There’s only so much one can say about Remembrance Day. The ceremony is pretty much the same from year to year–this year I attended the one in front of the Legislature here in Victoria. I’ve written a lot about this day in the past: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.
This year I was thinking back to the Remembrance Day assemblies in elementary and high school. One year, I have a clear memory of a video being shown, featuring a song, I think, by Bryan Adams. I even remember some of the lyrics:
The guns will be silent - on Remembrance Day
There’ll be no more fighting - on Remembrance Day
This wasn’t the video, but here’s the song. It’s hardly In Flanders Fields, but it’s what I was thinking about today.
Andy linked to this delightful alternative time line for the last forty years of popular music. It imagines what might have happened if the Beatles stayed together:
February 11th, 1978. Eventually is released simultaneously in the American and British markets. Some critics find significance in the fact that the first single off the album, “Blow Away,” is not a Lennon/McCartney collaboration but instead a George Harrison song; others find themselves underwhelmed and suggest that the Lennon/McCartney “Free As A Bird” should have been the first single instead. (”Free As A Bird” is released as the second single six weeks later.) Harrison, for his part, says that “Blow Away” was “a lot less of a rocker” before Lennon suggested an increase in tempo and “letting Ringo go nuts.” No music videos are produced for the album: Lennon says “no, that would be too much bother. We want to have fun with this. Work’s for our own stuff.”
I’m sure these have been done before, but there are a number of creative projects that extend naturally from this kind of ‘what if’ exercise. A book-length version, maybe, or writing songs that the still-together Beatles might have written.
Via a recent Slate Culturefest episode, I learned about L Magazine’s five-part series of video essays on the evolution of the modern blockbuster. They’re a terrific middle-brow exploration of the blockbuster movies and related pop-culture of two years: 1984 and 1989. Here’s the first in the series:
I was ten years old in 1984, and I’m surprised how many of the movies I recognize from that year. I saw some of them in the cinema, certainly, but I must have watched a lot more on video. I wonder, did we have our Betamax VCR by then, or were we still, hilariously, renting one from the video store?
Having clumsily experimented with it myself recently, I’m quite fond of this essay-as-narrated-video treatment. When writing about the medium of moving pictures, it feels like the right format.
Yesterday I posted a link to an NPR segment on MetaFilter. It’s some kind of quiz shtick called “Not My Job” and features, hilariously, Neko Case talking about Necco wafers. I read about it on Kennedy’s blog. I figured that Ms. Case was, as one commenter put it, “precisely calibrated for the MetaFilter demographics.”
I learned that this “Not My Job” segment, on a show called “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, is quite popular, and has featured all sorts of celebrities. Another MetaFilter commenter remarked on a previous piece with sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, where she remarked that, in her youth, she’d been a sniper in the Israeli army. Could that be true? Apparently.
“When I was in my routine training for the Israeli army as a teenager, they discovered completely by chance that I was a lethal sniper. I could hit the target smack in the center further away than anyone could believe. Not just that, even though I was tiny and not even much of an athlete, I was incredibly accurate throwing hand grenades too. Even today I can load a Sten automatic rifle in a single minute, blindfolded.”
I was doing some rewrites on the video chapter in our book, and discovered that this unremarkable clip was the first ever video posted to YouTube. It features YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim making a bad joke:
It’s interesting how much this video predicts the vast majority of YouTube videos: a young person speaking in direct address to the camera. He’s not in his bedroom, but otherwise it’s utterly typical.
In a recent piece in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell combines the tales of a high school basketball team, King David and Lawrence of Arabia to explore how and why underdogs beat favourites:
“And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.
Now, those of you who are familiar with my writing will know that this practice of talking about X by discussing Y is my only rhetorical move.
There’s also a wonderful piece by Adam Gopnik (probably my favourite magazine writer) about razors and innovation in that issue. Unfortunately, it’s not online, but it’s in the May 11th issue, should you get your hands on a copy.
I was more interested to learn about why there are a bunch of feral horses on this tiny island with a permanent human population of five. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
The first horses on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada were brought to the island during the late 1700s. Many people believe that they arrived on the island from off of the many shipwrecks, however, this romantic notion is false - they were in fact intentionally left on Sable to graze and multiply, and were most likely seized from Acadians during their expulsion from Nova Scotia at the hands of the British. Although often referred to as ponies due to their small size, they have a horse phenotype.
