Asakiyume mita

Sometimes I feel fond of a person based solely on one acquaintance. That's how it is for me with Benjamin Zephaniah: I knew him solely for his "Tam Lyn Retold," which he created with Eliza Carthy as part of The Imagined Village, a project "intended to produce modern folk music that represented modern multiculturalism in the United Kingdom" (Wikipedia). "Tam Lyn Retold" recasts Tam Lin as a war refugee threatened with deportation whose lover holds onto him despite his turning into "a victim, a loser, a pimp, and a real mister mean" until he manifests as his true self again, "just a cool human being." The way Zephaniah narrates the tale makes me want to see it as a full-length film.

I never chased up Zephaniah further, but it turns out he was a beloved poet, performer, novelist, and actor, appearing in the series Peaky Blinders. And now, sadly, he's no longer with us: he just passed away from a brain tumor he was only diagnosed with eight weeks ago.

Thank you for the gift of your art and your self, Mr. Zephanaiah!

(Photo from this BBC remembrance)

I found this song, Samba da Utopia, while wandering through YouTube. The composer's video is here, but there are many, many other videos by cover singers--like this one, which I almost like better. The words and tune are simple and the message is a good one (aside from the minor detail that I don't believe in utopias)--I really like it!




PS, I don't actually know what makes a samba a samba--I should find out.

"Pra não dizer que não falei das flores" is the name of a Brazilian song. It means "So it can't be said that I didn't speak of flowers." It's also known as "Caminhando" (Walking). I came across it originally as part of a medley of songs sung by Chico César, a Brazilian reggae singer. (The whole medley is just wonderful and I listen to it all the time.)

When he segued over to "Pra não dizer que não falei das flores," my heart was grabbed by the lyrics:

Caminhando e cantando e seguindo a canção
Somos todos iguais, braços dados ou não
Nas escolas, nas ruas, campos, construções
Aprendendo e ensinando uma nova lição

(Walking and singing and continuing the song
We are all equal, arms linked or not
In the schools, the streets, fields, buildings
Learning and teaching a new lesson)

Especially that last part: learning and teaching a new lesson.

Then it got to the chorus, and he just pointed to the audience, and they sang the whole things without him. They'd done that earlier with his song "Mama Africa," but only after he'd sung it through once. Here he just turned it over to the audience, and they belted it out. (If you start here, you can hear that.)

It was clear they knew it *so well.*

So I got curious about the song. And it turns out it has an amazing story behind it. Wikipedia tells me that it was composed by Geraldo Vandré, who sang it at the Festival Internacional da Canção in 1968, where it was "the most applauded song of the night"--but only came in second place, because the army felt it was too critical of the government (at that time Brazil was under a military dictatorship). The next day, playing the song was banned, and all recordings of Vandré's performance at the festival were destroyed. Vandré himself had to go into exile.

Geraldo Vandré, as drawn by Jeferson Nepomuceno


Wikipedia says (though it's marked as "citation needed"), "'Walking' is regarded by many as the true Brazilian national hymn" and that it is "sung emotionally and in a spontaneous way by a large number of people."

That chorus, by the way:

Vem, vamos embora, que esperar não é saber
Quem sabe faz a hora, não espera acontecer

(Come, let’s go, for waiting is not knowing
The one who knows makes the time and doesn’t wait for it to happen)

(Here's a 1968 recording of the audience joining in with Vandré singing--I've set it to where the audience joins in.)

It really does seem to have anthemic stature. Here's a link to the whole song, sung by Vandré (not live).

Here's an image that's used on Youtube for a remix of a version of the song as sung by Simone, a well-known Brazilian singer who was--so Wikipedia tells me--the first to record it after censorship was lifted.



I think it's a cool image... and/but also, as someone who writes about a country that honors Abstractions, it's interesting to me that Order and Progress are what made it to the national flag ... they seem ominously predictive of the struggles Brazil has had. ... Not that "Liberty and Justice for all" as a slogan guarantees that anything like that will be what the population actually gets, but...

... okay, gonna just drift off now.

Via sovay, in turn via kore.

What I love about seeing other people's version of this meme is discovering all the weird and wonderful song titles that I didn't know previously.

