Wednesday, April 27, 2016

River Redux: Phil Spector revisited





I am sure, sure-tee-sure I have posted this song before, but is this the kind of song you only listen to once? You listen to it until you fall right into the middle of it and drown.

Much is made of the famous or infamous Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound, a weird aural trick that no one had thought of before. Back in the early '60s, recordings were made in the most primitive circumstances, with one or two microphones and a couple of tracks. Bob Dylan just sang into the sucker on his first album, and that was that. I've seen video of all Four Seasons clustered around the same mike.

Spector was dealing with the supposed limitations of mono sound recording when he began to innovate and percolate and come up with something eerily new. I say eerie because that's how I feel about Spector recordings. I get the chills, even the willies, when I listen to them, particularly late at night.





There are tons of them on YouTube, fortunately - God, how did I LIVE without YouTube? - so I can listen, at a click, to Be My Baby by the Ronettes, And Then He Kissed Me and Da Doo Ron Ron by The Crystals, and the two big Righteous Brothers classics, Unchained Melody and You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling. But Tina's classic is still my favorite, and it gives me the shivers no matter how many times I hear it.

Why is that? Spector uses some pretty complex arrangements in these things, strings, brasses, lots of funky percussion (and for some reason he used a lot of castanets), and keyboards: piano and even harpsichord, as well as (usually) a female chorus. But all these things were not separate entities. They were layered on top of each other, even smeared and bleared together like pigment in an impressionist painting.





In another video, which I won't post here, a couple of session musicians of the era give away some of the secrets of the Wall. The two guys are sitting right there in the recording room at Gold Star Studios, a seedy-looking little place that looks like it turned out records that amateur singers would give their grandmas for birthday presents. But no. Miracles happened here. The musicians were cramped together so cruelly that going to the bathroom would necessitate clambering over the trombonist. This was done on purpose, so the individual sounds would meld and fuse together.

Another trick was the use of the echo chamber. I didn't know what one of those looked like - I assumed a glass tube like in a Star Trek movie or something, but no. It was just a room, an ugly little room in the basement made out of cement, and microphones were aimed at the walls. Yes. The walls. A cheap little speaker blasted the music into the echo chamber, and the sound waves from all those densely-clustered instruments bounced and zinged weirdly off the walls and into the mikes, which took the sound back to the control room where Spector did God knows what sort of Satanic thing to it.





Wikipedia explains it more clearly than I can:

"Microphones in the recording studio captured the musicians' performance, which was then transmitted to an echo chamber—a basement room fitted with speakers and microphones. The signal from the studio was played through the speakers and reverberated throughout the room before being picked up by the microphones. The echo-laden sound was then channeled back to the control room, where it was recorded on tape. The natural reverberation and echo from the hard walls of the echo chamber gave Spector's productions their distinctive quality and resulted in a rich, complex sound that, when played on AM radio, had a texture rarely heard in musical recordings."

One of those session musicians recalls:

"There was a lot of weight on each part.…The three pianos were different, one electric, one not, one harpsichord, and they would all play the same thing and it would all be swimming around like it was all down a well. Musically, it was terribly simple, but the way he recorded and miked it, they’d diffuse it so that you couldn't pick any one instrument out. Techniques like distortion and echo were not new, but Phil came along and took these to make sounds that had not been used in the past. I thought it was ingenious."






Not content with this kind of reverbatory sorcery, Spector was known to turn off a guitar track on a tape, relying on the "bleed"/spillage of the guitar's overtone-y sound into one of the other mikes to create the sense of a ghost guitar. It's there, except that it's not. And you can still hear it even when it isn't.

Whether all this supernatural stuff was folded in right then and there, or later, I don't know, but that smeary, bleary, echo-y, ghostly shade of the music was liberally used to give the song a sense of throbbing unreality. A chorus had the sound of fourteen glass globes vibrating to the point of near-explosion. A brass section was cooked down and down, reduced like a sauce that boiled away into a vapour of brassiness that almost had no individual flavour at all. Strings were sometimes doubled, then doubled again, and again, so that two string players could end up sounding like an entire string section, bizarrely cloned - not to save money or space, but to give the whole thing an unnatural, uniform, mutant quality.

