OK, go here. How awesome is that? Alan Rickman reading you one of Shakespeare’s more famous sonnets? After seeing this on Cherie Priest’s LJ, I just went out Saturday and bought this CD. (I can do that, because Halifax has shops like The Madrigal).
Man, there’s a lot of good stuff on there. Branagh, John Hurt, Joseph Fiennes, Diana Rigg, etc. Plus some musical sonnet renditions–Sarah is a fan of the Annie Lennox “Live With Me And Be My Love” in particular.
The Ditty Bops, the Wishful Thinking video. Girls in foundation garments, singing happy jangly old-timey tunes, in a well-designed video with lots of comic violent imagery. How can you go wrong? (Would you click if I told you that it was an official selection at the coney island film festival 2005?)
Learning a Latin drinking song would be a hell of a party trick, wouldn’t it?
Meum est propositum in taberna mori
ubi vina proxima morientis ori.
Tunc cantabunt laetius angelorum chori:
Deus sit propitius isti potatori, isti potatori.
Of course Latin has that advantage of everything rhyming so easily, which makes for easy verse construction.
If you translate it literally you don’t get something you can readily sing:
My proposal is to die in the tavern
Where the wine will be near my dying mouth;
Then choirs of angels will quite happily sing,
“May God be propitious to this drunkard!”
So someone has to do a bit of more idiomatic translation:
For in this my heart is set:
When the hour is nigh me,
Let me in the tavern die,
With a tankard by me,
While the angels looking down
Joyously sing o’er me,
(More verses, with both literal and idiomatic translation at the link.)
I fully endorse Danielle’s plan to take care of the future of music, the “Get In The Van” plan:
First I find the warehouse space in various locations around America and line the walls with speakers connected to a single turn table and one CD player. I enlist the help of five volunteers, all of whom must own a van. The vans will be driven everywhere – urban, suburban, big cities and small, picking up children and young adults that would like to rock the mike. No one is exempt – black, white, Indian, Venezuelan, we don’t care, GET IN THE VAN. The van will take you to the warehouse, where an electromagnet the size of Montana will suck your bling-weighted bodies to the bench, forcing you to sit through hours upon hours upon hours of Kool Mo Dee, Slick Rick, Ice-T, Doug E Fresh AAAAAAAAAAND the Get Fresh Crew, Leaders of the New School, Public Enemy, NWA and Ice Cube before he started acting in Disney films. Actually, fuck that – Ice Cube, YOU CAN GET IN THE VAN TOO.
An aside–the phrase “get in the van triggers” three separate things for me: Hank’s book, the cop in Withnail and I screaming, and the Golden N sketch from Sesame Street. (How wrong is it that I can find no link to anything about the bit on the net?).
