Just How Does Music Hit All 8 of the Other Gardner Intelligences?
1. Naturalist: sensitivity to natural world features.
3. Logical-Mathematical: 32nd? 64th? 128th note. Think about the 8-bit computer chip!
4. Existential: Why are we… how’d we get here? Synthesizing idioms, metaphor, myth.
5. Interpersonal: Plays well with others. We be jammin!
6. Bodily-Kinesthetic: Fretboard logic, sound holes, air, pitch, breath.
7. Linguistic: Applying complex nuance, entendre, evaluating the inferred.
8. Intra-personal: Compare/Contrast self to others, community actualized.
9. Spatial: Analyzing time/space, abstract and concrete. Reasoning on the fly.
Happy Valentine’s Day, err’budd… I mean Groundhog day, ummm, I mean Polar Plunge day, or Solar Flare? Bipolar Hair day. Fred Astaire; Stroller Chair, everywhere. Yes, I mean that from the depths of my heart, top and bottom. So here’s a recap of my year. Much more in depth than the algorithm Facebook decided to share, although I did like the pictures they chose. But it definitely did not tell a complete “story.”
Another circle around the sun. Beauty before me, beauty behind me. Beauty under my feet, so I walk lightly, deliberately and with great care.
Winter NAMM. I didn’t go this year. Enough said. I’ll miss the new technology; I’m kind of take-it-or-leave-it with being surrounded by so many petentious snobs and so few peers and mentors who truly are the real deal…
The year mostly begins with my song “Frybread” getting picked up to be the theme song of a TV pilot. I got paid a little bit of money and if the show ends up seeing light of day (the percentages on these things are rather daunting…) I’ll see a bunch more and be able to say “you knew me when,” or something. Or something.
Anniversary of Ant Hamlin getting murdered in cold blood in front of New York Amtrak and then his body was dumped near Shewville Road out in North Stoningtonish, Prestonish, Grotonish. Yuck. I’m friends with his ex and many other friends of his and this hurt my feelings a lot. Facebook got this one right and collected up 4 pix of the ceremonies including a rose I kept on my dashboard until early summer and brought over to bury about where his body had been found.
27jan Pete Seeger died. I don’t even know where to start writing about that. I’ll wait for clearer words and a different venue to write that. I could go long! One of the best tributes was written by his friend David Amram who was with him the moment he died.
He wrote this just a day and a half ago, but almost a full year after Pete’s passing. Profound!
What else can I say about “Desiree Bassett sits in with Foghat at the Wolf Den,” but wow, just wow.
Bob Dylan did a car ad for the Superbowl and everyone gave him a hard time but me it seems. I must say it was a great ad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlSn8Isv-3M
Bob Dylan is a master creative, a creative genius and a genius musician, what more can I say. Does anyone out there feel just a little less venomous toward Mr. Dylan a full year out now? I sure do appreciate the guy.
4april can be summed up academically this way. So this week I watched Frozen three times and DrumLine four times. Yay!
In fact I’ll give you two perspectives of the same day back to back. Two different substitute teachers co-teaching the same students.
“I watched Frozen 3X & DrumLine 4X. 2day I’ll teach Quantum Theory & Linear Equations 2 Theater majors. Neat!” — Marco Frucht
“Any day can turn around: I am now getting paid to watch Drumline, speak Spanish, and have my hair braided by middle schoolers #love” — Carolyn Luby
I released a fully remastered and engineered cut of my EP “Poems For Roberta Blackgoat” in April too. You’ll remember it as the one I printed 150 copies of to give away at my Indian Summer Music Festival performance in Milwaukee last year. I had so much fun giving it away to not just radio stations and industry bigwigs but anyone I met who was considering whether they could afford the asking price on my commercial CD. “Here, have this free even if you can’t get my commercial CD,” I’d say, maybe you’ll get it some other day at iTunes or Amazon, right? I think I sold a total of 5 rekkids and gave away more than a hundred. Yay! Sometimes cash flow is not only less important than what else is going on, but not important at all.
No matter what else happens every April 12, this day will always be the time I was was beaten to within a 3-minute blackout of my life in Washington DC back in 2003. I was telling someone just the other day that one of the last big purchase items I got for myself from my out-of-court settlement was a $1500 memory foam bed. I have no regrets with that, and I joke that I’m actually thankful I was a victim of police brutality since I can sleep so well now.
2may the late Link Wray’s birthday.
