Rixosous

On Yellow Ribbons

Everyone my age and up remembers yellow ribbons.  We learned the song "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree" back in the early 1970s and we lived through the first big adoption of them as a symbol during the Iranian hostage crisis from 1979-1981, when we saw actual ribbons tied on trees everywhere while we were counting the days and weeks and months of the occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran and watching it play out as a political issue in the Carter-Reagan presidential race in 1980 (an issue that is much on the minds of people with long memories right now in light of last week's helicopter raid into hostile territory that succeeded where Carter's famously failed...) 

There was also a 1971 article in the New York Post by Pete Hamill telling the returning-convict story, which the Post has kindly republished here.  I never knew about that article before today, but the song was one of my childhood favorites even before the hostage crisis.   I love songs that tell a story, and this one is so simple yet so moving that it still makes me tear up.

Nowadays, the yellow ribbons have been reduced to those little magnetic stick-on things attached to cars, lost among a rainbow of other symbolic ribbons and now associated with supporting military men and women deployed overseas.  It had never before occurred to me to wonder about the yellow ribbon's history; I just assumed it started with the song.  That turns out to be wrong.  Very wrong.  And now I can document just how wrong it is. 

But before I get to my own little contribution to the historiography of the yellow ribbon, some background: 

Blood On My Name

Well, here's a creepy little music video/short film.  "Blood On My Name" is a ten-minute short from Whitestone Motion Pictures that wraps a teeny bit of plot and worldbuilding around a fairly decent song.  Major credits include Brandon McCormick as writer/director and Nicholas Kirk as writer/composer and performer (with Billy Wilkerson) of the title song.  Sean Bridgers and Justin Welborn play the two leads.

I've never heard of Whitestone before, but they seem to have a whole collection of films as well as lots of downloadable soundtrack music.  I'll be watching more of them in the future.

Spoilers behind the cut, so go watch it before reading on.

Stardancing

I heard the news today that Jeanne Robinson had died over the weekend, unsurprising since I knew of her fight with cancer, but saddening in the loss of a lovely artist of both words and dance.  I never knew her personally, but she and Spider's novel Stardance inspired one of those lovely songs that has stuck in my mind since I first heard it a quarter-century or so ago and still speaks to me deeply.  When I got my very first webpage, back in 1992, its primitive content consisted entirely of a quote from this song. 

I don't know who wrote it; I'm guessing one of the filk groups that performed at Shore Leave back in the mid-1980s.  I can still hear their voices in my head from an old live cassette tape I made then.  I transcribed the lyrics as accurately as I could long ago and repost them below with no intent to infringe copyright.  They express my thoughts more eloquently than I can myself.

So, and with sympathy to Spider and in thanks to Jeanne and to all those whose diverse arts leave the world a better place and stir creativity in others...

I shall leave the earth behind and dance where I am free
To dream of greater things
I shall say good-bye to air and choreography
And dance as thought I've wings.

We're All Mad Here

Crazy-mad this time.

I went far away last night and back again in the wee hours of the morning via shuttle and trains and subway and taxis and feet in the rain to hear S.J. Tucker (Skinny White Chick) sing at a lovely little house concert hosted by my friends Merav and Jon.  This falls under the heading of "crazy, not smart" on a weeknight, but I rarely get to see Sooj and hear her sing, and I didn't feel like waiting 'til next January at Arisia to do so.

(picture: Sooj sings "Alligator in the House" -- click to enlarge)

It started out as Hogwarts

Poor Bonnie Tyler. Not only did the Amateur Transplants borrow the tune of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" for their "Anaesthetists Hymn", now one of the makers of literal videos has piled on with a hilarious take on the song's rather mind-boggling early-1980s MTV video, supposedly storyboarded by Jim (Bat out of Hell) Steinman, who must have had a little help from a whole pharmacopeia of illicit substances.

I'm not a rabid fan of literal videos unless they're vocally very similar to the original and have consistently clever lyrics.  I don't like to watch three or four or seven minutes of video for only one or two good lines, and it ruins the joke if the vocal sound is too noticeably different.  It also helps if I know the original video and/or song.  I laughed myself sick last fall over this LV version of A-Ha's "Take on Me," the infamous "Sketchy Arm" and "Pipe Wrench Fight" video:

Take on Me: Literal Video Version

Deep Waters Don't Run Still

I wouldn't exactly say I'm into metal, musically.  My tastes are so eclectic I don't think I can describe them succinctly.  I like to experience music actively and viscerally, so anything I can dance or otherwise get physical to pleases me, from waltzes to hard, thumping metal.  I also like clever lyrics and interesting music videos.  By way of the latter, I've been watching/listening to a lot of Rammstein lately.  The lyrics are mostly wasted on me since they sing primarily in German, which isn't one of my languages beyond a half-dozen simple words (a few numbers and dance terms).  They generally sound angry, but German is a great language for rage, and as a friend of mine pointed out, for all I know they might just be aggressively reciting their grocery lists.  

(After that comment I went and looked up some lyrics.  Definitely not grocery lists.)

