Gothic Bellydancing

First of all, I'd like to make a protest. As a person who studies Goths as in the tribe that was in the middle of Europe before it split into the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, I have long been burdened by getting hits on sites for people who wear deathlike makeup and gloomy clothes when I search for "Goths" and on sites about gloomy cathedrals and gloomy novels when I search for "Gothic". Having the term "Gothic" taken up by yet another non-Goth-the-tribe group is not going to help. (And what is up with all the gloom anyway? The tribal Goths were as cheerful as anyone.)

The confusion did let me stumble across Gothic bellydancing. There appear to be technical definitions of this art form. (See GothicBellydance.com, for example.) My short description is that it is Goth-the-modern-movement women wearing Theda Bara bellydancer costumes dancing to Goth-type music.

I have to confess. I am not a Goth. I don't think there is anything wrong with the movement or the styles--they are just so not for me. I did, however, expect the Gothic bellydancing to be silly or pretentious. It's not. It's actually pretty interesting for me. (I am not qualified to say if it is sexy or not.)

I was doing web searches on "Gothing Bellydancing" trying to come up with more to say than "it exists" and "it doesn't suck". I got engrossed in trying to figure out the difference between tribal fusion gothic bellydancing and industrial, so I decided I better surface and give a preliminary report.

Youtube has plenty of examples, but here are two I like as illustrations. Here is Sashi with a tribal fusion gothic bellydance:


And here is BellyCraft with industrial bellydance:

Generic Music from Generic Bands

A couple of weeks ago, I was letting iTunes run through couple of new albums I had bought. I didn't realize until afterward that I had gotten "shuffle" set. The songs from the two bands were indistinguishable. Then I thought about it and realized that I could take a track from either of these bands and drop it into the middle of a number of other albums I have--and no one coming to the music cold would notice. These bands make generic music.

What am I calling "generic music"? It's the musical eqivalent of water in world of soup. It's music that has no distinguishing features, no particular voice or style or viewpoint or anything. It's just there. It observes all the conventions of it genre, hits all the standard marks ... and nothing else.

I can understand how manufactured bands (like the run of hair metal bands or the run of boy groups) could end up being generic. I'd rather have something more interesting, with a viewpoint and a voice, have the rack space, but I can see where they come from and what they are about. They have minders who work hard to rub out all their distinguishing features so they can control the product (and the group members) better. I see the market niche of these bands. I get how they are good business. They are like Dennys or McDonalds: safe, predictable, easy to market. Product.

But the two bands that started me thinking about this were independent bands who (apparently) invented themselves. Could anyone be so vacant, so blank? But how could anyone set out be a musician and say "OK, great, I'm going to record music that no one will remember for a minute after it finishes. I'm going to be a can of peas on a shelf of peas."? Can they imagine that, as a small producer, they can afford to be invisible against the background? And don't they have anything they want to say?

I can't help thinking about two albums with meat and vegetables that I didn't buy because my money went to bottles of tap water with pretty labels. (And I am on to the people who recommended these to me. Hah. They won't fool me again.)

I will continue to do what I can to get people to listen to more and better music, music that has something to say and some distinctive way of saying it. It's spitting into the wind, but I'm stubborn that way. I would appreciate it, however, if so many musicians weren't working so hard to sell water.

I’m back. Sort of. PLUS: Buddy Miles

Oy. I was sick. Then I was trying to catch up on what didn't get done while I was sick. I promised myself that I wouldn't waste any time on this blog until I caught up. And then I said when I was almost caught up. And then I said the last week of February, even if I still wasn't caught up. Then we were overtaken by a series of family crises that kept me too busy and stressed to write.

So, now what? Well, I'm back! I am organizing my thoughts and will get back to regular business tomorrow.

In the meantime, I will leave you with this video of a live performance of the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Fillmore East (way back before it was a franchise--they are going to open A Fillmore down the block from me. What is that about? A Fillmore? But I digress...) These guys are so completely locked in, I doubt another live performance has ever been better. So here, in memory of Buddy Miles, enjoy:

My dog ate my brain

Dear Blog Readers, I'm not dead. I still love you. I am just too sick to think with a bug that won't go away. Watch this space!

My Roy Orbison Shame

When I was in college, before I got the tedious but interesting job doing breadboard layout and wire-wrapping at a chip design company, I had a tedious and dirty job as a dogsbody in a ceramics craft shop. This was a shop where you could buy slip-cast (low-fire) ceramic shapes, clean them up, paint and glaze them, get them fired, etc. My main job was cleaning unfired ceramic dust from surfaces. Lots of dust, lots of surfaces, shelves and shelves of easily-destroyed unfired ceramics.

