50 Years Ago Today

… A freighter carrying iron ore was sunk on Lake Superior in hurricane-force winds.

I don’t follow the shipping news and even if I had I’d never have heard of this particular tragedy if it weren’t for a song by Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian musician who died in 2023. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a masterpiece of storytelling and melody.

Every year the Mariners’ Church in Detroit tolled its bells 29 times to commemorate the lives lost on the freighter. After Lightfoot died they changed it to 30.

How we as humans choose to memorialize our dead is an interesting question I’m pondering as I’m planning a trip to Bodega Bay tomorrow to have my own memorialization of my parents…

House of the Perpetually Setting Sun

Pica has been subscribing to Netflix for the past few weeks mainly to watch the new season of “The Great British Bakeoff”, and yesterday I took advantage of the access to view the new movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow, “A House of Dynamite”. This is a nuclear war thriller about the response of the United States government to the detection of a single ICBM of unknown origin on a suborbital trajectory leaving the Pacific to strike the continental U.S. This covers a period of about 18 minutes between detection and impact, which makes for a quite short movie in real time. Bigelow’s intent in the movie is to show the reactions of the key people involved in the crisis, and she accomplishes this by following different sets of people in three different retellings of the 18 minutes. The first part follows the duty officer in the White House Situation Room (played by Rebecca Ferguson) as well as the crew of the anti-ballistic missile base in Alaska trying to shoot down the ICBM. The last part focuses on the response of the President of the United States, played by Idris Elba. Narratively I didn’t find that this structuring of the story worked well. The first portion was quite exciting, but in passes 2 and 3 it grew tedious. The strongest performance in the movie was from Rebecca Ferguson, but her story ended in the first portion.

The movie was good, not great, more didactic than memorable cinema. We certainly learn about the impossibility of communication among decision-makers under a crisis of such a short timespan, and the doubtful utility of the present-day anti-ballistic missile system (“hitting a bullet with a bullet” is the phrase they use in the movie). My favorite movie in the genre of nuclear war films still remains “Dr. Strangelove”.

A Visit to Berkeley

I took myself to Berkeley yesterday to visit my mother-in-law whom I love but don’t see very often. She had recently had a heart procedure but wanted to give me a hug in person following mum’s death.

I don’t see her very often, but I almost NEVER see her alone. Our conversation ranged far and wide — I told her about alchemy and what I’d been reading, we talked about music and its relation to poetry. I have always wondered whether composition is like poetry, in that it seems to fall out of the sky. Well, yes, she said, but there are rules.

I have never listened to much Schubert outside of the Lieder but she pointed me to his final piano sonata (D960 in Bb major). Sharon says he was the master of juxtaposition: in one bar your dog died, in the next, you’re eating cotton candy. I listened to this sonata after I got home and it really does plumb the depths of grief, so I think I’ll be listening to it some more. When she told me that Numenius’ father had asked for it to be played during his last 24 hours of life, it made me determined to listen to it even more carefully.

Write a book, she said. Write a book about your mother, since it’s really hot now. Even if only 10 people read it. Hot like an alchemist’s flame? It’s a thought.

Jazz Band

This is my urban sketch for this past Sunday. I went over to Central Park where the biweekly Davis Craft & Vintage Fair was taking place. The local New Harmony Jazz Band was playing at one end of the fair, as they often do.

I am getting used to sketching in this 7”×7” sketchbook. It’s a little bigger than what I’ve been sketching in previously, but this lets me be freer with the sketches. I like the combination of fountain pen fine line work with a gray Pentel brush for bolder ink strokes. I am still pleased with the Derwent line and wash kit. It was nice to have that bold Inktense yellow handy for the tent canopy. And I figured out how to mix skin tones with the paint pan set: I used a combination of poppy red with the mango Inktense colors.

The Monk Of Santa Cruz

I was saddened to learn yesterday of the death a couple days ago of the satirical songwriter and performer Tom Lehrer at age 97. By coincidence I was watching an interview yesterday with the creator of the website hosting all of Tom Lehrer’s works. The interview was from three weeks ago, when Tom was very much alive. The interview prompted me to check his entry in Wikipedia and I was taken aback to learn he died the previous day.

Tom Lehrer’s songs were very much a part of my childhood in the early 1970s. I don’t know if it was my record-collecting father or my record-collecting brother who brought the recordings home, but I heard his songs often. Judging from the accolades these past couple of days, many other people loved his songs as well.

He withdrew from songwriting and performing in the late 1960s, but his satire remains surprisingly relevant in 2025. The flip side of this is the unfortunate truth that we really haven’t solved any of these issues since then! (E.g. his song “Who’s next” is all about nuclear proliferation.) Starting in 1972 he settled into a quiet career teaching mathematics for non-majors and musical theatre at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Here is a just-posted musical eulogy for Tom Lehrer by the interviewer referred to above, Kira Coviello (aka Honest2Betsy).

On Catalan and Occitan

As I mentioned a couple days ago, I’m now dabbling in Catalan. I think I got drawn into the language in the following way. Pica just related how she herself started dabbling in Catalan because of the arrival of our Catalan neighbors. At that point, I watched a couple videos from the YouTube channel Easy Catalan. Easy Catalan is part of the Easy Languages network of language learning content that is built around street interviews that are doubly-subtitled in English and in the target language. When listening to these street interviews in Catalan, I thought to myself “Oh, I really like the sound of this language! It sounds a good bit like Old Occitan.”

