Occasionally, I stumble at a word or phrase when I am reading. This is not always because of the twist in my brain responsible for dyslexia or some such. My mental hurpling can be caused by images or fancies. They are ignited in my mind’s eye and I can be taken by them for days, months or even years. The great Kurdish cook Pakora is celebrated in our house with gusto.
Rex the receiver has made an appearance previously on these pages and there are many more.
John Naughton, in Memex1.1, refers to an article by Tim Wu in Slate. This outlines the possibility that AT&T will shoot itself in the foot with a new strategy to pursue copyright infringement.
Detail aside, the following fired up the old synapses nicely:
And that's why the recording industry sued Napster and Grokster, not AT&T or Verizon, when the great music wars began in the early 2000s.
That phrase - the great music wars -burst into my mind.
A pitched battle begins between the Berlin Phil. and the LSO, Damn Busters’ March pounding in the background. The Phil start up with the Fifth, staccato and the plucky little Englanders pick up the strains and hurl them back over the World Service.
The Bolshoi Orchestra and the Bournemouth Symphony giving it large to a bunch of fancy pants from Paris with cardboard epaulets as the 1812 builds. The roaring of the massed cannons (or canons from the choir of Westminster Abbey) brings the cheese eating surrender monkeys to their knees!
The Chicago and Boston play Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare” as a camera pans across smoking battlefields of the Civil War, Nagasaki blasted by atomic devastation, Vietnamese and Cambodian villages ghost empty, no sign of animals, children or people.
The sounds are taken up by a small group in brown and white cotton moving across a mountain backdrop. A high voice straining and ululating in devotion as the camera takes in villages, the colour of mud, Pastures of Plenty in Afghanistan. The tabla is light but incessant as shells pound into the likeness of some carved image of the compassionate Buddha in a remote valley.
If you ventured north you would hear the crude clash of cymbals and blast of off key horns wielded by saffron robed, coxcombed, monks as they resisted the massed brass bands of the Peoples’ Liberation Army playing selections for the Beijing Opera, the Mikado and Andrew Lloyd Webber, marching faultlessly in goose step.
And so on…
