Consonants and vowels all together, equally

Hey so pts asked me five questions, and here are the answers!

( some stuff about my college )
( some stuff about American history )
( some stuff about Clint and Coulson in the form of a tiny story )
( some stuff about an underrated album )
( some stuff about culture made just for me )

( REM albums in order of preference )

( old REM songs you might like )

( the part where I have memories and am very old )

Have some super old R.E.M., when everyone was young and had more hair, including David Letterman.

Wow, that moment when we could comment on LJ was short-lived, wasn't it? Well, when things are back up and running I'll throw them a few bucks. They're fighting the good fight over there and I'm happy to be patient while they get all that straightened out.

In the meantime here are some short thoughts:

• The EWFS sequel is so close to being done I can taste it. Seriously: two scenes, one of which I've started, and the epilogue will be done and I'll send it and the reworked final chapter to the betas and then do what I really should have been doing the last two weeks, which is work on the STBB. Though that one is so fun and so clear in my mind that I think it'll go really fast.
  
• Oh my god Morissey stop being a dick. People might take your comments about animal rights more seriously if (1) you didn't try to boil down a complicated issue into a sound bite (2) you didn't do this at moments of global sensitivity (3) you didn't also run around saying weirdo racist anti-immigration bullshit. Sorry you don't like all them brown folks in your lily white England, but that's the breaks of being a colonial power.
  
• However, Chris Daughtry, you keep letting your geek flag fly. Cosplaying with your kid at SDCC, two thumbs up.
  
• My brief moment of reading the newspaper (mostly due to the phone hacking scandal, which I could not get enough of) has ended now that the news is back to "things that give Clio anxiety attacks." You know, like racist massacres and monetary crises and drought-related famines.
  
• KENNA IS PLAYING THE TOTALLY FREE AFROPUNK FESTIVAL IN BROOKLYN NEXT MONTH STOP SO ARE JANELLE MONAE SANTIGOLD CEE LO GREEN STOP BASICALLY THIS FESTIVAL SHOULD BE CALLED THINGS THAT CLIO LOVES STOP
  
• Love you, Karl, but I'm not seeing Loft. From the summary of the original Belgian film that was posted on tumblr, it just sounds like a movie of men being jerks to women for two hours, and then possibly getting some comeuppance but not really. Yuck, no thank you.
  
• I've been actually seeing tons of people on the weekends. It's really fun to be social! And I'm glad the horrible heat broke.

Yeah, I know, whatever. I can be irreverent on my own journal, damnit!

So first thing's first: He was perfectly fine. ( the details, if you want them )

So in sum, I don't think the severe pans were really deserved, though I also don't think the show adds that much to, say, the Broadway stage. It isn't something that needed to be revived. But Dan did perfectly well in it, and I'd definitely go to see him sing and dance again.

Oh and pinkfinity also treated me to a tour of the Harry Potter exhibit, which was super cool. Lots of sets and props and costumes, especially Quidditch robes which, yay, and wands everywhere, and the robes they wore to the ball, etc. etc. etc. Definitely gave me some oomph as I head into the homestretch of the HP writing I'm doing right now!

Okay, not original to me--it's the AV Club's AVQA today--but music, memories, and hey, that census meme is already making me feel old so why not continue the trend? So here's the meme for your copying pleasure:

What's the first song you truly remember loving? (Don't worry if it's a little embarrassing; you were just a kid!) Then tag as many friends as you like to do the meme as well!

My parents tell a story that when I was first crawling--this would have been winter 69-70--I would come tearing into the living room from wherever I'd wandered off to if the Doublemint gum commercial was on. But I don't remember this.

Now my parents were a little older and listened to a lot of swing music in the house, rather than rock, so one of the two songs I remember particularly loving as a little kid was Pennsylvania 6-5000 by Glenn Miller. And then in 1973, when I was four, The Sting came out, which resulted in Joplin's "The Entertainer" getting a lot of radio airplay and I adored that song as well. I also have a vague memory of liking "Come Together", or at least the line, "one and one and one is three."

When I was seven, I was really into "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, though I didn't know what the name of it was; I mostly knew the line "thunder only happens when it's raining." I was an alto even as a little girl and loved that Stevie Nick's voice was so low; I used to sing that song all the time and was really happy whenever it played over the radio in the school bus.

I am officially tagging everyone, but I'm going to nudge a few people whose musical tastes I'm particularly interested in: ignaz, honestys_easy, mahoni, sistermagpie, abigail89, sangueuk, slytherincess, evil_erato and lillijulianne. (This list is a little weighted toward folks my age, I admit.)

So? What about you?

I was going to do the WIP meme to lay to rest a story I have recently decided to abandon, but the thousands (maybe, 3000?) of words I wrote are so damn lifeless I couldn't find a snippet I liked. Which probably means it was a good idea to abandon the story. Anyway more on that later.

