Tag: music

New Paradise

I found (can’t remember how) Suno in April 2024 and it took me this long. Here’s a filk song with lyrics I wrote.

[Verse 1]
They sold us calm rivers and black fertile soil
Rich harvests, abundance without the toil.
We packed up our lives, we paid our passage price,
And cast off for the promise of New Paradise.

[Interjection]
Off to New Paradise!

[Verse 2]
The landfall came hard on dry rock, we were stunned,
No river, no forest, no loam, no refund.
We surveyed, explored, we tested the ground
Abundance we paid for was nowhere around.

[Interjection]
Nowhere around.

[Chorus]
We raise our own garden on stone,
Every seedling a hope for a home.
We have crossed empty light years, there’s no going back
We build paradise from our foolish hope’s wreck.

[Interjection]
Build our New Paradise from our foolish hope’s wreck

[Verse 3]
We carried the water, we quarried and stacked
We can’t go back and we won’t go back!
We shared what we had to survive the lean years.
We earned every harvest with sweat and with tears.

[Interjection]
Our sweat and our tears

[Chorus]
We raise our own garden on stone,
Every seedling a wall of our home.
We have crossed empty light years, there’s no going back
We build paradise that we couldn’t buy on spec.

[Bridge]
First children were born in the first orchard’s shade,
They played in the creeks and the pools that we made.
As humans have ever we took a hard land
We gave it our labor and made it our friend.

[Final Chorus]
We raise our own garden on stone,
Every seedling the start of a home.
We have crossed empty light years tempted with lies
Our backs and our brains built our New Paradise!

[Outro]
We built our own paradise.

Peasprout Chen

Henry Lien’s new book is coming out. It is, disappointingly, not about Peasprout Chen. Instead it’s about how to tell stories (I think, pre-ordered but haven’t received it yet) and OMG he knows how to tell stories. The stories he tells are absolutely overpoweringly insane and incredibly multi-faceted. Here are some reviews that are funnier than anything I’m likely to write AND CONTAIN MASSIVE SPOILERS SO DON’T READ THEM IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS about the outcome of Awesome Ice Skating Martial Art Battles in a Manga School and politics and deep heavy teen relationship drama: https://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/tag/henry+lien

I’d just like to note that these two books about Awesome Ice Skating Martial Art Battles in a Manga School can ALSO be read as:

  • A sensitive bildungsroman that accurately shows the inside experience of being a certain kind of teen
  • A deep psychological exploration of the effects of parentification and totalitarian government on a child, in the vein of Gaidar and Kassil (but with more martial arts! and magic! and ice skating! and no actual real-world children being killed)
  • A relationship drama in the vein of Princess Charskaya (but with more politics! and ice skating giant MegaZord! and martial arts!).

Did I mention multi-faceted? Henry Lien’s writing has more facets than dragonfly eyes do. It is round, it is firm, it is fully packed, and it is enormously satisfying. Can’t wait to read the new book.

Vu iz dos gesele

TIL that three of the most commonly known Yiddish songs (Donna Donna, Bei Mir Bistu Shein, and Крутится Вертится Шар Голубой) exist in the versions written by the same guy, Sholom Secunda.

Interestingly, in Polish Vu Iz Dos Gesele exists as a chorus to the folk song Szła Dzieweczka Do Laseczka (above). That song, without the chorus, was a favorite of my grandmother’s because it was a favorite of her father. It is an outgrowth of an 18th century Silesian song “Szla Dzieweczka do Gajeczka”

It is, supposedly, a wedding song, which makes the last verse, in which the guy promises to beat the girl up if he ever meets her in the forest, even weirder. Grandmother never sung that one.

The chorus, in the Крутится Вертится Шар Голубой version heard in Maxim’s Youth (below) was a favorite of my grandfather’s. Both of my grandparents were born in the early 30s, while the song became popular in the USA in the late 20s.

In English Secunda’s 1926 version was re-worded after the Holocaust and sung by sisters Barry and many others.

In Russian there are a number of versions of this song, from train-oriented (see Wikipedia link above) to soppy love ones (one of which is claimed to be the original Russian text, referring, moreover, to a scarf. I am skeptical.) .

There are two versions about fighting Nazis, the classic one also from the Maxim trilogy and one by Isakovsky, author of almost every Soviet song I know by heart (Incomplete list: «Катюша»,  «Враги сожгли родную хату», «В лесу прифронтовом», «Летят перелётные птицы», «Под звёздами балканскими», «Ой, цветёт калина»).

All that would be amazing enough, but this song, with the Polish version of the music minus the chorus and a very gruesome text (“let’s go to the forest my daughter, we’ll cut you, run! run! ha-ha-ha!) is also popular in Japan!

In India the same Silesian folk song, again minus the chorus, translated into a beautiful love song with no beatings or gloating included.

Globalism, I love it.

I would be remiss if I did not note this article containing the hypothesis that the original version had a blue scarf, not a globe (although I think a blue scarf twirling above someone’s head and falling is just as unlikely as a blue globe) and the even more unlikely hypothesis that the author of the ugliest version of lyrics was Grand Duke Konstantin.