Oh right

Some of you might reasonably complain that this blog’s clear daily mandate has been grossly betrayed, and you’d be right.  It’s simply the case that I’m moving in a few days and the preparations for that – which have included co-ordinating the paperwork, among other things, for two future roommates, one of whom has an erratic work schedule and the other of whom is vacationing in another province – have been the focus of my attention in recent days.  That’s going to continue for the rest of the week, too, but there will be a return to form after that.

In the meantime, the internet is a big place; I’m sure you’ll find something else to tide you over for the next couple of days.

Best news of the day

A Texas State University researcher has apparently discovered unpublished C.S. Lewis work in Oxford’s Bodleian Library:

C. S. Lewis, author of the Narnia Chronicles and Screwtape Letters, and J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, had planned in the 1940s to write a book together about Language. According to a letter written by Tolkien in 1944 to his son Christopher, the collaborative book was to be called Language and Human Nature. A news release from their publisher announced that the book was scheduled for publication in 1950. It was, however, never published. Scholars have thought, until now, that it was never started.

Steven Beebe, Regents’ Professor and Chair of the Texas State Department of Communication Studies, discovered the opening pages of the unpublished manuscript in the Oxford University Bodleian Library and has recently documented that the manuscript was the beginning of the previously believed to be unwritten Lewis and Tolkien book.

He’ll be publishing an article about his findings in the near future, and I assure you that he has at least one guaranteed reader. Publishing the manuscript itself will be more tricky, as it’s still under copyright and negotiations with the Lewis estate are ongoing. Still, I doubt they’ll be too difficult about it unless there’s something scandalous in the document.

It will be interesting to see how (if at all) the contents of this abortive project relate to Lewis’ actually-finished book on language, Studies in Words (1960).

[HT to Mere Comments for the news]

“He took what he knew and applied it”

The proverbial became the real when a well-established football player, in an act of community service, tackled one of the root causes of poverty: people stealing your stuff.

[Edmonton Eskimos defensive end Kitwana] Jones could be considered a purse snatcher’s worst nightmare. He stands six feet tall, weighs 227 pounds, and ran a 4.39-second 40-yard dash in college. He’s a freak who led his former team, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, in quarterback sacks last season. The Eskimos acquired him in a trade in May, and he has five tackles and a fumble recovery in three games this season.

Putting those skills to use, he got out of his car and took off after the suspected thief.

“I just took the initiative, jumped out of my car, ran him down and tackled the guy,” Jones recalled. It was a blindside tackle that included an unfriendly arm to the head. Police took three or four minutes to arrive. While they waited, the men had a chat.

The police were pleased with the turn of events, though the purse-snatchers still lead going into half-time.

A new experience

I went out for lunch with a friend of mine today.  That’s not remarkable in itself (though she was only in town for a limited time); what’s worth noting is what I ate.  Yes, the blog has reached this point.

I made the delightful and unprecedented decision to try some watermelon gazpacho, a soup so astonishing and unusual that nobody on earth apart from me has ever heard of it.  Maybe you thought you knew gazpacho before, with its tomato-based pretensions and ice-cold provenance; you thought wrong, my friend.

This was the same deal, but with watermelon.  It was accompanied by a delightful sandwich, with toasted bread surrounding grilled chicken, avocado, and a red pepper sauce.  My friend informed me that her vegetarian brother had once attempted to make watermelon steaks, which struck me as a novel enough idea (though one I’ve never tried myself).

Anyway, just thought you should know: it was very nice.

For Galactica fans

Túrin Húrinson has a thoughtful post about the troubling tendency of science fiction shows and movies to neglect the implications of multi-planet society and treat each planet as though it were just one city or – what’s worse – as just one village or forest or field or what have you.

Consider Star Trek – every episode I’ve seen involving a planet treats it like there is one city on the planet, just one civilization to deal with. Star Wars is the same way; Tattoine is “small village in the desert”, Coruscant is “large city”, Naboo is “seaside city”, etc.

In other words, we achieve diversity at the interplanetary level – which is what we want, since this is space opera – at the expense of actual planets. Instead we get a bunch of city-states floating in space with blank space between in which to fight and arbitrary rules for how long it takes to get from one planet to another.

He makes the same claim about Battlestar Galactica, though, and I’m afraid he has started a nerd fight. Check the comments to watch it unfold.

