carrie z

he's sooo good and the fact that his role in Wu-Tang is still "the goofy stoner one" and not "the greatest rapper ever who accidentally ended up friends with a bunch of weirdos" is an astounding display of being chill

we plan to have Puzzles of 2025 done by the end of November. will it be a success? will we beat TMBG to their next album? will the constant atrocities pile up so much as to make releasing a collection of silly songs seem impractical or in poor taste? will we release it anyway? stay tuned….

YouTube video by Ichnehmon Diagelegenaitoikon “Puzzles of 2025” Trailer

here’s the trailer again. Elsie Janis stans rejoice and/or recoil www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1CM...

hedra and i in “the studio”; i’m taking the photo and playing the accordion and taking the photo and hedra is playing a pink violin. we’re wearing matching shirts of palaeontological diagram and janet jackson respectively. we’re recording track 31 “My true love has marched away” in this photo, don’t tell anyone

hedy and i, your favorite regular girls, had a fun several days recording Puzzles of 2025 in person… it’s really happening !

this'll be in a bit! in chicago! i might be first actually, who knows. hope you're doing okay out there

not to distract from the nice tune, but how is that chair creak at the start so incredible and so in time with what follows???

i also saw a large grasshopper on a rock. (this is the only interesting thing that has happened to me recently.) i took a photograph of it but i'm not going to share it. go outside and see a bug for yourself! !!

while i'm here (i have not been keeping up with "social media" and i have no intent to), i am doing fine and i hope you are as well. this week, i was pleased to get this year's vaccines, and to vote in the local election. i'm feeling lucky to get to do these basic things.

i'm going to make a rare live appearance, in Logan Square in Chicago, the evening of Thursday Sept. 25. it'll be a short set (following a set by Angel Destroyer), in which i'll either improvise atonally on the piano for half an hour or do something else.
comfortstationlogansquare.org/calendar/202...

promotional post-script: this sort of thing is what happens when you listen 2 music on "youtube". instead, avoid and/or maximize inexplicable bass solos by paying ur fave artists directly, e.g. using "bandcamp" on today, "bandcamp friday" ! ! ! even Chuck Mangione had a page there for some reason

rose i am forced to admit that i have eternal affection for Escape from Monkey Island because it came out when i was a kid and was the first LucasArts game i played

YouTube video by Chuck Mangione Quintet - Topic Solar (Alternate Take)

then this youtube playlist follows the tune with an alternate take of the same tune, and at around 4:00, it sounds as though someone has added reverb to the horns for like a single riff?? what's going on with pre-smooth-jazz Chuck Mangione??? i'm going to bed!!!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=URs-...

YouTube video by Chuck Mangione Quintet - Topic Solar

listening to the early Chuck Mangione album "Recuerdo" (1962) and they do "Solar"... and give the tune in the head to the bass??? it's probably partly because it's late and i'm stressed out, but i find this choice utterly absurd. Sam Jones rises to the occasion tho!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=usNX...

i was in fact singing "So Long Mom" to myself just yesterday (for no particular reason). the satire aside, his rhymes and tunes are such a delight! his work is a fundamental influence on me whenever i'm trying to create a rhyme or a tune.

when i was a kid listening to Tom Lehrer, i learned about how the new Iraq War had a panoply of horrifying antecedents in 20th-century U.S. interventionist military policy, and i learned the word "fellatio" from the same song. rest in peace scoundrel

Re-posting this album trailer. I don't think i've ever before made a trailer for anything i was working on, so this was fun to do. If you turn on the sound you can hear some sound.

Video text: In 1925, at the height of The Cross-Word Mania, the renowned vaudeville performer and songwriter Elsie Janis (“The Sweetheart of the A.E.F.”; “The Regular Girl”) presented her new revue: “Puzzles of 1925”. A smash hit at the time, drawing crowds across the country, this cross-word-themed revue would quickly be forgotten: a mere footnote in the life of a woman who is herself a footnote in the history of musical theatre which is itself a footnote in the great story of Mankind. There in the dust-bin of history: there “Puzzles of 1925” has remained for 100 years! and there it shall remain even after… carrie z and Hedra Rowan proudly present: “Puzzles of 2025” A new revue for a new century!! (in auditory format) Forty songs!! (including the surviving songs from that forgotten revue of yestercentury) Hidden secrets!! (a puzzle in the background both unfair and unreasonable) Amidst a foul year, a fair breeze of frivolity!! (or so it has been to us) “Puzzles of 2025”! by carrie z and Hedra Rowan. To be released, if all goes well, before the year is out. (Also this image is of Elsie in the play, wearing a crossword-puzzle dress and standing next to Jimmy Hussey.)

(oh, as i did not include "alt text" for the video above, i've copied the text of the video to the "alt text" for this image (one of the Elsie Janis photos in the video (White Studio, 1925, from the NYPL)))

Some of what we've done so far sounds so good and some of it sounds so bad and I'm excited for everyone to hear it all. thanks

I'm happy to finally be collaborating with my pal Hedra. It's a big project and the year is halfway over today, but I think we can pull it off.

Here is the announcement of Puzzles of 2025, by me and Hedra Rowan.

I have a brief video to announce my latest upcoming musical project. But I don't know what the etiquette is here on "Bluesky" for uploading videos, so I'm going to put it in the middle of this thread, so that hopefully it will not annoy anyone by playing automatically.

if it's about sin (abrahamic concept), the 1st and 4th panels make perfect funny/sad sense, the 2nd is obtuse but rewarding to consider, and the 3rd i couldn't crack. and trying to see the central drawing as a drawing of the concept of sin bent my brain nicely

it was a lovely experience to spend several minutes trying to interpret this before i realized that it might involve a fictional entity i hadn't heard of

(oh also i got a booster for the covid vaccine today; it is still allowed to do that ! )

presumably my next online post will be about some stupid little music project, because i'm continuing to do those. i can only take care of other people if i take care of myself, et cetera. later

i hate war and i hate imperialism and i hate ethnonationalism and thus i've been continually ashamed for my entire life of the country where i live. it's meaningless to say this, particularly to an audience of no one, but i felt the need to say it publicly somewhere regardless.

Thanks as always to Douglas and Talia at Etymonline (www.etymonline.com). Enjoy the solstice.

Oddly, there's entirely separate origins for "post-" the prefix and for "post" the mail (that's about riders stationed (positioned) at intervals). I wonder if the online "post" benefited from a confluence of the etymologically distinct "message displayed publicly" and "message sent by mail" senses.

A post online is a metaphorical extension of a posting offline – that is, a notice affixed to a wooden post in a public place. And a wooden post? That is from Latin "postis", which is one way or another about something standing up, from that same PIE "sta-".

By the way, I just learned that "solstice" and "post" share an etymological origin!

"Solstice" is about the sun ("sol") standing still ("stice") in the sky. That "stice" is from Latin "sistere", meaning to stand still, which is a doubled form of PIE "sta-" meaning "to stand". (See "armistice".)