Rhapsody in Blue

SCENE: INT. THE NEEDLE INSIDE A RECORD PLAYER, CIRCA 1924-2011—NIGHT, URBAN PREFERRED

GLISSANDO

The clarinet-wail beginning of the rhapsody may evoke, today, a morning siren headed towards a crime scene (a gunshot to the torso, head; wrinkled shell casings on the blue concrete). Tomorrow the clarinet-song beginning may be nostalgic (the horn of a ship announcing the arrival of a long-lost mother, brother, etc.). Yet another day the clarinet-chirp beginning may be the call of a morning bird (and what’s the feeling then? Oriental mysticism? Or should we stay in America?). It is in all ways still a beginning, the thirty clarinet seconds. It bodes instability, announces the coming of emotional stampedes in colors orange, jazz, and blue.

THE ORCHESTRA: 

"We are the pianos and the are horns.  We would like Gene Kelly to dance to us, we are 1950s Hollywood or 1920s Jazz or both. We could be Woody Allen drafting his new screenplay (it will be black and white, it will be set in George Gershwin, New York: zip code Lush), a jazz player drawn in zig zag lines, a Jewish artist, a SNL comedian walking to NBC studios in 1972, Wallace Shawn walking down a decayed street to see André in 1981. We are the hustle-bustle that lasts its way into the twentieth-century, United Airlines commercials. We belong to New York, and our Rhapsody is New York: morninglike grumpy and night-grungy, U. N. and Ground Zero. Sincerely yours," 

HISTORICAL MEMORY ADDENDUM:

The lessons learned from the Rhapsody in Blue Andante (otherwise known as the last minute of Manhattan [see below]), the lesson learned from a song, what is its name? 

THE CLARINET, CONT'D: can also evoke the smell of a Subway sandwich on a gutter being licked by a dirty dog that belongs to a homeless man who sings outside of the Met. His voice is blue like the year 1924, the year the clarinet sings from.

ETYMOLOGY (accompanied by piano, clarinet, trumpets)

Rhapsody, n. : a miscellany or medley

In Spanish it's rapsodia, and in Spanish one would use the female article la (as opposed to the male article el) before rapsodia, which means that it's am la rapsodia, la femenina rhapsody. In English, simpleton tongue, we have the neutral the, and the the does not have a sex attached. But la rapsodia. O, la rapsodia. Now that recalls a woman dressed in gypsy skirt and CEO shoes, or a woman dancing waltz with the upper half and salsa with the lower half, with a flare of tango in the eyes. A woman that is a woodwind voice, a rasp of brass, percussion fingers (her little finger a timpani, her thumb the drum set), piano black-and-white eyes, string-set lips (could you call that upper lip anything else than a violin?). The woman is the rhapsody, as much as the rhapsody is a medley, a fiesta of emotions and of the senses. The woman is the whore in the concert hall, the jazz in the concert hall. She is reconciliation, the whirlwind of a life lived in 16-minute frenzy, a train-ride, a walk to work, a Woody Allen monologue, a dinner with Andre, a rhapsody located in George Gershwin, New York.