Endicott Redux

The Monday Video

Thanks everyone for your patience while waiting for this blog and JoMA to get back on schedule. I'm still not entirely over my illness, and thus not back to full-time work yet, but I'll start posting again as I'm able to. (If you're waiting for correspondence from me, please be patient a while longer. There's a lot to catch up on, and I'm still under doctor's orders to strictly limit my work time.)

Our Monday Video (above): Natasha Khan's quirky all-women band Bat for Lashes (based in Brighton, England) peforming their eerie song "Horse and I" at the Mercury Awards.

If you like the music made by Khan and her cohorts as much as I do, then be sure to check out their weirdly wonderful videos for "What's a Girl to Do" -- which makes me laugh every time I see it -- and for "Prescilla." Want more? Here's the band performing "Trophy" at Maxwells NJ, and a short interview with Khan at Flasher.com (followed by another gorgeous performance). Enjoy.

The Monday Video

Our Monday Video today comes from Anglo-Indian singer Sheila Chandra, performing the Scottish song "Lament of McCrimmon/Song of the Banshee." It's a rendition that draws upon both sides of the singer's heritage, evoking the ancient sound of the Indian drone and the distinctive drone of traditional Scottish pipes.

"This melody was composed in 1745 on the departure of Donald McCrimmon by his sister. Another legend has it that Donald McCrimmon had a premonition of his death and composed the tune the night before he died and that his sister later wrote the words. Donald McCrimmon is said to have been killed in a skirmish in 1746 at the Rout of Moy during the last Jacobite Uprising. The McCrimmons were famous pipers and the hereditary pipers of the Clan MacLeod."

See "Folklore of the Voice," our profile of Sheila Chandra, for more information on this extraordinary performer.   

The Monday Video

We kick off the week this time with a video of Israeli singer Yasmin Levy and her superb, international back-up band performing "Ir me Kero Madre" on Dutch television during their recent tour of Europe. Levy's father was one of the leading figures in the preservation of traditional Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) songs, and Levy herself is dedicated to the revival of this passionate, cross-cultural art form. As her website explains it:

"The Spanish Jews who fled Spain in 1492 after the Edict of Expulsion took with them a rich cultural heritage including the Spanish language. For nearly five centuries Sephardi Jews have kept alive the language of those Spanish exiles. Ladino, as it is popularly known, is an archaic form of Spanish with structures and vocabulary that can be traced back to the 15th century. Over the centuries it has absorbed vocabulary from the countries in which the Iberian Jews had settled.

"While there remain very few native-Ladino speakers today, there has been a recent worldwide revival of interest in this 'dying' language. Likewise enjoying great popularity today are Ladino songs. These can be divided into romansas, ballads (dramatic narrative poems) and kantigas (lyric songs), the most popular of which are love songs."

Visit Yasmin Levy's website for information on her various CDs, and her tour schedule. If you have the opportunity to see her perform live, don't miss it. She has the presence of a goddess onstage and her voice is truly transporting.

The Monday Video

Our video to kick off the week this time is of the Canadian "folk fusion" band The Duhks playing "Greenfields of Glentown" at CBC Routes Montreal 2006.

Sunday and Monday on Tuesday

With Midori and I both down with winter illnesses (*cough* *cough*), we owe you a belated Sunday Poem, and a Monday Video too. Both are from poet, fiction writer, and musician Joy Harjo.

The poem is "A Map to the Next World," a deeply mythic piece which draws on the sacred stories of Harjo's Muskogee Creek heritage.

The video is of Harjo reading her work as part of An Evening with Native American Women Writers in Berkeley back in 1997.

Joy was born in Oklahoma, earned an MFA at the University of Iowa, and has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Arizona State University, the University of Colorado, and the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Hawaii. She has published many collections (How We Became Human, A Map to the Next World, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, etc.), won numerous awards, and performs with the band Poetic Justice. Visit Joy's website & blog for a list of her books, her CDs, and the films she is in. She also has a MySpace page where you can hear some of her music.

