AVDGGAD 02 – The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other (1970)

January 6, 2017 //
1

The horn sound on this album moves VDGG closer to what King Crimson were doing during the Lizard/Islands period while the classical keyboards pull the sound towards early Genesis (with whom they toured the following year). I love the confluence of gorgeous vocals and rhythm guitar work that goes head to head with free-jazz saxophone on tracks like What Ever Would Robert Have Said? Hammill had a lovely voice (and possibly still does) and he uses it to great effect, from a croon to a growl and often in the same song.

vdgg-tlwcd2After the deluge of Darkness (11/11), Refugees is a beautiful interlude with some nice harmonies before White Hammer, another example of proper early prog histrionics. Lyrically the latter owes too much to its source material (the 15th century treatise on witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum). That said, the interplay of the sax and keyboards can occasionally make you forget the words. I hope I can find a live version, because the fadeout (given that this song closes side A) is annoying. Honestly not sure where I got my hatred for the fade, but in general I think the shows that the producer was sleeping on the job.

Side B starts with Whatever Would Robert Have Said? For being only about six minutes long, it goes through several sections, some with vocals, some without. The opening wailing saxophone shows off some interesting production – the sax in the left channel is different than the sax in the right. They definitely knew what stereo was for.
Out Of My Book is another musically gentle track. Primarily flute-driven, it’s another first-person not-quite-love-song.
After The Flood has a section with some great flute/drum interplay. Lyrically it’s half biblical flood and half apocalypse. The horn work in the middle of the song has the free jazz feel of contemporaneous King Crimson. I like the Dalek effect on the word ‘annihilation’. Alas, the refrain of And when the water falls again / All is dead and nobody lives doesn’t really do justice to the majesty of the music.

The version on Spotify is the 2005 remaster with two extra tracks: The Boat of Millions of Years and the single version of Refugees. Wikipedia says that these are the B and A sides of single released two months after the LP. The latter still isn’t exactly radio friendly at 5 minutes 18 (versus the 6:25 of the album version), but radio was a different beast in 1970.

Tags ,
Categories Music, Rock

AVDGGAD 01 – The Aeresol Grey Machine (1969)

January 5, 2017 //
0

Having finished A Dylan A Day a few weeks ago, there was a request to take on A Van Der Graaf Generator A Day.

Here’s the first: AVDGGAD 01 – The Aeresol Grey Machine (1969)

Main man Peter Hammill made much of his reputation as a guitarist, so it’s a little odd that this first VDGG album is so keyboard heavy.

Lyrically, the whole album is something of a mindfuck. Here’s an almost but not quite track-by-track…

Orthenian St. is ostensibly about an averted accident on an icy road. Part I closes with a nice Neu-like repetition (yes – I know that Neu! came later) before slipping back into folk-prog. The same motorik feel comes back around at the end of part II

Running Back has some nice flute going on and studio echo that reminds me of what Jonathan King did on some of the tracks on the first Genesis recordings. Its lyrics seem to be about a relationship the narrator has returned to after trying to leave.

The much harder Into A Game has the narrator pushing a partner away who is trying to return (Now we’re into a game / And it’s all a bit strange / But familiar too / The rules never change / I know it, but do you?). Its closing features some nicely improvised jazz piano.

Now this is the place where listening to a continuous medium such as a CD (or single track video) shows up how different it was to listen to a recording with two sides. Side B opens with the title track, a 47-second music-hall takeoff reminiscent of I Want To Marry A Lighthouse Keeper (used in A Clockwork Orange, but probably not an influence on the later VDGG track A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers). It just sounds really weird coming after Into A Game. The jarring is similar to that produced by Sergeant Peppers’ side 2 inner groove and the alarm at that follows The Wanderer on U2’s Zooropa.

