Author: JP

Lyrical ballads 2.0

My 15-year old son told me about this site, SongMeanings. Love the idea. People commenting on lyrics and making connections that way. Just take a look at the discussions around A Day in The Life.

As with anything else 2.0, these things improve with time and increased “liquidity”, as people learn about the subtlety of the mashup. I can see so many ways to vary what I see at SongMeanings, having people come together with comments and views and ratings around a catalogue of “things”. And I am sure that most of them are being done already.

Chopping bits out of books

dettmer2_14

Those of you who know me well will also know that I love books. I read them. I devour them. I collect them. I love them.
At home, we had books everywhere, and I have many wonderful childhood memories built around reading. The way we lived, it was perfectly normal to hear harrumphs and guffaws as you wandered in and out of rooms, the sounds made by people enjoying what they read; there were times of day (and night) where all those who were awake were reading.

We read eclectically. And voraciously. We were the kind of people that would walk a mile for a Camel or a new Rex Stout; if we had to choose, then Rex Stout won. We quoted from poetry and from plays, from books as well as magazines. We were Walter Mittys and Holden Caulfields, we lived among Empresses as well as Queens, we moved from misty-eyed meanderings about “acres and acres of golden yellow pajamas glinting in the noonday sun” to equally misty-eyed meanderings about the liquefaction of Julia’s clothes.

We read Wodehouse all day as if our lives depended on it; at high noon it was Max Brand; in between games of Cluedo it was Perry Mason time; our Grishams weren’t Grisham, they were Desmond Bagley and Alistair Maclean and Hammond Innes. [An aside. We played a short-lived charade game where you had to guess “composites”, weird creatures that were portmanteau phrases merging a popular film with a popular song. And the worst one I can remember was “The Guns of Navarone A Sunday“, which should need no explanation. That one hurt].

We read Shakespeare as well as Pynchon, Dante as well as Rabelais, the Thousand and One Nights as well as George Mikes, Salinger and Mailer, Dumas and Swift, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Hawthorne and Eliot, Whitman and Twain, Carroll as well as Castaneda, Sellar with Yeatman. We moved from Parker to Parker as if nothing was amiss. Leo Rosten kept warm alongside H Allen Smith. Somewhere in between we read a lot of comics as well, but that’s for another post.

We dwelt among many untrodden ways. We would talk to each other about the books we’d read, the books we were reading. [An aside, about “untrodden ways”. I remember a time when the men of the house were busy reading the oeuvre of Nevil Shute book by book, while the womenfolk were equally busy with …. Mills and Boon. It drove us crazy. So we the menfolk did the only thing possible, we started reading the Mills and Boons as well. Which drove the others crazy. Yup, I’m confessing to having read a horde of “Violent” Winspear (Violet’s heroes were always festooned with romantic scars) and Anne Mather and Janet Dailey and others of that ilk). We laughed and teased about Innocent Deceptions and long tall drinks with cubes of ice clinking at the bottom of the glass (sic).]

Yes, we read a lot. And we treasured books. So when I came to this country, I was unprepared for some of what I saw. People tearing chapters off books and throwing the “read” bits in the bin. People clearing houses and throwing hordes of musty mouldy books into skips. People actually destroying books.

I was aghast. And I’ve been collecting books ever since. Some strange collections, some very strange collections. For example, I have over 180 different first editions of just one book. Don Quixote. Just for the illustrations.

Bearing all this in mind, I had some mixed feelings when I first saw the works of Brian Dettmer, one of which I’ve used as an illustration above. I’ve decided I quite like his stuff. What do you think?

If you do like it, you can find out more at Aron Packer Gallery, which is where I found out about him. How did I get there? I Stumbled.

Cricket: The Sound and Numbers Game

Thank God for the Web. How else could I have done what I did a few minutes ago?

It all started this morning. I was doing my snooze-awake thing, a critical technique practised and refined over years of really important business meetings. You know the one I mean. When your eyes are open, one ear is cocked attentively and tuned to the right channel, and the rest of you is fast asleep, ready to spring into action as soon as your name is mentioned. That’s what I mean by snooze-awake.

So there I was. Snooze-awake, with the cricket on in the background; India versus Pakistan at Eden Gardens; there was nothing really happening, India had just declared, and Pakistan had yet to come out. The expert commentators were out in their droves. And then someone said something.  He said that it looked like VVS Laxman had scored a century consisting solely of ones and boundaries.

I sprang awake. And a part of me went “wow, could that be true?”. So I resolved to check it out, which, thanks to the web, I can now do. Easily. So I went to Cricinfo, got to this page containing ball-by-ball text commentary for the entire Indian innings, and laboriously went through every ball Laxman faced, all 178 of them. And it was true. VVS Laxman scored his 112 all in ones and fours.

I wonder how often that has happened before. And how I would find the answer to that question. Any budding Bill Frindalls or Wendy Wimbushes out there?

Incidentally, I understand that India managed to achieve an unusual sequence in this innings: 111/1, 222/2, 333/3, 444/4, 555/5.  Again, I wonder just how often that has been done.

For those of you who don’t follow cricket, all I can say is it’s never too late. The sound of willow on leather. The sound of harrumphing moustaches and gentle snores. The sound of the Barmy Army and of calypso cricket. The sound of Eden Gardens in full cry.

Cricket. A game of sounds. And numbers.

Chewing over jhal moori and chicken tikka masala

Culture shock is a strange thing. When I came to the UK in 1980, there were many things I had to get used to, and many things I got wrong; I’ve shared some of my thoughts with you over the years. But not this one.

