I’ve won a book on Haikasoru’s latest contest. I hope it gets here in one piece! My Book Depository orders get here without problems, but I’ve had books won in contests end up completely lost in transit.

They had an interesting topic: the future of gender, so I’m going to reproduce my answer.

The questions were: “What is the future of gender? Is gender static, or does it shift naturally? Can it, and should it, be manipulated purposefully for scientific or social ends?”

I think gender and sexuality are going to become increasingly flexible with the progress of medical science, but that doesn’t mean they are going to become less important, or irrelevant. To the contrary, people tend to be especially attached to the identities they themselves choose – for example, people who convert to another religion tend to be more vocal about religion than people who stay with their parents’ religion.

Yay Genderform already lists 947 different possibilities, and the list goes on… I think writers often manage to reinvent the wheel, and come up with groups intended to be fictional which already exist. (Not really gender-related, but the other day I even managed to find a story in this year’s Hugo crop which seemed to reinvent Asperger syndrome.) Worse still, the fictionalized group often ends up treated as inhuman in the story universe. I’m hesitant to link to TVTropes because it can eat up time like nothing else, but the Hermaphrodite page is a good example, featuring only a few realistic portrayals of intersexual characters and a lot of, um, alien porn or straight-up fetishism.

A discussion on fictional gender might seem like a diversion from the future of gender, but what I’m trying to say is, the future is already here, it just goes unnoticed by the people who are not “early adopters”. As for whether gender should be manipulated purposefully, my answer is more or less the same – if it can be done, it will eventually be done, and in many cases, it has already been done!

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Tim Lieder is taking submissions for his second anthology of Bible-themed horror stories. I thought the first one was awesome (I didn’t like the Catherynne Valente story, though) and I’m all for Bible fiction, so this is great news. Submit stuff, I want to read the anthology as soon as it comes out

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You can’t be pro-GLBT and still work to exclude transgender and transsexual people, that’s a contradiction in terms. Harvard University still tries to pull it off – post by DesiArcy.

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I realized Amazon also sold clothing items, so I decided to search for clothing items I like to wear – for example, wrap skirts. It’s not that I’m going to order anything from Amazon – the shipping would probably cost much than the actual product – but it’s a fun diversion, you know?

Except it was The Lulzy Fail. Apparently everything that even vaguely resembles clothing I wear is somehow “exotic”, “tribal” or “Gypsy”. (These items have nothing to do with actual Gypsy clothing, but nevermind.)

If you don’t know me in person – I wear two kinds of clothing. Either the “all black with metallic implements of torture” type of oldschool rivethead clothing (with a dash of goth or punk) or loose clothing with color prints.  This time I was looking for the latter, since the former is usually just a black skirt, a black shirt and my mostly self-made accessories, I don’t need an online store for that.

I like bright colors and busy prints, ideally both at the same time, but I often have to compromise on bright colors (sigh!) since it’s hard to buy this type of clothing locally. As a religious Jew I’m also a modest dresser, which really constrains the type of clothing I can buy in mainstream shops, even when I’m taking layering into account.

So I am apparently Super Exotic because I wear long skirts. Go me?

Clarkesworld #57 – June 2011

I liked this issue overall. Again, spoilers are in white.

Semiramis by Genevieve Valentine (an American woman)

The first-person protagonist really comes across as female, which made me wonder if the story was centered around a lesbian relationship, but in one place the protagonist calls him(?)self a “gentleman”, so I guess not.

Otherwise, this is a calm and quiet story about huge and upsetting events… global warming, political turmoil, countries destroyed or occupied, while the protagonists are working in or around the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. I enjoyed it, but I kept feeling there could have been more. For instance, we never learn about the mysterious organization that employs the protagonist.

There is something I feel like mentioning, not directly relevant to Semiramis or my mini-review, but I can see some parallels… Another gene bank with a story behind it is the currently endangered Pavlovsk Experimental Station in Russia. During the siege of Leningrad, the botanists starved to death, but still would not eat from the collection. There is a moving song about the station by an American band, The Decemberists, which also starts with an allusion to Babylon, like Semiramis… so we’ve come full circle.

This is just someone else’s random Youtube upload of the song with no video, so I’m keeping the embed size small:

There is a (non-SF) novel on this topic, Hunger by Elise Blackwell, but unfortunately I haven’t read it yet.

Trickster by Mari Ness (an American woman)

Trickster looks like fantasy, but it has many science fiction elements – I think I can list it as both.

