My mTBI and added SAD are doing multiple head-tricks to me. I am actually nearly praying that the hurricane tracks more inland into NY giving us rain this last long gasp weekend of the summer. We are in severe drought here, farmers who bought crop insurance get a payoff. Not much, but it buffers.

good/21st century deals about this social technology and its blogs. People can reach out to each other for help and help out. Back to the diary....a lot of great Russian classical music like Tchaikovsky's was written cos he got paid for it. He was a gay guy who had to stay in the closet BIG-TIME, and suffered greatly for it. REC'D!!

This material is nice and all but it shows why Little Richard had to invent music in the 1950s.

Heh. So many of us (musicians and rock fans) think along these lines I'm seeing. That when it comes down to it, King Richard probably doesn't get the kind of exultation he deserves for just what he means as the singular force at the advent of rock n roll, imo our single greatest export to the world. Good golly...

Bass player I play with says every town should have a statue of Little Richard in it. I think he's right. Doesn't it bug you too to see in almost every small town in this country the ubiquitous hunk of granite dedicated to some Armed Forces venture somewhere (I have a friend in Berlin, NY where the pop. is 2800, yet they have a war monument...)? As I always say, when you go to Europe the names of scientists, poets, musicians and authors grace their town squares, street names, etc. The two political parties we are told we can vote for had their conventions in places called the Wells Fargo Arena and the Quicken Loans Arena. WtFF? Are we really entering a reality satirized in Idiocracy? Seems too bizarrely true right now.

Will check out the music later. Just finished cleaning the place while the baby slept. The Ipod shuffle has been fun in the background. Loaded it up with 26k songs (160 gigs, an Ipod Classic I'm told - whatever), which was possible from the days when I worked at Billboard Magazine and cd's were the new big thing. I have a ton, and made that mistake encouraged by that melted industry, to pursue digital instead of analog vinyl. Still have a good bit of records, though the heart of my collection was stolen. I've been replacing the classics here and there. Just having vinyl around the house imbues the place with the right kind of vibe, like the aroma of good home cooking. Have a wall of cd's. Not sure, if I should just pack up and put in books with the covers, or what. Just seems so weird, where the world of music, radio, record collections have gone today. Young folks seem to just be on Spotify and Pandora, hardly buying any music at all and listening to it on their phones. After 30 years nobody buys cd's anymore, and vinyl albums are now going for double the price of them, which was the opposite back then. Strange days indeed, most peculiar mama.

One of the tunes that came up was by a Brazilian artist Seu George doing a Portuguese version of Bowie's "Starman." Which got me thinking of the difference in how the candidates have been couched in music. While I don't think Bernie is a Bowie fan (recall someone asking him if he had a comment on his death and he claimed not to know much about him) the tune, I thought, really captured the zeitgeist of the movement. The other two are so fucking cheesy and like you find with wealthy spoiled people, they don't have an artistic bone to speak of. They may have collections of incredible art, libations, etc, but none of it of their own accord. Hire lackeys to locate it and bring it back to be hoarded so they can brag to their criminal financial terrorist friends that they've got the best this and that. $hills is a soulless, stilted Stepford Disney cornball who aligns with Katy Perry, while the Goon is that typical slimeball promoter who doesn't pay bands but takes their music (hey, whatayagunnado? Sue me) and predictably clips the most played out of classic rock, with some more suited to a pole dance at a strip club.

Thanks as always for the humor, history and good vibes. One of these days we've got to organize a national C99 Meetup. And jam too!

history. I like the classic old masters in music and visual art all the way back to the Greeks. I wish we could hear the ancient music that Pan played but unlike stone, murals and clay the tunes of that day are somewhere in the air.

My parents had some classical music but it was cornball American 'classical' like the Grand Canyon suite. I was in my twenties when I first heard the big time old masters of western music. What came before the biggies like Bach, Mozart or the long haired famous guys is floating somewhere in the air also. I bet that the dirges and chants from the early Church are so heavy they never left the ground. Glad you started your history with secular music that people must have danced to.

Here's a secular pop composer musician from the 1200's. It figures he was from Mediterranean France as they were not as Gothic and Dark.

The Trouvères and the Troubadours

Popular music, usually in the form of secular songs, existed during the Middle Ages. This music was not bound by the traditions of the Church, nor was it even written down for the first time until sometime after the tenth century. Hundreds of these songs were created and performed (and later notated) by bands of musicians flourishing across Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries, the most famous of which were the French trouvères and troubadours. The monophonic melodies of these itinerant musicians, to which may have been added improvised accompaniments, were often rhythmically lively. The subject of the overwhelming majority of these songs is love, in all its permutations of joy and pain. One of the most famous of these trouvères known to us (the great bulk of these melodies are by the ubiquitous "Anonymous") is Adam de la Halle (ca. 1237-ca. 1286). Adam is the composer of one of the oldest secular music theater pieces known in the West, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion. He has also been identified as the writer of a good many songs and verses.

Le Jeu de Robin et Marion

Marion's song

Here's a pop tune by Yanus Emre from the 13 century that is not western but Turkish. I don't think it's secular but it's catchy and lively.

Written by Yunus Emre, he is the first mystical popular poet of Turkish tradition. He was born in Central Anatolia in the mid-13th century and died in the first half of the 14th. The use of Turkish indicates his rural origin; at a time where in the cities of Anatolia Arabic and Persian were current languages of literature and science. Yunus Emre was the first important poet to make literary use of his mother tongue.

the sun makes.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9URQW_hZ-vo]

not only a great essay but a rec for some Will Cuppy. Sadly, it is an inadequate rec, since it only mentions 1066 and All That instead of telling people to also read The Decline & Fall of Practically Everybody. Fabulous work all the same.