I've remarked before that music may be the nearest we will ever get to a working time machine, in that certain pieces and songs can transport one back to the time of first hearing it, or to a time of great personal significance.
It has other effects too.
I'm in the process of writing another piece for Transdiffusion, and I needed to check out a piece of music which was relevant to the events I'm trying to describe in the article. The music in question is the Baîlèro or 'Shepherd's Song' from Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergne.
I needed to hear the song again to see if it was as I remembered it, so I went to YouTube to see if anyone had uploaded it there in some form or other.
I found more than one, but settled on one which set photographs (presumably of the Auvergne) to a recording by the Finnish singer Karita Mattila. I clicked the 'Play' button and settled back...
...and found that within a minute or so, I was sobbing like an eejit. So much so that by the time the thing finished I had to go and lie down on the sofa, so overwhelmed had I been.
OK, drink had been taken. But I hardly think that one can of Guinness Original would cause that sort of reaction. Music, of all human art, speaks to us in the most direct fashion - it's almost visceral, primal even.
But I know all I'm doing by saying that is trying to intellectualise myself out of my embarrassment, and it won't do. See and hear for yourself:
Update: As happens so often, someone objected to the video (or, more likely, to the audio), and the clip that I originally linked to has been pulled. What follows is quite similar to it, however, and has exactly the same soundtrack).
Well, I've finished work for the year now, so I've had time to put together an idea I had a week or so back.
It's a short animation set to what is perhaps my favourite Christmas song. You can play it in the Windows Media screen which should appear below. The file is only a touch over 4MB, so it shouldn't max out your bandwidth.
A few remarks, if only to excuse myself:
First off, this is the first time I've done a proper animation with sound, and perhaps I should have considered making sure the images fit the music. As it is, the images don't always change on - or anywhere near - the beat, but trying to sort that out completely would have meant jettisoning some of the images, and I'd gone too far down the road with it by then to want to do that. I'm afraid IFWIT (It Fits Where It Touches) is the rule of the day there.
Secondly, I'm aware that the quality of the images is sometimes a bit lacking. This is the Curse Of The Compression Algorithm, which shows itself most markedly with reds and greens. I can live with it, and I'm sure you can too.
Thirdly, apologies to anyone who thinks I've 'disrespected' their flag. I know that Bangladesh's looks a bit squashed because I had to change the aspect ratio. Apart from that - get a life, everyone. I also hope that I haven't inadvertently wished anyone something unpleasant (a plague of boils, being hit by a falling suet dumpling, a visitation from Tony Blair, that sort of thing).
Finally, can you figure out which languages are featured, and in which order? The flags will give it away in most - but not all - cases.
Warning! If you don't want to know yet, don't read the next paragraph! (Which is also why I'm leaving a bit of a gap here - known to us experienced webnauts as 'spoiler space' - to reduce the risk/temptation)
Just hum to yourselves for a minute....
OK, the cast in order of appearance is: English, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Euskerra (Basque), Scots and Gaelic, Bosnian, Greek, Breton, Esperanto, Irish, Indonesian, Polish, Armenian, Azeri, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Hausa and Swahili (that's the Pan-African flag), Arabic (that's the flag of the Arab Revolt!), Czech, Slovenian, Croatian, Dutch, Hebrew (the menorah), Belorussian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Spanish, Catalan, German, Estonian, Hindi, Farsi, Turkish, Albanian, Greenlandic, Japanese, Bengali, Portuguese, Maltese, Italian, French, Romanian, Vietnamese, Mandarin and Cantonese, Welsh.
A few weeks ago, my editor (hello Kif!) received an e-mail asking to be put in touch with me. It turned out to be from Mike Evans, who had been Ryan's personal manager. He has started up a website as a sort of tribute-cum-archive, and he wanted permission to reproduce my article there.
Well, I phoned Mike up and had a very enjoyable chat with him. He asked me to write reviews of some of the CDs of Ryan Davies (and Ryan and Ronnie) material which his company, Black Mountain Records, have now issued. I, of course, was more than pleased to agree to this.
You can see my review of The Many Faces Of Ryan by clicking on the picture below, and I may be reviewing some of the others when I can find a minute (Kif wants another article from me for Transdiffusion, eager old thing that he is!)
