Tag Archives: music

The thinks you will think…

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We saw a musical last weekend.

Several years ago, when Michael and I had season tickets to one of the local theatres, we saw a national touring company of Suessical the Musical, with Cathy Rigby (former Olympic gymnast most famous since for playing Peter Pan in more than one revival on Broadway and numerous national tours) as the Cat in the Hat. It was fun.

This last weekend we saw the musical performed by a bunch of middle-school kids, one of whom happens to be my godson. It was also a lot of fun. And that isn’t just my prejudice as a doting godparent.

At least some of the fun is remembering what it was like being on stage around the age, and not feeling at all as fearless as these kids seemed to be. It was quite amazing to hear the voices on a few of those kids, who did not sound like “kids” at all.

It was also fun to remember all that Seuss. The musical takes elements from a bunch of Dr. Seuss books (most prominently Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches an Egg) and weaves them together to make one story.

It would be easy to be cynical and dismissive of the play, what with the themes of accepting yourself for who you are, loyalty, and respecting others. And since people usually accuse me of being the opposite of cynical, it should surprise no one that I’m not going to go there. In fact, what I found myself thinking about most during the drive home was how easy it was to fall into the imaginary world with very simple costumes and minimal props. You don’t need a lot of special effects to believe that a group of monkeys are trying to steal a clover with a dust spec from an elephant. Just a few hints and a bit of body language is all that’s required.

Which was a good thing to be reminded of while I’m slogging away on my novel, occasionally wondering how words on a screen can compete with animation and music.

It’s the story and the characters that matter. Everything else is window dressing.

Music, part three

music

Another Friday, and time for some random music recommendations from me!

This is a nice song that sounds like one should be listening to it at the end of a sunny day while sipping at a cocktail. Or dancing between cocktails:
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This one would fit in the same dance set, I think:
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I’ve been listening to this song on my iPhone for months, and loved it. I hadn’t seen the video until I wanted to share it here, and the video makes me love the song in a completely new way:
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Hot Chelle Rae is a bouncy, lightweight band whose music always makes me smile:
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And this is just beautiful. You don’t have to understand the lyrics. Just watch:

Music, part two

music

There’s enough heavy, serious stuff going on in the world that I wanted to keep track of, that I have been listening to less music than usual, lately. So I thought rather than ranting more about marriage equality or any other news of the world, that I should share some music.

This is part of a project to create mixtapes covering forty years of music (1972-2012). The final project will not just include remixes of songs from the varies eras, but other sound clips. Whether you are interested in a big project like that or not, this remix of Paul Simon’s “Call Me Al” is fun:

I was looking for another song, entirely, but happened across this interesting cello number that I couldn’t stop listening to:

And this one is fun:

This is just fun (even if they won’t let me embed it):

https://soundcloud.com/bombay-bicycle-club/bombay-bicycle-club-shuffle

And finally, no music post this week could be complete without Black Simon & Garfunkel:

Part and parcel

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A pop musician or movie star gets arrested for driving under the influence and being in possession of an illegal controlled substance. When he or she is sentenced to nothing more than some hours of community service, there may be a bit of an outcry from the public, but thousands still attend the concerts, buy the music, see the movies.

If questioned, the fans might claim that you have to separate the art from the artist. They’re more likely to simply say, “Yeah, but I love the music/movie.” But it’s the same argument. Things that an artist does in their real life has nothing to do with the quality of product itself. Just as it would be inappropriate to claim that a painting is less than worthy of appreciation because the artist happens to be a member of a race other than the majority, a particular piece of art should stand upon its own merits, alone.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t argue that the celebrity doesn’t deserve special treatment before the law. We can compare the punishment given to the celebrity to those typically given to non-celebrities charged with the same crime. We can point out that this prominent person was given a punishment at the very lowest end of the first-offenders sentencing range, even though this is their fifth or sixth or twentieth run-in with the law over substance abuse issues.

We can demand that the special treatment stop. Yes, maybe that movie we’ve been waiting for will have to be delayed (or more likely, made with a different actor), but crimes and irresponsible actions should have consequences, and sometimes those consequences impact people other than the perpetrator.

The aforementioned situation is pretty clear, and not likely to draw a lot of argument on the principles.

