Peeking into the rock

So you probably know my predilection for listening to Youtube's automatic playlists starting with a song I know. They tend to drift and it often dismays me to find out where we end up. But usually that's just an esthetic problem. Today I got a shocker.

I started with Gid Tanner and the Skillet Licker's "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" which is a nice and kind of innocuous old dance tune. I have to be careful with Gid Tanner because while he does sing a verse about hanging Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree (in "Pass Around the Bottle") and who can blame him, I've never been sure whether that was a true hatred of the Confederacy and the traitors who ran it or whether that was supposed to be a characterization of someone else's sentiments, and there's more than one verse in various other songs that embody crude racism. So when something comes up with that it in, I skip: man's been dead for years, there's no dealing with him now. "Fly Around M Pretty Little Miss" and "Give the Fiddler a Dram" do not have that, by the way.

Youtube likes to mostly play the same things for me, so there's a pile of Doc Watson and Dock Boggs and a nice little surprise with The Tarriers who I didn't remember at all (first interracial group? folk group? on tv) and I'm relentlessly skipping all the goddamned lady-murdering ballads.

Okay now comes the shocker. I know I shouldn't drive hits there so don't go and listen to this unless you're committed to flagging it, okay? Because this piece of inflammatory garbage has been floating around for at least four and a half years, has been upvoted over two thousand times,and you don't even want to know about the comments. Let me tell you a bit about it first. It's called "Coonshooting boogie." Already you're uncomfortable, right? The artist is listed as ARYAN. Now you know for sure, don't you. I needed more than that before flagging it so I listened to bits of it. If it was subtle, I'd have to explain it, right? Not subtle. First random line I listened to was enough: "shoot em up good, shoot em up bad, hand a noose over that coon's head."

I have flagged it and Youtube's flagging menu is dumb. You have to choose violent or racist.

Do us all a favor if you're up to it-- go flag it. It's right here. It's got more than two thousand upvotes. More than two thousand times some actual human being has come across this piece of shit and said, yow, this is awesome.

I swallowed Thornlost in five hours after I picked it up but the next book isn't even published. Now I understand the plight of the person who normally reads series books.

Like I said for Elsewhens and Touchstone, I can't describe these books so they sound like good books. But I love them. The key questions of the books are all about the complex relationships among people who are not lovers (at least not so far). The personal, the political, the magical, class relationships, gender issues, interracial relationships in a society that believes itself to be post-racial, even environmental issues, are echoed and mediated by the frightenign possibilities of these relationships. There's a bunch of stuff about the manipulations of art and audience, too.

Notice I've been talking about the abstractions here. Would you be more likely to read it if I said it was a fantasy novel which employs Dungeons and Dragons -like "races" with inherent gifts? I was really uncomfortable with it when I first saw those things deployed, but as I've seen how Melanie Rawn tears that stuff apart and stomps on it while allowing the characters to continue to believe in different versions of it in different ways, I've started to admire her for it. Also, it's one of those fantasy worlds where people wear a lot of ribbons and velvet when they can afford it, but she's much more aware of the economic and technical-industrial questions around clothing and class than most high fantasy authors seem to be.

I may end up actually reading things from her other worlds, even though they seem to have even more high-fantasy trappings and I often get itchy when I pick up books with dragons and princes and things in them. We'll see.

I'm still slowly working my way through The Coasts of Bohemia and I'm really really glad I stuck with it. He's dealing with the Enlightenment and the early Czech nationalist movements in nuanced, fact-dense and eye-opening ways. I'm fascinated with the way he traces how particular written works travel through time and their meaning changes while their words remain faithfully the same. Derek Sayer is just a much more impressive historian than I thought he was from the introductory chapters. He's treating the various actors in history, for example the Bohemian Estates, as the complex entities they were. Yes, for example the Bohemian Estates. These are the indigenous aristocracy. They were in various times the spearhead of the push for local autonomy. Sometimes they were allied with the students and workers and sometimes not. Sometimes they were preponderantly Slavic-speaking, but for example in the late eighteenth century when the modern nationalist movement was born, they had been speaking and reading German for close to two hundred years. And their complaints about the centralizing tendencies of the Austrian government included that the new laws freed up peasants from having to give two-thirds of their labor and earnings to their lords (they still had to give them some, of course, and now they also had to give more than they used to directly to the central government, but the net effect was to leave a lot more in the hands of the peasants): and that the new laws also made lords and peasants alike answerable to the courts of law and gave the peasants the freedom to sue their masters. There was likewise generally more freedom of movement for all the working classes than before, and universal education was instituted for all classes (and yes, for girls, too). There was an immense tug-of-war over languages. Sometimes the centralizers instituted actually more diversity of language in education and official business, in order to draw everybody in better, and other times Czech (and other languages) was vigorously suppressed so that everybody would be doing business in the same language. Sound familiar? So anyway, this is fascinating stuff, and it makes me want to go looking for some of the folklore and literature that was collected, written, and published in these years. The direction that Czech intelligentsia appears to be going is from an Enlightenment "Land Patriotism" including a lot of dictionaries and museums and challenging of historical texts to a Romantic Nationalism, the kind that leads to exactly what you think it will lead to, and did, even beyond the participation of the Nazis. I'm also seeing why the Nazis thought they could fold the Czechs into their orbit without much resistance, and also why the Soviets were surprised the Czechs didn't want to do exactly as they were told. Not so much that they thought the Czechs were docile in each case, but because they thought the Czechs were one with the Program.