I've mentioned a number of times here my regard for the singer-songwriter Steve Tilston.
Well, I've now homed in on his daughter Martha as well. First off was the song Red, a re-telling of the Little Red Riding Hood story, which you can download from here. It's absolutely beautiful.
In search of more, I looked at YouTube, and found the following. It's a short film by Matt Kelly based on Martha's song Artificial, a song she wrote about her time spent working in an office. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding that it strikes a chord.
In line with JudgeCo™'s policy of bringing you a laugh to cheer you through the Credit Crunch, the Salary Slam and the Banking Balls-up, we give you something from the greatest comedy double act of all time.
Morecambe & Wise's Christmas shows were the high spot of the light entertainment year on British television for much of the 1970s. Not only were the skills of the two men themselves without parallel, they were able to get some most remarkable guests to come on and perform comedy, mostly to great effect (Glenda Jackson got her role in A Touch Of Class after the director saw her as Cleopatra in one of the plays 'wot Ernie wrote')
(And this is the moment to give the proper credit to their writer Eddie Braben, whose contribution to taking Eric & Ernie to the top has been in my view scandalously overlooked)
In that same Christmas show of 1971, the famous musician and conductor André Previn was invited to participate. Here you can see what happened.
To set the scene a little further: Morecambe & Wise wanted to do a couple of days of rehearsal for the sketch, but Previn was working in the US and couldn't get to London until the day of shooting. This made Eric Morecambe (who, despite appearing to ad-lib a lot always prepared meticulously) very nervous. Note, therefore, his reaction to Previn's line (at about 2:49 in), "All right, I'll go get my baton [...] It's in Chicago." At this point, Eric knew that all would be well.
Previn, indeed, acquits himself perfectly with a sense of timing which befits someone who had spent his professional life in the world of music. And the ability to keep a straight face - especially difficult when 'the band' was cracking up in front of him.
Because of all this, what follows is one of the - if not the - greatest TV comedy sketches of all time.
Enough blather - here. Enjoy! And rejoice that we had these guys around to make us laugh - then and long after the curtain came down on them.
But that's not to say that Porky's is a movie without merit. Much of the acting is very well done, especially when you bear in mind that the performers playing high-school boys in early 50s Florida were mostly in their mid-twenties at the time (another classic of the time, Animal House, was similar in that respect).
When people think of Porky's nowadays, they think of the famous 'shower scene'. My favourite part, however, is the very next sequence, as seen below.
To set the scene, in case you don't know: the boys have found a peep-hole into the girls' showers at Angel Beach High. Three of them - Tommy Turner (Wyatt Knight), Billy (Mark Herrier) and 'Pee-Wee' Morris (Dan Monahan) - are looking through it when Pee-Wee gives the game away, and the showering girls find out that they're being watched. In an act of bravado, Tommy sticks his cock through the hole in the wall. Unfortunately for him the girls' coach, Beulah Ballbricker, comes into the showers at this point and...erm...apprehends Tommy by grabbing hold of the evidence. Tommy gets away, but Miss Ballbricker is not to be denied, and calls a meeting with the boys' coaches and the school principal, Mr. Carter:
(Left to right: Nancy Parsons as Beulah Ballbricker, Boyd Gaines as Coach Brackett, Doug McGrath as Coach Warren, Bill Hindman as Coach Goodenough and Eric Christmas as Mr. Carter)
It never fails to get me giggling anyway, but I always marvel at the playing of this scene. Firstly because acting laughter is difficult to pull off convincingly, especially throughout a scene of over four minutes in length; and secondly because Nancy Parsons (and, for as long as is necessary, Eric Christmas) manage to keep straight faces against a backdrop of utter hysterics.
One more thing: what you have just seen was done in one take!
(OK, smartarse, you try coming up with clever titles all the time)
First off, my old chum Alex manages to put things much as I would hope to do on the subject of rationality and religion (although my own position is even more Dawkinsite than his).
Secondly, Blood & Treasure links to a remarkable painting which reminds me not only of Peter Blake's artwork for Sgt. Pepper but also of Paul Kidby's cover for Terry Pratchett's Night Watch (which itself was a parody of Rembrandt's painting of the same name).
