AnimaMundi

Longtemps or Where The Runoff Goes

For those 7,845 unique readers who look at my blog each and everyday, I would like to tell you that I am still standing. As for blogging, I have turned to micro-blogging. Is that what they call it nowadays? I might still post here occasionally, but for the most part I can be found over at Marco's Loose Ends, Tumblr-ing away. This format is more suited to our ADS digital life support system, non? Quick, precise, succinct, image-driven.

Soundcloud (everything is going up to the cloud now or will be soon, including ourselves) is a music hosting service where all kinds of music is shared. Everything is being connected on the Interwebs. Social networks link to blogs, blogs connect to forums et al. Fairly soon, one will not able to whisper in one's own bedroom without the whole world knowing it. But who cares? I like my privacy, but I'm not hiding anything. Back to the music. At Soundcloud I can post 120 minutes of mixed music. That mix will change every now and then. It's like having my own mini-radio station. The neat thing is that Soundcloud and Tumblr are automatically linked up. Well, you have to check a box and this happens. Some connections on the Interwebs are better than others.

So, see you there, all 7,845 of you. You know who are.  

Happy Mardi Gras!!

 

 

Today's Mardi Gras, all youse Northerners. It's not all about beer and boobs. It's a culminating celebration that has been going on since the world began. It's a way of life. This year's Carnival is one day shy of the longest possible and some people in NOLA may feel that lengthy parade tomorrow. Lent is a fixed time period, but Carnival time is short, medium or long. If you don't believe me, look it up. Since Carnival was so long this year, Easter comes in late April. Easter is never in May. Look it up.

Only in places like New Orleans, they actually celebrate it. Really. The people know how to celebrate and party because they know that like their precariously perched city, we all walk that proverbial tight rope over the abyss.

So, remember as you are working or just walking around that there are people celebrating today and for good reason. They instinctively know about these matters. They know what matters and what's bullshit. We should celebrate along with our brethren. Even Google doesn't know it's Mardi Gras for God's sake. The 100th Anniversary of International Women's is important, but I believe Google should change that later in the day, to, you know, celebrate the end of Carnival, i.e. Mardi Gras.

My blog stats soar** at this time of the year because people are searching for the lyrics to a certain song that is sung at the end of Mardi Gras. It's nonsense and fluidly changes as the tides. This mad search happens every year without fail. So to make things easier for those around the world who want to sing along very loudly with their sisters and brothers in New Orleans. Here ya' go.

"If I Ever Cease To Love"

This particular set of lyrics is from a 1946 "Souvenir Edition"  published by  Dave Frank, New Orleans.
Authorship (improperly) attributed to "Rex Knarf" [franK backwards] and "Re' Kel"

Verse 1:
In a house, in a square, in a quadrant, in a pocket, in a passing lane,
In a street, in a lane, in a road, in the Superdome.
Turn to the left, on the right hand,
you see my true love's abode.
I go there a courting,
and cooing to my love like a dove and defensive end
And swearing on my bend-ed knee, Drew Brees,
If ever I cease to love,
May sheepsheads grow on apple trees, may OT field golds split the uprights
If ever I cease to love.

Chorus 1:
If ever I cease to love,
If ever I cease to love
May the moon be turned to green cream cheese, may the Saints come back from 10-0 at the half with an onside kick
If ever I cease to love

Verse 2:
She can sing who dat, she can play on the piano, 
She can jump, she can dance that NOLA bounce and skanky leg, she can run and catch a clinching interception 

For she's a wonderful girlie,
She's all of them rolled into one looooong second line.
I adore her beauty, she's like an angel dropped from above

May the fish get legs, and the cows lay eggs, like the Colts laid one 

If ever I cease to love,

Chorus 2

If I ever cease to love,

If I ever cease to love,

May we all turn into cats and dogs in a Krewe who knew

If I ever cease to love

*Photo -- Louis Maistro

** Update: As of 3 pm EST over 80 people have searched for the lyrics to this elusive song.

The Hurricane of '38

Last night I tuned into the PBS American Experience show on the Hurricane of '38 a little late. The moment that I tuned in the narrator, the great David McCullough, mentioned Watch Hill and Westerly, RI, the town I was raised in. If you look at a map of the southern New England coast, you can see that New London, CT and Westerly, RI stand a good chance of being in the path of a major hurricane coming up the Atlantic coast. In March of 2009, I was at the shore and took this photo of Napatree Point.

