Unguiltable Me

Video Find(s) of the Day

It being Mexican Independence Day, I went looking for Mexican Independence music. What I found was really Mariachi music, and I thought, what the hell, I'll just find some good Mariachi music. So I did a search on "mariachi music" on YouTube, and the first of these videos popped up, and I got severely sidetracked, away from Mexico, and all up into Spanish speaking America. This happens all the time with me. I've learned to be unashamed and unguiltable about it.

VIVA OBAMA 2008



Obama Song Spanish Reggaeton



Cumbia de Obama



For Obama: "Si Se Puede Cambiar" by Andres Useche

Medieval Music

Video Find of the Day

I don't know how it happened; I just realized that for the past year I have let Medieval music be off my radar. I've searched for renaissance music but it never occurred to me to search for Medieval. Well, that's simply wrong. I mean, besides having a life-long dream of banging pots in a Chinese funeral procession, I have dreamed of making raucous Medieval noise. So here's some. First, a Spanish ditty.

Remdih - medieval song by Alfonso X



In the next, the performance is in Sighisoara, a walled Transylvanian town which was once the home of Vlad Dracul, but the style of dancing looks Italian.

Sighisoara -medieval dance



From southern Bavaria:

Nachtwindheim - Medieval music

Happy B-Day, Quebec City!

Video Find of the Day

Here's a little something in honor of the Four Hundredth Birthday (today!) of Quebec City. OK, maybe it's more about the province than the city, but do you think this is easy? OK, it's easy, but, why do you think I do it? Because it's easy. OK?

Mes Aïeux - Dégénération (English Subtitles)

Cricket Music Videos? Really?

Video Find(s) of the Day

While Seattleites are fussing over the impending loss of their men's basketball team, India is just beginning a brand new dazzling super cricket league called the Indian Premier League. Some three-quarters of a billion dollars was spent in an auction for eight franchises in eight cities. The first game will be held Friday this week between the Bangalore Royal Challengers and Kolkata Knight Riders at Bangalore.

As always I'm not interested in spectator sports unless were talking Women's Single Figure Skating, or the like. But I was blown away by the promotional music videos these new teams are putting out.

If the Sonics ever had promotional videos like these, well, I bet that would have changed history. Maybe.

Or what if we had a cricket team of our own with its own cool video? Would we buy tickets?

ipl Kolkata Knight Riders Music Video



Rajasthan Royals - Halla Bol



IPL Kings XI Punjab Music Video

Mittelalter-Rock

Before I get to the Video Find of the Day, I want to talk about how much I love Richka. Richka is a website I discovered years ago which features a ton of music of the former Soviet Republics and links to a Renaissance period music site and an Andes music site. Most of the music is in the Real Audio format, so it stays on the site, but with an internet connection you can access it on demand.

Here are some of my favorite RAM files on Richka and sister sites:

From Richka itself:
Kalinka (Red Army Chorus)
Polyushka Polye(Song of the Plains)
Song of the Volga Boatmen
Unharness the Horses, Lads

From the Andean music site:
El Condor Pasa
Bayon de Madrid (not really Andean -- from Paraguay!)

From the Renaissance music site:
E La Don Don
Vésame y abràcame
An Italian Rant

My favorite of all:
J'ai vu le loup (I Saw the Wolf)

Which brings us to the Daily Video Find. You start with a beautiful devotional, pious, Renaissance Christian song, and this is what happens when you release a German metal band on it. "I Saw Da Wolf" Mittelalter-Rockischer style.

In Extremo -07- Ai Vis A Lo Lop (Live)

You've Got That Thing

Video Find of the Day

... and video provider. kspm01 specializes in 20's and 30's recordings, mostly, and mostly audio. Here's a random sampling. There are hundreds more.

Clicquot Club Eskimos - You've Got That Thing



Jack Pettis & His Pets - Hot Heels



The Goofus Five - I Need Lovin'

Sly & the Family Stone

Video Find of the Day

I've said it before, I'll say it again, I didn't really take rock seriously until it turned funky. In particular James Brown and then, Sly & the Family Stone, got me going.

But who's the Sly-est of them all? Ed McMahon?

Sly & The Family Stone - Dance To The Music - Music Lover



The next has a string of clips from rehearsals, plus excerpts from live performances. The video kind of loses steam toward the end, but the rehearsal scenes are worth it.

Sly & the Family Stone - Live! 70's rehearsals Rare!



Then there's the Woodstock "Higher", which is in a class in itself.

Sly & The Family Stone - I Want To Take You Higher

Best Dynasty Ever

Video Find of the Day

I love T'ang Dynasty music. [Roughly 7th through 9th centuries AD, China.] I plan on looking for more of these. This one features percussion.

