Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

Listened to:
From WNYC's "RadioLab" -- A a segment from a show from December last. The first five and a half minutes or so of this 33 minute segment is about the joy of a man at the end of a three-month solo trek across Antarctica. And then, from then on, it's the story of a Holocaust survivor who tried to invent a new communication system that he hoped would end all war... That, it itself, would have been fascinating. I was not expecting it to end up revolving around children with cerebral palsy living in an institutional home/school/hospital in the 1970's in Ontario, Canada... but it did (Content note-- it ends on a fairly tragic, ironic note):

Mr. Bliss

For something completely different, also from "RadioLab": Liev Schreiber reads Italo Calvino's The Distance of the Moon; written in Italian in 1965, and translated into English in 1968... i.e., before we landed there...
(Content note-- one of the main characters is written as Deaf for metaphorical/symbolic reasons as a sort of Magic!wild-man/Innocent-Primitive)

Read:
Found by way of "Rolling around in my head": Reclaiming memory: Searching for Great-Aunt Sarah (Content note: institutional life and death in the early 20th century)

From "Rolling around in my head" Directly: The Better Way (content note: neither tragic nor ironic-- includes a crying baby)

Watched:
And a child shall lead them -- going-on-eleven year-old Stephanie leads a blue-grass band of adult white men... You can tell she's the leader in this particular set, because she sets the tempo for their playing, and signals the final chorus of the first song with a straight-leg kick (a standard signal in folk music):


(Content note-- precocious kid on stage and occasional out-of-focus camera).

This moved me not so much for the cuteness factor, but the aplomb and grace of one so young in front of an audience -- maybe that's her "un-cuteness"?

I've been contemplating, as my next YouTube project making a video of my poem, "Just Like a Garden, This Poem is a Trick," wherein I have the lines:

"Where tadpoles, covered in fur, and web-footed mice/Swim in the frog pond."

So, the other night, when I was browsing through YouTube, fishing for videos of lullabies and children's songs to replace a bothersome ear worm that threatened to keep me awake, I was tickled to find this version of "Froggie Went a'Courtin." Not only does it satisfy the principle of Chekhov's Gun ("One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."), but also the frog and the mouse survive their wedding day and actually do have progeny (I knew there had to be at least some survivors, somewhere).

( lyrics (refrains only typed out twice, to avoid tl;dr) )

Video of this song being sung: 57. Kimo Kemo (Traditional)

Version where the household cat crashes the reception (it goes as well as one might expect) 12-string guitar: Here's to Cheshire

And finally, a version where everyone meets with the hungry side of a water snake: Froggy Went a Courting

So, you can see, with all the odds against success, why I kind of cheered this new (To me) version.

A wee bit more sincere/sentimental than the last one:




I gotta say: I prefer this cover to the Pogues' original... Less... snarly?

( Lyrics )

This is a Yin-Yang post. The first is cheering in a lump-in-the-throat, "where's my hankie?" sort of way: Straight forward and innocent. The second is complex, dark and verges on despair. But, just as the Yin Yang symbol represents one thing transforming into another, I think they really do come together into something that is ultimately hopeful:

1) One Small Voice (can teach the world a song) -- YouTube video by the late, Great, Jeff Moss, song-writer and Muppet designer for Sesame Street, and sung here by a church choir for a concert on December 11, last year.

( 'One Small Voice' lyrics and music by Jeff Moss )

"Every song the world sings -- each was once unknown ..." That's a much bigger thought than you usually find on a show for little kids. BTW, according to the Muppet Wiki site, this song first aired in 1989 (Sesame Street's 20th Anniversary year), but I can't find that version -- it got remixed very quickly for recordings and later on-air versions.

2) Shakespeare's Sonnet #66 -- not sure why I find this so cheering, since it's basically a list of eleven reasons to wish for death, versus one reason to keep on living... Except maybe I'm finding solace that an essential stranger from 400+ years ago once raged against the same injustices in the world that I do-- assurance that, no, it's not just me-- and that he expressed his rage with wit and wordplay, instead of (or perhaps, taking a break from) a raw, animalistic, howl.

( Tired with all these, for restful death I cry )

Mother was tickled by line 12: "And captive good attending captain ill" when she first read it. And I find myself nodding with "OMG THIS, so much!" at line 11: "And simple truth miscall'd simplicity"

I find it interesting, by the way, that when I searched for readings of this sonnet on YouTube, most of the hits that came back had the sonnet translated into either Russian or German, and put to melodies as protest songs, and it was much less popular (apparently) among American / British people.

Maybe where these two pieces agree is in the notion that we find our comfort and our courage in our relationships with other people ... ???

