Category: musings

Variations on a theme

I love soundtracks. I think it comes from when I was young, when I used to put my tape recorder next to the television and record the audio of my favourite Doctor Who stories so I could listen to them on my Walkman later. Sure, there was lots of dialogue, but I also heard those music cues a thousand times. When I started buying CDs, some of my earliest purchases were a box set of the Star Wars soundtracks (I don’t even like Star Wars that much!) and the Silva Screen Doctor Who soundtracks. Listening to the medley of music from The Caves of Androzani I am always transported to the first time I saw it, and I picture every moment in perfect detail. I’ve listened to it hundreds of times. I’m also a bit obsessed with Hans Zimmer’s amazing soundtrack for the Sherlock Holmes movie, Alan Silvestri’s score for Back to the Future, Joby Talbot’s work on The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (especially the desctruction of Earth, one of the funniest pieces of music ever if you’ve seen its context), even Vinc DiCola’s ultimate 80s electronic rock for Transformers: The Movie, but I also love the best game work, including Yu Miyake’s Katamari soundtracks, the Final Fantasy titles scored by Nobuo Uematsu, and the incredible work of Michael Z Land.

I also love cover songs, and nothing brings the two together like a good theme. I was part of a sadly abortive cover band called Rough Draft, and our gimmick was that we would play only acoustic covers of cartoon theme songs. We started with the theme to Sealab 2021, and managed to learn at least a dozen songs or so – I particularly enjoyed performing The Trapdoor, Dangermouse and Count Duckula. We never got past rehearsal stage though – probably because, even if we played our entire repertoire, we hardly managed a 6 minute set!

But there are three themes which have occupied my brain like a fever over the years, one quite recent.

Doctor Who

The Doctor Who theme is one of the most important pieces in the history of electronic music. Composed by Ron Grainer, it was “realised” by Delia Derbyshire, for many years an unsung heroine of the Radiophonic Workshop (who were never credited individually). In the days before computers, Derbyshire used tone generators and manually spliced together tape to create the most iconic television theme tune of all time. Grainer himself was rightly so impressed by the final product that he supposedly didn’t recognise it as his own composition. There were several revisions in the show’s first couple of decades, then the Peter Howell 80s update changed the pace and spawned a couple more revisions (I have a soft spot for the Trial of a Time Lord version, with its extra little layers) until Dominic Glynn’s slower version for Sylvester McCoy. The television movie in 1996 (which I prefer to call by its nickname, Grace: 1999) had a pretty lame orchestral version which lost a lot of what made the originals great, and while I have enjoyed the new series versions, they too started out too generic themey; when more of Delia crept back in, and they lost the trumpety bits added in by Murray Gold, they won me back.

But it’s not just the show that’s produced new versions; there have been loads. The most famous is probably Doctorin’ the Tardis [sic], the KLF’s cynically manufactured number one single, a glorious mash up of the theme with Gary Glitter’s “Rock n Roll” (parts one and/or two) and “Blockbuster” by The Sweet. I do love that track; it brings a mix of memories, of car trips, my first album (Smash Hits ’88 or the equivalent), and of being chased around the school yard by bullies chanting the chorus.

But for my money, it’s the fan versions I love. Some are slavish recreations of this version or that; some horrible misfires; some new interpretations that blow you away with power, or humour, or experimentation. The web site whomix collects them and even has a handy feed you can subscribe to as a podcast; I have nearly 250 of them sitting in my iTunes library, and despite having a few CDs worth of profressional remixes and new versions, it’s one of these I sometimes use as a ringtone (it’s the Vortex Mix by Hardwire, a chap who’s made many of my faves on whomix).

Monkey Island

I’m relatively old school when it comes to gaming. Sure, I like Dragon Age: Origins and Portal and my XBox 360 gets a decent workout with the cream of the crop of new titles and downloads, but my heart belongs to the long dead graphic adventure genre. While I played plenty of games before it, it was LucasArts’ The Secret of Monkey Island which really made me love computer games – and no small part of that lies in the musical genius of Michael Z Land. He put together a magnificent score, and at its centre lies the theme from Monkey Island, a brilliant piece which combines a Caribbean feel and a real sense of humour to perfectly encapsulate the mood and tone of the series.

