Glape Jello

Alessandro Moreschi-The last castrato

Alessandro Moreschi was born in 1858 and he was the only castrato singer to make solo sound recording.

As the castrato's body grew, his lack of testosterone meant that his epiphyses (bone-joints) did not harden in the normal manner. Thus the limbs of the castrati often grew unusually long, as did the bones of their ribs. This, combined with intensive training, gave them unrivalled lung-power and breath capacity. Operating through small, child-sized vocal cords, their voices were also extraordinarily flexible, and quite different from the equivalent adult female voice, as well as higher vocal ranges of the uncastrated adult male



Critical opinion is divided about Moreschi's recordings: some say they are of little interest other than the novelty of preserving the voice of a castrato, and that Moreschi was a mediocre singer, while others detect the remains of a talented singer unfortunately past his prime by the time he recorded. (Moreschi was in his mid-forties when he made his recordings.) Still others feel that he was a very fine singer indeed, and that much of the "difficulty" in listening to Moreschi's recordings stems from changes in taste and singing style between his time and ours. His vocal technique can certainly seem to grate upon modern ears, but many of the seemingly imperfect vocal attacks, for example, are in fact grace notes, launched from as much as a tenth below the note - in Moreschi's case, this seems to have been a long-standing means of drawing on the particular acoustics of the Sistine Chapel itself. The dated aesthetic of Moreschi's singing, involving extreme passion and a perpetual type of sob, often sounds bizarre to the modern listener, and can be misinterpreted as technical weakness or symptomatic of an aging voice.

Robin Blaze, counter-tenor

The renown singer and professor of music at the Hunter College in New York, Russel Oberlin, shows the difference between a "True countertenor" (The french Haute-Contre), such as he, and a "Falsettist" in an interview to Camera Three TV Show in 1962

Countertenor Andreas Scholl sings

grim practical joke

gotta love her

best percussion piece ever

So Fuckin Cute!

Chief Marie Smith Jones

On Monday, January 21, 2008, Chief Marie Smith Jones, the last native speaker of Alaska's Eyak language died. In this excerpt from the 1995 Documentary, More Than Words, Chief Marie prays that her people can recover their culture.
This took place in Cordova, Alaska - a small fishing community along Prince William Sound.

Jan Terri

Amanda Lear - Tranny Superstar!

better than Lachenmann

A tribute to Julius Eastman (1940-1993)

The Nightmare from Glen Or Glenda

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Hellenistic sculpture - Hermaphroditus

Hermaphroditus' name is derived from those of his parents Hermes and Aphrodite. [2] He was raised by nymphs on Mount Ida, a sacred mountain in Phrygia (present day Turkey). At the age of fifteen, he grew bored of his surroundings and traveled the cities of Lycia and Caria. It was in the woods of Caria, near Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum, Turkey) that he encountered Salmacis the Naiad in her pool. She was overcome by lust for the boy, and tried to seduce him, but was rejected. When he thought her to be gone, Hermaphroditus undressed and entered the waters of the empty pool. Salmacis sprang out from behind a tree and jumped into the pool. She wrapped herself around the boy, forcibly kissing him and touching his breast. While he struggled, she called out to the gods that they should never part. Her wish was granted, and their bodies blended into one hermaphrodite form. Hermaphroditus, in his shame and grief, made his own vow, cursing the pool so that any other who bathes within it shall be transformed as well. "In this form the story was certainly not ancient" Karl Kerenyi noted, as compared the myth of the beautiful ephebe with Narcissus and Hyacinthus, who had an archaic hero-cult, and Hymenaios

"Song of the Cabin Boy"

first known film with live-recorded sound
The melody is from a barcarolle, "Song of the Cabin Boy," from Les Cloches de Corneville 1877

Takala (Malfunction)

bovine sound installation

lionel marchetti

Sesame Street - Philip Glass

www.ihatecilantro.com

the cabin and the ghost town

John Cougar Mellencamp - This Time (Featuring Edith Massey!)