The protagonist is a physically disabled woman, which, combined with the presence of several deities in the story, made me really worried about the magical cure trope. Fortunately there is no magical cure in Trickster. Instead there is a very resilient protagonist, assumed to be weak by everyone around her – including her deities –, when she is anything but. Lots of destruction ensues. (You don’t need to be a buff superhero to cause lots of destruction. OH YES.)

It’s a quite lengthy story – I’m not even sure if it is, technically, a short story – but it’s well worth the read. This one will rate high on my scale, even though I don’t normally like fantasy stories with overly anthropomorphic deities.

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While we’re at scales and such: I’m going to make a “Battle of the Stories” page to help people with Hugo nominations and voting. I’ve already assembled it and added the stories I’ve reviewed thus far, but before I make it public, I want to make a nice button to put on the front page… and I’ve hit a roadblock. What should I put on the button? The obvious answer is the Hugo logo, except…

The Hugo logo is really bland. When I looked at it, my first reactions were: 1. It’s really boring! 2. It looks like a penis! Now, I’m not a very sexual person, but I still think it’s a feat to design a logo that manages to be boring and penile at the same time. I read the comments on the logo announcement and people seemed to be having the same reactions, so it’s not just me.

I know the Hugo award itself looks like a rocket. That’s not an excuse!

They did not publish a list of runners-up, but I liked this logo set a contestant posted in the comments. Alas, it doesn’t lend itself to a horizontal button similar to the ones already in my sidebar.

The short story reviews are back after the interruption… Again, spoilers are marked with white.

Clarkesworld #56, May 2011

Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know by Cat Rambo (an American woman)

Last week, I had a strange idea. Sometime in the far future, I’d like to edit a thematic anthology which features body horror stories without the horror… or more accurately, without the revulsion. Body horror is usually presented in a bad way. The character changes into something in a quite graphic manner, and this is presented as horrifying and possibly evil. Stories which still have quite graphic elements, but where the reader is expected to feel the events are good and moral for some reason, or just neutral and normal, are few and far between… even though speculative fiction is supposed to be (at least in part) about just how far the human condition extends.

This story could possibly qualify, though it is not really graphic. The main character is a shapeshifter, but the usual tired tropes about shapeshifting do not apply. For example, when someone dies, everyone (including the reader) expects the shapeshifter killed them, but it turns out the shapeshifter was telling the truth that it was an accident. All throughout the reader is left rooting for the shapeshifter, and in my opinion that’s a Very Good Thing and something so often lacking in modern Western SF. (A Russian parallel I really liked was the Stars duology by Sergei Lukyanenko, unfortunately not available in English yet.) The fictional Other is usually evil, demonized, disgusting – the restraint writers try to exercise when writing about real Others is usually gone and their xenophobia shows through clearly. Not here, and thank Cat Rambo for that.

We still have the evil mad scientist trope – by now you probably know this is one of my pet peeves -, but in this story the scientist is more of a greedy jerk than the classic mad scientist.

The Architect of Heaven by Jason K. Chapman (an American man)

I simply could not get into this story. It starts off very slowly and does not really pick up steam until the second half. A friend of mine showed me The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test the other day and I couldn’t get it out of my head while reading The Architect of Heaven. Trent is extremely rich, extremely popular, and people readily sacrifice their lives for him. This would not be necessarily bad in itself, but I saw nothing in the story that would’ve made me feel that yes, Trent really was that kind of guy. The characterization just wasn’t strong enough for the rest to be believable.

I wasn’t sure if there was a gay subplot, because it is never discussed explicitly, but if there is, then that’s probably worse, because of course the gay man ends up sacrificing himself for the straight guy. LJ user prusik posted a lengthy analysis, so I’m not going to go into more detail; this is definitely not one of the cases where I notice something about a story that no one else has pointed out yet.

I’m writing an article on the characterization of Eastern Europeans, so I’m not going to comment on the stereotyped Russian… and the stereotyped Chinese, either. But I think this story is going to make an apparance in the article…

A bit more on yesterday’s topic – I’ve been linked to Deepa D’s most recent post about the queer YA controversy and I’ve also had a private discussion with someone else, and I think there’s something that needs to be said.

Any thematic list that tries to be comprehensive ends up featuring a lot of junk. (Maybe I should call this prezzey’s corollary of Sturgeon’s law!) I did not say this in my previous post because I thought it was self-evident, but it has been brought to my attention that for many people participating in the controversy, it wasn’t! People were and are saying “vote with your wallets” and then linking to the comprehensive list of queer characters in YA.