vdgg-agmSide two is otherwise dedicated to the kind of lyrical mythology that prog and sub-par fantasy novels became famous/infamous for. Aquarians and Necromancer both have silliness like ‘My form is mystic, but my heart is pure / You’d better believe what I say / I am the Necromancer’, but particularly on the latter, the drumming and synth work are quite intriguing.
Octopus is a little less like that, but is still an interesting example of early prog rock.
The version of the album I found on Vevo is taken (I think) from the German reissue which closes with The People You Were Going To and Firebrand. The first of these is an odd address to another person much like Running Back. It’s more of a straight up folk rock piece than what otherwise populated side two. On the other hand, Firebrand is most definitely another one of those heavy keyboard, heavy mythology pieces of fantasy rock. The vocals are histrionic and the lyrics…well, the chorus goes like so:
“I ride an icy stallion, fire at each end
and poison at the centre;
you won’t hear my words as I scream into the darkness:
his plans are like a firebrand,
his plans are like a firebrand.”

The closing of the song makes reference to a couple of folks named Njal and Hildiglum. I had to look them up – they come out of an 10th century Icelandic saga. Much like Peter Gabriel did with The Fountain of Salmacis a couple of years later, Hammill seems to have lifted the lyrics nearly wholesale from the older text.

All in all, quite a satisfying album, though I think I’d prefer to have heard just the album either as it was released or as it was sequenced by the band. I give it ****.

Tags ,
Categories Music, Rock

Holiday notes

January 4, 2017 //
0

Just arrived home from a two-week holiday in England. My wife and I took the ferry over to Harwich and had breakfast with her 92 year old cousin Margaret. The family calls her Auntie Margaret because even though she and my mother-in-law Mary are first cousins, they are 20 years apart in age.We’d only planned to spend an hour or so with her, but after three hours of stories, we looked at the time. (Rachel describes conversations with Margaret as ‘giving her a good listening to’.) One of Margaret and Mary’s common great-grandmothers (if I have the story correct) was one of 22 children. Their grandmother was one of three whose children were born over the space of about twenty years. I think this is right. I want to write to Margaret and ask her for a family tree because I know there’s a great novel in their backgrounds.

We then continued our drive up to the midlands where we spent Xmas week with Rachel’s parents. Too much food, as always, but we got a couple of walks in, and (as is tradition now) Xmas eve with Rachel’s brother and his kids. Rachel has been very attentive to them as they grow up and bought gifts that were very appropriate to the interests they’ve been showing. She feared that this would make her ‘Crazy Aunt Rachel’ which I assured her was already guaranteed as she’d wed Crazy Uncle Joe, and that it was a title worthy of esteem.

Rachel’s parents aren’t in the best of health and had not been able to attend to the graves of Mary’s parents and grandparents (indeed – the aforementioned grandparents) in over a year, so we went up to the cemetery with garden tools and cleaned them up. Other than that, we mostly relaxed and took a couple of walks.

ETA: I forgot to add that we had a wonderful luncheon with three more cousins and their spouses. The daughters of Rachel’s uncle Bob all live (relatively) close to Rachel’s parents and they came to a newly reopened carvery in the village. It was really great to see them as we hadn’t seen one another in several months. They’re a great bunch.

Every year we gather for New Year’s Eve with a crowd of Rachel’s college friends for a week or so of walking in someplace hilly. This year, the place was Ilkley Moor in the Yorkshire Dales. James Herriot territory. On the first full day there, I’d planned to walk maybe six or seven kilometres. Nope. Rachel and I set off with one group to the Cow and Calf Rocks and then we separated. I joined a group that ended up walking almost 16km all told. The next day we took it easy – a slow 10km walk near Bolton Abbey that included child in pushchair. The following day our walk included Malham Cove and Gordale Scar, the attraction of the first being that it was used as a location for one of the Harry Potter movies. That walk was also less than 10km.

One more walk of note was another 16km doozy that included Simon’s Seat (a great big rock with a trig point). I can now say that I’ve been to Arthur’s Seat, Simon’s Seat, and Sea-Tac.

