Nothing about the election

[ritaxis]

. . . until later.

I'm having a phone party at my house this afternoon to get out the vote in swing states. Did I mention that I noticed that California is surrounded by swing states? This phone party thing is through MoveOn. If Kerry isn't elected it's not MoveOn's fault.

I've been picking away at the meeting with Tía Citlali. It's hard to get right. But honestly, the biggest problem is as usual distraction: I found the Max Hunter Folksong Archive which has field recordings in RAM and AIFF formats (fortunately Winamp plays AIFF, because I can't get Real Player to download for love or tears and they don't answer my pleas for help)and the lyrics written out. First I collected five different versions of "Little Margaret," all of which had in common that none is to the same tune as Bascom Lamar Lunsford uses. Then I collected a bunch of songs sung by Almeda Riddle in 1965. I adore Almeda Riddle. She wasn't a famous singer or anything, but she came to the Berkeley Folk Festival when I was a girl to help give workshops on Sacred Harp singing (I think: I may be conflating things) and on song collecting. A song collector (I can almost remember which) demonstrated the problems with recording, and she sang a lot of songs and was very patient and gracious and told little stories with the songs. She had a very intelligent, dramatic, lyrical approach to the songs. I guess I was ten, because we moved away from California when I was eleven, and I couldn't h8ave been much younger. I had my own admission to the festival and rambled around to the workshops that interested me. And then we had lunch with Peter Tammany, who was almost famous as an "independent scholar" of folklore. And he demonstrated how to make a melodic instrument of a wooden ruler.

Here's the link in case you are interested in field recordings of Arkansas from the last century: http://www.smsu.edu/folksong/maxhunter/index.html

Back to Citlali, who thinks there's something awfully fishy about our guy. But she doesn't know that he can understand Mixtec yet, so she's talking about him in front of him.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Yep. We had six callers all told, though one friend couldn't come till the end and only made a few calls (I made her dinner, too, because she came straight from work and she had to go vote after and also take care of a sick father). We made 432 calls, 152 of them by one young woman who is just 21 (and therefore missed out on the 2000 election by a few months). We didn't reach many voters: 143, of whom most had already voted. Another friend got all the "I'm not gonna vote" calls, and I was really glad I didn't, because I listened to her and I couldn't believe anything we could have said would have made a difference an hour before polls closed.

It's midnight back East, and 9:00 here, and I think Bush is going to have a narrow win, and it makes me ill to think how they're going to spin that, what mandate he's going to claim.

I hope I wake up to find that I'm wrong. But all of the many states who had initiatives to ban gay marriage seem to have voted them in by a wide margin -- and for some reason that seems to be a weather sign.