So the lead singer would be laying down tracks on top of a vibrating prism of sound,  a rotating jellyfish at a depth of several thousand feet that would explode if it ever found its way up to the surface.





If you listen to this, and listen to it, it gets scary, because this is not real sound. Mind you, what you hear now isn't either, it has all been mucked with, but all this was done manually, no electronics, because there weren't any (and Spector despised the innovations that came later - he did not change with the times). When I listen to his productions, I get the same feeling as when I listen to those Tibetan monks chanting in overtones: yes, we ARE hearing the actual components of sound, but pulled apart, like white light being shattered by a prism into a rainbow. In this case it's almost the opposite. The sound waves are all pushed together, creating something we've never heard before and can't even quite comprehend.

There was another aspect of this twenty-thousand-leagues-under-reality effect: Spector made the musicians rehearse for at least three hours before rolling tape. At the end of this, everyone would be so sweaty and exhausted and beaten-down that they would lose their individuality and "meld", almost melt, the way he wanted them to. It was no doubt a form of brainwashing or torture, acceptable torture because he paid them. Spector is not a nice man, and is in fact batshit crazy and a sociopath, but damn! he came up with an interesting recording effect that people are still trying to duplicate today.





You can try it, you can record and re-record and re-re-RErecord musical reverberations and play them back and then record them again, but it's not the same. No one has quite the right demonic quality to put it all together. And singers are different, and music is different, it just has to be. And I am sure I am not using any of the right technical terms in writing about all this, but I'm writing what I hear, and I have a pretty darn-tootin' good ear, thank you very much; I came in with it, I inherited it from all the crazy musicians in my genetic pool.

Some are so crazy they aren't even here any more. But at least none of them are in jail for murder.





P. S. Listen at your own risk! I guarantee you, this is the weirdest thing you've ever heard: just the sound of one man chanting. 

. . . OK, there is always a P. S. to the P. S. Since I posted all this, including Tina Turner singing River Deep Mountain High, I found a version of this same song which sounds SOOOOO much better that I had to post it again. It sounds so much better because it's in glorious, clean-cut, diamond-hard MONO with no soup-ups or enhancements. (See follow-up post, where I get into a serious rant about this.) It may be the playback equipment that makes a difference, but I can hear so much more of the recording here, the deep well (not wall) of sound. In fact, Well of Sound might be a more accurate description of what the Mad Phillster was after.










Stand on guard: Canada geese at Piper Spit





Bill managed to get a few shots of these newly-hatched goslings at Burnaby Lake yesterday. These are little fluffballs, still with their golden coat on.




If you get too close to the babies, there is a certain sequence of events. Unlike ducks, where only the female hangs around, geese guard their young in pairs. The sentry duck raises its head and stiffens its neck, then begins to nod its head up and down vigorously, then lowers its head and kinks its neck. The next step, you don't want to see - it charges at the enemy full-on. Swans have been known to kill people, so I don't think a riled Canada goose can be far behind.






Newly-hatched mallard chicks seem to go into the water immediately, but you usually see these little guys on the ground. That might explain their parents' zealous guarding behaviour. Either that, or they're just being Canada geese ("we stand on guard" - oh no - that's the second time I've said that).






We didn't get a shot of this, but there was a mother duck with thirteen newly-hatched ducklings swimming around in the warm, shallow waters of Piper Spit. This is a place we "discovered" maybe ten years ago, then it was blocked off for construction and we almost forgot about it. But every few years I'd ask Bill, "Remember that place - where was it? It had a great big boardwalk with a round thing at the end, and there were ducks just swarming all around it." "I dunno." Then I'd shove it back into the dreamscape that makes up 85% of my mind.

Then we got lost recently, and ended up at. .  . 

"This is Burnaby Lake," Bill said. "Remember? We came here once."