Instead, for today's post, have some videos. Someone on Fandom Secrets was talking about an anime or a manga called Shaft? So of course I had to find the actual theme from Shaft, and got this video, which has Jesse Jackson in it for some reason:

( damn right. )

One would think he had better things to do in the 70s than be a hype man for Isaac Hayes, but then maybe in 1973 there was nothing better to do than be a hype man for Isaac Hayes. I love how you can hear him shouting "yeah! yeah!", on the beat, every once in a while, like he's a sample, only live. Someone actually should sample that.

Meanwhile here's something I still love, "Teenage Dream" from Glee. I mean, anyone who thinks Chris Colfer doesn't deserve the accolades should watch him in this scene, where he's not doing much of anything other than reacting and standing there both grinning like a goofball and then looking around to see if anyone is noticing that he's grinning like a goofball, and you can feel his delight in having some cute boy basically serenading him. It's lovely.

( you and I, we'll be young forever )

So my friend calloocallay recently mentioned something about a musical Bechdel test, about finding songs about a third person woman whom the singer didn't either want to sleep with or do away with (I presume as a romantic rival?). So of course I had to try and see if it held up through an entirely unscientific survey of my iTunes.

I had thought, going into this, that the problem would be that the vocal music I listen to—pop, rock, soul, rap, dance—is mostly about sex, and that's true. But actually the bigger problem was that many songs that seemed to be in the third person in the verse go into the second person in the chorus. The American Songbook stuff was the worst; it was nearly all first or second person. And of course all that confessional singer/songwriter stuff is entirely in the first person. So the limiting factor here wasn't that there aren't a lot of songs not about romance, but rather that there aren't a lot of songs in the third person.

That said, the question in songs about women is whether saying that they are beautiful or that you love them is making it about how hot they are. In those cases I admit I went extra-textual. For example, I know that "Julia" is about John Lennon's mother, even though he talks about singing a song of love to her seashell eyes.

In the end, I don't think that there really are tons of songs about nonsexualized men in the third person but far fewer about women, so I'm not sure the Bechdel test is really telling us anything here except that popular music doesn't tend to be in the third person in the first place, regardless of the gender of the people writing or who they're writing about. But I only heard about this in passing, so I could be mistaking the point of the test!

songs about ladies ( I found 25 )

songs about guys ( I found 14 )

songs about a lot of people ( I found 18 )

songs discarded for being ultimately in the second person ( I found 19, though there were more I didn't bother to put down )

songs discarded for ultimately being about the singer
Fleetwood Mac | Gold Dust Woman
Britney Spears | Lucky (you know: she cry cry cries in her bed at night)
most Smiths songs

songs ostensibly about men but actually about awesome music
Stevie Wonder | Sir Duke
The Replacements | Alex Chilton

songs about girls/guys you may want to get rid of but not because they are possible romantic rivals, but more because they make poor choices in eye makeup or are your soon-to-be-ex's asshole buddy
Blondie | Rip Her to Shreds
Erykah Badu | Tyrone

songs not really about people
Flaming Lips | One More Robot

songs that may be about someone, but no one is really sure
Donna Summer | MacArthur Park

Look, I know most of you guys feel this show is mostly full of fail after fail after fail and can't understand why anyone would ever watch it. But you know, so is Supernatural, and I don't hear a lot of people ragging too awfully much on the right of folks to watch two brothers drive around in an Impala chasing ghosts.

So here's why I watch Glee: ( because I knew what they were quoting (cut for song spoilers) )

You can reply to this post as well, thusly:

• Reply to this post with the words ALA PEANUT BUTTER SANDWICHES and I will pick six of your icons.
  
• Make a post (including this info) and talk about the icons I chose.
  
• Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
  
• This will create a never ending cycle of icon glee.

smilingskull chose these icons for me, and I got really philosophical and rambly, so bear with me!

( Nocturne Alley, ladies, PR & absent friends, that fic wut I wrote, Ms. Vega & the bff, and that Pine feller )

So! My startrekbigbang story matched both a mixer and, as of last night, an artist! Also, there are so many fics I'm looking forward to reading! So my own recent freak out about many things writing-related is slightly mitigated.

Unsurprisingly, however, my rpf_big_bang story hasn't matched with an artist yet, though this is not due to lack of trying by the mods. At least it is, as of this writing, in with 14 other stories that also haven't matched yet. My cynicism about matching with an artist has much more to do with my cynicism about Idol fandom and general fangirl feelings about my ship than anything regarding the rpf BB itself, which has been really well run so far! It's difficult to balance my wanting to have faith with my also wanting to manage my expectations.

I'm thinking about signing up to do a mix for STBB next year, as doing a mix for my own story isn't that exciting but doing one for someone else's story seems sort of interesting. It would certainly give me an incentive to finish the writing early like I did this year to give me time to make a mix. And it's nice to do both sides of the equation, yeah? I mean, I have a lot of music and I like to think my mixes don't suck.

Maybe I'll make my own mix for the rpf_big_bang story, though, since mixers aren't part of that BB.