I was looking up the T'ang Dynasty on Wikipedia and found out that its capital was Chang'an, present day Xi'an, which was back then the largest city in the world, and I recalled that Xi'an is reputed to be the origin of the variety of glutinous rice wine I have been trying to imitate. Maybe that explains the affinity I feel.

musicians fron tang dynasty xi'an

Stupid Search Trick

Video Finds of the Day

YouTube was partially down tonight, "that functionality is unavailable at this time," but the search functionality was available so I did a search on porn + music. I know what you're thinking, "Wes probably spends 95% of his time looking for porn." Well, perhaps, but this time the idea was to see if I could find something of a MUSICAL nature that was TAGGED with the word porn, that would be interesting from a non-pornophilic vantage point. It's a trick I use for finding interesting things while stupid. I think this next one fits the bill. There is the word porn, but no actual porn-o-graphy.

Bill Bailey - Medieval Porn



In this one the kernel of humor is cockney music, as opposed to porn, but it is still interesting.

Bill Bailey and Cockney Music



This is the only one that may be pornographic in any sense, as he sings a song in French that according to a translation in the description is about sex. But, who cares, aren't all French songs about sex?

Bill Bailey - Foreign Ambulance Sirens

Bill Hicks

Video Finds of the Day

Thanks to homelessness and too much poverty (more than now) I had no opportunity to know of Bill Hicks while he was alive. I learned of him for the first time from my daughter, of all people. I can't tell you how proud of her I was after I checked him out. Later we agreed that it was more evidence that she was my spawn, in addition to the eyes.

bill hicks drugs and music



Bill Hicks - Play From Your Fucking Heart

They Couldn't Handle The Truth

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7", immediately after appearing to try to kill myself by jumping head-first off a jungle gym. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

I woke up groggy in some sort of hospital room. When a nurse came into view I asked her where I was. She told me. I think it was the Fort Devens infirmary again. The important thing to me was, it wasn't any heaven. It hadn't worked. I screamed and cried and tried to bang my head against the wall, and the nurse gave me a shot.

My next memory is of a room of my own faced with two doctors. Again, I asked where I was. This time the answer was a shock. I was in a military hospital in Maryland. I was told I was flown to it.

The two doctors wouldn't answer any more questions. From then on they were going to ask the questions. "Why did you want to kill yourself?"

I told them I didn't really want to kill myself, I just wanted to go to Hawaii. That didn't please them. They said it didn't make sense. I said, too bad, it's true. I was getting an attitude. I was in no mood to show respect to a couple of know-it-all haoles, even if they were doctors.

[Above: A studio photo of me taken just before my call to Alta triggered the chain of events that got me to Maryland. I think there was some attitude there to start with. Subsequent events enhanced the attitude. Not the 1st picture I put here. The 1st was from age 5. Attitude there, too.]

Their answer to my attitude was to give me another shot. But this one wasn't a tranquilizer like the one in Fort Devens. It was sodium pentathol. They were going to make me tell the truth by means of science!

The drug broke down my resistance, and made me compliant. So when they asked again, "Why did you want to kill yourself?" I told them the truth. "I wanted to go to Hawaii."

They were ready to pull their hair out at that point. Then one of them got the bright idea to ask, "OK, why did you want to go to Hawaii?"

"My parents tried to kill me. My Mother tried to kill me. My Mother does bad things to me." I started to go into details. They cut me off, and left the room. That's when i noticed that the room had a window and my parents were sitting in a room on the other side of it. The doctors consulted with my parents for a minute. Then they came back in.

"You know what you said isn't true. What's the real reason you wanted to go to Hawaii?"

Being told that I lied didn't make sense to me. I hadn't. The only way I could interpret what they said to me was that they didn't want to hear that truth.

I was still under the influence of the sodium pentathol. I had to be compliant. But that didn't reall mean that I had to tell them the truth. It meant that I had to tell them what I thought they wanted me to tell them. When I thought that what they wanted was the truth, I told them the truth. But now I saw they didn't want the truth. So I strained to imagine what it is they wanted.

I came up with music. I told them I wanted to go to Hawaii for the music.

This led to a weird discussion, mostly between the two doctors, about how they could deal with my "compulsion". The gist of the debate, as I understood it, was that they could either get rid of all my compulsions, with a major lobotomy, or they could do a minor excision and just get rid of my Hawaiian memories. it was clear to me that it was best if I could get them to do the minor thing, versus the major.

So when one of the doctors asked me what it was about music that made me want to go to Hawaii I said, "It's just that I remember the Hawaiian music, and it reminds me of Hawaii, and I want to go there."

