In vacant or in pensive mood…”
Well it might have been daffodils that flashed upon William Wordsworth’s inward eye, but I find that every once in a while the strangest dang things leap into my mind’s foreground from some distant mental recess, leaving me utterly baffled as to why. And it doesn’t have to be while lying on a couch, either.
For example, last week, in one of those bone-chillingly cold February days that combines a north wind with the moisture-saturated air that hovers above the Ottawa River on my daily bridge crossing, for no reason I can fathom suddenly I found myself reciting, “Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheuer, Alison Krauss and Bill Schroeder”, names that were seared into public consciousness in May 1970.
At this very moment, I haven’t Googled either the names or date, but I’m willing to bet almost all of it passes muster… (Just did. It’s “Krause”, not “Krauss”. Everything else still pops into my head correctly almost 37 years later.)
The four were, of course (to me, anyway; possibly not “of course” to too many other people) the four young Kent State University students who at the time were among hundreds doing nothing more than publicly protesting the war in Vietnam. For heaven only knows what reason – and heaven so far isn’t telling – units of the Ohio National Guard, who were brought in to maintain order, opened fire using rifles loaded with live ammunition. The four students named above were shot dead.
In May of 1970, I was in Grade 12; a university program in journalism had at least entered my thinking as a possible course to follow in my post-secondary life but that was still a year and half away (Ontario then had Grade 13). Kent State, while not on my list of possible schools, was home to a first-rate journalism school for people who had the money to take their university training in the US (I didn’t).
Maybe I just paid more attention to the deaths of people my own age in what was supposed to be a pretty safe place to be – a university campus. For whatever reason, the names of the four students killed that day became a permanent memory that still comes very easily, whenever something triggers it. I suppose if serious memory loss is anywhere in my future, one of its early onset warnings will be when those names are no longer there.
I also recall much of my reading of James Michener’s “Kent State: What Happened and Why” when it came out. Mr Michener certainly nailed the “What?” but no one, to this day, has ever satisfactorily managed to produce a justifiable, “Why?”.
But my more immediate wondering, and the reason for this entry, is why those names suddenly came to mind a few days ago in the utterly unrelated circumstances they did.
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From the ongoing “I am not making this up” file (because I was there, in this case). Overheard in a recent meeting that involved this exchange between a cabinet minister’s Director of Communications (DC) and a senior bureaucrat (SB) whose responsibilities include staying on top of the department’s programs that are attracting media attention. The bureaucrat has just been asked to re-format the daily report that is prepared for the Minister so that the major topic of the day appears at the top of page 1, instead of buried deeper in the report.
SB: That’s a good idea, because putting the most immediate information first will help the Minister at least look like he knows what he’s talking about.
DC (somewhat drily): Uh huh. And as a bonus, it will help the Minister actually know what he’s talking about.
It was a pretty short exchange. It also illustrates why, for some people, the classic British comedy series, “Yes Minister” and its sequel, “Yes Prime Minister” were hilarious comedies, while for others who actually work in the public service, they were documentaries.
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Music recommendation: I’ve moved from last entry’s Hawaii to Africa here, and recently bought two new albums from the Dark Continent. "The Best of Johnny Clegg and Savuka" is a superb compilation of Mr Clegg’s best, and date from when he was a member of his first band, Juluka. Their signature song was a powerful piece of music entitled “Scatterlings of Africa”. (It must be Clegg’s own, because it went with him to the immediate repertoire of his next band, Savuka.)
Clegg is about as eclectic as one musician can be, as this brief passage from his full Wikipedia entry notes: “Sometimes called ‘The White Zulu’, he is an important figure in South African popular music history, with songs that mix Zulu and English lyrics, and African / European / Celtic music styles.”
“Scatterlings…” is one of those “I dare you to sit still while it’s cranked on your stereo” songs. And there’s a recurring deeply baritone multi-voiced vocal break that doesn’t even make it into most official lyrics of the song. You hear it several times throughout (Let’s see… “Yeh-UMM; Wo HUM…Yeh-heh-WO-oh-HUM” is about as close as I can render it) and, to my mind, it would not be out of place in a movie scene where thousands of Zulu warriors are in the process of working themselves up to the required fever pitch to attack the hated redcoats; the screen is filled with that ubiquitous image of tens of thousands of Zulu warrior feet smashing the dusty ground with their signature grass ankle bands flaying the air in rhythm with that chant.
Which probably is not even close to Clegg’s reasons for its being there, and it’s probably just me. (Then again, reading that “Savuka” is a Zulu word that means, “We have awakened”, who knows?) BAYETE!
By the way, if watching Zulus be Zulus in their glory days is at all an interest of yours, I commend to you two or three video experiences. “Zulu” is a movie. It is Michael Caine’s screen debut and is the story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift that took place during the Zulu Wars with England. (If chronology is important to you, you should first watch “Zulu Dawn”, another movie, this one about the Battle of Isandlwana in which the Zulus slaughtered the British, due in no small measure to the rigidly bureaucratic British rules about delivering ammunition to its front-line riflemen. Historically, Isandlwana precedes Rorke’s Drift by a couple days and it was the victory-flushed Isandlwana Zulu army that next attacked the Drift.) From the English perspective, the second action was positively heroic as the tiny English garrison of 139 soldiers resisted wave after wave of attacks by a Zulu force variously estimated at up to 5,000, earning for themselves 11 Victoria Crosses in the process, a number for a single action that to this day has never been exceeded.