Stevie Wonder got my friend Dylan Jenet Collins signed. That was my high point for the month of March I think. Just rooting for that young Native American rockstar!
10 may New London Konetiuk’s 4th annual Youth Talent Show. I’m their instrumental talent coach. Some amazing moments that day. No, many amazing moments that day!
7june or so? Whalie Awards. Nominated for 2 or 3, win nothing. I will never win an award in New London because of people like, well I won’t name them there are 5 or 6 of them and they are very corrupt, very small minded and very self-centered not to mention big fishes in the littlest pond ever. Oh well, who cares. I don’t do this stuff for awards — nominations just tell me someone was thinking about me and makes my nose itch so I’m happy about that!
16june or so. I go to Hank’s Dairy Bar to see Noelle Smith. An amazing singer/songwriter who moved to North Carolina. Connecticut’s loss and America’s gain for sure.
21june I sing some of my zaniest renditions of my even crazier songs at the bonfire of a guy named Andrew and his wonderful family. Soooooo fun. I hope we do that again 3 or 400 more times next summer!
23june I get accepted to Sacred Heart on a full ride scholarship from the VocRehab section of the Veterans Administration. I should probably say that in allcaps. I GOT ACCEPTED TO SACRED HEART FOR GRAD SCHOOL! Wait, I should type it in allcaps but spaced out old gutenberg style, I’m just THAT excited about it.
I G O T A C C E P T E D T O S A C R E D H E A R T F O R G R A D S C H O O L !
Yeah, that was a highpoint in my year, perhaps my decade. I got rejected by UNH because they didn’t like my essay, and was feeling pretty terrible about that when the letter from SHU came in and patched it all up and made it better than better. Heck, I’ll say it, UNH is a horrible school anyhow. Their loss 😛
22junish Gabriel Ayala plays the National Anthem on a classical guitar at an Arizona Diamondbacks game. You could hear a pin drop! Wow.
26jun or so I drop off a single flower at the site where the murdered Ant Hamlin’s body had been dumped after someone killed him outside of Amtrak in downtown New London. His murder just like Mr. Spicer’s up the road from me here in groton remain unsolved from so long ago. Not among New London, Groton, Waterford submarine-capitol-of-the-world’s proudest moments, to be sure.
4th of July I publish Marc Frucht’s American Songbag. 🙂
12july my first A as a grad student. My bachelors degree did not even closely resemble these grades.
Jana’s movie starring alongside Lorenzo Lamas hits Walmart stores around the country. About the same time last year or so she managed to get onto Sony RED which my friend Tony helped start back in the day, and they agreed to some kind of distribution for her newest CD but when you walked into Walmart and BestBuy you had the clerk telling you it wasn’t present but you can order it. This time around I was able to walk right in the store and actual buy a copy of the DVD right on premises. Sooooo happy for Jana to be getting her artwork out there like that. She’s been working so hard in these industries!
Pauline Whitesinger dies. She was Roberta Blackgoats next door neighbor. (and by next door I mean half a mile down a fairly well graded dirt road) In the early 90’s I walked back and forth between those two house at least 5 dozen times. A couple times pickup trucks have pulled up and given me a ride half way there because a snowstorm had just begun that might have killed me before I got there. One time it was Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) cops that saved my life.
18aug – I sort of “ambush” the Governor GuerillaJournalist-Style at one of his openhouse town meeting forums in a coffeeshop to request that he bring gas prices down in southeastern CT since wages are so much lower in the parts of CT where gas prices are artifically low but wages are so much higher. I’ll never know if he brought the prices down two weeks later or if they did that on their own but it sure made some good press.
26aug my Making Wampum video gets to the 6000 hits mark which I’m happy about but I get a little suspicious. It seemed to climb really fast a couple days in a row. Looking for why the spike hit I discover that for one year this video had been included in an eBook by one of the CommonCore corporations outfitting schools with material they claim is better than what the schools are already using. Sort of a backhanded curriculum change without any reflection or deliberation on the school district’s part. Anyhew, state of New York school systems were using my homemade music Video as supplemental material to teach grade schoolers about NDN crafts in centuries past. I’m flattered and aggravated at the same time, to say the least.
9sep I find out that the makers of Duke Nukem video game have been using the .MID file of my song “Hey Mon” for years in their video games. They acquired it in a very “pirate” way from their own developers so I’ll never see a single penny from it, but I don’t care. I’m just happy to be able to say you can hear a melody that I wrote in some of the most popular singlepersonshooter games to ever hit computers prior to Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Combat and stuff, right? Ah, there’s a claim to fame I might not even tell too many people about, certainly not anyone under age 11 or so, yikes.
