SharondaWoodfin.net

Top 13 Reasons This is a List Post

1. I don't care what search engines think about placing posts into multiple categories.
2. I'm still streaming Xena.
3. I'm adapting my taiji routine to include my burglar beater (approximately 3' section of a young tree -- which had to be cut down because it was growing too close to the house -- complete with spikes where the tiny limbs were growing; too short to use as a bo staff, too long for a billy club, painful if you whack yourself with the spikes).
4. I'm a bit distracted by all of the Adam Lambert stuff. LOLed, literally, at the faux fellatio on the AMAs; put off a bit by the kiss, but only because it struck me as more aggressive than sexual. Noted that Adam was right about one thing: gender discrimination. CBS blurred the guy-on-guy kiss, this morning, but didn't blur the whole Madonna-Britney-Xtina thing. (PS, I muted Eminem, and played with the dog 'til he was off the stage.)
5. Sunday was my mom's 77th birthday.
6. Still have things to do regarding the recent death of a friend.
7. I've been having to cook for the dog for the past several days, while waiting for his dog food to ship. This isn't as simple as "Hey, Jerr? You want a burger?" Feeding your human kids shouldn't be that simple, either.
8. A bit put off with at least a couple of high-quality dog food companies. One because they rant about chicken meal, while replacing said meal with oatmeal, instead of adding more meat. The other because a commitment to "indie pet specialty retailers" is the reason they site for not selling in supermarkets. 'Cept PetCo ain't "indie", and that commitment does nothing for rural dogs, regardless.
9. Doing a bit of chart work, which is a bad thing, because I can easily get obsessed with that stuff.
10. I've been making a concerted effort to not blog while angry. If I manage to stick with that goal, hiatuses may become the norm around here.
11. Trying to get enough points for the portable hard drive at Club Bing, because I need a way to back up my files.
12. The scanner is pretty much done. Reworking old designs until I can get a way to draw again.
13. As my mention of taiji would suggest, I'm out of balance, and trying to find it, again.

Free Music from Amazon: Dragonette, Skinny Puppy, and Ghostape

It's feeling a lot like the '80s! For some of us middle-aged folks, that's a very good thing, indeed! This week's edition of The Amazon MP3 Download newsletter included three free gems with a bit of an '80s music vibe:

• Dragonette, "Pick Up the Phone"

  This song is my favorite track of the week, and could've easily seen wide air-play in the '80s. It's just really listenable. The lyrics had my gaydar bleeping, and the video only served to reinforce the alarm. The video for the band's "I Get Around", on the other hand, eliminates the need for gaydar, altogether. To echo Sarah Warn at AfterEllen:

  Sadly, lead singer Martina is married to the bass player, Dan, so she's not actually gay in real life. Nor is she a champion tennis player. But the video is hot and pro-lesbian, so I'm willing to overlook that detail.

  Visit Dragonette's official site here or check out more songs on their MySpace page.

• Skinny Puppy, "Chainsaw"

  These guys are actually from the '80s. I'm one of those people who had heard of, but never actually heard, Skinny Puppy. Think New Order, but with growly, gravelly, more-industrial and less-melodic vocals. And power tools.

• Ghostape, "Many Stars (Ste Mix)"

  I really want to pronounce that "ghost tape" and not "ghost ape", but whatever. I downloaded this primarily because there are some unusual sounds in the track. I'm just that easy. The remix is a bet repetitive, but there's enough good in it to make me wonder what the original version of the song sounds like, beyond the few seconds that Amazon provides by way of a sample. This song has a sleepier vibe than the other two. Great for when your tired from dancing to the first one and being angry with the second.

Adam Lambert's Out Interview

According to Out editor Aaron Hicklin (via Michael Musto at The Village Voice, which I found via MJ's Big Blog, and -- my god! -- this is starting to feel like a game of whisper down the lane), Adam Lambert's management were a bit dickish about Adam's appearance in the Out 100:

*Adam's people were reluctant to let him appear on the cover. They only let it happen if it was a group shot, preferably including someone straight. (This even though Out was first in line, ages ago, in asking for a Lambert cover. Somehow Details was granted a crack at him first, presenting the singer caressing a barely clad woman and talking about kissing girls, though he did also manage to get in the fact that he's gay).

