Sean Daily is an English major from New Jersey now living in Las Vegas, the Other City of Lights. "I consider 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' to be comfort reading, I like the al pastor tacos at Tacos Mexico and I count among my literary influences the Chainsaw from 'Doom'. 'RRRRRR! You don't like that, do you, Mr. Undead Marine! RRRRRR!'"
Shanoah Alkire is our Discordian at large. "Born in Santa Cruz, I grew up in Grass Valley and the Bay Area, and now lurk in Las Vegas. My literary influences include Ray Bradbury,
Lewis Carroll, and Douglas Adams. I also program as a hobby,
and currently maintain the Gtk port of Angband. You can find
a rather old bio of me here."
One of the more inappropriate segues from the Birthday Massacre would probably be Joni Mitchell. And you know, I’m not sure how, but I just realized that even with the number of Joni Mitchell songs I’ve played here, I never got around to playing my absolute favoriteJoni Mitchell song.
As such, here is the song she adapted from the poem “The Second Coming“, by W. B. Yeats, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem“.
Turning and turning
Within the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart
The center cannot hold
And a blood dimmed tide
Is loosed upon the world
Nothing is sacred
The ceremony sinks
Innocence is drowned
In anarchy
The best lack conviction
Given some time to think
And the worst are full of passion
Without mercy
Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely it's the second coming
And the wrath has finally taken form
For what is this rough beast
Its hour come at last
Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born
Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born
Hoping and hoping
As if by my weak faith
The spirit of this world
Would heal and rise
Vast are the shadows
That straddle and strafe
And struggle in the darkness
Troubling my eyes
Shaped like a lion
It has the head of a man
With a gaze as blank
And pitiless as the sun
And it's moving its slow thighs
Across the desert sands
Through dark indignant
Reeling falcons
Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely it's the second coming
And the wrath has finally taken form
For what is this rough beast
Its hour come at last
Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born
Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born
Raging and raging
It rises from the deep
Opening its eyes
After twenty centuries
Vexed to a nightmare
Out of a stony sleep
By a rocking cradle
By the Sea of Galilee
Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely it's the second coming
And the wrath has finally taken form
For what is this rough beast
Its hour come at last
Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born
Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born
That is generally one of my traditional Christmas songs, actually. Trouble was, I’d already played most of them last year.
So, the war is over? Let’s see what Bob Marley says about that. This is his song, War, which is based on a translation of a speech Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, made to the United Nations in 1963. The Rastifari religion, in fact, was founded entirely around Haile Selassie.
No idea why that Black Winter Day video looks so outdated, Sean.
I know you’ve already gone from Jesus to hookers, but given Jesus’s normal entourage of hookers, that isn’t a big stretch. So I thought I’d play a clip from Rowen Atkinson called Amazing Jesus that I found rather entertaining.
In this case, I’m switching over to Pink Floyd, though. This song is titled Goodbye, Blue Sky, and the video is from the movie of The Wall. I thought the imagery on this was, well, disturbing, really. But in a very well done way. Bombers and the flag of England into crosses. It wins lots of disturbing points from me.
And since I’m a day or two late on posting, I probably ought to at least throw another song in. I was interested to see that Queen has written a song about Jesus, and since I just posted a video with a bunch of crosses in it, this seems an appropriate time to post it.
This keeps with two recent themes. This is another song being sung by Joan Baez, but I really wish I’d found it when I was posting about Mary Travers death, because this is a duet with Mary, and is appropriate to the topic.
Walk That Lonesome Valley is a traditional, but it’s well sung. And, no, I’m not intentionally playing a bunch of songs that are depressing or about death. It just seems to work out that way.
(And remember, Sean, if you’re reading this, you can post and change the theme at any time. )
Sometimes I have no idea how I got to a video. Or even if I do, it’s from a strange enough route that I have to wonder anyways.
This is a case in point. However bizarre it was, earlier I was looking at a Japanese cast singing “Jesus Christ Superstar” (and that was very cool. Too bad it didn’t allow embedding.). And later, I was watching parts of Andrew Lloyd Webers “CATS” in Japanese.
None of that explains how I got to this odd fan made video, titled Overdrive, by IOSYS. After watching a purely Japanese version, I grabbed a version with subtitles. It didn’t help, though I’m assured this features Reisen Udongein Inaba, the Moon Rabbit.
Warning: this video may cause insanity in laboratory rabbits in clinical studies. And it’s not worksafe, besides that.
This isn’t related to the last post either, except, perhaps, in that it isn’t related.
Don’t really have much time for posting today, but here’s a song by XTC I found. This one is called Dear God, and basically consists of the ranting and raving people of a highly Christian background tend to do when they rub more then two brain cells together.
Of course, in my opinion, the fact that there is suffering in the world doesn’t mean god doesn’t exist. It just generally means that there is something wrong with the model of god given, or that there are constraints that you don’t know about.
Besides, if bad things didn’t happen, we’d still be in the stone age. And, frankly, good and evil are too sides of a coin; you can’t really have one without the other.
Still, I like songs like this. It shakes people out of complacency…
Oh, I know what route I go down when I experience too much kawaii, too, Sean.
Admittedly, it first involves porting it here, where everyone can see it. But afterward, there are antidotes. In this case, I got together with a friend from work after work and played a board game he has with him called Arkham Horror.
Cthulhu won the first game, but we managed to beat an elder god the second time, though we house ruled one or two things. (Mainly because of only having two players.)
In honor of that, I thought I’d play a short creepy animation called A Lovecraft Dream. I think it speaks for itself.
That’s all right, Sean. I was only there long enough to hear 4 bands or so play, anyways, so we don’t necessarily need to keep Worldfest going as a theme.
And it’s lacking in the requisite number of explosions for this blog, in any case. To rectify this, I thought I’d play a song by a band called Xploding Plastix titled Joy Comes In The Morning. It has a lovely animation featuring a rabbit, robots, rockets, and other goodness. And the overall song is pretty good, too.
Well, no new deaths today that I know of, though I haven’t really checked too closely. It’d be pretty eerie if a new celebrity started dying each day for a blog theme, after all. Like Michael Jackson, who is now confirmed to have died of a heart attack. (The default method of dying from having your name written in the notebook from Death Note, as I recall.)
Don’t think we had a firm established theme before that, so I’ll fall back on what I had been doing: posting Frank Zappa songs.
This one’s a rather nice rundown of televangelists and other religious groups, Jesus Thinks You’re A Jerk. Includes jabs at Jim & Tammy, and the Ku Klux Klan, among others. Pity the lyrics shown are occassionally misspelled, or incorrect. (Bush for Pat was one noticed, for example.)
It’s a fun song lambasting various people and groups that need it, anyways. And no, not work safe.
![Lazy Lass [eXPLoReD]](http://static.flickr.com/7083/7272226034_3d95aba441_t.jpg "Lazy Lass [eXPLoReD]")