Oh Lord. Here it was, the big boardwalk with the round thing (a circular dock) at the end, the hordes of wildlife, songbirds, ducks, geese. . . shallow warm water and people feeding the birds, which is not a good idea, but which draws them magnetically.

We had found it, by God, or re-found it. I had not imagined it. Looking up information on it, we discovered were on the Piper Spit boardwalk. There was a colony of birdhouses nearby, and tons of red-winged blackbirds, which might be making families in there. These are nearly tame enough to eat out of your hand.

Best of all is the birdsong, the wildlife sounds which calm my brain. Urban life is noisy, and the noise is ugly. It jars. This heals, and restores. 

What does it mean when Paradise Lost is found again? 

Mystery duck




The duck mystery deepens. For years now, Bill and I have been walking around Como Lake in Coquitlam - a very pleasant alternative to the "duck park" that has been bulldozed to make way for a Third Reich-scale cement amphitheatre that will blast loud rock music night and day. Obviously, all the wildlife within a 5-mile radius has fled. 


But we still have Como Lake! We noticed some time ago that there are some pretty strange ducks amongst the mallards and wood ducks. This one, for example. This is a very big duck, almost the size of a goose, and he is brown-and-white  (several different shades of brown, from quite dark, almost coffee bean, to cocoa brown). Then we discovered, to our delight, a second brown-and-white duck, somewhat smaller than this one, likely a female. And yet, strangely enough, we've never seen them together.





I made this gif from an eight-second-long YouTube video labelled "Ducks at Como Lake". I know it's the same duck. Not my video, of course. There was no information with it, not even a description. This is not much help.

Do you think I can find ANYTHING on this duck, or on any duck remotely close to it? If I google "brown-and-white duck", I get professional photos that are labelled "brown-and-white duck". They appear to be of barnyard animals, but I can't be sure because there is no information with them at all.




NOBODY knows anything about these two ducks (or are there more? Or will there be babies?), which both intrigues me and drives me crazy. It's possible these are domestic ducks that have gone native, or whatever-it-is they do when they answer the call of the wild. Or maybe they're hybrids - it's just crazy enough. 

There were beavers living in LaFarge Lake (in the famous "duck park" which has now been paved, like Paradise in the Joni Mitchell song), and no one could explain that either. Nine beavers, to be exact, two adults and seven kits. Seems like some fever dream, except that there were nineteen trees felled or seriously gnawed in the park - we've seen some of them - and many still have wire mesh wrapped around the trunks. Beavers in a lake is no big deal, right? How about beavers living in a STONE QUARRY in the middle of a major city, in the residential area right next to a community college?





To make it even stranger, we saw an otter in the lake one day which scared the bejeezus out of the ducks. We've never seen them do this before, but they all, to a duck, beat it out of the water and just huddled in a line along the shore until the otter was well away from them. It swam around on its back like they all do. No way can there be ONE otter in a lake. Or a stone quarry.

Today we went to a place in Burnaby called Piper Spit and saw ducks and ducks and ducks: a mother duck with THIRTEEN babies, so newly-hatched their fluff was wet even when they were sitting on the ground. And we saw a pair of Canada geese with goslings so new they still had that pollen-y-looking yellow stuff on them, almost like vernix on a newborn.





One of the geese kept kinking its neck and bobbing its head at us. We knew why, of course. We were too close to its young. So I said to Bill: Do you know how you can tell it's a Canada goose?

Because it stands on guard? (Moan. It's too late at night.)





Special bonus news item from the Tri-City News!!


They may be one of Canada’s most iconic animals, but the beaver is not welcome in a popular park in Coquitlam.

City officials are once again dealing with the large rodents at Lafarge Lake after the animals appeared in late fall.

While the city isn’t sure how many beavers are in the park, Lanny Englund, the city’s urban forestry and parks services manager, noted a process is underway to have them removed and relocated.

The problem with the beavers is they damage trees and dig tunnels, which can undermine the trails around the lake and cause a hazard.