LA's Great Satanists part 1

Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron (23 April 1922 - 24 July 1995) was an American writer, painter and occultist.
The night of Cameron's birth was surrounded by chaos; there was a terrible thunderstorm and her father got drunk and attempted suicide because he thought his wife was dying. Her grandmother, a staunch churchwoman, believed Cameron to be a child of the devil because of her fiery red hair.



As a child, Cameron began to have strange and powerful visions that were so vivid, she could not be sure if they were real or imaginary. One night from her bedroom, she saw a ghostly procession of four white horses float by her window. Later she would recall these dreams in detail and was able to capture this in her artwork and poetry. In a letter to magician and Aleister Crowley associate Jane Wolfe, she mentions finding a "hole to hell" in her grandmother's backyard:

"I remember always a tree on my grandmother's property from which hung an old, old swing where my mother had played as a little girl. Near this spot I recall a well which I always believed was the hole to hell - also the blue Bachelor Button flower grew near this spot. Herein I find again a new concept of the 4 elements and the name of god - the tree, the well, the swing (water's life) and the flower - which is seed."[citation needed]

When she was 17, the Great Depression was underway and Cameron moved with her family to Davenport, Iowa, a considerably larger town than Belle Plaine. Having trouble adjusting and after the suicide of a close friend, Cameron several times tried unsuccessfully to take her own life using sleeping pills. She claims that these near brushes with death had further enhanced her psychic abilities, reportedly giving her a glimpse into the realm of the dead.

By the late 1950s, Cameron was living in Malibu and hanging out with a crowd of artists that included the likes of Dennis Hopper, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, and others. Wallace Berman's show at the Ferus Gallery was closed in 1957 after displaying one of Cameron's drawings which depicted a woman, possibly Cameron, being taken from behind by an alien creature.

When rocket propulsion researcher and occultist Jack Parsons met Marjorie Cameron, he regarded her as the fulfilment of magical rituals he had been performing as the beginning of the Babalon Working, roughly, an attempt to incarnate in a physical body a divine entity that would bring about great change for the Aeon of Horus.

Parsons wrote of Cameron in a letter to his mentor Aleister Crowley in 1946:

"The feeling of tension and unease continued for four days. Then on January 18 [1946] at sunset, whilst the Scribe and I were on the Mojave Desert, the feeling of tension suddenly stopped. I turned to him and said 'it is done', in absolute certainty that the Operation was accomplished. I returned home, and found a young woman [Marjorie Cameron] answering the requirements waiting for me. She is describable as an air of fire type with bronze red hair, fiery and subtle, determined and obstinate, sincere and perverse, with extraordinary personality, talent and intelligence. During the period of January 19 to February 27 I invoked the Goddess Babalon [a particular aspect of the Egyptian goddess Nuit] with the aid of magical partner (Ron Hubbard), as was proper to one of my grade."

They termed this incarnation the Moonchild. Writes Aleister Crowley on the subject:

"The Aeon of Horus is of the nature of a child. To perceive this, we must conceive of the nature of a child without the veil of sentimentality - beyond good and evil, perfectly gentle, perfectly ruthless, containing all possibilities within the limits of heredity, and highly susceptible to training and environment. But the nature of Horus is also the nature of force - blind, terrible, unlimited force."

The Babalon Working was allegedly successful.

After her husband Jack Parsons' death, she starred in Kenneth Anger's 1954 cult-film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Both Cameron and Kenneth believed that this film was proof to the world that she had manifested the force of Babalon on Earth. Anger later said of her that "She was doing art for the sake of magick and her soul. She never sold her paintings."[citation needed]

Cameron later burned most of her paintings in the late 1950s in a symbolic suicide performed with her second husband Sherif Kimmil after they had been up for several days on speed and had formed what Cameron called a "suicide club". Kimmil slit his wrists in the bathroom at the same time as the burning.

Cameron's two brothers, her sister, and her father worked at JPL, the company co-founded by her husband, Jack Parsons. She was a protege of mythologist Joseph Campbell.

Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel died of cancer on July 24, 1995.

Directed by Allison Johnson

Don't Mess Around - Sean Griffin