There's been a great thread going on the past day or two over at Dykes To Watch Out For concerning music that rocks our worlds. It's an eclectic bunch, and tonight I followed up on some of the recommendations others made, as well as my own. I found almost all of them on You Tube, and decided to share the videos here with you.
People were comparing versions of "Gracias a la Vida" (written by Violeta Parra), and here's the three mentioned:
Violeta Parra singing "Gracias a la Vida" (audio and stills only)
Mercedes Sosa singing "Gracias a la Vida"
Joan Baez singing "Gracias a la Vida" (audio and stills only)
Folks were also weighing different versions of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelejah", and again, here's the three mentioned:
Jeff Buckley singing "Hallelujah" (audio only -- I have to say, this is by far my favorite)
John Cale singing "Hallelujah"
k.d. Lang singing "Hallelujah"
Speaking of k.d. Lang, someone recommended this:
k.d. Lang singing "Crying" live in Sydney
Someone else recommended Walela, which is Rita Coolidge, her sister Priscilla Coolidge and Priscilla's daughter Laura Satterfield
Walela singing "Cherokee Morning Song" (cheesy stills but good audio; )
Milton Nascimento got raves, and here's one of his songs mentioned:
Milton Nascimento singing "Travessia"
Another rave was for this:
Ruben Blades and Jerry Garcia singing "Muevete"
Of course, I had to jump in and start talking about Doris Day, whom I am rather desperately hung up on. Picture, if you will, a room full of revolutionary San Francisco dykes organizing against the police in the early 1980s, young, furious, androgynously dressed. They stop during a long, contentious meeting to take a break, and relax by singing various uplifting things like "Joe Hill", "El Pueblo Unido" and "Amazon ABC". But one of their favorites is "Secret Love", which they are convinced is a coded lesbian ballad when performed by Doris Day. Yep, really happened. Listen and imagine:
Doris Day singing "Secret Love" from Calamity Jane
Doris Day singing "Sentimental Journey" from the Big Band era (this was my parent's "song")
I also grew up with a passion for Rosemary Clooney. All of her nephew George's dreaminess, smooth demeanor, big sensual eye-rolls and self-deprecating smiles originated with Rosemary. Not to mention a voice from heaven. Check her out in the following:
Rosemary Clooney and Jo Stafford singing autumn songs
Rosemary Clooney does Gershwin -- "A Foggy Day"
And, the ultimate Rosemary doing Gershwin: The brothers Ira and George were extremely close all their lives. When George died suddenly at age 38, he had written the music for a final song but Ira had not yet begun the lyrics. Ira finished the song as a tribute to George, and it completely changes your read of the lyrics when you learn that. (I wrote about this in my post last year A Word After A Word After A Word.) You can hear it here:
Rosemary Clooney singing "Our Love Is Here To Stay" (in 1993 at the Newport Jazz Festival)
Thursday, May 8, 2008
NOT YOUR TYPICAL MUSIC VIDEO LIST
Friday, March 21, 2008
DYKOGEEK, A PUZZLE FOR DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR FANS
Self-portrait of Alison Bechdel, from the interview with her by Anne Crémieux at TransAtlantica. © Alison Bechdel.
This was posted by me in the comments at Dykes To Watch Out For as fun for my colleagues there. I'm posting here with the answers. If you're a DTWOF fan, the answers form a familiar pattern. Go to the link above to see the original quiz, jump to after the fold for the solution.
