"You must tune the violin ver' carefully when you play dirty songs."

I'm home making this entry and not out at the evening concert for Nordic Roots because the vertigo was a bit much after the afternoon concert. We went into this knowing that I might not be up for the whole thing, so I'm not massively disappointed, just going to start again tomorrow and see how far I get, enjoy what I can instead of sniffling over what I can't.

But I just wanted to say: last night one of the members of the band Väsen played for us a cell phone recording of one of the actual rolls on the actual repaired barrel organ of Carl Linnaeus. The real Carl Linnaeus and not another fella of the same name. And then they played us their version of that tune, and it was very cool, and you know what? This is the future I wanted to live in. The one where people take the time to fix Linnaeus's barrel organ to see what he listened to and then other people run with it and make art. Not the wrong alternate history after all.

I am also very fond of the way the native Swedish and Norwegian singers say that someone made a song, rather than that they wrote a song or composed a song.

Also: just as hypatia_j and I were going inside last night, there was a black man standing outside the Cedar repeating to himself, "Norwegian and Swedish music. Norwegian music...and Swedish music. Well, God bless ya. God bless ya all." I can come up with half a dozen things he might have meant by that, and I'm sort of amused at the possibilities.