It’s all happening again

Now that we have two points rather than only one it looks like we can safely begin to plot a trend:

Coming Sept. 15, 2009.

And more from the Guardian:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has sold over 50,000 copies in the UK and 600,000 in the US since publication in April, sparking a new trend for what Quirk has dubbed the “literary monster mash-up”. Other publishers have rushed to jump onto the bandwagon, and this autumn will see publication of both Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter – subtitled She Loved Her Country; She Hated Demons – and I am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas. “Marley was dead. Again,” says its publisher Orion. “Will the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future be able to stop the world from drowning under a top-hatted and crinolined zombie horde?”

Seth Grahame-Smith, meanwhile, the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, signed a deal worth a rumoured $500,000 (£300,000) in April with Grand Central to write the life of Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter.

Intriguing. I also note with a certain amount of interest that they’re purposefully releasing Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters on the same day as Dan Brown’s latest novel is set to come out. Apparently the people at Quirk Books are all about choosing their battles.

UPDATE: Thanks to the invaluable Craig Burrell, here’s a look at the official trailer for the book – an apparent novelty in its own right:

Tentacles!

Outrage mounts as Science makes bold claim

I really don’t understand this at all.

Prior to this moment in the illustrious history of Science, it had always been assumed by historians that Nelson’s relentless broadsides were let fly with the hope that the impotent cannon-fire would distract the French long enough for the drill-tipped submarines to move into position.  On the rare occasions when these submarines were not available, the cannons were fired so that their percussive force, while harmless in itself, might drive the French ships onto a nearby sandbar, or what have you.

Moreover, however, cannons were mostly employed to give the deckhands something to do when they weren’t engaged in the far more essential task of holystoning the decks.  It was found that the lower classes (of which seagoing crews were comprised to an inordinate degree) were greatly pleased by explosions, and this was in turn found to boost morale during engagements with enemy vessels.  That the cannons were in any sense directly involved in the sinking of ships of war had  until today been viewed by leading scientists as a quaint myth born of the human tendency to see correlation as causation.

A fire in the evening

Sunday evening saw me fulfill a dream of three years’ standing, and it didn’t shake out exactly as I had predicted it might, if it were ever to transpire. In many ways it was better.

At some point in 2006, while at the University of Western Ontario, I happened to read a write-up in the student newspaper about the latest album by an artist I had never heard of. That I read the review at all was sort of a departure, to be honest; I didn’t make a habit of reading the paper at all, it being so often teeth-grindingly terrible, and my interest in music produced by people who are still alive is minimal at best. Still, I was leafing through it and saw the album cover next to the review. It caught my eye. How could it not:

It all sounded pretty interesting, so I checked out some clips on the internet to make up my mind. My mind was made up. I had no choice. Something new had happened to me.

Neko Case’s music is hard to describe, and not always easy to listen to, either. Her lyrics are of that brilliant sort that are largely incomprehensible when taken together but which contain a seemingly endless series of entirely familiar ideas. It’s like – well, it is – modern poetry in that respect, and in the hands of a lesser vocalist such lyrics might be insufferable. Take this section from “Red Tide,” comprising some fifty seconds of Middle Cyclone, as an example:

There’s a smell here of gravel and cigarettes lit
When the match made them sweet
When the engine turned over and beat up our street
Oh that was a day to remember
I remember because of the fires that lept
From the caves of the things that have not happened yet
When I think of them now they smell to me quite sinister

I want to go back and die at the drive-in
Die before strangers can say
I hate the rain
Oh I hate the rain

The song is about Seattle, she said.

It’s one thing to read the lyrics in print, of course, and quite another to actually listen to them. I don’t want to insist that it all becomes clear when one hears the thing properly performed, for in truth it doesn’t, but it remains an incredibly satisfying fifty seconds, and an incredibly satisfying song.

It was with a desire to find such satisfaction in a live venue that I set out on Sunday afternoon for the sprawling site of the Ottawa Bluesfest at Lebreton Flats. Several enormous stages were in evidence as I approached the grounds – the first time I have ever done so, for George Clinton and his associates played in the heart of the market downtown – and the crowds appeared large. They were also defiant: it had the gall to start raining almost immediately upon my setting out for the concert grounds, and didn’t let up until twenty minutes or so before Neko was to take the stage. My outrage at the time could be described as Complete, but those already in attendence were determined to enjoy what was before them regardless of the weather.

