New Orthophony...(Intro, Dance, Birds, etc)

ok! I'm glad you've heeded my calling, because this is now where you should look if you want to get an inside view into things in my big-fat-Dutch-life and my momentary mental musings, which no doubt you'll be thrilled about when you read them! This is going to serve as an archive and journal of sorts for me, so keep in mind you’re looking into the mind of… me!

This is all my sisters fault, as many good things have been in my life. Her snazzy blog inspired me to follow in her footsteps. And so... I have nothing more to say, other then Ma, Mapa, Molly, Hardy, Greg, Geo, Jacob, Lyssia, Nate, Shannon, Mush-John(for mushy romance), Surra, BIBakers Mike, and everyone else too great and wonderful to mention who happen to read this, *preview announcer voice* GET READY....! for the first post.....


Last night, I performed the vocals for the music I wrote for a dance piece, "Syzygy", in Eindhoven, NL. This was part of the Fonty's Dance Festival and brings to a conclusion my (for now) work and collaboration with Estonian choreographer, Jaan Ulst. This piece has three lady dancers Diane (Swiss), Anthi (Cypritian), and Daniella (German). The piece is supposed to reflect the essence of the feminine experience, yet if two MEN were creating this, I have no idea if we succeeded in this goal, but whatever happened, it turned out to be a fantastic piece and very interesting to look at. And great fun to perform. The music (which I will try to post up here, if I can figure that out) was inspired by… well. You better take a listen and tell me if you can hear any influences ;-). But I got a lot of grief from the team, insisting that the second movement was in fact “country” music. They were worried that people would expect to see line-dancing and crap like that. I roll my eyes at the naïve qualities of Europeans. After a careful query and scrutinizing of audiences (there have been two performances of this piece), there was in no way any sense of line dancing or country music. People obviously don't know what country is. That horrible song, “Watchin’ You” by the brilliantly bad Rodney Atkins is country… what I wrote was probably more blues. In fact the melody is derived from an old Appalachian folk song. Either that or an old Delta Blues melody. Either way, it’s timeless. I remember hearing it when I was about 17 or 18 (back in the day… when I was young and didn’t need my Centrum Silver) and it stuck with me ever since. I remembered only one line of the lyrics, (the whole song was something about how if girls don't obey men then they’ll die… pretty good song, eh!?) so I based the rest of the lyrics on that one line. The original was “The more she gave the more she wept/Till she laid low her sorrow/She’d die for him some other day/She’d die for him tomorrow”. Then for the dance version, I changed and expanded on this little “fragment” or “impression”:

A
The more it gave/the more it wept/till it laid low its sorrow/it’d die for her/but it couldda saved/some tears for late tomorrow
The more she gave/the more she wept/till she laid low her sorrow/it’d die for her/but she couldda saved/the tears for late tomorrow
B
The more its view/the more it wept/no comfort in tomorrow/no point in think/of what couldda been/no peace for those in sorrow
The more she viewed /the more she wept/no comfort in tomorrow/no point in think/of what couldda been/no peace for those in sorrow
C
The more they gave/the more they saw/and they laid low their sorrow/they’d die for that/what they couldda saved/no tears for late tomorrow
D
The more they gave/the more they saw/and they laid low their wishes/they’d die for that/what they always knew/no tears for late tomorrow


The original version I wrote had even more but some words and pronouns needed to be changed to fit with the idea of the dance.

Anyway. That's the second piece I’ve written for dance this year. I hope not the last.


The other day, I heard an awful lot of bird noise out my window… more then usual. I did a little recon and I noticed a really small bird outside… didn’t look like it hit the window, but rather fell from a nest somewhere, while its parents were screeching and flying around above. I chased it around for a bit, flapping wildly and dodging my groping handibles. When I caught it, it let out a terrific screeching cry of help and fear, at which the parents above went so far as to try to dive-bomb me, coming only a meter away from my head. I felt quite bad for this little guy, being so scared in the hands of what it perceived as this huge, massive monster… Its fate in my hands, its destiny at my mercy and will. Is this power? As I contemplated that and warmed the buggie up, I remembered a lament my mother once uttered; something about a horrible fate it would be if avian bird flu or some other avian disease wiped out all birds. How horrible would that be? Never again to hear their music in the trees or see their pecking and scratching in fresh turned earth. Then I got this PETA email about KFC and a video investigation about how horribly they treat their chickens. That made me really sad, and it reminded me of our chicken-raising days back when I was a little kid. I think chickens are my favorite birds. They’re like… chicken! But seriously, I haven’t eaten meat since the beginning of the month, I think. It’s going quite well, actually. It’s actually quite easy to avoid it. Just go to the PETA website and look at the horrific videos of pigs, cows, chickens, in slaughterhouses and foxes, raccoons, rabbits, dogs, cats in Chinese fur farms. That’ll fuck you up for a while.
Anyway… to get back on target, I let the bird go back to its flapping about. What else could I do? I had no idea where its nest was or if it would survive. Its been a few days since that and I haven’t seen it around.

I'm sure he made it back to nest J

Thanks all for now. I’ll get back to it later.