Hot Club of Cambridge

I saw these guys at the Elm Tree a couple of months ago, but never got around to writing anything about it becuase… well, mainly because I’m lazy.  I do like this style of music, from ukmg’s takes on it (Adrian’s 18 Champs Elysees and T.N.Nurse’s Frosty the Infidel, which is now sadly unavailable for download), through to my recent purchase of a collection of actual Hot Club recordings, Swing from Paris.  Kyla bought me a book on the style for my birthday, though being my typically crap self I haven’t got very far through it; so far I’ve learnt a lot of minor arpeggios and an interesting scale that is a major third follwed by minor thirds all the way, kind of a diminished arpeggio but starting on the third of a dominant seven, i.e.
E ----------------
B ----------------
G -----------6-9-- ... etc
D -------5-8------
A ---4-7----------
E -5--------------
Seeing the Hot Club of Cambridge was made particularly interesting because the lead guitarist used exactly this scale at one point. Often I work on things I’ve read and they’re just interesting exercises, and I think this was the first time that I’d seen something I’d read in a music book applied!

Stand-up at the Cambridge Fringe

I went to an evening of stand-up comedy, which was put on as part of the Cambridge Fringe Festival.  Overall it was ok; three acts, with two of them compering between the main sets.  None of them were outstanding, but all had their moments.  One chap, Nick Page, did a story about his attending the most homophobic school in Britain, where pupils spent all day working out who the gay teachers were, accusing other pupils of being gay and denying being gay when they were themselves accused.  He quickly listed a few teachers and the various foibles that marked them out, and it was at that point that I realised that I had been to the same school as him, mainly because we’d taken the piss out of the same teachers.  A surprising coincidence.  This kind of rolls into the recent bru-ha over Chris Moyles’ use of the word gay as a synonym for “rubbish”.  Not that I agree with Moyles, but kids have been at the very least verbally homophobic for years, it’s not some new repurposing of the word; Moyles is simply behaving like a school kid, which is pretty much all I’d expect from him.

The Archaeology of Warfare

I read a review of The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of Raiding and Conquest in this week’s New Scientist, written by this chap.  The book goes about trying to give some answers to the question of whether or not humans are actually genetically predisposed to bash the living shit out of each other with sticks on a semi-regular basis, or whether it’s more of a social construct.  As the review points out, chimps are actually quite violent, with recorded examples of war-like behaviour. Of course in contrast, the bonobo are quite peaceful, preferring to resolve differences through sex rather than killing.  (Hey, they’re lovers, not fighters.)  In chimps’ defence, it isn’t known whether their current, agressive behaviour is actually the result of human influence: shrinking ecological niches or disturbed food chains could lead to more desperate actions on their part.  If there is a genetic tendency to violence that we have inherited from our evolutionary forebearers, it should be possible to find examples of it in our pre-history, which is what this book focusses on.  It’s quite an interesting debate, and one that is particularly resonant given current world events; it’s depressing, but I’m starting to think that we are all doomed.  One of the comments in the review, that an ideology of violence can quickly become entrenched in a culture, with the youth growing up acclimatised to the acceptability of violence and the society’s elite reliant upon warfare to maintain their position, seemed particularly true.  How much time must pass after the second World War before the legions of hooligans stop trashing a variety of European destinations?  I wonder whether violent films and computer games are a cause or effect of violence in our society.

Even if we had no-one to fight, I’m sure that people would still be lying and cheating their way to the top.  I think Communism will forever remain a theoretical idea rather than an actuality, mainly because not everyone is altruistic enough to make it work.  Much as I disagree with many of the things that Margaret Thatcher did, her quote, “There is no society,” often rings true for me.

So what can we do about it?  Well, like global warming, I guess it’s all up to the individual; we must try and build stronger communities and more understanding between them.  I don’t know, hugging a few trees might help, but I’m not sure I’d go as far as hugging a hoodie, Mr Cameron.

