Pirate Video

Captain Bogg & Salty, the pirate rock and roll band from Portland, Oregon, have released their new video:

Pieces of 8ight

Their notes about the video can be found here and their animated video for "Cat O' Nine Tales" is available as a podcast here or streaming video here.

Coffee Shop Jam

The Coffee Shop Jam was fun. Highlights included the seven year old boy playing "Wild Thing" on the electric guitar, my guitar teacher's original composition, and the first performer's cover of a song by newcomer Diana Jones. People enjoyed my performance, even though I don't think I got one single B7 chord right. I even stopped the song for a few seconds to find it the third time. Aiee! But I was into the song, the audience gave full participation with the animal noises, and the scary story "The Graveyard Voice" went over well. It was a relief to finish the song and start on the story. From that one performance, I've become enamored of my voice over the microphone. "Enamored" may not be the right word, but as I began the story, I thought, "Wow, this is good. I need to get one of these for myself." Bede, Lucia, and Ulric came to the Coffee Shop Jam to cheer me on. To Lucia's credit, she clapped for every song, danced to a few of the songs in the beginning, and was particularly interested in the seven year old playing the guitar. That night, we heard Lucia playing "guitar concert" with her dollies.

Before the show, I talked a bit with the first performer of the set, a woman who'd been playing for awhile and had attended the Puget Sound Guitar Camp. She said, "There's someone performing who's a children's librarian and will be doing both a children's song and a story. I'm looking forward to that." I beamed.

Someone took photos, which may be available at some point in the future. In the meantime, imagine I looked something like this, were I 20 years younger:

Joan Jett in the 1980's



Alkelda in the 1980's

Laugh, kookaburra (grumble, camel)

I've been working on "Water for the Elephants," my song for Sunday's Coffee Shop Jam. Here is my version, with some different animal sounds:


WATER FOR THE ELEPHANTS
(Played in the key of E, but capoed up to G)

Circus came to town and to the circus I went
Didn't have a ticket, didn't have a cent
The circus man said, “To see the show without a cent
You've got to carry water for the elephants.”

So I carried water for the elephants
Back and forth to the well I went
My feet got sore and my back got bent
But I couldn't fill up the elephants.

I said to that man with the standing up collar
“I bet two bits the elephants are hollow,”
The circus man said, “Well, first you'll see
The animals in the menagerie.”

First saw the lion and the lion he roared (roar)
Saw the wild duck and the wild duck quacked (quack)
Saw the wild cats, and the wild cats meowed (meow)
Saw the wild cow and the wild cow mooed (moo)
Saw Mister Possum sitting on a limb
Two fruit-bats sitting next to him
Saw the wild python like in the zoo
Wild rooster said, “Cock-a-doodle--doo.”

Saw the wild birds and the birds sang sweet (too-wheet)
Saw the wild dogs and the wild dogs barked (ruff ruff)
Saw the kookaburra and the kookaburra laughed (ho ho ho ha ha ha)
Saw the wild camel and the camel complained (grrr-um, grrr-um)
Saw the hippopotamus splash in the water
Trying to flirt with the crocodile's daughter
Saw the giraffe and a big kangaroo
Wild horned owl hollered, “Hoo hoo hoo.”

I went down to the circus tent
Sure am doggone glad I went
Saw the whole show, it didn't cost a cent
Because I carried water for the elephants.

Some of the animal noises are standard, while some of them are a bit more uncommon for storytime singing. My guitar teacher and I were working on animal sounds this morning. His kookaburra sound was akin to the Tarzan monkey cry, whereas my rendition was "something funny from a cartoon, but definitely not a kookaburra." There are a number of renditions of kookaburra sound files, but I'm aiming for the one featured in Common Birds of the Australian National Botanic Gardens and camel sound number 5 on this Free Safari Sounds page.

So far, my two main challenges with this song are:
1) Plucking the 5th string on the B7 chord without looking at the guitar
2)Keeping from laughing while I make the camel sound

Six Word Storytime

I enjoyed reading your contributions to last week's Six Word Stories*. Let's play again. I'll go first. Write whatever you like. I feel like rewriting children's books. If you like pithy reviews of children's books, check out Emily Reads and Book-A-Minute.

Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White:
Some pig! Some spider! No bacon.

Constance: A Story of Early Plymouth, by Patricia Clapp:
"I hate you!"
"Kiss me."
"Okay."