I’d had a discussion with a couple of our friends about the life of native Americans on the reservation. They’d been to one in Utah (I think) and found it quite depressing, especially with regards to the levels of technology/mod cons available to them. One friend wondered why the North American natives hadn’t developed technology at the same rate as was found in Europe at the time of the explorations. I know that it’s quite complicated, and I wasn’t prepared to delve too deeply into my own ignorance, but I brought it up with Rachel as we walked up to Simon’s Seat. One way of looking at it is as a microcosm of the Drake Equation. We’ve only been developing civilisation on this planet for a few thousand years. It was never evenly distributed, but more to the point, in the absence of that interchange of ideas, one tribe in isolation isn’t going to hit upon those ideas that take that tribe to the next level of technology. They’ll probably get there, but an offset of a few hundred or even a thousand years is negligible in the grand scheme of things. There’s a blog entry in it, to be sure.

Today’s adventures included a wander around Harrogate and a really fantastic chicken sandwich for lunch before heading to the airport for an uneventful and on-time journey back to the Netherlands.

Categories Uncategorized

More on Palestine

January 3, 2017 //
2

ETA: Please read Nedra’s very thoughtful response to this in the comments. She’s on the ground and doing the work in Jerusalem and has a far clearer view of these things than I do.

Again, I’m writing from the perspective of profound ignorance that blights all of us who choose our media bubbles and stick to them. (Disclaimer: My preferred news sources include the BBC, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Rachel Maddow. If I get my act together this year, I hope to add nu.nl, NOS Journaal, and at least one other Dutch source.)
In response to my last post, my mother referred to a friend of the family, a liberal Jewish woman who made aliyah (Note to the goyim: To make aliyah as a Jew is to emigrate to Israel) and lives in one of the settlements. Mum’s wish is that I get in touch with this friend who has on the ground experience and for a variety of reasons doesn’t fit the stereotypes, but ‘says things like “Palestinians teach their children to hate”‘.

This phrase has always struck a nerve with me. Yes, among the Palestinians are those who attack Israeli settlers and soldiers and who fire explosives from Gaza into those settlements. And the entire population suffers IDF (Israeli Defence Force) response far out of scale with the initial attack. 

And it has happened over and over and over again.

We Jews have an interesting history with occupying powers that predates our history as one. By the (hundreds of?) thousands we endeavoured to escape the pogroms of the late 19th century. We all know what happened to those who didn’t escape, but with almost the regularity with which we tell the story of Passover, we retell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. We tell of how the Jews of Warsaw were forced into smaller and smaller spaces and had their resources systematically cut off, and of how valiantly the Jews of the ghetto fought against the Nazis. ‘One shudders to think that it required a quarter of a million Jews to give their lives, for the remainder to understand the reality of the situation and come to the right conclusions,’ wrote one Shmuel Winter as documented on the Yad Vashem web site dedicated to the uprising (http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/warsaw_ghetto_testimonies/index.asp).

This is the crux of the matter. When we were systematically restricted in World War II, we finally rose up. We glorify those who finally rose up and shudder through the tears of 20/20 hindsight at the meekness with which we suffered the slow approach of our destruction. I don’t have my copy of Night to hand, but Eli Wiesel described the situation in the Romanian village in which he was raised similarly. The villagers could see what was happening and talked about emigrating (to Palestine, generally), but few made the leap because that village had been their home for a thousand years.

I know I’m simplifying the matter, but wasn’t Palestine the home of these people for a thousand years before the Zionist movement and the establishment of Israel? Yes, their children are taught to hate the occupying power. We glorify our meekness, but wish we had hated sooner. Perhaps something could have been done. One of the problems is that Israel insists on the right to the territory that comes from greater military strength rather than the might that derives from diplomacy and its attendant hard work. 

Colonial histories, from the liberal perspective, often berate the colonising power for the length of time it took it to leave. Britain’s long occupation of India and Rhodesia (and, for that matter, Palestine) are cases in point. France in Algeria, Belgium in the Congo, the US in any great number of places – North Dakota at the moment comes to mind. And I berate Israel for the same reason. It’s long since been time to make a solution. Blaming the occupied population for their resistance isn’t productive. 