 
Below is Napatree Point before the Hurricane of '38.

"Rhode Island saw the greatest destruction, as wind and tide proved deadly. Along Fort Road in Watch Hill,the beach was swept clean of any signs of habitation. That area of beach has never been rebuilt...  

In New London, Connecticut, the tidal surge drove the five-masted school ship Marsala into a warehouse complex along the docks, setting off a short circuit and fire which consumed a quarter-mile area of the business district -- the worst calamity in New London since Benedict Arnold burned the city in 1781."

From the transcript: Patricia Shuttleworth (West Hampton, L.I.): "About 3:30 or quarter of four, my brother came running into the house, saying, "The water's coming up, the water's coming up." And at that moment, they had to make, again, split-second decisions about what to do with all the people in the house. So they put as many people as they could into that little five-passenger Ford which they had. Mother drove. She put grandmother in and her guests, Father and the other children, but they couldn't fit the help in, so they said, "You'll just have to fend for yourselves." And she said she would never forget the sight of them standing there, waiting, when the water came up."

"In Long Island on the storm's eastern rim, winds slammed into the land at 100 miles per hour. The seismic impact registered as far away as Sitka, Alaska."

My grandparents, my father along with his sister and brothers, were living in New London close to the business district at the time. My grandparents and father had emigrated from Sicily sometime around the end of WW I. I remember my father telling me of that fire, of how their home was almost lost to the inferno.

I also distinctly remember the aftermath of Hurricane Carol in 1954.  My father was a photographer and took me with him the day after the storm. I don't know what happened to those photos, lost to time I guess. But the images of destruction are emblazoned on my memory card. Rows of slabs where homes once stood. One of my aunt Celena's beach homes lying mostly intact on the opposite shore of a salt lake behind Atlantic Avenue in Misquamicut. A glass bottle of milk standing on a door step of a vanished home.

 

 

MALAVOI

10 Me Ki Sa Ou Le

On the island of Martinique, there grows a strain of suger cane that is especially sought out. This sugar cane, known as Malavoi, is also home to the poisonous viper. Malavoi's sound is unique on the planet. They played the Fete International in Lafayette many years ago. When I was first introduced to what many consider to be their best album, "Matebis" (creole for "skipping school"), I was disappointed at first. At the time my ears were craving zouk chire, which is the stone-hard driving style of zouk. I actually returned a copy to the now gone Tower Records on 4th and Broadway in NYC. At the time the strings and ballads did nothing for me. Now it is one of favorite albums. I now own two copies of the cd, one of which is still sealed. On the track here a man pleads with his lover. He has bought her this, that and the other. He has taken to her to myriad places. What more can he do? What does she want? The age old story retold from time out of time. At the end of the song he decides to just go to sleep. The relentless monster bass drives home his frustration to the 10th power. It is remorseless. What's to be done?

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

Noel

This is the way they roll in Guadeloupe-Martinique for the holidaze.

Download 05 Noèl o péyi

Miriam Makeba RIP

A giant musical voice of South Africa, Miriam Makeba, dead at 76. 

Kokola

Another track from the same Tshala Muana album, "Ntambue".

Dezo Dezo

Tshala Muana has taken the Congolese sound and made it her own. She's the Queen of Mutuashi. This track is from her 1994 "Ntambue".

Okaman

Readers, I offer you this song on my birthday for being so loyal. Monique Seka comes from a family of Ivory Coast musicians. Okaman is Afro-Zouk at its best.

Preto E Mi

Tito Paris is a Cape Verdean guitarist and vocalist. Very highly regarded in Cape Verdean music circles, his albums reflect the Creole give-and-take of these trade route islands. His music is a crystallization of African and European elements fused with Caribbean strains.