I’ve got this thing for fiddles. My friends and family don’t really understand it — what’s a city gal doing listening to bluegrass and country music? Sure, they’re pretty broad-minded with their music. They listen to rock and pop, classical and jazz, but down-home, folksy, Americana music with fiddles and banjos? Definitely not their cup of tea.
So when the whole hipster thing started up, I was delighted. I can do without all the ironic facial hair and lumberjack plaid, but the hipster penchant for folk music is right up my alley. From Mumford and Sons to The Civil Wars, the twang of the banjo and toe-tapping sounds of the fiddle have gone mainstream.
The musicians of the "Goat Rodeo Sessions" (Source: Classical Archives)
Recently, I stumbled upon an amazing collaboration between Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Stuart Duncan (fiddle, banjo, mandolin), Edgar Meyer (bass, piano, gamba), and Chris Thile (mandolin, guitar, gamba). The collaboration is known as “The Goat Rodeo Sessions,” and has become one of my favorite albums to date. According to Wikipedia, “The term ‘goat rodeo‘ refers to a chaotic situation where many things have to go right in order for it to work, a reference to the unusual and challenging aspects of blending classical and bluegrass music.”
The result, however, is nothing short of fantastic. It calls to mind the work of earlier classical composers like Aaron Copland, who wove folk-inspired songs of the “common man” into his work (for those of you in the US who remember the “Beef, It’s What’s For Dinner” campaign, the theme song was taken from Copland’s “Rodeo“).
The song below, the first track off of the Goat Rodeo Sessions album, just plain makes me feel good, and the video brings a smile to my face. There’s nothing like watching four amazing musicians perform together, and look like they’re having a blast doing it.
Has anyone stumbled upon awesome new music lately? Rave and recommend in the comments below!
The band OK Go is one of my favorites when it comes to inventive, creative, dance-yourself-silly music videos. Their first, the infamous treadmill dancing video that earned an MTV Video Music Award (VMA), set the bar for what has become the band’s trademark style.
The video for their 2009 single, “This Too Shall Pass,” features an insanely complex and intricate “Rube Goldberg” machine (a highly complex machine that does simple tasks).
Cool fact: A good friend on mine worked on the set of this video. You can see his contribution to the Rube Goldberg machine — the falling pingpong balls — around 3:00 minutes in.
There’s really not much I can say about this video, except that I now want ALL the babies and ALL the puppies in the world.
Improbable, perhaps, but there is so much darn cute bound up in this 41 second clip that I don’t know how else to react. Watch it, my friends, but be prepared for massive squealing.
I was on top of the world when I checked in on Monday, and for good reason: I had enjoyed an absolutely fantastic weekend away, and I was buoyed up by all of the good vibes and happiness that had been sent my way. Everything was grand for a few days… and then around Wednesday, panic set in.
Source: Pinterest
Like so many of you, I have a vast to-do list of things that absolutely must get done, and what sucks is that my biggest priorities have nothing to do with writing. I have a conference paper proposal due next week, along with the oral defense for my thesis and the regular load of 60-70 papers to grade. Add on everything else that I’d rather be doing (writing flash fiction and blog posts, visiting everyone else’s blogs, working on my WIPs, tweeting, reading books, watching movies and eating Cheetoes), and I basically need, oh, an extra 24 hours in a day to accomplish everything.
The anxiety and panic are physically paralyzing, to the point where I end up with fierce migraines and nausea. I sit down to tackle something on the to-do list, and I get so overwhelmed at the thought of everything else that I should be doing that I can’t do anything at all.
The thing is, I know much of this is self-inflicted. I am capable of finishing everything that I have on my plate. As so many of you have pointed out, I’ve lived with this thesis long enough that I know it inside and out. A 5-10 minute presentation, and the conversation that will follow with my committee, really shouldn’t be challenging. The conference paper proposal is only a short abstract, again one that is based on the work that I’ve already been doing. And the blog posts and social media are fun, nothing that should be giving me heart palpitations and sweaty palms.