Tags , , ,
Categories Middle East, Politics

We haven’t done it…Again

January 1, 2017 //
0

It might look from the air like the Burning Man festival. It’s a gathering in the desert, but at 81,000 inhabitants in 2015, this gathering exceeds the population of Black Rock City by approximately 12,000 people. This is Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Last September, at the height of the Syrian crisis, Israel refused to take refugees from the conflict. PM Netanyahu claimed Israel was ‘too small‘. (That link points to the NY Times, but a google search on ‘Israel refuses Syrian refugees also provides links to the LA Times, Al Jazeera, and the Daily Mail in the first ten hits.) During the endgame last month the Israeli government had agreed to take a few. Netanyahu announced, ‘We see the tragedy of terrible suffering of civilians and I’ve asked the Foreign Ministry to seek ways to expand our medical assistance to the civilian causalities of the Syrian tragedy, specifically in Aleppo where we’re prepared to take in wounded women and children, and also men if they’re not combatants.’

I’ve possibly mentioned before that I’m Jewish by birth and have great love for the holy land and look forward to visiting there again, some day. However, I cry whenever enough Israelis vote for Netanyahu to put him back into office. He’s spent several decades fighting for Israel’s right to pariah-hood amongst the family of nations. At the moment they could have taken the moral high ground and admitted the refugees from one of this century’s more insane conflicts, he said no. Whenever there has been a chance to move towards peace, he increases the state of war. The main exponent of this behaviour has been the war on Israel’s Palestinians. (This subject is far more complicated than I present it and I know that in my idealism, I miss a lot of salient issues. I’ve consistently missed the point on this issue for well over 30 years, and I probably won’t stop now.) 

On the one hand there’s the treatment of the residents of the Gaza Strip, an insane piece of real estate sandwiched between the Negev desert, Egyptian Sinai, and a small piece of Mediterranean beachfront. Every couple of years, that area heats up and some idiots fire rockets from the strip into Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In reprisal, the IDF rolls in tanks and destroys another part of the Strip. Note that Israel blockades the Gaza Strip from receiving a great number of things including construction materials such as concrete. Rebuilding after these invasions, from what I gather, is well nigh impossible.

On the other hand, there are those settlements I mentioned. The ones the UN condemned last week or the week before, when, for the first time in 40 years, the US didn’t use its veto power to support Israel’s ‘right’ to construct Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. The history of the settlements is well documented. For a very long time, I argued that Israel won the West Bank fair and square in 1967 and should have the right to do with it as it pleases. Of course, this ignores the fact that for 19 years the area we now call the West Bank had been in Jordanian hands, and Jordan had done feck-all to integrate the Palestinian population. When Israel occupied this area (and The Golan Heights and the Sinai Desert) at the end of the Six-Day War, there was already. The issue that refugees of the previous two wars for Israel’s right to exist (’48 and ’56) had deprived the residents of the area of houses to which the only indication the houses had ever existed were the keys the refugees and their descendants still cherished. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank precipitated its own refugee crisis for which Lebanon also provided the real estate for refugee camps.

I’m going to piss some people off here, not the least of whom are family members and friends who have made aliyah. At this point, the settlements are an abhorrent Israeli echo of Germany’s early 20th century claim to ‘lebensraum’ in northern Czechoslovakia. Netanyahu said last year that Israel is too small. The problem isn’t that Israel is too small; it’s that Israel thinks too small. Too small to do the right things for peace in a time of war, too small to say repudiate decades of No with a resounding yes, too small to give of its bounty instead of taking again.

As I said, I know this is more complicated than that. I’m well aware of how crazily hateful Israel’s enemies have been since the first shaking of the British Mandate. Remember, though, that Israel managed to make peace with Egypt and to establish diplomatic relations with Jordan. The process of peace is slow, but it was working. However, hate is easy and taking and holding the moral high ground is hard. An argument could probably be made that if the US hadn’t invaded Iraq, and perhaps had worked against the inflammation of the late 90s intifada, then we might be much closer. As I said, it’s really complicated. And dreams of what could have been are just that. Working with the now is much harder.

Beer: Brewdog Punk IPA // Music: Muslimgauze: Intifaxa

Tags , , , ,
Categories Politics, war
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »