Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Weeping for the Marche militaire

September 23, 2024

The famous one: Schubert’s composition for piano four hands, his Marche militaire Op. 51 No. 1 (later re-arranged for various combinations of instruments, up to a full symphony orchestra). Which was posted today by the Classical PIANO Geniuses (their spelling) group: in a wonderful warm performance by Daniel Barenboim & Lang Lang, along with three other performances, of which one — by Salim & Sivan (with the Israeli Symphony Orchestra sitting behind them, and a symphony audience in front of them, so it was part of a larger program) is brilliant, great fun; and the video is worth watching just to see Salim’s body language and facial expressions.

You can watch B & LL on YouTube here. And S & S on YouTube here.

(A bit more on Salim & Silver below.)

I had in fact intended to write about this four-hand piano piece before; I’ve never played it, but it’s a great favorite of mine, a masterpiece of joy.

What I was not prepared for was what happened a few bars into the B & LL performance: I began to weep with some mixture of sadness and joy, and when S & S began, I had tears running down my face.

Then it occurred to me that my joints were singing with pain, which I’d put down to the sudden ferocious heat of the day (in the low 90sF). But then I checked Weather Underground, and the air pressure had just nosedived. So the pain and the depression were barometric. And my plans for the day were toast.

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Posted in Music, My life | 4 Comments »

Mango(e)s and papayas, anything your heart desires

September 18, 2024

From the Economist‘s 8/24/24 issue, under the characteristically jokey head Beneath the (ap)peal, the informative subhead

South Asia’s long love affair with mangoes

(yes, about the appeal of the fruits in South Asia, incorporating –peal as a pun on peel ‘outer covering of a fruit or vegetable’)

Which stopped me in my tracks, because I would have written mangos rather than mangoes. It turns out that there’s real variation on this point; both mangos and mangoes are well attested (and have occurred in postings on this blog, though all the instances of mangoes are in quoted material, not from my hand). And, entertainingly, published lyrics for the song titled “Mangos” (made famous by Rosemary Clooney) come in two different versions, from different sources: one with mangos, one with mangoes.

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Posted in Inflection, Music, Puns, Sociolinguistics, Spelling, Usage, Usage advice, Variation | 6 Comments »

White Party

September 10, 2024

White Party: my name for the white-flower bouquet that León Hernández Alvarez gave me last Thursday for my birthday, which I trimmed and rearranged yesterday. It sits on my worktable, giving me great pleasure.

White roses are symbols of purity — sorry, not my game at all — and loyalty, which I think suits me pretty well. But then the shock yesterday when I saw that the white rose was actually a very pale pink (symbolizing gentleness, sweetness, and of course femininity, so also — yay for the boys with pretty pink pom-poms — gayness).

The name alludes to the White Party in Palm Springs (this year it was March 29-31), the circuit party that bills itself as “the largest gay dance festival in the world” (there are of course other White Parties elsewhere around the world; there’s some discussion of circuit parties — and for a bonus, shapenote singing — in my 6/22/10 posting “Rivers of Babylon”). Never felt bold enough or hot enough to go to one, and now both my dancing days and my traveling days are long over. But the name comes with sexy vibes, so I’m going with it.

But now about the flowers.

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Posted in Color, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Music, Signs and symbols, Smell | 2 Comments »

Queerios

September 8, 2024

🎶 9/8 🎶, and it’s Antonin Dvořák’s birthday (in 1841); see my 1/27/24 posting “Spillville”, about Spillville IA and the Czech composer, with this note:

let me recommend the Wikipedia article on Dvořák, for its detailed telling of a remarkable life, of great talent, a lot of pluck, a fair amount of luck, generous humanity, and the benefit of champions, advocates on your behalf (in this case, primarily Johannes Brahms)

(with a reminder that tomorrow, 9/9, is Negation Day, on which we protest, in German: Nein! Nein!)

