Coelacanth and the tiger scene

A celebration of a classic movie scene. I don't follow dance as an artform, but this evening Clare was watching the BBC Four Young Dancer competition, and I overheard from my office some music that was very familiar and evocative. It accompanied the duet by Jacob O'Connell and Jason Mabana performed for the Contemporary Final. It took a few minutes to place it - or, it turned out, to place what it was so strongly recalling.

A Slight Trick of the Mind

Further to Aged Holmes stories, I just finished Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind, a novel imagining Sherlock Holmes at 93, long retired to the Sussex Downs and his bee-keeping. Although it dates from 2005, I only checked it out recently after news reports mentioned it as source for the forthcoming film Mr. Holmes.

The tinkle of the accordion ... and the concertina's melancholy string

The Athenaeum comment on Thomas Duncan's silly translated phrase from Bruges-la-Morte, "the tinkle of the accordion" put me in mind of the above scene from the 1985 A Room with a View.

Diamonds in the sky

I don't normally enthuse about adverts, but this current Sony 4K "Ice Bubbles" one, showing soap bubbles freezing in cold air, is very pretty, though I'm not sure quite what to make of it.

The Full English

The Full English Digital Archive is a free searchable online archive of early 20th century English folk arts manuscripts. Largely Heritage Lottery funded, it's part of the larger Full English project of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS),  and went live on 20th June 2014.

Franklin: streamlining a ballad

I got so absorbed in the maritime details that I forgot the important point that the Franklin expedition got into the English folk tradition. After the loss of the expedition, Jane, Lady Franklin, sponsored seven expeditions to find what had happened to Franklin and his crew. This inspired the 1850-ish broadside ballad that evolved into the folk song Lady Franklin's Lament aka Lord Franklin aka The Sailor's Dream.

We'd erode and fall in green ...

... or, Kate Bush meets coastal geomorphology. The Express & Echo, Exeter, is one of many publications to report on the coastal erosion threat to the singer's mansion in the South Hams, Devon: Kate Bush faces a battle to save Devon clifftop home from falling into the sea (September 03, 2014).

Ubik poem

For Tony Boucher

ich sih die liehte heide
in gruner varwe stan
dar suln wir alle gehen,
die sumerzeit enphahen

I see the sunstruck forest
In green it stands complete.
There soon we all are going,
The summertime to meet.

Billie Millin / Dawlish Museum

I can't remember the precise date on this, but I visited Dawlish Museum some time mid-summer 2014, and a very good town museum it is.

      With 11 rooms over 3 floors, the museum is most famous for its display of Piper Bill Millins D-Day bagpipes. The displays in Dawlish Museum are regularly updated and depict life past and present in the town and notably tell the story of the February storm of 2014 which severely damaged the railway line. A vast archive of 100's of rare historical photographs can be seen in both album form or on the new library P.C.
      Children as well as adults are well catered for and there are many fun activities just for them such as the dressing up outfits and the Black Swan Trail. The Museum is entirely run by volunteers, is self funding and recently proudly gained official accreditation.

As may be well-known by now, the celebrated bagpiper and soldier William "Bill" Millin - the personal piper to Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat, commander of 1 Special Service Brigade at D-Day - retired to Dawlish in 1988, and his bagpipes and an associated display form a central part of Dawlish Museum.
      Dawlish Museum's collections of topographic material, such as old photographs and postcards, are excellent. Although the Museum has a no-photo policy, I had a very useful discussion with Andrew Wright, one of the Museum volunteers, about the use of a virtually uncredited postcard image of the "Clerk" a.k.a. Shag Rock for a debunking pamphlet. (I'm now confident that the "Parson and Clerk" legend has no precursor or basis in folklore, but comes entirely from a very literary anonymous short story in the 1848 anthology Legends of Devon - one of a series of which a Notes & Queries correspondent described as: "each and all original whims of the moment, and not reproductions of popular legends").

- Ray

The Eyes! The Eyes! and other ads

It goes without saying that ads for scammy products are nothing new, especially in the days before the Advertising Standards Authority, but these (among many) caught my eye while I was browsing the Isle of Wight Observer for April 05, 1879.

The Three Old Maids of Lee

This is Old Maid's Cottage, Lee, near Ilfracombe - subject of a large number of historical postcards - which turned up as one of the Mystery Devon images locations in a recent Devon History Society post. The house still exists, as what looks like an extremely pleasant holiday rental.

Babylon is Fallen

Just purging some bookmarks, I rediscovered Ted Chiang's SF story Tower of Babylon, brilliantly imagining the practicalities of building of the Tower of Babel. This in turn reminded me of Alasdair Gray's collection Unlikely Stories, Mostly, which has a two-part fable on the same theme: The Start of the Axletree and The End of the Axletree, which uses the building of the Tower of Babel, and the evolving social structures within its workers and management, as an allegory for the development of human civilisation. The bookmarks also included several links for the hymn tune Babylon Is Fallen, which concluded the Topsham production of Tony Harrison's Mysteries earlier this year. It's a very catchy tune, open to considerable variation in style, whether the powerfully raw close harmony of Swan Arcade ...