"I agree with Gide," Joy says, "that most of what is created is beyond us, is from that source of utter creation, the Creator, or God. We are technicians here on Earth, but also co-creators. I'm still amazed. And I still say, after writing poetry for all this time, and now music, that ultimately humans have a small hand in it. We serve it. We have to put ourselves in the way of it, and get out of the way of ourselves. And we have to hone our craft so that the form in which we hold our poems, our songs in attracts the best."

Dance of the Mermaids

Following Mary Barnard's ondine poem yesterday, our Monday Video to kick off the week is "Mermaid," a dream-like montage featuring the underwater dance photography of Oceanides and music from Aine Minogue's The Twilight Realm.

And speaking of mermaids, there's some lovely "Little Mermaid" art by Tigana here, including "Her Garden," pictured on the right.

In the JoMA archives, you'll find 2 good articles, "A Million Little Mermaids" by Virginia Borges and "The Mermaid" by Heinz Insu Fenkl, as well as two fine poems, "The Mermaid Sets the Story Straight" by Debra Cash and "Undine" by Jane Yolen.
   

Happy New Year from the Endicott Studio

At the Entering of the New Year
by Thomas Hardy

I (Old Style)

Our songs went up and out the chimney,
And roused the home-gone husbandmen;
Our allemands, our heys, poussettings,
Our hands-across and back again,
Sent rhythmic throbbings through the casements
On to the white highway,
Where nighted farers paused and muttered,
"Keep it up well, do they!"

The contrabasso's measured booming
Sped at each bar to the parish bounds,
To shepherds at their midnight lambings,
To stealthy poachers on their rounds;
And everybody caught full duly
The notes of our delight,
As Time unrobed the Youth of Promise
Hailed by our sanguine sight.

II (New Style)

We stand in the dusk of a pine-tree limb,
As if to give ear to the muffled peal,
Brought or withheld at the breeze's whim;
But our truest heed is to words that steal
From the mantled ghost that looms in the gray,
And seems, so far as our sense can see,
To feature bereaved Humanity,
As it sighs to the imminent year its say:-

"O stay without, O stay without,
Calm comely Youth, untasked, untired;
Though stars irradiate thee about
Thy entrance here is undesired.
Open the gate not, mystic one;
Must we avow what we would close confine?
With thee, good friend, we would have converse none,
it the fault may not be thine."

Feathers to Fire

Our Monday Morning Video to kick off the week: "Feathers to Fire," from Gregory Colbert's gorgeous Ashes to Snow "nomadic museum" exhibition.

My apologies for my general absence from this blog of late -- which is likely to go on for another week or two for I'm in the chaotic middle of a house move. Yet it's also a pleasure to leave the blog in Midori's capable hands, for I too am delighted and amazed by the treasures she comes up with...

Music, masks, and more...

The video above captures several members of Daughters of Elvin in performance at the Oxford Folk Festival. (Daughters is a medieval music and dance troupe based here in Devon, directed by my good friend Katy Marchant -- playing pipe and tabor in this video.) The masked figure who emerges halfway through the song (based on medieval Woodwose legends) is just one of the many mythical creatures who turn the Daughters' sublime music into spells of incantation. The Woodwose mask was made by Katy, but the group also use masks and costumes designed by Alan Lee and Wendy Froud.

You can read more about the group here (in an article from JoMA's archives), or visit the Daughters of Elvin MySpace page to hear more of their glorious music. And I hope you didn't miss Chanda Cerchione-Peltier's in-depth article on Katy and the Daughters in the Summer 2007 issue of Faerie Magazine.

Speaking of Faerie Magazine, Chandra has asked us to mention the current Fall issue, which does indeed sound promising. "In the new issue," she says, "I interview [film puppeteer] William Todd-Jones, Ari Berk writes about Beowulf's Grendel, SurlaLune's Heidi Ann Heiner offers a history of Rapunzel, and there is a wonderful spread about Brian Froud's new book, World of Faerie. The magazine is available in the US through booksellers such as Barnes & Nobles and Borders; for readers in the UK, issues can be purchased through I Do Believe."

La Gallina

Here's a bit of craziness to jump-start your week on a sleepy Monday morning, complete with masks and poultry from the fabulous Ozomotli.