But now for something completely different, from the Gay & Fabulous site (brought to my Facebook page all the way from Oz by Ruth Lawrence this morning):

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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and business, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Acting normal

September 2, 2024

Today’s Zippy asks the question: would it be better if Zippy acted in a normal fashion? Would that make Zerbina happier?


(#1) Faced with a normal-brain alternative to Zippy’s surreal non sequiturs about logic, word salad, and accountants, Zerbina decides to sing along with Rogers and Hart: don’t change a hair for me

A few words about Rogers and Hart’s song, and a few words about me and my postings, which, like my linguistics articles, are regularly labeled as eccentric and idiosyncratic, usually not in a nice way.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, This blogging life | 1 Comment »

Annals of commercials music

August 30, 2024

It appeared a few weeks ago, and then was often repeated on tv stations I get. At first, I heard it out of the corner of my ear, got the brassy women’s voices  singing what was not quite “We Built This City”, but was instead, “We Quilt This City”. So a commercial for something. Quilted puffy jackets for the coming fall weather? Beautiful bedquilts, pieces of folk art? Well, something quilted as in this NOAD entry:

adj. quilted: (of a garment, bed covering, etc.) made of two layers of cloth filled with padding held in place by lines of stitching: a blue quilted jacket.

Then I listened a bit more closely and pieced out:

We quilt this city on a comfy roll. 

Whoa, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. What kind of rolls are quilted? Oh… So the song goes on:

Say it doesn’t matter, say it’s all the same,
But we are here to change your toilet paper game.

Ah, quilted toilet paper. It’s 3-ply — so, though it doesn’t fit the NOAD definition of quilted, it’s analogous to quilted stuff as in the NOAD definition. It’s a natural metaphorical extension.

What we have here is a sales-pitch parody of Starship’s “We Built This City”, in fact a whole production number built around that parody. In a one-minute music video (first used on 7/29/24) that opens with the three Quilted Queens — three women of varied age and racioethnicity (most toilet paper is bought by women) — taking over a grocery store in “Keep It Quilted” puffer jackets; the store then turns into a neon-colored set, while the three sing their sales pitch. (As it happens, I find the Starship original really annoying — probably a minority taste, but there it is — so I find its being hijacked for a paean to toilet paper refreshing.) You can experience the whole thing on a YouTube video here.

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Posted in Compounds, Furnishings and tools, Language in advertising, Metaphor, Music, Parody, Technical and ordinary language | 2 Comments »

Diamonds, dildos, and in Seattle, clams

August 27, 2024

Acres, folks, acres. Diamonds and dildos got covered in my 8/26 posting “Acres of dildos”. Then from Wendy Thrash on Facebook the next day, more acres that I probably should have talked about in the first place. WT wrote:

Sorry, but as an old Seattleite this forces me to think of Acres of Clams

and referred to a Folk Music Blog posting, “The Songs of Ivar Haglund” by Jacqui Sandor on 5/28/19. I was just going to post WT’s note as a comment on my posting here, but then it occurred to me that “Acres of Clams” might not be familiar to everyone, and even if you know about the folk song (a text climaxing in acres of clams, set to an old Irish jig tune), the note might not have transported your imagination to Seattle, or, indeed, to Ivar Haglund. It might just have been baffling.

So now I will take you into a gigantic morass of the folk song world — in which, however, shines the canonical “Acres of Clams” text, which ends up being about Puget Sound (where Seattle is located), where clams abound, and where there’s a seafood restaurant founded by folksinger Ivar Haglund named Ivar’s Acres of Clams. You see, it does hang together. (And, despite the previous dildos, the clams in question are — surprise! — not lady-parts, but edible bivalves.)

The morass is a consequence of the fact that an extraordinary number of texts have been set to that same jig tune — possibly more than to any other folk tune — and then both the tune and all those texts have been popularly known by names that are phrases from the texts (you’ll see a small sampling of these names in a moment). Even the canonical clam text (from about 150 years ago) is so popular that virtually every folksinger who performs it alters the text to fit their own interests, passions, aims, and politics.