*Out was urged not to make Adam too gay in the shot.

*They were also informed that Adam probably wouldn't be able to attend an Out 100 event because they didn't want to jeopardize his record sales.

If true, the condition of including a straight person on the cover should be insulting to every non-straight person in existence. No offense to Cyndi Lauper. I like Cyndi Lauper. I was glad she was on the cover, because she's been a long-time friend to the GLBT community. I don't think that straight people should be excluded from the cover, or from the Out 100. But that particular demand from Adam's management sounds a helluva lot like "heterosexuality equals legitimacy", even if that wasn't the motivation behind the request. 

On the other hand, Adam is not Adam's management. There's no closet in the actual interview:

To be honest with you, it was a really weird moment, because I’ve been living in L.A. for eight years like, yeah, I’m gay.

I just happen to be a gay man -- and I’m not ashamed of that at all.

And my personal favorite:

But wouldn’t you say that it was a minority of people who were actually surprised that you were gay?

Yeah, I would hope.

On the surface, it appears there may be a bit of cognitive dissonance, there, between Adam and his management. But then there's this:

...We’ve gotten plenty of push back from your management -- and many other people’s -- who say, “Well, let’s not be too gay…”

Well, you know, I think that there’s something to that, though. I think the whole magic of this moment is that I’m not alienating anybody. I’m not trying to anyway. I want as many people to feel like they can like the music. I don’t want to edit myself to the point where I feel like I don’t have integrity. But at the same time, I feel like I don’t want to alienate people, so it’s really hard. It’s almost like being a political figure. It’s like a balancing act. I feel really good about how open I’ve been, ’cause I really don’t feel like I’ve hidden anything. It’s like the picking and choosing. When is it appropriate and when is it not? One of the things that I don’t like about the gay community is that people define themselves by their sexuality -- and that’s bullshit. It shouldn’t be about that. It should be that it just so happens that you’re this or that, and that’s your sexuality. It doesn’t mean that that should dictate what your social group is or where you go out or who you talk to or what your interests are. That’s bullshit. That’s outdated.

And even though the quote from Adam seems far less offensive than the list of his management's alleged demands/requests (indeed, a good deal of it makes sense; also, it's in context), I'm still a bit put off by the notion that someone being "too gay" might be too alienating to Adam's audience. Not because of any sort of gay issue, in and of itself, but because it feeds into the polarized notions of gender that, in turn, feed those gay issues, and transgender issues, and even some issues for all of you legitimizing heterosexuals.

Am I put off enough to regret buying Adam's album? Not at all. This isn't Eminem rapping about raping lesbians. Plenty of you -- and this time, I don't mean heterosexuals -- have bought his albums. The only way to justify punishing Adam for a perceived slight, while willingly putting out money for that crap, is if you're also willing to admit that you're holding Adam to a higher standard (ridiculously so) precisely because he's gay. And that's no justification, at all.

The Weekly Standard: Hark! the Heralded Dylan Sings

As a pop music reviewer put it in the New York Times a few years ago, by way of exculpation, Dylan "dips into a shared cultural heritage" to write songs that "are like magpies' nests, full of shiny fragments from parts unknown." The problem is, we do know where some of those shiny fragments come from; most recently they've included lines and images taken from a modern Japanese novel and the mawkish poems of a 19th-century Southern versifier with the unlikely name of Henry Timrod. More to the point, in the folk tradition, performers didn't copyright their works. Property rights would have complicated beyond recognition that gentle spirit of communal give-and-take.