Click on the image below to go to the full-size original. It comes initially from a Chinese web site, so there are rather more Asians in it than there might otherwise be.
I've been thinking a lot about Douglas Adams today. This is largely due to the fact that I've been transferring my cassettes of "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy" into digital form for the purpose of having a backup in case either the tapes wear out or my remaining tape player packs up.
This led me to do some searching around out here on teh interwebs, where I found this very splendid and worthwhile lecture which the author gave at the University of California, Santa Barbara a matter of a month or so before his death at the obscenely young age of 49 in 2001. It's mostly about his book A Last Chance To See, but there are links to his most famous work:
(A small warning - the video runs for nearly 88 minutes, so make yourself a nice hot cup of tea and make sure you know where your towel is before starting).
It's a mercifully long time since I last had to claim welfare of any kind, but I suspect little has changed for the better for those who have to do so. I got far too used to being treated like something which had dropped out of a rat's arse every time I went to sign on. This, we were assured, was for our own good, as it would teach us to stand on our own two feet and not expect the hard-working company directors and other 'wealth creators' of our great land to keep us in luxury.
So Justin McKeating's elegant suggestion for dealing with the mountebanks and chancers who have created our latest economic trauma has immense merit: I suggest you go here and read it.
I've remarked previously that Roy Zimmerman is the genius of modern satirical songwriting - the true heir to Tom Lehrer but with the political fire of Pete Seeger.
Although there's a serious message behind most of his songs, here's one which - for all its satire - is deadly serious. Enjoy (in a manner of speaking), then go to Roy's YouTube channel for more.
Billy Connolly once said, "I hate watching good guitarists. They make me feel as if I've got one hand....and it's growing out of the top of my head".
Take a look at this kid:
All I can say is "Wow!!".
Update: unfortunately, the clip has now been removed, apparently by the person who uploaded it. It showed an Asian (possibly Asian-American?) boy of about eleven playing California Dreaming on an acoustic guitar. The guitar itself was slightly out of tune, but the boy played it superbly.
(Thinking up titles for these pieces is more difficult than writing the pieces themselves, I swear)
There are moments - rare by their very nature - where sport, however you care to define the term, comes close to the beauty usually associated with art.
In the days in which the 'hard men' were deemed to rule the world of football, for example, there was the guile, poise and instinct of George Best, the most talented player ever seen in the English game (seen here scoring six goals against Northampton Town in 1970):
It needn't be pretty, however. Here's Ian Botham putting the Australian attack to the sword in that remarkable turnaround at Headingley in 1981:
(Update: this clip replaces the original one, which the pussies at YouTube pulled)
Even that ballet of beef known as Rugby Union has known its moments, few more famous than that remarkable try by the Barbarians against New Zealand at the old Arms Park, Cardiff in 1973:
Sometimes, however, art itself is forced to doff its cap. I relived such a moment last night. In an access of boredom, I thought back nearly a quarter of a century.
The place: Sarajevo, in what was then Yugoslavia. The occasion: the 1984 Winter Olympics.
It's the Ice Dance competition, and the final, free dance, section.
Competing for Great Britain (a country not renowned for its prowess in ice and snow - hell, its transport network comes to a complete halt after half an inch of sleet) are an ex-Policeman and a former insurance clerk, both from Nottingham - a town as synonymous with aesthetic qualities as Beijing is with environmental purity.
Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean were leading going into the section, but the competition was strong and they needed something special to make sure of the gold.
They had devised a routine based on an edited version of Ravel's Boléro. The story was that of star-crossed young lovers, climbing a volcano to throw themselves over the lip into the fires within.
The performers came out onto the ice and knelt facing one another in the centre of the rink. The familiar tom-ticketa-tom-ticketa-tom-tom of Ravel's music began.
At this point, something happened. A doorway opened into some other world - one where the abstract notions of art and beauty took on a tangible, physical form - and two seemingly unprepossessing people led us through that portal and allowed us to inhabit a time and space in which what was was what should be.
Our visit was, inevitably, brief; some experiences are too intense to last, otherwise they would overwhelm us. Imagine being held in a state of orgasm for a whole hour at a stretch, for example; we would be annihilated by the experience.
Scarcely four and a half minutes later, it was over. The artists (for such they had truly proven themselves to be) lay upon the ice. The tormented lovers had achieved their quietus in the flames, forever at one with each other and with the very matter of their world.
