taylor price
Show & Tell
shark vs the universe
Monterey Bay Aquarium
PR's Tumblrdome
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Origami Around
sheepfilms
Misplaced Lens Cap
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Product Placement
pixel skylines
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祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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titsay
almost home
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Sweet Seals For You, Always
DEAR READER
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@pargolettasworld
Diaspora's sound is going to seem familiar. "Oh," you'll say. "That's Jewgrass. I've heard that before." The reason you've heard it before is precisely because Diaspora was doing it in the 1980s. This recording is from 1982, and Diaspora was one of the first bands to combine Hebrew lyrics (in this case, a line from Psalm 118) with folkie sound. And I have to say, even after forty-four years, this song still slaps!
Discworld book where the auditors hear about the phrase "it's not over till the fat lady sings" and hire someone to kidnap all the fat ladies in the world to find the One who will end the world when she sings.
Lady Sybil Vimes is one of the ladies, so Sam Vimes is on the warpath until he can find her, while the watch desperately try to keep all infrastructure from falling apart without all the fat ladies who keep it together on a daily basis
It ends when Sybil leads a hoard of fat ladies into battle, which ends up being so glorious an unrelated time traveler who witnesses it goes back to his native time starts the myth of the Valkyries
Sorry @mypunkpansexualtwin but you ain't leaving this one in the tags boss
When most people think of Lori Laitman's 1996 song cycle I Never Saw Another Butterfly, they generally think of the title song, the first movement, setting Pavel Friedman's famous poem. But this one is the fifth song in the cycle, "Man Proposes, God Disposes," which in Yiddish would be "a mensh trakht, un got lakht," or "a person thinks, and the Divine laughs." It's a sharp observation, by a trio of kids called Miroslav Košek, Hanus Löwy, and Bachner (who went by the collective name KOLEBA) about the sharp change in circumstances that many prisoners suffered when they were deported to the Terezín transit camp. The combination of voice and clarinet heightens the keen-ness of the observations here -- even in such dire circumstances, the kids are interested and curious, and they notice what's happening in their communities, even as those communities are being destroyed around them.
Flory Jagoda z"l chose Susan Gaeta to be her successor, to inherit all of her songs and keep performing them. This song is one of Jagoda's own compositions. She recalls the various aunties, each of whom had a particular holiday as their own. In their turn, they would invite the family to their homes for the holiday -- for Chanukah, for Pesach, for Sukkot, each holiday with its own food and festivities. The aunties help to keep the family together and keep traditions going. As a proud auntie myself, who has inherited the family Passover seder, I do resonate with this song!
A non-writer asked me "but where do you get your ideas" and i genuinely did not know how to explain that it's not a place. it's not a website. it's not a folder. it's that i was on the bus and a woman was holding a paper bag very carefully and something about the way she held it made me need to know what was inside and then i needed to know why she was sad about it and then there was a whole person and then there was a whole story and the bus had already stopped and i missed my stop. that's where.
Barry Longyear, author of the Circus World series, got asked that question one too many times, and he finally kind of snapped and answered an interviewer thusly:
Interviewer: Mr. Longyear, where do you get your ideas?
Longyear: Members of the Science Fiction Writers of America are supposed to answer that question with a post office box number in Schenectady. You send in two dollars and a self-addressed stamped envelope and you will be sent back an idea.
Interviewer: Schenectady?
Longyear: Schenectady.
This interview snippet is preserved for us because Longyear recounted it in the introduction to his collection of short stories, titled (of course) It Came From Schenectady. Other writers have used the joke, and I'm not sure it originated with Longyear, but of all the places authors have picked, Schenectady is the funniest.
A lot of people tend to equate religion, broadly understood, with homophobia/transphobia/other phobia. But it's always more complicated than that! The progressive Jewish movements (various flavors of Reform, Conservative/Masorti, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Humanist) are all generally pretty queer-friendly by now, and far more rabbis are authorized to perform same-sex weddings than are authorized to perform interfaith weddings. The Conservative movement in particular is still very squirrely about interfaith weddings, but the American Conservative movement approved same-sex marriages in 2012, and in 2014, the British Masorti movement allowed its rabbis to officiate same-sex marriages, but left it up to each individual community to decide whether or not they wanted to do that. Orthodox congregations don't allow same-sex marriage, but there are openly gay Orthodox rabbis (there are almost no women Orthodox rabbis, lesbian or straight).