My coversong of the Violent Femmes’ coversong of Marc Bolan’s “Children Of The Revolution” gets shown for an entire month at a listening station in an art gallery as part of an installation at a national gallery in Sharjah, UAE. You get to hear my song in between ones by Joey Ramone and Aldous Huxley! I use an exclamation point there because this is way more exciting than it sounds.
30oct 4 years ago this day 6 teenagers killed my friend Matt Chew. That’s why I became a substitute teacher and that’s why I became an instrumental talent coach, to show young people all over my county that they can write a song, or sing along, or dance and shout or let it all hang out, instead of pulling a drive by or a beat down, right? Yupper and this led to the annual youth talent show that brings so much beauty out of and into New London!
9november I discover someone’s selling a used copy of my SOFFTY FASNFFTOF CD for almost 60 dollars online. I don’t know for sure yet but I think it’s a drop-shipper who hasn’t even purchased it yet but knows s/he can get it off of CDBaby anytime he needs to. If I ever see a penny from that transaction it will only be something like four-dollars-and-fifty-cents and there’s almost nothing I can do about it. This “recording industry” is dying a slow torturous twisted and sordid death and it’s killing off so many souls in the process. I refuse to care. I’m just flattered someone thought enough of my musical work to include it in his/her diabolical plans to take over his or her tiniest part of his world.
Janice Marie Johnson closes out the Nammys this year. I wasn’t able to go this year but was able to see the thing livestreamed on the web. Great stuff. My friends Clayson and Jeneda performed and got an award, so did the Plateros. Very happy for them. They get to tour as the Plateros now and also as part of the band Indigenous.
8oct. Educator Diane Ravitch speaks at Quinipiac college. That was major!
——————————————
HIGH POINT OF MY YEAR:
And sometime in early November I was the sole witness to a Kindergartner speaking for the first time. I won’t write much about it, but he was labelled with a nonverbal learning disability and was on watch for either Selective Mutism or full Mutism and I was supposed to lead in structured play and readalongs and make notes if I see him do even so much as a grunt or a snortle. Well since I’m not like your usual average “garden variety” substitute teacher I brought a guitar and played him some flamenco music three days in a row and sang to him a capella occasionally in between all the structured play. He had a favorite book called “Five Little Monkeys,” that I could read to him and point at pictures. I impovised my own little ditty to sing to him as the introduction of this book and then I’d ask if he wants to read it with me. The third day I did this he pointed at it and said, “Monk.” I nearly jumped out of my skin! “Did you just say “monkeys?” I asked him. He just puffed out his chest and grinned and said nothing else. So I read it to him and that’s all I’m going to say about that. It really was one of the “most high” moments I’ve experienced in 5 or 6 years, not just this past year!
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13ish November my friend Frank Waln makes it onto MTV with a major project he’d been working diligently on. I’m amazed that MTV allowed such monumental ideas to be shared in one movie short. Not since Little Steven led the Sun City campaign, or maybe with “We Are The World” did that much “movement” happen!
Please close the School of Americas no matter what name they’re giving WesternHemisphereInstituteForSecurityCooperation it’s still the School of Assassins. I’m embarrassed to be a patriotic American citizen having served in the US army signal corps with each new day that our tax dollars pay for us training paramilitary death squads like that. Look it up.
F I N A L E X A M S 🙁
(Translated from the Greco Roman to the English that means, “stress.”
2dec starts off the month AND THE FOLLOWING YEAR with auditions for the 5th annual New London Youth Talent Show coming up 13march (pi day by the way)
13dec Franc Gramz releases a CD to a fully sold out show at Hanafins Pub. I saw Dio Hanafin and his wife at a local Homegoods/Hardware store a few days later and he told me it was one of the best shows of his entire year, with his wife nodding in agreement the whole time.
Sometime between Thanksgiving and NewYears I found out online thanks to BlackBoard educational webapp that I managed to get 3 gradschool As and a B- at America’s most unaffordable college. My masters degree candidacy is more difficult, more stressful and rigorous all the while more fulfilling than I could have ever imagined it to be.
26dec My friend Tanya Tagac gets declared Canada’s best artist for 2014. Wow.