We the watchers, the visitors, had achieved our own resolution. We had been taken, we had been in some way transformed.
The earthbound question of the points to be awarded didn't matter very much. There could only be one possible result, and so it proved. But the gold was not in the medals - they might as well have been recycled baked-bean tins for all it really mattered - it was in the moment itself, in the thread which for an instant of time tied the millions watching around this small planet into a conspiracy of wonder. A reminder that, for all our obvious faults, humankind - by dint of imagination and effort - can become greater than the mere sum of our parts, and can reach out and transcend ourselves and our surroundings.
Watch again, as I have. Perhaps you will weep, as I have. I hope you will marvel, as I still do.
Play the video if you can: only then will you get the full force of it.
Note: the video was previously embedded into this page. However, I found that MSNBC's iframe code was causing a problem to people using the Opera browser and as I haven't been able to find this video in one piece on YouTube or any similar sites which allow embedding, I've had to remove the video. You can still see it by clicking on the above link.
Damn it all - I'm a day late with this. Things tend to pass you by when you're lying in bed waiting for The Snot Fairy to pack her bags and leave.
April 9 marked the eightieth birthday of a remarkable man.
Tom Lehrer remains, nearly forty years after he stopped performing and writing, the greatest satirical songwriter of all time. Coming out of Harvard in the post-war era, his songs - written initially to entertain his fellow mathematics students - spread across the US via his self-recorded LPs in the early fifties. This was the era of the Eisenhower boom, when America was on its way to becoming the most bloated, self-satisfied and conformist society the planet had ever seen.
That this Ivy League graduate set out to lacerate that society's many sacred cows (most particularly the one called 'good taste') was never going to earn him much airplay on American radio. There were enough of the cognoscenti, however, to make sure that Lehrer's dextrous parodies and sharp and technically-adroit lyrics remained in the public ear. His success was more pronounced in the UK and Australia, although this didn't stop the determinedly ignorant and self-righteous from excoriating the man and his works, or of simply damning him with faint praise.
His work became more political in the sixties, largely because of a commission to write a song a week for the US version of That Was The Week That Was. Here he sent up charity TV fundraisers (National Brotherhood Week), the strange case of a Nazi technocrat being at the head of the US' attempts to win the Space Race (Wernher von Braun), and - most memorably - the 'modernising' wing of the the Roman Catholic Church (The Vatican Rag). I think this last song was the first one of his I ever heard (I'd have been about thirteen, I think), and I was immediately beguiled by the lyrical genius of the middle eight:
"Get in line in that processional
Step into that small confessional
Where the guy whose got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original.
If it is, try playing it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer.
Two, four, six, eight: time to trans-substantiate."
This, in fact, marked Lehrer's last main burst of writing. Never happy with performing, he also stopped writing, citing the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger as a sign that satire was no longer necessary. Apart from a few short songs for a children's television series and a couple of one-offs, that was it.
Thankfully, true talent will leave its mark, and Lehrer's songs still amuse, entertain and shock (if you're of a certain cast of mind) to this day. He has also inspired musical parodists such as 'Weird Al' Yankovic and Roy Zimmerman (his true heir, in my opinion).
So, a belated happy birthday, Mr. Lehrer. May you have many more years of not writing ahead of you.
**********
Footnote: Just in case you are so benighted as to never to have seen or heard the great man, see the following YouTube items:
To show that US foreign policy has always been consistent down the years, Send The Marines
The aforementioned Vatican Rag (complete with rare fluff!)
And finally, from an edition of Parkinson in 1980, when Lehrer was in London promoting Cameron Mackintosh's tribute to him, Tomfoolery, the man sings a song which he never dared record when he originally wrote it, fearing that - even by his standards - it was a bit naughty: I Got It From Agnes. (That's Robin Ray - who was in the cast of Tomfoolery - you catch a brief glimpse of at about 00:52).
No? Well, here's a little of what Wikipedia has to say:
"A Lolcat is an image combining a photograph of an animal, most frequently a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in broken English referred to as Kitty Pidgin [...], or lolspeak."
The spiritual home of these images on the web is Icanhascheezburger, and perhaps you should look around there for a little while before reading on...