The whole island is a wildlife preserve, so the animals are left in their natural state. You apparently need special permission from the Canadian Coast Guard to visit.
I always feel a little existential when I’m in non-coastal cities and towns in the US. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s just the foreignness of not having an ocean that dominates part of the horizon? Or maybe its the highways which often bisect the towns? I felt the same way in Lake Tahoe years ago. Coincidentally, I quoted Merton there as well.
This is my first visit to Austin. To me, it feels kind of like the Calgary of the south. Or perhaps Calgary is the Austin of the north. Until we found the few boisterous blocks of 6th Street where all the action is, I was struck by how empty downtown Austin seemed. Two nights in a row we dined in half-empty restaurants in the centre of town. What do these establishments do when SXSW isn’t in town?
I haven’t had a lot of time to look around, but local two heritage buildings were highlights. The first is the Driskill Hotel, originally built in 1886. It’s in the Romanesque style, and reminded me a little of the Empress Hotel in Victoria. We had desert there. In what seems like a very southern tradition, the Driskill holds an annual pie bake-off, and the winning pie gets on the desert menu for the subsequent year.
This afternoon I saw the premier of Splinterheads, a charming if run-of-the-mill comedy at the historic Paramount Theater. It’s a gorgeous little theater built in 1915 (here are some photos), with a capacity of about 1300. It’s the prettiest cinema (I gather it’s also a live venue) that I’ve seen in years–it’s really a pity we don’t have more of these left on the west coast.
I don’t really feel like I’ve had the Texas experience yet. I’ve seen very few cowboy boots and hats (aside from those worn ironically by SXSW attendees), and haven’t heard much of that twangy accent which I expected. That, I gather, may be due to Austin’s status as the city that’s unlike the rest of the state. We’re spending a couple of nights outside of the city later in the week, so that experience may seem more genuine.
On an unrelated note, things have been quieter than usual around here because I, uh, broke the back end of this website. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that my reach exceeded my grasp, and chaos ensued. Big thanks to local Vancouver SEO expert Kerry Morrison for digging around under the hood and straightening things out again.
UPDATE: Here are a few photos from our time in Texas:
I’m a descendant of the McLeans. Emilie Delphine Robb of New York granted Zavikon to Andrew McLean of Passaic, New Jersey on June 27, 1918. Andrew was a cotton goods manufacturer. He died in March 26, 1931. His property was then divided among his children. On August 22, 1931 they sold Zavikon to Philip A. Castner of Philadelphia. The Great Depression caused the McLeans to end the family’s business and sell Zavikon!
I’m always pleased when something on this site enables a little connection like this that didn’t exist before.
Today I followed a link and found this story on the BBC website. It’s entitled “Shakespeare’s first theatre found”, and refers to the discovery of the remains of the confusingly-named Theatre, the first theatre in which Shakespeare acted and his plays were performed.
That seemed vaguely familiar to me. Scanning the article, I spotted another headline in the ‘See Also’ section of the sidebar:
That article, from last August, is called “The Bard’s ‘first theatre’ found”. That’s actually when the discovery was announced by a team from the Museum of London. You can read the original Museum of London press release, and today’s subsequent one that spawned the confusing headline. Maybe the BBC needs some kind of “check for duplicate heading” functionality in their content management system?
To make matters worse, the Daily Mail used the headline “Remains of Shakespeare’s first Globe Theatre unearthed in East London”. This is technically accurate, but deeply misleading. In 1599, the Globe Theatre was built with timber from the aforementioned Theatre. The Mail used that headline despite the discovery having been made six months ago, and the Theatre only being tangentially related to the Globe.
And, since I’m being all nitpicky, why does London Museum’s Taryn Nixon refer to The Theatre as “probably the second theatre ever built”? in the video associated with today’s article? What about all those Greek and Roman theatres? Maybe she means “the second theatre ever built in London”?
From a theatre history perspective, this is a really important find. It is, for example, almost certainly where “Romeo and Juliet” was first performed. Appropriately, the Tower Theatre Company plans to build a new theatre on the site.
