Another passenger on that first flight was Timothy Leary—or at least, a sample of his remains. I don't know what condition the remains were in: we all know what Leary was famous for: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Leary was a doctor of psychology at Harvard when one of his mates took him to Mexico and fed him some mushrooms. The experience, which taught him more about the brain and its possibilities in five hours—he later said—than 15 years of research in psychology had, led him to start a program studying the effects of LSD on graduate students back at Harvard.
Swiftly the program was dropped in favour of tripping parties and the research got some bad publicity and Leary was sacked from the university and in 1966 LSD was made illegal. After several arrests for things like possession of marijuana and a lecture tour promoting LSD and psychedelic drugs as a way of opening the mind and freeing the nervous system, Leary ran for Governor of California against Reagan in '69 with a campaign slogan of “Come together, join the party.”
From that phrase, Leary's friend, John Lennon, wrote a campaign song. It didn't actually get to be used in the campaign which came to an abrupt end when Leary was again arrested for marijuana possession but Lennon reworked the song for the album Abbey Road released later that year. ‘Come Together’ is a cracker of a tune with lyrics rewritten to contain digs at McCartney (who provided one kickass bass line) and Harrison.
The Abbey Road album, of course, contained some outstanding songs—it is surely among the greatest records ever—‘I Want You (She's So Heavy)’, ‘Something’, ‘Golden Slumbers’… such magnificent material.
Harrison's ‘Here Comes The Sun’ came after he had been playing around with a riff that he and Eric Clapton had earlier used for the bridge in the song ‘Badge’ that Cream used for their final album Goodbye. Clapton and Harrison were good friends—Harrison had Clapton play on his song ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ for the White Album and on All Things Must Pass, Harrison's first post-Beatles album.
Eric Clapton's own post-Cream project was Derek And The Dominoes (the name came from a compere who kept getting Clapton's first name wrong when introducing them at a gig) who recorded only one studio album. But what an album! Duane Allman plays some magnificent slide guitar through all four sides of this double LP and challenged Clapton to raise his game with some stunning fretwork. Their version of ‘Little Wing’ (recorded only eight days before Jimi Hendrix's death) is, in my opinion, better than Hendrix's and it is forbidden in rock music to say anything is better than Hendrix. The title track from the album, ‘Layla’ with Allman's riff over Clapton's chords and lyrics about his unrequited love for George Harrison's wife, proved to be a mammoth hit and is now an evergreen Gold FM favourite.
The piano-driven coda was written by (and on the recording the piano was played by) Jim Gordon who was the drummer of Derek And The Dominoes. He had been a Los Angeles session drummer before joining Clapton. He worked with such people as the Byrds, the Monkees, Frank Zappa. You can hear his drumming on the old Carly Simon classic ‘You're So Vain.’ Gordon suffered from acute paranoid schizophrenia and in 1983 he murdered his mother with a hammer. Sentenced to 16 years to life, he is currently serving his time in California Men's Colony.
The CMC is a prison designed to hold about 3900 inmates; today it holds over 6600. Overcrowding of American prisons is a well-known problem and the reduction of overcrowding was one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's policies for his run for the position of Governor of California (the same position Leary ran for, three and a half decades earlier).
Exactly what Schwarzenegger is doing running California, I don't know. Reagan? Schwarzenegger? Perhaps there is something in the water in California. This isn't the forum to speculate. Schwarzenegger—the star of such fare as Kindergarten Cop,Junior, and True Lies—got his Hollywood breakthrough in the film Conan The Barbarian.
OK, so Conan is no Citizen Kane but it is still a terrific flick. The Riddle Of Steel, The Tree Of Woe… “There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle, when gold loses its lustre, the throneroom becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father's love for his child.” You can't help but love it. The film has very little dialogue; the narrative is often carried by Basil Poledouris's dramatic and brilliant score.
The producer really liked Carl Orff's Carmina Burana but the makers of Excalibur had used it for their film a year earlier so Poledouris was told to write something that sounded similar. Bits of “Dies Irae” from the requiem mass and of Ravel's Bolero were inspirations and a huge orchestra and choir employed for the recording. It is one of my favourite movie soundtracks.