Like the Doctor Who theme, it’s an iconic piece that many, many fans have sought to cover. While The International House of Mojo has been the main community hub for LucasArts fans, your best bets for finding covers of the theme – and other parts of Land’s very memorable score – are World of Monkey Island, which has a whole section for fan music, or The Scumm Bar, which also has a fan music section. My favourites would have to be Monkey Island Rocks, a heavy guitar version by Eduardo Gouveia, and the enigmatic MJ, TW, and PH’s atmospheric Monkey Island Medley, which reinterprets various refrains and introduces new music which fits in seamlessly with Land’s stuff.

Game of Thrones

I have rarely found a new obsession and thrown myself into so wholeheartedly as I have Game of Thrones, the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s beloved series of fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire. The theme – and the score – for the series are works of art by Ramin Djawadi, and indeed my newest heavy rotation playlist has been my top nine tracks from the soundtrack album – including the title theme of course – and a couple of fan covers for good measure.

Yes, before the series was even finished, lots of people were covering the theme. In keeping with its newer pedigree, most of the covers are found on YouTube, though thankfully both of my favourites also provide mp3 downloads. Unsurprisingly, given the popularity of the books among metal bands – there are at least three songs titled “Take the Black”, which is what it’s called when you join the ancient order of the Night’s Watch in the series – one of the best ones gives the theme a harder edge.  The Heavy Version version is by Whitenoise Lab, and since it was the only version I had prior to the release of the soundtrack, iTunes tells me I’ve listened to it 159 times. (It’ll be 161 by the time I finish this article.) The layers of guitar, bass and drums really kick things up a notch! My other favourite is no less amazing, though accomplished with just two instruments – both of them violins. Jason Yang’s violin cover is a thing of beauty from a great musician, laying down around a dozen tracks on acoustic and electric violin to give a rich, full sound. This one is climbing up the charts!

Journey of the Sorcerer

This is a bonus track, of sorts. It’s not technically a theme, but rather an instrumental track from The Eagles’ album “One of These Nights”. You probably know it, though, as the theme from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The original radio series used the song without any modification to great effect; the ethereal banjo and strings arrangement really does fit perfectly with hitchhiking between the stars, and was used at Adams’ insistence. The television series used a new version which has charm, but the soul of the original wasn’t recaptured until a short sequence in the film version which paid homage to this extraordinary piece of music. It’s been my default ringtone for years, and back when I had a phone which could use custom text message tones (are you listening, Apple?), my phone would emit one of those iconic banjo chords to let me know I’d received a message.

There are quite a few covers and alternate versions on YouTube, though to be honest I can’t really fault the original, and play it constantly. Of the others, this one is perhaps most interesting: played at the end of the last episode of the expanded radio series (produced by Dirk Maggs and covering the books after the first two, bringing them into the radio continuity), it uses parts of the original song not often heard in the radio series, and brings a little orchestration in.

Wow. Look how productive I am when waiting for my iPhone to restore from backup!

The Science of “Slut”

If you’re a fellow feminist then you’ve surely heard of Slutwalk, an organized march first held in Toronto after a local policeman told local university students not to dress like a slut to avoid being sexually assaulted. This view is hardly new, but the reaction to it was: women – and men – taking to the streets under the banner of the word that defines all that’s wrong with society’s attitude to female sexuality. The idea has since spread across the world, and came to Australia in force this month, with marches scheduled in most capital cities.

I’ve been thinking about it constantly since I heard about it, and like many people have had initial enthusiasm tempered by deeper consideration of the issues involved – something acknowledged by Slutwalk’s Canadian founders. We live in the 21st century and instant, wide-reaching communications makes organising an event like this a much simpler affair than it would have been even a decade ago; recruiting people to march for a cause can be easy, especially when you tap into genuine anger about an injustice. I support Slutwalk’s essential messages: women dressing provocatively do not share any blame for being raped, and no woman deserved to be shamed for expressing her sexuality. But there’s a lot more to unpack, and as the days have stretched between announcement and event – it’s on in Melbourne this weekend, May 28 – I’ve been reading a lot of critical discussions of it. Here I try to unpack my thoughts, and I welcome yours in return.

One quick note: some people have tried to distance Slutwalk from feminism. I’ve no idea why, aside from the stigma still attached to the word. But why specifically distance yourself? Push the message, and when people ask “is this feminism?”, give the honest answer: it’s a feminism. The issues at stake are certainly feminist ones.

