sadara.be

today i needed to change the file names to upper case and the extensions to lower case on 1500+ files on a windows xp machine. and realised i had no idea how to do it quickly. a bit of googling and a few minutes later i was using ‘Febooti fileTweak Case’, which is freeware. great little application!

download it here: http://www.febooti.com/products/filetweak/members/case/

I missed my train out of Delhi yesterday evening. The traffic was awful and the rickshaw wallah very old (looked it, anyway). Should have used the metro, but I couldn’t find it. For the record: New Delhi metro station is on the far side of the main line station’s tracks – over the footbridge. No signs, of course, until you’re nearly there. So today I have some more time in Delhi. So …

Today a trip out to Majnu Kha Tilla, a suburb of Delhi, where there’s a Tibetan enclave. A haven of peace!

The temple is fairly small, with the usual beautiful collection of thankas and rupas. I was particularly drawn to a White Tara rupa.

Get the metro to Vidhan Sabha. It’s a 10/- rps ride on a cycle rickshaw from there.

And I’ve just dicovered that my ‘waitlisted’ reservation – I was no. 18 on the list – has been converted to a confirmed reservation. I’m off to Jaisalmer. This time I’m going to Delhi Junction Station by metro. The announcements on the metro really do say: Please Mind the Gap, though there’s no gap to be seen.

It’s not often you come across a genuine spitoon these days. Indeed, I’m not sure I’d ever come across one before visiting Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport yesterday. I’m afraid that in my ignorance I used it as a litter bin.

The snow clouds over Moscow came almost down to the ground – as the plane was landing, I saw the ground for the first time only a few seconds before we touched down.

The whole journey from Amsterdam to Delhi went absurdly well and to schedule. When I’d cleared immigration and picked up my luggage, it was still a bit early to be looking around for a hotel, so I hung out at the airport until about 5.30, then got a taxi into town. I had the name and address of a hotel which had been recommended, but it took the taxi driver a while to find it. On the way, he tried to drop me in two places which were clearly not where I’d asked to go – and one of them was a dark alley where I definitely did not want to get out and explore.

Today has been the familiar culture shock: the heat, the noise, the crowds, the riches and poverty, the shoe-shine boys, the touts, the strange crumbling remnants of the British Raj. Of course, there are many, many changes since I was last here, in 1988, but my main impression is actually that it’s just the same. Or maybe it’s just the effect on me that’s the same! One difference: where’s that smell of bidis gone?

And not a spitoon in sight, just lots of spitting.

I was at a funeral on Monday. Not someone I knew well – the father of a friend. In the last week I’ve also been in contact with an old friend in Israel I’ve not heard from for many years, so what with the news from Gaza, maybe it’s not so surprising that I’ve had death and loss on my mind.

So … here’s a mix of music which begins with Fairuz evoking Christ’s Passion closely followed by Emily van Evera singing the famous Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s opera Dido & Aeneas. Two sublime voices from very different traditions.

There’s Chôros No. 1, one of the best-known guitar pieces by Villa-Lobos, followed by another sublime voice, that of Amália Rodrigues, singing Fado da Adiça.

Rokia Traoré sings Finini next. The translation of the words of this song is:

Nobody has both everything and nothing
Everything’s favouritism and inconvenience
That’s the way it is
Some people say that what we are, we asked for it
Others think that everything has a transcendent reason
Still others receive everything with a peaceful fatalism
No matter what your principles are
Hold the cloth that absorbs tears

Ghazal play a piece called Pari Mahal, which is followed by To a Dead Friend, part of the soundtrack to Eternity and a Day, composed by Eleni Karaindrou. The mix ends with a cheeky bit of froth from Werner Egk’s opera La Tentation de Saint Antoine, sung by Janet Baker.

The first time I saw Waltz with Bashir, I fell asleep. No reflection on the film, more a reflection on my irregular lifestyle. Seeing it the second time I was again struck by the opening credits, a masterpiece of scene-setting. But to wind back a bit ….

Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary telling the story of the director Ari Folman’s search to recover his memories of his own involvement in the 1982 massacres of Palestinians in the Shatila and Chabra refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut.

This mix is a bit quirky, I have to admit, but then … there’s no telling what people will like.

The first voice is that of Asha Bhosle, the voice of a thousand Bollywood movies.

(Note: The tracks will be in this order the first time you play the mix. If you listen a second time, the tracks will be in random order. Unless you delete the 8tracks cookie first. Or use a different browser.)

Then there’s Hamza el Din, accompanying himself on a ‘tar’, a type of frame drum. Just a voice and a drum. And check out this YouTube video of him singing a song from his native Nubia. He’s accompanying himself on the ud.

Then there’s Purple Rain, by Stina Nordenstam and Red Green and You Blue by Kevin Ayers and the Whole World, featuring a teenaged Mike Oldfield on bass and the amazing Lol Coxhill on soprano sax.

For a bit of early-nineties nostalgia, there’s the hyperactive Alexander Bălănescu and his string quartet commenting on the ex-Warsaw Pact nations’ new-found liking for Democracy.

There are a number of versions of Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. This piece consists of a tape loop of a tramp singing, which Bryars has given a variety of string orchestrations. My favourite version is the one where Tom Waits sings along, but at 19′ 38″ that’s a bit long to be putting on 8tracks. The version in this mix lasts a paltry 6′ 6″. As with so much of Bryars’ music, there’s a story behind it.

Next there’s Funeral Ikos by John Tavener. Unfortunately, in this recording the low basses at the bottom of the chords which end each ‘Alleluia’ are either inaudible or missing, which in the context of an audio CD could be said to be a distinction without a difference. The text is pretty wonderful, too. Here’s one of the verses:

Youth and the beauty of the body
fade at the hour of death,
and the tongue then burneth fiercely,
and the parched throat is inflamed.
The beauty of the eyes is quenched then,
the comeliness of the face all altered,
the shapeliness of the neck destroyed;
and the other parts have become numb,
nor often say:
Alleluia.

Lastly a reworking / recomposition by John Woolrich of a Monteverdi madrigal. The piece is called Ulysses Awakes and is for solo viola and strings.

I’ve been reading Kate Atkinson’s collection of short stories called ‘Not the End of the World’. And enjoying it a lot. I was compelled to read too much Guy de Maupassant as a teenager / university student and as a consequence I’ve avoided short stories ever since. Over-reaction or what?

Atkinson is particularly good at beginnings. Here’s the beginning of ‘Tunnel of Fish‘:

If Eddie could have chosen, he would have been a fish. A large fish without enemies, free to spend all day swimming lazily amongst the reeds and rushes in clear, blood-cold water. His mother, June, said not to worry, he was halfway there already, with his mouth hanging open all the time like a particularly dull-witted amphibian, not to mention the thick lenses of his spectacles that made his eyes bulge like a haddock’s.
Afterwards, of course, June had regretted saying that, but sometimes Eddie was so infuriatingly gormless that she couldn’t help herself. June had hoped that the removal of his adenoids when he was eight would make Eddie look more intelligent. It hadn’t. She had had the same expectations at nine for his spectacles. Most people she knew looked brainier with glasses, yet somehow Eddie contrived to look even more dopey. June thought that the grommets in his ears at ten would raise him from the undersea world of the deaf, and theoretically they had done, according to his ENT consultant, yet Eddie still behaved as if he couldn’t hear a word June said. Which was just as well, June thought, seeing as half the time the things she said to him were not very nice.

Despite the very down-to-earth style, the genre is definitely magic realism. What Gabriel Garcia Márquez might have come up with if he’d been born into the English middle classes, been educated at a good grammar school and gone on to get a first from a red-brick university. A big if, I suppose.