Polka Mass!

WMUA 91.1 had their seasonal vinyl sale last Saturday (of which I got to help kick off the morning by DJ-ing from 11:00 to 11:30). The event featured an array of vendors in vinyl records, CDs and other memorabilia from the area and beyond. For hunters of rare vinyl, it's a dream come true - you can probably find anything you've been looking for there and leave with 100 + pounds more of recorded music in exchange for $100 + less in your wallet. Vinyl collectors are pretty die hard, which is understandable - it's an art form that has rapidly inched toward extinction with the onset of digital media and the depletion of resources that go into making records. While I'm not a vinyl collector myself, getting out to see the people who constantly search for rare recordings to add to their collections is fun to witness, just like the old days when I used to go to the swap meet to find cheap recordings among the massive aisles of junk to aid me in getting my fix for fresh music to listen to and share with others. It's like a socio-anthropological romp through the fields to see what strange rituals the natives are engaging in and what they use to express themselves. I could easily become a vinyl collector myself, but if I had all of my music on 12 inch documents I'd have to live in a mansion, and to afford that, I'd have to stop buying vinyl. These are the demands that art would require of me to live in the perpetual beauty of it's presence, a feat that I would never be worthy of living up to. Perhaps there are others that can fill the gap.

I did come away with two modest purchases, both from the WMUA table of overstock: a CD of music from bands out of Manitoba that I bought for $.50, and a record titled "Father Frank Petrovich Presents... More Songs & Hymns from the Polka Mass" that set me back one dollar. This one is so wonderful that I have ventured out of semi-dormancy just to write a blog post about it so that I can put up a picture of the album cover:

On my radio show - Grooved Pavement World Music, Fridays from 12:00 to 2:30 PM on WMUA 91.1, for those who don't know about it - I like to look for some overlap in the weekly zeitgeist if possible, and with Easter fast approaching, the Polka Mass seemed fitting to try and fit in on the show preceding it (which happens to be Good Friday, of all things. Oh horror.) So - we may have some of Father Perkovich's Polka Mass alongside some selections of Paco Pena's Misa Flamenca. From what I have discovered on the internet, the Polka Mass is still popular, although quite reviled among conservatives and haters of anything that has the combination of accordions, polka & Catholicism, and Father Frank Perkovich has his own web site featuring the Polka mass, which you can find here: Father Perkovich & the Polka Mass. 

And now for something completely different, an album cover that could easily be mistaken for something else entirely. Alas, I didn't find it among the vinyl on sale.

MassKara Festival

Wish I'd known about this earlier, yet it is always fun to discover something new to share.

This, from the flickr blog:

"The MassKara Festival is a week-long festival held each year in Bacolod City, the capital of Negros Occidental province in the Philippines every third weekend of October nearest October 19, the city's Charter Anniversary.

The festival first began in 1980 during a period of crisis. The province relied on sugar cane as its primary agricultural crop, and the price of sugar was at an all-time low due to the introduction of sugar substitutes like high fructose corn syrup in the United States. It was also a time of tragedy; on April 22 of that year, the inter-island vessel Don Juan carrying many Negrenses, including those belonging to prominent families in Bacolod City, collided with the tanker Tacloban City and sank. An estimated 700 lives were lost in the tragedy.

In the midst of these tragic events, the city's artists, local government and civic groups decided to hold a festival of smiles, because the city at that time was also known as the City of Smiles. They reasoned that a festival was also a good opportunity to pull the residents out of the pervasive gloomy atmosphere. The initial festival was therefore, a declaration by the people of the city that no matter how tough and bad the times were, Bacolod City is going to pull through, survive, and in the end, triumph."

from wikipedia