So much of my problems stem from self-doubt and fear — fear that I won’t be good enough, that I’ll crash and burn in a spectacular display of epic failure, that I’ll embarrass myself (and my advisor) with my sheer incompetence.
All of this has started me to thinking over the last few days, and the question that reoccurs in my mind is one that is startlingly simple, yet also challenging: How much would I get done if I just abandoned self-doubt? I’m not talking about embarking on projects armed with hubris and arrogance. Rather, I’m thinking about approaching all areas of my life with the confidence that I am equipped and prepared to tackle any challenges that come my way. In my heart of hearts, I feel like I know more than I give myself credit for, and those things that I don’t know can be learned.
Perhaps this is one of those overarching goals that I can try to adopt for the remainder of this round: Abandon self-doubt. It’s not something that can really be measured directly, unless we’re talking about potential decreases in panic attacks, but I’d like to strive towards it all the same.
Here’s the short list of what I did get done this week:
Writing: Not too much happened here. I have ideas that are demanding to be released, and I am dying to just sit down and allow them to run free. This will maybe-hopefully happen this weekend.
Day Job: Met with my advisor on Thursday and started hammering out the next year of my life, including the directed study I’ll be taking with her next quarter, a list of the grants and fellowships I plan to apply for this fall, and plans to work as her research assistant next school year. There was also chatter about co-writing an article based on my thesis, and brainstorming potential syllabi I’ll want to have under my belt when I hit the job market in a couple of years. Overwhelming, but exciting.
Exercise: I squeezed in 4 days this week, even though 3 of those days were 15 minute stints on the glider, rather than the 30 minutes that I usually do. But I figure it’s better for me to at least move a little instead of sit around for days at a time.
Social Time: Surprisingly, there is lots of this happening — an impromptu girls’ night out on Monday, a birthday celebration for a colleague Thursday night, and a mock bachelorette party on Saturday night (it’s for Science, people, a sociological study of whether or not one of my single friends can “pass” as an engaged woman — long story).
50/50 Challenge: I haven’t had a chance to do any reading, but I finally saw Midnight in Paris, and I am in LOVE. So many people told me to watch it, and I’m delighted that I finally got the chance. As someone who has always felt like I was born in the wrong era, the movie resonated with me, and made me miss Paris all the more. I highly recommend it.
For anyone else who is feeling ridiculously overwhelmed, I dedicate the following song. Turn up the volume and dance it out, ’cause there’s nothing like a little Queen and David Bowie to make the world a better place. 😀
Be sure to swing by and send warm fuzzies to all the other ROW80 participants!
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and because I am a die-hard hopeless romantic, I thought I’d dedicate today’s post to love, that most noble sentiment.
I dabble with romance in my writing, and a good romance book or film can always boost my spirits. But as much as I enjoy the love stories that Hollywood and my favorite novelists can create, it’s the love stories from real life that affect me the most.
Cupid and Psyche | Image via Wikipedia
I didn’t always feel this way, but after my first (and, to date, last) relationship ended, I found myself looking at love in a completely different light. If there’s anything that I’ve learned, it’s that maintaining a relationship is really damn hard… but that it’s worth the effort, if the person you’re with is also willing to put in the work.
My parents on their wedding day, July 1986
The older I get, the more I come to admire and understand the nuance of my parents’ relationship. As a child, I idolized their love story, the tale of a man and a woman from two different parts of the world meeting by chance in San Francisco, falling in love, getting married, and having a couple of kids.
I spent a lot of time looking at my atlas back in the day, tracing myself an imaginary line from the Philippines, where my dad was born and raised, to San Francisco, where he and his family moved when he was 15; from Ohio, where my mom was born, to Los Angeles, where she grew up, and up the coast to SF, where she moved in her early 20s. Add in the fact that my mom claims to have day-dreamed of marrying “a boy from an island” when she was 5, and you have the recipe for little Lena thinking that her parents’ relationship was written in the stars.
My parents worked in the same office in San Francisco, where dad was the chauffeur for the company president. As my mom tells the story, all of the ladies in the office had crushes on him, including all the fancy-pants executive secretaries… but somehow, he fell for her, the lowly receptionist. It almost reads like a romance novel: the plain Jane who wins the cute guy over all the other ladies. It was a story that I loved.
