Sunday, December 18, 2011
Top 10 of 2011
End-of-the-year list time! Please make a new post and list your personal top 10 of 2011 (open to interpretation).
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Bella Ciao
In October, I saw Goran Bregovic and his Orchestra for Weddings and Funerals in Oakland. He played for over three hours. This was one of the songs he played, an Italian partisan song made famous, especially in the Communist world.
A Russian friend explained to me that she knew of it from the American singer Dean Reed, notorious in this country for having deserted to the Communist world and living in East Germany. Here's a documentary made about him in the USSR in 1983.
Last night, walking along the port road in Oakland, I heard a brass band playing one English version, written by Chumbawumba I think.
There was also an Arabic version that went viral during the Arab Spring, even though Egyptians have their own battle songs.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Winter Songs
NPR is doing a series called Winter Songs where people write in about a song that they associate with Winter. I submitted something (below); you should, too!
My song is GARDEN by THE FALL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdintQNo9og
I was in an odd spot in college -- it was the Winter semester of my Junior year at the University of Michigan. I was living in a co-op with 20-some other people, but a lot of my close friends were studying abroad, and those in town were either getting more serious about their majors or their girlfriends. I was taking Introduction To Screenwriting and writing a road trip movie set in a surreal, almost hellish version of late-50s Pacific Northwest, but I was stuck in middle of The Great Midwest where the sky was perpetually overcast and it felt like midnight by 6:00 in the evening. Plus, this was before I invested in a seasonal depression lamp. I had gotten into The Fall, the British post-punk band, and I loved the off-kilter guitar hooks and distinctly cantankerous vocals. In this song, like a lot of their others, I have my own understanding of what Mark A. Smith is ranting/mumbling about -- the song isn't specifically about Winter (I think it's about a former Nazi), but, to me, it held the feeling of isolation that I was experiencing. One of the stand-out lyrics while I spent hours holed up in my room writing is "see what flows from his mushy pen". The guitar has a chilly, clanging drone which evokes rows of icicles, or maybe Nordic fjords. I think of this as a night-time song, and, in my mind's eye, I remember seeing moon-shadows of barren limbs in the snow from my window, or walking through empty streets, looking at houses with the lights off, and the sound of snow crunching under my feet to underscore the solitude and stillness. Ann Arbor felt like it had emptied out, and even though I was exploring a new imaginative world in my class, I was exploring it by myself. The moseying bassline is the counterpoint: it bounces along with some obliviousness to the threatening swells that occasionally flare up in the song, and -- as I shuffled home through the bitter cold after my evening screenwriting class -- I, too, was strangely contented.
Needless to say, the screenplay was never produced.
My song is GARDEN by THE FALL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdintQNo9og
I was in an odd spot in college -- it was the Winter semester of my Junior year at the University of Michigan. I was living in a co-op with 20-some other people, but a lot of my close friends were studying abroad, and those in town were either getting more serious about their majors or their girlfriends. I was taking Introduction To Screenwriting and writing a road trip movie set in a surreal, almost hellish version of late-50s Pacific Northwest, but I was stuck in middle of The Great Midwest where the sky was perpetually overcast and it felt like midnight by 6:00 in the evening. Plus, this was before I invested in a seasonal depression lamp. I had gotten into The Fall, the British post-punk band, and I loved the off-kilter guitar hooks and distinctly cantankerous vocals. In this song, like a lot of their others, I have my own understanding of what Mark A. Smith is ranting/mumbling about -- the song isn't specifically about Winter (I think it's about a former Nazi), but, to me, it held the feeling of isolation that I was experiencing. One of the stand-out lyrics while I spent hours holed up in my room writing is "see what flows from his mushy pen". The guitar has a chilly, clanging drone which evokes rows of icicles, or maybe Nordic fjords. I think of this as a night-time song, and, in my mind's eye, I remember seeing moon-shadows of barren limbs in the snow from my window, or walking through empty streets, looking at houses with the lights off, and the sound of snow crunching under my feet to underscore the solitude and stillness. Ann Arbor felt like it had emptied out, and even though I was exploring a new imaginative world in my class, I was exploring it by myself. The moseying bassline is the counterpoint: it bounces along with some obliviousness to the threatening swells that occasionally flare up in the song, and -- as I shuffled home through the bitter cold after my evening screenwriting class -- I, too, was strangely contented.
Needless to say, the screenplay was never produced.
Drunken Singing Bike Ride Home
Now the courtroom is quiet, but who will confess.
Is it true you betrayed us? The answer is Yes.
Then read me the list of the crimes that are mine,
I will ask for the mercy that you love to decline.
And all the ladies go moist, and the judge has no choice,
a singer must die for the lie in his voice.
And I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty,
you keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty.
Your vision is right, my vision is wrong,
I'm sorry for smudging the air with my song.
Oh, the night it is thick, my defences are hid
in the clothes of a woman I would like to forgive,
in the rings of her silk, in the hinge of her thighs,
where I have to go begging in beauty's disguise.
Oh goodnight, goodnight, my night after night,
my night after night, after night, after night, after night, after night.
I am so afraid that I listen to you,
your sun glassed protectors they do that to you.
It's their ways to detain, their ways to disgrace,
their knee in your balls and their fist in your face.
Yes and long live the state by whoever it's made,
sir, I didn't see nothing, I was just getting home late.
Is it true you betrayed us? The answer is Yes.
Then read me the list of the crimes that are mine,
I will ask for the mercy that you love to decline.
And all the ladies go moist, and the judge has no choice,
a singer must die for the lie in his voice.
And I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty,
you keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty.
Your vision is right, my vision is wrong,
I'm sorry for smudging the air with my song.
Oh, the night it is thick, my defences are hid
in the clothes of a woman I would like to forgive,
in the rings of her silk, in the hinge of her thighs,
where I have to go begging in beauty's disguise.
Oh goodnight, goodnight, my night after night,
my night after night, after night, after night, after night, after night.
I am so afraid that I listen to you,
your sun glassed protectors they do that to you.
It's their ways to detain, their ways to disgrace,
their knee in your balls and their fist in your face.
Yes and long live the state by whoever it's made,
sir, I didn't see nothing, I was just getting home late.
Friday, December 02, 2011
R.I.P. Frederick Meijer
As many of you know, ol' man Meijer kicked the bucket the other week, leaving palaces of commerce scattered throughout the Midwest... Would anyone care to celebrate the man's contribution to our lives by sharing a Meijer memory?
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