The guy who owned the shop believed that in a place where people would be working, there must be music. He didn't trust people to choose their own music, of course. He had a beat-up tape player and a stack of tapes, and one of his important jobs was to change the tapes. No one else was allowed to touch his precious player or tapes.

What he played was 80% Roy Orbison and 20% miscellaneous psychedelic leftovers. Unless he was having a day of getting grief from his wife for being a bad shop manager or for wandering over to the lounge next door or for going down to the laundromat to flirt with the slut (yes, really, I knew her, she'd do anything with a knob) who ran that. Then he played all Orbison for a long as he was grounded.

This was the worst music I had ever heard up to that time. Oh great gods above and below, it was torment day after day. I could never describe to anyone how dreadful it was, because the music was so bad in so many ways. I put Roy Orbison down in my book under "To Be Avoided At All Costs".

Years later, the Traveling Wilburys appeared on the scene. Of course, I loved their music and of course, me being me, I read up on who they were and all. Well, damn--Lefty Wilbury, Roy Orbison, wow.

So then I found someone who had some Orbison albums and listened to them. Hey, that was him? Damn, wow. And what a songwriter. So did he get better or did I get smarter?

It only occurred to me a couple of years after that--that stupid tape player and the tapes were the only surfaces that didn't get dusted. They all must have been full of that stuff. It's no wonder that the music was wobbling, screeching, and gargling. ::headdesk::

So, Roy, whereve you are--I'm sorry I thought that you sucked a mighty suck. I am ashamed I blamed you instead of that idiot Odie.

My Day Of Music

This morning, I listened to Collective Soul's Collective Soul. 

Then I went to Chick-Fil-A for lunch.  They always have a fairly loud corporate soundtrack playing.  Mostly, nothing jumped to my attention.  They did play "Mmm Bop" (I actually had to look up the spelling of that), which I now know I still like.

I walked around doing errands to Disciplined Breakdown. 

In Plaza Art Supplies, I had to turn Ratatask off to transact.  They had a very nice cover of "I Ain't Missing You At All" playing.  The people behind the counter and I had a nice talk about how much we liked it and who might have done it and covers in general and all.  I popped out my Blackberry to look it up and was dismayed to see how many of the top Google hits credited it to Tyler Hilton without any reference to John Waite or even Tina Turner.  Damn kids, mutter mutter.

When I got home, I decided to watch some streaming movies from Netflix.

The first was a documentary about Tom Dowd, who has been a very important recording engineer.  (Could I be any more understated?)  He got the second 8-track recording setup ever made for Atlantic.  (The first was in Les Paul's kitchen or basement or something.)  He was the one who thought of using sliders instead of knobs.  He had Atlantic recording in stereo before it was possible to use it, just because it seemed like a good idea.  He has worked with pretty much everyone, it looked like.  (I mean, think of the Atlantic catalog.) Very cool story about a cool guy.  There was one amazing bit with him messing around with the tracks of "Layla" that he hadn't had his hands on since it was released.  (He introduced Clapton and Allman.)  You really have to hear the guitar parts isolated to fully appreciate that.

The second was an old feature called Orchestra Wives, from 1942.  It is about a sweet thing who marries a trumpeter and goes on the road with the band.  The band is played by Glenn Miller and his orchestra, mostly.  The music was interesting because it was not the usual Miller greatest hits.  Oh, and it had two versions of "I Got a Gal In Kalamazoo", one done straight by the orchestra and one by the Nicholas Brothers.  The whole movie is yet another reminder that music "videos" go way back, but the Nicholas Brothers number might as well have had a paleolithic MTV logo in the corner. I was amused to see a scene at the beginning with the orchestra cutting a record that illustrated some of the stuff about the early tech in the Dowd documentary.  The movie is also a reminder that the trials of life on the road were not invented in the rock era.  All it was missing from the modern template were drugs and breasts. In this movie, the band was even broken up by a wife! 

I am about to watch Rock My World, which promises to be a romp with Alicia Silverstone as a bass player who just happens to be at a British mansion when a big famous important band that needs a bass player shows up.  With some mischievious British aristocrats running around as well.   Hijinks ensue.

Music to be snowed in with

I'm not dead!  I finally gave in to the series of viruses and collapsed into the arms of a binge-athon of the first five seasons of Law and Order:  Criminal Intent.  Vincent D'Onofrio's character is interesting, but what I kept thinking about was how seriously I'd be screwed if I were ever interrogated that way.  So many of the things they assume are just alternate-reality to me.

Although I wasn't doing much blogging, I was also thinking about music.  I was propped up in bed with my laptop with WiFi and my iPod with my whole music library and a stack of books next to me, and I started laughing about the whole idea of Desert Island Music, or Movies, or Books, or whatever.  You know, the old standard interview question:  If you were going to be stranded on a desert island, what album/movie/book/whatever would you take with you?"