I'm about to read The Song of Achilles because a friend of mine has been begging me to so we can talk about it. She's a huge Iliad fan to start with. I also picked up a random Polish-Lithuanian novel that might either be really interesting or else might be repellent. We'll see.

On another front, speaking of Czechs and so on, Frank sent me this video of the most popular Moravian popular tune of like thirty-forty years ago, with English subtitles. Natually since then I've been tracking down all the videos ever made of Ivan Mladek and the Banjo Band, and it is illuminating.

When you have an earworm and for once you want to undulge it rather than exorcising it and either you don't know the name of the song or worse, you do know the name of the song and youtube is full of songs with that name or a similar one and you keep clicking and clicking trying to find the particular song.

I had no idea how popular lemon trees were as a topic for Greek and Middle Eastern folk and popular songs. Many of them are nice, but none is that particular song I want.

Edit: found it. This group appears to be Hungarian? And the drummer has green hair.

2nd edit: I also found the lyrics.

So I had lent my banjo out and I just got it back, and I'm very glad to have it, but I need to get a new bridge for it.

I'm not an accomplished musician. I play for my own enjoyment, when I feel like it. Sometimes this causes a dilemma. People think I'm being weird and rude and ungenerous if I don't play for them, but if I do play for them they're embarrassed for me because I'm really that unaccomplished. And no, it's not "not as bad as I think it is" -- I can't even tune to a tuning fork or pitchpipe or other person's instrument, I can only tune the banjo to itself, and then only with great difficulty. I know only a handful of tunes that I learned by ear. I can puzzle out the notes on sheet music, but slowly and with difficulty and it's not worth doing most of the time. But I can have a lot of fun banging away on my banjo.

I can sing in a group, when I find myself there. But my banjo playing is not a group activity.

I can't even remember what I read in the weeks I didn't post, which is why I have joined this little game.  Anyway, my bathroom book is A Hundrede Thousand Fools of God which is not about religion especially: it's about everything to do with ethnic music in ex-Soviet Central Asia since before it was ex-Soviet to roughly now. It comes with a CD to which I have not listened yet. It's more of my father's ethnomusicology trove. It's really interesting, and the author's point of view is one of the least annoying and most nuanced ones I have read when assessing Soviet history. Even things he hates (like the Soviet penchant for inventing large-ensemble music styles for each nationality, whether the instruments and the musical styles were suited for it or not) he is able to look at with open eyes. It's refreshing to read something that is neither an apologia nor the usual dumb, uncaring knee-jerk anti-sovietism that you see around the place.

My bedroom book is Stephenson's Reamde which I am having trouble with. It's very, very scary, because he's got this whole normal, benign world that people are moving through and then -- people who view large amounts of murder as a simple, sensible business strategy get involved. It is very long, and very detailed -- not loving graphic details of murder, but it doesn't need it to be unsettling and even occasionally disgusting (I don't mean that the writing is disgusting, but ddisgusting things happen).

I seem to have inordinate amounts of trouble with all sorts of things lately. I haven't really finished very many of the books I've started this year.

On another front, I got deferred for giving blood today. My hemoglobin was 11.5. It needs to be 12.5 to give blood. Last time it was low and then it came up enough when they re-tested it. I do not like this development: I used to have remarkably high hemoglobin, and now it is below the normal range (it should be 12 to not be considered to have anemia or something). I am pissed off. My diet is normally high-ish in iron. I have a reason at hand for why I might be dropping hemoglobin levels, but I do not see an immediate answer for what to do about it. Also, I still have no health insurance, so I'm looking for self-treatment first. I will go see the doctor but first I will do whatever I can find that is obvious so as to be able to come in with that information and make the most efficient use of his time.

On still another front, a PSA: too many livejournal users are using the automatic location finder thingy and they are publishing the exact address from which they are posting. This is a dumb move, folks. If you want to post a location, use some kind of cute shorthand instead of your whole address.

Pyrophone -- an instrument in which flames cause vibrations in glass tubes.

Symphonia-- ah, who knows?

Glassichord -- different from the glass harmonica in that it is played like a spinet and little hammers hit glass rods.