There are many people on YouTube who use their channel as a showcase their own humor and wit about the ridiculousness of their lives.

There are also many people on YouTube who use their channel to earnestly and sincerely share their love for a particular genre of music.

The people who do both at (almost) the same time are a lot rarer.

This young man is one of those people -- sincere fiddle playing sandwiched between a "blog part" and "outtakes" (which I suspect are -at least, some of the time- also scripted).

OB-Who:
Here, have a red-headed young Scot, living in Cardiff, playing a song written by Turlough (really!):

On Tuesday, I posted this:

From the end of the second verse [eta: of Mystery Song]:

Reporting live from the frontline
We carry the torch for the ones who're scared to shine

The last verse:

One thing I know is for definite
Soul, body and mind, you got the same benefit
If you trust your heart, there ain't no way of losing it
Keep doing your thing, against all etiquette.
10, 9, 8, start the countdown
7, 6, 5, about to go down
4, 3, 2, 1, sing along now.


ETA #2: At first, I thought I'd just leave it there, and not burden you guys with me gushing on about a language I love but don't live in.

But thanks to trouble, I learned about a video (reported on by Huffington Post) by a couple of ignoramuses claiming to be covering a song in ASL -- but really, all they're doing is flailing their hands about in a stereotypical, audist, hateful way. And then, they're removing and blocking all comments by actual Deaf, Native ASL Signers who are calling them out on it. So I thought I'd put dedicate some of my space to real True-biz Sign Rapping, to thumb my nose at those fools.

( The Answer to the riddle I posed (With video of the whole song) is below this cut )

As my mother would have phrased it: "If I could write like that (in a third language, no less), I wouldn't talk to anybody!"

1. The other day, I was wondering aloud about whether or not I should consider Hans Christian Andersen's The Ugly Duckling as part of my Plato's Nightmare stable of stories. Yesterday, I remembered that search engines are my friend, and I could probably find some critical essay on the story and how it fit into Andersen's life, and his motivations behind writing it.

Well, it didn't take any deeper digging than Good Ol' Wikipedia to discover that Andersen thought of The Ugly Duckling as his autobiography, and that he chose the metaphor of the swan raised in the barnyard to represent his own artistic temperament and being teased for loving music and singing in a small, provincial, town where only practical careers were valued.

So the way it was used in the Danny Kaye movie of 1952 is a modern take.

So I'll leave that story for another place and time.

2. For spiralsheep: I won't include links, or anything, because then I'll be marked as in the market for the stuff, but I just saw a "crafts" video about magnetic fingernail polish. It comes in many glitter colors, and it has iron filings embedded in the liquid. It also comes with a special magnet, which, if you hold it close to each nail before the polish dries, pulls the filings into position for very specific patterned designs -- so your nails end up with different glitter-and-black stripey designs.

Magnetz! And Glitter! It's obviously the wave of the future...

3. In the end, I decided against hunting down a YouTube video of Si Kahn's "It's Not Just What You're Born with" just so I could post my own song in response. I'll definitely do that if one of the singer/music vloggers I already subscribe to decide to cover Kahn's piece. But to hunt down people I don't follow, otherwise, just so I could post an opposing view?

That's being a Nasty Troll. And I don't do that.

So, instead, I sent a link to my song to Dave Hingsburger, since it was his writing, this past couple of months, that inspired me to go back and change half the lyrics, and also gave me the courage to make a video of the song, in the first place.

And today, he's posted my video as his blog entry of the day: http://davehingsburger.blogspot.com/2012/03/simply-human-by-capriuni.html

Excuse my moment of being slightly chuffed.

I admitted to calapine this afternoon that the only thing that gets me through it was to stick my fingers in my ears and sing silly children's songs very loudly.

After I wrote it out like that, it seemed only fair that I should hunt some down and share them with my reading circles.

This is one I found just now. I don't know how easy it is to sing very loudly, as it's a tongue-twister by design. But it did make me grin, so:



Edited to add:
( The Long Word Song (hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliaphobia), lyrics to: )

I woke up with this song stuck in my head, today, and happened to be sing-mumbling it in the grocery store, today, within the hearing of a worker who was busy stocking shelves. Whereupon he commented on the general niceness of the day.

Singing silly songs out loud and in public: a form of "civic duty" they neglect to teach you about in school.

More grandpa with a yellow ukulele (though in this specific instance he is a great-uncle)

Shared with the hope that it cheers people who need some cheering.



Info provided by said grandpa/great-uncle:

Remy started watching Lew Dite when he was a year and a half old. He is now four and a half and taking ukulele lessons. Remy lives on the west coast and I'm in Montreal, but through the magic of technology I get to play with him... Remy is an inspiration to me.

( transcript )