“Slut” has a whole bunch of meanings, but all of them are negative. Had sex with lots of men? You’re a slut. Had sex with one man, but not another? You’re a slut. Dress sexily, but don’t want to have sex at all? You’re a slut. More than that, though, it’s used as a general pejorative term for any woman – and most women, regardless of their dress or behaviour, have been called a slut some time – as evidenced by the collection of stories quickly amassed by Clementine Ford for an article she wrote about the Slutwalk. But some participants say they want to “reclaim” the word slut, for themselves – and will dress “like sluts” to do so.

So what are the self-proclaimed “sluts” trying to reclaim? Is this another instance of “raunch culture” replacing truly progressive attitudes of female sexuality? I don’t think so, but then of what use is the word “slut” in a world where female sexuality is not separated or dictated by our culture? If there is no pressure from media imagery to be a cliched, porn-derived version of sexy, no accompanying shame and disapproval of women who dare to enjoy sex, no constant comparison of the sexuality of men and women, then who needs the word slut? The whole point is that we shouldn’t judge anyone – I’m being inclusive here, but of course it’s nearly always women who are so judged – by the number of sexual partners they have or haven’t had, by how often they do or don’t have sex, by how they dress. Those so-called “moral” standards are imposed by “traditional values”, often religious in origin, about what constitutes “correct” behaviour. But they’re prescriptive, and usually based on a very outdated understanding of human sexuality. Maybe not having sex before marriage works for some people, but to apply that kind of standard to everyone, no matter their background, desires or situation, is absurd.

All the Slutwalk pictures you’re likely to see in the media will be of those who choose to wear revealing or traditionally sexual outfits, though I should mention that for Melbourne’s Slutwalk there’s no dress code; indeed, it’s a pretty bitter Winter here, so most people will probably be rugged up. There’s something to be said for bringing media attention to bear on an issue, even if it means using provocative language; Reclaim the Night, a similar annual event started ine 1970s, receives very little media attention these days. That might be as much to do with our 24 hour news cycle preferring new news to old news as it is with a “sexy” image, but there’s no denying it’s worked; Melanie Klein examines the strategy behind the name, and addresses criticism of Slutwalk – including her own – in her excellent piece in Ms. Magazine. She quotes several of the other articles I mention here, but importantly Jennifer L Pozner, from Women in Media and News, who considers Slutwalk an “effective media tool” and a “well-messaged media stunt”.

All Slutwalkers want to see an end to victim blaming, and to slut shaming, the practice attacking women for displaying their sexuality. And this has had a huge response – at least, say its detractors, among young privileged white people. (See Ernesto Aguilar at People of Colour Organise!) Participants want to defend their right to wear what they like without being made to feel ashamed, and to “be a slut” if they want, but they have incredible freedom already – including the privileged freedom to assume these values and ideas will be applicable to other cultures as well. Feminism must be inclusive – but I think that means we have to fight slut-shaming in first world Western society, and also female circumcision in Africa, sex trafficking in Asia, and all the injustices against women everywhere. Of course white women in Toronto will march for their own freedoms; I hope that doesn’t mean they don’t value or consider the freedoms of others. Hopefully, even though a movement starts with privilege, there’s no reason it can’t spread and grow to encompass diverse backgrounds and situations – or that it will suit every culture and society. Slutwalk clearly isn’t for everyone, and indeed not everyone marching for it feels the same about it, but hopefully we can agree on a unified message.

Another criticism is about the attitude to which Slutwalk is responding. There’s no denying that victim-blaming and slut-shaming are destructive behaviours; it’s a positive move to speak out publically against them. But it’s not just victim-blaming of which the Toronto policeman was guilty; he was also perpetuating a myth about sexual assault. If you really believe that “dressing like a slut” makes you a target for rape, then presumably you believe that rape is something that happens to women walking alone at night through dark alleys. That does, sadly, happen, but more than half the (reported) sexual assaults in Australia are perpetuated by people who know the victim: co-workers, family members, boyfriends and spouses. Kimberley Ramplin has a good coverage of the stats on her blog The Referral in part one of her critique of Slutwalk, “Not In My Name“. (Trigger warning: in part two she discusses her own experience of being raped by a family member.)