Marimbaphone -- which could be used with a bow.

Lithophone -- yes, a xylophone made of rocks.

Crotales -- little bowed cymbals.

nail violin

Daxophone

friction harp

Ball point pens  now, go surfn the pen tapping

*I know several people with six children, so I spent a few moments and tallied up all the women I knew who were definitely done bearing children, and all their children who were either living or had lived to child-bearing age, and made a crude average.  The result was 2.4 children/woman, which is a tiny bit above what's necessary for replacement, and also much like the US as a whole.  And yes I know "all the women I can think of" is not a method.  It was for fun, so I could say "don't judge these friends of mine, without them, the rest of us wouldn't be producing enough children to carry on."


*I have spent several days surfing the Central Asian-to-Siberian You Tube videos (I learned the tune and refrain to "A-Shuu Deikei-O" and turned it around from a competition taunting game song to a simple song to describe infant's motions when they're dancing, as a welcome-back present to my babies.  They weren't impressed, but they were glad to see me). I have a present for you!  It is two excellent musicians in very funny hats playing a competition concert with a komuz (on the left) and a dombra (on the right).  I have rarely seen such accomplish musicians be so ridiculously playful. I do not think they are competing for a prize.  I think it is a game. Like the Inuit Throat Singing, which is an improbable girl game involving amazing sounds and the goal is to make your partner laugh first.

Like break dancing.  And capoeira, except when you play capoeira you could get your ribs kicked in.

Here is a link to some of that hypnotic Hungarian string music.  The video is an hour and a half long.
edit: have another one -- a whole raft of violinists paying tribute to one who just died.  Catch the cute kid with a stick and pretend bow at the beginning.

On another front, I have total laryngitis -- no voice at all, and no real warning: I was suddenly hoarse in the afternoon yesterday, but not extremely, and then I woke up with nothing. I can't really work with no voice, so here I have been all day, messing around with an embarrassing little Sims project -- trying to make the art nouveaulicious build set not suck.  It is clearly not finished: the edges are much rougher than EA's artists usually do, and the texture is nothing at all.  Obviously, it was a concept sketch and when EA decided they were done with the SIms 2, they yanked the project away from the people who were working on it and slapped the thing on the store page and people paid good money for it.  It's promising.  I don't have the skills to smooth out the mesh but I can retexture the things so they actually look like more than a jigsaw stencil.  maybe.  If you could see my desktop now, you would see this garish rectangle of awkward swirls of lime green, magenta, periwinkle blue, red, and ashes of roses -- justfive colors that would be distinct enough that I could use the magic wand selection tool and always get the right field.  This is a template for a layer that will have different colors of inlaid woods or paints, depending.  I traced the general outline from the object texture, but that was not immediately successful as the original texture had very little actual molding or shading to it.  It was like a flat piece of plywood, really.  Which means that the swirlies I put into the texture will look like crap if I don't figure out how to sculpt it all.  I think I have a trick to do that, involving the find-edges thing and then using the edges to make highlights and shadows on a different layer from the color part of the texture. But I also think there will be a lot of intermediate stages of suck.
For one thing, I can't smooth the blobs of color for the template, so therefore the curves are really difficult and tend to be hideous.  And not in the good way. 

Another thing is that there are five pieces to this: one-tile door and arch, two-tile door and arch, and a one-tile window.  I have started with the one-tile door. They do not share a common texture, and the swrily bits behave differently on each piece, so they will be happy if they go together at all by the time they are finished.

Also, the young doctor's go-to-city-hall marriage has turned into a Disney princess wedding with oranges.  Prague has a way of doing that to you, I guess.  At least the young folk are having fun.

I cannot reconstruct the path that led me to Laura Lavric and Mioara Velicu. I don't understand even a shred of Moldovan, so I have no idea if there's an ideological or moral land mine hiding in this stuff, but I love the way they sound and the energy of their performances.

edit: I just figured out that the male singer on a couple of the records that we dance to Friday nights is actually Mioara Velicu after all.

(maybe not named after us, but named after the same town we're named after, anyway)

I thought that Chemnitzer was a mere brand name of accordions. But Wikipedia says we are a particular type of concertina, "most closely related to the Bandoneon." And, apparently, when you see a concetina in a folk or polka band, especially in the American Midwest, chances are, it's a Chemnitzer.

It's really weird to be googling this, and see quotes like I know, I know… we already have enough accordions around the house, but I've always been attracted to the chemnitzer ...

I mean, I've always been attracted to the chemnitzer! Speaking as the resident Kemnitzer hereabouts, I thank you.

(I wanted to include an accordion in a scene I was writing)

edit: Also, the decorative style of a bandoneon is usually more subdued, while chemnitzers often tend toward flashiness.

well, I don't know about that.