ad reprinted and today it’s being hand-delivered to each congressional office. I also created a display ad for the online version of Roll Call, but I think it appears at random so I haven’t seen it yet.

Now back to book editing. I’m procrastinating like crazy on these books, because the source material is, shall we say, quite rocky.

Fellow bloggers, what do you do in the course of an average day that we may not have heard about? Write about it and post a link here.

An Unwriterly Life

The novel is progressing nicely, thanks for asking. At least, it seems to be. May be too close to it to tell for sure. On top of that, I’ve been editing two books for work, and my boss has suggested I write a book for him in a new series of volumes we’re creating, The Accessible _________ (some great but difficult classic that needs “unpacking,” explaining, annotating; he’s doing The Accessible Wealth of Nations, an annotated version of the magnum opus of the Scottish economist Adam Smith; I’ll probably do some work of philosophy or religion, but that hasn’t been decided yet). I’ve got several non-fiction irons in the fire, and we want to issue reprints of some of Adam’s books that haven’t received the audience they deserve, and move a couple of his new projects to the front burner. I’ve even been thinking about starting a new work of fiction that I haven’t told a single soul about yet.

But because I haven’t been attending to my blog, I’ve told myself that I haven’t been writing much lately.

I remember when I friend challenged me to list everything I had published. I was astounded at how much there was; I still felt like a rank beginner who had never achieved anything. Somehow I expected to become a writer who woke early to tap-tap-tap away for a few hours over a cup of tea, then stop to have a nice breakfast and exercise, then do some more writing—profound, moving, and well-paying—in a quiet house, uninterruptible. Or, if my life turned out darker, I might be one of those people who kept a bottle of Scotch in a file cabinet drawer and wrote only in fits of depression and drunkenness. You know, the two basic writerly stereotypes.

Instead, my personal writing is squeezed in amid writing newsletters, doing Internet research, editing press releases, watching television, doing book and advertising graphic design, paying bills, consulting on web design, getting acupuncture, helping friends, yadda yadda yadda. It’s amazingly easy to let life and work steal creative time, especially when I feel like one of those jugglers who spins plates atop tall poles.

E.M. Forster famously wrote, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” It’s a good question, frankly. I should do more journaling, more experimental writing, more writing with no specific end in mind. It might help me clarify all these half-formed notions floating around my brain. I’m thinking I may want to do just that with this new bit of fiction that’s been nudging me, just to see if there’s anything there that really wants to come out, and if it does, what it might look like.

But it’s now almost 10:30 p.m. on a Sunday night, and I’m tired, and a new Miss Marple takes over for a few weeks on tonight’s Masterpiece Mystery: the wonderful Julia McKenzie. So I’m going to go watch her on my DVR, and the writing will just have to wait for now. If midnight rolls around and the muse of fiction is still rattling around in my head, I may play with words and ideas, and see what it is I think.