I’m surprised because this probably means that these people have never tried to assemble any thematic list (OK, I know I have an obsession with lists…) or they have genuinely never read any book about minorities with a critical eye. For example, I collect fiction related to autism. A lot of it is bad – and I’m meaning “I’m going to MASH my keyboard with my FOREHEAD” kind of bad! A lot of the rest, even when well-meaning, still utilizes problematic assumptions. And so on…

This is one of the reasons I’m reviewing stuff – I’ve just started going across this year’s Hugo crop and I’ve already bumped into multiple stories with issues that were not called out by anyone else. (I’m making an effort to read other reviews, comments on stories, etc. too.) In some cases I’m not really the best person to do the calling out, for example if there is a story with a Chinese setting, I am not the best arbiter of accurate representation – though I can spot a confused ethnic hodgepodge. But if there is, say, a Jewish story with problematic elements, I think I can say that it is problematic (though I obviously do not speak for all Jews everywhere).

I’ve found the best stories are ones which draw on the author’s own background, but even this is no guarantee of success – for example a secular Jew can write shtetl kitsch about Orthodox Jews. People can also struggle with internalized oppression… I know I have myself. And some works, even when they represent a particular group well, are just not really good as fiction. So a thematic list is a very different kind of animal from a recommendations list.

Due to health problems and work-related issues I haven’t been able to post much lately… I’ll try to make up for the delay, G-d willing. First, a bunch of links I thought would be worth sharing–

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An article where two YA authors talk about their experience trying to sell a YA novel with a gay protagonist has caused quite a furor lately. “The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.” A huge flamewar erupted with some people essentially claiming the authors were lying. Here is a summary.

Flamewars of this kind make me uneasy irrespective of my viewpoint being represented… but some people linked to resources I was previously unaware of, and these are definitely worth sharing.

I’ve found a list of YA spec fic with major LBGTQ characters, collated by LJ user tanuki_green. This particular entry looks especially interesting, to me at least: “Guardian of the Dead, by Karen Healey. An ambitious urban fantasy making thoughtful use of Maori folklore. A major supporting character is asexual.” (Edited to add: Wow, this review is… discouraging, to say the least. Sigh!)

And in case people were wondering about the state of queer YA, here is a post with actual statistics. A few quotes: “Less than 1% of YA novels have LGBT characters.” “50% of LGBT YA books are about boys, with only 25% about girls.” [The rest feature LGBT parents, multiple characters, etc.] “only 4% of LGBT YA books are about transgender or genderqueer characters.” – I assume asexual characters would be included in this category? (Edited to add: Dash made the point that it made little sense to group these categories together – I agree)

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Something completely different, here is a video game project I’ll be keeping an eye on. Warco is a first person shooter, except you shoot film, not guns: you play as a news correspondent in a war zone. I loved the photojournalist theme in Beyond Good and Evil (the game, not the book!) and this looks similar, except it’s set in a realistic setting.

Alas, with this type of game everything hinges on the storyline. It can be a gritty drama where you learn something about real-life war zones beyond “ooooo third world country getting destroyed!” (sigh) or it can be something totally failtastic, or something else entirely…

I think this would be a good opportunity to link to Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical article on writing about Africa. (It also has a sequel!) …wow, I’ve even found a crowd-sourced “how to write about poor people”.

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And a third topic, here is a poignant essay on Martin Luther King’s impact, by HamdenRice. It struck really close to home because it’s related to what I see people go through in my own ethnic group – of course there are differences, but it’s close.

In Hungary most Jews are afraid to admit they are Jewish, because they do not want to be on the receiving end of verbal and yes, physical violence. They are in the closet for this very reason. When I decided in my teens that I would become more religiously observant (and eventually Orthodox), I knew I could not remain in the closet without constantly lying. Why won’t you eat this – just a bite, why won’t you go out with us on Friday evening, why won’t you shake my hand etc. – I would’ve had to lie in response to all these questions. You can’t really live a religious life in the closet because it affects every little thing you do.

But this meant I became the token Jew everywhere – even when there were lots of other Jews in the group, since they would not tell the non-Jews. Sometimes they would not even tell me, and I’d find out about it through mutual acquaintances.

And yes, I became a target. I’ve been in situations where I had to defend myself physically, where I had to run, I’ve even been in a situation where a policeman walked away from such an event. People say at least anti-Semitic violence is not institutionalized in Hungary (implication: you shouldn’t complain) – well, if a policeman refuses to protect you, i think that’s exactly what’s going on. Two of my friends decided to pursue similar cases through official channels, with quite negative results – one of them was even told to drop the case or they would prosecute him.