Sleeping Beauty, retold by Trina Schart Hyman:
"What is a spindle? Owwwwwch." (Snore.)

*Six Word Story concept stolen from the pages of Fishsuit. I'm hoping to settle out of court.

Update: Six Word Stories is a meme. I don't have to pay Fishsuit anything. Here is Wired magazine's feature on six word stories by science-fiction authors: Very Short Stories. My favorites are by Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. LeGuin. Thanks to Bede for the link.

Faerie in Flannel

If you live in the North and want to dress up as a faerie princess for Halloween, flannel is the fabric of choice. The flannel I used for this dress can be found here.

Garrison Keillor and the youngest adults in the audience

Last night, Bede and I went to see Garrison Keillor at the Paramount Theatre. I had bought the tickets as the third part of a mini-subscription series so I could get early-bird tickets for Sarah Vowell and Dan Zanes. I’d listened to Garrison Keillor on the radio, first when I was a little girl, and then when I was in college. In more recent years, the voices and humor styles of Ira Glass, David Sedaris and the aforementioned Vowell appealed to me far more than Keillor’s, but still, this was the guy who brought me the CaféBoeuf skits. For one night, I was willing to be a member of the audience.

What Bede and I did not know beforehand was that we would be the youngest members of the audience. I’m 34. Bede is 36. For the first time in a good while, we felt “too young” for the crowd around us. We eavesdropped on conversations about today’s youth and its obsession with iPods and video-games. “With today’s generation, it’s all about hanging out with your friends, listening to music, " someone said. Someone else said, "Everything has to be in-your-face. They miss the subtleties that we grew up with.” The people talking were children of the fifties and sixties. What exactly did they remember? I wondered. What exactly did they forget?

When Garrison Keillor came on stage, he shared memories of listening to his aunts’ stories and running around on the farm, but couldn’t recall when he started to use the internet. Keillor sang about winters in Minnesota, crooned pseudo-cheeky limericks about the current political administration and waxed nostalgic about the simpler times of long ago when people weren’t afraid to help out hobos and hitchhikers. At the end, he got a standing ovation. (In Seattle, everyone gets a standing ovation.) I clapped, but I definitely felt out of my element.

I am not a fan of nostalgia. Nostalgia says, “My era was better than your era.” Some parts were definitely better, of which I have no doubt. Some parts definitely were worse. Say what you like about the proliferation of cell-phones and how they’ve invaded all aspects of our lives, but I am grateful for cell phones. I remember family trips where we were stuck by the side of the road because our car had broken down. I remember trying to communicate to my parents via mental telepathy that I was okay, I just had to stay after school for a bit, back when it was considered impolite to have answering machines. As far as email goes, I remember exactly when I started using it. Because of email, I have reconnected with people I thought were lost to me long ago. I know I’m now of the older generation because I don’t feel the need to send text-messages, and I’m satisfied with my clunker of a cell-phone. I don’t want to be part of the younger generation, though. I want to be an ally. As terrifying as it might be to encounter a group of boisterous high schoolers falling over themselves with laughter might be, or even worse, a group of snickering, sniggering junior high students, I don’t have to dig very deeply to find that this wide demographic of young adults is made up of individuals with their own thoughts, anxieties, and ambitions. If you don’t believe me, just read the literature out there.

Some of my favorite young adult novels include:

The Chocolate War—Robert Cormier
Catherine, Called Birdy—Karen Cushman
Annie on My Mind—Nancy Garden
The Outsiders—S.E. Hinton
The Adventures of Blue Avenger—Norma Howe
The Adrian Mole Diaries—Sue Townsend
Like Sisters on the Homefront—Rita Williams-Garcia
Probably Still Nick Swansen—Virginia Euwer Wolf

Remember to vote!

You may vote for your favorite children's and young adult books of 2006 in the Cybils, a new literary award bestowed by bloggers.

Six Word Story Round-Up

Here is a sample of the six word stories you contributed this week. Thank you, Fishsuit, for starting this whole circus of storytelling.

"What? I missed my show? No!"
Lady K.