A Place: Arrested Development: Tennessee
A Food: Johnny Flynn: Cold Bread
A Drink: Shurwayne Winchester: Girl Born to Wine
Animal: Dolly Parton Little Sparrow
A Number: Pray for Polanski: 9191991
Color: Nina Simone's version of Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair
Boy's Name: Of Montreal's cover of M.I.A.'s Jimmy
Girl's Name: Cordelia's Dad's version of Katie Cruel
Profession (but this could double for the vehicle...): John Holt: Police in Helicopter
A Vehicle: The Cat Empire: The Chariot

Two of my children live in Japan, and one--known in this journal as Little Springtime--was directly in the path of what the Japanese call Typhoon 19 and what in the United States is called Typhoon Hagibis. Little Springtime lives in the flood plain of the Sumida river, which they were saying could flood to 5 meters. She and her girlfriend were assiduously thorough in their emergency preparation and took shelter on the second floor of their house, as advised, and kept the TV on to hear if their ward was going to order an evacuation. I waited all through Saturday day--their Saturday night--to find out how they weathered it. And they were fine! And their house was fine!

I'm very, very relieved.

"This experience has made me feel like I want way less stuff," Little Springtime said, and that dovetailed with something I'd been thinking: that in this age we live in, where our homes are assaulted by hurricanes and tornadoes and fires and floods, maybe we ought to have our concept of house be a much, much less permanent (and less expensive) thing. Maybe freestanding houses should be something quickly assembleable and deconstructable , and apartment buildings should be earthquake resistant armatures, with the individual units, like freestanding houses, something you can easily put up in the armature. And these things would cost very little--much less than cars cost. If they're destroyed in a storm, it's no biggie; you replace them. And they wouldn't last long--maybe five years, and then you'd have to replace them (assuming a natural disaster didn't destroy them first).

They'd be kind of like the Laurie Anderson song "Big Top."

When Buckminster Fuller came to Canada
He kept asking the same question
Have you ever really considered how much your buildings actually weigh?
….

He showed them pictures of domed cities
Cities with no basements
No foundations
Cities that could be moved in a minute
Portable cities
Portable towns
…

He said think of it as camping out
He said think of it as one big tent
He said think of it as the big top
Spinning
Lightweight
Portable

And what of personal belongs? Well like Little Springtime says, we'd want way, way less of them--or way less that we're emotionally attached to. I was imagining into existence big spheres, like exercise balls, into which you could put your very special items when a disaster is coming. It would have your contact information on it, be watertight and fireproof, and openable only by you or trusted others. If it got blown away or carried away by water, no worries--after the disaster you could recover it, open it, and there would be your treasures.

... What do you think?

Having finished La Niña, Wakanomori and I found a new, non-narco (this rules out the majority of what's available on Netflix) Colombian telenovela to watch: Lady: La Vendedora de Rosas. It's very loosely based on the life of Leidy (Lady) Tabares, a Colombian streetkid who got lifted up to glory as the star of a film called La Vendedora de Rosas [the rose seller] (1998) aaaannnnd then dumped right back into the situation from which she came. Gotta love exploitative directors.

The real Leidy Tabares spent twenty years in jail for charges of accessory to murder (although this Guardian article casts doubt on whether she was really guilty)--but recently was freed and has married her girlfriend. Here's a picture of her with Natalia Reyes, the actress who plays teenage-her in telenovela:


(Source)

With this novela, you see bad stuff coming a thousand miles away and just have to watch as it gets closer and closer and closer, all the while wanting to scream to the characters to do X or Y or Z to avoid it, but no, they're not going to. So what you're watching for is how fate will unfold and what grace there'll be within the strictures that confine people.

It's got an absolutely hopping soundtrack. Here's my favorite song: Sueños cumplidos



Here's the CD case I made for the soundtrack, which I bought.





Gotta have this picture, too:

One of the women I work with at the jail is in the choir there. I got permission to go in for the performance. The jail choir group is called the Majestics, and they've been mentored by a senior-citizen choir called Young at Heart, all of whom were wearing T-shirts that said "We put the 'zen' in 'senior citizen.'" Young at Heart performed as the opening act, so to speak, and they were delightful and good, singing things like the Jackson Five's "I Want You Back" and Bananarama's "Venus" and totally carrying it off.

Then the Majestics took the stage. There were six women, and they covered a great age range (three in their twenties, two in their thirties-forties, and one who was even older than me) and ethnically diverse (two Black, one Hispanic, three White). They sang well-known songs with lots of different flavors (hip-hop, pop, blues, soul), and all the choir members were featured at least once--even the older woman, who I thought would remain relegated to the background, but she came forward and did "Drift Away," and it was a huge success. The entire thing was a huge success; the audience was **so** supportive. They sang along with all the songs, even the fast rap portions of the rap songs, and clapped out the beat, and gave standing ovations.

