Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Ugh I’ve got a chest cold which could mean endless coughing. The good news is I have a recliner for sleeping mostly upright, and copious amounts of guaifenesin-pills-and-water, and the right sort of social network.

• When I woke up early, I commanded Siri #4 to narrate amaruuk’s sweet Rosie & Johnlock series Paternity

• Got a phone call from kestrell

• Hopped on here, and tozka linked me to an excellent concert from Cathy Fink, Marcie Marxer and Chao Tian, hosted by the Smithsonian. Fink & Marxer were role models when I was a "movement musician" between 1976-1981, and I love how closely Chinese yangqin (hammered dulcimer) and Appalachian banjo music can intertwine

• Today’s prettygoodword was the wonderful campanulate

• minoanmiss shared strategies for smuggling the good bacteria past TSA

My public library’s Kanopy subscription provided two profound films, both under nine minutes:

• CODA is an animated short from 2015. This Irish masterpiece follows a lost soul’s encounter with death. Pro captions, no audio description, no gore. Watch on YouTube or ( stream here )

• Bacon & God’s Wrath meditates on loss of faith when Razie Brownstone, at age 92, tries bacon for the first time. CONTAINS: Very lifelike animated dead pig’s head, racist autocomplete results, emesis mentioned. Watch on YouTube without captions or ( stream here )

Listening to a new performer handling a well-known tune is my favorite introduction to their style and philosophy. Of course there’s a website for that: Second Hand Songs. Here’s their data on the lovely tune "Blues Run the Game," which you may have learned from Simon & Garfunkel if you’re a boomer.

https://secondhandsongs.com/work/4015

( one version and 134 other interesting takes )

I’ve sung folk music all my life, and the folk tradition of modifying music to fit the moment fertilized my transformative fandom tendencies.

sasha_feather posted about "Major Tom (coming home)" by Peter Schilling. She commented, "This song rules it's a fix-it fanfic." It was my introduction to the song, and it totally fixes the canon, David Bowie’s Space Oddity.

( canon and fix it on YouTube, with lyrics )

I was primed to delight in that song, because I’d snuck onto BlueSky for a minute (ha! 48 minutes) and found Annalee Flower Horne’s fabulous commentary on Donald Trump’s felony convictions, to the tune "How Can I Keep From Singing?" (This was good news old enough I risked exposure. Please don’t update me).

My life goes on in endless song
Above earth's pain and friction
I hear the real, though far-off hymn
That hails a new conviction.
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear those verdicts ringing
They sound an echo in my feed—
How can I keep from singing?

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear
And hear the jury judge them
When friends rejoice both far and near
How could I dare begrudge them?
In bad hotel and golf course vile
Our words to him are ringing:
Your daddy never loved you dude,
You've never heard of winning

What though my faith in systems dies
The jury's truth, it liveth
What though he's still that fucking guy,
Three dozen counts, they giveth
No storm can shake my schadenfreude
While this I'm a capella'n:
Where e're he walks on God's Green Earth
That fucking guy's a felon

https://bsky.app/profile/flowerhorne.com/post/3ktqinod2i42z

To learn the melody, check out Rise Up and Sing’s Music Box entry. An extensive Mudcat.org discussion shows the fuzzy history of the original lyrics and subsequent modifications. (Mudcat is the forum for the useful Digital Tradition Folk Song Database.)

Do you have any fixit songs you treasure? Is there a specific twist and tumble in the folk tradition that gives you joy?

...is an appropriate holiday entry, I reckon.

Hello world! I’ve been noodling along, counting down the days until the Winter Solstice and the return of more light, doing a whole lot of nothing.

Happily, a pal turned me on to Elle Cordova, a musician, filker, rapper, and very funny person (formerly known as Reina Del Cid).

No transcript, but beautifully open-captioned:

( Seasons Greetings from our little multinational empire )

Much more at:

tiktok.com/@elle.cordova

youtube.com/@ElleCordova

youtube.com/@SundayMorningsHQ

and damn

geeky aside about user heads

I'm finally used to Dreamwidth's @-sign userheads, and the socials go and change their URLs so that including the @ generates a 404, thusly: ElleCordova

SistaStrings are Black sisters from Milwaukee, recently arrived in Nashville. Chauntee Ross plays violin, Monique Ross plays cello, and they both sing. They combine classical string voicing with R&B and gospel and folk. It’s heavenly.

