Archive for November, 2007:
Bargain Bin Reviews: Kickbutt City, U.S.A.
Kickbutt City, U.S.A.
The Juleps
Price: $5
Verdict: This will be a short review because this CD isn’t really anything special. It’s nice, and certainly worth the $5 I spent on it. But it’s kind of bland despite its rockin’ country beats.
This is part of a sequence of reviews on CDs I found at bargain piles in the local CD stores, thrift stores or some other place that sells really cheap CDs. Want to read more bargain bin reviews?
Subscribe to the comments for this postOn Giving Thanks
One of the things I learned in theater school (not really, but it was a school and I studied theater, so it’s close enough) is that you always end a phone call or e-mail with “thank you”. No matter what that communication is, just end it with a word of thanks. A request for ten hours of extra rehearsals? A message telling a set designer that he completely screwed up and a thousand dollars’ worth of materials have to be scrapped? A note about a pizza party after the next meeting? End every single one of those with a thank you.
In the end, many of these words of thanks feel like and often are signs of passive-aggressive writing. But forcing yourself to end every message in a word of thanks does take the edge off the hardest attacks—it reminds you to swerve your tone around so that the “thank you” at the end connects nicely with the rest of the message. No “hate hate hate hate thanks”, but more “hate hate frustration indifference appreciation thanks”. Of course, this is assuming that the writer cares about writing a coherent and reasonable communication; but if I wasn’t going to respect my audience enough to write coherently
Russia (107 in The Sacred Harp)
This afternoon I went to the Third Sunday Charlestown Shapenote Sing in Charlestown, MA. It was a cozy little sing that turned out rather large, with about 25 to 30 singers present at one point. The songs we sung came from the obligatory Sacred Harp, both the Denson and Cooper revisions, Norembega Harmony and Northern Harmony. There were color-coded loaner book bags; the colors of the bags matched the book spines. It was the most wonderful bit of organization I’ve ever seen.
I think I really like Northern Harmony, but in moderation; this was the third time I’ve sung from it. There are some great songs in it (my favorite being Do Not Go Gentle, especially the bass line which contains the word “rage” repeated many, many times) but most of them are pretty hard to sing. It also seems like singing shape note tunes for a year and a half and being in a chorus for a few months made be a better sight reader. But this post is actually not about that.
This post is about Russia, which was the song I led today. It was also the first song I ever led alone; I only forgot to bring the altos in once!
Bargain Bin Reviews: The Road Goes on Forever
The Road Goes on Forever
The Highwaymen
Price: $1.76
Verdict: Why was this in the bargain bin? Okay, it should be in the bargain bin because the reissued CD is better and I wouldn’t really pay more than $8 for this. But certainly it deserved to cost more than $1.76.
This is part of a sequence of reviews on CDs I found at bargain piles in the local CD stores, thrift stores or some other place that sells really cheap CDs. Want to read more bargain bin reviews?
The Singing College
Amherst College and Tufts University both claim the title “The Singing College”. However, since Amherst appears higher on a Google search for “the singing college” and I went to Amherst, Amherst is the singing college as far as I am concerned.
One thing that did not exist in Amherst where I was there (and still doesn’t exist now) is an unauditioned, secular music group. There were plenty of choirs and a capella groups. There is currently a gospel choir that I believe is unauditioned. But discounting the karaoke nights that happen once in a blue moon there weren’t any place where someone can just go and sing.
There was one “communal” secular singing group that almost got started when I was a freshman, though. However, it never got anywhere because the person who started it did it because he did not make the roster of the premier men’s a capella group on campus. So he decided to form his own group (with him in charge). He would take anyone he could and transform it into a group that rivals the best established singing groups; it’s the classic motivational movie plot! It failed miserably. He was rejected from the singing groups he auditioned for less due to skill than due to the fact that he was a jerk.
Anyway, that’s what I think Amherst was missing. Just a place to sit around and sing. It’s not really that much of a singing college if only the best singers are singing. (Insert quote about the forest and the bird that sound the best.)
On The Topic of Billows
From Issac Watts’ The Psalm of David:
Thy words the raging wind control,
And rule the boisterous deep;
Thou mak’st the sleeping billows roll,
The rolling billows sleep.
When I first encountered these lines (singing 184 Smear from Northern Harmony) last Saturday, my first thought was “god is so awesome he can both make sleeping billows roll and reverse it by making rolling billows sleep!”. It seemed somewhat redundant, really. Are both these abilities worth praising? One on each line? That’s kind of a waste of paper, right?
Of course, we have to remember that understanding a function does not mean understanding its inverse. Knowing how to square a number is far from knowing how to take a square root. Less mathematically, knowing how to dirty a house doesn’t mean knowing how to clean it. Understanding logarithms instead of just exponents separates a good math student from an average math student. So being able to both make rolling billows sleep and sleeping billows roll, as opposed to being able to only do one of those things, makes someone a god as opposed to a mere mortal.
If we use this criterium to determine a necessary condition for godhood then we are very far away from it.