The alien princess zapped gross posters.
Lone Star Ma

"That's not my belly-button."
"Oh, sorry."
Limpy99

"What's that?"
"I made it."
"Oh, sorry."
BlueMamma

Arg...thick...poop...hurts...ung...corn.
Steven Novak

"I ate raisins?"
"Nope. Bugs."
"Squishy!"
Alkelda

The laundry just kept piling up.
Nonny

I came, I saw, I caffeinated.
Tony (aka Bede)

Six Little (or Big, or Medium) Words

I get it! The Round Robin is too much work. You want to be entertained, not to entertain me. Well, the pigeon has feelings too. I'm going to sulk in a corner and make faces at all the passers-by.

Really, though: if it works, it works. If it doesn't, I move on. Sometimes it takes awhile for things to catch on, and sometimes they never catch on at all.

Now, how about writing a six word story instead? Come on. Entertain me. Six little words. Six big words. A pleasant mixture of both little and big words. Follow Fishsuit's link for some examples, then add your own in my comments section. I shall reuse my own contribution just to kick-start the fun.

Alkelda's 6 word story:
Where does this go? Uh-oh.

Round Robin

Let's tell a story in a Round Robin style. Here's how it works: I'll provide the 1st paragraph. In the comments section, the first commenter will write the 2nd paragraph (or lines of dialogue). The second commenter will read write the 3rd paragraph. We'll keep going until it gets much, much too silly to continue, or if someone comes up with a natural ending.

The rules:

1) It's a story, not a competition. Don't negate the previous storytellers' contributions with claims that "it was all a dream" or killing everyone off willy-nilly.

2) Give the next person something with which to work. Setting a character up for a line of dialogue is fair.

3) No eating all the chocolate-covered strawnberries while the current storyteller is contributing to the round robin (did I mention that we often told these stories during tea-parties in college?).

The 1st paragraph:

When Ember, the youngest daughter of Xerxes the blacksmith, became apprenticed to Oren the tailor, no one would have thought the girl would have adventures any more exciting than accidentally stepping upon straight-pins or dropping thimbles into cold cups of tea. “The quiet life of a seamstress will be more becoming to my little girl than the grueling work of the smithy,” Xerxes said. Ember knew her father suffered from guilt over dropping the anvil on her foot and making her lame for life, so she didn’t contradict him, but she would have rather stayed in the smithy than worked for Oren the tailor. Oren was a cantankerous man with haughty airs and a weak chin, but he had no children of his own, and Xerxes had eight. It was only fair that someone like Ember would leave her family to become the apprentice to someone else in the village. Nonetheless, Ember decided that the first chance she could, she would run away.


Your turn!

You'll be dancing in the stacks

From Cursor Miner's The Library:

"The library, the library,
It's the place where books are free.
The library, the library,
(Librarians are often sex-y)."

Snippets

I have a storytelling gig coming up on October 23rd at the Shoreline Library where I'll help tell "scary stories for brave listeners" with Aerene Storms, Jim Beidle and others who will participate in an open mike session afterward. I know four or five scary stories in all, two of which are called "Skeleton Woman" (but are two different stories). The audience will probably be older than the usual set for whom I tell, so I'll leave the finger-puppets and felt birds at home.

Also, at the end of the month, I'm participating in my guitar teacher's coffee-shop jam. It's a laid-back guitar recital, and it'll give me more practice playing in front of other people. I'm planning to play "Water for the Elephants" and tell a Halloween story for the benefit of the children who will be there.

In the meantime, I've come down with yet another cold. (Yes, I wash my hands a lot, but I suppose I haven't washed them enough.) Does anyone have a miracle throat-gargle mixture to recommend? So far, I haven't done well with the vinegar concoctions, but maybe I just haven't yet found the right one.


"Drink Me," by John Tenniel

Green Smoothies Revisited

Over the past week, I've experimented with different fruit blends for my daily green smoothie. They've all tasted good, but some of them were quite a bit less aesthetically appealing than others. The blueberry-strawberry smoothie I made looked even more revolting than the strawberry-banana smoothie of the day before. I decided that if I wanted a good-looking smoothie, I needed to stick to yellow and orange fruits. Today's smoothie is made of bananas, peaches, a dab of yogurt, and kale. The strawberry is a festive garnish. Now, the smoothie looks more like a glass of guacamole.

Hey! It's an improvement.

Run Away, Bunny! Run Away

When you follow this link, you will find that blogger Jen Robinson was inspired to make a list of children’s books that taught her life lessons after reading a number of other discussions on the same topic. These discussions were inspired by The Guardian writer Lucy Mangan’s article about why she still reads children’s books.