When I was a younger lad with a bit more spare time than I have now, I made a tape of all the musical cues from a videotape I had of the movie and I often listened to it in the car. I did the same for Ennio Morricone's unparalleled score to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly which is probably the best thing ever. Go and rent GB&U tonight and listen to the score. Watch Clint Eastwood if you like, the movie is cool, but listen to the score. The scene where Tuco has found Sad Hill Cemetary is, thanks to Morricone, the finest scene in film history.
The composer Michael Nyman provided some of film's finest scenes when collaborating with Director Peter Greenaway in movies like Prospero's Books and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. One of Nyman's few ventures into Hollywood was for the Andrew Niccol film Gattaca staring Ethan Hawke. It was a movie about genetic predetermination with Heinlein/Huxley themes of utopia and destiny. It left me somewhat bored but it was kind of cool. In order to invoke an Orwellian-Big Brother style of soulless newspeak the world in which Gattaca was set had all public announcements read in Esperanto.
This language was constructed by Ludovic Zamenhof in the late 19th century and is generally now thought to be a failure. Zamenhof's vision was that everybody would know a common second language thus solving “the language problem” that hindered communication, caused misunderstandings, distanced people and ultimately caused wars. The language is easy to learn and has been used to communicate between most countries of the world but only by a small minority, almost all of which have already learnt English to some degree.
A common criticism of Esperanto is that it cannot be a real language as it has no culture. This criticism seems to be belied by the amount of material, fiction and non-fiction, written natively in Esperanto. An Esperantan poet has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. A couple of Asterix books have appeared in Esperanto and if that is not culture, I don't know what is. There has even been a studio movie written and performed entirely in Esperanto.
Made in 1965, the film Incubus tells a timeless story of good vs evil and so on, shot in stunning black and white by Conrad Hall who went on to win Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and American Beauty. The movie starred a 33-year-old classically trained Shakespearean actor—speaking Esperanto in his French-Canadian accent—who, a year later, would gain fame as Captain Kirk in Gene Roddenberry's new TV series Star Trek.
And that is where we started.
¶ 10:30 pm 13 comments
I was sitting in the crowd at Telstra Dome on the
weekend, watching a team I follow. As you do, you get to
the ground, you pick your spot and spread yourself out
trying to look proprietorial over as many seats as you
can. My mates only turned up right before the start of
the game and by then my demesne had shrunk only to the
two seats beside me — I have not the commanding
presence I wish I had. Shortly before they got there,
the chap on the other side of the spare seat to my right
leant over.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
Never seen him before as far as I could tell but my answer left the door open.
“I'm sure I know you,” he continue. “Do you play soccer?” This was very encouraging. My athletic build and sporting prowess were apparent at a mere glance to this stranger. I'm not often confused for sportsmen, it's usually movie stars: Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom… I still constantly get mistaken for Johnny Depp. But, to his query, I had to answer in the negative.
“I know,” he continued. The fellow wasn't being intrusive or unpleasant. He was just a bloke who wanted to connect. “Do you work in Sunbury?”
Do I work in Sunbury? Where did that come from? As I'm sure you will understand I was non-plussed by this and repeated a sterner assertion that I'd not met him before.
I bring up this commonplace interchange — which pretty much ended at that point — only to announce to everybody: I do not work, have never worked and will never work in Sunbury.
Should anybody from out of town stumble upon this page, for their benefit I say that Sunbury is a charming hamlet on the distant Melbourne outskirts that boasts many attractions like wineries, historic buildings, an agricultural show. It calls itself the birthplace of the ashes — the perpetual trophy, shown in the picture here, awarded to the winner of test cricket series between Australia and England. The people who live and work in Sunbury all bake. That's all. They just bake. Cakes mostly, a few biscuits, some bread. Baking. That's all they care about. How good is your oven? What flour do you use? Do you use low-fat butter? If you have any self-respect you will not move to Sunbury or baking is all you will ever care about.
I do not work, have never worked and will never work in Sunbury.
¶ 12:45 pm 2 comments
I spent the morning looking at body parts.
Not something I usually do, I'm prepared to admit.
But my class and I were at a lab looking at cadavers
of people who had generously donated their bodies so that
students like me could see genuine iliotibial bands and
brachioradialis muscles, diaphragms and pancreases,
carotid arteries and scapulae…
There were half-a-dozen trolleys in the lab. One had a couple of arms and a few more shoulders after various degrees of dissection so that we could see the different muscles in different layers. Another had legs all the way up to the waist; another torsos with hearts that had bits of the wall cut out so you could poke your fingers into the different chambers; another had brains — nothing else, just brains.
