getting synesthetic

if you’re like me, one of your favourite pastimes is licking toads, firing up some allman bros on your microsoft zune, and finger-painting with fastfood condiments until your mom comes in and tells you to clean up your mess and remove your goth makeup and take off your sequined cocktail dress and stop feeding your mogwai after midnight.  

maybe, however you’re like annie besant and c.w. leadbeater who, in their 1901 book thought-forms, instead of finger-painting to the allman bros, thought it might be an enjoyable exercise to try and render the sound of wagner, gounod, and mendelssohn into oil paintings.

the resulting images could certainly be considered an early demonstration of synesthesia: the super power which permitted nabokov to see words as colours and some guy named james wannerton to “taste” sounds. 

Many people are aware that sound is always associated with colour—that when, for example, a musical note is sounded, a flash of colour corresponding to it may be seen by those whose finer senses are already to some extent developed. It seems not to be so generally known that sound produces form as well as colour, and that every piece of music leaves behind it an impression of this nature, which persists for some considerable time, and is clearly visible and intelligible to those who have eyes to see.

in [the Mendelssohn plate] we have a small and comparatively simple form pourtrayed in considerable detail, something of the effect of each note being given; in [the Gounod plate] we have a more elaborate form of very different character delineated with less detail, since no attempt is made to render the separate notes, but only to show how each chord expresses itself in form and colour; in [the Wagner plate] we have a still greater and richer form, in the depiction of which all detail is avoided, in order that the full effect of the piece as a whole may be approximately given.

if your zune is loaded with felix mendelssohn’s no. 9 of “songs without words,” or charles gounod’s soldiers chorus from “faust”, or richard wagner’s overture to “the meistersingers,” you can listen to these pieces as you go about your gardening work. or if you are an elite synesthete, you can give these striking images a once-over and be left with a similar aesthetic aftertaste.

how to format various music titles

i’m writing an article about music for a certain lifestyle magazine to which i subscribed in undergrad but now only read while waiting in line at my favourite tattoo parlour. because the piece references all types of music (from glam rock to obscure sonatas), i figured that i would take some time to understand how to format various titles. never in a hundred trillion years did i think for a minute picosecond that the style for formatting different music pieces was this specific.

for the record: an opera is italicised, a popular song gets quotation marks, a classical piece that is not a tone poem nor short receives neither quotation marks nor italics.

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source: lauther’s complete punctuation thesaurus of the english language (1991).

elektro & bass man

you guys—MY BAND IS GETTING BACK TOGETHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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from the nypl digital gallery

and laid him on the green

a close cousin of the holorime is the mondegreen which is a mishearing of a phrase. one of my most visceral experiences with this was when i first heard alanis morrisette’s you oughta know. her angsty lyrics in my head were:

It’s not fair, to deny me of the cross-eyed bear that you gave to me

and i was like: holy scrotumburgers alanis! if you had just kept your angst in your pants, you and your inamorato could be playing with that rascally cross-eyed bear all weekend long, teaching it to steal pick-a-nic baskets. you really blew this one big time.

for wunderkammer: a paleolithic flute

q: what were you doing 40,000 years ago when your stone age neighbors were rocking out on paleolithic flutes made out of woolly mammoth femurs? a: you were probably some stinking monkey scratching your hairy butt with pinecones.

in celebration of the fact that you and me have had a musical culture that spans over 40 millennia, let us start a paleolithic flute/theremin jam band. IT WILL BE A POLITICAL STATEMENT and we will rock out on the top of the sphinx wearing sequins and goat hides.

a space opera… in the year 2000

what do you imagine going to the opera will be like in the year 2000? what about people in the 1800s, what did they imagine what going to the opera would be like in the year 2000? furthermore, what do you imagine that people in the 1800s imagined what you would imagine that they would imagine what going to the opera 9 years ago would be like? before we sink into an infinite abyss, let us observe this 1882 illustration from the hyper-cool paleo future blog (which has several more pictures of this series) where lithographer albert robida conceptualises his 2nd millennium operatic vision. consider:

your elegant monocle and tender moustache and the bevy of fly honeys in paisley petticoats that you assist in boarding your flying yellow dolphin while kaiser wilhem patrols the perimeter in a solo spaceship (sword at the ready), and 100 feet below you, some dandy ushers boobsy mcgee out of her wooly overcoat. it’s almost as if steampunk scene happened last year.