I would like to say that if I were going to be dumped in the middle of anywhere remote and dangerous, I would be thinking about Bowie knife, metal buckets, rope, cord, wire, heavy contractor-grade garbage bags, sharpening stone, big hat, warm socks, and whatever else seemed likely to help me stay alive.  I would be worried about my Leatherman and not a solar charger for the iPod.  So I would reframe this as "If you were going to be snowed in a nice comfortable place with power and supplies and all for a couple of months, what albums would you take?"

I would also like to say that I have actually done this.  I mean, the "what music would you take?" and not being dropped into the Gobi desert in my sneakers.  I had to run away from home to escape from an abusive relationship, with just what I could fit into my car with two kids.  I thought I would probably be able to get most of my stuff later, but I knew I couldn't count on it.  So I had to give a lot of though to what books, clothes, etc. I would grab on my way out the door.

Here is the sad truth:  I was so concerned about getting my essential reference books and out of print books and papers for projects I was working on and a working set of kitchen gear and toys and figuring out how to get the kids out without a scene and realizing I had no place to go and all, that I completely forgot to think about music.  So what I had when I drove away and for the next 5 months was just the discs I happened to have in my car leftover from a recent long drive.

This stack of albums was not what I would have made my canonical Snowed-In Music list.  I was pretty low, and so I was overstocked on "I am blue but I reckon I will survive somehow" songs.  There was also albums that I just like to listen to for the particular mood I was in when I was picking the music for the trip.  I wasn't in the mood for anything loud or hard at all that day, so I put in a lot of twangy ballads.  And I smacked myself on the back of the wrist and made myself drop the Queen and Collective Soul, so that was completely missing, because I always listen to them over and over and wanted to give them a rest for a few days.

When I started thinking about it this week, I realized how remarkable that I still like the music in that stack at all.  I listened to it all over and over, because it was all I had.  And yet I still listen to it and enjoy it without having flashbacks to those difficult days.  It passed the field test for repeat listening.

So, here is my official field-tested list of 48 Albums to Take to a Snowing In--the ones I actually took, other essentials that I listen to frequently, and some new ones I think are worth a try.  To make the game more interesting, I made myself choose just one album from each artist, and only albums I actually own right now.  (Why 48?  That's how many disks my biggest carrier holds.)

1. Maura O'Connell, Blue is the Colour of Hope
2. Rodney Crowell, Houston Kid
3. Paul Thorn, Mission Temple Fireworks Stand
4. Hedningarna, Kaksi
5. Gordon Lightfoot, Summertime Dream
6. Deep Forest, Boheme
7. Santana, Best of Santana
8. Audioslave, Audioslave (the one harder ringer in the stack)
9. Buckwheat Zydeco, Buckwheat Zydeco Story
10. Flaco Jimenez, Partners
11. Birmingham Symphony, Beethoven's Seventh
12. O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack
13. Cold Mountain soundtrack
14. Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody
15. Collective Soul, Disciplined Breakdown
16. Soundgarden, Superunknown
17. k.d. lang, Shadowland
18. Songcatcher soundtrack
19. Mark Knopfler, Cal soundtrack
20. Beethoven's Ninth
21. Michael Tolcher, I Am
22. ACRES, 3 Minute Movies
23. Alice in Chains, Dirt
24. Booker T. and the MGs, Soul Men
25. Concrete Blonde, Bloodletting
26. Daniel Lanois, Acadie
27. Ryan Adams, Heartbreaker
28. The White Stripes, Elephant
29. Drowning Pool, Full Circle
30. Hoobastank, The Reason
31. Don Williams, Twentieth Century Masters
32. Mr. Whirly, Mr. Whirly
33. Various Artists, Essential Gershwin
34. Various Artists, De Lovely soundtrack
35. John Hiatt, Perfectly Good Guitar
36. Lee Mellor, Ghost Town Heart
37. Texas Tornados, A Zone of our Own
38. Foo Fighters, In Your Honor
39. Matthew Sweet, Altered Beast
40. Muse, Black Holes and Revelations
41. Robbie Robertson, Storyville
42. Screaming Trees, Sweet Oblivion
43. Mudvayne, Lost and Found
44. Gin Blossoms, New Miserable Experience
45. Broken Sunday, Identity
46. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Time - The Revelator
47. Plusminus X, State of Mind
48. Sly & The Family Stone, Anthology

It hurt to be cut down to a dozen or so albums as I was. It even hurts to cut down to 48. The best part about the 160 gig iPod is that I am a few years away from needing to choose like this. I can always just take it ALL.