It gets less black and white if the actor, musician, or artist is arrested for assault, or worse. How much that changes our perception of his or her work depends upon the nature of the crimes and the nature of their work. It may become difficult to listen to a singer crooning love songs when you know he has been convicted multiple times of domestic abuse against multiple partners, for instance.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.—Salvador Dali

So far our hypotheticals have been about what an artist does during aspects of their lives that would otherwise be private. What happens when it happens on the stage? Say, for instance, that you’re a C- or D-list singer-songwriter who, early in your career, made statements indicating you were lesbian, and for a couple of decades your fanbase has been predominately lesbian, and you’ve continued to cater to that fanbase even though in your private life you’ve married a conservation fundamentalist Christian man and joined an evangelical church.

And then one night, on stage in a city that most of the world equates with gay people, in between songs you start going on a long, screaming rant about how gay marriage is going to destroy the world, how decriminalizing abortion is the signal of the collapse of civilization, and screaming at the audience members who start walking out that “God hates fags!”

I don’t think anybody would argue that other venues you were scheduled to appear at are within their rights to cancel your shows. Politics aside, no one wants to deal with all those angry customers.

Issuing statements afterward that it was meant to be ironic (yet another assault on that poor, abused, misunderstood word), or taken out of context, afterward isn’t going to undo the damage. Particularly with the full video available on the internet and it is quite clear the the context is only hate, hate, more hate, and crazy.

And you can insist you have freedom of speech all you want. Freedom of speech means that you can say what you want without intrference from the government. It doesn’t mean freedom from people being so offended that they choose to stop listening to and buying your music. It doesn’t mean freedom from being criticized. It doesn’t mean freedom from being seen to be a hateful hypocrit whose career is based almost entirely on milking an ambiguous statement that you might be a member of a group of people you despise. Nor does it mean freedom from being labeled a self-loathing closet case in addition to the hypocrit charge.

Assaulting your audience and essentially admitting that you’ve been scamming them for years is another case where things are pretty black and white. There is no reason to separate the art from the artist, because the art is an inherent part of the crime the artist committed.

While I think that Ms Shocked’s tirade was deplorable and revealed that she is a reprehensible, malicious, vulgar louse deserving of our scorn, that wasn’t her biggest crime.

The most awful thing she has done is to produce all that disingenuous music. It is a sin to be a hateful bigot. It is a bigger sin to intentionally produce crap that you don’t believe and call in art.

Music

music,

My music listening tastes are a bit weird and all over the place. Often the old, “It’s got a good beat and is easy to dance to” are my primary requirements. Interesting lyrics are always a plus.

Sometimes my tastes are hopelessly pop:

“Cover the face! Pump the bass!”

Experiences, not things

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The ads usually pop up as Christmas time approaches: give people the gift of experiences, not things. They suggest paid excursions, theatre tickets, sports event tickets, and so on, with an appeal against consuming natural resources. As a person with a house continually crammed full of stuff that I love but don’t really have room for, I understand the sentiment.

But I’m not terribly good at following it.

While I was browsing the dealer’s den at RustyCon (a small local sci fi convention), one of the booths was filled with zillions “Rare! Hard to Find!” soundtrack albums on CD and movies on DVD. I have a weakness for soundtrack albums and started flipping through the tightly packed rows of discs. Within the first half dozen I looked at, all labeled with a price of $44.95, were two which I had happened to buy in the last year at the iTunes store. One for 9.99 and the other for 7.99.

I have no doubt that many (if not most) of the discs he had there are not available for download from iTunes or Amazon or any of the other digital music sources. And I’m sure that many of them were difficult for him to obtain. Certainly storing and transporting those enormous piles of discs isn’t cheap. So I’m not in any way disparaging the vendor.

It’s just that seeing those two albums (one originally released in 2002, the other originally released in 1975) which I had by chance purchased digitally recently made me stop to think about the situation. The reason I like owning music is to listen to it from time to time. I have a rather daunting amount of music in my digital collection, and how often any individual track is listened to is rather less often than might justify even the typical digital price of 99₵ per song. So does it really make sense to spend 45 bucks on a disc with 12 – 16 tracks on it?

I had just this last week commiserated with two friends about our shelves and shelves full of music and movies, which even though many had been digitized, we were still reluctant to get rid of because the discs now constituted the backup. But we also were all a bit frustrated at how much space they took up.

Not too many years ago I still owned a couple boxes of music albums on vinyl. I hadn’t owned a machine that could play them in a few years, so I finally admitted it was time, and got rid of them. I should mention that among those boxes was the 1975 soundtrack I mentioned above which I recently purchased digitally.

