Temple's Longtails and Fur

     This is an excerpt from the Disney film The Jungle Book , released in the US in 1967, directed by Wolfgan Reitherman.  Born in Germany in 1909, Reitherman served in the US Air Force during World War II, seeing action from Africa to China, for which we was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.  He began working for Disney in 1934, and is responsible for other Disney classics such as The Aristocats, The Sword in the Stone , 101 Dalmations, The Rescuers, and Sleeping Beauty .  I reckon if I was forced to say, The Jungle Book would be my favorite of these greats.            This movie is based on the novel of the same name published in 1894 by Rudyard Kipling.  Kipling was born in what is now Mumbai, India in 1865, and for a time shared the earth with Reitherman.  Kipling was of English descent, though born in Bombay, and grew up in a Southsea foster home after being brought to England by his parents when he was six.  His was a haunting childhood, described in his stories "Baa

    Questions where the answer is in the asking are vexatious to me at first glance.  The performer's role is to perform.  Be that in singing, acting, dancing.  Their job is to put on a performance.  But what is that?  What is a performance?     That is where my wheels started turning.  The job of the performer is to elicit a response from us, the audience.  Whether it's love, elation, sadness, or even hate, it's their job to induce these feelings in us.  They don't have to write it, but if they don't generate a response from us there's no reason to pay them any attention and they fade away.    This ain't musical yet, but we'll get there.  Take Delores Umbridge for example.  At a glance, she's not unattractive, pleasantly dressed, well quaffed, polite, mousey.  But from this one frame we all know we hate her pink guts.  Why?  Because Imelda Staunton PERFORMED the hell out of that role.  She took that script and made it her bitch like Umbridge tried t

Chuna McIntyre of the Nunamta Yup’ik  D ancers. Photo by Jim Hardin.     Unknown Spoon Player     I'm having some trouble getting rolling with this one.  With many of these blog posts, including for my previous art class, once I kick the keystone out from under the subject matter the post flows from me.  The wedge under the door is stubborn on this one.  It may be because of my own conflictions which I touched on in my "Alaska Native Contemporary Art" post.  I'm a half breed Yup'ik Eskimo, my mother's family is from Western Alaska.  My father's family is from North Carolina.  I'm literally the son of hillbillies and farmers, and raw meat eaters.  I'm not saying this with denigration, these are just true facts.  Pop's mother's family is from the flatland of Eastern North Carolina, hard working farmers.  His dad's people were musical moonshiners from the hills that could wring a song from laundry implements.  Pop's culture is all but

      I'm a child of the 80s.  But growing up in The Village, before the internet, it might have still been the 70s there when I was born.  Trucks, the few there were out there, had 8 tracks, the newer ones, the two of them, had radios with cassette players.  Portable radios were the size of five gallons buckets, and took at least a half dozen C batteries.  Today, as I write this, I'm listening to Pandora streamed from the internet to my smart phone, "piped" into my wireless Bluetooth headphones, on which I can also take phone calls, and village kids share their adventures on Tiktok.  At least I hope they're doing that, and not wasting time doing the Tiktok dances when they could be having adventures.  Who am I to talk though?  I spend too much time on The 'Gram and 'Book myself.    You young'uns in the class may not remember camcorders and those big boomboxes.  But cameras used to be that big, and stereos had carrying handles so you could lug them aro

  Hurt Covered by Johnny Cash in 2002 Written by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails (hereafter referred to as NIN,) released in 1995.     This song shook me to my boots when I first heard it twenty years ago.  I had no idea at the time that Johnny Cash didn't come up with it, and later struggled to listen to the NIN version after I learned it originated with them.  I have no doubt it meant a lot to them when they wrote it, and that the moments in their life that inspired it were substantial.       But those lyrics, emitted in that worn gravel baritone, from that aged face with it's weary eyes, I mean it's his damn song.  Trent Reznor of NIN said it himself, though he did describe his realization as feeling "like I lost my girlfriend." (Uitti, 2022.)         Overall the song has a slow rhythm, maybe because Johnny Cash couldn't sing any faster given his deteriorating state.  But even the original performance by NIN, was slow, though their tone is tinny in my meag

 Surface Pressure        Written by Lin-Manual Miranda for the Disney film Encanto released in 2021, the song relates the internal struggle experienced by the strongest member, Luisa, of the multi-generational Madrigal family living together in one house, La Casita.         Luisa is both blessed and cursed with immense strength.  As such, there are burdens placed upon her, labors she is expected to complete, a never ending list of duties, feats ever increasing in number and magnitude, the assignment to which she never acquiesced, yet she simply grins and bears her lot, with nary a hair out of place on that gorgeous head that graces the top of that tree trunk of a neck.  But under the surface...           The song starts in a slow, low, and strong tone, exuding an element that confirms Luisa's outward appearance, the harmony that is created as the lyrics and low frequency timbre of the instruments come together affirm her station and demonstrate her own confidence in her ability.