“It does seem to happen on and off and eventually it gets to the point where the impact is too great,” Englund told the Tri-Cities NOW, noting the city experienced a similar situation with beavers a couple of years ago.

“Town Centre Park is such a high use [park],” he said.

“There’s too much risk allowing them to do their thing.”




In the short term, the city has wrapped trees close to the lake in a fencing wire to protect them from the animals.

The city has also brought in a contractor to live-trap the beavers and relocate them to another part of the province.

It’s unclear how long it will take to trap and remove the animals from the lake.

Meanwhile, the big mystery is exactly how the beavers made the lake their home in the first place.

Englund noted the lake is connected to Hoy Creek and the Coquitlam River by underground pipes, but suggested it would difficult for the beavers to travel through them.

There is also a small creek in the northwest corner of Town Centre Park that has been home to beavers, but it would force the animals to cross over land.

Englund said an even more unlikely scenario is that someone intentionally put the beavers in the lake.
     









Monday, April 25, 2016

Money in hamsters


                                                                                                                                                                   


      






























Transcript of Get Into Business For Yourself ad:

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Gentlemen:
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With complete instructions HOW TO BREED AND RAISE HAMSTERS FOR THE MARKET. Inclosed find Postal money order for $15.00. NO C. O. D.s




. . . Like in that ad, with the pony in the dog door






   
                                                              . . . like this one.


William Shatner's love child, and other hazards of turning 85




OK, so you already know that one of my many fascinations/obsessions is William Shatner. Whenever I read about his hyper-busy life, I think: geez, that's a lot for a man his age. 65, is he?

No. Nor 70. Nor 75. Nor. . .

He doesn't LOOK like a man of 85. He doesn't SOUND like, LIVE like, or do anything like whatever-85-is-supposed-to-be. Every so often, when I'm watching YouTube or an old Twilight Zone or just about any TV series from the 1950s, I'll see an unbelievably gorgeous Shat, just a matinee-idol type with the most exotically beautiful eyes.

Hey wait a minute. The *1950s*??

I was just about kind of getting born then. (Forgive all the italics. This is about William Shatner, after all.) He already had a career well underway on TV, worked steadily, had cut his teeth on Shakespeare at Stratford, Ontario. WHEN, during the Depression or what?

This guy is like that character in Trek who was Da Vinci, Brahms, Einstein, Bill Gates or whatever, all those different famous smart guys (and they always throw in a few we've never heard of, presumably from other planets), but he never dies because of "whatever". I don't really care why. The point is, this guy not only never DIES, he never slows down either. Right now, along with a host of other things, he is involved in - gulp - a paternity suit, the kind of thing a guy in his 30s might face.

I don't know how long he can keep going like this. He seems ageless. It creeps me out, some way, it really does seem downright weird, and in past posts I've wondered if he made some sort of a deal with "somebody" to just stop ageing.

I've known too many people, especially lately, who have expired far too soon. I don't know what happens to them. Then you have this guy who looks like a well-preserved 65, who is literally 20 years older than that.

Predictably, he has a whole lot of new stuff happening/coming out now. Not sure how he does it, but I'm glad he does.




William Shatner talks fame, Leonard Nimoy ahead of Calgary Expo appearance



William Shatner speaks during the Silicon Valley Comic Con in San Jose, California on March 18. He will be guest at the Calgary Expo     JOSH EDELSON / AFP/GETTY IMAGES


On the day William Shatner talked to the Calgary Herald, a Google News search of his name turned up a wide variety of articles.

There were headlines from Vanity Fair about how star-struck actor Sam Heughan of the series Outlander had gone out to dinner with Shatner and was thrilled to learn he was a fan of his sci-fi fantasy series.

RollingStone.com was reporting on Shatner’s newest book Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man, which chronicles his relationship with his Star Trek co-star Leonard Nimoy. Gaming sites were all atwitter with news that the space simulation, Elite: Dangerous, would soon feature Shatner’s voice.

