The Prince and the Wolf

There’s some circumstantial evidence that THE PRINCE AND THE WOLF may now be available, a month ahead of schedule. I’ve written to Zero for clarification, but the Amazon UK link above clearly claims to have it in stock. I ordered a copy, and it gave me a definite delivery date of next week. We’ll see.

another concert photo

That’s Geddy Lee on the video screen, playing “The Spirit of Radio” (first song of the night). Still light outside, unlike the first photo I posted.

eyewitness report from Cairo

Just received this a couple of hours ago, from a trusted observer:

“I’ve been in Tahrir since sundown. There was little sign of the morning’s and previous night’s violence (which was centered in Bab al luq and the AUC library area, and was harsh — bricks, gas, rubber bullets) when I arrived. But there were a dozen ambulances lined up all the way from KFC (still open! The Colonel would be proud) to the Museum.

The circle is filling up again, but cars are still allowed to pass. Shabab [youth] are marshaling traffic. I sat on the circle’s ledge reading a book for an hour and saw three minor acts of violence. Two were when police trucks drove by—instantly the crowd roared and started throwing stones; the trucks sped off toward the Omar Makram side of the Mugamma before the incident could escalate. The other was a shoving match between protesters and a guy who brought a small horse (the ‘Thawra Pony’).

Now the crowd is thickening as people arrive from the soccer match [between rival Cairo-based powerhouses Zamalek and Ahly]. If I were to guess I’d say the tensions will rise for a bit, then simmer down for the night.”

mystery YouTube video

Someone posted a video of objects with the sound of me talking about objects. It doesn’t say where this was from, but I think it may have been Oxford.

HERE.

I’m speaking too quickly here. Sorry.

sign of a good concert

I’ve had Rush songs in my head all day, which means that they did their job well.

After the art museum I walked over to my brother’s office, strolled in, and he had Rush playing on his computer, which isn’t his usual style of music in his late 30’s either. The concert had the same effect on him, I guess.

He took this photo last night, among others:

Portland Art Museum

The claims on their own website and on the Wikipedia Greenberg article both turn out to be exaggerated. They don’t have his annotated personal library or any real scholarly material. That stuff is all in the Smithsonian (where it belongs, frankly).

What they do have here are a bunch of catalogs from shows that Greenberg went to. It’s pretty striking to see pencil notations in his own hand, but it amounts mostly to simple check marks. There was one David Smith catalog where the remarks were slightly more interesting. He wrote “weak” next to a photo of one sculpture, and next to two others he wrote “back view,” I suppose in exasperation at catalog photographers he must have viewed as inept for photographing the wrong side.

But the librarian seemed to feel sorry about my disappointed expectations (and she warned me they would probably be disappointed). So she very kindly let me in the art gallery itself through a secret back entrance using an employee pass key, and there one could see the works from Greenberg’s private collection. Those were all good works, as you might expect.

Portland has a surprisingly nice collection beyond that, as well.

gloomy and drippy again

Portland is a city blessed with beautiful natural landscape. But you shouldn’t move here if you’re dependent on sunlight for good moods. It’s another gloomy, drippy day today.

Don’t get me wrong– I like that when I’m on vacation. In Egypt it’s sunlight day after day, which is great for mental health, but if you’ve done it for over a decade then you start to crave rainy gloom after awhile.

comment by an Iraqi who met Steve Everhart

While we all continue to come to terms with Steve’s death, I was glad (but not surprised) to hear that he’d left a very good impression on the Iraqis he worked with during his week there.

“Omar Nayef:
June 25th, 2011 at 7:46 am
Dr. Everhart worked with us in Baghdad for the last few days and he was nothing but a dedicated hardworking gentleman with a sense of humor, we all here, as Iraqi working for this project to bring development and international standards to the country financial sector, we are saddened and shocked for this tremendous loss.

our heartfelt condolences to Dr. Everhart’s family, and he’ll be remembered here, at this place, Mansour Compound in Baghdad, forever.

thank you Dr.Everhart for your kindness, sense of humor, compassion,

thank you for everything”

A dedicated, hardworking gentleman with kindness, a sense of humor, and compassion– that was Steve, all right.

I think many of us are still in complete denial, and it will take a few months’ worth of the school year to start to come to terms with this incident.

Egypt

A list of events from yesterday can be found HERE at Ahram Online. It’s in reverse order, though.