31dec – Noon. Save for eating dinner and other NYE stuff the very last thing I did this year was pretty neat. Late morning I get a call from DJ Dot who is the “Gramma” in Gramma’s attic. She’s had a last minute cancellation on her weekly TV show and can I come on and entertain TVland in one of those “Taped-Live” settings. Sure, when? Oh, a couple hours. I literally went home, got three guitars, tuned them up once quickly and scoured my room for several set-lists and cheat sheets because I knew I wouldn’t even have time to rehearse at all. I’ll stick to songs I know well. Yeah right. How did that work out for you? I had to cover for so many mistakes with humor that this show went from loose to fun to downright zany in less than 35 seconds. I hope that translates well to the upcoming show and isn’t too embarrassing for you. Or me!
Consequently, I had more fun entertaining on this show than I’ve had in any venue for years! The show airs in a few weeks and then I can start sharing movie shorts from it on vimeo or liveleak or something. Yay!
Happy GNU Year!
Sincerely,
marco frucht
aka Marco Capelli
e&p atizine since 1988
Singer/Songwriter since well, since I’ve been singering and songwritering.
PS: THIS JUST IN!! 2015 begins with my dear friend Eric Lichter nominated for a New England Music Award as Producer Of The Year. Eric owns and operates Dirt Floor Recording Studio which is almost entirely an analog environment. If you want an easy comparison of just how wonderful analog equipment can sound with the right producer placing mics and engineering you, you can listen to his three productions on my commercial CD and then contrast them against most of the others.
A very headhitting funny story I can tell you about Sam Drywater is this. A newage wannabe lady came to this potluck supper we were having and she found out that Sam was a bona fide certified wool-in-the-dyed medicine type elder dude. So she offered him a pack of cigarettes and asked his advice about a profound moment she had just had. She was driving to that pot luck just hours ago and drove by a large hawk that had been hit by a car. She stopped a while and sat and prayed near it and asked Creator for guidance and was just certain Creator sent him to her, in the form of sending him to that Potluck that she was going to. Well Sam asked for a small room he could darken completely and some blankets and clothespins to do it. He sat in that room for at 20 minutes, and I swear this lady sat in a chair facing that door the entire time waiting for him to come out just like my family dog used to do when you pushed down the electric canopener.
Well he eventually came out that door while most of us were eating potluck stuff and mingling and he went right to her. Well he couldn’t go anywhere else without going right to her first because she was about 9 feet away directly in front of that door facing him. She got up like he was 9 men on a jury about to give the verdict and she was the defendant.
Well?
She stared deeply into his eyes, and he stared back. Neither of them blinked for a long time.
I just knew she wasn’t going to do a thing until he said something. It was almost painful to watch. Finally he pursed his lips and stiffened his chin and here’s what came out.
“Did you call the DEP or at least the DOT?”
She left that potluck with a mission, pronto. Many of us giggled a little. Even before Sam Drywater told Eagle, Eagle’s wife, his wife, me and Sam and a guy everyone calls Fumby, we laughed again as he told us he figured out in that room that it had to be the same roadkill wild turkey he’d driven by a few hours to get to the same potluck supper.
Well that’s what I remember, there’s probably more. So long ago.
Story about Sam Drywater while I’m remembering Sam Houston Kingfisher, sort of his nephew, who died a couple years ago. I just found out this morning. RIP.
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A Connecticut K-5 school. I’m on a three-day assignment in Special Ed. Several one-on-ones with students who have a schedule of tiered RTI pull-outs from their regular classes. A little pre-schooler I won’t name of course comes every day for a morning hour and an additional afternoon on Fridays. I have him Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. They’ve tagged him as nonverbal and on watch for mutism. I was asked to write down any grunt or giggle I might hear if possible. Even if it’s just positive response to something I’ve said or done and you almost hear a snortle or something.
First two mornings there was nothing, but he was very cheery and happy to comply with each and every change in structured play. Each day in between tasks I sang a capella to him or got my guitar and played him an instrumental flamenco piece. Each morning I read him a cardboard book entitled, “Five Little Monkeys” and he really seemed to like that.
So Friday morning I made up a song about the 5 little monkeys book before reading it to him and asked if he wanted us to read it together and he looked at me plain as day and said, “monk!” Yes, I nearly jumped out of my own skin.
I said, “Wait, did you just say “monkeys?” and he didn’t say another word, just grinned and puffed out his chest.
Then I read him the book and he smiled the whole time.
Then I had one more hour in the afternoon and it turned out it was after his class had a music special. He walked in, waved goodbye to his para professional and pointed at the boom box on the floor. So I turned it on and he sat on the floor repeating “wheels on the bus” and “heads shoulders knees and toes” over and over for most of the hour.