But you know what: it’s not that bad. What’s the worst thing that can happen? “They will kill us” – newsflash: they’ve already tried and we’re still here. We need to be proud of who we are.  If we all did it together,  eventually we would not have to live in fear. …and it would certainly be easier on me, the token Jew!

Clarkesworld #55 – April 2011

As I’ve said in the previous entry, I’m trying to add every author’s ethnicity and gender, for later statistical purposes… but I’ve had difficulties with this issue. I think E. Lily Yu is Chinese-American and Erin Hartshorn is Jewish-American (or American Jewish? that always confuses me), but I’m not sure, so I’ll probably just have to ask the authors directly.

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees by E. Lily Yu (a Chinese?-American woman)

I’m not particularly fond of parables, but this fantasy story is neatly told – I think this is the type of content that’s best-suited to podcasts, flowing along smoothly. (I read the text myself, but you might want to try the audio version.) Maybe it was a bit too didactic at times, but the political content did not ruin the story outright.

I’m not really sure about the take-home message, though – you can try to be different, but you will probably fail and die a miserable death? Well, life is like that sometimes, true enough…

Matchmaker by Erin M. Hartshorn (a Jewish?-American woman)

Yay, a Jewish story! The family of the protagonist really reminded me of the stories I hear from American secular Jewish friends – I think the American Jewish “guilt trip” experience is expressed quite eloquently, or maybe it is an American secular Jewish experience? Many of the American Jews I know are religious, and their families are nothing like that. Anyway, the author is clearly on to something here! There is also the interesting intersectionality of culture and class – one seldom sees really rich characters in SF, and even then they do not tend to belong to minorities. The author avoids the traditional ‘Jewish millionaires own the world’ trope, but the family comes across as slightly obnoxious… just as it probably would in real life! So far, so good.

I’ve never heard of a shidduch this fast, though – even the most fervently Chareidi people I know had at least 3-4 dates before marriage. (And most shidduchim end up going nowhere. Just ask me!) I understand that things need to come to a satisfying close in the span of a short story, but to me this part came across as more stereotype than reality… and not a stereotype I’d personally like to reinforce.

Clarkesworld #54 – March 2011

I enjoyed this issue, but I still had gripes with both stories. By the way, I forgot to mention that the previous issue had a great “making of” feature about the cover image, by Julie Dillon. I wish all issues had a similar column, this would also help me decide who to pick in the artist categories of the Hugo! Artists talking about their technique make a more memorable impression on me than picture dumps.

The Book of Phoenix (Excerpted from the Great Book) by Nnedi Okorafor (a Nigerian-American woman)

Lush greenery is a recurring theme in Nnedi Okorafor’s work and this particular story is no exception. Yay for lush greenery! As for the rest, it’s certainly an interesting, fast-paced tale, but it leaves way too many questions unresolved. All kinds of intriguing plot elements are introduced, but none of them are discussed in detail. The title refers to a larger text – I could see this story work as a chapter of a novel, but not as much as a standalone short story, even though I’d enjoyed it while reading. (Nnedi Okorafor’s website says that the story is set in the universe of Who Fears Death, which is on my TBR pile – I liked her other novels a lot, so I have high hopes for this one as well.)

Being a scientist, I tend to dislike stories which heavily build on the evil scientist trope, especially when there is no particular justification for this. The rationale behind including a Holocaust scene also eluded me, was it included just to demonstrate how evil the scientists were? It certainly did not seem to serve any other purpose.

Also, minor annoyance (but one I see quite often in stories, and this one was no exception): the Bible includes the Torah, these are not separate sacred texts. If someone is trying to say that a character read both the Christian and the Jewish versions of the Bible, the proper word for the latter is “the Tanach”. Spellings may vary, “Tanakh” is also used.

Perfect Lies by Gwendolyn Clare (an American woman)

I love interspecies diplomatic relations stories, and this one is also fascinating, but I am confused: did the author just rediscover high functioning autism / Asperger syndrome? The protagonist’s behavior shows many characteristics of autism, which enable her to negotiate with the aliens, but she is  repeatedly described as “the only human”  capable of doing so. I don’t really know what to think: is this an instance of deliberate erasure, or “only” ignorance? I read the comments on the story, and I’m not the first person the Asperger analogy occurred to – so it’s probably not a case of “one who has a hammer sees nails everywhere”

I think the moral is, if you make up a cognitive minority, try hard to make sure the group does not already exist, and if it does, take that into account?