Those movements that are queer-friendly can in fact be very queer-friendly, and more and more synagogues are figuring out how to do a Pride Shabbat in June. While you can still encounter overt homophobia in some Jewish communities, an increasing number are much more in line with the sentiments expressed in this song.
Pride month vest project, a patch a day #29: Wheat But Not Bread, Fruit But Not Wine
As my friend Julian puts it, only half winkingly: "God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation."
-- Daniel Mallory Ortberg
This has been driving me insane because this quote is so incredibly Jewish but every time I saw it was completely divorced from Judaism in the version applying it to 'transsexual'.
The original concept that humans complete the act of creation by making bread from wheat is from the Talmud! And the specific "wheat but not bread, grapes but not wine" phrasing is from Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel but it is missing "clay but not bricks".
And among trans Jews the sentiment was already popular before I ever started seeing this specific phrasing so I knew, knew, knew a Jew and likely a trans Jew was involved.
As it happens, Ortberg's friend Julian is Jewish and they have strongly negative feelings about the way the quote has been removed from the context of their life as someone trans and Jewish. They used to have a thread up on xwitter about it but have since made their account private and only have a very terse FAQ online from which you can glean the treatment they likely received when being more open about their Jewishness, relationship to transness, and the interaction of both.
I've always thought there was something extremely Jewish about that quote! I had no idea that Julian is Jewish.
This is Hazzan Yanky Lemmer singing with the London Cantorial Singers -- all very Orthodox -- giving a stunning rendition of a prayer for Jerusalem. This isn't quite the "Avinu Shebashamayim" prayer for Israel that you see in a lot of siddurim. It's a slightly different text, though the intent and a lot of the imagery are similar. I love the blend of grand choral singing and the hazzanut break in the middle, really showing off the strengths of both a British cantorial choir and an American Hasidic hazzan combined.
According to Cantor David Berger, he composed this setting of the Birkat Kohanim for Rabbi D'ror Chankin-Gould in honor of Rabbi Chankin-Gould's many years of service to his synagogue. And I'm sure that was the excuse. But if you have the extra bit of information that Cantor Berger is married to Rabbi Chankin-Gould, and this premier performance of the piece happens during Pride Month . . . yeah, that's a labor of love right there.
(Yes, Cantor Berger and Rabbi Chankin-Gould are clergy at completely different synagogues, miles apart, one Reform and one Conservative. There is something highly charming about that.)
Let’s say that I’m a From the River to the Sea person. Let’s say that I think the only way to free Palestine is to erase Israel and send its populace back where they “came from.” Let’s say we reject genetic research about where the Jews “came from” and assume that Jewish history magically started in 1000 CE and now everyone has to “go home.” What would this require? At its most basic level?
-mass buy in from the SE Asian subcontinent to the British Isles. I’m talking government, populace, infrastructure, the whole nine yards. Every government from Bangladesh to Morocco to Scotland will have to issue immigration papers, determine sources of income, and set up social safety nets. Etc etc etc.
That in turn will require:
-populations the world over to commit themselves to never creating an environment so hostile to Jews that Jews come to feel that a nation state in the Southern Levant is the only option.
Now let’s go full idealistic. Let’s say that the world decides to free Palestine and send the Jews “home.” Let’s say all the people and governments are committed to making that happen humanely and equitably. What would that look like?
-trillions of dollars in reparations for murder, property theft, bank accounts, businesses, etc compounded over minimum 80 years
-full buy in from all levels of society to educating themselves about anti-Semitism, and eradicating it. I’m talking from executive branch to the working poor.
If you want Palestine to be free from the river to the sea, you really need to sit down and actually think about where you will send those Israeli Jews and descendants who only ended up there in the first place after they were violently expelled from somewhere else. I’m not talking about the Yishuv. I’m talking about the world after 1945. Are they supposed to go back to Poland? Or Yemen? Or France? Or Syria? What would that look like? Genuinely, how do we administrate and create the infrastructure for that?
