"Feeling Good"

On the SyTYCD Top 10 results show, Mia Michaels choreographed a number for the five women to a version of "Ave Maria" by Celine Dion, while Gev did his solo to a cover of the great standard "Feeling Good". He used the version by Michael Bublé, and lots of folks were wowed by how he meshed the b-boy moves with this song.

It's a song from a Broadway musical, originally sung by Gilbert Price in an arrangement that was like a spiritual. What an amazing voice he had! But when Nina Simone sang it, she gave it a jazzy swagger which has marked almost all versions since.

Oddly enough, I had just heard Simone's cover, which I have listened to endless times, a few days ago when I watched a clip of my favorite champion ice-skater Johnny Weir, debuting his new routine in Seoul, Korea. This video also has his performance of his crowd-pleasing "Ave Maria" showcase number. Cosmic convergence!I wonder if Gev, who comes from a family of professional figure-skating performers, was inspired in his song choice by Weir? It's not impossible since he's also a skater.


Here Nina Simone sings "Feelin' Good" with a wonderful visual someone created for a class!


I don't mind Michale Bublé'sversion, and I quite like what Muse has done to the song. Apparently, Nescafé used their version without permission in a TV ad; they sued and won, and donated the money to Oxfam. And Celine Dion tried to name her Vegas show Muse, but they said No, they didn't want people to think of them as her back-up band.

The SYTYCD heartbreak begins.

Now that it's up to the vote of the viewing public and not the judges to cut the contestants, the results are much more unpredictable. In the bottom two for the men were Mark and Gev, two of my favorite dancers of the season. Gev might not have been best dancer all around in terms of technique, and I knew he wouldn't get to the top four, but he was the most entertaining for me, and the one who brought the "most improved" arc to the show. And I don't think any of the other dancers could do many of the moves he does. He danced his heart out every time. I'm going to miss seeing him on my TV! I hope he will be able to continue to grow as a dancer and a performer after the tour.

Someone who has made some incredible remixes of routines is buffmetube.Check out the remixes and montages for an example of fabulous editing. This remix of Gev and Courtney's rumba substituted a Portishead song for the R and B ballad "Wishing on a Star" used for the performance. The effect is amazing.


Here's Gev's farewell solo:


This is my second favorite solo by Gev, from the Top 14 show:


He missed a move in the beginning of this solo, but watch what he does with his shirt!:

Are we funny yet?

So, David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker magazine, mistakes himself for the T. Herman Zweibel, the "editor" of The Onion, and all hell breaks loose. "Can't people take a joke?" ask some. "What was he thinking?" ask others. "It's supposed to be satire!" cries the New Yorker.

But satire only works when it is a successful collaboration between the satirist and the audience, and if it is poorly done, it fails. What is the object of satire in the now infamous Obama cover? It isn't clear: is it Obama himself? the right wing that makes up lies about him and his wife? the media that perpetuates those racist, anti-Muslim, hateful stereotypes about him and his wife? or the "ignorant-bumpkins-who-don't-read-the-New-Yorker-and-actually-believe-that-stuff"? This image, appearing as it does at this time, really upset a lot of people, for very good reasons. It is a good example of an attempt at satire that failed, like a firecracker that fizzles (or, to use J.L. Austin's terminology about illocutionary speech acts, it is neither true nor false, it is "infelicitous.") Whether humor works depends on the audience, not the intentions or even the performance of the humorist.
(Want a more technical explanation of how that works? Go here.)

I think the folks over at Culture Kitchen get it absolutely right when they call the New Yorker's Obama cover an example of "Hipster bigotry."

The current master of political satire in the U.S., Jon Stewart, weighs in: "Come ON folks, repeating unsubstantiated claims and perpetuating stereotypes is the job of TELEVISION NEWS, not something for smartypants magazines!"


Now here's a satirical piece that really works for me!

How to advertise online without making people watch your commercials

It's all about content. Find out what people want to watch or read, give it to them, and they will come.
There are only three of them, but they are the most brilliant cartoons about living with a cat that I've seen. They've also generated millions of views on YouTube, and when they are picked up by megatraffic sites like Cute Overload, we are thrilled to find them. Simon's Cat has his own YouTube channel where you can see the other two cat cartoons. There's not much on the channel: "Official home of the 'Simon's Cat' films from Tandem director Simon Tofield." As far as I can tell, Simon's cat is a great mode of advertising for the Tandem website, although I wonder how many cat cartoon viewers actually click over on the site link in the profile to see what Tandem is all about, watch the ads they make, read about the company. Maybe industry people, who are probably the principal target market? He's left bait in the form of a fourth video just called Tandem logo. When you click on it, that is all you see: the logo.

