The Left Banke

The Left Banke, 1965 in a photo from KRLA Beat, a newspaper published
for KRLA Radio in the mid-1960s., Public Domain, Link

The Left Banke was an American rock band formed in New York City in 1965. They are best known for their two songs "Walk Away Renée" and "Pretty Ballerina."

Due to keyboardist Michael Brown's classical background, they had a sound that was labeled by critics as "baroque rock," or "Bach rock." Not all their songs featured string arrangements and classical-sounding piano and harpsichord, but enough did that the labels stuck. Their vocal harmonies were reminiscent of the "British invasion" bands like the Beatles and the Zombies.

The original lineup was keyboards/composer Michael Brown, drummer/singer George Cameron, bass guitarist/singer Tom Finn, lead singer Steve Martin and drummer Warren David-Schierhorst. It was Brown's father, Harry Lookofsky, who got them into a recording studio. Harry was a well-known session violinist and ran a studio in New York. He ended up as their initial producer, manager and publisher.

"Left Bank" is the Anglicized version of the French Rive Gauche which is the southern bank of the river Seine in Paris. The river cuts the city into two parts and if you're looking downstream, the southern bank is to the left, and the northern bank (or Rive Droite) is to the right. The appeal to the band of the name Left Bank is its association with writers and artists, particularly after WWI. The area was known as the haunt of Colette, Djuna Barnes, Erik Satie, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Edith Wharton, Pablo Picasso, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Henri Matisse, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the "Lost Generation" of American expatriates such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin. The Left Bank became a phrase associated with bohemianism, counterculture, and creativity. The band added an "e" which is not French. (The French form of bank is banque.)

"Walk Away Renee" was a huge hit in late 1966 and their second single, "Pretty Ballerina", (both written by Brown) charted in early 1967. They appeared on The Left Banke album Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina. Rolling Stone magazine put "Walk Away Renée" at number 220 in its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time."

The band went through personnel issues and broke up, reformed, and recorded with other members.  The songs recorded by various incarnations of the group in 1967 and 1968 were assembled into a second LP, The Left Banke Too, which was released in November 1968.

The single from the second album that is most like the original "baroque" sound of the first two singles is "Desiree."

The band's story gets complicated at this point. Here's a capsule summary. The band continued playing live in 1969, but without Steve Martin. They disband but Brown and Martin reunite in the studio to record another single as The Left Banke, "Myrah" b/w "Pedestal." Brown, Cameron, Finn and Martin reunite to record two songs for the movie Hot Parts but due to legal issues with the name "Love Songs in the Night" and "Two by Two" are released as being by Steve Martin solo recordings.

There are a number of odd one-off recordings, some of which have been collected on other albums or passed along bootleg style. One of those came out of a 1971 recording session at Bell Records with Les Fradkind. "I Could Make It Last Forever" (not written by any band members) was released on Fradkin's Goin' Back solo CD in 2006 and features Caro, Finn, Cameron and Brown and Brown's father, violinist Harry Lookofsky. 

Martin, Cameron and Finn reunited as The Left Banke in 1978 to record an album's worth of songs but an album was not released. One single, "Queen of Paradise" (b/w "And One Day"), was released in late 1978 with some airplay. The album was issued by Relix Records in 1986 under the title Strangers on a Train (Voices Calling in Europe) but gained little attention or sales.

For fans, several of Michael Brown's post-Banke bands are collectible. Those bands include Montage, Stories, and The Beckies.

The 1992 Mercury Records compilation, There's Gonna Be a Storm: The Complete Recordings 1966–1969 collected almost all of their recorded output from those years.

None of the band members are still alive.

For more details see the band's Wikipedia entry and check out the fine video history below.

COVID-19 variant names

SARS-CoV-2

As I write this, the omicron variant of the Covid (Sars-CoV-2) is peaking in the U.S., but no one believes it will be the last variant of this deadly disease. But why "omicron"? 

