Timewaster's Guide Archive

Man, Yorkshire is a place I want to see. I loved the James Herriott books growing up. Stereotypical, I know, especially because I grew up on a farm. But my dream was always to grow up and become a vet, so my grandma gave me the books, and several years later, my other grandma gave me the same books plus one volume. Right before I went on my trip to Scotland I was on this kick with Netflix (you can rent the strangest DVDs from them that you'd never find in a movie store), watching all the All Creatures Great and Small tv shows.

Of course, then I found out they had Till There Was You on DVD, too, so I had to watch all those, too. I think that was the name of it. It had Judy Densch in it and ran throughout the 90s, about this couple that was in love in the 50s and then separated when he was sent to the Korean War, and were reunited all those years later. Then again, it might be still running for all I know.

Anyway, I was on a big British TV kick, but we get them about 10 years later over here.    There were a couple shows I saw in the hotel I was staying at that I thought would be pretty cool to see over here while they were running, like Wire in the Blood. It seemed to be a cool cop show with a running mystery in the storyline, something you don't get very often over here.

Which city is that? Don't accents vary across cities sometimes too (I was talking to a guy in Glasgow that commented on how many different Glaswegian accents there were).

But I would think it's more a function of his training as an actor, having to pick up so many different accents for different roles, and of living in so many different places over the years. I mean, was his accent more like his home accent in the 60s, say, than now?

I wonder, because I grew up in western Illinois, went to school in Utah, lived in Chicago for a couple years (which is a completely different accent than the rest of the state of Illinois), and now live in Boston. I've had several people comment on my accent, wondering where the heck I was from. I think I picked up several Utah-isms while living there, and I KNOW I picked up some Chicago-isms, sad to say (that nasal A is so bad).

shiny

cleans

I'm listening to U2's All that You Can't Leave Behind album. "in New York" is playing now.

Jumping back to the post on the previous page, SE, if you name your daughter Rachel/Rachael, if you include the A in the spelling, be sure to put the A before the E. I'm figuring it was a typo, but you never know.  

Wow, we really have a range of musical appreciation here. I was talking to 42 a couple years ago before I left Provo and he was saying how much he loved stuff like the soundtrack to the Nightmare before Christmas. Before that, I never really thought about people my own age listening to stuff outside the spectrum of what you could hear on the radio (though even then I had cd wallets full of stuff that couldn't be found on the radio).

I, too, love the Muppets. My favorite Christmas cd that I have is John Denver and the Muppets--hilarious. I usually have my radio tuned to the classic rock station, but since I don't have cds of my favorite songs, I can't remember the names of the singers. I'm notorious for that. But oh--I will add Van Morrison to my list. And Cat Stevens.

I've heard the Bela Fleck stuff, I think--at least, I know my roommate in Chicago had the CD. Personally, the reason I'm turned off by Bob Dylan is because he tries to sound like an 80 year old man, even when he was in his 30s. And maybe that's the problem I have with much of contemporary American folk.

I've never actually heard Woody Guthrie sing, but I had to read 3 books about him this semester for my nonfiction class--seems like everyone was stuck on Woody in 2002 in children's publishing! If you ever want a well-reading, thorough but straightforward biography of him, I suggest This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie, by Elizabeth Partridge. Written for a high-school readership and above, it does a great job of including the truth about Woody's life, including his mother's struggle with the disease that also killed Woody himself, Huntingdon's disease, without sugar-coating. But it also concentrates on the impact his songs had for so many decades. Good book.

I don't know--maybe it's because folk is trying so hard not to be country-fied that it bothers me. I mean, if modern folk music grew out of folk music from the past, that would mean songs about everyday life, yes, and granted, we're not an agrarian society for the most part anymore. But it should also have lively music, interesting scoring, use of interesting rhythms, that sort of thing. You'd think. I can't describe it by typing it, but if you've ever heard any of the local bands in Utah except for Ryan Shupe and the Rubber Band (and they're guilty of that kind of songwriting at times, too), you'd probably get a good idea of what I mean--every phrase is ended with a long, low held note, usually with awkward emphasis on the wrong syllable.

Great example of this was the guy who opened for Kate Rusby last year (whose name I forgot promptly after sitting through that excruciating concert): he has this song about wistaria, the flower that grows in vines on the sides of houses. Now, whenever I hear that word, all I can think of is the chorus of his song: "Wis-ta-riiiiiiiiiyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaa, wis-ta-riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiyyyyyaaaaaa," with the "iiiiiiii"s going up and the "aaaaa"s going down. Yeah, hard to describe, typewritten.

Maybe it's just that I don't mind country music and I like older Celtic music and the music that grew out of it (including country, which grew out of folk music of Scots-Irish immigrants in the Appalachians). So I'm drawn to music like Kate Rusby's, which is decidedly different than American folk, even though her label is sold as folk, too. Then there's groups like The Mamas and the Papas, and other groups I've always thought of as rock, but who were actually part of the folk movement of the 60s (as I found out from reading the jacket on my John Denver cd, because they sang his Leaving on a Jet Plane first).

But I just thought maybe there were American groups like that today that I might have been missing. I'll have to check out Bela Fleck again.

By the way, I HIGHLY recommend getting Kate Rusby's newest cd, Little Lights. Too bad she has a fear of flying. She somehow got past it last year to do a tour of the U.S., which is how I got to see her in Chicago, but I went to the website recently and found out that she's going to stick with places she can travel via the surface of the earth for a while, so she won't be coming back here anytime soon.   Hard to promote here if you can't get here, so I'll do what I can to recommend it to friends...  

Sorry to pull you guys off the original topic. Maybe I should have started a new thread.