This afternoon I gave our governor some data and asked him to do a favor similar to what Sam Gejdenson pulled off back when I was about 17 years old. He had managed to catch lots of gas gouging that caused southeastern CT to be the lowest wages and highest gas prices. Prices went down to something managable but crept back up little by little to where it is now once again New London County having some of the lowest wages in the state but the highest gas prices.
I was telecommuting in Muddy Waters eating one of their famous Love Salads when the Mayor, Governor and many other democrat cronies walked in to do some schmoozing at this the third of three local coffeehouse stops including BeanLeaf and Washington Street Cafe.
I wasn’t prepared to speak with him but I remembered this issue historically and would love to pose this question of everyone from him to Richard Blumenthal to Joe Courtney. And no, not just because they’re democrats. Mostly because it hurts.
Well the Governor begged to differ and said he thought Fairfield’s prices were 10 or 20 cents higher, and I sought compromise saying then that maybe Groton, NL, Wtfd have the lowest wages and the second highest gas prices in the state and he agreed to look into it.
So while he was schmoozing with everyone I buried myself back in my laptop and went right to one of those gasprices dot com sites to get him some data. Jotted them down on the back of a biz card and handed it off to one of his staffers asking him to get that data to him whenever things are less pressing. He obliged.
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Cappuccino.
Monkey and Bull make meal of
Pomegranite, potatoes, pineapple & peppers.
LL Zamenhof worked Pepsi's graveyard
Shift til the day he died. Poetic.
Death not for lack of irony.
For growing calamity, asks Esperanza,
Does one need fertilizer?
Removes tongue from cheek.
1477. Chris visits Iceland inquiring
As a wannabe Portugese picking up
Waterfront gossip of "the NewFound Lands."
Looks like Lawnmower Man on valium.
Vacation - Grape Cod. Dwelling on payola,
Punkrock, and plasma in Adobe Abode.
Hystorically, a bladder bag full of bull.
Mother Earth, you are beaux, bela, belle,
Beautiful - Where's Dr. Esperanto
When you NEED him??
Peabody Coal purchases CavenhamForest for a copper penny.
Mrs. Farthing leaves a pie on her porch for
The plutonium miners. Make mine a strip so
Rare IT'S STILL IN THE GROUND.
Spineless as a Portugese Man O'War, now if
That ain't the scumm calling the scummsucker scummy.
Sage tea makes sore throat to merely a wet
Groggy flemmy thing; yet Dire Wolf offers
12-page thesis on Yak semen.
Can God hear you in a Hindu Ashram?
"Yes," yells Yayo. She's 12 and SMARTER than you.
Fiesta. Laguna March 19, 1992
They say you'll be led by children.
Haiku: Zuni Moisture Dance
Mudhead Kachinas - Laura,
Yayo, HasKey Tso.
Sweatlodge. Madrid, NM
2 FAS children flying a kite.
Filthy fake fony false hair follicles
Now fact thanks to Rogaine.
Or was that Reagan??
Nancy's war-on-drugs:
Rhymes with moron thugs.
Open Mike is playing at the Chez What Cafe.
Who IS this Open Mike?
Just some honest Joe?
Stench fries and fillet of potatoes at
The Full Spoon Cafe.
And Bo Diddley's cook wears wine-red
Dingos pouring sherry in Mrs. Farthing's Chowder.
Pampa, TX. Letting go of Police Brutality -
Release, relax, relief.
2:30 a.m. Katy reads poetry for tips at the
Omaha Greyhound.
Makes 2-bucks on "Bernalilo Blues."
Mytho-philosophical street poems.
How do they make coffee in Nowata?
Strong - same as Coffeeville.
Trivia question: who's face on $5
Foodstamp??
Thomas Jefferson or Johnny Cash?
Movado watch with moon minute hand,
I straddle the corner of Florence
& Normandy contemplating cops.
A house full of cat-tails never falls;
And Medina pours Mecca a 20 oz. cup of
Mocha java.
Previously published in a $5 Chapbook entitled "I Slurp My Coffee."
Currently released as an album at:
http://www.reverbnation.com/marcfruchtpoet
And you can get the whole album as a printable .zip file at:
http://www.frucht.org/Poems4RobertaBlackgoat.zip
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The first time I saw Pete Seeger perform this live was in Providence Rhode Island. He was doing a tribute to Malvina Reynolds who he credited for his first hit single. It was an evening of folk music that was a who’s
who of “Pete Seeger & Friends.” Each did a song or two
that she’d written, and then they
ended the show with a stage full of people singing
Little Boxes for a very long time. I was in heaven.
