Weather report

Twenty years ago (plus a few days), I was standing in the nursery of the Victoria General Hospital watching elder daughter (then only daughter) being set up "under the lights" to treat her neonatal jaundice. She was all of three days old and as they slipped the blindfold over her head, I, who had been watching with interest and chatting to the nurses, burst into tears.

I gasped out an apology:  "It's just that (gulp) she looks so (sniffle) helpless..."
The nurses exchanged a look and chorused:  "Third Day!"

Four years later (plus a couple of weeks),  I sat in my hospital room with newborn younger daughter a few feet away.  I had a stack of birth announcements on my lap and with a calligraphy-style felt pen was filling them out, large tears flowing down my cheeks.  I was careful not to let them hit the cards and smear the ink.  I knew that it was "Third Day", and there was no point blaming my misery on the wait for a private room, the difficulties in getting younger daughter to latch (resolved by the private room, by the way), or the complications of this second, more challenging delivery.  It was Third Day.  Third Day becomes Fourth Day and you get on with it.  In the meantime, it was the time to cry.  That was all.

Twenty years later (minus a week), I wait in the airport for elder daughter, who has completed her second year in university in Halifax, and turned twenty the day before.  I'm listening to a pod-cast of BBC Four's radio version of Twelfth Night featuring David Tennant as Malvolio.  (Not that it's relevant.  But it's the reason I'm listening.)  I look up to see a lovely young woman in a cream-coloured jacket gliding down the escalator.

Come and kiss me, sweet and twenty...

She doesn't, but I do get a hug.

Not quite a week later,  I make myself trudge down to the corner coffee shop.  It's Sunday evening, so I know there will be a seat, and this is younger daughter's fifth psycho-developmental-educational assessment which has been sitting unopened in our living room for several weeks, so I know I need a latté, a biscotti, and a wad of tissues.  There are no surprises.  The psychologist (a new one who was mentored by the old one) has been thorough, thoughtful, and kind.

The tears don't come, but later, as I salve myself with family research at the computer, the tears arise unbidden..  I continue to work, noting my wet eyes, but doing nothing about them.  It's the time to cry.  That's all.

Merry Titanicalia?

Last September, we had an orgy of 9/11 retrospectives, rather like a bleak sort of holiday celebrating the vaporization of three thousand people. We have now reached the end of a week-long festival of Titanic remembrances, a loving itemization of the freezing/crushing/drowning/imploding of 1500 people in 1912. There was a parade in Halifax (where many of the recovered bodies were buried); the newspapers have had series of articles on the disaster, and of course, as with 9/11, we've been treated to a week of Titanic documentaries and movies. The Turner Classic Movie Channel showed The Unsinkable Molly Brown and A Night to Remember (which features one of my indirect links to the Titanic). The fellow responsible for Downton Abbey has come up with his take on the sinking, four episodes shown repeatedly. (I've only managed to watch bits before wanting to hurl stuff at the TV.) The History Channel and The National Geographic Channel have had a field-week.

Predictably, those that aren't interested were crying "Enough!" within a couple of days, but I've been, while not exactly a "Titaniac", a follower of things to do with the big ship since I was ten, so I've been having rather a lovely time. Or does that sound morbid and inappropriate?

One intriguing aspect of having so many television presentations on one topic is the opportunity to compare. We have the really high-end specials involving mind-boggling computer graphics. They have remarkably similar titles: Titanic: Case Closed; Titanic: The Final Word and Titanic 100: Mystery Solved. While all three are engaging documentaries, brimming with well-known experts and high production values, as a family researcher, I'm leery of titles indicating completeness. History is never finished.

A bit farther down the scale are those news specials and TV series suffering from limited time and funds. Real Stories: The Real Titanic, for example, has its heart in the right place, stating (quite rightly) that what really happened was many times more dramatic and tragic than in films made about the disaster. Unfortunately, Real Stories's budget did not allow the hiring of real actors --- nor the purchase of nail polish remover. We're treated to a long shots of "re-enactors" chatting on deck (looking remarkably unmoved), or in impossibly small row-boats (most of the Titanic lifeboats had a seating capacity of between 40 to 60 people). Most distracting and improbable is a scene where a First Class passenger with pearls, a shoulder-length hair-do and blood-red nails pretends to rub invisible cream into her face.

 Aside from the more expensive, less-hastily-made shows, few have been able to resist the basic Titanic myths:
 1) She was out to break a speed record. No, Cunard was after the speed records; White Star was going for the comfort angle. She was going too fast for seas laced with ice-bergs, but that was due more than the crew being unaware of the true danger.
 2) She had been marketed as "unsinkable". The "u" word only appeared in an engineering article which described her as "practically unsinkable". Any public perception of the Titanic being indestructible came from word-of-mouth, not from advertising.
 3) The ship's band went down playing "Nearer My God to Thee".  Oh for Pete's sake. Take a look, if you will, at very similar scenes from the two most famous movies about the Titanic: 1997's Titanic and 1958's A Night to Remember.

