Fear Not: For, Behold

The Gun Control petition I reprinted yesterday went viral.  It gathered more than 200,000 signatures in support, and the author, Staci Sarkin, will be going to Congress in person to present it.

There’s some current woo-woo about the world ending on December 21^st, because that’s when the Mayan calendar “ends”.  I wouldn’t put much stock in the prophetic abilities of the Mayans.  They stopped calculating their calendar because they were too busy dealing with the invasion of the Spanish, and two centuries of drought, both of which decimated their culture, neither of which they saw coming.

Getting in the Spirit

A Newsy Post you can Sing Along With

Life is Beautiful (1997)

The time between Halloween and New Year’s Day seems to go by faster every year.  I’m doing less than I used to, on purpose, but it still feels like activities, responsibilities, even the passage of hours speeds up.

Election Day Trivia

Archie Roosevelt, with Presidential pet badger Josiah, who bit visitors.

WOO-HOO!  It’s OVER!  Those suffering from arrested development will continue to whine for a bit if their man or woman didn’t win, but the wisest will progress to more important matters.   Like raking leaves, cleaning the gutters, and throwing out those stupid lawn signs.

Thanks All Round

It’s been a good week.  The rest of the country has been uncomfortably hot, but until yesterday it was raining most days in my little town, and I sometimes felt sad without reason.  I chose to live at the geographic edge of a rain forest.  It would be silly to expect it to be drier.  Perhaps I’m still adjusting to not living in the artificial oasis of El Lay.

First Love

The sweet things in life stay in memory forever, long after injustices, obstacles and hardships have all fallen away.

Four Hard Songs

There are so many different ways to enjoy sacred classical music.  It can be an expression of faith, as it was for these composers.  But you don’t have to be religious to enjoy it, because it’s beautiful to hear.

All-Star Day Off Silly Song Playlist

Trance Planting

High Desert Dream, by Sam Weis

One of the nice things about having creative friends is that you enjoy and pay attention to their work, and it inspires you to produce work yourself.  It’s an effect of the originating energy of all art.

A Christmas Clip Show

The Spirit Awakes

His Master’s Voice by Francis Barraud (1899)

I might have called this post “Whine-O-Rama”, but I’m trying to understand the process from a more enlightened position.

Small Town Graded Down Blues

Miss Anne, an Uptown lady, told us how it used to be.

My little town had the blues last week.  The rest of the world has the blues too, something or other about debts and deficits, but we in the old port town celebrated having the blues with a festival.

Shapeshifting

La Belle et La Bete (1946)

There’s a tension that exists between natural and artificial order.  You can be creative by playing that tension as if it was a tuned string.  If you continue to play, you will undergo a transformation that unifies art and nature.  You merge with everything.

Polite Romance

Early in our courtship, my wife and I each risked participation in the other’s creative hobbies.  She was an experienced ballroom dancer.  I had never danced except in the uncontrolled, untrained fashion acceptable between horny teenagers.

Animal, Vestigial, Musical

Dondo and Cell Microtower

We talk within contexts, in groups, in culture, varying with the situation or occasion.  I’m trying to collapse the different levels, and unite modernity with tribal spirit.  At the most basic level, we pass messages as animals.  We smile or show other facial reactions within each other’s sight.  It’s more elementary than language.

Scratching Post

The cats and I each have items used to exercise our paws.

My period of relevance has passed.  I’m enjoying my life very much, but I know I am out-of-sync with current culture.

More Music You Didn’t Know You Knew

The original page with “O Fortuna” in Carmina Burana

Romantic, Classical and Baroque music is often repurposed for film soundtracks and other things.  It’s evocative and heightens emotional impact if chosen wisely, and it’s cheap compared to the cost of licensing current pop songs

Video Aloha

As I have mentioned before, my Brother and others in my family are into Hawaiian culture and music.  He just sent me this, and it’s nice so I’m passing it along.  He’s the guy with the reddish beard playing fretless bass ukelele behind the singer

Where There is Charity

Our bodies are instruments, the first ones that were ever played.  Rhythm comes from our awareness of the beat of our hearts.  Melody is the practiced pattern of chosen pitches, but it originates in the verbal interactions between parents and children.  Our baby squeals reached higher and higher pitches.  It gave us delight.  Our parents lulled us to sleep using peaceful vocal tones.

Here’s another example of a song that has managed the trick of time-travel.  Many of you just heard a bit of it last Friday, but didn’t know how ancient it was.  I’ll show you the trail from long, long ago.

Elegant Borrowing

Artists borrow material from earlier artists in order to adapt it for use in new works.  Allow me to focus on music to illustrate.  If a melody has depth and flexibility it can be reworked and reused in other ways such as marrying it to different sets of lyrics, or rearranging the instrumentation.

Queen of Denial

“Some people said I couldn’t sing,

but no one could say I didn’t sing.”

Let me begin on a positive note.  Singing is good for everyone, and learning to love music will enrich your life.  But you ought to be better than average before charging people money to see you perform, unless you are destined to be among the best of the worst.