And yet, I knew very well the darker side of their relationship. Both of my parents came to their relationship saddled with their fair share of baggage, emotional and otherwise. To top it off, my dad had a nasty addiction to drugs and alcohol, which contributed to the fights and arguments, the cycle of making up, breaking up, and making up again.
The early years of their relationship were turbulent, and those problems only continued after they married and I was born. In my early memories, it was just my mom and me — dad was off elsewhere, carousing with the guys, too busy getting drunk and high to come home. And I even remember the day when everything changed, the terrible fight when my mom called the cops and had my dad arrested because his temper got so out of hand.
This is a story that, for so many reasons, shouldn’t have a happy ending. It’s a story that should have ended with a divorce… but it didn’t. Mom decided that she wasn’t going to take it anymore, kicked dad out the house, and told him he couldn’t come back till he was clean. And my dad hit rock bottom, decided that his life, his job, and his family were more important than anything else, and came back to us. My little sister was born shortly afterwards, when I was 5, and slowly but surely, we became a family.
The whole family together, Christmas 2010
Watching my parents grow together over the years has taught me that love is never easy, that it requires constant maintenance and cultivation, like a garden that must be tended each season in order for fruit to ripen and flowers to bloom. They have their ups and downs, the occasional argument and misunderstanding, but they are on solid ground with one another.
Now that my sister and I are both grown and more or less living on our own, it’s exciting for me to seem them enter a new phase in their relationship: two empty nesters who go out on impromptu dates, who have been together long enough to overcome some of the hardest challenges in their relationship and who now know each other so very well.
I think my proudest moment came last summer, when I watched them renew their vows for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Their story is still in the process of being written, but it is one that reminds me that real life love is rarely as simple or straightforward as in the movies.
My parents on their 25th wedding anniversary, July 2011
I remember them today, especially because they have another anniversary coming up — the 28th anniversary of their first date, which, in a strange twist of coincidence, falls on February 18th, my 25th birthday. Congrats, Mom and Dad!
-oOo-
Because I am a music fiend, I had to give you all a couple of my favorite love songs to go along with today’s theme of “real life love stories.” These two, in my mind, capture the poignancy and uncertainty of love.
The first song, “Kissing You” by Des’ree, will be familiar to any of you who have seen the 1997 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrman and starring Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s bittersweet and beautiful, and Des’ree’s voice never fails to send chills down my spine.
The second comes from John Legend’s first album, Get Lifted. No matter how many times I hear this song, I’ll never get sick of it. John Legend tells the story of the love that “ordinary people” face, one that is far more complex and nuanced than any Hollywood fairy tale can portray.
What are your favorite “real life” love stories? Any romantic songs that you can’t stop listening to?
As I understand it, many people in the United States spent yesterday afternoon watching some sort of sporting event on television. Because my poor San Francisco 49ers weren’t participating in said event, I skipped out on all the parties and barbecues and tables laden with chips and 7-layer dip, and went to the beach instead. However, it has come to my attention that Samsung totally had some awesome commercial involving one of the greatest one-hit wonders in the world, The Darkness.
This song means a lot to me, because it brings back memories of the best Valentine’s Day I ever had, way back when I was just turning 17. It involved two of my best girlfriends, amazing Mexican food, and driving through San Francisco with this song blaring and all of us attempting to hit those crazy high notes. Pure magic, people.
You can find the ad here, but I find it highly depressing that they didn’t air clips from the actual music video, which is crack-effing-tastic. There is a spaceship, and space monsters, and more crazy-weirdness than you can shake a stick at. Honestly… you just have to see it to believe it.
So here you are, folks — a dose of WTF-ness to start your Monday off right.
Last week, I think we more or less came to the agreement that baby sloths are among the most adorable creatures in the animal kingdom. However, my sleepy sloth-in-a-box is nothing compared to this clip from Animal Planet, showing the orphaned of baby sloths of Costa Rica’s Sloth Sanctuary having a bath.