... Sacred Harp devotional part singing ...



... or this grim anti-capitalist anthem by Plunderphoenix: Babylon muß fallen:



The tune is quite often claimed to be a 17th century Shaker hymn, but attribution doesn't seem to reliably track back further than the 1870s and William Edward Chute ...

His tune BABYLON IS FALLEN was printed in The Musical Million 6 (December 1875) and in Hauser's Olive Leaf (1878), where Hauser states that Prof. William E. Chute, then living in St. Thomas, Ontario, “composed the tune out of an old theme, and is too modest to claim any originality, but I do it for him."
- The Makers of the Sacred Harp, David Warren Steel, Richard H Hulan, University of Illinois Press, 2010

However, in an interesting Google Groups discussion on the tune - music for SH 117 BABYLON IS FALLEN - Gabriel Kastelle plausibly suggests a relation to an Irish tune called Reilly's Reel (see YouTube for basic tune, and this rather academic Celtic Trio arrangement - Babylon is Fallen fits perfectly with it).

Since 1991, it has been included in The Sacred Harp, a continually accreted collection of traditional American devotional choral singing (see Sacred Harp and Shape Note Singing and Wikipedia's article, Sacred Harp). I'm not sure what to make of the Sacred Harp tradition. Its choral music is not intended as a performance, and it's participatory and highly inclusive of all levels of ability: highly positive aspects that it's hard to disagree with. But as a musician used to striving for a polished performance, I find it sounds gratingly ramshackle. I guess you have to be in the mindset to appreciate it or not care about that.

- Ray

Honeybee

Another song from the aforementioned steampunk musical troupe Steam Powered Giraffe: Honeybee, a lovely piece of close harmony, of the kind whose seeming laidback effortlessness covers very tight musicianship.

By coincidence, I just had a pleasant e-mail from Garson O'Toole, author of Quote Investigator, who has kindly credited my research (and that of Bonnie Taylor-Blake) in tracing the roots of the meme to the effect that "If the Bee Disappeared Off the Face of the Earth, Man Would Only Have Four Years Left To Live" (Albert Einstein? Charles Darwin? Maurice Maeterlinck? E. O. Wilson? Apocryphal?). Despite such debunkings, the story trundles on ...

Albert Einstein famously said mankind would become extinct without them. "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years to live," he predicted.
- Why we need a Plan Bee, Julie Carpenter, Express, The (London, England) - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 

... and even when authors acknowledge the lack of attribution, they still perpetuate the meme by repeating it in detail, with a minimal wrapping of provisionality. For example:

The importance of bees to the environment is clear. Often attributed to Einstein, there is some debate about who actually said: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
- Battle against pesticide-makers to save honeybees from a sticky end, Oliver Moody, Times, The (London, England) - Thursday, February 28, 2013

It seems a good scary soundbite never dies.

Anyhow, check out Quote Investigator. It's a long-running site, going back to 2010, with well-researched articles on quotes attributed to several hundred authors. Its resource recommendations are also worth checking out. I especially second Wikiquote; it still doesn't seem generally known that it differs from Wikipedia in actively encouraging original research, and that its default position is that included quotes must have demonstrable citation ("Wikiquote is a free online compendium of sourced quotations"). In this, it differs from the vast majority of online quotation sites.

- Ray

Diamonds

Another musical recommendation, in case Ola Gjeilo was too normal. I just ran into Steam Powered Giraffe: a brilliant performance art group popular on the steampunk convention circuit. Their persona is a group of robots, allegedly built in the late 1800s, who perform sketches, improvisation, and music. Check out their official website www.steampoweredgiraffe.com and YouTube channel.

I just love the above embedded video, one of their handful of singles. It's a cover of Rihanna's Diamonds, which I rate highly anyway, but with an added edge. It's a powerfully-sung version of Diamonds by David Michael Bennett as "The Spine", one of the robot characters who's the 'straight man' in the act. The outro reveals it as The Spine's reverie, which I'm sure many of us can relate to: of expressing his inner lyrical ecstatic self, before he's brought back to reality and his mundane companions, and left only with the regretful thought that "I am a diamond". Ignore the slightly comic presentation and robot giraffe: this is a superb cover, and I think I like it more than the Rihanna original.

- Ray

Dark Night of the Soul

A musical recommendation: Ola Gjeilo (just found via his piece The Ground on Classic FM). He's a Norwegian-born composer of a rather lyrical repertoire - piano, choral, symphonic, neoclassical, crossover - with considerable inspiration in cinematic music. It's not the kind of weird stuff I usually like, but it's nevertheless quietly powerful. Check out his official site olagjeilo.com for more background.