Not for the fame around me, but for the mass of people
we were, singing together. It was something I can’t
describe in words. Greater than his banjo playing and
his beautiful voice that to this day remains clearer
than a bell, Pete Seeger’s gift really IS his ability
to get an entire “room” singing together.
“Katzberg recalled Seeger as emcee at a tribute to Malvina Reynolds at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in 1993, and singing at the Rhode Island Labor & Ethnic Heritage Festival in Pawtucket in 1996. The latter, she said, perfectly fulfilled a vision she once had about the festival. (Katzberg has a picture of herself on stage with Seeger.)”
Seeger also encouraged Oneida Nation musician Joanne Shenandoah. She was one of his favorite artists. He shared the stage with her on many occasions including a remarkable set with the late Odetta ten years ago, at Madison Square Garden for his 90th Birthday on May 3, 2009, and in 2012 when he, Shenandoah and Patti Smith sang at Cooper Union Hall in New York City for a human rights event. When asked last year as to which performance he wanted to attend he elected to hear Joanne Shenandoah, standing on the side of the stage for her entire hour long set.
Last night Lincoln Center Out Of Doors put on a ginormous memorial concert remembering Pete Seeger’s legacy through song.
It reminded me so much of that Malvina Reynolds tribute in Providence way back in the day. It had that same feel to it. Heck, at least 15 of last night’s performers were at that show.
Here goes some “explication” about the two newest recordings I’ve mastered and edited up. Enjoy.
Recorded live from the soundboard at a Bonfire in Groton, CT.
I noticed while I was organizing these tunes that it kind of serves as the best kind of ethnomusicology lesson you could ever receive for free. Pro Bono, my gift to you. Call now, operators are standing by…
16th Century Greensleeves. (cover of a Ritchie Blackmore arrangement of a very old song)
Other Side – Orig. Someone I was very sweet on turned to me one night and said, “why don’t you write a song about turquoise and silver and a pebble and a ring.” So I did.
Johnny B. Goode – Standard (played very non-standard)
Oh Boy – written by Sonny West, Bill Tilghman and Norman Petty. Made most famous by Buddy Holly
Hey Mon – Orig.
One Tin Soldier – Coven. Made most famous by the movie “Billy Jack.”
Little Things – Orig.
Wicked Wicked World. – Medley arranged by Marc Frucht. “Wicked World”
by Black Sabbath’s Ozzie Osbourne, “When The Levee Breaks” collected
folk style by Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. Last verse Original.
Happened Just That Way – Roger Miller
Seminole Wind – John Anderson
Want to hear just a cute cover of it by a little girl named Mary Elizabeth Kirkpatrick? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsN0zk7VojA Neat how sometimes a song can be kept immortal by lots of people giving it some love!
Mary Had a William Goat – I learned this parody from Carl Sandburg’s publication “American Songbag.”
Merry Minuet – I first heard the Kingston Trio version of this song from my mom and dad’s massive record collection. It was written by
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes – from the Movie of the same name.
I’ve actually been asked to sing it a capella at movie premieres and stuff.
Dream On Again – You notice how they sing, “sing with me” and it’s a song written in like Fm7 with a flatted 9th in the bass, and it’s a key that only Bessie Smith can sing but she’s gotta warm up all opera style before she even tries to sing it?
Evil Ways – Carlos Santana
Milli Vanilla – I wrote this as a parody to the Poison song “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”
FUN song – from Sponge Bob Square Pants. Just don’t ask me to sing the Campfire song or “I Ripped My Pants.”
Blister In The Sun – Violent Femmes. Done as a medley together with “American Music” and “Free.” Proof that the Bodeans stole liberally from the Violent Femmes. J/K they’re all friends with each other.
Oh Freedom – medley. My version of Pete Seeger’s version of Odetta’s version of several ancient spirituals
Do Wacka Do – more Roger Miller
FryBread – Orig.
* Recordings engineered in Groton, CT by Andrew Barnes
I was getting straight A’s in Language Arts going into my Junior Year.
Yet my verbal SAT score was 150 points lower than my math/science! I wasn’t getting into UConn or other good schools with such low scores.
Crying, I asked my English teacher what could be wrong. He handed me a 1-page document similar to this one and told me, “It’s easy to explain. Your mother and father aren’t clergy, they’re not law and they’re not medical. You never heard latin prefixes and suffixes around the house; so you are at a disadvantage behind other students who are children of doctors, lawyers, ministers and rabbis.