This all took me by surprise once I got back to the hotel, and I’m still not sure I understand what’s going on, as I try to piece things together. It sounds like a protest by the families of the January 25 martyrs, justly demanding trials for snipers and others who killed protestors in January/February, turned ugly. It’s all centered in the Tahrir area, of course, though one death seems to have occurred at the Balloon Theater just west of the river from Zamalek.

I’ll ask my media friends in Cairo to fill me in.

Wael Ghonim is quoted as protesting the lack of revolutionary decisions. He has a point. While the free speech/free press climate improved dramatically after Mubarak’s resignation, much else has remained the same. It is appalling that, among other things, the former Vice President remains free. Those now in charge made no effort to prevent the February 2 thug invasion of Tahrir, and so forth. And based on events of last night, it looks as though thugs may still be at the ready.

Rush

Tonight I went up to near Vancouver, Washington (quite close to Portland) to see the Rush concert. With me were my youngest brother and two eldest nephews, who are now 14 and 12 and have a wide range of rock music knowledge ranging over several different decades. They happen to like Rush independently, so this wasn’t just my brother and I dragging them along in enforced nostalgia participation.

It was a great show. The guys can still play. I was listening to them only in late high school, way back from 1984-86 (I also listened to a lot of blues in those days; strange combination, maybe). I then suddenly and completely lost interest in Rush as my tastes immediately shifted in college towards Wagner and atonal music, plus Bird/Trane/Monk. As a result, I have no familiarity at all with anything Rush has recorded since the Power Windows album a quarter of a century ago. For that reason most of the first set was lost on me. But the second set was more of a gift to their first-generation fans, with a lot of stuff from 1974-1980, including the whole of the Moving Pictures album.

I’d say that the band is aging reasonably well, with a few caveats to be mentioned shortly. It was a generously long concert, and they obviously had plenty of energy despite a gruelling schedule for this tour, which technically began a full year ago (though they took a refuelling break from October through March).

The first song of the night was “The Spirit of Radio,” and at first Geddy Lee’s vocals (despite a still impressive upper range for a male) were bad enough that I was worried it would be a very long night; my brother later confirmed that he’d had the same concern initially. Geddy’s voice was a bit off-key and even cracking now and then. But it only took a couple of songs before he was back to normal and singing very well. The only vocal issue for the rest of the night was that he now often has to drop an octave where he used to sing falsetto, as was especially evident in the “We are the priests…” section of “2112.”

I’d never seen them live before, and so this was the first time I realized that Geddy provides most of the personality for the band. He’s the only one of the three who’s even remotely outgoing; he’s also the only one who dances a bit across the stage while playing, the only one who addresses the audience, and so forth. He also looks reasonably similar to how he looked in the 1980’s, whereas the others definitely do not.

Alex Lifeson looks considerably older than before, but his playing seems comparable to what it always was. His solos stick closely to the recorded versions, which audiences generally appreciate.

Neil Peart, haunted by personal tragedy in the 1990’s, now looks much older when wearing his concert hat (not so much so when you see him normally). He’d have been completely unrecognizable to me if met on the street. He still knows his way around a drum set, but obviously you can’t play the drums as frantically in your late 50’s as in your late 20’s; some of the risk-taking is now gone. His second-set solos used to be “wild man” routines, but tonight it was more of an understated world/ambient solo with spooky mood lighting. In fact, it reminded me (as well as my brother) a bit of Muslimgauze.

Highlights of the concert…

*they nailed “Subdivisions” at the end of the first set, and the video on screen for the song was hilariously literal: footage of high school halls, shopping malls, basement bars, and backs of cars, following the lyrics exactly.

*other than an unfortunate first few bars, when Neil was slightly out of synch with Alex and Geddy, “YYZ” was performed with typical virtuosity

*the second encore was the now ancient “Working Man” (it’s a pre-Neil Peart song), which began amusingly as reggae before shifting into the normal heavy metal vein a couple of minutes into the tune

The musical memory of humans can be really remarkable. I hadn’t heard many of these songs in literally 25 years, but hadn’t forgotten much about them. I still had the solos memorized, and so forth. And that’s not me, that’s just typical of humans in general, I think.

If some random unknown person told you they spent the summer studying H.P. Lovecraft and going to a Rush concert, you’d probably guess they were about 19 years old. It just worked out that way this summer. I’ll make up for it with a year’s worth of 24/7 Aristotle after that.

What I was really stunned by was the level of sophisticated musical knowledge displayed by my nephews, who in several cases made astute critical remarks about certain changes in the songs compared with the recorded renditions.