The caroling party was great as usual! Though I wish I'd brought more food. Usually they have a ton of great food... tonight no one brought stuff and what was there almost all had nuts in it.
But oh what a great party! We sang with rapidly increasing competence... K.'s favorite weird songs like the W3xford Carol were challenging... I couldn't reallly sing alto on anything that wasn't completely obvious and easy or else stunningly familiar. Though i was not as bad as the person who shall remain nameless who was sitting next to me for a while and who could NOT stay on a note... wtf... when you're just singing the same note over and over for a whole line how can you fuck it up? I got up and sat next to Rook, finally, though he is singing a different part at least it is actually harmony.
The shap3-note singers are really good! They get very excited about everything.
The ubernerdy filk guy, whose name I always forget, passed out copies of the original words by mendelssohn to "ang3ls we have h3ard on high" which are all about Gutenberg. No one really laughed at my dumb jokes about how it's all very mean to gutenberg to say that he's a liar, and gross, and wack. how not to make fun of german? come on. someone has to do it.
These people intersect with last year's pr0ust reading group and they are next going to do Mobyy Dick which is one of my favorite books. It's so weird and rambly and digressive! And it is not what people think it is about!
Moomin could sing all the secular nursery school songs, and followed along with me on a few others, but mostly he laid on the floor reading and playing with little animals and knights.
I love how they give away giant boxes of books at every party! We all turned into total rabid animals! If anyone wants an advance review uncorrected proof of Ors0n Scottt Card's "X3nocide" then I can hook you up.
My favorite thing was singing rounds esp. the dona nobis pacem one. And whenever K. and the chick playing the piano would go off into wild descants. I guess I also especially love all the very grim parts of the carols like "sorrowing! sighing! bleeding! dying! sealed ina stone cold tomb!" or anything about Hell. I had xeroxed one of my favorite hymns that is not quite an xmas carol but is close enough -- it's not grim but instead ... well you can look at it. It's all good except for the "throbbing vein" line. Anyway, it was one of my favorite songs to sing when I was little and would sit way up high in the giant spruce tree in the yard.
Every year we get better at the "Bost0n Ch4rlie" song which is sung to the tune of D3ck the Halls and which sounds really incredible and silly with all the harmony! And just that it's all grownups very seriously singing it with their best serious, religious church voices, on purpose to be funny.
Dude, I love the dona nobis pacem round. We used it as a warm up for every choral group I was ever in. I know so many different parts for it! I was just singing it the other day as I was hanging laundry on the line. I don't know why it makes me so happy, it think it just sounds so soothing. You must come to The Bahamas to visit just so I can have someone sing a harmony part with me while drying laundry in the Caribbean breezes!
Posted by: Melanie | December 20, 2004 at 07:21 AM
Me too me too!
Posted by: Jo | December 20, 2004 at 11:52 AM