SOUNDTRACK: JOHN ZORN-“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (2011).
Wild skronking horns, screamed vocals, chaos chaos cha–. No.
Piano and vibraphones with some gentle guitars thrown on top. This is a beautiful, gentle jazz rendition of this song. What makes this so strange is well, frist, because John Zorn loves death metal and all things noise. But also because John Zorn revels in Jewish culture. So what’s up with this holiday album?
Evidently he always wanted to make a holiday album. And he’s using most of the same guys who have played with him for years.
That’s a real Christmas miracle! Read more about it here.
[READ: December 16, 2011] Children, Gender, and Social Structure
Our director sent us a link to this article to get us in the holiday spirit (you have to subscribe to JSTOR to read it). Although he spoiled it in his email (boys and girls are different), I still enjoyed reading the contents here. At least somewhat. The article was really quite dry and relied on some scientific terminology which I found confounding. Nevertheless, the results were easy enough to follow, and that’s what really matters.
The most interesting thing was the setup. They read all of the letters mailed to Santa that were received in the Seattle post office in 1978. (I wondered why it was so long ago before I confirmed that this was written in 1982, so that makes sense). They received 855 letters that year. And I found this breakdown as interesting (if not moreso) than the rest of the article: 63% were from within the state; 29% were from out of state (how did they get there??); and 8% were from out of the country (what?? how, why?–no answer is given, sadly). 31 letters were illegible, so they were out. The rest were assessed by gender of the names based on a baby naming book (from 1966!). This yielded 359 from boys, 391 from girls, 46 gender ambiguous (what percentage would there be today??) and 28 with no name.
I was also fascinated by the age breakdown: 24%: 5 or under; 41% 6 or 7; 29% 8 or 9 and 7% were ten or older! (more…)
I Just Read About That... 