Siena College, which is very near Albany, did a Evanier musing about typos, this definitely made me chuckle. It wasn’t the ONLY typo I found so far, but I’ve been looking.
ROG
Author: Roger
I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.
February Ramblin’
Lots of things that interested me recently, many of them dealing with music.
This website is quite interesting and has several fascinating SOUND CLIPS from Aerosmith to Pavarotti including Joan Sutherland and harmonics singing. Even if you don’t read the whole article, it is fun to listen to the singers clips and read the short info about their sounds. The sound clips and “infographics” of the vocal instrument are located in a box on page one of the article entitled “ALSO IN THIS ARTICLE”.
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There’s a film called The Singing Revolution which was shown in L.A., opened in NYC recently, and has been shown in a few other places in the U.S. It is a full-length documentary about the relationship between singing (much of it choral singing) and the struggle for Estonia’s independence from the Soviet Union.
You can see and hear film clips and request that the film be shown in your community
by going to the film’s website.
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Ever see Now Play it, a YouTube variation? It contains tutorials that explain how to play specific popular songs — many posted by the recording artists themselves. This page, for example, lets you download a 27-minute video tutorial of Paul McCartney explaining how he played the parts on a single from his last album. Other entries: Iggy Pop (“Lust for Life”); David Bowie (several, including “Heroes” & “Space Oddity”), Radiohead, others. The downside: The site bills for downloads. Let’s see how long THAT lasts.
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I know they’re over, but I still enjoy Ask Vulture: Should You Watch Sunday Night’s Grammy Awards?
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Subject: A RIGHT TO SING THE BLUES?
Not an inalienable right, it turns out.
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There have been dissenters of Brahms’ work since the nineteenth century, some of them heavyweights, e.g., Tchaikovsky and Britten. The blasphemy continues in this piece from the Washington Post by Anne Midgette.
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HEMA is a Dutch department store. The first store opened on November 4, 1926, in Amsterdam. Now there are 150 stores all over the Netherlands. HEMA also has stores in Belgium, Luxemburg, and Germany. In June of this year, HEMA was sold to British investment company Lion Capital.
Take a look at HEMA’s product page. You can’t order anything and it’s in Dutch, but just wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens.
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Why I’m supporting John McCain:
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A recent event that I missed, unfortunately. Compleat with Waxmagik and even More Wax.
ROG
Power Outage
Our electricity was out for three hours and eight minutes last night due to an ice storm that undoubtedly knocked down branches on some transformer somewhere. So I hasn’t a post for you today. (It’d probably be maudlin anyway, it being Valentine’s day and all.)
Instead, I will direct you to another blog I’ve contributed to recently. And if you ask me why, I’ll say it’s so I can hear this guy say, “You’ve sold out to the evil Hearst Corporation!” ROG
Major Taylor
On a library listserv a couple months ago, someone was looking for specific information about a French journalist and sports promoter by the name of Robert Coquelle. “Coquelle,” she wrote, “is known for having brought the African American cyclist, Major Taylor, to Europe to race.” Now I’m intrigued, not only by Coquelle, who interviewed the Wright Brothers early on, but mostly Who is Major Taylor?
Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor was a champion cyclist in a period of American history when cycling was very big. Major, who got the nickname from wearing a uniform in his early teens has a society named for him and has a pretty decent write-up in (shudder) Wikipedia. There’s a guy in Rochester who has put together an extensive timeline including his burial in a pauper’s grave in the early 1930s, despite making some serious money, arranged by Coquelle and others.
But it’s this story that most intrigued me. It suggests that Major Taylor was trying to be white, not as in passing for white – he was too dark for that – but rather hoping for a raceless society, recognizing that his blackness was a hindrance. Here’s a poem from this piece by Taylor:
As white as you are, and black as I be
Still it was nature’s Decree
For black as I be, and white as you are
I can be white though blacker than tar (Taylor 418) Apparently, he had hoped his “inner whiteness” would save him from Jim Crow segregation; it did not.
Whatever his racial ambivalence, he is now considered a African-American hero, and, I believe, rightly so. I encourage you to read more about him at the links I’ve provided, but also here and in Google books.
ROG
Steve Gerber
Back on May 19, 2005, I wrote:
Steve Gerber, writer of fine comic books such as Man-Thing and Howard the Duck (but don’t blame the movie on him!), wrote in his inaugural blog on April 4, 2005:
“I make my living as a writer. There is only one characteristic that distinguishes writers from non-writers: writers write. (That’s why there’s no such thing as an “aspiring writer.” A writer can aspire to sell or publish, but only non-writers aspire to write.) Anyway, writing for a living requires writing every day. Writing every day requires discipline. Discipline requires enforcement.
“I’ve lost the habit of writing every day. I need discipline. I need enforcement. You’re looking at it.
“I intend to post something on this blog every day. If I fail to do so, that failure will be very public, and I’ll be embarrassed by it. I don’t enjoy being embarrassed. So maybe, just maybe, making this obligation will help transform me into a habitual writer again.”
Of course, he was not able to hold to this schedule because of various ailments. Still he continued to inspire me. From July 18, 2007 re: Bill Moyers’ piece on the impeachment of George W. Bush:
Interestingly, I read about it first, not in the Huffington Post or even the knowledgeable Mark Evanier. Rather, I saw it first in Steve Gerber’s blog. Gerber is a comic book writer of some note, probably best known by the general public for Howard the Duck, and he wrote the second blog I ever read, after Fred Hembeck’s, and was the final inspiration for me starting my blog less than a month after he started his.
I never met the man. I never knew the man, except through his words. I followed his blog regularly, but didn’t write to him often.
I’m sure you know where this is going, if you haven’t heard already: Steve Gerber died late the day before yesterday. I’ll remember seeking out those first three Howard the Duck issues that my local comic book store didn’t get because the distributor thought it was a “funny book” that the store didn’t want. I’ll remember how my old employer, FantaCo, spomsored the premiere of the HTD movie, which seemed to have departed from Gerber’s vision.
But mostly, I’ll remember Steve as this smart, occasionally acerbic guy, whose example affected me far more than he could have ever known.
The aforementioned Mark Evanier is keeping Steve’s blog alive for a while.
Goodbye, Steve, and thanks.
ROG