Stacy Horn

My friend singer/song writer Lianne Smith is trying to raise money to make a CD using that place Kickstarter. I love the song that she’s singing on the video. I also found this wonderful recording she did with Nada Surf, which she refers to on her Kickstarter page:

” … I’ve worked on other people’s records, but I’ve NEVER put out my own. But that’s about to CHANGE. With your help through Kickstarter, you’ll know me as the singer/songwriter with a Really Good debut album. I’ve got Anton Fier on board as the producer, as well as lot of of New York’s best musicians.”

“It used to be that a musician was able to depend on a record company for the money to make and release an album. The world has changed. And yet it hasn’t … You are my agents. You are my executive producers. YOU are my record company.”

So if you like what you hear and would like to help out a struggling artist, please contribute to my friend Lianne!

Another year, another cat picture. I might as well say another breath, another cat picture. (I actually took this shot a month or so ago.) I was listening to A Sea Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the piece my choir is doing next. It begins with this very dramatic, “BEHOLD! The sea!” So I’ve been going around singing, “BEHOLD! A kitty!” (I know, I know.)

But back to 2011. Tell me, 2011, what do you have in store? No really. Tell me. Because I *need* something fantastic to happen.

Welcome to the couch little guy. We just got back from the vet, Buddy yowling the whole time. He’s lost a pound, which isn’t good and I’m totally surprised. I would have sworn he gained a little. But it’s too soon to panic. Both the cats got cat nip and now I’m going to relax on the couch, doing easy work like answering email, looking up stuff, etc., with the Twilight Zone marathon on in the background.

Taking it easy is always better with cats.

I’ll be back later today with a more New Years-y post, hopefully, but I just wanted to rave about this documentary I watched about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and their fight to get women the right to vote. It’s called Not For Ourselves Alone. I missed I don’t know how much of the first half, I came across it channel surfing, but I recorded and watched all of the second half. Mesmerizing and mind-blowingly well done. I know, women’s rights, blah-blah-blah, but trust me, it was absolutely riveting.

And we didn’t get the vote in their lifetime. It didn’t happen until freaking 1920. Can you believe that?? It took that long to figure out that we deserve that same right? I’m doing all this research about singing and music and composers and I realize that all this time that I’m writing about, women couldn’t vote. And they could barely talk in public, much less sing (most of the early choral societies were all male).

We always think of America as so forward thinking, but over and over, if you do the research, we’re just not. We weren’t close to the first to give women the right to vote. I forget how many countries were listed in the show, but dozens, including the Soviet Union, gave women the right to vote before we did. Look how many other countries that have already had women leaders.

Anyway, watch it. It’s great. Trust me. And thank you Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (and thank you Ken Burns and Paul Barnes and everyone else who worked on this). The filmmakers really capture how much work and heart and intelligence went into this battle. I can’t imagine summoning all that it must have took. Anthony and Cady Stanton should be huge national heroes, celebrated often, with many books and movies. They should be as big as George Washington and anyone else who fought for freedom and independence.

I was walking through Grand Central Station on my way to a cocktail party … oh yes, I am such a sophisticated NYC woman, I go to cocktail parties, ha! Do you ever think back to when you were a kid, imaging yourself doing grown-up things and now here you are?

Anyway, I was WAY early, so I stopped and took photographs of the balcony where I had set up computers all those years ago and introduced some New Yorkers to the internet.

A closer, less moody look.