Word: guns
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...noted in Lawrence Bergreen's excellent biography "As Thousands Cheer": "Do you realize how many little nigger boys I'd have to have?") The simple fact is that he wrote fast. In 1946, when he accepted the job of doing the music for the Broadway show "Annie Get Your Gun," Berlin went off for a weekend and returned with five songs - "Anything You Can Do," "The Girl That I Marry," "My Defenses Are Down," "Doin' What Comes Naturally" and "I Got the Sun in the Morning" - all instant standards...
...made him the favorite composer of the people - but maybe not of other top composers. I wonder if he was ever considered a member of their club, of whether he considered himself one. Oh, they were all chummy. Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein were his producers on "Annie Get Your Gun"; he took over from Kern, who had died suddenly. (Twenty years earlier, Rodgers was not so pleased when, at the request of the star Belle Baker, Berlin had written a song for her to interpolate into an otherwise all-Rodgers-and-Hart score for the Broadway musical "Betsy." The song...
...course, lyrics are naked on a page; if you don't know the tune and the setting for, say, "Anything You Can Do" from "Annie Get Your Gun," the words won't make it sing ("Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you. No you can't. Yes I can. No you can't. Yes I can. No you can't. Yes I can, yes I can!" Huh?) But the book makes the best case for what showbiz historian Ethan Mordden has described as a "casual timelessness" of Berlin's songs...
...Noted "The gun has to stop ruling the country." Hamid Karzai, interim leader of Afghanistan, pledging to end 20 years of chaos...
...enough dust to be seen a half hour away. Around any turn a posse of hungry villagers or unpaid soldiers could wait with Kalashnikovs. Harried peasants live almost exactly as they did 500 years ago - beggared, illiterate, and isolated, hidden in fortress-like compounds with lookout towers and gun slits. Trust is nowhere on display...