What was before them when I arrived was the English hip-hop artist Estelle, who strode boldly (and not a little terrifyingly) across the rain-slicked stage on high spike heels that would have been imprudent even at the best of times. She was well aware of the danger, and made great show of toweling down the stage at various points. She also inadvertently pointed out one of the many differences of idiom that exist between her people and ours; she worried that she would soon “bust her ass” if she continued to dance or even move on such a slippery surface. It took a moment for many to follow her meaning, and if they were disappointed that she hadn’t been promising still more industrious crooning, they didn’t show it.

Nevertheless, her performance was well-received by all present – even those not watching her at her actual stage. Those of us waiting for Neko’s set to start at the other substantial stage (the major performances were staggered in both time and place to prevent them drowning one another out) could hear it all just fine, and many of the younger women present seemed to be quite happily grooving to tunes I’d never heard. That’s not in itself unusual – moreover it’s typical – but it seemed an odd sort of platform to cross in terms of both style and subject matter.

The crowd assembling was a mixture of young and old hipsters; no toddlers on shoulders this time. Men with ponytails and women with crew cuts. Girls with rectangular glasses and dresses they made themselves. Young males who were either substantially portly or who had chests like coat-hangers, and very little in the way of those falling anywhere in between. There may have been different demographics represented elsewhere in the crowd, but around me this is what we had.

Owing to my legendary prudence, so often manifested in the form of getting to places early and then standing around, I found myself right at the front of the pack, so to speak. The crowd filled out substantially as 7:30 drew closer, and the number of people ballooning off behind me numbered in the very least in the high hundreds, but very likely in the thousands. But they didn’t matter; what mattered was that I was right up against the barrier, just right of centre-stage. They weren’t messing around with this, either. There was the standard metal barrier, plus a four- or five-foot gap, and then a layer of security guards standing between us and the stage, which was itself pretty tall and lacked any visible stairway. I guess if there was ever a crowd likely to charge the stage in a frenzy it was us, so I don’t blame them for their caution.

There was half an hour to go, so I continued to work my way through The Doctor’s Wife. If that offended anyone they didn’t let on, but I only got to read for a good ten minutes before I was interrupted by a pleasant woman making conversation. Fair enough! That’s what the pre-show lull is for, after all, and it would be great to talk to some other fans about what was going to transpire. But then she kept Making Conversation, and I was not disposed to continue, so I politely absented myself and walked over to the other side of the stage, saying that I needed to find someone. I feel bad about it, but at the time it seemed the thing to do.

It was true, anyway, in the abstract: I needed to find someone who would not talk to me for a little while. I found her. Her disinclination to talk to me would later prove frustrating, for she was quite pretty, but I wasn’t there to flirt with girls in rectangular glasses.

The raison d’etre took the stage shortly after that, and it rather cut across my expectations. I’ve heard of performers dressing in unassuming attire; Neko Case was unassumption incarnate:

[Photo from actual performance; cellphone camera quality not so great actually]

I’ve seen her peforming live in clips on the internet, so I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did, a bit.

The show was a no-nonsense affair. She thanked us for being there, and thanked us for thanking her for being there, and then she made it happen. I took the liberty of keeping track of her set list, and it proved quite substantial:

1. Maybe Sparrow (from Fox Confessor Brings the Flood)
2. Man-Eater (from Middle Cyclone)
3. Hold On, Hold On (Fox Confessor)
4. The Pharaohs (Middle Cyclone)
5. Middle Cyclone (MC)
6. Deep Red Bells (From Blacklisted)
7. I Wish I Was the Moon (from Blacklisted)
8. The Tigers Have Spoken (from The Tigers Have Spoken)
9. Margaret vs. Pauline (FC)
10. Red Tide (MC)
11. Prison Girls (MC)
12. Favourite (THS)
13. Don’t Forget Me (Harry Nilsson cover; MC)
14. Teenage Feeling (FC)
15. This Tornado Loves You (MC)
16. Vengeance is Sleeping (MC)
17. If You Knew (THS)
18. Star Witness (FC)
19. Knock Loud (as encore; lyrics by Sook-Yin Lee)

Certain moments were eminently memorable. The song “Middle Cyclone” includes a delightful riff from a sort of cigar-box music-maker with a little wind-up chime in it, the playing of which involves turning the crank to draw the hole-punched strip through the mechanism. It’s a smaller version of the player piano, I guess. Normally Neko’s friend and backup singer Kelly Hogan would have done it, but she was unable to attend due to a death in the family. Neko thus played the instrument herself, or tried to; the first go-round worked fine, but she was off-tempo on the second one and couldn’t make it catch up for the life of her. “Yes,” she said, as the band played on around her, “it is possible to screw up something this simple.”

