Shake a million meanings out your side

[sovay]

Rabbit, rabbit! Happy May Day! Don't cross any picket lines!

Yesterday got sufficiently scrambled on different fronts that none of the things I had planned to do actually got done, but we came out of it with a lot of produce and a share in a subscription to Disney+ and I got to see gaudior in person for the first time since the beginning of the month. I watched Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration and loved much of it and every now and then realized what's important to me about a song by watching someone not do it. I watched DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990) for maybe the first time since it was in theaters and was amazed by how specifically I had remembered certain lines and scenes and most of all the mile-a-minute genie's serious yearning to be mortal with choices and no longer the slave of the lamp and how completely other elements had dropped out of my brain, like most of the action sequences and the comedy racism of the villain's sidekick. spatch and I watched Rosana Sullivan's Kitbull (2019) and I couldn't stop crying for a long time. I'm not sure what it tapped into. Maybe just tiny, stubborn kindness in the face of cruelty. It was a very believable kitten.

Governor Baker has finally mandated rather than recommended the statewide wearing of masks in public. I wish he'd done it a month ago, but at least he's done it.

I cannot but hope that this cartoon from Life magazine, January 1919 was the origin story of a queer girl gang.

Comments

[coraline]

"every now and then realized what's important to me about a song by watching someone not do it."


Ooh, tell me more?
Also I liked reading this
https://t.co/nfpEbNUgNs

[sovay]

Ooh, tell me more?

Katrina Lenk doing "Johanna" from Sweeney Todd as bedroom chamber-pop with her own guitar is a wonderful idea, but it turns out that one of the things I really love about that song as it exists in the musical, especially the original cast recording with Victor Garber who appears in the livestream to tell a story and send birthday wishes but not sing, is the operatic quality of having no chill whatsoever. If you're not going to sing it like a love-stunned Victorian sailor alone on a stage with a majestically clanging orchestra, it just doesn't sound like "Johanna" to me—I don't mean that it needs the orchestra, just that degree of intensity, and Lenk sings it gently and yearningly and I suspect it's a very good performance, but it didn't work for me.

Also I liked reading this

Thank you! That is so neat. The title is desperately poignant in context; I had wondered if it was chosen or before after the live event fell apart.

[coraline]

johanna: oh yeah i was 100% with you on that, also the chords which are available to a guitar player do not capture the weird-ass things sondheim does in orchestration (which you can mostly capture on piano). it was a new and different thing but it was not that song from that show :)

[sovay]

also the chords which are available to a guitar player do not capture the weird-ass things sondheim does in orchestration

That is also true, and since I don't play guitar—I don't play anything beyond can-make-a-melody-come-out-of-the-piano—I would not have guessed it in advance.

it was a new and different thing but it was not that song from that show

On the other hand, Mandy Patinkin a cappella in a park worked beautifully.