In which we have only four, count ’em, four of us present for music; in which we break in a GBS song we haven’t done before; and in which we break in a new song of ‘s as well. Songs: “Concerning Charlie Horse”, “Captain Kidd”, “Come to the Labyrinth”, “America in Amber”.
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I know I haven’t been properly keeping up with the last couple of Jam Reports, and this is me trying to get caught up on that! Since it’s been a while since the last couple of Jams, all I have to offer is brief notes on the actual songs we played, so I’ll go ahead and make notes of those here. We’re currently talking about when the next Jam will be, some time in December, and hopefully when that happens I’ll return to serious Jam reporting.
Songs for the 10/18/09 Jam: “Getting Away With It”, “Captain Kidd”, “Chickies in the House”, “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate”, “Elf Glade”, “Dancing With Mrs. White”, “Billy Peddle”, “Mari-Mac”, “Stars”
Songs for the 11/1/09 Jam: “Come to the Labyrinth”, “Pirate Bill”, “Elf Glade”, “Chickies in the House/Duncan’s Dance”, “Goin’ Up”, “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate”, “John Waits Polka”, “The Road to Lisdoonvarna”, “Brian Boru”, “Butterfly Jig”, “Nonesuch”
Some generally fun things to note here:
“Getting Away With It” is a newer one of ‘s, and is a song about super-villainy! Which is of course appropriate, given that Dara is a super-villain.
“Come to the Labyrinth” was brought into rotation by request; it’s one of ‘s, and turned out to be fairly easy once Dara found the chords for it online. The guitar line is dead simple–all the interest here is in the complex layering of the vocals. When the group’s at suitable strength, thankfully, we have more than adequate vocal power to pull this off. We’ll be coming back to this one, I suspect.
Y’all may notice quite a bit of instrumentals in the last couple of rotations. This has particularly appealed to , who asked me for pointers to the various bits of GBS instrumental goodness, and I am of course all over that. But we also broke out my mandolin fakebook to give Dara and Molly both a quick and dirty introduction to how to play “Nonesuch”. I really do need to remember to whip that fakebook out more often; it’s a handy resource. It’s also chock full of all kinds of instrumentals that would be fun to explore in Jam.
On a similar note we also tried to make a serious run at playing through not only “Chickies in the House”, but also its companion pieces, “Napoleon’s Rant” and “Duncan’s Dance”. My eventual goal here is of course to be able to play the whole trio through without stopping, but I think it’ll be a while before we catch up with Tricky Pixie in our ability to do that!
I can also note of course that the last Jam’s pie, in favor of the holiday season approaching, was pumpkin. And as I recall, it was pretty darned tasty.
Watch this space for further Jam goodness, and very possibly, a special Solstice edition of a Jam report! Also? Now that I can play it, I am totally going to be bringing in “Concerning Charlie Horse”!
I’m pretty sure that if I arrive at work only marginally less damp than I would have done without an umbrella, I might need to think about getting a new umbrella. My pants are wet from the knees down. Yay!
But at least I have on good warm socks and a cup of tea is steeping at my elbow.
Meanwhile I blew the weekend playing way more of our game Unwell Mel than I probably should have done, but hey, we make good games, what can I say? 😉 And has been digitizing a lot of my old filk tapes, finally–which means I can at last get this stuff onto my iPhone. We’re focusing on stuff that has not to my knowledge been released on CD, like the Technical Difficulties tapes, the Where No Man… Trek tape, the general-folk Brandywine tape that’s got some good Julia Ecklar and Leslie Fish on it, and best of all, the original Elfquest tape, the one that isn’t remastered to within an inch of its life.
And this does of course mean I’ll have “Banned from Argo” on the iPhone too. <3
This'll be nice to listen to. I've missed a lot of this; when it comes to filk, I'm really more a fan of the older stuff than I am current, although I do of course like me some and and and . The Technical Difficulties and Julia Ecklar were really the people who got me interested in filk in the first place!
… but I have now purchased the very first Beatles album I’ve ever bought in my life. I got the new remastered 2-disc edition of Past Masters, which looks like it’s the new version of two previously released CDs that came out in 1990.
Decided to pick this one because it’s got the German versions of “She Loves You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on it, as well as the English versions of those songs, and I want to see how well I can understand the lyrics! I can already tell that “I Want To Hold Your Hand” doesn’t literally translate; the German title is “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand”, which is “Come, Give Me Your Hand”.
I totally blame this on Beatles Rock Band, which I finally got to seriously play last night when came over to join us for a session of gaming. This is the first time I’ve ever seriously actually done Rock Band or anything like it, and that’s pretty much because this is the first time there’s been a version with a bunch of music I actually like. I’m still very new to the game, though; I spent the whole time with the guitar controller playing either Guitar or Bass on Easy. I’m going to have to try the singing, though. I kept bursting into harmony lines anyway while I was playing, and Paul thought I should have one of the mike controllers. 😉
It’s pretty nifty though that this has kindled my first serious burst of interest in the Beatles. I’ve now listened to most of ‘s albums and have a new appreciation for the quality of the music; I’ve got Magical Mystery Tour and the White Album left to listen to. But now I’ve got the new Past Masters volume as well!
came over this afternoon, and we had a delightful time getting her laptop updated to Snow Leopard (plus the .1 update) while watching the first two hours of the BBC version of State of Play. I really liked that, and it’s quite nice how the US version did a decent job of preserving the bones of the plot while condensing it down to two hours. John Simm is easily a match for my beloved Mr. Crowe, I’ll totally grant–plus, the BBC version has David Morrisey, who I’d first seen being awesome in the last Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Next Doctor”. It’s quite cool to see him in something else.