Finally, there were tabloid-y reports about a man suing Shatner for $170-million, claiming he is the actor’s love child.

It suggests that, at 85, “The Shat” still commands a good deal of attention and continues to experience all the vagaries of fame: The good. The bad. The weird.




“Denial and downcast eyes is a good way of dealing with fame,” jokes Shatner, without referring specifically to any of his recent headlines. “It has it’s own qualifications. It can be irksome. But, on balance, what it has brought me in terms of talking to you, and going to Calgary and eating at the charcuterie there … if one were to look at my life, you would have to say: ‘One of the luckiest son-of-a-bitches that ever lived.'”

Shatner sneaks in the Calgary reference because he will be returning to the city this week as one of the higher-profile guests of Calgary Expo. He heads an impressive contingent of Star Trek stars that come from virtually every chapter of Gene Roddenberry’s ever-increasing universe, from the original series and movies in which Shatner played Captain James. T. Kirk to J.J. Abrams’s recent reboots. Shatner, as with many Trek alumni, has been at the Expo before. But this is a special year, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Rodenberry’s vision.

While Shatner’s relationship with the Trek phenomenon has had its ups and downs, the half-century milestone is also a reminder that he has spent at least that long in the spotlight.




Few performers could have parlayed starring in a three-season cult series into such a wide-ranging, artistically restless career. As an actor, he has done everything from serious drama to goofy self-parody. He has authored or co-authored dozens of fiction and non-fiction books. He has directed documentaries, released albums, raised horses, played poker for charity, hosted a talk show, been a pitchman for Priceline, developed an autobiographical one-man show for Broadway. . . the list goes on.

At 85, he apparently has no plans to slow down and still has some surprises up his sleeve.

“I helped design a motorcycle in Chicago,” he reports. “A group of people drove, and I drove the motorcycle, from Chicago to Los Angeles and on the way shot a documentary of what went on as well as raising funds for the American Legion. All and all it was a very busy time. But I’ve got a lot of film of what I’ve called ‘the ride.’ And, in the intervening time, there are all kinds of documentary suggestions that I’ve got and I’m trying to sell and make. I’ve been very busy doing that kind of reality work.”

As a documentary filmmaker, Shatner has mostly concentrated on Star Trek, whether it be revealing “the shenanigans” that went on behind the scenes during the production of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the very entertaining 2014 TV doc Chaos on the Bridge, examining the deep cultural reverberations of the series in 2013’s Get a Life! or interviewing his fellow starship commanders in 2012’s The Captains.





For those documentaries, Shatner occasionally seemed to be looking at the ramifications of the franchise from a bemused distance. But that certainly wasn’t the case with his latest book, which was a deeply personal affair. In Leonard, he reflects on his five-decade friendship with Nimoy, who played the original Mr. Spock in Star Trek. By the end of his life, Nimoy was no longer speaking with Shatner, who says he doesn’t know why his good friend shut him out of his life.

The actor has written plenty of books, but this one was different, he says.

“Writing a factual book on somebody I really cared about was difficult,” he says. “It took a toll. We had so much in common. Our lives, our backgrounds, even our foregrounds, were strangely in line. So we talked about that a great deal over the years. And yet when you lose somebody that is close to you, all those memories are in jeopardy of being forgotten, they might as well have never happened. You have no validation from the other person. So that was one reason for writing that book, to try and remember some of the incidences and motivations.”

While Shatner may keep busy with writing and directing, one of the reasons he stays in the spotlight is because he remains one of the more prolific celebrity tweeters. The aforementioned exchange with Outlander actor Sam Heughan followed months of online banter between the two.




In 2015, he gained headlines for mocking Star Wars: The Force Awakens in a number of tweets.

A few weeks after this interview, he drew attention by briefly debating morality with author Stephen King in relation to the Netflix series The 100. But while he clearly seems to enjoy it — particularly if he can dictate the tweets (“Typing is onerous,” he says) — maintaining such a high profile online is also a pragmatic exercise. In fact, bringing it up in conversation allows him to plug another one of his many pursuits.

