My ex-wife, Mary Steenburgen, got to work with Cagney on a film called Rag Time, which I thought was a bit ironic.
While the group was initially hesitant to using outside songwriters, including Tyler being furious for Knight getting songwriting credits for changing one word ("Rag Time" became "Rag Doll"), the method paid off, as Permanent Vacation became the band's most successful album in a decade.
Wells's contemporary Scott Joplin "ragged" time against "common" or march time, and Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey discovered how to stop time by resolving continuous motion into still images, which they and Edison put back together as "movies".
It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle.
(Ware is an old-music enthusiast, and in his spare time he edits and produces a magazine called The Rag-Time Ephemeralist).
"What I want more than anything else is quiet, no children, no Victrolas, nor strumming of rag-time and the singing of sentimental songs," he wrote, on his last trip.
The Harding Collection is named after Walter Harding, an impoverished British rag-time musician who amassed a huge collection of printed poems and song books from the 18th and 19th centuries while he was living in Chicago, as they reminded him of his English upbringing.
In his poem Blighters, Siegfried Sassoon expressed his disdain towards the music hall-goers on the home front, claiming bitterly that he'd "like to see a Tank come down the stalls, lurching to rag-time tunes".
The song features Scott-Heron's poetic references and lyrics that portray America in a dystopian state where "democracy is rag-time on the corner", "the forest is buried beneath the highway", "robins are perched in barren treetops", and, in conclusion, "no one is fighting because no one knows what to say".
Whether it is "on the rag," "that time of the month," or "the curse," it seems as if euphemisms have represented and misrepresented menstruation forever.
Wipe down your counters with the spray and a dish rag each time you cook.