 Go ahead, I'll wait: Notice something? There are two completely different tunes. "Bethany" is the setting most familiar to North Americans, while the usual Church of England setting, familiar to most Brits, is "Horbury". Furthermore, Wallace Hartley the band leader, was a Methodist and was said to prefer another setting called "Propier Deo". Walter Lord, the author of the book A Night to Remember, wrote a follow-up in 1986 entitled The Night Lives On (because history is never finished). If you want to read the full argument, someone has thoughtfully posted the chapter and some bonus illustrations online. (Incidentally, the article mentions "Mrs A.A. Dick of Calgary" who happened to be an acquaintance of my late mother-in-law, so there's another of my admittedly very indirect connections to the Titanic.)

 I listened online to BBC Four's The Titanic Minute by Minute which depended heavily on Lord's original book for research and claimed to be an accurate timeline of the sinking. It was a tribute to the Titanic's noble and dutiful musicians, and also featured nifty numbers from the likes of Billy Bragg and Kate Rusbury. I quite enjoyed it until BBC Four, as so many others, could not resist the pull of the legend. They played "Nearer My God to Thee", in the Bethany setting, yet! I actually screamed abuse at the computer, much frightening the dog.

 Maybe I am a Titaniac, after all.

I am not a camera

I've got to start carrying a camera again, thought I, as I leaned back in the rickety metal chair outside Planet Coffee in the Byward Market. Directly above, the blue sky was criss-crossed with spindly branches, some twigs gleaming in the afternoon sun.

I used to lug my Nikon everywhere, but I seem to feel so weighed down these days. I could pocket younger daughter's Lumix. We bought it for her a few years back, hoping she could capture images for when words fail her (which is often), but she mainly used it to photograph tiny details in her bedroom: the corner of a doll's face, a piece of a page in her favourite book, her own fingers. She seems to have lost interest now.

I haven't lost interest in photography, but, like writing, I need a spur now and again. Earlier this week, I again wished I had a camera as my Transitway bus whizzed down the Ottawa River Parkway. There are quicker ways to get to younger daughter's school, but if the bus windows are not too muddy and if I can get a seat on the right-hand side, I can gaze out on the Ottawa River. I have discovered over the years that the water is never the same colour. In winter, it can be white, ivory, pewter, silver, gun-metal gray or black. In spring it ranges from sage green, to bronze, to sable brown. Summertime brings every shade of blue: cerulean, cobalt, teal, ultramarine, and nearly everything between. In the autumn, surrounding trees will add dashes of red, orange, and yellow.

This week, Hades was hit with seasonal temperatures after a week of what would pass for high summer temperatures in Victoria. As a result, as we hurtled by the water (rather an ash gray, spattered with sparkles on a brisk but sunny afternoon), I saw something I haven't seen during nearly a decade of river-watching: a kind of fence of gleaming ice spikes. It looked something like a row of Snow Queen crowns and from the road, made a long continuum of flashing silver undulations of sharpness. I probably couldn't have captured it even if I'd had a camera handy, though I would have liked to have tried. Those who did were down by the shore, like Stephen MacIntyre, who took the below image and posted it at Flckr.
It wasn't what I saw. But it was what he saw, and since he had his camera and I didn't, his image will prevail.

Eternal Leap

February. The shortest month that still manages to be too long. And this year it's a day longer. The media is all about "leap birthdays" and how someone who was born on February 29th, say, in 1968, is only ten today -- ha-ha.

So, in 2016, will Davy Jones only have been dead one year?

Everyone seems to be playing "Daydream Believer" today, and arguing whether the Monkees were real musicians. Well, they could play their own instruments (eventually), and Mike Nesmith wrote some damn fine songs, including one of my favourite Monkees ditties, "The Girl That I Knew Somewhere". Davy Jones certainly was an appealing singer in those long-ago days before Auto-Tune, and actually got the idea for being a pop star when he was The Artful Dodger in the Broadway cast of Oliver. The cast appeared on the Ed Sullivan show the same night the Beatles turned up.

I came across this gem amongst the online mourning, a collaboration with the illustrator and songwriter Sandra Boyton, whose greeting cards have always been among those I'm least embarrassed to send:

How will we ever know now?

I wasn't particularly a fan of Whitney Houston's music, but it is clear that she was a very talented lady. Pretty, vivacious, with golden vocal chords and killer connections (her mum Cissy Houston and her cousin Dionne Warwick, among others), she was a gifted and powerful singer. Unfortunately, she spiraled down into addiction.

I did always like this song tremendously, a lighthearted, innocent ditty about awakening love that really is pop at its best. It also includes a little nod to Whitney's real-life godmother Aretha Franklin.

