America's Oldest Teenager

Dick Clark, long-time host of American Bandstand, has died at the age of 82.

The Pogues Featuring Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale Of New York (Official V...

I apologize for the ad before this, but trust me, it's worth waiting for.

RIP: Owsley "Bear" Stanley

Owsley Stanley, known to Deadheads as simply "Bear", has died following a traffic accident at the age of 76. He was also known as a pioneer of the psychedelic drug culture and the producer of the highest quality LSD ever made, as a one-time financial backer and early sound engineer to the Grateful Dead and as the first of the "tapers", a community of music activists / deadheads who carefully chronicled virtually every note of every Grateful Dead concert on a myriad of private audio tapes that were always swapped or given away free.

Ukulele Orchestra of GB Anarchy in the Ukulele

I had a YouTube video here of "Fly Me Off the Handel" by the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain but sadly YT has purged the video for ToU violation :(

Christmas Blogs for Christians

My friend Lance, an Eastern Orthodox Christian in Minneapolis, has this to say for Christmas. And for even more spiritually uplifting fare, possibly to counteract the unnecessary brouhaha from elsewhere (no link, you know who you are):
All about the angels of Christmas
A beautiful essay on the use of the Jesus Prayer
Why not re-read Franny and Zooey while we're on the subject?
Let it Shine! Inspiring quotes about the return of the Light
Brightest and Best, my favourite Christmas carol

Odetta - 1930 - 2008

Odetta, the "protest singer's protest singer" has died aged 77. She was planning to come out of semi-retirement to sing at Obama's inauguration. She will be missed.

"Mama Africa" Miriam Makeba. 1932 - 2008

Miriam Makeba, the pan-African activist and musician known as "Mama Africa" and the "Empress of Africa", died of an apparent heart attack following a concert Friday in Italy. A friend of Nelson Mandela, and one-time wife of Stokely Carmichael, a protege of Harry Belafonte and a mentor to many younger performers, she was connected to everyone in African politics, civil rights and music. Many younger Americans were first introduced to her as part of Paul Simon's Graceland tour in 1987, at a time when she was still officially in exile from her native South Africa and from the US for her controversial political actions.

50 greatest arts videos on YouTube

Courtesy of the Observer / Guardian. A collection of cinema arts, visual arts documentaries, videos of great classical, jazz and folk performances and dance.

Scottish Deadheads, a real minority

Roddy Woomble, a solo artist and lead singer of Idlewild, tells a very hippie-ish tale about Ripple.

Ain't Nobody Who Can Sing Like Me - a great podcast

I have only listened to three or four podcasts in my life so far. If I had more time I would listen to a lot more. This one was excellent. And by the way, the CD is great too.

Deborama's WWW Number 35 - the Dylan Dream concert

I will definitely be listening to (and recording if I have the technology) this. By the way, Deborama is a big fan of Dylan's radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, even though I don't often get to listen to it in real time, and in fact I have a massive backlog of them on the Freeview box to listen to.

Deborama's WWW Number 29 - Last.fm

I am still very new at this, but I got turned on to this site by the same guy (from the BBC) who forced me to join Facebook. (OK, to be fair, Facebook forced me to join Facebook, he just gave me a link on it.) This week's Wednesday Website of the Week is for music lovers. It's called last.fm and it is yet another possibility for the future of music distribution, consumption and production. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Triumph of Serbia is also triumph of the "big-boned gals"

The Eurovision Song contest of 2007 was won by a 23-year old Serbian lesbian, singing in a deliberately non-glitzy but not what you could say is traditional setting. According to Germaine Greer (who seems over the moon about it):

It was wonderful enough that a solid plain girl in glasses won it for Serbia with an old-fashioned torch-song; that she should have sung it in passionate earnest as a lover of her own sex is what made this viewer switch off the iron and start praying that the gods might let her win. When Marija Serifovic was asked in interviews why the presentation was so subdued, no high kicks, no pelvic thrusts, she was puzzled by the inappropriateness of the questions. While all around her were writhing and mugging, she sang Molitva as her ostracised self.

Molitva is a traditonal Serbian ballad; the word means "prayer".