The World Health Organization (WHO) decided in May 2021 that its nomenclature for important strains in the Sars-CoV-2 variant classification would adopt Greek-letter names. WE use those letters to label hurricanes and tropical storms after we run out of the letters in our own English alphabet - which happened this past season. 

I found an article from the WHO titled "WHO announces simple, easy-to-say labels for SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Interest and Concern." But this naming is not so simple or easy to say.

The switch to Greek for names was to end associating place-of-origin names (“Wuhan virus,” “South African variant”) which was criticized as being xenophobic and racist. They didn't want to put the blame on a country or region.

The other place that some people learn the Greek alphabet is in the naming of fraternities and sororities. So many of us have learned some of the letters.

The letters of the Greek alphabet are alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega.

Wait - how did we jump from the delta variant all the way to omicron?

It turns out that when what we call the omicron variant appeared, the WHO had already used up 12 of the Greek alphabet’s letters. These “variants of interest” thankfully didn't develop enough to hit the general public and the media. Next should have been "Nu." You see a problem with that letter. How do we differentiate a "Nu variant" from a "new variant"?

That makes sense. So, next is "Xi."  Nope. That one looks like a common Chinese family name. I'm sure Chinese President Xi Jinping and many others are happy to not have a variant with their name. 

There is also the issue of pronunciation with the Greek letters. For example, "xi" is pronounced in Greek as "zy" (like xylophone) and it is usually transliterated in English as  "she." 

I would assume that the next variant would be "Pi" but I read something today that said next will be "Omega" which is the big "O" compared to small "o" omicron. That sounds ominous. And what happened to pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, and psi?

When the Delta variant hit hard last summer, Delta Air Lines was not very happy. I actually saw a witty tweet response from the airline's own chief health officer, Dr. Henry Ting: "We prefer to call it the B.1.617.2 variant since that is so much more simple to say and remember.”

Going back to when all this started, why was it COVID-19? The illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 was given the acronym COVID-19 by the WHO to represent "coronavirus disease 2019." The "19" for the year, not because it was the 19th version of it. This name was also chosen to avoid stigmatizing any populations, geography, or animal (like a bird or swine flu) associations that had occurred in the past and still happen occasionally.

SARS-CoV-2 is the acronym + abbreviation used to label “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” which was given in February 2020. This name was chosen because the virus is genetically related to the coronavirus responsible for the SARS outbreak of 2003. While related, the two viruses are different.

epiphanies

 

Epiphany (also known as Theophany in Eastern Christian traditions) is a Christian feast day that celebrates the revelation of God incarnate as Jesus Christ. In Western Christianity, the feast commemorates principally (but not solely) the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child, and thus Jesus Christ's physical manifestation to the Gentiles. It is sometimes called Three Kings' Day, and in some traditions celebrated as Little Christmas. For Catholics, the Feast of Epiphany is celebrated on January 6. In the Greek New Testament manuscripts, epiphaneia refers also to Christ's second coming.

Though my family celebrated this holiday, the meaning that I am more likely to invoke during the year comes from my study of literature.

Epiphany in literature refers generally to a visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world. 

James Joyce first borrowed the religious term "Epiphany" and adopted it into a profane literary context in Stephen Hero which was an early version of his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that manuscript, Stephen Daedalus defines epiphany as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself."

Epiphanies in common usage are any moments of revelation, oftentimes not literary or religious at all. "As he was reviewing his portfolio, he suddenly had an epiphany about investing."

The word "epiphany" descends from the ancient Greek ἐπῐφᾰ́νειᾰ (epipháneia), meaning a "manifestation or appearance." You can break it down into the Greek words "pha" (to shine), "phanein" (to show, to cause to shine), and "epiphanein" (to manifest, to bring to light).

The pre-Christian Greeks used the word to describe the visible manifestation of a god or goddess to mortal eyes, which is a form of theophany. Early Christians adopted the term to describe the manifestation of the newborn Jesus to the Magi.