Update: a gentleman named Jake Fogelnest posted an amazing track of Whitney's vocals for "How Will I Know?" It's every bit as listenable as the song with full instrumentation and illustrates how very, very good she was.

Band/choir/orchestra geekiness meets Doctor Who geekiness

Still dog-paddling, gazing across the bleak expanse of February. Here's something keeping me afloat. This is the third collaboration of the Doctor Who Fan Orchestra, where musicians and singers from all over the place submit a video of themselves playing or singing part of Murray Gold's Doctor Who score which is then knitted into a quilt of gorgeous geekiness. (Yes, I know. You don't knit quilts. It's been a tough month, okay?) The first two were fun, but sounded a wee bit like high school band class. This one is the best one yet.

I just love these glimpses of bedrooms, living rooms, band rooms from all over. Coordinator Stephen Willis tells us: This final mix includes a total of 177 submissions from 154 individual participants, ranging in age from 11 to 57, and who are located in at least 18 different countries across the world, including: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Spain, France, Russia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland.

I've subscribed to http://www.youtube.com/user/socksofbalhoon so I won't miss the next one! (Don't quite have the nerve nor the technology to join in!)

BabelColour does it again!

I've been --- occupied. Plenty to write about, but somewhat overwhelmed. However, I simply cannot resist this. I have mentioned BabelColour before. He is totally batty about Doctor Who, but I've yet to meet a Whovian who wasn't. (The Resident Fan Boy has just spent over thirty dollars on a SFX Magazine with a DW theme; he swears he will not eat lunches in restaurants for weeks.)

Anyway, there's some sort of Doctor Who milepost or anniversary coming up this year (or next?), so here's a worthy offering. All hail the BC:

For Doctor Who fans only (and possibly for literal video fans only as well)

Two or three years ago, I did a post on literal videos which featured the work of dascottjr, featuring his classic literal version of Bonny Tyler's epic and weird music video "Total Elipse of the Heart". Dascottjr's version went viral, so naturally, the people responsible for the original got it yanked for copyright infringement (presumably they didn't appreciate such a work of -- cof, hac, wheeeeze -- art being made a figure of fun), and since I'm among those who failed to save it to my computer, I can't show it to you here.

Recently, a very strange tribute has appeared on YouTube by someone who evidently did have the foresight to save dascottjr's masterpiece to her computer. Zeborahnz took the soundtrack of the literal version of Total Eclipse and made (wait for it) a Doctor Who fanvid.

Now, I don't know if you need to be familiar with the original literal video to find this amusing or clever, but I certainly do -- although I echo Zeborah's recommendation of using the CC (closed captions) option so you know exactly what the singers are saying.

MAAN-i-cure

Not everyone sees out Christmas by seeing one's youngerdaughter crowned The Royal Fool at a Twelfth Night celebration and having oneself serenaded with sonnets by two august members of the Company of Fools. Okay, one so-called sonnet was actually the lyrics to "Poker Face" as recited by the very handsome AL Connors, but being compared to a summer's day by the very intense Scott Florence was dreamy. Too bad I knew he was acting.

Then Epiphany dawned and I got all bogged down taking the decorations off the tree, so badly that I had to beg the Resident Fan Boy to only play major key music on the computer and to hide the tree out back until it's time to leave it out for the city.

Thankfully, I found this on the 'net yesterday. It's nowhere during the play, so I must assumed this was something reserved for those entitled few who actually got to to the theatre in person. Take it away, Davy and Cathy:

Hugo First

New Year's Day hit me like a hair-pin turn. Shortly before awakening that morning, I was hit with an attack of gremlins, and woke up in a sweat of anxiety, the myriad of worries I'd set aside for Christmas flying at me like panicked bats. What I'd like to know is, do I get overwhelmed by anxiety in the wee small hours because I'm vulnerable with lack of sleep, or is it because I'm seeing things with dangerous clarity? Oh gawd, I really don't want to know, do I? I'm blaming this on PMS.

Best to cling to what is beautiful. I started the new year with the almost completely silent filmThe Artist because I've heard so many good things about it, and it is charming and lovingly made, but I'm going to make a plea for what is the most gorgeous and beguiling movie I've seen in ages:

Hugo is also a tribute to the art of silent film, but the much earlier works of Georges Méliès. The movie itself is not silent; it's a russet-brown and midnight-blue fantasy of Paris eight or nine decades ago. It's meant to be seen in 3D but the Resident Fan Boy, younger daughter and I saw it in 2D in a small-screen cinema and you know what? We were still enchanted.

There is not a single ugly shot in this entire work, and the performances by Ben Kingsley, the two child leads, and a half-dozen not-quite-cameo supporting performances are a joy to watch. If this doesn't get some sort of Oscar recognition, I certainly will be pelting the television with foodstuffs.

If you haven't seen it, go. 3D or 2D, it won't matter.