They played Sam Cooke’s fabulous song "A Change is Gonna Come" in a Nashville backyard last weekend for Juneteenth:

( YouTube player inside )

Commissioned by the Milwaukee Opera, "The Sound" pairs their penetrating music with voices and videos from Milwaukee protests in June 2020.

( click to watch )

Their digital EP LIFT is just $10 on Bandcamp. I particularly love their take on "Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing"—often called the "Negro National Anthem"). ( play it here )

On Wisconsin Public Television’s "30-minute music hour"

Australian singer Sarah @CommasAndAmpersands created a funny and on-point "she shanty" about mansplaining.

In three parts, fully captioned, a Tiktok trend I highly approve.

1. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeLj54fj/
2. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeLja8y3/
3. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeLjWaE9/

Sarah is also commasandampersands where she talks about books.

This isn’t the first time I’ve squeed about Dessa Wander, a rapper, musician, poet, and writer from the Twin Cities, Minnesota. I was introduced to her music thanks to fanvids. She’s multimodal!

---

Her most recent record was released twice: once as rap/pop CHIME and once backed by the Minnesota Orchestra as SOUND THE BELLS.

I’ve listened to both at least 50 times. It’s hard to choose a favorite track, but today it’s Five Out of Six.

( Rap & Orchestral Versions Within )

---

Since she’s toured the world on her own and with the Doomtree Collective, Dessa turns out to be a great travel writer. Check out this London adventure with LJ Rich, who’s a synesthete

( 130 word taste )

---

Dessa is not only great at song lyrics — she’s swell at prose, including technical writing.

My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love

This is her 2019 memoir as an essay collection. I deeply enjoyed listening to her narrate the audio version in her deep and melodic voice. She’s the child of committed environmental hippies, so I learned about growing up on the land in Minnesota. She spent 10 years in love with that one guy who really was bad for her.

print at libraries - audio - ebook - bookshare

She knew it wasn’t the best use of her time, and she managed to get her lovesickness imaged via a functional fMRI. This served as a great news hook — the search engines have pages on this story. Second best to reading the book, here’s her TED talk. (Meta aside: she learned about fMRI imaging of love by watching an earlier TED talk by Nancy Kanwisher.)

( TED talk embed with pro captions )

Given I love Dessa, who else should I be listening to?

John McCutcheon is a lefty songwriter and traditional American music evangelist who I’ve been listening to for 40 years. He just released an album called Cabin Fever with several songs relevant to the current crisis. It’s download-only for pay-what-you-will.

I was particularly struck by the disability pride shining through the song Monet Refuses the Operation:

( Play with YouTube embed )

It’s based on the poem by Lisel Mueller, 1924-2020, free to read at the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52577/monet-refuses-the-operation

( 300 words on the pleasures of seeing the world through cataracts )

The UK election result crashed through my news barriers. Oh, crap.

This scary turn reminds me of a song that helped me in an earlier ugly time, when I was stunned in certainty of imminent nuclear annihilation.

What can you do with each moment of your life
But love til you’ve loved it away?

Bob Franke: Thanksgiving Eve.

( The lyrics )

Three ways to hear it (hoping one of these links survives):

• Bob Franke performs with Chamber Orchestra Kremlin inside a nuke-proof bunker in Moscow

( YouTube embed no lyrics )

• Franke writes from a Christian tradition, so it’s no surprise Amidon Choral Music arranges the song for SATB, with full recording and lyrics

• More sonorous version from Irish singer Janet Holmes 2004 record, Road to the West

( Spotify player embed no lyrics )

gwynne has created a masterpiece of Vorkosigan filk.

It's to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Modern Major General from Pirates of Penzance, refer to this captioned video to refresh your memory

I’ve several times with no intent been accidentally treasonous.
I always have fast answers when they ask me what my reason is.
My loyalty imperial is total, true and absolute
But sometimes I might just forget some details when the time’s acute.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/20349997

(Thanks to the person on my d-roll who recced this, and whose name has escaped.)