Deborama's WWW Number 22 - The Flash Girls, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly and QWERTY Ranch

A homage to lost Minneapolis things. At the May Day parade, I saw a young woman wearing a T-shirt that read "Keep Minneapolis Weird". Amen to that.
Some excerpts from Wikipedia about the Flash Girls and Emma Bull:

The Flash Girls are a now defunct folk music duo based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota..
The duo consisted of Emma Bull, a noted science fiction author, and Lorraine Garland, who went by the stage name "The Fabulous Lorraine". Garland is also notable as Neil Gaiman's personal assistant; the group formed at a Guy Fawkes Day party at Gaiman's home. The connections that both Bull and Garland had with the science fiction and fantasy communities allowed them to have an unusually notable group of people writing songs for them, including Jane Yolen, Alan
Moore, and Neil Gaiman. These songs are mixed in with traditional songs such as Star of the County Down, and Lily of the West, as well as poems put to music, including works by Dorothy Parker and A.A. Milne.

Emma Bull is a science fiction and fantasy author whose best-known novel is War for the Oaks, one of the pioneering works of urban fantasy. . . She sang in the rock-funk band Cats Laughing, and both sang and played guitar in the folk duo The Flash Girls while living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Her 1991 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Bone Dance was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Bull wrote a screenplay for War for the Oaks, which was made into an 11-minute mini-film designed to look like a film trailer. She made a cameo appearance as the Queen of the Seelie Court, and her husband, Will Shetterly, directed. Bull and Shetterly created the shared universe of Liavek, for which they have both written stories. There are five Liavek collections in print.
She was a member of the writing group The Scribblies, which included Will Shetterly as well as Pamela Dean, Kara Dalkey, Nate Bucklin, Patricia Wrede and Steven Brust. With Steven Brust, Bull wrote Freedom and Necessity (1997), an epistolary novel with subtle fantasy elements set during the 19th century United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Chartist movement.

Emma's Blog, Dark Roast
Will's Blog, it's all one thing
Steven's website, Dream Cafe
Neil Gaiman's Journal
Emma and Will's website QWERTY Ranch

I would dearly love to put a link to my Amazon.co.uk site and sell you CDs of the Flash Girls and Cats Laughing. They are unheard of at co.uk, and Amazon.com, there is one used CD available for each group (they both made several). The Cats Laughing CD is $44 and the Flash Girls will only set you back about $120.

Number 45 on the top

This morning, I was singing some of my favourite hymns and spirituals softly to myself (as you do) in order to lift my spirits from some non-specific malaise. And I had this insight brought on from singing "Amazing Grace": the difficulty with the correct use of "less" and "fewer" dates back to the early 19th century at least. That's because I just noticed for the first time, after knowing this hymn for over 20 years, that there is this line "We've no less days to sing God's praise". Now, if you're going to tell me, no, you mean the late 18th century, I must correct you there. You see, I always do my research, even for the simple things like this (some would say simple-minded, but just shut up.) It appears that, although John Newton wrote the words in approximately 1779, the last verse, in which the stanza quoted appears, was added by an unknown author, and first appears in 1829 in the Baptist Songster, by R. Winchell (Wethersfield, Connecticut), as the last stanza of the song “Jerusalem My Happy Home.” So there.
This website has the full story of John Newton and Amazing Grace. The story is quite different from what I have heard in a sermon, and yet in some ways, better. I only knew that Newton had been a slave ship captain, had a conversion that changed his life, and wrote Amazing Grace. I did not realize that he continued in the slave trade for some years after his conversion, nor that it was decades between the experience it tells of and the writing of the song. But then I also did not know of the brutality of his early life, that he was a self-taught clergyman, an admirer of John Wesley, and a hugely popular preacher who strongly influenced the famous abolitionist William Wilberforce. The title of this post refers to "Amazing Grace's" designation in the Sacred Harp tradition.

Keeping up with the Shetterly-Bulls

I was misinformed about Will Shetterly and Emma Bull. They are still a couple, a married couple. Will also has a very good weblog. Will and Emma no longer live in Minneapolis either - they are in Arizona. Emma's brilliant first novel The War for the Oaks has been reissued in the past couple of years and I highly recommend it. While we're on the subject of Minnesota connections, check out the music of Greg Brown, Boiled in Lead, and the long unavailable Cats Laughing.

Tony Benn on Glastonbury

Tony Benn - way out in Left Field at the Glastonbury Festival.