and to think only a few years before this lithograph was published, nietzsche (in die geburt der tragödie) went on a 54 paragraph tirade about how much opera blows chunks. look who’s eating a corvine delmonico now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(answer: friedrich wilhelm nietzsche!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

the linen anniversary

as today marks my 4 (four (iv)) year anniversary of dispatching curiosities on the ragbag, i thought that i would break new grounds and post something that i wouldn’t normally post. thus, i give you my fourth audio entry, the song, “it probably always will” from the album, it’ll shine when it shines by the ozark mountain daredevils (1975).

this relatively obscure bluegrass/rock song has a deep personal significance for me and each occasion that i listen to it, i am astrally projected back to the time and mind to which it is unfailingly linked. but i shan’t go into that here because i am very curious to learn of your thoughts on it.

also: in order to post this song, i had to check a box stating that i had permission to do so. i have no such permission, and that is what rock and/or roll* is all about.

*this song is more properly classified as country rock. additionally, rock and/or roll is also about raging against the establishment and crooning about chicks.

and you thought that taking the know your dvořák quiz was the maximum amount of mirth that you could have on the internet… well guess again, pipsqueak. i give you the know your odyssey translation quiz.

the following are seven famous translations of the epic’s opening line. can you match them to their translators? (note, for each answer that you get wrong, poor odysseus must wait an additional year before returning to his special lady friend (and to ratchet up the gravitas, he’s not allowed to engage in any autoerotic proclivities))

αʹ Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

βʹ Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.

γʹ Tell me, O Muse, of that sagacious man
Who, having overthrown the sacred town
Of Ilium, wandered far and visited
The capitals of many nations, learned
The customs of their dwellers, and endured
Great suffering on the deep

δʹ The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound;
Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall
Of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall

εʹ Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.

ϝʹ The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;
That wander’d wondrous far, when he the town
Of sacred Troy had sackt and shiver’d down;

ζʹ The man, my Muse, resourceful, driven a long way
after he sacked the holy city of Trojans:
tell me all the men’s cities he saw and the men’s minds,

the translators: george chapman (1616), alexander pope (1713), william cullen bryant (1871),  robert fitzgerald (1961), richard lattimore (1965), robert fagles (1996), and edward mccrorie (2004).

answers can be found here. also: which translation do you think is the tops? (for my money, it’s fitzy-fitzgerald’s but maybe this is because this was the first interpretation that i read. related: doesn’t it always seem that the first version of a song that you hear is always the standard and all covers become inferior?)

dead poets

perhaps there is more to hip-hop than lusting after girls in apple bottom jeans and/or sipping a brand name rum as if in celebration of the day you were born. what of the 28 year old grad student studying the ancestors of modern rhymesters for the last five years of his life? is he not entitled to his own anthem to which he can put his own damn hands up?

baba brinkman has made the case that he is entitled to such an anthem and has crafted a very convincing candidate in “dead poets” from his 2006 album, swordplay. consider some of his savvy lyrics and make your own decision:

For a challenge I’m known to approach talent shows with
Poems that I stole from Edgar Allen Poe’s lips
Opium hits dope Alexander Pope’s wits
I was Samuel Coleridge in a trance when I wrote this
And I awoke with the whole song done
I felt the soul of John Donne; Andrew Marvel
Taught me to chase the sun; I can’t make it stand still
So instead I’ll make it run, with puns denser
Than Edmund Spencer’s, and modern lyrics
Modeled on Robert Herrick’s;

the two other audio posts on the ragbag can be found here.

another peculiar holiday tradition: m’aider!

ever since i was really really little, my mom would barge into my room at 6:30 a.m. every may 1st blasting the appended song (vanessa redgrave singing the lusty month of may from the musical, camelot) on a portable boombox. she continues this tradition via phone EVERY year. i post this audio° not so much for your benefit but out of annual pavlovian conditioning.