Clarkesworld #53 – February 2011

I didn’t like this issue. It was also shorter than the usual Clarkesworld fare, which makes me think if there just wasn’t enough good fiction submitted…

I am including everyone’s ethnicity and country of origin because I’ll make some statistics eventually (IY”H). There will also be a separate tag cloud and listing for the Hugo eligible stories, I just need some time to set it up. Feel free to recommend additional tags!

I’m also starting to be concerned everyone is going to hate me for expressing my opinions. It’s a bit late now!

Diving After the Moon by Rachel Swirsky (an American Jewish woman)

The setting is a confused hodgepodge of world politics – apparently Egypt and Australia are the major powers, with little explanation beyond “the American Empire and the old Republic of China fought themselves to pieces”. They are also at war with each other. The Chinese province of Qinghai is an independent state populated by Tibetans. Qinghai is a developing country that’s struggling to put a taikonaut on the Moon. All this is occasionally interspersed with sentences that come across as imperial guilt (to me at least): “Cheap North American fabric was little good against the chill” etc.

I understand there is this post-Racefail pressure on American authors to diversify, but surely throwing country names and ethnicities into the blender is not the way to do it. For one, what happened to the current Han Chinese majority in Qinghai? Why are the Tibetans called “taikonauts”, an English word used to refer to Chinese astronauts? I’m admittedly only an outsider to this present-day conflict, but to me it seemed as if the story was trying to step on everyone’s toes.

Some spoilers follow in the next paragraph (I marked them with white so that they are not visible unless you are reading this with a different color theme, but I also want to accommodate people using screenreaders, hence the statement… BTW there must be a better way to do this! Popups? I dislike popups.).

The science and technology seemed nonsensical – I understand part of the story is a hallucination, but this refers to the parts that weren’t, at least in my reading. Exactly why cannot they communicate with Earth? Surely radio isn’t the only way to communicate. “The engines won’t reinitialize unless the ship has confirmation of radio contact” makes no sense from an engineering standpoint – why would anyone build a spaceship like this if they were not worried that, say, aliens would attempt to take it over? Even then, one would probably want the ship to be destroyed and not just ground to a halt.

I understand this is empathically not a hard-SF story, but IMO even soft SF should not have these sorts of blunders. My suspension of disbelief was completely ruined by both the technical details and the social backdrop, and I could not enjoy the rest of the content.

Three Oranges by D. Elizabeth Wasden (an American woman)

This one is a historical fantasy story featuring Prokofiev, heavily inspired by his The Love for Three Oranges. I think some of the plot points seem arbitrary if one is not familiar with the source of inspiration, but that’s fixed by familiarizing oneself with it

I’m not really convinced the story would stand on its own even without the reflection to Prokofiev’s work of art, but maybe that wasn’t the intention either. I am happy about stories that get the reader curious about something else. Also, does this qualify as RPF?

While we are at RPF, I liked Wasden’s Leningrad better, mmm Shostakovich

I’m going to start posting my mini-reviews of content eligible for next year’s Hugos.

I’ve decided to start with Clarkesworld for multiple reasons: they only post two stories a month, but these can be assumed to be of very high quality, since the magazine probably receives a huge amount of submissions due to the fast turnaround. Furthermore, Clarkesworld often has stories by authors who belong to minorities and/or underrepresented groups – I’ve never seen this explicitly declared as a policy, but the trend is definitely noticeable to me. (Especially when we consider some other venues… I’m trying not to point fingers here, because many venues are changing in this respect, but surely everyone can think of a few which are a lot less diverse than Clarkesworld.) Maybe they just “take good stories”, but the magazines I’ve seen which made that sort of comment regarding their editing policies usually took stories mostly from white American men. Clarkesworld is definitely not like that.

I’ll go issue by issue and work my way up to the present. I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum. I’ll probably add more quantitative ratings eventually, but only after I’ve read more of the eligible content.

Clarkesworld #52 – January 2011

Ghostweight by Yoon Ha Lee (who is a Korean-American woman)

I think this story starts off more purple than poetic, but eventually the prose settles into a calm, restrained rhythm. I liked the imaginative setting, but during the first half I found myself going back to reread earlier sections, because I kept on losing track of exactly what was happening, who was whose enemy, and so on.

I was discomforted by the way massacres were portrayed, but maybe that’s exactly the point of the story – namely that high-tech warfare can have an alienating effect on the warriors themselves.