On first encounter, I especially like Dark Night of the Soul, Gjeilo's wistfully ecstatic arrangement for choir, string quartet and piano (in a style somewhat akin to Thomas Newman) of the poem Dark Night by Juan de Yepes y Álvarez (1541-1591). This Spanish friar and mystic, better known as St John of the Cross, was heavily involved in religious politics during the Counter-Reformation, and in 1577 was arrested and imprisoned by his opponents; during his incarceration he wrote the poem La noche oscura del alma.

It's rather baffling to analyse. As explained in the Wikipedia article, Dark Night of the Soul, the author later wrote a theological treatise explaining its meaning: a narration in allegorical form of the journey of the soul from its bodily home to its union with God (the treatise is here at the Catholic Treasury) and subsequent critique largely takes this at face value. But I wonder at the psychology behind it. Was John sublimating? Was even he himself falling into the Christian tradition of explaining away overtly erotic texts as allegory (as in the explanation of the Song of Songs as "Christ's declaration of his love for the church")? Go figure - it's pretty well impossible to psychoanalyse a 16th century mystic. But not being religious, I can't understand the intellectual gymnastics required to construe this as anything but a brilliantly intense love poem written from a female viewpoint.

La noche oscura del alma (Dark night of the soul)

One dark night,
fired with love's urgent longings
- ah, the sheer grace! -
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.

In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
- ah, the sheer grace! -
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.

On that glad night
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything
with no other light or guide
than the One that burned in my heart.

This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
- him I knew so well -
there in a place where no one appeared.

O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the Beloved into his Lover.

Upon my flowering breast,
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.

When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.

I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased;
I went out from myself,
leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

- St John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (1991)

- Ray

Bayan time (19): new angles for TOPJAM

On Sunday I played again at TOPJAM, the very friendly open music sessions that have been meeting at various venues around Topsham for some three years now. I think it's finally found its niche at The Nelson, a hitherto neglected pub whose open-plan layout gives plenty of room to circulate for musicians, their gear, audience and other pub-goers.

The standard at TOPJAM is very high, but the bayan has always gone down well as something different from the standard guitar-vocals combination.

I haven't mentioned the bayan much lately - not through loss of enthusiasm, but because I've largely just been getting on with solid practice that wouldn't be very interesting to describe. A real breakthrough, however, was playing in the accompaniment band that the musical director Ben Beeson put together for The Mysteries in April. The general demands of this project - tight schedule, wide mix of genres, and repeated semi-public and public performance - jogged me into a variety of new areas of playing: improvisation, a lot more confidence in locating left-hand chords, more exploration of the possibilities of right-hand chords, singing while playing, and general experience at playing in front of people (if you've been following these bayan posts, you'll know that hitherto I've felt like the character Invisible Boy in Mystery Men who has a super-power that only works when no-one is looking).

I hadn't realised the sheer cumulative effect until playing on Sunday. I took a break from the instrumental 'party pieces' like Por una Cabeza and Libertango, and brought along some new material, my own vocals-bayan arrangements of Careless Love, Autumn Leaves, and a parodied version of Is This the Way to Amarillo. It went excellently; my hands felt a trifle shaky afterward, but I felt completely comfortable while performing (for the first time, really) and wasn't bothered by distractions. And they liked the songs!

If you're a musician in the area, and haven't encountered TOPJAM, check them out on Facebook (www.facebook.com/groups/TopJam/).

Gallery from TOPJAM, Sunday 23/6/2013 - click to enlarge

Jamie Boyle and Alex Kumar	Max Jurczyk
Daniel and Hannah Durdin	Hannah Durdin
Ray Girvan	Jamie with the Durdins
Anna-Marie Waite and Mark Christopher Taylor	Mark Christopher Taylor
Anna-Marie Waite	Neil Ebdon and Ben Beeson
the collective band	Neil Ebdon

The Dreadnoughts

More YouTube serendipity: while listening to the Dropkick Murphys (see, previously, Celtpunk!) I just ran into another band so far unknown to me, The Dreadnoughts.

They're a Canadian folk-punk band who have been described as "One part roaring sea shanty, one part haunting Irish melody, and a solid chaser of gut-crunching street punk". Their influences are highly eclectic: English folk, Eastern European and klezmer, polka, and even a spot of Finnish 'humppa' (an ultra-fast foxtrot). Check out Gintlemen's Club, a song of London low-life; The Cruel Wars, a raw a capella fusion of Johnny I hardly Knew Ye and High Germany; the wistful Avalon; the shanty Old Maui, a straight a capella cover of the traditional Rolling Down to Old Maui (the tune is very close to The Miller of Dee); Amsterdam (a kind of grim modern shanty / cautionary tale with Russian-influenced music); the Eastern European influenced Sleep is for the Weak; (one commenter says, "This song makes me wanna binge on vodka while dancing"); the laidback instrumental Clavdia's Waltz; the French-Canadian Poutine (a reference to the heart attack inducing Quebec dish); the frenetic Goblin Humppa; and the humppa-meets-Wurzels West Country Man.

