Chicken waltz

Today I'm in the mood for some classical music. We'll start with an unusual a capella performance of 'The Blue Danube', composed by Johann Strauss in 1866. The conductor is Gonzo.

Bzzzz....

Malena Ernman and Martin Fröst, accompanied by Niklas Sivelöv on the piano, perform 'The Flight of the Bumblebee', an interlude from the opera 'The Tale of Tsar Saltan', which was composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov around 1899-1900.

'The Typewriter'

With unemployment on the rise, beat competition by offering prospective employers advanced secretarial skills.

'The Typewriter', composed by Leroy Anderson, is performed by Martin Breinschmid and the Strauß Festival Orchestra Vienna (Germany, 2008).

Sub-atomic sounds

Many years after Blondie's 'Atomic', here's CERN's 'sub-atomic': here you can listen to the simulated sounds produced by sub-atomic particles, the most famous of which is the ever-elusive Higgs boson, aka 'God particle', when they are generated in the Large Hadron Collider. There's a definite sci-fi feel about the littlw tune, I must say. More about the project on the BBC.

The image represents the electronic signatures produced by collisions of protons and antiprotons in the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab (image via Science Daily, courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory).

La Belle Vuvuzela

The entirely unofficial World Cup 2010 cover version of the classic hit by Labelle.

Psychobilly, que'ce-que c'est?

If you too think 'Psychobilly' is pretty imaginative as music-genre names go, wait till you hear the names of some of the most representative Psychobilly bands. Here's a list of my favourites:

The Chop Tops

Image source

Calamitiez

Image source

Elvis Hitler (a mutant made in hell, no doubt)

Image source

The Vaudevillains

Image source

Zombina and the Skeletones

(image source)

The godfather of the genre seems to be songwriter Wayne Kemp, who wrote for Johnny Cash 'One Piece at a Time', a country song in fact, which became a hit in the US top-ten charts in 1976. The song tells of a Detroit factory worker whose job was to fit wheels on Cadillacs, and who hatched a cunning plan to smuggle a Cadillac out of the factory piece by piece (hence the title) in his lunchbox, never mind if it took him years. His home-made beauty, however, looks rather idiosyncratic - it's a 'Psychobilly Cadillac' (lyrics from elyrics.net):

'I got it one piece at a time
And it didn't cost me a dime
You'll know it's me when I come through your town
I'm gonna ride around in style
I'm gonna drive everybody wild
'Cause I'll have the only one there is around.

[Spoken] Ugh! Yow, RED RYDER
This is the COTTON MOUTH
In the PSYCHOBILLY CADILLAC, Come on.

Huh, This is the COTTON MOUTH
And negatory on the cost of this mow-chine there RED RYDER
You might say I went right up to the factory
And picked it up, it's cheaper that way
Ugh!, what model is it?'

'Le vent de la nuit'

Ridiculously, as long as I watched this, I could think of nothing else than the sperm scene in Woody Allen's Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask).

Les Classels, 'Le vent de la nuit', via PCL LinkDump

Suppertime

Bon appetit.

Image source: LPCover Lover

'I've got confidence'

The sisters practiced autosuggestion daily.

LP cover from Retrospace.

It's happy hour!

A double shot of the Cocktail Trio.

Love proves a safe bet

Remember the post on the BBC's prediction that Germany's song 'Satellite', by Lena was the most likely winner of this year's Eurovision contest on the basis that the word 'love' recurs no less than 26 times in the lyrics? Guess what - the prediction was spot on. 'Satellite' is indeed the winning song with 246 points (or 9.5 points per repetition of the word 'love'), and the love overkill has proved a triumphantly tried & tested recipe for Eurovision success.

...and deaf. Unfortunately, the 2010 Eurovision winning song is not trashy enough for this blog, merely dull as ditchwater. So, if you'd like to watch the clip of 'Satellite', click on the image and you'll be taken there.

Easy Rider: God damn the Pusher

From Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper (1969)

'You know I've smoked a lot of grass
O' Lord, I've popped a lot of pills
But I never touched nothin'
That my spirit could kill'

'The Pusher', Steppenwolf (1968)

Ken Lee

'Ken Lee' (aka 'I Can't Live'), as interpreted - title and all - by Bulgarian aspiring pop idol Valentina Hasan. Please note that the song is performed in English. I thought I might let you know, because it's unlikely that you'll realise as much while listening to the clip.

The full version, with English subtitles, here.

