Love it or hate it, the Pacific Northwest rain is something we suffer through in Vancouver, and eventually all long-term Vancouverites will bitch about it. It’s the heavy grey clouds that sit just above tree top height for days at a time, pissing out huge volumes of frigid, lumpy water, turning the local woods into swampland.
Crystals can be very polarizing. Sorry fellow geologists, bad pun, I know.
In three decades, I’ve built a half-decent collection of museum-quality pieces, currently leased to a business downtown. I collect them because of my love for the inherent esthetic value of crystals; their rarity, the science behind their formation and the intangible “wow factor” that spectacular samples elicit. See I’m in Love for some recent drooling.
Continue reading “Crystal Power”Hands up if you know what scrumping is? No idea? Well, in England it means stealing apples from an orchard; kids climbing over the fence with a pack full of apples plucked from the trees. The word also pops up in the name Scrumpy, as in a fairly rough apple cider (not the clear, sweet, sparkly muck that often masquerades as cider on the west coast.)
Continue reading “Let’s Go Scrumping.”I promised myself I wouldn’t get political or overly preachy on UrbanCrows. I’m trying to write about stuff that I find interesting or that strikes me as quirky. And I’m trying hard to keep it engaging. The last thing we need in our lives is another soap box site banging on about domestic or national politics. Having said that…
ThisProportional Representation (PR) referendum is driving me bat-shit crazy.
Continue reading “To PR or not to PR?”Jakarta? No, she flew there.
That old chestnut of a joke got me thinking about place name puns and jokes. We learned some goodies when I was a kid at my Hogwarts-style boys only grammar school in Kent. Most of them for some reason involve wives and exotic locations, channeling the teller’s deep-seated desire to see the wife travel a long way away perhaps? Ah hem… moving on.
Continue reading “My Wife’s Gone to Indonesia”A few nights back, my wife and I went to a candidates’ meeting for the looming Vancouver municipal elections. In our neighborhood that means only one thing: A large crowd with an average age close to70 and one of the increasingly rare occasions where I still feel young and mentally on top of things.
Continue reading “The Municipal Elections”I’ve always thought Herr Bach was a particularly ballsy composer. So much of his catalogue was written for solo instruments; his violin partitas or the cello suites for example. To my simplistic mind, composing for solo instruments puts the composer and the musician out there for all to hear. There’s nowhere to hide if the composition or musicianship is weak.
Bach’s best known instrumental works are probably what we now think of as his solo piano pieces, like the Goldberg Variations. What I didn’t know until today though, is that many were originally written for harpsichord; the Variations is a case in point. It was transposed for the piano after his death.
My personal Bach favourite pops up in the middle of his Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. Officially titled the Partita in D Minor for solo violin, it’s also known as the Chaconne or Ciaccona. If I had to make a top 10 list of classical music, actually all genres of music for that matter, the Chaconne would be top 3 for sure. I never tire of listening to it.
Written around 1718 give or take a year or two, it forms the fifth movement in a series of five pieces in Partita No. 2, each representing popular dances of the time. Most of the pieces are 3-4 minutes long but then, just as you’re getting used to the format, here comes the Chaconne in all its stunning 13 minute-long glory; a full on symphony played on one instrument.
People have speculated that he wrote it while grieving for his wife who’d recently passed away. Other speculate it’s the bottled up emotion that comes from losing 10 children. Yup, Bach lost 10!
Whatever drove him to write it, it’s fostered a deep reverence amongst classical musicians and composers. It’s almost impossible to play for anyone but true virtuoso violinists. Fiendishly difficult double and triple stopping (with chords thrown in for good measure) add incredible texture to the piece, which is in 3 parts moving from the minor key to the major and then back to minor again.
No less than the great Yehudi Menuhin went as far as to call it “the greatest structure for solo violin that exists.” Brahms said of it:
“On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.
Quite.
I screwed around on the violin as a kid for 5 years at high school. I never really progressed beyond vaguely tuneful scrapes and cat howls. But I was left with enough appreciation for the instrument to know when someone’s doing something truly special with it. The link below is to a great performance by Bulgarian violinist Viktoria Mullova. The real fireworks go off around 5-6 minutes in. So go take a listen. Not just once. Go back and listen a few times and you’ll begin to see what a marvel the Chaconne is. If you only have one piece of classical music to listen to on your phone, let it be this.
Seriously. I hate gardening. Aside from growing vegetables, the rest of it I detest. Our back yard is a case in point. Nothing we do to it has any effect on the paucity of grass. We mow. We spread seed and from time to time we dutifully resoil with that foul smelling muck the City sells but it always looks shit.
Part of the problem is bad drainage. The patch closest to our house is underlain by an old sloping driveway into what used to be a parking spot beneath the back porch. The driveway was filled in back in the day with concrete rubble which means lots of subsurface cavities. The net result is any rain or hose water that falls on that part of the lawn instantly fucks off downwards leaving a parched scrap of dead lawn that doesn’t bother even trying to growing anymore. Other parts of the lawn have been taken over by moss. Still more has been invaded, conquered and settled by a marauding army of lush, leafy weeds.
If we do pluck up the courage to take it all on, there are the doggy land mines to deal with. Nothing attracts the canine arse more than cool inch-long grass, or in our case, inch-high weeds, which are remarkably good at hiding turds. Any attempt to mow the jungle has to be preceeded by a UN-style mine clearing operation wearing protective suits and a systematic grid search for hidden poo.
My wife tells me some people enjoy gardening; they find it relaxing. Our neighbours across the road do, bless them. They’re always out tending their pristine bloody lawn, and they’ve got all the gear to throw at it. Electric weed wacker, fertilizer spreader, weed digger-upper, an edger.. the full arsenal of lawn care products. If gardening was war Point Grey would win.
Last night was our fortnightly choir practice; something I really look forward to and as close to spiritual as this avowed Darwinist will ever get. We’ve been working on a short piece called “Adoro Te Devote” linked here. The recording –done inside a church most likely- is not the best. Actually, it sounds like the choir is inside a sewer pipe. No matter.
The all-knowing Wikipedia tells me…
“Adoro te devote” is a Eucharistic hymn written by Thomas Aquinas. It is one of the five Eucharistic hymns, which were composed and set to music for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, instituted in 1264 by Pope Urban IV as a Solemnity for the entire Roman Catholic Church… The opening line literally translated means “I devoutly adore you, o hidden Deity”
Sounds quite grandly religious when you put it like that doesn’t it?
On a more mundane level, the opening three notes of the main theme are the same as the Beatles’ song Ob La Di Ob La Da. A bit slower, and a bit more ethereal, but the same. A climbing pattern of third intervals.
Our teacher Colleen uses musical cognates like Ob La Di to help the less-musical members of our choir improve their sight reading skills; essentially she turns it into an exercise in pattern recognition. And we all know that a pattern is easier to remember than being told it’s another melodic theme based on opening climbing thirds.
In today’s news, Bill Cosby was laughed at by world leaders during his speech to the UN general assembly. And Donald Trump was sentenced to 3-10 years for sexual assault and was forced to register for life as a dangerous sex offender.. Then I woke up and it was all a sad dream.