This post is brought to you by a general feeling of depression engendered by the state of the Middle East.

So

Peter Gabriel is messing with my head.  One of the first albums I actually wanted to own was Pete’s So, which I will fully admit was less driven by the music and more because the ten-year-old me was fascinated by the video for Sledgehammer (which I read on the Wiki page was done by Aardman Animations, who seem to be responsible for more cool stuff than the Arctic).  (For the record (arf), I think the first album I ever owned was a Play School one, see this page and search for “Play On”, but I can’t remember anything about it.  So perhaps represents a musical highpoint in my early listening; I think after that I asked for the Wax album, because I’d liked the single Building a Bridge To Your Heart — a bit dodgy — then followed it up with a Best of Bananarama — decidedly dodgy.  That said, I acquired Squeeze’s Babylon and On sometime around there, and surely a Squeeze album can’t count against me.  OK, maybe it can.)  Anyway, back in them days I was given the album on vinyl, and now don’t have a record player, so this weekend I popped into HMV just to check the price of a CD copy of the album: £16.99.  Seventeen quid?!  I know I’ve crossed into the “Music for 40-year-olds” section, but bloody hell, the album’s twenty years old!  Surely they’ve made enough money from it by now!  Even play.com puts it at eleven quid, though that is at least slightly more realistic.  Frankly I’m tempted to buy it from one of those cheeky Russian mp3 sites, because after all I do own a legal copy, even if I can’t play it on anything.

Looking at the CD in HMV, I spotted that the track listing looked different to how I remember it.  (Don’t ask me why I remember the order of tracks on an album that I was given two decades ago; I’ve remarked in the past that if I could only free up the parts of my brain dedicated to remembering pop lyrics and other trivia I could probably learn three new languages and still have room left over for The Knowledge.)  Again the Wiki page reveals why: the tape and CD versions had an extra song, and when the album was remastered Pete changed the song order to what he’d originally wanted.  I guess the fact that In Your Eyes was in the “wrong” place on the album had been bothering Pete all these years!  There’s probably a ruling against listening to albums in shuffle mode in his house.

I got sun burnt for Alex Harris

Cambridge’s summer event, the Big Day Out, rolls around again. This time, however, the opening act was Alex Harris and his band, now known as the New Dynamics.  I did have a momentary feeling of “Hey, that could have been me up on the big stage,” but half way through the set they played a song where Ian, their bassist, took lead vocals.  For starters, he can sing, and for seconds, he can sing and play simultaneously, two things that I’m very bad at doing.  I stupidly left the house without applying any suncream, and hence now sport my usual summertime blushing lobster look.  Ah well, pretty soon it’ll all peel off and I’ll go back to my normal hue: pallid scientist.

XOR

Recently I’ve been wasting time playing XOR.  I remember first playing this at school, aged ten or eleven, so it’s worrying to think that I’ve been wasting time in front of computers for about two decades.  Anyway, it’s a puzzle game, so at least there’s some chance its exercising my brain.

Stuff it

I spent the weekend down in Kent ushering at a friend’s wedding. (Ushering is great: all the comedy suit action, none of the speech-related stress. So far I have ushered for six different friends’ weddings and been best man at exactly zero; the main reason for this is that no-one has yet wanted to find out whether I could give a speech without saying fuck in front of all their assembled relatives. I shall be using this line in my speech at my wedding.) The ceremony and reception was at a place called Quex House, which was the home of a chap called Maj. Powell-Cotton.  The Major visited Africa a number of times in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and I will swear that he must have shot everything that he saw.  From the biggest elephant down to the smallest mammal, you can find them all in Quex house, stuffed and arranged into lifelike tableaux.  Let me assure you, it’s eerie.  He must have carried an armoury of guns of various sizes to suit the target of the moment; there is a collection of butterflies on display that I imagine the Major stalked with a weapon of Lilliputian proportions.