DykoGeek, the game that combines geography, literary references, language and history for the ultimate puzzle with a Dykes To Watch Out For theme. See if you can decipher the following eleven clues (and if you can, then create another puzzle for us!):
[1] In the Stephen King Novel The Dark Half, these creatures are called “psychopomps,” creatures that carry spirits from the land of the dead to the land of the living. [Sparrows]
[2] A fictional FBI officer who was raised in a small town in West Virginia, with her father (a police officer). When she was about ten years old, her father was shot by robbers. He died a month after the incident. She was was then sent to live on a sheep farm with her uncle, where a significant incident occurred. [Clarice Starling]
[3] The edible rhizome section of a perennial plant commonly used as a spice, originating in China which continues to lead the world in its production with a global share of almost 25% followed by India, Nepal and Indonesia. [Ginger]
[4] Grandmother of Saint Timothy, this woman is noted for her piety and faith, and probably lived in Lystra, a city in what is now modern Turkey. Lystra is located south of Konya, a city previously known as Iconium. [Lois]
[5] This fortress was a military barracks built by Herod the Great in Jerusalem on the site of an earlier Hasmonean stronghold, named after Herod’s patron. It is thought that the area where the fortress was located possibly later became the site of the Praetorium. The Praetorium, or Pretorium, is thought to be the place where Jesus was taken to stand before Pilate. [Antonia Fortress, i.e., Toni]
[6] Another name for the Chinese constellation known as the Horn mansion, one of the eastern mansions of the Azure Dragon. [Jiăo constellation]
[7] Small towns of the same name, with a few hundred to approximately 14,000 people, occurring in Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Virginia. [Stuart]
[8] The most populous city in Australia, with a metropolitan area population of approximately 4.28 million, the state capital of New South Wales, and the site of the first European colony in Australia. [Sydney]
[9] The “Show Me” state. [Missouri, i.e., Mo]
[10] A Galápagos tortoise (Geochelone elephantopus porteri) who had an estimated age of 175 years at the time of her death in Australia. She was reportedly collected by Charles Darwin during his 1835 visit to the Galápagos Islands as part of his round-the-world survey expedition, transported to England, and then brought to her final home, Australia, by a retiring captain of the Beagle. [Harriet]
[11] An Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance, usually known by his first name, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his paintings and drawings. His career falls naturally into three phases and three styles: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two Popes and their close associates. [Raphael, i.e., Raffi]
Saturday, January 12, 2008
SOME NOTES ON BLOGGING
("Corfu Lights and Shadows" by John Singer Sargent, 1909, Transparent and opaque watercolor over graphite pencil on paper; a large, high-quality framed print of this has hung at the foot of my bed for 17 years, the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing at night)
At the rest of sounding like Thomas and his Friends, who are psychologically stunted around the issue of Usefulness (and avoiding public humiliation): My definition of art includes what Sharon Bridgforth refers to as "raising the energy". When I create, I seek to not only reflect my perception of reality in such a way that you have a chance at sharing the experience, but I also feel obligated to walk in beauty, to avoid anger or despair as destinations, and to weave into the fabric of my creation a belief that the viewer/reader has just as much expertise about the world as I do.
How well I achieve these goals depends on my skill level that particular day, of course. Holly Near once said that nonmonogamy was a post-patriarchal idea that we were trying to implement in a patriarchal environment. I think this goes for almost any of our best ideals: We have goals, and then we have reality. The tension between the two, the gap, can be extremely productive and even joyous if self-hatred is under control.
I bring this creative ethic to my poetry, my fiction, my essays, and my blog equally. I'm new to blogging, and have tried to learn the craft from reading others' efforts. Some conventions I follow, some I don't. For instance, I don't have a "Blogroll", I have a list of what blogs I'm actually reading regularly. I don't link to something unless I have derived good from it. No trading favors for me. I'm not in this to curry power and influence: I already have that in my life.
I also strive for graphics to accompany my text which offer an added dimension, not just illustrate my words. This means I spend a lot of time sweeping the web for interesting visuals, and my saved images files are enormous. I do my best to credit the creator of the graphic -- this isn't always possible, there's a great deal of anonymous stuff out there, but I search for origin when I have any kind of a clue.