It’s a hard, shitty question which flies in the face of blind optimism and overly simple narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. But from where I’m sitting as a non-Zionist (I don’t do nationalism point blank; this is not a value judgement or a smug assertion of diasporic Jewish moral superiority) Holocaust scholar, it seems like those Jews are supposed to disappear or like, painlessly immigrate somewhere?
This is another iteration of The Jewish Problem, and if we’re going to seriously say that Israel should cease to exist and be replaced by a Palestinian nation state, we have to answer these questions.
Because in the current global climate? The “solution” to the “Jewish Problem” in the Southern Levant looks like mass murder. And that’s half the Jews in the world right there.
That bothers me. Does it bother you? Or is it the price you’re willing to pay? You don’t have to answer that. Deep in your heart you already know exactly what your answer is.
It’s ok if this post makes you angry, and triggers intense cognitive dissonance that make me you want to yell. But I will not be engaging with abusive and/or anti-Semitic responses, and whoever replies with that material will be blocked.
the obsessive, religious fervor at work here also reduces Palestinians themselves to mere objects, Christlike martyrs with Israelis cast as the devils, the crucifiers. it’s effectively entrenching this belief into every social justice movement, and more than simply normalizing, it is uplifting and canonizing antisemitic ideology as righteous and sacrosanct. it’s nothing new, but it is dangerous, and there are thousands of years of evidence to show why.
When I say, again and again, it's a fandom cult, this is what the fuck I mean. It quite literally fills in the 'religion/community/hierarchy' for a bunch of people hungry for structure and meaning but traumatized/certain they're 'too smart for organized religion' and they fall right into the hands of terrorist grifters. And in a bunch of rapidly-secularizing countries who still have a shitload of baggage from the Catholic Church they'd rather not face (Hi Ireland, Hi Spain) and offloading it onto Jews is easier, and they're lazy losers so their activist wings can go do more Jew baiting shit instead of actually confronting their own fucky governments.
I don't think I'm quite the religious-studies scholar to do this, but I would love to see a serious study of this kind of speech specifically from a religious-studies perspective. Because this is fascinating to me in a "the more things change, the more they stay the same" kind of way.
My guess is that this lady has been carefully taught, in post-WWII Europe that the racialized antisemitism of the 19th and 20th centuries is Bad, and Wrong, and anyway Jews Are White now (which is very much code for "Whoops, we went a bit too far on the antisemitism between 1933 and 1945, so we'll give Jews a little bit of Whiteness, as a treat, to make up for that little oopsie"), so you can't be racist against Jews by definition.
But cultural Christianity, and especially cultural Catholicism, is a helluva drug. In trying so hard to be progressive, she's actually looped all the way around to the kind of medieval antisemitism from which we derive the idea that Jews have horns/tails/cloven feet. And I'm sure she doesn't even realize that.
And, as others have noted, the look of spiritual awe in her eyes at the memory of a mere glimpse of Gaza -- the Promised Land, if you will -- really seals the deal that this has become a religious substitute. You really do have to wonder what she'd think if she ever actually did manage to set foot in the Promised Land of Gaza, with all of her intense, earnest, spiritualized White Saviorism so prominently on display.
In such an instance, I would hope that the first person she meets is not a Hamas soldier, but some ordinary shmoe who tells her the equivalent of "Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Zoot! She has been setting a light to our beacon, which, I've just remembered, is Grail-shaped."
This is relatively long, clocking in at 18 minutes, but stick with it. A final mention from Matti Lazar's webinar. He couldn't play all of this, of course; in fact, he really only mentioned it. But I was interested enough to look it up, and I was rewarded with this stunning, fiendishly difficult choral setting of the beginning of the Torah, Bereshit, the creation of the heavens, the earth, and humans.
Copland does a couple of interesting things here. The first is that, as the famous seven days of creation come to an end with the verses about the Divine resting on the seventh day, Copland doesn't stop. He keeps going through Bereshit 2:7. The thing about Bereshit is that it actually contains several different creation myths, all kind of strung together, and Copland is giving you the first two of them -- the famous one, and then another one thrown in as a bargain.
The second interesting thing that Copland does, as Lazar pointed out, was that, like the good atheist Jewish boy that he was, Copland made sure to end his piece with a powerful celebration of humanity as the apex of creation.
Absolutely stunning work from all the singers here!
Finally. Gay weather.