I’m afraid all this thinking about how much stuff is cluttering up the house made me steer clear of the booksellers. If I stopped acquiring new audio books and ebooks, and just focused all my reading time on the piles (multiple) of “new books to read” beside my bed, it would likely take me a few years to get through them.

I have been enjoying myself at the con. I’ve had several good conversations, attended interesting panels, and yes, I bought some things. As a person who frequently has a table with things for sale at conventions, I don’t want people to stop buying things at cons, don’t get me wrong.

I just think that I, personally, need to focus more of my enjoyment on the experience, and less on carrying home a pile of toys and such afterward.

I’ve got my love to keep me warm

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Our good friend, C.D. Woodbury, who happens to be the man officiating our elopement today, had a gig with his band last night, which we’d already been planning to attend with friends. When I realized earlier in the week that it would be the night before the elopement, I started referring to the planned excursion as our bachelor party.

C.D. Woodbury Band performing at Grinders Hot Sands.
C.D. Woodbury Band performing at Grinders Hot Sands.

The band has recently been recording an album of all original songs, and this was their first gig after laying all the principal tracks. So they premiered several of their original songs. It was a fun evening with friends, great music, great food, and great beer at Grinders Hot Sands in north Seattle.

I’d heard from several people that the bread pudding at Grinders was a religious experience. Bread pudding is not on my diet, so I didn’t order it the last time we’d been there (to hear the same band play some months back). Of course, the meatball sandwich isn’t really on my diet, either, but…

Michael ordered the bread pudding, and told me to have at least a bite. I ended up eating most of it because the whisky sauce was stronger than he had expected. He’s never been fond of the taste of alcohol. For the record: the bread pudding is like a religious experience. It is awesome.

Listening to a blues band (a great blues band, and I’m not just saying that because they’re friends) with a bunch of friends is more my kind of bachelor party than any of the stereotypical activities.

At least Scrooge found redemption

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Many, many years ago, before what most people think of as the internet, I was active in several forums on Fidonet. One December someone started a thread about Christmas movies, and someone else posted into that thread a brief explanation of why The Bing Crosby, Danny Kay, and Rosemary Clooney White Christmas was their favorite movie.

And one of the first replies to that post was a cranky rant about how that movie was not the film which had introduced the song of the same name, that the song had been originally written for the Fred Astaire film, Holiday Inn, and no one should like White Christmas because it wasn’t the movie that introduced the song.

Nothing in the original message had even mentioned the song, “White Christmas.” The person had even said that the movie was full of corny and silly bits, with a highly improbable plot.

I shrugged my shoulders at the cranky, crazy person, and went on to read other people’s recommendations of their favorite Christmas movies.

A year or so later, I think it was on a Usenet forum, a similar thread was in progress, and again, not long after someone mentioned White Christmas, there was another angry rant about how that movie wasn’t the one that introduced the song, and how much the person wished people would stop saying it had. Except, of course, that once again, no one had.

I’ve seen it again, and again. Mention the movie, White Christmas, and some troll will post a rant about it not being the movie that introduced the song. Now, sometimes, before the troll got there, someone would mention in a more friendly way the fact that the song was originally written for another movie, but had become so popular that a studio decided to base an entire film on the song. But eventually, there would be the angry post conveying the same fact.

When I posted on an old blog a list of my favorite Christmas movies, I got an anonymous message from someone, ignoring all the other movies in the list, to angrily tell me he’s tired of people mistakenly believing that White Christmas, the movie, introduced “White Christmas,” the song. Which, of course, I hadn’t said.

It’s perfectly legitimate to dislike a movie that someone else likes. It is also socially acceptable to join a virtual conversation about a movie by sharing some trivia about the film, one of the people in it, and so on. The part that I don’t get is why this movie, of all the innocuous, corny, trivial films that have ever been made, seems to always attract this one particular rant.

I have wondered if it’s just the same troll. Does he have alerts set up searching for mentions of this film, so he can log into whereever someone mentions it and post his rant?

If it isn’t the same troll, what makes several people feel a need to react with righteous outrage about a movie named after a song which it didn’t introduce? How can such a trivial detail provoke such outrage?

People get angry about things that other people enjoy all the time. No matter how wrong headed (and factually wrong) it is, I underatand why people get worked up about the so-called war on Christmas, for instance. Something that represents their faith and their personal history appears to be under attack. I think they are deluded to think it’s under attack, but I understand why traditions and beliefs and treasured memories are important to them.

But which movie introduced a sentimental holiday song? Really?