“Not a small part of it is that I raise money for charity, especially for children and veterans, and by making acquaintances that you wouldn’t recognize if they came into a room and they are with a show, they will give me stuff to auction off,” he says. “So the silent auction, for my charity show, which is the Hollywood Charity Horse Show, I’ve gotten really some wonderful stuff that has made use of this celebrity by raising money for kids in need.”

William Shatner is scheduled to appear at the Calgary Expo at Stampede Park from Thursday to Sunday. Visit calgaryexpo.com.




OK, so MY question is. . . where can I see all those documentaries? They never come on TV. They don't appear in theatres. I would DIE to see any one of them, or all three. Do I have to go to film festivals or what??

UPDATE/BADDA-BOOM. This is from the Smithsonian Magazine. Is there nowhere this man doesn't show up? I mean, doesn't he show up nowhere? Doesn't he anywhere NOT show up? Or something. But for some reason, not one article mentions that he looks 65 when he's 85.

William Shatner spoke at Smithsonian Magazine's "The Future is Here" festival. We sat down and asked him questions regarding his thoughts on politics, climate change, and the new Star Trek series. (Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)

We're probably six minutes into a 10-minute interview when I ask William Shatner the question that's been dogging me ever since I found out there was to be an interview.

"Ted Cruz, the Republican presidential candidate, has said that Captain Kirk is a Republican," I said. "Do you agree?"

For Shatner, this could have been an easy question. Who better to answer it than the man who played the swashbuckling "Star Trek" captain on film for nearly 30 years?

Maybe he didn't want to color the way people view his character. Maybe he was channeling the post-partisan politics of "Star Trek's" 23rd century. Whatever the reason, Shatner did a very un-Kirk-like thing: He took evasive action.

"If you could define what 'Republican' and 'Democrat' means nowadays, I might be able to enter into that discussion," he said. "But the roles seem to be mixed. And what defines a Republican and certainly what defines a Democrat is so blurred, I don't quite know where anybody's standing."




So Shatner is very reluctant to talk about politics, it turns out. But if he could cast a ballot today, chances are he wouldn't be voting for Cruz.

You see, Cruz has been a vocal critic of man-made climate change. And Shatner's biggest fear? It's that humanity won't even live to see the 23rd century because of overpopulation and greenhouse gases. In fact, Shatner is disappointed in us all for making 2016 such a letdown compared to the sunny utopia laid out in "Star Trek."

"There was all kinds of interest in flying vehicles and health and the state of the world" among science fiction writers 50 years ago, Shatner said. "That we wouldn't be melting away, into the sixth extinction. It would be a much more pleasant. Peaceful. Humane world. Than it is."

Are there any technologies that worry you? I asked.

"The technology that worries me is the old technologies," Shatner said. "The technology of uses of energy and the spilling of toxins into Mother Earth, and we're killing our Earth and nobody is irate about it enough. And not enough people are irate about it. People like yourself — young people like yourself should be screaming at the top of your lungs to the people who lead."

It's a challenge not even Captain Kirk would be able to take on, Shatner said. Kirk was the captain of a single ship. Climate change is a big collective action problem requiring the input of lots of different actors.

I later asked him whether there was any role on "Star Trek" that Shatner, looking back, would have liked to try. He joked that he might have wanted to replace George Takei as Hikaru Sulu, the USS Enterprise's helmsman. Perhaps it was a dig at Takei, with whom Shatner is said to have a contentious relationship. But it was clear Shatner is preoccupied by bigger things these days than politics, on or off the set.

BLOGGER'S NOTE: Finally. We know Sulu's first name.

These eyes






Coolest thing ever: click on the link!








































http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/mcvmagazine/bird_songs_interactive/index.html

And your bird can sing. Click on the link to get the interactive poster. Click on each bird and watch your cat go crazy. (Note. Make sure you don't mouse away from the bird or it will stop singing. Leave the cursor over it. Some of the songs go on for half a minute or so!)