Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
June 15, 2024
(Some readers will find some of the material in this posting distasteful, but there’s nothing visual or verbal in it to merit keeping the kids away from it.)
I’ll blame this on the luminous Minnie Driver, playing Queen Elizabeth I in season 2 of the Starz tv period drama The Serpent Queen.
(#1) MD in one of her fabulous QEI costumes; the character invites extravagance in costuming and makeup (further examples to come)
Through an accident of dates, QEI will take us to “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” song and secret worlds hidden from everyday life (and, of course, gay bears). Then, through the excellent “hell of a queen” quotation, she will take us on a further wild ride to the Princeton Triangle Club in 1960 and, more generally, to queens in drag.
Buckle up.
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Posted in Actors, Costumes, Double entendres, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Princeton, Quotations | 1 Comment »
June 10, 2024
To begin the new week, a bilingual rock-music groaner in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:
To understand this cartoon, you have to know the Spanish gratitude formula muchas gracias ‘many thanks’, and you have to know that Jerry Garcia was the lead guitarist of the rock group The Grateful Dead; otherwise, the cartoon is just baffling (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Garcias (the plural of the name Garcia) is a pun on gracias ‘thanks’ in muchas gracias — but it works better as orthographic play (just AR for RA, a reversal) than as phonological play, since Garcias and gracias are strikingly different in their prosody (second-syllable accent in Garcias, first-syllable accent in gracias); and if Garcias is pronounced in English and gracias in Spanish, they’re also segmentally distinct, notably in the final syllable, [ǝz] in English, [as] in Spanish, and in the phonetics of the r.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, Puns, Spanish, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
June 9, 2024
… the hunky way-gay electroclash musician and performance artist, who somehow escaped notice on this blog until a photo from a 2017 Out magazine piece (“Gallery: Wet n Wild With Casey Spooner”) about him popped up on my Pinterest yesterday, with this, um, hose-drinking shot:
(#1) There are contexts in which this would be innocent fun — but this is not one of them
The rest of this posting will be soaked through with playful, entertaining queerness, from a performer who deploys his very muscular high masculinity to jab at and undermine conventional notions of gender, sexuality, identity, and relationships. That might not be to your taste; use your judgment,
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Music, Photography, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
June 5, 2024
From Sally [Sarah G.] Thomason on Facebook yesterday, a beetle tunnel report from Montana:
(#1) ST: I’ve seen [bark] beetle galleries on logs before, but this log, which lies across a trail we [AZ: linguist ST and her philosopher husband Rich, plus their dog Yaskay] often walk on here in Montana, has a particularly exuberant and artistic bunch of galleries
Five things: the title of this posting; beetle galleries (of tunnels); bark beetles; gallery lexicography; beetle tracks (as we referred to them) on a family place out in the boonies of New Smithville PA.
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Posted in Language and animals, Language play, Metaphor, Music, My life, Names | Leave a Comment »
June 3, 2024
A flyer for a 2025 concert series — Chamber Music San Francisco’s season in Palo Alto — which I was about to toss without further attention (it’s been many years since I’ve been able to go to concerts), when I looked at the address: it was mailed to Conrad Zwicky at my home address in Palo Alto.
How did that happen?
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Posted in Music, My life, Technology | 3 Comments »
June 1, 2024
Today’s Zippy strip, with a burlesque of a 1982 Elvis Costello song, notably covered by Chet Baker in 1987:
(#1) Zippy burlesques the first lines — Almost blue / Almost doing things we used to do — and the final lines — Almost you / Almost me / Almost blue — but in the middle he goes off, not into the wild blue yonder, but, stickily, into the glue
In case you didn’t get the allusion, Bill Griffith gives us a hint with his title “Almost Chet Baker”, pointing to a remarkable performance of “Almost Blue” by the jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker.
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Posted in Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Music, Parody | Leave a Comment »
May 26, 2024
Schroeder to Lucy in a Peanuts comic strip from 1/27/73 (passed along on Facebook yesterday by Jeff Bowles), providing a motto that speaks to me very deeply:
“The joy is in the playing”. As it was once for me (my right hand has long been too disabled for piano-playing). Meanwhile, in Sacred Harp singing, the joy is in the singing, which I can still sort of do, and in the joining with others to sing, which I can now do only remotely, but it’s a great pleasure anyway,
Sacred Harp singing brings with it an explicit ethic of doing for its own sake and of community; the joy truly is in the singing. Which (in our ordinary custom) we do with and for one another, not for an audience (which would provide external appreciation and perhaps a kind of fame) and not for monetary reward.
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Teaching and learning | Leave a Comment »
May 21, 2024
Passed along by two friends on Facebook recently, this Manchild Manor cartoon, deploying Kix breakfast cereal in a pun on the title (of the theme song for a tv show) “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”:
(#1) If you don’t know the song, this cartoon is incomprehensible
(I don’t know where or when this cartoon first appeared, and I couldn’t find it on the (sizable) Instagram page for the strip; I’ve appealed to the cartoonist, but in my experience, most artists view such queries as just a nuisance drag on their time, so they’re not inclined to reply. If he gets back to me, I’ll add his information to this posting.)
[Added on 5/22. Never assume. The cartoonist — Tim Thavirat, now living in San Diego CA after some time in Austin TX — has now replied, and even thanked me for sharing his work on my blog. This cartoon is from 10/25/18, early in the days of his cartoon page — a silly pun that tickled his fancy.]
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Posted in Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Photography, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
May 16, 2024
From a little while back, a morning on which I came to full consciousness to the music from the final section of Handel’s Acis and Galatea. Ravishingly beautiful music, as gorgeous as anything Handel ever wrote. When it all came to an end, I wheeled into the living room so I could get my Apple Music program to play the section again, And again, this time while I took notes on the music. Eventually I went on with things and was overwhelmed by the needs of my daily life — and am only now getting back to A&G.
This was not my first Morning Music Moment with A&G. A couple years back — on 5/3/22, in the posting “A moment of joy on waking up” — I celebrated some fabulously joyous music in the early sections of A&G, with some notes on the work.
A&G was written as an entertainment (like a little opera or a masque, for a private audience), in fact as a parody of pastoral opera, but ended up as what some critics consider to be the pinnacle of the genre. It has been altered by many hands for different purposes, so there are many versions (Mozart did one). In any case, Handel poured some of his most joyous music and some of his most drippingly beautiful melodies into the work, along with some delightful counterpart between different voices. Making it (in my estimation) entirely comparable to his Messiah — but full of fun instead of the glorification of God.
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Posted in Music, My life, Myths, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
May 14, 2024
Very briefly noted, a celebratory moment in two of my worlds — the Swiss diaspora and the gender & sexuality sphere — because CHE (Latin Confoederatio helvetica ‘Swiss Confederation’) is the winner in the 2024 ESC (Eurovision Song Contest); and because the winning performance was an extravagant production about the singer’s realizing and embracing their non-binary identity.
The facts in a nutshell from the Wikipedia page on the singer:
Nemo Mettler (born 3 August 1999), known mononymously as Nemo, is a Swiss singer and rapper who plays the violin, piano and drums. They represented Switzerland and won the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 with the song “The Code”, giving Switzerland their first win since 1988
And a p.r. photo of Nemo looking bigenderously beautiful:
The hyperkinetic performer caught in repose (photo: SRF / Ella Mettler)
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Music, Switzerland and Swiss things | Leave a Comment »