The final twist left me cold, probably because I’ve been playing The History of Hammerfight lately, and it has a similar storyline, with evil empire and unusual flying machines and all. These are probably coincidences – while Hammerfight was originally published in 2009, it became well-known only after it was featured in the third Humble Bundle indie game promotion this July.

(Hammerfight will probably get its own review once I manage to finish it, I am at about 75% of the main story. I have problems with the narrative and the setting, but those are better reserved for a separate article.)

Tying Knots by Ken Liu (who is a Chinese-American man and the first person I’ve seen with a .name TLD)

Definitely a smoother read than the previous one. I don’t like the theme of ‘Wow Look, Uncontacted Group’, and in places it read more like a colonialist story than a postcolonialist one, but that’s clearly intentional: out of the two narrators, the American one is designed to be a jerk. The story is trying to expose the dubious concepts of intellectual property ownership – only important as long as it protects the property of the privileged -, genetic use restriction technology, etc.

(Minor side note: actually, the infamous terminator gene seeds have not been commercialized anywhere because everyone called the practice immoral, so now there are legal agreements farmers need to enter into which basically do the same thing. This alone would be worth a story in itself!)

It is hard to write a racist, privileged jerk while not ending up one oneself, and the unreliable narrator technique adds further difficulty, but Ken Liu manages to accomplish the task quite well without going overboard. One could make an argument for Tom being slightly one-dimensional, but this doesn’t cause much concern in a story of this length. And it’s a hard-SF story, what else can I ask for? I have to say I am biased in favor of hard SF.

One more gripe: I didn’t really see a particular reason for setting the story in Burma/Myanmar of all places. Why Burma? Just because?

Endnote: I will probably discuss this story in my ongoing Hungarian series about languages and linguistics in SF; it will go well with Looking Through Lace by Ruth Nestvold, which also features an unusual writing system.

Sorry I haven’t been posting much – I was busy with work and I also had to assemble my new desktop computer. My brother helped out (thank you!) and together we finished fairly fast, B”H.

My motherboard died after about 4 years of valiant service (sigh!), and this meant I had to buy new RAM and a new CPU to fit the new motherboard. A very annoying unexpected expense, but I really need my desktop computer to be able to work. I think we’ll be able to use the RAM in some of the office computers, but I have no idea what to do with the CPU – it’s in perfectly working condition, I just don’t have anything to fit it into. I really wish socket types wouldn’t change so often! Maybe I could sell it, but I kind of doubt I can find a buyer.

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I thought I’d compensate for my absence by starting my brand-new series where I torment my readers with Youtube videos I like. Be afraid, be very afraid! I decided to embed the videos for convenience, but if this breaks your feeds or something, I’m OK with just hyperlinks, let me know.

This will be a weekly feature IY”H, on Tuesdays (because “Youtube Tuesday” sounds cool), but usually posted in the night because that’s when I have time, so actually on Wednesdays in my time zone.

I mostly listen to traditional and urban folklore from all over the world (especially Central Europe and Central Asia), industrial, and everything that features people screaming. So I thought people who come for the “diversity in SF” theme might stay and listen to a few weird songs from all over the world at least before we get to the screaming part.

Every update will have four videos, just because. First up is BeRosh Hashanah, a traditional Jewish song arranged by Eyal Bitton. (It’s an a cappella rendition, so you can watch it even if you are a religious Muslim. The video actually reminds me of Islamic nasheed videos, I wonder if that was intentional.)

Rosh Hashanah is coming up, so this is in the spirit of the season. The Jewish New Year is not a particularly happy occasion – it is more connected to the awe of G-d -, so this is not a party song either. The lyrics actually summarize the most important features of the holiday quite well, so be sure to read the English subtitles.

The second song is a great cover of Nina Simone’s Four Women by Madame Pepper, using only a loop pedal. I love loop pedal tracks and you will probably see more of this stuff… This is a heartwrenching song and Madame Pepper is a great singer who could use more exposure.

Next up is Karaván Família performing on a Swedish music festival – if you know me in person, you’ve probably been subjected to this video a few times

They are Hungarian Roma and they play urban folk. They are also 100% PURE AWESOME. In the first part of the video they sing their song Shej baxtali from the album Gipsy Crossroads, and the second part is a free-for-all jam with a Persian singer and a Serbian accordionist.

And finally we have Araatan by Altan Urag (featuring Naran), a Mongolian folk rock band. I wonder if I enjoy Central Asian music so much because I’m Hungarian and it’s kind of similar (except really different). This song even features a dulcimer.

I managed to keep the screaming to a minimum in the first instalment Though be sure to check out Naran’s falsetto above!