It started raining again between “I Wish I Was the Moon” and “The Tigers Have Spoken,” and as such “Red Tide’s” enigmatic final announcement (you read it earlier in the post, pay attention) was greeted with a roar of approbation.

The performance quality was uniformly excellent. I was worried at the outset that it couldn’t possibly live up to the high production values of her album work, but Neko’s voice seems stronger in person, oddly enough. It may even have been the absence of the backup singer that did it. Whatever the cause, there was in her delivery every ounce of the thunderous fire that we have come to expect from her. It served her especially well during “Deep Red Bells” – one of my very favourite of her songs – which is a hard-wrought exercise in the southern gothic. I was gratified to see that even confronted with a crowd full of her fans she still managed to fake them out with the apparent ending before storming into the actual (and awesome) conclusion.

All in all it was a fine evening. The rain only endured for a little while, and it was pretty light anyway; both the wetness and her performance gave way to a beautiful and cool evening with patchy clouds across a strangely yellow sky. I had an expensive beer with a nice red-headed girl I had ended up standing next to for the bulk of the show, and listened to Joe Cocker’s performance in the process. He still has it – whatever it is he had – after all these years, and sent out entirely creditable performances of “Up Where We Belong” and the Beatles’ “Come Together,” the latter of which was sort of amazing, actually. He did other songs, too, but I didn’t hear all of them.

And then I went home, reveling in the quiet and slightly drunken stupor of a city who knows her weekend is over.

Incoming and ongoing

I’ve been rather busy today with various forms of bureaucracy, but there will be content posted later on.  The Neko Case concert was definitively experienced and about it there is much to be said.  You’ll have to come back later to find out just what, though.

After that, I will (probably) be going out to see some more musical acts in the evening, and thus my coverage of these events will (likely) continue tomorrow.

Escape from Castle Funkenstein

In the post in which I forecast the events about to be narrated, I declared that, in light of the undeniable fact of George Clinton and his funk orchestra giving a free performance in downtown Ottawa, “I’d be foolish not to go.” Indeed.

The evening being a fine and clear one, and not at all afflicted by the rains that have been our constant companion in recent weeks, I resolved to attend the performance at the corner of William and York, just off Sussex. A strip usually set aside for parking had been closed off to accomodate the stage and the substantial crowd, and as my friend and I arrived, some fifteen minutes ahead of the scheduled beginning of the funk set, a sassy reggae band was warming up the crowd.

We elected to grab a beer at the Dominion, a seedy but unblushingly honest bar nearby, and there I’ll leave us, for the moment, while I talk about the crowd that was beginning to form.

I had worried, at the outset, that I would be denounced as being simply too white and square to attend such a concert, free or otherwise, and laughed off of the very pavement soon after showing up. I pictured enormous black men with dreadlocks uttering incomprehensible warnings as they shooed me away, and perhaps even George Clinton himself, acting in his capacity of Speaker of the House in the Parliament Funkadelic, halting the proceedings until the floor could be cleared of the disruption I was bound to represent.

As it happened I needn’t have worried; there were people of all walks of life there, from the moment I arrived to the moment I left, and anyone wishing to drive me off in a bid to keep the tone of the place sufficiently groovy would have had many hundreds of other candidates to consider before I even became a factor. There were a goodly number of toddlers on shoulders, which I felt boded ill, but there were also lots of young hipsters, with their distinctively elaborate haircuts and attire contrived to appear cheap while actually being very expensive. There were in fact several enormous black men with dreadlocks, but they seemed to be having a good time and didn’t care that I was there after all. There were security guards dispersed throughout the crowd in a vain attempt to stop that mad crush of enthusiasts from smoking joint after surreptitious joint. There were middle-aged and even elderly yuppies, no doubt hankering for something vividly remembered but only faintly felt. There were about 1.3 pretty girls per square yard, though “pretty” and “girls” are hardly the words. There were – probably more than I had anticipated – people who had just been passing by and who had stopped to see what the fuss was about.