Dylan not only copyrights his stuff, he publishes it under the auspices of the particularly ruthless copyright enforcer BMI, and then without apology he cashes the royalty checks from songs that depend on lyrics that aren't his and melodies he didn't write. He must reckon that a shared cultural heritage is all well and good, but a man's got to make a living. To cite the most lucrative instance, Dylan copied the tune of "Blowin' in the Wind" from an old spiritual called "No More Auction Block." So far so normal, as far as the folk tradition goes: Just one troubadour tipping his dusty slouch hat to a forgotten forerunner. But Bob filed ownership rights over the melody, and it has been a favorite of elevator-music programmers for nearly half a century. He has a big house in Malibu to show for it, with ocean views. No telling what the real tunewriter got for thinking it up.

via www.weeklystandard.com

I knew there was a reason I didn't like that guy! Of course, my dislike may have more to do with a friend in college who drove me absolutely insane with Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan. Odd that she never mentioned this stuff.

Bob Dylan's "borrowing" may not be news to many of you, but it was to me. What I found even more interesting than the snippet of the Andrew Ferguson article quoted above, is a 2006 blog post from Ralph the Sacred River, focusing upon "borrowings" in Dylan's memoir, and the comments serving to justify those borrowings.

Yes, borrowing is a literary tradition. There are passages in Stephen King novels that just wouldn't be as scary without a particular bit of a particular song playing on the car radio. But King doesn't pass those lyrics off as something of his own invention. 

I guess the big question for me is this: If borrowing is OK for Dylan, why wasn't it OK for Hootie & the Blowfish?

In the end, I know that no question matters. Those who see Dylan as a genius will justify anything Dylan does just as quickly as others will defend Roman Polanski or condemn an acquitted Michael Jackson or O.J. Simpson. Why? Because we're all elitists, in one form or another, justifying the actions of those we admire or have some sort of affection for, while vilifying the same actions in others.

As for myself, I have a sudden urge to listen to "Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues". 'Cause, unlike the contents of this blog post, that shit's just funny.

Book money? Yeah, that's gone.

And it'll be weeks before I have anything to show for it.

Yes, I recently asked for book suggestions regarding my Barnes & Noble gift cards. Yes, the response was overwhelming singular. No disrespect to Jayne d'Arcy intended, but once the snippets from Adam Lambert's For Your Entertainment album were posted to Amazon UK, the whole notion of buying something to read flew out the window. And I knew it after the first few vocal notes of "Music Again".

One quick pre-order later, and that illustrated edition of the Tao Te Ching I've been coveting was, once again, on the back burner.

Oh well. It's hard to read a book when one can't pull herself away from the internet, anyway.

Hat tip to thespindleshay for Tweeting me toward the samples and rescuing me from the twin traps of luddite literacy and philosophical enlightenment.

From the Archives: Why I Hate Classical Music

This was originally published in October 2007, on a blog far, far away. It's being republished, now, because Jayne d'Arcy's The Details, or Who is Geminiani? made me think to do so.

The comments on the original post ran something like this:

sara: that's cute

Elrena: Ha!  That's funny.  It made me remember a conversation I had with my mom back when I was in high school (she's an artist and a musician) -- I asked her why, if all the classical composers were so smart, they couldn't think of anything better to call their pieces than "opus."

jayne d'Arcy: I love a lot of classical music, but most of the time I have no idea what piece it is, because of the stupid name!  lol great cartoon!

Bob: I feel like I am witnessing some kind of Sam renaissance. This is so much fun!

Talia Mana: Awwww I like classical music!!!

Me: Talia, I like some of it, too. But, like Jayne, above, I really couldn't tell you which pieces I enjoy. ;)

And my last comment still holds true. Sure, when I hear "Eine Klein Nachtmusik", I might recognize that it's Mozart, but when I heard Korngold's "Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Major, op. 35: III Finale: Allegro assai vivace" on the car radio, I had to try to remember the key terms (Korngold, concerto, violin, and allegro), then Google like mad once I got home.

Seriously, a better naming convention would be a fantastic thing! Even simple subtitles would work. We could call it The Colloquial Classical Re-branding Project, or something equally snazzy.

While we wait for that to happen, though, you can listen to a small snippet of the concerto mentioned above, henceforth known as "My Dog Hates Violin", by clicking here.