Ramplin contends that Slutwalk is complicit in perpetuating this stereotype, though my experience has been the opposite – it’s part of the refutation that slut-shaming has any basis in safety to say that the scenario imagined by shamers is a minority of rape cases. Hopefully some of the placards will reflect this, as well as the fact that a disproportionate number of sexual assault victims are very young – in more than 40% of reported assaults the victim was under 14. The proportion of sexual assault victims who are male – between 9 and 16%, depending on study and year – is small by comparison, but also evidence that slut-shaming and victim blaming – activities only ever directed at women – are not the solution to ending sexual violence.

There’s more, of course – much, much more. But I already feel nervous enough putting all these thoughts out there. I’m a feminist, sure, but I’m also a man, and while of course men can be – must be – feminists, it’s an area which more than any other makes me question the value of my voice – which is, after all, yet another one that’s middle class, white, young and male. If it matters to you, I’m primarily influenced in theory by bell hooks, though I need to read much more widely; in practice I’m primarily influenced by the women in whose lives I’m fortunate enough to share.

Anyway, whether you’re marching in Slutwalk, violently opposed to it, or struggling to analyze what it means, I hope my thoughts have helped you with yours. I hope the discussion – about the word, about victim-blaming and slut shaming, about feminism and privilege and raunch culture and differences in feminist attitudes – continues long after the placards have been recycled into firelighters. And I hope you’ll share with me what you think.

Names have power

My photographer friend Rob recently introduced me to The Inky Fool, a great blog about the English language. The most recent post, Dinosaurs and Tennyson, reminded me of In Memoriam, Tennyson’s famous poem which coined the phrase “Nature, red in tooth and claw”, and which I had completely forgotten features dinosaurs – newly discovered at the time – as evidence that even species don’t last forever, and that one day, humanity itself may die. It’s beautiful, if melancholy.

The Fool also talks about a few dinosaur names, which is something I talked about during the most recent Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour season. See, when you discover a species, you can call it anything you want – so long as you make it sound Latin. It needn’t be real Latin, you can just stick -i or -us on the end, even if you’re using Greek or French or English words. (This is exactly the same rule used by J K Rowling for making Harry Potter spells.) I thought I’d share a few of my favourite dinosaur names, some of which I’ve talked about on the blog before:

  • Seredipaceratops arthurcclarkei – “Arthur C. Clarke, serendipitous horned face”. Serendipitous because the discoverers only realised it was a ceratopsian dinosaur after seeing a specimen in Canada that resembled their new dinosaur. Arthur C. Clarke because some scientists are massive nerds. Note that like many so-called ceratopsians, it quite possibly didn’t have any horns; the only common facial feature among them is the bone frill at the rear of the skull.
  • Sinosauropteryx prima – “first Chinese reptilian wing”. I like this more because it sounds like something you’d put up your nose to stave off hayfever, but also this is the first dinosaur to have it’s colouration in life identified – and it was a ginger. Yeah!
  • Raptorex kriegsteini – “Kriegstein, king of thieves”. King of thieves? Yes please! Though I’d prefer Autolycus from Hercules to Kevin Costner… I also appreciate the species name, Kriegstein: the father of the person who donated the fossil, and a Holocaust survivor, which is poetic: fossils being the only suriviors of the K-T extinction event, the dinosaur equivalent of the Holocaust.
  • Quetzalcoatlus northropi – “Jack Northrop, Quetzalcoatl”. Yes, it is a supreme act of imagination to name a prehistoric huge flying frightening beast after a mythical huge flying frightening beast, in this case Quetzalcoatl, feathered serpent of the Aztecs, patron of learning and knowledge. And eating innocent window cleaners and sunbathers, if terrible 80’s horror cinema is to be believed. John Knudsen “Jack” Northrop was the founder of the Northrop Corporation, an aircraft manufacturer, who wanted to make large aircraft based on Quetzalcoatlus‘ tailless design. We’ve yet to definitively work out if Quetzalcoatlus could fly or not, though, so maybe planes based on it aren’t the best idea; I get images of Howard Hughes in my mind…
  • Stegosaurus armatus – “armoured roof lizard”. The first discovered species of my favourite dinosaur, and though the meaning of the name is a bit naff, I do love the name itself. Stegosaurus, which a good friend of mine shortened to “steg” (she had to, I talked about them all the time). Instantly recognisable, just like their silhouette.

So those are some of my favourites; what are yours?

2011: International Year of EVERYTHING

It’s always an international year of something. Indeed, usually of several things: 2011 is the international year of Forests, People of African descent, Veterinarians, and Chemistry.