You know, the scariest thing I had to overcome, in the context of culture shock, was this: getting used to Western cuisine. No, not what you think. Calcutta is a pretty cosmopolitan city, I’d been used to western cuisine.

What I hadn’t been prepared for was the way people here cooked Indian cuisine. That hurt. It really hurt. In the early years, everywhere I went, people were hospitable to me. Extremely hospitable. So much so that everyone tried to provide me with “Indian” food. And it was expected that I ate it.

It’s kinda hard to describe the feeling I had, when I went into a pub with friends, and it was time to order food. I was expected to order the “curry” on the menu. Which meant saying a little prayer and then manfully working through meat with apples and raisins, with a bit of stale curry powder thrown in, and if you were lucky, a large dollop of turmeric for colouring (which had the salutary effect of killing all other tastes for a short while).

Those were the days. We hadn’t really learnt about curry here at that time. [Actually the same could be said about wine. Those were the days indeed, when Black Tower and Blue Nun and screw-top warm Lambrusco were readily available, when French wine was conspicious in its absence, and the New World had not yet arrived. I remember a particularly bilious Bulgarian Laski Riesling that would have worked well as a paintstripper…]

Then the Invasion from Sylhet arrived, and we moved to Curry Awareness Phase Two. Now, when I went with friends to an “Indian” restaurant, I had to explain to them that for me, it was like being invited to a European restaurant. How would you feel if you went to a restaurant that served smorgasbord, paella, gnocchi, chateaubriand and wiener schnitzel? What would you think?

I had to explain to them that the Indian restaurant was actually Bangladeshi, and that the chefs had created an “Indian” set of dishes suitable for the western palate. That the vindaloo tasted nothing like the vindaloo I’d had in Goa, that vindaloo itself had nothing to do with degree of hotness. That chicken kashmir and meat madras were dreamt up by people who could not point to Kashmir or Madras on a map.

But at least the cuisine was edible, and I started enjoying myself at Indian restaurants.

Now? Now life is fantastic. I can eat good Indian food anytime I want, there are good North Indian restaurants, good South Indian vegetarian restaurants, good Bengali fare, even good Nepali fare.

And during this time, this strange beast called the Chicken Tikka Masala has become, and now stayed, Top of the Pops.

Which makes this video of how to make it interesting to watch. Actually it’s an excuse for showing the video. I haven’t tried the recipe, I have no idea how good it is, but I do like the way they present it.

Talking about recipes, here is one that I do want to try. CY Gopinath on jhal moori. I’ve met CY many years ago, he probably doesn’t remember. But the jhal moori he describes is the jhal moori I remember, so I intend to try and make it.

Just freewheeling about sharing and privacy

Sharing isn’t just about what you do, it’s also about the way you think. I remember, many years ago, learning this the hard way:

When I lived in Calcutta, I used to be pretty gregarious. We were that kind of family, and “home” had the feel of being a club. People coming and going all the time, a free and easy house. Meals on tap. No real concept of individual or personal space, in fact no real concept of individual friends either: you were either a friend of the family or you weren’t, that was that.

It was “normal” for me to come home and to be greeted by one of “my” friends leaving, saying he may be back later. We didn’t have a large house, so it meant that every room was pretty crowded, with stuff happening everywhere; people playing contract bridge, carroms, cards, cluedo, chess; people listening to music; playing table-tennis; just sitting and chatting.

And eating.

We ate all day and all night. Magically tea and coffee and food would arrive. And it would disappear. Fast. I have no idea how my mother coped with me during that time. I was capable of inviting a dozen (or two) people over to the house, with zero notice, and with the expectation that all would be fed. It was the done thing there. When you went to someone else’s house, food would appear. And you were expected to eat it.

That was then.  A long time ago, in Calcutta, when I was growing up.

Much later, when I’d been married for a while, this mindset caused me to come unstuck. Without thinking about it, I added a couple of people as invitees to dinner one night, just an hour or so before dinner. And my then fiancee looked at me strangely, and I knew I was in trouble. [Not that much trouble, really. We’ve been married over 23 years now, and we get closer every year].

So why did I get into trouble? Well, we planned to serve steak that night, and this meant we did strange things. Strange western things. Like counting out potatoes, three per person, with a handful over. And for that matter counting out steaks….

So we had 10 steaks and 12 people. Problem. And the only way to resolve it that late was for me to “make” two new steaks by trimming pieces off the existing steaks, sort of gourmet large-granularity hamburger I guess. And of course we as hosts had to have them.

That episode, a quarter of a century ago, taught me something. I never had meals in India that I couldn’t expand at will. Just add rice. Just add a few vegetables. Just add a bit of this and a bit of that.

Sharing is something that’s in your head. That goes for information too. Take collaborative filtering. You get out of it what you put into it, and something more. Of course you need to have choice, you need to be able to choose whom you share with, and what you share. Of course there are different decisions to make in terms of the sharing architecture, in terms of the way you implement collaborative filtering. Is it an opt-in or opt-out model? How granular is that option? Is the shared data anonymised or not? Should it be?

There are many things to be resolved, many classes of person to protect, many classes of action to look out for.

But it all begins with one thing. A belief in sharing.

Let’s not kid ourselves. I meet too many people who criticise social software, who rant against open communities, who come up with reams of excuses as to why virtual communities aren’t designed right, why there are a lot of problems with privacy. Most of them don’t like opensource either; most of them don’t like to see current IPR “regimes” being attacked; most of them don’t believe in wisdom-of-crowds.

Most of them don’t really believe in community.

Sharing is community. They don’t like that.