My jr. high/high school friend Debbie Danesi (now Debra Marx but this is a time-travel post) sent me the sad news shortly before Christmas that her mother, Rose, had died. Because Facebook had put me back in touch with Debra, I did know that her mother had been having some health issues, but this was still a sad thing to hear.  Even though I hadn't ( Read more... )

Tonight will be the third Thursday evening that the local shapenote singers will head over to sing at our friend Joan's comfortable hippie house overlooking Powderhorn Park, where she is now in hospice care. I here forward the bulk of the note she wrote us all. This was written to a public list, so it doesn't seem a privacy violation, but mostly I ( Read more... )

At the Midwest Morris Ale, on most nights the pickup dancing goes on until the very wee hours of the morning. Dancers from different teams accompanied by some versatile musicians get together and dance any dance in any tradition for which you can muster a side. Sometimes a dance will get taught. Sometimes a specific team will get up and dance for ( Read more... )

I've mostly been off on FaceBook, but I wanted to get this link here. This is me at a sort of private club-party in my neighborhood, performing for friends, a song I didn't quite know as well as I would have liked (I didn't have much time to prepare), but I think this captures the fun.

The song is "Nobody Loves a Fairy When She's Forty", written by ( Read more... )

This is the report I'm submitting to my department, which I put here so that there's a public place I can link to.
( Report behind the cut tag )

This new digital era provides an overwhelming amount of photographic documentation of the world as it spins. I've been sifting through the many albums of the Midwest Morris Ale that have been appearing on Facebook and reminiscing in general. I've also seen some nice photos of my own team that I want to comment on here, mostly because my parents ( Read more... )

So I gotta' tell you about three amazing dances I was part of at last weekend's Midwest Morris Ale, dances in circumstances so specific to the Ale that they will remain unique. My challenge will be to translate the humor and fun expressed as movement into words, which at best provide only a second-order glimpse into that fun. Interestingly, two of ( Read more... )

It's hard enough to explain Morris dancing in general -- not to explain what it looks like, or its ethnographic history, but what it feels like from the inside and, therefore, why anybody would do it. But explaining Morris in general is easy compared to explaining the Midwest Morris Ale, because every aspect of the description requires some further ( Read more... )

If you want to get a sense of the self-involved arrogance of some practitioners of European classical vocal tradition, go browsing through YouTube for the various lessons on vocal technique people offer. I have no issue per se with anything that's being taught, and in fact most of it I'm finding useful and interesting (as somebody who spends a hell ( Read more... )

I grow wilder all the time with the liberties I'll take with an existing song. I've been working on a new song for tonight's Pub sing at Merlin's, and in this case I'm doing some major reworking of actual published old poetry, in the service of a workable chorus ( Read more... )