At the end the programs director called for an encore, and there hadn't been a song laid by for that, but the Young At Heart choir sang "Forever Young," (Bob Dylan lyric; the Jay-Z song is good too though) with various choir members singing solos, and each time someone sang a solo, he or she linked arms with one of the members of the Majestics and brought them forward, and I could see tears in my student's eyes and I had tears in mine, because--as the chaplain who was present pointed out--that song is a benediction, and it was so great to hear those words of blessing and hope and expectation directed at the audience in the jail:

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
And may you stay
Forever young

ETA: I didn't realize until dudeshoes commented that the choir is the same one that had a documentary made about them in 2007. Also, at the group's website you can see a video about their work at a different jail. (We are a nation filled with jails...)

Having enjoyed a number of hits from Taylor Swift's 1989 album, I decided to buy the CD. And I enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) it very much! It's a rumination on the various ways you can feel and react during a love affair, how you can feel such intensely contradictory things at different moments (or in different relationships, but really, almost all of the emotional states could be reactions to the same relationship, but in different moods and states of self-perception).

I lent it to Wakanomori, who had a take-it-or-leave-it reaction, but remarked, "She really does go on about her own red lips, doesn't she." And she does. Three songs, two of them sitting cheek to cheek on the CD, feature red (or cherry) lips.¹ Is that body-positivity? Vanity? Conforming to traditional femininity? Enjoying herself? Probably all of those. But what it got me thinking about was how many images repeated across songs, sometimes word for word. This could be the sign of someone with a very small word horde, who has to keep reusing things, but what if we gave her the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was artistry? What if it's the album equivalent of creating a sestina? Since thinking that, I've been meaning to do an analysis, and . . . Here it is!



( What is this madness? )

So yes: I think this [ETA: by which I mean, her choice of words, not my diagram!!] shows deliberate artistry in service of unifying the album, both through direct song-by-song links and through links that connect songs that are distant from each other. By using repeated images in different contexts, she's emphasizing that it's the same situation seen from a new angle. They're not particularly startling images--they're pretty stock, in fact--but that makes the songs accessible to a wide audience. Nice job, Taylor Swift! You've got a good album here!

**from "Welcome to New York"
¹And speaking of cheeks, they are featured in three consecutive songs, as you can see from the handy chart.

On August 23, writing in her journal, Kaya recalls a traditional song repurposed as a children's taunt for games of chase:

I’m sending, sending, sending the Lady’s birds
To find, find, find what you have hid
They’ll seize, seize, seize your every secret
And pierce, pierce, pierce your many lies.
They’ll leave, leave, leave a burning ember
In the place, place, place of your coward heart
And fan, fan, fan the Lady’s fires
To flame, flame, flame in your fevered eyes

I love children's songs and rhymes--clapping games, jump rope rhymes, counting-out games, insults and retorts, all of it. I've posted about them before, but this time round, I'd like to link you to the handclap and jump rope rhymes page on the Cocojams website. The whole site is an excellent resource, and this page is loads of fun. For example, this rhyme, which developed after my childhood:

MAMA MAMA CAN'T YOU SEE (Version #17)
Momma momma can't you see
What the baby's done to me
Took away my MTV
Now I’m watching dumb Barney
Tic Tac Toe Three in a row
Barney got shot got shot by GI Joe
Who ever got stop get a bump in the head
And that is how the game will end

The site includes videos of kids playing the handclapping games:

Watch on YouTube

Doing some research, I came across this moving song, "Timor Oan Mos Bele," ("We Timorese Can Do It"), sung in Tetun, Portuguese, and English. It's addressed to everyone in Timor-Leste and urges them not to lose faith in the possibility of a good future for the country.

hatudu ba ema katak Timor oan mos bele,
labele lakon esperansa tuba rai metin
no lao ba oin nafatin

We have to show people that we Timorese can do it
We can't lose hope; we must stand firm
And continue to walk forward

The little signs say things like "Fight Corruption," "Education Starts in the Household," "Stop Using Violence," and "Create Peace and Love."

There are lots of tensions in Timor-Leste; violence and corruption¹ are problems, and I bet it's easy to get discouraged. But lots of people are doing such great work--I'm not talking about million-dollar initiatives; I'm thinking just of the ordinary people I met, who are running computer classes or transportation services, or investing in a washing machine and then offering laundry services, etc. And those are just the people I was aware of from my brief stay. But meanwhile there's a law in the works that may restrict journalistic freedom, and there've been some pretty dramatic police actions . . . so, I appreciate the spirit of this song, and I hope people hang on to this spirit.

Timor Oan Mos Bele Halo--Viva Timor!

(And I do love learning language through listening to songs. Phrases I learned today include fiar-an, "believe in yourself," and ida-idak, "everybody.")

¹Like this worrying story about petty police corruption that came down the line this morning from the East Timor Action Network :-(