I guess I should have expected it had I thought about things at all beforehand but the muscles on the bodies themselves looked just like any other meat straight off the cow or the lamb. I can't say what I was expecting; perhaps because the human body is ‘special’ in some sort of speciesist Great Chain of Being-style we-are-at-the-top-of-the-heap way. In the lazy kind of thinking I happily indulge in, I suppose I assumed that it would somehow be different.
Why is it that the thought of eating human flesh is so repugnant. I am certainly not advocating it: the thought revolts me but I'm just asking why? A morning looking at body parts for civilians like me is a little bit of an odd way to spend time and does leave a lad thinking about wierd things like this.
I could try to lighten the tone of this post with jokes about carrying bits up to the north tower in a lightning storm with my assistant Igor and so on. Yadda yadda yadda. Frankenstein. “Give my creation life” etc but I'm just not in the mood after today, really.
¶ 5:10 pm 2 comments
I did not intend to put up another post here about the
chess but Unrelenting Tedium
has
brought up the subject of last weekend's farce.
By Thursday the score was 3–1 to Kramnik in the 12-game match for the world championship and Topalov was looking in a lot of trouble — a two-win lead is a big gap in such a short match (until the last decade or so world championship matches were best of 24). Topalov's manager, chap called Danailov, sends a letter to the appeals committee pointing out that Kramnik was going to the toilet far too many times during the games. Topalov threatens to abandon the match.
There is a rule in chess that you are not allowed to disturb your opponent in any way whatsover. Not by smoking over the board, not by tapping your foot, not by shouting “what kind of a crappy move was that, imbecile. You deserve to lose like the clueless patzer you so clearly are.” If Topalov was disturbed by, I don't know, the sound of the flush perhaps then he may be justified in filing a complaint but the actual letter was not to do with disturbance. The implication was that Kramnik had been checking the position against a computer and getting illegal assistance while tucked away in a room where nobody can spot him.
This accusation is completely absurd in a world championship match and the letter should have been handed back to Danailov with a facetious chortle but, astonishingly, the appeals committee — filled with FIDE cronies given the cushy, well-paid job as reward for ‘services rendered’ and one of whom is a personal friend of Danailov's — went and upheld the decision. The separate bathrooms were off-limits and the conditions of the match were thus changed which is expressly forbidden in the contracts both players signed.
Match-play chess is a contest in which the psychological side — the feeling that things are going your way — is very important.
Kramnik's team protested the implied insult, the decision, and the bias of the appeals committee and refused to appear for the game on Saturday. The arbiter started the clock which expired two hours later and he awarded the game to Topalov.
This is all just wrongtown and Kramnik comes out the worse in just about everything. Topalov has a point he doesn't deserve and now has the momentum on his side — after a couple of draws he won last night to tie the match at 4–4 — the appeals committee have all been made to resign, indicating that their decision was wrong, but the forfeit has stood: the arbiter should never have started the clock in such a situation but having done so the result has to stand.
Fifteen minutes before game 7 started Danailov put another letter to the press comparing the moves made by Kramnik to those suggested by the strongest chess computer program and finding 77% of the moves corresponded — again suggesting that Kramnik is cheating. This is simply farcical. Today's chess computers predict Bobby Fischer's moves from '72 with the same accuracy. Grandmasters pick the best moves 77% of the time, just as chess computers do: because they are the best moves.
My position is a fairly simple one: Topalov is a prat. Either for making these miserable accusations or at least for allowing Danailov to perform them on his behalf. A pity, really, because he's been playing some killer chess in this match.
So, that was just to let you all get up to speed on
that one. Of course, it's been all over the papers
already…
(kudos to Mig
for the photo and the headline)
I had my practical assessment last night on the shiatsu
component of my course. This was the first subject I did
with no practice
at all but what I had in class and I got the highest mark
I've got all year.
If anybody doesn't know what I'm talking about, I'm studying massage therapy. I work my gainful way through eight hours for my employers and their shareholders and then drive through the worst that Melbourne's peak-hour traffic has to offer to the far reaches of human inhabitance in the north eastern suburbs and then I'm supposed to provide relaxation during class? Pffft.
Still. If anybody needs a massage, we students—me included, regardless of the assessment last night—keenly want practice.
¶ 8:45 am 2 comments