Maybe Chris Matyszczyk, over at Pond Culture, could explain it to us; he seems to have created the blog Pond Culture as an experiment: make a blog with the plainest of templates, no archives, no links to other posts, blog about some of the most highly trafficked stories of the day and provide only wordpress tags to generate traffic. Monitor the site to see who comes there and why. If they bother to click on the profile, they can find the URL of his other website, but it is not hotlinked. So part of the experiment seems to be seeing who actually goes to the trouble to venture over to his other sites which is embedded in complete connectivity. Oh, and he writes witty and dryly entertaining posts about being a European living in the SF Bay Area and what the view is like for us pond dwellers as we look up at the antics of the mass media, the advertisers, the politicians, and the sports franchises as they market, sell, and promote. I found his site through a link on BSYTYCD, but found it funny enough to read my way back through the blog even though he provides absolutely no archive or category shortcuts (that would compromise the purity of the experiment, as would external links).

But I digress: here's the latest from my cat's alter ego on the internet, Simon's Cat 'TV Dinner'. It is not an exact reproduction of Leo's behavior: Leo's voice is much louder and more annoying; Leo claws at the bed just out of reach rather than the sofa to get me to get up to feed him; Leo jumps up on the TV tray table in order to knock my electronic devices out of reach; we don't have a remote, but I'm sure he could work it if we did. He does steal your spot as soon as you get up, get all in your face while you are using a laptop, yowl relentlessly for food (or toy activity) while you are trying to watch TV, and do that thing with his claws when he does get on my lap.

Doo-wop lullabies

Zaragoza is seven hours ahead of us here in the Midwest, so when we iChat, my daughter is usually about to go to bed.
I used to sing her to sleep every night, with songs I remembered my mother singing to me, and any song I could remember: old Joan Baez, tenor arias my old boyfriend used to sing in the shower, Raffi. For a while, at least, she thought I was the greatest singer ever!

Today in Cute Overload, Meg posted this hilarious video of a man singing his puppies to sleep. What makes it especially sweet to me is the song; in high school I dated a guy who was the lead singer in a Sha Na Na cover band (yes, a cover band of a nostalgia doo-wop cover band, but they were fun!)

Here is the puppy lullaby:


The original version was by The Spaniels! They were a doo-wop band in the fifties that got ripped off like so many other black musicians. One of the singers from Sha Na Na has been working to make sure that the old groups don't continue to get ripped off by groups passing themselves off as the originals.

Get This Party Started X 3

I went to see a friend who performs at the Townhouse Bar in a drag revue called Pumps and Pearls. The MC, Lily White, did a number to the song "Get The Party Started," written by singer, musician,songwriter and producer extraordinaire, Linda Perry, and made a huge hit by Pink on her second album in 2001, but this version was sung by Dame Shirley Bassey! (You know, "Goooolllldfingaaaahhhh!"). She has just come out with a new CD, at age 71, and her cover of this song is fabulous!
Here's a live version by Pink who performs l some incredibly daring aerial moves on Chinese silks with her dancers:

Here is the Welsh Diva, Dame Shirley Bassey, consummate vocal artiste, giving it her own spin:

and here is local favorite Esme Rodriguez doing Shirley doing Pink at the Bryant Lake Bowl:

Dance inspiration from the summer dance shows

My summer addiction is now So You Think You Can Dance AND America's Best Dance Crew. Since I dont' get MTV I'm really glad the ABDC show provides complete episodes on its website. I'm getting a hip hop education, and a kind commenter provided me with a link to an incredible hip hop dance documentary called The Freshest Kids, that puts hip hop dance into historical perspective.

Quick SYTYCD round-up: We now have the top ten dancers out of the twenty contestants. They are Mark and Chelsie, Joshua and Katee, Twitch and Kherrington, Will and Jessica. I'm very happy with this group, although there were some talented and entertaining dacers among those who were cut. The top ten are the dancers who will go on tour after the winner is announced. Since this show is a reality show, and really is "America's favorite dancer" and not necessarily "the best dancer of the bunch," the show relies on a combination of truly entertaining and sometimes even brilliant dancing, and the manufactured narratives that pit the audience against the Judges: are the critiques really about the judges expertise, or are they (also) trying to influence fans with more crass, commercial motives? Half the fun for some viewers seems to be arguing about conspiracy theories, while the other half involves the pleasures of the dance itself, the attractive contestants and the possibility of sharing the love with other fans.
Here's Gev's solo:

Here's Will's solo

Josh and Katee's contemporary:



After dancing with the same partner for the last several weeks, now the dancers will be paired with different partners, and have a chance to show us what they can do with new partnerships in the various styles. The voting will now be viewers only ("Americker") and not the judges, so there is a different dynamic, more about the individuals and less about the couples.

