A reminder about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.

"But you have no weapons, no defenses, no plan!"

"Yeah. And doesn't that scare you to death?"

'nuff said.

Gaba Kulka is also a member of an Iron Maiden cover band called Baaba Kulka (she is the Kulka and guitarist Bartek Weber is the Baaba). They just released a new album a week or so ago. This is one of the songs from it.

I first came across Gaba (Gabriela) Kulka because she has performed with Czeslaw Mozil (Czesław Śpiewa). As you might expect of someone who has performed with Czeslaw, this is not a faithful punk rock cover of the Clash song. In fact, I would venture the opinion that her vocal stylings here owe more to Kate Bush than they do to Joe Strummer.

Well, I installed Fedora 14 from the live cd a couple of days ago and real life got in the way. So I didn't really get a chance to play with it until today.

In terms of hardware, everything just works. But I expected that.

The default install creates a persistent home partition in a LVM partition scheme (that includes /boot). The installer did not recognise the Ubuntu partition. I had the option to edit the grub config that anaconda came up with but I decided not to. I reckoned I could always fart around with it later.

Ubuntu uses grub2 and Fedora still uses grub so adding Ubuntu to Fedora's boot menu wasn't as obvious as it could have been. I actually had to read some grub2 documentation. Egads!

The Fedora 14 splash and wallpaper image sucks. I think I vaguely remember (e:paul) complaining about it at some point. It's not a big deal because it is easy to change.

So far, so good. I'm planning installing planet ccrma which is the Fedora equivalent of Ubuntu Studio when time and tide let me.

I already like it better than Ubuntu 10.10

Poland is a weird place. Artists think that they can sing in French and still be loved in Poland. Even more curiousier Mademoiselle Karen is actually Danish with a French boyfriend. Her Polish connection is Czeslaw (The-Right-One).html from Czesław Śpiewa.

I thought about translating this from French but I don't want to piss off the the Quebecois. I know, I'm weird like that. Any old way, I like this song but I suspect that understanding French might be helpful..

Czesław Śpiewa (Czesław Sings) is one of my favie newish Polish artists. Like many Polish artists, his output is not easily defined in Western musical terms - there are elements of Polish folk music, cabaret and modern rock music.

Although he is Polish, he grew up in Denmark.



The song begins: "I dream to myself that we are in Seventh Heaven . . ,"

The chorus is
"They tell me to that your heart just wants to laugh
They tell me that that you want more,
what and why, that's what you get for you is the right one. "

It's Friday night and what could be more appropriate than a video celebrating man's eternal search for beer. Although come to think of it, this video is more about the morning after than it is about Friday night.

This one's by Kazik. It's a cover of a fake folk song. I'm feeling lazy. I'll give more details if anyone is interested.

Both my mother and my grandmother cried every time they heard this song by Ewa Demarcyck The words to this song are a compilation of poems by Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński who participated in Warsaw Uprising, and died 4th August 1944.

Love it or hate it, this is about as Polish as it comes.

This is a user created video by someone who also (decently meaning-wise in my opinion for non-native English speaker) translated the lyrics.



War poems

I will open you a golden heaven
in which - white thread of silence,
like a huge nut of sounds,
which will crack to live
on green leaflets,
on warble of lakes, on playing of twilight
till the birdlike whistle shows
the milky core.

only take out from my eyes
painful shard -- picture of days,
which's rolling the white skulls
through the burning meads of blood.
only change this crippled time,
cover graves with coat of river,
wipe the battle dust of hair
the black dust
of wrathful days.

who will give me back my reverie
and this shadow, which's walked away behind you?
oh, those days, growling like animals,
like plants - they are younger and younger

and shortly now - so little,
standing on the nutshell,
we will drift against the seasons,
like against the water vains

and verging alternately to water
we will drift carelessly into oblivion,
and only our shadows, left on the earth,
will cry

I'll transform for you rough ground
into fluent flight of soft sow-thistles,
I'll lead shadows, tighting like a cat,
out from things.
twinkling with the pelage, they will furl everything
into colors of the storms, into hearts of leafs,
into grey tangle of rains

only take out from my eyes
painful shard -- picture of days,
which is rolling the white skulls
through the burning meads of blood.
only change this crippled time,
cover graves with coat of river,
wipe the battle dust of hair
the black dust
of wrathful days

With long, curling ribbon, warm voice is cooling in the air,
till it attains him in dusk, and he will hear a whisper near his mouth
'Darling' - the song hums and coils his head, rings
like trail of soft hair, and lilies smells from it so strong,
that he, leaning over the death, he locks his fingers on gun,
and stands up, and still, black of the battle dust, he still feels
violin playing in him silently, so he walks carefully, slowly,
like on the thread of light, through soughing sea of dusk,
and the softness of white clouds is closer and closer

till the space completes, and he feels the soft voice
standing within his grasp, in terrific silence
'Darling' - the song soughs, and so then arms will hug

Forest grows in the night. Abyss opens
extreme mouth, it absorbs and sucks.
They passed, they mawed; only reek is squeezing,
and high scream in mist, in mist

only take out from my eyes
painful shard -- picture of days,
which is rolling the white skulls
through the burning meads of blood.
only change this crippled time,
cover graves with coat of river,
wipe the battle dust of hair
the black dust
of wrathful days

(e:tinypliny) is not the only (e:peep) who listens to Spanish language music.

Duncan Dhu is my favie Spanish (as in from Spain) band.

(e:tinypliny) - I hope you like this one. I posted it with you in mind.



Duele más
cuando es por amor
siempre más
si no estamos los dos.

Las noches son como día sin luz,
los días son como noche con luz.

Amarga
amarga
¿quién da más?
por mi pobre razón
¿quién da más?
si yo tengo un montón.

La nieve está
empañando el cristal
no quiero estar solo
en Navidad.

Amarga
amarga
amarga
amarga.

Today's Polish Song is a wonderful bit of pop fluff from the late 1990s by the band Sixteen with the lead singer Renata Dabkowska