Chemistry is the study of matter – what it’s made of, why it does things, how it can be changed. Much of it has very little to do with beakers and bunsen burners, but of course that’s what we all remember from high school. But all that stuff you think of as elementary physics – the structure of atoms, how they combine into molecules – that’s all chemistry. And it’s awesome. It’s really the study of stuff (if you’ll excuse the Dr Karl-ism), the study of everything. Everything is, after all, made up of stuff.

Fittingly, a day or two ago it was also the centennial of Marie Curie winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Take a moment and think: what was significant about Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize in 1911?

If you answered “she was the first woman to win one”, well…if this was QI, you’d get a big “OBVIOUS BUT WRONG” alarm going off. Sure, Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and that’s significant – there have only been 41 prizes awarded to women, compared to 776 to men since 1901 – but she was the first female Nobel laureate in 1903. In 1911, she became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, something only three other laureates have managed in all the years since, the first not until fifty years later.

It’s for these awesome reasons that I am the proud owner of a Marie Curie T-shirt, produced by nerd retailer ThinkGeek. I’m pretty excited by this range of excellent women T-shirts, which show them being awesome for things other than cleavage and nudity. I plan to pick up the others (Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace) when I can convince myself to get rid of some of my old T-shirts.

Before I finish talking about 2011, let me say that I also hope it to be a year in which I get out there and do a few more gigs for science. (There are a few lined up already; check out the gigs list.) I’ve not been idle, but it’s been a long while between drinks when it comes to writing science shows. I’ve been instead feeding that other geeky side of me, the one that loves games, mainly with +1 Sword and Dungeon Crawl (you can read about them at Shaolin Punk). I might write a bit about that here for you as well; this is my blog, after all. I never said it would be all about science stuff!

It belonged in a museum

…and thankfully, that’s exactly where the original Foucault’s Pendulum was: the Musee des Arts et Metiers (the Museum of Arts and Industry) in Paris. It’s still there, only in mid-May its cable snapped, sending the weight crashing through the floor of the museum.

It was only about 160 years ago that many people were still not convinced the Earth rotates on its own axis. After all, we don’t feel the motion; the Sun, Moon and stars seem to wheel around us, we don’t spin around like a top. Otherwise we’d get seasick on land, surely? Even when it became fairly common belief that the Earth orbited the Sun, the idea that the Earth also spun didn’t have much going for it. What’s to keep us from flying off?

We can be all superior about it now and talk about how the attractive force of the Earth’s gravity is far stronger than any angular momentum we might experience from it’s spin, or about frames of reference, or anything else, but we wouldn’t all have such concrete knowledge of these ideas without the work of Léon Foucault.

No relation to the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault achieved all manner of great things: he measured the speed of light (with pretty good accuracy, much better than his predecessors), vastly improved the quality of telescopes, and named the gyroscope. But his most famous invention was a large, free-rotating pendulum, suspended in the Panthéon, which slowly changed the direction of its oscillation as the Earth rotated.

Many other such pendulums have been built, and I saw one when I was a boy, set up in the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney. I remember being quite obsessed with it at the time, reading up about its significance, enjoying the rich history of the same experiement being carried out over more than a century and across vast distances. I didn’t know it was only a temporary exhibit until I tried to find it on a trip back to Sydney in 2008, but I relived the joy when I saw another one in operation late last year at the Boston Museum of Science – suspended over a Mayan calendar!

Even the pendulum in the Panthéon was not Foucault’s first, but it was this one that caused a sensation in both scientific and lay circles – and which was irreparably damaged in May. Imagine it in the context of the time: a definite, physical demonstration of the Earth’s rotation! Today, a comparable feat would be to set up a simple demonstration  showing direct evidence of anthropogenic global warming. It’s easily possible to show that even a small amount of CO2 causes an increase in temperature – the wonderful Intelligent Life Magazine recently ran a great article showing you how – and perhaps building such a demonstration in public would silence some of the critics, but it’s hard to imagine it having quite the same impact as Foucault’s simple and elegant experiment did back in 1851.

There’s still a pendulum in the the Panthéon, a replica of the original, and given that party-goers at the Musee des Arts et Metiers had previously pushed the pendulum around, perhaps it’s better to go see the replica. That’s the wonderful thing about science – and indeed art: you might destroy the artefact, but the idea lives on. And if you really want to see a pendulum in action, you can find them all over the world.