Fly with 99 Luftballons

A 36-year-old US adventurer has flown across the English Channel by means of helium-filled toy balloons. Jonathan Trapped set off from a field in Kent early in the morning and crossed the channel strapped on a chair that was suspended from dozens of toy balloons, to finally land in a cabbage field in France.

Image source. Full article on the BBC.
And speaking of balloons....

Stool Pigeon

A pigeon is held in custody under armed guard by Indian police on suspicion of spying on behalf of Pakistan, according to Indian media. No-one has been allowed to visit the suspect.

'Stool Pigeon', by Kid Creole and the Coconuts.
Full article in the Telegraph.

'Love': twelve points; 'amour': douze points

All you need is love, especially if you're a Eurovision contestant. The BBC had the brilliant idea to feed the lyrics of all winning songs of the Eurovision contest, from its inception in 1956 till now, into Wordle website - a magic online toy for creating word clouds (think of tag clouds) on the basis of how often a word occurs in a given text. Once common words like 'and', 'I' were removed, the most frequent word in Euroschmaltzy winning songs turned out to be 'Love'.

To be more precise, of the 12,299 different words that make up the BBC's own collection of 54 years' worth of Eurovision's winning lyrics, 'love' accounts for 2%. Not all that surprising, if you think that love is embedded in the Eurovision logo, is it.

...And in case you're itching to find out what this year's lyrics word-cloud looks like, here it is:

On the basis of word frequency alone, the BBC predicts that this year's German entry, 'Satellite', has pretty decent odds for winning: it features the word 'love' no less than 26 times. Alles Liebe.

(Article and images from the BBC)

Igor Stravinsky arrested in 1940 for an offence he committed in 1944?! Uhm, not really...

Yesterday, Boing Boing, which prides itself on accuracy, posted a mugshot of no less than Igor Stravinsky, under the title 'Igor Stravinsky, arrested for "tampering" with the Star Spangled Banner, 1940'. The post prompted the inevitable cascade of comments from readers whose sense of democracy had been (rightly) offended - a couple even observe (probably wrongly) signs of the venerated composer having been beaten up by the police.

Boing Boing is not the first blog to publish the photo (below) and the story (just Google it and you'll see). However. Take a careful look at the photo:

Now, check out your encyclopaedia, if you have one, or run a simple search for "Stravinsky" "Boston" "anthem". Here are a couple of results from what you'll probably agree are reliable sources:

'Stravinsky's unconventional major seventh chord in his arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner led to an incident on January 15, 1944 with the Boston police, but "Boston Police Commissioner Thomas F. Sullivan said there would be no action" (Wikipedia).

'Igor Stravinsky was greeted with silence, in Boston in 1944, when he conducted a Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of his own orchestrated version of the anthem. The police showed up the next night to make sure he didn't play it again' (Boston.com, News).

'Other versions of the anthem left the words alone but altered the melody, in one case so drastically that it got the composer/conductor in trouble. When Igor Stravinsky raised his baton in Boston in 1944 you would have thought he was Roseanne Barr. [...] Boston authorities warned Stravinsky that he was afoul of a state law that forbade rearrangement of the anthem. Music critic Albert Goldberg noted Stravinsky's version was banned in Boston and booed in Baltimore, but he escaped sanctions' (George Mason's University History News Network).

(Source: Stephen Walsh, 2008, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971, p. 152).

The date on the mugshot is 1940. The "tampered" version of the Star Spangled Banner was performed in 1944. This means, rather obviously, that the photo was taken four years before the incident with Boston police. The only sources I have come across affirming that Stravinsky was actually arrested while in the US and linking the photo taken in 1940 with the 1944 incident happen to be blogs. Of which I run one, so clearly I've nothing against the medium. But I'm not a fan of sloppy journalism, to which this medium unfortunately lends itself, nor of passing off unverified rumours (as in the case of Stravinsky's alleged arrest) or fabricated stories as news and urban legends as facts.

So. Was Igor Stravinsky ever arrested for re-arranging the US national anthem? Well, I don't know, but I've yet to see any evidence that he was. Was he arrested for anything ever in the US? I don't know that either, but given that he moved to the US in late 1939 and married Vera de Bosset on 9 March 1940 in Massachusetts (capital: Boston) I can at least imagine that the mugshot, which is dated 15 April 1940, was probably taken for some unexciting bureaucratic reason that wouldn't make for eye-catching blog-headlines...

'Wild Thing' by Senator Bobby (1962)

This must be the wildest Wild Thing cover I've heard so far. Wow.