I've got a list, too. I'm starting out with picture books and Easy Readers (i.e. "I Can Read" books). My first four of many (many more):

A Bargain for Frances—-Russell Hoban, illustrated by Lillian Hoban

Frances the Badger’s fink friend Thelma swindles her out of her china tea-set money, and Frances gives Thelma her comeuppance. In the end, Frances and Thelma are friends again, but what impressed me was how contradictory the message of this story was in comparison to my upbringing. If I had been Frances, I would have allegedly learned my lesson about trusting shady friends, but I would have still been stuck with a plastic tea-set and I would have had to “forgive” Thelma. A Bargain for Frances taught me that I could be a good friend to someone without acting like a doormat.


The Runaway Bunny—Margaret Wise Brown

As much as I enjoyed the pictures, especially the cozy warren in the final spread, I felt quite hostile toward the mother rabbit in the story. Even when I was 4, I wanted to shout at the cloying rabbit mother, “Leave the bunny alone! Give him room to play!” Fortunately, my parents did just that for me, though I don’t think they ever suspected the full extent of my resentment of the rabbit mother. Personal space is important.

The Terrible Tiger—-Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Arnold Lobel

Carry a sewing kit at all times. You never know when you’ll have to cut your way out of a ravenous tiger or (if you’re feeling benevolent) stitch him up afterward. Also: there is no appeasing or reasoning with bullies.


Over in the Meadow—-Olivia A.Wadson, illustrated by Ezra Jack Keats

You’ve probably gathered by now that sometimes I was an angry child. Like other children, I hated it when people were unfair, I resented adults when they patronized me, and I didn’t understand how someone could just decide that s/he didn’t want to be friends with me. When my mother said, “You only spend a little time of your life being a child. For most of your life, you will be a grown-up,” I couldn’t imagine even making it to the age of 10.

Over in the Meadow starts off in the morning with one turtle mother entreating her child to do what turtles do: dig in the sand. It progresses throughout the day, and on the last page, the ten firefly children are shining “like stars in the soft, shady glen.”

Life lessons learned:

1) Time passes. It's a good thing.
2) Lists help me settle my thoughts.
3) I remember ideas better when I set them to lyrical poetry.
4) It is hard to rhyme “seven” with anything remotely pertinent to the storyline.

That's me. What about you?

Vinyl Record

Today, I found this extremely rare vinyl 78 record. The song speaks to a matter that has long been the subject of debate: why do catalogers insist upon placing Hans Christian Andersen's literary fairy tales in the folklore section instead of in fiction? This power ballad will have you shaking with tears of outrage.

For more records of this ilk, check out the Vinyl Record Generator.

"Green indeed is the colour of lovers"*

Lucia's preschool teacher eats a raw foods diet and offers fresh fruits and vegetables to the children during snacktime. Lucia's favorite snack is the "sushi" made with veggie pate plus cucumber and carrot slices rolled up in dried seaweed sheets called nori. If food is wrapped in nori, there's a chance Lucia will try it.

No one in the House of Glee has any plans to toss out our cooking pots or cover our burners with cutting boards. If we're fanatic about anything, it's our dislike of artificial sweeteners and hydrogenated fats.** Still, we are open to new ways of getting more fresh vegetables into our diets with as little discomfort as possible. Today, we tried the Green Smoothie for the first time. I blended bananas and strawberries, then threw in a handful of fresh kale.*** The mixture turned green. I'm a fan of green, so I was undeterred. I took one sip, then another. The mixture tasted like a strawberry and banana smoothie. That's it. There was no kale taste. Really. I would not joke about such a serious matter. One of the hardest things about my era of vegetarianism (1991-95) was my displeasure in eating minimally-prepared vegetables.

I'm not implying that you should go grocery shopping immediately to get the ingredients for a drink that will rejuvenate your blood cells, make your eyes shiny and your fur glossy. I'm just thrilled to have an alternative to salads. I'm not a big fan of salads unless they're mostly meat, nuts and fruit.



*Shakespeare: Love's Labours Lost. It's one of the few lines I remember from that confusing little play, but it made an impression.

**Actually, Brad the Gorilla and I are the only ones with strong opinions on artificial sweeteners and hydrogenated fats.

***Lucia's teacher recommended starting out with kale, which is mild when blended with fruit. Other fresh greens have much stronger tastes.

The way I want to write:

Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind--
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea--
A poem should not mean
But be.