And of all the things about that song to get exercised about, again, it’s which movie introduced it? Not the fact that it’s a secular song about a sacred holiday? Not that a song for a Christian holiday was written by a Jewish man? (Actually, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that—because now the war on Christmas folks will decide that Irving Berlin started their whole war, or something.)

Maybe these folks just need to be visited by some ghosts, perhaps the spirits of Musicals Past, Present, and Yet To Come.

Haven’t you always wanted to see those ghosts doing jazz hands?

Joyous voices sweet and clear

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Several years ago, my hubby bought me an iPod Nano for my birthday. I had been resistant to the notion of an iPod. I was used to the ritual of changing out discs in a carrying case I kept with me to use with my portable disc player, and I just didn’t quite see the point.

The funny thing was that I had iTunes installed on my computer and had imported a bunch of my music CDs into its library. One of my Palm Pilots had used iTunes to synch music, so I had given it a try. I hadn’t been terribly impressed with the experience, but I had found iTunes on the computer a bit easier to use than other music playing software, so I had kept it.

The iPod quickly changed my mind. The convenience of something that fit in my pocket and replaced both the portable player and the carrying case with all those discs should have been obvious, I suppose. I found myself importing music like crazy, because the small number of discs I’d imported before that would hardly fill the Nano’s humongous 4 gigs of space.

I spent most of the Thanksgiving weekend importing Christmas music, and wound up with about 3 gigs worth of holiday songs. That left enough room on the Nano for a Scissor Sisters album, a few Queen albums, and my podcasts. So I could set the entire iPod music collection on shuffle for the month of December. I would get mostly Christmas music, with an occasional non-Christmas song to break things up.

And, of course, the iPod carried a much larger portion of my Christmas music collection than I’d been able to carry around in that case for discs.

The following year, Apple released the very first iPod Touch about a week before my birthday. Guess what my hubby gave me for my birthday? I think he got me the 16gig model, which seemed enormous. It was enough of an incentive to get me working a bit more seriously at importing all of my music collection on disc into the computer. I don’t remember how much of my Christmas music I got imported for that second Christmas (and because of a hard disk crash a few years ago, I can’t use the “date added” information in iTunes to make a guess–iTunes thinks the date added for about half my library is the day I bought the new hard disk and started restoring from backup), but it was far less than 16 gigs, and so I had start making big playlists if I wanted to have something I could randomize to give me hours of Christmas music while working.

Christmas music is one of my obsessions. I usually start listening to it a day or two after Thanksgiving and keep listening to it through Three Kings Day. Unfortunately, my hubby is one of those people who really dislikes Christmas music, or at least a lot of it. I’ve managed to figure out a bunch he can stand, and load that up in the player for the car. Otherwise, I listen to it when he’s in the other room or try to remember to use my headphones.

My hubby’s not the only person I know who has issues with at least some kinds of Christmas songs. I know a lot of folks who have problems with the specifically religious music. As a gay kid growing up in a very conservative and uptight denomination, I understand. Some sacred music triggers memories of very bad experiences. I get that what some people hear in those songs is, “You must conform to this belief system that has oppressed you, or else!”

My particular idiosyncrasy is that traditional religious Christmas songs just don’t register that way for me. I know all the words to “O, Holy Night” in more than one language (my Latin’s a bit rusty, but…), and intellectually I get that it’s sacred, but emotionally, it’s Holiday Music, to me. It evokes the same sense of wonder I get when accompanying friends out to the countryside and looking up into the night sky, hundreds of miles from a city, where the enormity of the universe is visible just by looking up. I love singing along to “Angels We Have Heard on High” because I remember the many Christmas concerts where I either sang it or played in the orchestra. In my head, I’m singing the tenor, and bass, and alto part (and wishing I could hit all the notes for the soprano), as well as playing the trumpet and baritone horn parts.

So I get a little bit too enthusiastic about lyrics that sometimes annoy some of my friends.

For me, Christmas is a season of light. We do these things to remember that the sun will come back, to remind ourselves how much metaphorical light our friends and other loved ones bring to our hearts throughout the year, and to give a bit of light and joy to both loved ones and complete strangers.

Strumming

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Several people I know are prepping (and some still thinking about it) for National Novel Writing Month. If you’ve never done it, but have an interest in writing, have tried writing, or are a writer, I encourage you to give it a go.

I will not be participating this year. I have a slightly different reason than I’ve given before: I have to spend a lot of time practicing ukulele if I’m going to be ready for this year’s holiday party.

Continue reading Strumming →