For some of the best recaps--creative, funny, smart, snarky-- I've been following Leee! over at Television! You Black Emperor, Matt at Ranting Details (he's a dancer and a whiz with Photoshop), BeckyLooo at If a TV Falls in the Woods (also a dancer), the threads at TWoP, and, of course, the great crew of Ted, Natalie and SueB over at BloggingSYTYCD, who kindly provide a roundup of news, videos, and live open threads during performances. It's fun to get different perspectives on the performances, especially from those with dance background. I really appreciate their recaps and song lists as well.

Now that my shoulders have healed enough so that I can get back to dancing myself, I have rejoined the Y, started taking stretch classes and will work my way up to going back dancing. I don't want to jump right in, because I am so out of shape that if I overdo it right away, it will through me into a fibromyalgia flare-up, so I figure I'll see how I do after a couple of weeks with dance stretch and water aerobic cardio. Then I'm going to make the rounds: cajun/zydeco at the Half Time Rec on Sundays, salsa at Babalu, late night Swing over at Tapestry on Thursday where I am sure to find the lindy hoppers, and some ballroom studio parties where I can get back in the swing of my favorite dances.

"Best" Quixote translation?

My mother is reading Don Quixote in English with one of her reading groups, and asked me what I knew about different translations. I had to reply that I knew nothing, as I had read it in Spanish, and had never had the occasion to think about "the best translation" before. I started poking around (hey, the Wikipedia entry is good!)and after looking at some scholarly and not-so-scholarly discussions of the history and quality of the very many English translations, I decided that the one her group is reading (the Edith Grossman translation with Alan Bloom's introduction) is probably, in fact, the best for their purposes; it is not a scholarly edition with footnotes explaining every proverb and reference and arguing with past translators' versions, but it is a accurate, and most importantly, a lively and FAITHFUL translation that captures the tone and spirit of the work. Here is what Edith Grossman herself says about translating literary texts (she has translated many Latin America authors, including Gabriel García Márquez):

Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.

Why a new translation, when several were made right after its publication? Well, because English has changed a lot in 400 years, and Cervantes is, above all, a modern writer, and reading the original is an experience of great pleasure.
Without having looked at any of the texts myself it seems to me as if Grossman has done two important things: rendered the text in English that is colloquial and accessible, and captured the tone and multiples voices of Cervantes' text. Many people also had great praise for the audiobook read by Guidall.
Wikimedia has a lot of images of Don Quixote including the wonderful series of illustratioins by Gustave Doré.

Here's an interview with Edith Grossman
on translating Cervantes.

welsh welsh James Bond welsh welsh

Three Welshmen on the loose in "Los Angelees"

Like Richard Burton, who grew up in a Welsh-speaking household, actors Ioan Gruffuth and Matthew Rhys are bi-lingual Welsh/English speakers.

Wordle makes your text into a word cloud!

Jonathan Fineburg has created a lovely thing called Wordle. It allows you to make word-clouds out of any text and play around with fonts and colors. You can then post your creation to a gallery. The site's gallery makes these images available to anyone. As you can see if you browse the gallery, one need not choose a poem as a text; you can paste in any text, or write one of your own. Repeated words are bigger. Certain very common words (the, etc) are blocked.

I made one of the poem "Wild Things" by Emily Dickenson. You can paste in the code to embed it in your blogpost, like this. Click on this small image, and it will take you to the Wordle Gallery: Check it out!
Or, I can "print" it by saving it as a PDF, then use Grab to select the image in the pf and make a screen capture. This saves it as a TIFF file, but I can resave it as a JPEG then upload it as a picture, as you see below. Fineburg says that these images can be used for anything, fun, printing on T-shirts, making money, whatever.



OK, now I've realized that when I have created my little Worlde image, that I can click "print", then select PDF from the printer menu, and then choose to save the PDF to iPhoto and it will make a picture. No need to go through the screen grab method. (NB: the FAQ gives alternate instructions for PCs)
Wordle handles multiple languages as well. Here's another Worlde I made with César Vallejo's poem "Masa." This time, instead of generating the format by hitting the "randomize button" a bunch of times, I selected "edit,", then chose the font, colors and a few other features. Because I didn't save it to the gallery, it's not there. Why don't you try making one?