They've been classified as Neue Deutsche Härte ("new German hardness"), Tanz-Metal ("dance metal"), industrial rock, heavy metal, gothic rock, etc.  Whatever.  I've no clear idea what distinguishes those genres, but I know what I like.  I first heard a song of theirs when I danced to it at Stanford Waltz Week a few years ago, then was reminded of them last fall when I received a mix CD with one of their songs on it.  Since then I've been digging around for information and trawling for videos on YouTube.

When I say "oo..."

As usual, I'm about a year behind the curve on noticing silly things on the internet, like this video by Moog featuring British rapper MC Elemental, introduced as:

The quintessential English fellow, explorer, scientist, exotic dancer and some might say raving lunatic.  Banned from 13 of the colonies for 'unspeakable scientific experiments', yet heralded as something of a deity in a great many more.

I was filled with fear when I first saw the title, "Cup of Brown Joy," given the last time the word "cup" came up in the context of a video, but it has nothing to do with that other thing, I promise.  I think it could even be considered Steampunk.

Good Music, Good Cause

Amazing singer-songwriter-musician S.J. Tucker, Skinny White Chick, whom some of you may have heard me rave about, was hospitalized recently with unidentifed serious abdominal ick and may be facing more hospital time and surgery.  Since Sooj is an itinerant musician, she doesn't have health insurance and is already facing serious medical bills with more potentially to come.  (Insert standard rant here on the disgusting state of the United States health care non-system.)  I sometimes feel a little drained by the number of people I know with problems like this.  I can't help them all, but picking and choosing makes me unhappy.  This is an insane way to deal with medical crises (repeat standard rant).

This news has been floating around the net for a week or so, and various charity auctions are going on, but it took me some time to think about what I could contribute, since what I mostly do (historical dance) is not easily donated unless someone is geographically near me. 

Let me digress for a bit and talk about Sooj's music, which has been a great joy to me for the last few years. 

What Anaesthetists Do

I actually came across this video at my day job.  I work in (but not for) a hospital, which is not exactly a laugh-a-minute sort of environment.  So when I heard raucous laughter outside my office I had to investigate.  I found a bunch of my co-workers clustered around a computer watching this video and making interdepartmental jokes:

Drugs, I Dance

"I never drink wine, and I do not smoke shit."

One of those statements is actually true; the other is mostly true.  I just couldn't resist quoting from one of my favorite silly movies, which I trust Serge and/or Neil will identify for anyone who doesn't recognize it immediately.  And thus it is perfectly logical that I was dancing wildly around the house caroling rapturously about drug use early on a Friday evening instead of loading sound equipment into the car.

Airship Pirates!

Steampunk band Abney Park has finished the music video of "Airship Pirate," which I embed here for your viewing pleasure:

While I appreciate a good, thumping beat as much as anyone, I prefer it to be accompanied by lyrics I like as well, and now that I can mostly understand them (not the case at Saloncon with the disastrous sound system) I am suddenly much more into Abney Park than I was before.  I am particularly taken with the chorus:

With a crew of drunken pilots
We're the only Airship Pirates!
We're full of hot air and we're starting to rise
We're the terror of the skies
But a danger to ourselves now

Full lyrics are here.

After watching/listening to/singing along with this repeatedly, a strange, trancelike state came over me, and I moved slowly to one of my bookcases, where stuffed inside the pages of an elderly cookbook was a scrap of paper upon which I found the following:

Noctilucent Clouds We Sing

NASA is now making music videos.  "Noctilucent Clouds":

The soundtrack is by the wonderful Maryland a capella group, The Chromatics, who actually are rocket scientists at NASA and as a sideline do all sorts of wonderful science tunes plus non-science-related originals and covers (their version of "Love Shack" is a must-hear!)  I heard them sing live at Shore Leave last year and snapped up their entire run of CDs.

While I have your attention, here are a couple of other bits of science in song that they have up on YouTube.

Tempest 20th Anniversary Tour

Left, Norwegian band leader Lief Sorbye on one of the four instruments he played during the evening.

I wandered up to Vermont Friday night before a Saturday teaching gig to see a performance of California band Tempest on their 20th Anniversary tour.  They were performing at an interesting little hobbit-hole called Middle Earth, in Bradford Vermont.  Middle Earth is closing in a couple months, unfortunately.  It was a great little basement club with an  entertainingly Tolkienesque ambiance - trees "growing" along the walls, a trellis of branches over the stage, etc.  There was also very inconsistent wireless internet access; everything the modern hobbit concertgoer could want.  The only problems were the lack of a dance floor (criminal for a concert that included enough reels and jigs to get a corpse on its feet) and the overpriced nachos.  The lighting was fine for a performance and dreadful for an inexperienced photographer - mostly dark, with lighting on the stage being white in some areas and red in others.  I'm sure there's some way to compensate to for this if you actually know what you're doing, but even with Lief's okay to use the flash, my pictures are sort of dark and demonic looking (click the pictures for larger views).  Fortunately I have no pride or illusions about my ability with a camera!  More important than the lighting, though, Middle Earth either has fabulous acoustics or a genius of a sound guy.  The band was appropriately loud but not deafening, and the balance between the vocals and the instruments was perfect.  This has occasionally been a problem for me at Tempest concerts, since I like to hear the lyrics clearly, and with Lief's Norwegian accent this can be difficult if the balance is off.