The fuss took the stage about twenty minutes late (8:50 for an 8:30 show), and George Clinton was nowhere to be seen. I’ll admit that I wasn’t exactly front-row centre on this one, but Mr. Clinton is anything if not incredibly distinctive in appearance and his absence was notable. The crowd seethed gently with unease; was that him in the corner, maybe? Did he cut his hair? Maybe he was the one with the enormous hat? Nobody knew; there was no certainty. I knew, though: George Clinton was not on stage.

Those who were on stage, however, constituted a colourful crew. The bulk of them were fairly conventional musicians, wearing casual clothes as they competently – and in some cases very skillfully – plied their trade. I didn’t come to see competent musicianship, though; I came to see the broken remants of the Parliament Funkadelic and whomever else they may have added to their number to fill the gaps. A man with a giant clown wig played a guitar; another man, dressed in nothing but a diaper-like loincloth (a yellow overcoat was quickly discarded), played another guitar — it was one of the saddest sights in all creation. Two young ladies provided backup vocals; one of them was dressed as a scantily-clad angel with a white top hat. Before the night had concluded we would see her dance on rollerskates for some reason not adequately explained. I wasn’t complaining.

The show began with the inescapable moment of silence for Michael Jackson, who “gave us everything,” the man on stage declared. We were then exhorted to “make some noise,” which request was duly fulfilled. He asked us to say “yeah” — we said it. This process had to be repeated a number of times because the man on stage wasn’t initially happy with the volume he was getting from us, but eventually he seemed satisfied and the show was able to proceed.

I don’t remember what the first song was called – the name may not have been announced – but it was something about The Funk and the varying levels thereof in certain individuals. The consumption of pills played some part in the process; it wasn’t exactly clear. Having easily intelligible lyrics is not a failing of which the P-Funk All-Stars could be accused. The thing went on for a good ten minutes, during which time each of the musicians on stage was permitted a short solo. They were all very good.

By the time the next song had begun George Clinton had finally wandered out onto stage. He didn’t seem to be doing much — just sort of looking at things that were happening, and pointing at instruments occasionally. He spent about five minutes straight standing perfectly still while pointing at the drums, which weren’t doing anything remarkable at the time. I remarked to my friend that he seemed to be more of a facillitator of music than a musician himself; he replied that it would be foolish to think that Mr. Clinton had any more idea of what he was doing than I did.

Things moved along well enough after that. A number of songs of varying degrees of quality were performed, but for the most part it was a hard-driving, funk-infused, mostly unobjectionable time. Things took a dramatic turn with the introduction of an angry pimp character, who strode around the stage pompously defying everyone without contributing anything musically. He got a solid and possibly deserved laugh when he unfolded a large bristol-board sign reading “F–k George Clinton” while standing directly behind the man himself, but his real place in the proceedings would not become apparent until shortly thereafter. As the band played on, he took off his pimp-jacket (the hat remained) and engaged in a series of acrobatic feats, each more impressive than the last. There were handstands and strange pop-locking episodes and moments of climbing on top of things. It was all very interesting.

The music was good; I frequently found myself nodding my head in sympathy to the rhythm.

All that changed, however, with the introduction of George Clinton’s granddaughter (or so, at least, he described her as being). This young lady took the stage triumphantly, and revealed that she had precisely what her grandfather lacked when it came to intelligibility, precision and strength of voice. Unfortunately, however, she employed these gifts in the unbroken utterance of increasingly monstrous innuendo and wickedness, on topics alternately salacious and profane.  I was reminded of the much more favourable moment in musical history when Buddy Rich’s twelve-year-old daughter came up on stage to sing a few rounds of “The Beat Goes On;” this was nothing like that.

I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me, but I found myself disappointed that George Clinton was the sort of man who would stand there, grooving abstractedly, allowing his own granddaughter to engage in such barbarism in front of the general public. My heart went out to those parents who had brought their children with them, though I had thought it a poor idea to begin with; I can only hope that most of the kids didn’t understand what was going on.

I had already intended to leave around this point anyway, for it was growing late, and the endless stream of wretchedness pouring off the stage made it an easy decision. My friend elected to stay to see how it all turned out, but I took my leave and made my way home in a strange and uncertain mood.

I got my money’s worth, anyway. Nobody could say I didn’t.