Tag Archives: music

Learning History through Pop Tunes

Via Sightless Among Miracles, a link to a group of history teachers’ remakes of music videos to teach history.

French seismologists have probably noticed disturbances near Toulouse caused by  medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas spinning in his grave after having been  memorialized to the tune of “Venus.”

The rap-style delivery of Middle English in Canterbury Tales is excellent, contrasting nicely with the tune, which is The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreaming.”

Check out the whole YouTube channel. You won’t be wasting your time.

(The real rap-ready early modern English poet is John Skelton, but that is another story.)

Gallimaufry with Grosbeaks

Black-headed grosbeak, evening grosbeak, downy woodpecker. Photo by Chas S. Clifton

First black-headed grosbeak of the season (left).

If it’s Beltane, why I am still splitting firewood? Usually I observe the rhythms of the “Celtic” year by turning off the furnace at Beltane and relighting it at Samhain, using just supplemental wood heat otherwise. Not this year.

But during a brief sunny interval yesterday morning, the first black-headed grosbeak of the season landed on a feeder, and I snapped a quick picture through the window. That’s a downy woodpecker on the shadowed side, and up above, facing the camera, a male evening grosbeak—they have been hanging around for a couple of months, an unusual “irruption,” as birders say.

Other stuff:

•  The Beltania music festival happens next weekend, just down the road. The weather still looks iffy. A friend on a Colorado Pagan email list said that spring weather is “manic depressive.”  My own mental image for Beltane is snow on lilac blossoms.

• I liked this quote from an interview with Lon Milo DuQuette at Patheos:

I have a new book coming out in November (from Llewellyn) titled Low Magick — It’s All in Your Head, You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is. It’s autobiographic and contains stories of magickal operations I’ve done over the years. The title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, facetiously using the term “Low Magick” to refer to any magickal operation one actual performs rather than those one just talks or argues about.

• Jonathan Ott, who gave us the world “entheogen,” had his home destroyed by fire, needs help.

• An article on depression and dreams offers this:

In the 1970s, psychologists noted that people suffering from depression also report more dreams than average. In fact, people who are clinically depressed may dream three or four times as much. The quality of REM dreams (also called “paradoxical sleep”) is different too: more intense emotions, more negative themes, more nightmares, and more unpleasant dreams, in general.

And consequently depressed people often sleep worse. It’s a vicious circle.  Processed food is also linked to depression—another vicious circle. Feel low -> eat worse, etc.

• The Pagan Newswire Collective has two new group blog projects: The Juggler, on the arts, and Warriors & Kin, about issues facing past and current Pagan military personnel. They will be added to my blogroll.

Black Metal Music: ‘Abiding and Transcendent’

The wide world of academia  includes Buffy Studies and edited collections published by serious presses on the legal aspects of Harry Potter’s world.

So why not a quasi-academic symposium on black-metal music?

He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of disco and punk; and he spoke of black metal’s preoccupation with “the abiding and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon.”.

(Tip of the steel helmet to Margaret Soltan.)

From Abortion to Icelandic Music and Back

So Jason decides that he would rather blog about abortion than Iceland Paganism, which leads me to follow the Icelandic Paganism link, as I have read all the usual blather that followed the murder of Dr. Tiller.

Thus I am lead to the documentary Screaming Masterpiece, about Icelandic music, which is now in my Netflix queue.

Must get back to work now — I have to finish my paper for the CESNUR conference.

Back when I had to teach first-year composition, the joke was that students in search of a topic tended to fall into well-worn ruts: abortion, gun control, the drinking age, etc.

Dealing with the first one was easy, after a while. I just issued a classroom fatwa that only people who had had an abortion could write about the topic.

The real purpose, of course, was to segue into a discussion of pathos and how hard it was to write convincingly about a topic with which one has no emotional connection.

Yule and its Songs

The Northern Hemisphere winter solstice occurs at 12:04 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time on December 21. That’s 5:04 a.m. here in Colorado, perfect for the people drumming up the Sun at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. (I won’t be there–too far away.)

Remember to visit Archaeoastronomy.com for all your calendrical ritual-timing needs.

You can vote on your favorite Pagan Yule song(s) here.

UPDATE: A YouTube video of this year’s drumming up of the Sun at Red Rocks.

"Roots"


I found this video of “Roots” by the British folk-rock group Show of Hands at Rod Dreher’s blog, where there is more discussion and more videos. The lyrics are definitely “crunchy” with a loosely small-p pagan tone. I think I need to watch all the videos.

Gallimaufry with Dreams

¶ Anne Johnson on Dream Weaving.

¶ Anne Hill writes about dreaming too. (Is this a blog meme? Ann + dreams?)

¶ Northern Path likes the new Beowulf movie.

¶ Peg is upset about people stealing Pagan music.

¶ Caroline posts collage Tarot decks.

Gallimaufry with Cocktails

¶ Having watched most of the “Thin Man” movies out of sequence, M. and I finished tonight with the last of them, Song of the Thin Man. It is notable for its proto-hipster dialog in some scenes and what I am sure are well-veiled cannabis references, slipped past the Hollywood censors of the day. I have a vision of a 21-year-old Allen Ginsberg, watching it and going “Yeah, yeah!” “Best minds of my generation,” check. [Hidden] drug references, check. [Euphemized] “negro streets,” check. Insane asylum, check. Jazz, check. It’s almost all there. But no overt references to Patterson, New Jersey.

¶ A friend writes, “I am finally reading Her Hidden Children!! It is wonderful, Chas. Intelligent, concise, thoughtful, and respectful as well. Lovely, bravo, you are my hero. It is well written and pleasant to read. Your style flows like water over glass, never stumbling over complexities or data.”

I can’t marry her, so do I put her in my will? Flattery goes to a writer’s head like a big glass of cheap sherry!

¶ You should bookmark Jason Pitzl-Waters’ music blog, A Sweeping Curve of Sound. “Music, Blasphemy, Idolatry.” I’m in. Links abound, including to his Pagan music podcasts.

Gallimaufry with Nut Brown Ale

John Barleycorn Reborn is a double CD compilation of dark folk music from the British Isles.

¶ Staying with the British theme: if you see this, you must be in Glastonbury.

¶ Now this is embodied Paganism.

¶ “Sexy witch” Halloween costumes (big this year) require striped stockings. Why is that? The “sluts and slashers” aspect of costuming bothers some Pagans.

¶ Another example of group disfunction?

¶ I missed DOR Day. Next year I won’t. (I do wish bloggers would abandon white-on-black type. The only thing more eyestrain-inducing is purple-on-black.)

Slow-Cooked Campfire Gallimaufry

¶ If you are not totally saturated with LOLcat humor, there is always the LOLCat Bible. (Via Boing Boing.)

¶ Download a quick Dutch oven cookbook. Then at your next festival, elbow aside all those half-naked dancers, set your cast-iron Dutch oven in the lambent coals, and enjoy a drink while waiting for baked goodness.

¶ Ready for some retro-Web design? Download traditional tunes from the British Isles, Ireland, and “the colonies” in low-res MIDI format. Then visitors to your Web site can listen to them over and over until they hit the BACK button repeatedly to get away from the noise. (Lyrics also available.) Or maybe you just want to remember how “John Peel” goes.

¶ If you are an alchemist or on the staff at Hogwarts, your name is here. (Hat tip to Stone Circles.)