I memorized all of these and the second time I took the SAT’s I increased my score by more than 100 points and got accepted to UConn.
I now hold UConn degrees in Literature and Native American Studies. Â Thank you Mr. _____ at Fitch Senior High School! Thank you, thank you thank you.
OK, so here go some of the most common SAT prefixes:
pre – before (hence pre-fix is a word that comes before)
super – very or over (super-impose means to impose over)
dis – not (dismembered means not membered or not together)
uni – one (unicameral means one house)
a – not (atypical means not typical)
ex – out (exhale means breathe out)
in – in (inhale means breathe in)
neo – new (neoconservative means new conservative)
post – after (postmodernism means after modernism)
circum – around (circumvent the world means travel around the world)
ben – good (benevolent, beneficial, benefactor, etc. all carry positive charge)
mal – bad (malevolent, malnutrition, malice)
re – again (to review is to view again)
gen – birth (genealogy is study of family history)
chron – time (chronology is study of time sequence)
poly – many (polyunsaturated means many not saturated)
intra – within (intraspecies means within one species)
inter – between (interspecies means between different species)
ante – before (antebellum means before a war)
hypo – too little (hypothermia means too low of body temperature)
hyper – too much (hyperactive means too active)
some common SAT suffixes that you should be aware of as well:
– ble: able or capable (doable, corruptible, edible)
– ous: full of (porous means full of pores, or in other words, easily transpired through)
– ant: full of (elegant means full of elegance)
– ose: full of (grandiose means full of grandeur, grand-ness)
– fy: to make like the prefix (magnify means make larger, terrify means to make scared)
– ate: to make like the prefix (procrastinate means to make a longer time)
– ile: tending to (puerile means tending to childish-ness)
– ism: belief (racism, sexism, nationalism, etc.)
– tude: condition of (magnitude means the quantity of magnification)
Story and Photos by Marc Frucht
Published in Mountaineer Weekly July 20, 1990
Comanche Code Talker Forrest Kassanavoid told
soldiers of 124th Sig BN to be proud of their lineage.
"You have a special relationship with an Indian Tribe
in Oklahoma," he told them.
Kassanavoid shared his World War II, 4th infantry div
experiences with the signal soldiers during a battalion
sponsored luncheon at Giuseppe's Depot Restaurant,
Tuesday afternoon.
The military recruited Comanche, Navajo and Choctaw
Indians because their native language was harder to crack
than codes they came up with every day. The Germans and
Italians were never able to interpret any of the trans-
missions they'd intercepted which contained the Indian
languages.
124th SIG BN boasts campaign history from WWII through
Vietnam including the Normandy invasion. Back then it was
called the 4th SIG CO, according to Kassanavoid. Organized
June 1, 1940 in the Harmony Church area of Fort Benning,
GA.; the 4th SIG worked under many commanding officers and
Kassanavoid remembers almost every single one.
"Let's see," said the code talker, "first there was Capt.
Terrance Tulley. He was a West Point grad, 1920. Then we got
Capt. Arthur McCrarey, then 1st Lt. Seoul Christman. He became
the division signal officer until he was seriously wounded in
an air attack in Normandy. Then came Capt. Phillip Bragen, and
hmmmm, a Capt. Dunaway..." He then went on to share all of his
4th Infantry Division war stories with the signal soldiers.
As a recruit, the code talker went from Fort Benning, GA.,
to Camp Gordon, now Fort Gordon and home of Army Signal School.
[Coincidently where Colonel Kaddaffy, Agosto Pinochet and Manuel
Noriega all took classes at one time or another.] From there he
went to Fort Dix, NJ; Camp Gordon Johnson for amphibious
training; Camp Jackson, SC and then Camp Joyce Kilmer, NJ
for his portcall.
Destination?
Liverpool, England, to regroup and train at Tibberton in
Devonshire, and then to invade Utah Beach.
4th SIG was made up of five platoons, according to
Kassanavoid. HQ platoon contained the company clerks, mess
cooks, drivers, supply and maintainance soldiers. The Message
Center section was where the distribution came and went.
There was a radio section similar to what signal battalions
have today; and a "T-n-T" section. They handled all aspects
of telephone and telegraph, to include the division
switchboard. The wire people, Kassanavoid included, were
called the construction section.
Street fighting was not fun from the construction section
point of view, according to Kassanavoid.
