New Song

[catsittingstill]

(note-I wrote this yesterday, but had trouble posting)

I've been out of touch for a while because I've been at OVFF (Ohio Valley Filk Festival (Filk being songs written and/or sung by science fiction and fantasy fans)) this past weekend. I'm very tired and going to take a nap soon, but I promised I'd post this after the con.



Moontage
lyrics and melody by Catherine Faber, 2003

The moon is our balance, a binary planet,
But lacking the mass that would bank or align
Stone sculpting fires that mountains of granite
For all of their majesty barely confine.
The blows of the ages have shattered and scarred
A world without weather to smooth any shard.

(chorus)
The mirror of more than the sun she appears
The dust where the eons have layered their track
The herald who taught us the dance of the spheres
The doorstep that marks where our footprints turn back...

Dark turns the moon unexpected and fey,
Forsaking the night we pretend is her realm
In favor of sailing abroad in the day
Charting her course with no hand on the helm,
And sometimes when all is precisely aligned
Brief night out of season her shadow will bind.

Waxing her crescent is vivid and bright
A bow fully bent to take aim at the sun,
Two fingers that point to the heart of the night,
Uncowed by a race that can never be won.
Though she is barren, like treasure she glows
Ever retreating the brighter she grows.

Full the fair moon comes to face in her run
Caught in the cogs of a clockwork so vast
Over our shoulder the face of the sun;
Sometimes she hides in the shadow we cast,
Reflecting a dusk dyed deep red by the glow
Of the dawn that embraced it two seconds ago.

Waning, the moon comes to close up the dance;
Later each night she will rise into play.
Retreat come full circle becomes an advance,
Patiently sidling into the day.
We call her inconstant--the light is to blame;
The face that she shows us is ever the same.



At some point I'll put up the music too.

I had a great time at the con. I'll tell you about it later.

Comments

[braider.livejournal.com]

That's really beautiful.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) Thanks. Actually, one of the reasons I called it "Moontage" is because its sort of a montage of the moon--lots of little pictures pasted together, rather than a coherent portrait. I'm very happy with some of the little pictures, but I couldn't get them to pull together in harness the way I was hoping to.

[quadrivium.livejournal.com]

Very very nice. (Mary Crowell here.) :-) Congratulations on winning the song contest, by the way. Way to go!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks :-) Hi Mary!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Livejournal was being, as theferret puts it, a "twitching hosebeast" yesterday when I posted the previous replies; it put up lots of extra copies, which I plan to delete. Just in case you're wondering what the deleted posts *were*.

[mneme]

Very nice, but I want to hear it.

Congrats again on both the Pegasus win and the song contest win.
(and yes, I'll get around to mailing you my parodies in a bit, now that I've gotten around to finding you up on LJ)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I'll be glad to sing it for you sometime.

Thanks for the congrats :-)

I'm looking forward to the parodies! They were great but I was so fried I don't remember as much of them as I'd like.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

A fine piece of work, even without the music. Look forward to hearing it sometime!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks Randwolf. I need to figure out a way to handle mp3s. Recording to them, I mean; ripping one from a CD is child's play.

I wonder if there are any tape-recorder like things out there that record either to CD or to conveniently mac-downloadable mp3. iPod would work with mac, but as far as I know there's no record function.

recording to mp3

[mrlogic.livejournal.com]

iPods are technically capable of this sort of recording but Apple hasn't released software to do it yet. (I'm awaiting it very impatiently.) Supposedly the very newest iPods support "voice recording" when hooked up to the proper Griffin microphone, but I don't know whether it will do it with a stereo line-in signal.

There are several other mp3 players that will also record in the way that you're referring to.

Re: recording to mp3

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Thanks Blake; I didn't know this. Something to look forward to :-)

And I would suspect an mp3 player would have no trouble holding music from a whole con.

Re: recording to mp3

[filkergem.livejournal.com]

The Archos Jukebox Recorder or Jukebox Multimedia or AV1xx/AV3xx boxes will do all of that quite nicely. I was around OVFF with my new Jukebox Multimedia 20 and had fun recording lots onto it. I will need to play with the resulting files to see how well they worked, though, before I can strongly recommend it. I can theoretically put 300 hours of "CD-quality" mp3s on it (just under 2 weeks).

Re: recording to mp3

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Let me know how the resulting files came out--I am seriously considering asking for something like this for Christmas. Is the Archos compatible with Macs? I notice some of the Archos models have a "retro-record" function--you push the button and get the previous 30seconds of sound plus everything till you hit stop. I gather they have some sort of continuous first-in-first-out buffer, 30 seconds long, that gets tagged on the front of your recording--at least, that's how I'd do it. I love this idea but it's always mentioned as being possible while recording from the (built-in) fm radio. Will it work with external audio too?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

There's a list of gadgets here. The problem with most inexpensive recorders is the quality of the microphone, though; meaningful specifications are seldom given. I can also look a bit further into getting minidisc analog outputs into your iMic--at least I can write the Griffin Technologies people & see if they have any ideas.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I have written Griffin. No reply yet.