Yes, that’s right: teeny, tiny, squeaky little sloths in the midst of bath time, and curling up to nom on a few hibiscus flowers afterwards (did you know that hibiscus flowers are “like sloth chocolate”? No? Now you do).
The only question that remains is whether or not I can find a way to jet off to Costa Rica to volunteer at the Sloth Sanctuary. I somehow feel like my life won’t be complete till I can cradle a baby sloth in my hands. *melts a little inside*
As always, I am deeply indebted to Jezebel for rounding up some of the best animal videos that can be found on youtube. If you’re ever in need of a dose of cute, be sure to visit their #squee stream.
There has been an unfortunate dearth of fuzzy creatures at Flights of Fancy of late, but I aim to change that. It’s Monday, and if anyone is feeling as blah, crabby, and stressed as I am (or heartsore from yesterday’s football losses — my poor 49ers!), you need a bit of a pick-me-up.
That’s where the precious sloth-in-a-box comes in: 1 minutes and 17 seconds of unbelievable cuteness. How can your heart not melt like butter at the sight of its round, blinking eyes or its smiling eyes? The adult sloth pictured below is adorable, but there’s something about the baby that is even harder to ignore.
How can anyone say no to a face like that? Image by Praziquantel via Flickr
On this rainy Monday morning, I feel a bit of kinship with the little creature, beset with a case of the sleepies as it tries to crawl out of its little box. There are so many things to accomplish on my to-do list… but — yawn — my bed is looking mighty inviting…
Isaiah Mustafa as The Old Spice Man. Image via Wikipedia
A year ago, Old Spice ran what might be its most popular ad campaign to date, starring Old Spice Man Isaiah Mustafa, also known as THE MAN YOUR MAN COULD SMELL LIKE (yes, the caps are deliberate. He’s just that epic).
In the original commercial, Mustafa encouraged women to buy Old Spice for their men to keep them from smelling like “lady-scented body wash.” His suave, confident delivery, along with the absolutely ridiculous style of the commercial itself, made him an instant hit (I can’t stand the smell of Old Spice, yet I was tempted to buy a bottle for my last boyfriend). It became so popular that even Sesame Street ran its own spoof, starring Grover in “Smell Like a Monster.”
This month, Mustafa returned to reprise his role (this time as the Old Spice “MANta Claus”) in an online campaign to distribute “a kingly gift to all the living people around the world.” The gifts and their recipients are nothing short of hilarious, including a “handsome cross-stich pillow schematic” to the elderly women of the world, “traffic happiness” in the form of a green light to commuters in Shanghai, and a “large collection of super manly gifts” to the manly men of the world.
There are a total of thirty-three clips on the Old Spice youtube channel, but these three are my absolute favorites. Get ready for some holiday cheer, grandiose claims, and plenty of laugh-out-loud funny. I recommend setting down any and all beverages. 😛
To the Lorraines of the world, a custom R&B slow jam:
To Australia, the gift of its creation 1.5 kabillion years ago (on a Tuesday):
To all the women in the world, the gift of his heart:
Today’s Monday Inspirations is more on the unrepentantly silly side. It’s my first day back to school after the holiday weekend, I’m still a little drowsy from all the tryptophan and my ridiculously long drive yesterday. I needed a little laugh out loud funny to start my morning off right, and oh boy, I found it over on Jezebel.
Folks, porcupines make ridiculously adorable Disney creature noises. And they eat corn. And woe betide the person who tries to steal their corn, because they will grab at it with their tiny little fingers, and emit high-pitched noises of fury and protest.
I am sure they will also attack with prickly quills, but I don’t care. I now need one in my life, and I will endure the threat of prickles with absolute delight.
So let the cutesy woodland creature inspire your day as you struggle through the post-turkey-and-football coma! I am, er, off to find a porcupine to stealborrow befriend.
Lena Corazon writes steampunk and fantasy novels, drinks far too much tea, and has an unhealthy obsession with Byronic heroes. She blogs about books, sparkly things, her masochistic relationship with academia, and anything else that tickles her fancy.