Wettervorhersage: Es wird schwul
This isn't a choral piece, though Lazar did talk about Irving Berlin, and he played a recording of a choral arrangement of it. But this is Irving Berlin himself singing the piece. In one of the grand traditions of Jewish music, this actually comes from a 1949 musical that Berlin wrote called Miss Liberty. The show was about a reporter in 1885, the year that the Statue of Liberty arrived from France, who goes to Paris to try to find the woman who modeled for the statue. Hijinx ensue. The show is all but forgotten now, but this song remains. Incidentally, as Lazar noted, this is possibly the only song for which Berlin wrote only the music -- the text is, of course, adapted from Emma Lazaraus's poem "The New Colossus," part of which appears on the base of the Statue of Liberty herself.
I’m so tired of the historical revisionism that acts like modern-day streams of Orthodox Judaism are somehow the most authentically historical streams of Jewish practice and that any liberalizing movements are either “invented” or “foreign.” It’s just patently untrue and is either ignorant or a malicious misreading of Jewish history and the evolution of halakha and its interpretation.
A few days ago, I listened to Matti Lazar, the director of the Zamir Choral Foundation, giving a talk about Jewish choral music through history. It really was quite amazing, beginning with the Levites in the Temple and spending some time with the work of Ovadia HaGer, which not a lot of presenters would do in that situation. Here are a few choice selections from that talk.
This is Salamone de Rossi's setting of Psalm 137. It's more choral and less madrigal-like than some Rossi pieces I've heard, but I kind of like the businesslike sound. Lazar leads it at a good clip, too; it's way too easy to sing choral pieces too slowly!
Lazar also pointed out that Rossi was one of the few composers of the Early (and later) Modern era who actually set the whole text of Psalm 137. Psalm 137 is about the Babylonian Exile ("By the waters of Babylon we sat and wept as we recalled Zion"), and a lot of composers like to focus on the first six verses of the Psalm, where the captive Jews are attractively mournful. But Rossi goes all the way to the bitter end, where the captive Jews recall the brutal pillaging of Jerusalem and retributively wish the same pain on their Babylonian captors. Jewish sorrow is acceptable, but only Rossi included Jewish anger as well.
Shape note friends! Have any of you seen this
This is a VERY cool arrangement that takes from Detroit. I think it's a little bit more socially acceptable to bring this to a choir rehearsal or something, but it's not the same as the real thing. I like the Amen part at the end but that's most certainly because of my other musical training.
My church choir sang this one. At first I thought, "Oh, this is going to be great!" but mostly it just made me sad and annoyed. "Y'all don't even know you. Are. Doing. This. WRONG."
My church does Wondrous Love for the Triduum and my choir director scolded me for being too punchy with the beat accent. She wanted it slow and meditative 🙄
Only 'slow and meditative' I want from my Sacred Harp is Hoboken-style with loads of folky-vocal ornaments (there's recordings that are even slower and more ornamented but I don't think they're on Youtube)
I mean. There are slow and meditative songs in the book. Cobb. Novakowski. Plenty of others. I like the slow resonant tunes. But Wondrous Love is not one of them! You gotta sing and joyous be! Throughout eternity!
I'll sing on! Throughout eternity I'll sing on!
(ps: NOVAKOWSKI MY BELOVED!!!!)
This post made me realize I hadn't heard Actual Detroit in quite a while. Here it is if any of my non-shape-note-singers are unheard in comparing.
A long time ago, in grad school, while I was still in the gamelan, we played Pak Joko Sutrisno's arrangements of "Three American Folk Hymns." When we received the notation, the entire gamelan was confused -- what were these allegedly popular American hymns? Not me! I recognized them instantly! They were HOLY MANNA, BELLEVUE, and WONDROUS LOVE, and I said as much.
Instantly, the entire gamelan switched their confusion to a different target. Pargoletta . . . you're Jewish. How do you know these hymns?
And that is how I got to be pesindhen for the first and only time in my life. Usually the pesindhen sings much too high for me to reach. But between the way that Pak Joko had set the tunes and the pitch of our gamelan, I could do it. The shape-note vocal style actually corresponds well enough to the pesindhen's style that I didn't have to change that much, and the hardest thing was remembering to sing WONDROUS LOVE in slendro rather than in Dorian.
This isn't us, but this is Pak Joko's arrangement:
