From: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org (ecto-digest) To: ecto-digest@smoe.org Subject: ecto-digest V9 #178 Reply-To: ecto@smoe.org Sender: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk ecto-digest Saturday, June 21 2003 Volume 09 : Number 178 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: Seeking: the Saddest Songs on Earth [karen hester ] More numerous stuff ["Mitchell A. Pravatiner" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 18:02:20 -0700 (PDT) From: karen hester Subject: Re: Seeking: the Saddest Songs on Earth Aw crap, now I'm miserable. I can't healthily listen to 'Tecumseh Valley' at the moment, so gshell@metronet.com, thanks for bringing *that one* up :) Story songs like Gulf Coast Highway, which you also mentioned, always get me - ones about people struggling through dust bowl days or realising the importance of love after their partner's death. Little historical details bring them alive. Patty Griffin has a few - "forty years go by with someone laying in your bed, forty years of saying things you wish you'd never said", that kind of thing. Kristin Hersh's more elusive and personal songs are always breaking my heart, "tell me what to say, tell me what to say." As a kid, I'd beg my dad to sing "oh my darling Clementine" to me at bathtime. I'd get into hysterical fits of giggles over her size nine feet in 'herring boxes without topses' or whatever. Death by toe stubbing, poor girl. So I'd cry and giggle at the same time, and very much enjoy myself as I splashed around. Her dad being a struggling '49er added to the heartbreak of the song. ok. lunchtime. Karen. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 18:14:18 -0700 From: Noe Venable Subject: AsSignmeNt: What is the saddest song on earth? There Was a Zebra-- by Eric Metzgar. http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/metzgare2 here are the words to it "There was a Zebra that held two vastly different opinions of himself. His mind was divided. One side thought of himself as a black horse with white stripes while the other thought of himself as a white horse with black stripes, but both sides knew that the hullabaloo would end only after both sides were dead. One day they agreed to exist as one, to see the pattern of stripes as one. Of course, that meant one mind, one source and just one grey horse. But neither one liked sharing its skin. They tried to decide how to divide their eyes and their ears, but they needed a volunteer to cut... so I pulled out my shears and stepped up. Oh, I sliced him, yeah yeah. Oh, I slashed him, yeah yeah. I separated his stripes and I stashed him under a tree, and I left him. Two days later I came back and asked him how it felt to watch himself gasping. "Not well!" he cried. "Not well!" he choked... "Sew me up! Sew me up, oohhh!" The blood clots sealed immediately around the skin I'd stitched. The recovery was quick. The zebra hopped to its feet and moaned. I stepped away but first I planted a microphone in its head to record everything he thought, and the following voices I caught: "Oh it's doubtful yeah yeah, oh it's doubtful yeah yeah, if we'll survive with a soul that's fractured... In coming days we'll practice appreciating both the stars and blackness... The easy days and the hard ones.... in time I think... in time, I hope... there'll be peace... there'll be peace, oh..." also: Snow Angels-- By Odessa Chen singing to a lover who's gone-- "let me lie in your arms let me oh let me lie in your snow angels" http://www.odessachen.com ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 00:09:24 -0500 (CDT) From: "Mitchell A. Pravatiner" Subject: Numerous stuff I empathize totally with Vickie's dilemma. I myself recently had to do a hasty bugout from my old home, and had to make many judgment calls, under the gun, about what to keep and what not. Some things I was looking hard for I could not find, no matter how hard I tried. Some things I made the decision not to hang on to, and now wish I had decided to keep them. But on the whole, I made decisions I can live with. So my offhand advice to Vickie in the triage process is, "follow your heart." That's quite a different thing from "just do it." The publishers of _Maxim_ magazine have lately come out with a music-oriented companion mag, called _Blender_. The current issue, which I heard about on one of the _Entertainment Tonight_-type shows on TV, has an article on Jewel. Unsurprisingly, is it nothing of any great depth. Surprisingly, for all its brevity, it is not as insipid as I had expected. It does have some interesting (at least to me), albeit likely not very original, material on her unmonied childhood and youth, which made me wonder if a desire for greater economic security in the long run than she likely could enjoy as a niche artist may be fueling, at least in part, her choice of commercialism over artistic values. It reminds me, for some reason, of my late father's definition of a capitalist as a communist with a pot to piss in :-). The same issue also has not-too-bad, if not too detailed, capsule reviews of Jewel's new album, and of Liz Phair's upcoming eponymous album. A more clearly insipid bit of Jeweliana appeared in the June 13 _Red Streak_, the _Chicago Sun-Times_'s offshoot aimed at youmg adults supposedly unable to relate to regular newspapers. Under the headline "Sexy new look doesn't quite cut it," the squib related how her march toward having _0304_ debut at number 1 was blunted by the release of Metallica's new album a few days ahead of schedule to head off bootleg copies. Jewel herself puts matters in perspective in the article, being quoted abiout her debut at number 3, "It's all out of my control." Closer in spirit to the Jewel we used to know, love or both is Lisa Germano. The June 18 _Sun-Times_ reprinted an article from _Billboard_ about her new album, _Lullaby for Liquid Pig_, which alludes briefly to her time in the school of hard knocks, and out of the music business, the last few years, and how she was inspired to re-enter the business by a record exec who was a reguoar customer at a bookstore where she worked. If the article is on the Billboard website, it must be in the paid section; I could not find a search engine on the publically available part of the site. Mitch ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 00:28:52 -0500 (CDT) From: "Mitchell A. Pravatiner" Subject: More numerous stuff WRT Pay Pal and the ecto napster idea: It recently came to my attention that Pay Pal dumped a local, alternative lifestyle-oriented enterprise as a client, on account of its "adult" nature. This should concern those of us who care about individual liberties (which is to say, all of us). WRT sad songs: my favorites are the standard, "Ballad of the Sad Young Men," whose best recording in my experience was by Eden Atwood on _Today_, but which also was well done by Rickie Lee Jones on _Pop Pop_; "Don't Watch Me Bleed" by Til Tuewday on _Voices Carry_; and "The People That You Never Get to Love" by Rupert Holmes on _Partners in Crime_, the latter perhaps not so much sad, as wistful. Mitch ------------------------------ End of ecto-digest V9 #178 **************************