How on earth do I know what Old Occitan sounds like? I don’t, of course, but long ago I discovered troubadour song and became enamored of that 800-year-old world of music and poetry. I collected many recordings of modern performers interpreting troubadour songs. One of which that stands out is a 1991 recording by the Camerata Mediterranea entitled Lo Gai Saber. The salient feature of this recording is that the singers all had contact with modern Occitan in their youth and assimilated the sounds of the language. Modern Occitan is not the same as Old Occitan but this is probably as close as one can get to recreating the medieval language’s phonology. This recording is at the present moment streamable on YouTube.

Catalan and Occitan are very closely related languages, described in an article in a site on troubadours as being one diasystem, two languages. Here is a YouTube video showing their mutual intelligibility. In it Laura (aka Couch Polyglot) has a conversation with Gabrièu (aka Parpalhon Blau), with Laura speaking Catalan and Gabrièu speaking Occitan. Laura has had very little exposure to Occitan prior to this point.

Good Night, and Good Luck

We had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Numenius’ family. His stepbrother is an actor and plays the part of cameraman in the George Clooney version of the above play on Broadway. This was streamed live today by CNN and we were able to watch it.

The media are very different now than they were in 1954… but scaremongering by those insatiably hungry for power is sadly still with us. Glad we saw it. And glad we saw Andy as Charlie on a screen seen by millions around the world!

State of Siege

Last week I finished reading Fernand Braudel’s masterful tome The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, a book which I’ve been wanting to get through for about twenty-five years now. Looking around for other retellings of the same theme I came across the author Roger Crowley, who has recently written the books 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West and Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, The Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World. Crowley is an able storyteller, and I finished both these books in rapid succession. Sieges are at the center of both books: the siege and the fall of Constantinople being the subject of the first, and the Great Siege of Malta in 1565 being the centerpiece of the second book.

After reading Crowley’s narrative I decide the siege of Malta would make a great movie, hitting a number of good storytelling tropes: an epic defense against overwhelming odds; the sacrifice of one contingent of the defenders to buy time for the rest; and finally rescue by the arrival of reinforcements just in time (delayed by the ditherings of Philip II off in Spain). Sieges don’t seem to make it into war movies very often though. What comes to my mind is Helms’ Deep in The Two Towers, and switching from fantasy to history, the 1964 movie Zulu. This list of top ten siege movies doesn’t really add any other examples of siege warfare, most of the movies on the list being thrillers or horror flicks. I don’t think the siege of Constantinople has quite the potential for being a movie as does the siege of Malta. Not that 15th-16th century Mediterranean history has the slightest chance of making it into the movies: how can you film a historical drama without there being any English royalty around?

Passe-Passe Papa

Numenius and I walked the five miles into town and back yesterday to see The Ilusionist, one of the three animation films nominated for an Oscar this year. It probably won’t get one because the Academy is so very safe and the Toy Story triology is over and will be hard for them to pass up, but you should go if you get the chance.

Jacques Tati wrote the screenplay in the late 50s. His daughter gave it to Sylvain Chomet after he’d asked her for permission to show a clip of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot in The Triplets of Belleville/Belleville Rendezvous. The resulting animated film is like having another — another! — Tati film come to life. He’s right there, exquisitely drawn, every expression and gawky crumple-from-the-middle impossibly perfect. There’s a scene in which the magician bumbles into a theatre playing Tati in Mon Oncle, leaving, not quite leaving, finally walking through a gate; it’s his cue to depart, leaving the young Shetland islander-turned Edinburgh beauty he’d been a father-figure to behind in the arms of the future — television and rock-and-roll. It’s the most loving story of loss and, well, passing.

If this film weren’t so heartwrenching I’d go back today. Actually, I’d watch all of Tati first and then go — I caught some of the references but lost many more, doubtless, and part of what makes this so painful is that my father was such a Tati fan. What I definitely want to do is listen to the final song (written, as was the entire score, by Chomet himself) — this film is almost devoid of dialogue and lots of clues are to be found in the lyrics, but I didn’t catch them all.

But We Forgot The Beer Beforehand

Yesterday we went to see “Invictus,” the movie directed by Clint Eastwood about Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s largely Afrikaner rugby team, the Springboks, during the 1995 Rugby World Cup played in South Africa. It’s a great story, and pretty much all true. Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon do credible jobs playing respectively Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar, the team captain of the Springboks. In classic sports movie trope fashion, the underdog Springboks manage to win the final, and more significantly help to unify the country in those fragile post-apartheid years.

As it happens there’s a bit of local color to the story. There’s a guy in Davis named Michael Lewis who writes a column every month or so in the local paper on beer and brewing (Lewis started the brewing science curriculum here at UCD). His last piece was about the story of the movie. It turns out Lewis was actually in attendance at the final of the World Cup, having been an amateur rugby player from a long ways back and for some reason was on hand in South Africa at that time. As he puts it — “The event is quite clear in my memory — despite a prodigious amount of pre-game beer sunk with my son and my brother-in-law, at his club — because it is, without a doubt, the seminal moment of my life associated with a sporting event.”

He concludes: “I look forward immensely to seeing the movie…partly, I suppose, because I’m an old rugby player, but mainly because I feel some ownership of it, odd as that might seem. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it as well. Look out for Jonah Lomu, the SAA 747 ^*, and the No. 6 jersey. And to make the experience thoroughly authentic, have a few beers before you go.”

^* The bit in the movie about the jetliner is true.