"We had to lay all the wire along the streets. We'd tag
the wires just like you still do today. But then the civilians
around town would take the tags as souvenirs."
He said without tags, troubleshooting became "one hell of a
time."
In wartime, light discipline didn't mean red lenses or quick
flicks of light that hopefully no one will notice. All wire
construction was done in the dark.
"You feel your way out there," he said. Out into the darkness
he went expecting a saboteur maybe, but hoping it was nothing
more than a short or a grounded wire. Most of the time he'd do
a quick fix, ring back to a switchboard and then dig in.
Kassanavoid said that on D-Day, June 6, 4th SIG was right in
the middle of things. While the 7th Corps was bombarding Omaha
Beach, three battalions from the 4th Infantry Division invaded
at Utah. Paratroopers made a perfect landing at Utah Beach, but
the Navy dropped 4th SIG - along with their division - about a
half mile off because of choppy waters and changing tides.
"Fortunate," said Kassanavoid. "It was pretty dry where we
landed. We didn't have to worry as much about water."
They battled in what he termed 'hedgerow fighting.' He
said farms were fenced off by nothing more than a series of
hills pushed together and they had hedges on top. The signal
soldiers were almost grounded to a halt by the hedges; until
they called in for support. B-17s bombed every grid coordinate
they hollered over their radios and they managed to break out.
When they worked their way to Paris, he said all France had
was armored units, so 4th ID was asked to provide infantry
support. That made 4th SIG front line troops, as well as
invasion forces.
When the war ended, Kassanavoid was billeted in Amburg in
preparation for coming home. From there he went to Camp
Bruckner, N.C., where he was given 30 days furlough.
Kassanavoid discussed how 4th ID has changed over the
years as well as how it has stayed the same. Recruits didn't
come in right away as privates, according to the code talker.
His first four months he was called a "yardbird;" he was paid
$21 a month. After becoming a private, a soldier could take
in $30 a month. A "shackman" was someone married with
dependents. He said 4th ID had more shackmen than any other
division in the Army. He remarked at how many women there are
in today's signal corps. Back then they didn't see women
working with radios or constructing wire.
Back in Kassanavoid's time the signal soldier had generators
to power his equipment. Some were similar to the ones still in
use, but he said most of the time there was someone pushing a
hand-crank to generate a couple volts.
He recognized the 5-gallon fuel cans being used in the
signal battalion's motor pool and commented that we stole
that idea from the Germans after World War I. A couple cans
got into our hands somehow and we've been making them for use
on jeeps ever since.
Kassanavoid said it was easy for a Comanche Indian to
adapt to military life because all of their early education
was at government boarding schools.
"Basically we changed barracks rooms and uniforms," Said
Kassanavoid, "that's all."
Army-run schools on the Indian reservations meant speaking
Comanche at home, and mostly English at school. His grasp of
both languages made him an easy recruit for the Code Talker
mission. Comanche language was used to relay some of the Army's
most important messages in WWII. The code talkers worked with
regiments in the field where they coded messages back to 4th ID
headquarters so another 4 SIG could receive and decode the
message.
Kassanavoid lives in Indiahoma, OK., with his wife Marian
and three children - Larry who served in the Army infantry in
Vietnam; Marlon who served in a signal outfit in Europe; and
a daughter, Amaryllis.
He now works for the school department in Indahoma as home-
school co ordinator under the Johnson - O'Malley Program passed
by Congress in 1934. His work is mostly youth-oriented, from
financial assistance for young Indians, morale and attendance
programs, as well as sports programs
On Nov. 3, 1989, the French government awarded him the
Chevalier de l'Order National du Merite" medal on the steps
of Oklahoma's State Capitol. Two other surviving Comanche Code
Talkers received the medal. Charles Chibitty is from Tulsa,
and Dick Red Elk is from Lawton.
"You soldiers can say with pride," Kassanavoid said, "that
you've been decorated by the French. Being singled out like
that is a great honor."
He said the Comanche heritage is in a 124th SIG soldier's
lineage and in his roots.
"Be proud," he said, "Be thankful."
PFC Frucht was a MOUNTAINEER stringer for
124SIG at the time of this publishing. While
Kassanavoid was on Utah Beach, Frucht has a
great uncle who lived through Omaha beach as
a signal soldier, and an uncle who also saw
combat as a "radio man" in the marines. Frucht
learned of this long after signing up for the
army signal corps himself. Go figure.
[ref]=[http://csmng.com/mountaineer]
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