I do this for two compelling reasons. One is the example we set for one another in the 70s, the heyday of lesbian-feminism, to credit our sources. We saw this as a behavior men did not tend to do unless legally or academically required, especially white men: For them, it was all about claiming territory by sneaking it away from others, and building ego through ideas. Our cooperative model, however, led to essays and even fiction being peppered with footnotes at the bottoms of the page, acknowledging the influence/conversation/support of another woman for our comprehension or embellishment of a particular thought. I first noticed it in the pages of DYKE: A Quarterly, but it was common in Sinister Wisdom, Common Lives Lesbian Lives, Chrysalis, Quest, Feminary, etc. Even graphic artists did this, such as Alison Bechdel in her strip Dykes To Watch Out For with her "Tip o'the nibs" squeezed into the margin.
The second reason is that I am assiduously trying to comply with the Web Accessibility guidelines spelled out at Wikipedia. Labeling a graphic means that text recognition software used by a blind computer reader, for example, can hear the caption and description of that image rather than just hitting the alphabet soup of graphics code and skipping over it. The blog server I'm using (Blogger) tends to limit my ability to create large and click-to-enlarge graphics, another accessibility recommendation, but I'm working on that as well.
As I have stated before, I avoid the practice of using some goofy riff to label a link instead of a clear description. This is an obnoxious demand that the reader either click on the link to find out what it's actually about (not all of us have the time and energy to live at our keyboards in this fashion) or ignore what might be something we really want to see. We should have enough information to make a choice. Some big-name political blogs are really terrible about this, and I've gotten into the habit of never clicking on an unclearly-labeled link. If someone won't make the effort to synopsize content into a handful of words, then it must not matter to them very much if I actually go look at it.
Conversely, I was inspired today by Liza Cowan's essay at her blog See Saw about the value of links, the revolutionary impact it's having on our discourse and our ability to not only "follow our bliss" but locate kindred souls out there in Cyberia. Liza says "Links are often my favorite part of blogs. I’ve found some of my most valuable resources by following links, not only in the body of the text but also by following the URL’s embedded in names of reader comments."
I, too, check out the profiles of someone whose work has reached me in some strong way. Ironically, although I knew Liza as a sister leader in our movement for decades, it wasn't until I saw her name in the comments section of a blog (unfortunately, not a blog which allows profiles to come through) that I was motivated to Google her down and commence one of the most rewarding relationships of my life.
(May your friendship spread all over the world -- Shen qing hou yi ji wu zhou)
I think the nature of reality is complex. Usually, more complex than we can comprehend, but dumbing it down in response is a major mistake. The truth is never simple. And art, communication, reform, atonement, any means of growth should simultaneously embrace as much of the complexity as we can see while earnestly attempting to deliver it in a comprehensible form.
One of my mentors, Terry Galloway, a genius of a playwright, dramaturg and director, always stressed that if we have been given an audience, we are not to indulge ourselves at their expense. We have a responsibility to work our asses off, to not intentionally confuse or insult them, to share with trust and goodwill. She was quite fierce about leaving adolescent embarrassment behind, and I often hear her voice in my head when I'm trying to edit a piece.
And, going off on a related tangent, here's a request: When interviewing an artist, please stop asking them the meaning of what they do. The meaning is in the piece itself, and what you get from it. Artists seem to feel compelled to answer these damfool questions with a long string of arcane solipsism which differs from the interviews with football players after a game only in vocabulary. The reason why someone wins a game is because they played better. The reason why an artist did X is because they thought it looked/sounded good. If you want to dissect the artist's psychology, point out that the reason why their faces are mostly expressionless or their conversation tangential is because they lived with a control freak molester, go right ahead but don't ask the artist to participate in it.
So, do offer me feedback and feel free to talk about anything at all in your comments, as long as its not white supremacist, woman-hating, or otherwise oppressive, and you're not simply hyping your own self. (If you do, I'll delete it swiftly.) Aim high, forgive yourself, and as Garrison Keillor says, do good work.
I leave you with a department store product page for HEMA, in the Netherlands, that is a stunning example of how creative a web catalogue can be. Wait patiently for the page to load, then keep you hands off your mouse and watch the place go wild: HEMA.
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