Gosh, is it November already?
And time for National Novel Writing Month again?
Yes, yes it is and I have a story idea ready to burst out through my fingers and the keyboard into the written word. It’s an idea that has been kicking around in my head for a good while – another song-inspired story, as it happens, and this time the song is Saint James Infirmary. Read More
Sometimes I convince my husband to come along with me to cultural events. Not just the sort of trendy plays acted in by people whose day job is barista, but the sort of Cultural Event where we are the youngest people in the audience. It’s possible this is because my mother did things like read me the Odyssey aloud when I was 5, or retold me stories from the Ramayana, or played classical music in the house pretty much always. I listen to lots of musical genres, but I have always like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (maybe because I have watched this cat video about seven million times). Read More
Towards the end of my undergrad, after I’d studied abroad and achieved a reasonable level of linguistic skill, I started collecting Russian pop songs that seemed to reflect political and cultural attitudes. Songs about AIDS, or Saddam Hussein, or army service. For today I want to share a clip from a Russian movie — a musical of sorts, which follows a group of musicians on a campaign cruise with a candidate, putting on concerts and getting out the vote in various ways. One of the first songs is sung by Shnur, the irreverent and generally foul-mouthed lead singer of the ska band Leningrad, and in the end it’s a farce – they get the guy elected, only to realize they’ve been in the wrong district the whole time. (If you want an overview of Russian music styles, search youtube for “день выборов” (election day) or “день радио” (radio day), both musical films by the same group lampoon a wide variety of Russian music genres.) Read More
I’m a big fan of cross-cultural mashups, probably because I view myself as sort of third culture kid lite. If you’re not familiar with the TCK term, in my mind it describes people like my husband, who have one foot in Culture A and one in Culture B, and somehow mix them together into something new and wonderful. He physically moved from one cultural context to another when his family left what was then the Soviet Union. I had a different type of cross-cultural exchange, spending a year in Finland at age 16, and then a college semester in Russia as part of my nine (yes, *nine*) years of Russian language study. One of my early techniques for language learning was listening to tapes of Russian pop music, but I was introduced to “world music” very early on. Read More