Back yet? Good. Funny, isn't it?
Sunny Hundal over at Pickled Politics had the idea of using pictures of another dumb creature instead, namely the ever more ludicrous figure of Tony Blair. You can see what people have come up with for this here.
Of course, I couldn't resist the chance to take the piss out of the wretched criminal, so here are some I made earlier (about twenty minutes ago, in fact):
(I've got a feeling that that last one's going to cause trouble...)
This has the hallmarks of an Urban Legend, but it made me laugh.
The actress Diana Dors' real surname was Fluck. She changed it when her manager warned her that her career could be ended by one blown lightbulb.
When she was famous, she went back to her home town of Swindon to open a fête. Lunching beforehand with the local vicar who was going to be introducing her, she told him what her real surname was.
This obviously played on the poor man's mind, and he made his introduction in something of a funk over getting her surname right. This is what he said:
"Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure that I introduce to you our star guest. We all love her, especially as she is our local girl. I therefore feel it right to introduce her by her real name; Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the very lovely Miss Diana Clunt."
I was just getting my packed lunch ready for work tomorrow.
Just the standard thing; a couple of wholemeal baps with the Filling Of The Day. Being a creature of routine, what the Filling is usually depends on what Day it is. Monday is tuna pâté, Tuesday is Lancashire cheese with tortilla chips, Friday is tinned Canadian salmon.
Wednesday and Thursday are usually chicken slices or bacon and, reckless devil that I am, I sometimes switch them around.
Anyway, I was standing at the grill just now waiting for the bacon, when I started to ponder sandwiches in general, and the bacon butty in particular.
And 'particular' is what I am when it comes to the pig sarny. Simplicity is the watchword as far as I'm concerned. I have no time for people who try to jazz up sandwiches with black pepper, balsamic vinegar or even (shudder!) avocado: after all, the sandwich was invented to be quick and simple.
So, for the essential, the seminal bacon sandwich, each of the following statements has to be true:
It must be streaky bacon, not that horrible rubbery back bacon that your teeth spend ages wrestling with
Said bacon must then be grilled to a high crispness; crisp enough for it to be in danger of shattering when you try to stick a fork in it, but not so crisp that it sets off your smoke alarm.
The bread must be white, sliced and with a good spread of butter on it
The bacon should be left for about half a minute after taking it from the grill, then placed on the buttered bread.
The whole ensemble should then be left for another minute or so for the heat of the bacon to start to melt the butter.
Then scoff.
This, my dears, is the food of the gods. But it got me thinking about other sandwiches I have known and loved. I remember when I first discovered peanut butter at the age of eleven, and horrifying my classmates when I produced it in sandwiches on a school trip to Penrhyn Castle. There were the Princes' salmon paste sandwiches which were a feature of my tiny days, followed later by the actual salmon butties when I visited my grandmother every Saturday afternoon (there were pickled onions with them, too - the juxtaposition of the salmon and the vinegar was just right).
Later, when I was a student, and very nearly penniless (and these were the days of full student grants - goodness only knows how I would have coped in these more modern, everything's-a-commodity times), I got by on crisp sandwiches. Walker's cheese and onion crisps, in fact. You could get a standard bag of them for about 17p, and you put them on the bottom slice, put the other slice on top and just pressed until the crisps started to break. I survived all this, somehow. My mother would have been horrified, and would have had the Red Cross to drop food parcels in for me had she known.
Then there was a type of sandwich which you would probably never encounter today, not even in the most private of sanctuaries: the beef dripping sandwich. We couldn't afford to have beef for Sunday lunch very often, and when we did it was usually the cheapest cuts. But the true treat was not the meat (which tended by its nature to be tough), but the fat. This would be poured from the roasting pan into a small earthenware bowl, then placed in the fridge to solidify. When required, this would then be taken out and made into sandwiches. The real delight of this was not the usual beige stuff at the top of the bowl, but the dark brown layer beneath it. This was ambrosial; it had a searching poignancy of taste which was the very essence of the meat.
Of course, you couldn't do it today. If you were merely to make the attempt, forty-seven government agencies would be knocking your door down within the hour, naming you and shaming you, and placing you on the Enjoyable Eating Offenders' Register.
Raves Archive 2008