I'll travel far and wide
Yes, I will, yes, I will
With comrades at my side
Yes, I will, yes, I will
West Country is a place that you can find
But furthermore, a state of mind
So drink thee cider down
An' pass the jug around,
listen the Wurzels when you can
Live loud and free, soon enough you'll be
A real West Country Man.
- West Country Man, The Dreadnoughts



- RG

How do you do/moo?

Further to Song recollections (April 10th), I just tracked down a musical memory.

In 1972 or so, when I was still at school, I went on a week-long geological excursion of Devon and Cornwall, sponsored by Shell (or maybe BP - that part's hazy). It was an opportunity: dangled in front of me was the experience of the previous star pupil who had gone on the course a year or two previously, and been offered a scholarship and job at the end of it. It turned out a disappointment in that respect, because they didn't offer me either. But it was an excellent tour, a mix of fieldwork and case study classwork; we stayed at Seale-Hayne Agricultural College (not far from here - I never thought I'd end up living in the area), and went to a lot of scenic and geologically interesting places including Meldon Quarry near Okehampton, Cligga Head near Perranporth, Hemerdon Tungsten Mine near Plymstock, and the museum at Camborne School of Mines. I also got horribly sick on the last night from drinking cider and rum, which is probably why I like neither of them.

However, it also left me with a four-decade earworm, a rather catchy song that was playing on the van radio on one of the days when it was chucking it down and we were all, including the organisers, disinclined to look at a quarry in the rain. I've tried Googling, but despite the catchiness, all I could remember of the lyrics was a "N'Na N'Na" section that invariably led to the wrong song, Mah Nà Mah Nà.

But imagine my surprise when the song appeared this evening on a TV advert (embedded above) for yoomoo, a brand of frozen yoghurt. They've slightly changed the words to "How do yoomoo" (here's the full track on SoundCloud), but it rapidly tracked down to the 1972 How Do You Do by the Dutch pop duo Mouth & MacNeal. It was a hit in the USA and Europe, but for some reason flopped completely in the UK. I must have caught one of its few British radio airings.

I'll inflict the original on the rest of you.


- Ray

Jun Togawa sings Pachelbel

戸川純　"蛹化の女" by GO-GO-STALIN

A year back - see Guernica - Kaigenrei - I mentioned the avant-garde/retro Japanese group Guernica. Good to see there are other fans: MetaFilter just had a post - Say you love me or I’ll kill you! - featuring tracks by Guernica's lead vocalist Jun Togawa.

I especially liked the versions of a song called 蛹化の女 ("Pupa Woman"), which is sung over Pachelbel's Canon. The one above is a pretty straight lyrical version over a standard orchestration (it's also at Grooveshark). Then there's this rather rawer live version played against acoustic guitar ...



... and finally a punk version:



They're all brilliant in different ways.

A look at the Jun Togawa Collective website finds a translation:

In a moonlit white forest
Dig at the foot of the trees
To find many pupas of the cicadas, ah

My overwhelming love for you has changed me
In the woods under frozen moonlight
Sipping sap from the tree, I am an insect

Someday
When you are to notice me
The girl who has changed into an insect
With an amber colored stomach
Shall have a parasitic plant
Growing stems of sorrow on her amber colored back

In a moonlit white forest
Dig at the foot of the trees
To find many pupas of the cicada, ah
My overwhelming love for you has changed me
In the wood under frozen moonlight
Sipping sap from the tree, I am an insect

So it's a song about unrequited love: the narrator has been waiting so long that she feels like a cicada pupa, waiting for years underground for its day of release. Personally I find it a poignant metaphor, but I rather concluded that Clare isn't a romantic soul. When I told her about the song's scenario, she said of the narrator - and I quote this with her permission - "she should get over it". :)

- Ray

Song recollections

I have a strong tendency to misrecollections, and even mondegreens, about songs heard in childhood, and a few such songs came up in conversation this evening. I thought I'd check them out.

Case 1:

Fly the ocean in a silver plane
See the jungle when it''s wet with rain.

This turns out to be correctly recalled; it comes from the 1952 You Belong To Me. Here's the Jason Wade cover:



Case 2:

Those faraway places
Where elephants roam

This Google finds - the tune also identifies it - to be misremembered lyrics of the 1948 Far Away Places:

Those faraway places
With strange soundin' names

Here's the 1961 Sam Cooke cover:


Case 3:

I never see the morning bright,
I sleep all day and dance all night.
I know that it's wrong, but it's swell.

This one is baffling me.

- Ray