He said, "Well, what if you couldn't remember the Hawaiian music. Do you think you'd want to go there then?"

"Oh no, sir. Then it wouldn't matter to me."

I fell asleep after that, for I don't know how long. When I awoke again, I couldn't move my head. The doctors were there again, plus nurses. After they talked to me for a minute, there was a sound of power equipment, like a saw or a drill, and I realized I was being operated on.

I had a vague feeling that my head was being touched. They said, we're going to move an electrode around and we just need you to tell us what you're seeing or remembering or feeling.

I was prompted for my feelings and thoughts every few seconds. I kept experiencing snatches of music, but they didn't have anything to do with Hawaii. Finally though I heard a Hawaiian drum chant. I told them. They said good, that's what we'll burn.

There was no indication that anything was happening. I don't remember a frying or zapping sound. They just said, "There, it's done."

Over 30 years later I talked about what happened to a psychiatrist. He said the story was impossible because those techniques weren't in use in 1956. The sodium pentathol was possible, but the method of brain probing to stimulate and pinpoint memories was not available then.

Well, I think my psychiatrist was full of shit. What he didn't take into account was that this was a military hospital. In fact it may not have been an actual working hospital but a military medical research facility. The military doesn't make all of its research public. These, in particular, would have been kept secret, on national security grounds. (I was very likely at the Walter Reed Medical Research Institute in Silver Spring.) He did not take into account the likelihood that my Father had knowledge of the availability of such procedures through his position in army intelligence.

The method wasn't all that precise either. It got rid of most but not all of the Hawaiian musical memories. It missed some. But it also erased some other non-Hawaiian memories. Remember that I could whistle like a bird? I couldn't whistle at all again after the surgery, for 35 years.

It was criminal. All they had to do was get me away from my parents. Would it have hurt them to spare me the surgery and send me to a Hawaiian orphanage? But at least it wasn't a fill frontal lobotomy.

Georgians In My Mind

Video Find of the Day

There's something eerie to me about both the music and the dance in this video. Maybe it's the certainty that I am being deliberately entranced. Why do they go to all this trouble to numb my will? What are these people planning to do to me when I am speechless and immobile? I don't know but I think there is a major clue in the shirts with the overly long sleeves.

Simdi

Kurdish Music

Video Find of the Day

As much as the Kurds are in the news, you'd think we'd be seeing this sort of thing all the time.

Kurdish music: Ayat ahmed nezhad - maqam

Gamelan Theory

The Weekly Wes Whine

This week I continue to whine about MySpace.

Regular visitors to this blog know that I like the music and the music videos. I am especially fond of out-of-the-way world music. I noticed that the only easy way to put music on my MySpace site was to get it from MySpace itself.

OK. First of all, would it hurt the management at MySpace to make the list of all genres immediately accessible when you are ready to search for music? Is it necessary for these puppy-killers to put the full list into a box you access only after making an initial inquiry? Or does the sadistic rush derived from knowing that we all have to make that extra step essential to maintaining their proper sado-masochistic balance?

Secondly, let's glance at the list, shall we?


WHAT THE HELL?

I admit, sometimes I'm looking for Balinese gamelan music, and I'm so picky I'm not prepared to settle for Javanese gamelan. Especially Northern Javanese. But I'm not so crazy as to expect to see a genre of Balinese-but-not-Javanese-gamelan on MySpace music.

And I don't! Instead, we get Screamo? Shoegaze? Acousmatic-slash-Tape music? Two categories of trance, both called trance?

Melodramatic popular song? That's gotta be a joke. That and hyphy. Resurrection of HiFi?

And through it all, nothing that fully takes in world music. Oh sure, Latin, african, afro, Chinese, J(apanese), K(orean), German, if you like pop. But no place to put the gamelan.

MySpace hates me, and they hate my music.

Awesome Music & Dance

From the description by vbfree: Traditional music & dance from Ghana, West Africa performed at the Millpond Music Festival [California, September 16, 2006.] The first video is a musical introduction. The dancing gets going on video #2.

Electronic Bear Handler Music

Wikipedia's article on the Shukar Collective says that it's a Romanian group known for combining gypsy bear handler music with contemporary electronic sampling. Yes, that's right, we are talking about bear handlers and bear handler music.



Here is a xenomanic treat. I am embedding here the 3 videos of Tamango's Story. Tamango is one of the members of the Shukar Collective. The videos' description on YouTube by ab4rock says he is telling us about his wild life. It is in a language I don't understand. I think it's Romanian with a gypsy accent. But, why do I need to know?