Bulls and Briars

It’s been a rainy Sunday, which at this time of year might mean the last rain we’ll see till November. Numenius got soaked while out on a levee walk. I, meanwhile, was in Sacramento learning how to do acrylic transfers. I’m not sure what I’d ever use this technique for but doesn’t hurt to learn it.

Armed with this new knowledge and Numenius with a pair of dry trousers we headed out to hear a concert by the American Recorder Orchestra of the West. An eclectic collection of Medieval and early Renaissance pieces, it seemed perfect for the drizzle. My favorite piece was “Byrd one brere” (Bird in the Briar), written by an anonymous 13th century English monk who was obviously bored with the papal bull he was reading—he turned it over and wrote this instead.

Birds in the briars: I have still not seen a blue grosbeak or an ash-throated flycatcher here this season, but they’re the last in. Should be soon.

Rewatching Lawrence

Inspired by last week’s outing to see “Hidalgo” (an entertaining horse movie featuring Viggo Mortensen riding across the desert), we just watched “Lawrence of Arabia” again, having found the DVD at the library this weekend. It remains an amazing film, an epic which after 42 years hasn’t lost a bit of its power. I love the shots of the desert, the horses, the camels (the greatest camel movie of all time).

Favorite T.E. Lawrence fact: in the summer of 1908 he rode his bicycle 2,400 miles around France for his study of Crusader castles which he wrote up in his thesis at Oxford completed in 1910.

Truck Driver’s Gear Changes

A truck driver’s gear change is a musicological term for modulation of a song up a key, generally just before the song’s end in a “repeat-until-fade” section. This effect has been termed an “odious time killer in much commercial music.”

This site is a catalogue of some of the most egregious examples of the genre, complete with clips from the songs. The site’s definitive example—“fearsomely sickening in its intensity, and yet somehow inspiring in its audacity”—comes from Michael Jackson’s 1987 song Man In The Mirror. The site warns that the clip may make you physically sick.

The Drowning Of The City Of Ys

This is the title of a medieval legend from Brittany concerning a king Gradlon who built a city below sea level for Dahut his daughter. Dahut turned wayward, letting a prince, or perhaps the devil, steal the key to the floodgates of the city and thereupon open the sluices, drowning the city. Gradlon escaped, Dahut didn’t, and to this day fishermen sometimes hear her singing or playing bells below the waters.

We just heard Shira Kammen, accompanied by Tim Rayborn and Jim Oakden, perform a rendition of this ballad in a concert this afternoon at the Davis Community Church. Shira Kammen is a favorite musician of mine, renowned for her performances on medieval bowed instruments (e.g. the vielle). The first half of today’s concert featured songs in Middle English, the second half being the Breton tale with a bit of dancing as well as singing of some of the refrains by the audience.

Medieval music provides the performer very little to go upon. Many of the verses in today’s concert survived without any known melody. But that makes it up to the musician to supply inventiveness and creativity, and there’s nothing wrong with that!

In Search Of Early Music

While stumbling around the radio waves Saturday looking to practice recording music digitally straight to the laptop with our new iMic, I came across the radio show Harmonia, a weekly hour-long program from Indiana University on early music. This week’s program was on early American music, and I managed to record some shapenote tunes and a jig or two. I’m glad I finally found this show, which should become a staple on Saturdays for me.

Discovering Digital Audio

Our installation of Panther, the new version of the Mac operating system, has prompted me to start playing with the Apple music jukebox program, iTunes. And in so doing I’ve finally become clued into the digital music scene. The world of internet music is quite in flux, but some trends are getting clearer. Business models are emerging for selling music over the net. The iTunes music store is doing quite well, seems to hit the sweet spot: reasonable prices for downloading (99 cents a track), an ever-growing selection of music, and fair licensing terms. And shareware music, where you can download before paying for the album, is now a viable alternative, examples being the Berkeley record label Magnatune, and the independent CD distributor CD Baby. There’s plenty to explore, and I’m learning that a laptop with a minimum of hardware and software can make for an all-in-one music box, allowing for recording, editing, and playback with great ease.

Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey

Disclaimer: I’ve read all the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels at least three times (well, okay, five). The series comprises twenty books. Rachel Jacoff, a Dante scholar at Wellesley, first put me on to them—she thought I’d like them because Stephen (the ship’s surgeon) is a birder. (And lots else, of course.)

My fear about this film when I heard it was being made revolved primarily around the choice of lead roles. Russell Crowe? How could he possibly carry off the role of a British naval captain in the Napoleonic wars, one whose punning is wretched but whose voice can be heard over two miles away, who understands the zeitgest of the lower deck where he was once assigned for stealing tripe (or stowing a girl), and whose most profound weakness is for that timeless English delicacy, the suet pudding?

I’m surprised, almost, to report that he gets it almost perfect. That Peter Weir absolutely understands the interaction between Jack and Stephen (Paul Bettany is an unlikely exquisite choice for this role). That despite the truncated plot, taken from at least five of the novels, it doesn’t matter: it’s all about character anyway. Jane Austen at sea is how someone once described it. There’s very little here in the way of Jane Austen; what the books don’t give you is the noise. I hope they don’t make any more in the series—I fail to see how this could be bettered. As a period piece it has no rivals, in my opinion.

The release coincides nicely for Oscar time and there are sure to be a few nods; I think it will win outright for editing.

Seabiscuit and the Great Depression

I feel as though I spent the afternoon in the company of my mother’s parents when they were young… The years before World War I when anything seemed possible, the twenties when everything went crazy and there was no booze to be had to celebrate it, the years following the Crash when a peripatetic lifestyle was cause for resignation and invention, family and focus. When the whole country was waiting for something more, something to lift it out of a self-induced quagmire. This story somehow seems very timely, a warning against complacency: if this happened tomorrow, would we cope? Would we deal?

I don’t know whether my grandparents were remotely interested in horseracing, or if they cared one way or the other about the fortunes of Seabiscuit. I’d like to think, though, that the story I saw on the screen today really did have the effect it was portrayed as having had: to lift the spirits of an entire generation, to raise the possibility of the second chance.

I like these underdog stories. I wish David Millar had not crashed in the Time Trial this morning so he might have beaten Tour de France speed record despite the appalling conditions, for instance. I hope against hope that the Red Sox will be able to edge out the Yankees this year and then not choke. I root for teams in the World Cup that are described as having no chance. I’d root for Seabiscuit.

The Movie Star from Davis

We had dinner this evening at Thai Nakorn, an excellent new restaurant next to the Signature Theatre on G Street in downtown Davis. There was much commotion in front of the movie theatre, including a TV cameraman filming people. It turns out that the supervising animator of “Finding Nemo”, Dylan Brown, is from Davis, and he was there for a theatre party for friends and family being given in his honor by his mom.

Our local movie critic, Derrick Bang, whose opinions we generally agree with, gave “Finding Nemo” five stars, so I think it just got added to our “to-see” list.