To set the stage, from the HistoryLink site:


(#1) From “Ivar Haglund opens Ivar’s Acres of Clams at Pier 54 in July 1946” by David Wilma on 6/19/00

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Posted in Dance, Folklore, Language and food, Language and politics, Language and religion, Music, Poetry, Pop culture | 1 Comment »

Dream blending

August 24, 2024

It appeared on Pinterest this morning, with no information beyond the artist’s name, Anthony Cudahy: a dreamlike sexual encounter like this one:


(#1) Like this one, but with a significant dream penis and testicle, which hog our attention; eventually, I’ll show you Full Frontal Man, but here, we’re drawn to the relationship between the somewhat anxious yellow-hued guy and the purple guy looming over him — note the subtle hand on yellow guys’s head, and then the head of another purple figure behind him, a remembered character, no doubt from another artwork, Cudahy’s or someone else’s

(I’d tell you more about this painting, but this is all I’ve got. So far the only copy of the image on the net seems to be this one on Pinterest.)

My first experience of Cudahy’s world. A quick intro from Wikipedia:

Anthony Cudahy (born [in] Florida, 1989) is an American painter. Cudahy’s approach is both figurative and abstract and takes inspiration from a breadth of source material ranging from personal photographs, movie stills, queer archival images and ephemera, and art history. Cudahy lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

… Cudahy’s paintings are often a hybrid of visual histories blending various figures from art history and queer photography into contemporary scenes such as portraiture, domestic spaces, or social sites.

Now for more detail.

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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and gender, Language and medicine, Language and plants, Male art, Music, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

Toto, Tonto, let’s call the whole thing off

August 11, 2024

Today’s Dan Piraro Bizarro, in three panels: an odd title panel that seems to be mostly about phallicity in the mythic Old West, and two Toto / Tonto confusion panels: the Lone Ranger and Toto (with a glancing allusion to Little Orphan Annie); and Dorothy and Tonto — to which I’ve added a Gershwin song in my title for this posting — to make a rich stew of American pop culture, covering the comics, jokes, movies, radio, tv, and popular music:


(#1) It’s a Sunday panel, so it’s by DP, not Wayno, and it’s a horizontal strip rather than a vertical one-panel gag (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)

I’ll look at things panel by panel, then comment on my title for this posting — but first I’ll point out that

— the second panel, set in the desert of the mythic Old West, is from the Lone Ranger world, but with the dog Toto (intruding from the Wizard of Oz world) in place of the faithful Indian companion Tonto (Toto in effect punning on Tonto)

— while the third panel, with Dorothy confronting the Wicked Witch of the West (accompanied by one of her evil flying monkeys) on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City of Oz, is from the Wizard of Oz world, but with Tonto (intruding from the Lone Ranger world) in place of Toto (Tonto in effect punning on Toto)

Here I’m carrying over my analysis, in yesterday’s posting “Harry’s scaffolding”, of one type of absurdist cartoon as involving an anchor world and an intrusive world; the second panel of #1 stands on its own as one such absurdist cartoon, and the third is another. The special delight of these panels is that the two absurdist cartoons are converses, conceptual mirror images of one another.

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Posted in Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Phallicity, Phonetics, Pop culture, Puns, Sociolinguistics, Variation | 5 Comments »

Silver Bob and Wooden Bob

August 6, 2024

Silver Bob. From Max Vasilatos Rasmussen on Facebook yesterday:

It’s lived as a piece of carved poplar at Arnold Zwicky’s house since the 1990s.

It’s taken a lot of years to get around to the cast piece.

Here is Bob in sterling silver, waiting to go to Arnold’s to complete the circle.


(#1) Silver Bob, soon to join his poplar brother; Max says: I’ve left him not entirely finished, so his sprues are showing, and he’s a little oxidized, which I think is good

(sprue ‘a channel through which metal or plastic is poured into a mold’ (NOAD))

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Posted in Art, Lexical semantics, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

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