Meanwhile, I have made my first ebook purchase inspired by my recently joining the Outer Alliance: a short work called Rot by Michele Lee. It’s a zombie work, and it adds an extra level of tension by making the zombies still sentient while their bodies are rotting around them. You can check out the Outer Alliance’s spotlight post on Michele here, and her own page about the work here.
In addition, I’ve picked up copies of Treason’s Harbour and The Far Side of the World, since I needed those to continue the Patrick O’Brian goodness. Y’all may remember I listened to an audio version of Treason’s Harbour already, but I didn’t have a physical copy yet. Very much looking forward to reading The Far Side of the World, too!
I have issues with the 3.1 iPhone OS update: namely, it’s totally broken Smart Playlists. All of my Smart Playlists on my device are displaying out of order, although they’re fine in iTunes on my computer. So to get around this, I’ve started listening to a lot of my stuff via album view or via the podcasts view. As a consequence, I’ve been stricken with an urge to just listen to my entire collection in alphabetical order, just because I haven’t listened to quite a bit of this stuff in quite a bit of time. Still working my way through the A’s. I think I’ll do a summary post when I’m done with each letter.
And, last but not least, speaking of music, the Murkworks now has Beatles Rock Band. We played it some Friday night and it was highly entertaining, and a Beatles Rock Band gathering at our house is highly likely next weekend. We need more mikes to properly do the harmonies. And I am totally requiring some Beatles in my iTunes collection now.
So yeah, Saturday in Vancouver has failed to suck. Made it safely up here to Chez , with hardly any wait time at all at the border. And today, we went out on various and sundry shopping sorts of excursions.
took and and me over to the nearby HMV–which proved to be a way more fruitful visit this time around than on the two previous visits, because this time I actually scored an album by La Bottine Souriante! Also picked up one by the Punters, who I’ve been meaning to listen to anyway by way of introducing myself to more Newfoundland music; plus, this album has the magic words “Produced by Alan Doyle” on the back, so I’m figuring that’s a strong recommendation right there. Lastly, got one by the Rankins, since I like their track on Fire in the Kitchen.
Relatedly, also gave Dara and me a copy of ‘s very first filk CD, Steel Cage Match. Looking forward to listening to this, in no small part because “I Fell Asleep (Reading the Silmarillion)” made me LOL, and also, I want to hear “Livejournal Shanty” too.
And, snagged me a couple of loaner copies of La Bottine Souriante albums from the Vancouver Public Library as well. These shall have to stand me until I can acquire actual copies of these albums–which I have now ordered from Amazon, since apparently Amazon’s actually stocked up on La Bottine Souriante a lot since the last time I looked. To wit, bitchin’. Or should that be bitchin-ez moi?
Anyway, aside from all this musical love, we stopped in at Little Sister’s, which is Vancouver’s oldest queer bookstore. Which was kind of neat. I walked out with a novel called Salt Fish Girl which sounded interesting to me and SFnal (it mentions shapechanging and biotechnology), even though it doesn’t call itself a science fiction novel. I told the dude at the counter that I was a bit surprised that they didn’t have Tanya Huff in their (teeny) fantasy section, given that she’s a queer Canadian author and that she has a whole trilogy of books starring a queer boy, set in Vancouver even! He thought that was cool, so who knows, maybe they’ll stock ’em. Also, they had a big black Labrador-lookin’ doggie who reminded me a lot of Sheriff, the doggie who lives along the goat trail.
OH OH OH, also, they had a magazine on the rack there with a cover blurb about an interview with the actress Alex Hedison. Wait a minute, I thought, Hedison? She did look suspiciously familiar, so I thumbed into the zine to check the interview–and yep, that there was the daughter of David Hedison, my very own Captain Crane from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. And she’s not only queer, she’s the former partner of Ellen DeGeneres! That’s some pretty high-profile queer there.
And after that, went back to his place while Dara and Paul and I proceeded to hop on the bus and head down to the Asian-heavy community in Richmond, where they have a couple of largish Japanese/Chinese/Asian-friendly shopping mails. That was neat. Quite a bit of flashbacks to Japan there what with the layout of the stores and the sorts of stuff they sold. We snagged a couple of gifts for folks, had tasty lunch and later on tasty yogurt, and eventually staggered back to Chez for zzz’s.
We’ll be heading to Steamworks for tasty food in a little bit, and to meet up with and possibly also . Which should be a fine closer to a pretty fine day indeed.