So OK, the Zulu lose Rorke’s Drift. But an even more interesting perspective – from the Zulu point of view – is a massive South African television project. “Shaka Zulu” is a 10-hour mini-series about the life of the man who took the Zulu from a patchwork scattering of constantly scrapping little villages and molded them into a single and much-feared warrior nation. Along the way, he is also credited with either inventing or perfecting, depending on what historian you believe most, two innovations in warfare. First, he discarded the throwing spear as weapon of choice in favour of a short, stabbing spear. Second, he crafted the signature Zulu method of attack in which the army advanced with two outer wings positioned like the massive horns on a water buffalo’s head. In attack, they simply raced past the flanks of the defending force, who naturally concentrated on the bulk of the army coming at them from head on. But when the “horns” folded in on the defenders, very few could avoid being overwhelmed.
(And on a final linguistic note, my earlier all-caps shout of “BAYETE!”, pronounced Bah-YAY-tay!, according to some sources literally means “Hail to the Chief” and was how Shaka demanded he be greeted. It certainly figures throughout “Shaka Zulu”, but whether the lore preceded the series or the series created the lore remains indeterminate.)
Um… well that was a bit of a wander from a music recommendation. Where was I?
Oh yes. The second disk is a much gentler, indeed almost hypnotic album of African “desert blues”, played by a guitarist that everyone calls the “King” of desert blues singers – Ali Farka Toure. His guitar is key to his sound – it has a metal face around the opening (not all-metal like the world famous National guitar that you see here (a design feature that served as the inspiration for the opening line of Paul Simon’s song “Graceland”: “The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar”), but rather as an insert, as it appears here.
It helps gives his playing a wonderful background twang to complement a variety of traditional instruments like a ngoni (a hollowed wooden guitar surfaced with animal skin), and a bolon (a stringed instrument anchored by a large gourd that, I confess, would single-handedly have reinforced
Prince’s Super Bowl “phallic silhouette” controversy had he also chosen to pluck a few notes on it during his performance.)I can’t sing along with this album yet (because I don’t know – and for that matter have never even heard of – Peul, Sonrai, Zarma, or Songoy, the languages he sings), but I can certainly close my eyes and drift.
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If at first you don’t succeed… don’t let the insanities of military procurement slow you down one little bit.
I’ve been having great fun recently reading a small but fascinating book called “The World’s Worst Aircraft: From Pioneering Failures to Multimillion Dollar Disasters”. “Great fun”, because the author is often hilariously glib with his observations about the outcome of designs that in many cases, frankly, induce astonishment in the reader that they even got into production. And it’s not just from the days when aircraft pioneers were first building some really odd machines aimed at sending men up to join the birds (although there are a few of those). It also covers WWII and the much more recent jet age, when designers, investors and, yes, even governments ought to have known better.
For example, the US military in the 1960s got the bright idea of designing a single airframe that was supposed to be adaptable by any branch of the armed forces who wished to use it, forgetting (or simply overlooking) that, sure, a heavily-armed jet fighter, given enough runway, would probably have sufficient aerodynamic capabilities in the 1960s that it would always manage to become airborne, but when that same jet fighter has to deal with an aircraft carrier deck for take-offs and landings, it’s a different matter entirely.
The General Dynamics F-111B was supposed to be a navy fighter adaptation of what had already proved to be quite a successful Vietnam War air force bomber, the F-111A. The author writes of the efforts to strip its weight down for carrier duty: “A Super Weight Improvement Program (SWIP) was followed without irony by three separate Colossal Weight Improvement Programs (CWIPs), none of which worked. As an admiral explained in post-failure Congressional hearings, 'All the thrust in Christendom wouldn’t make a fighter out of that airplane.'”
Others are described (again, one presumes, “without irony”) as having failed so spectacularly, that the few that were built wound up being used exclusively as ground decoys intended to draw fire from attacking enemy aircraft that might otherwise have been aimed at other flyable aircraft actually in service.
Still another – the Ryan X-13 “Vertijet”, was an airplane that took off from the position of being pointed straight up, like a rocket. And astonishingly, the best that the designers could do to help the pilot land the thing (by effectively “backing up” with the nose still pointed straight up, and settling to the ground as its jet engine simply howled) was to provide a graduated pole at the landing spot so the pilot could turn his head to the side and read how many feet he had yet to descend before touchdown. No mention is made of how the landing was managed if no graduated pole happened to be handy. The author, however, does recount one memorable demonstration that began at Washington DC’s Pentagon where “the X-13 flew from its trailer, crossed the Potomac, destroyed a rose garden with its thrust and landed in a net.” The “top brass” watching the rather unique test are described as being “impressed”, but funding for the X-13 ended almost immediately afterwards.
Very few countries are spared at least some ignominy in this painful review. England, for example, produced the Avro Manchester during WWII. It was a horribly underpowered twin-engined bomber that “suffered appalling losses” (136 out of 202 built – some due to combat, but most due to a “worrying tendency to burst into flames or fall apart with fatigue”), until someone got the bright idea of lengthening the wing, replacing the two useless Rolls-Royce Vulture engines with four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines and renaming the new product the Lancaster, which some argue is the finest bomber ever produced in the war. (OK, so maybe "if at first you don't succeed..." is a doorway to subsequent greatness, but managing to birth the Lancaster from its Manchester parent is more probably the exception, rather than the rule.)
Canada contributes the Avro “Avrocar”, a saucer-shaped 1952 design intended to serve as a “flying jeep”. Unfortunately, it never managed to “fly” above waist high, because it became unstable when the supporting air cushion vanished above one metre in altitude.
Italy gives us several, but somehow the Caproni-Stipa stands out simply because of its almost cartoon-like appearance. The author kindly calls it “bizarre”, but notes that others said it looked like “it seemed a de Havilland had fallen down a well”. It really has to be seen to be believed, and thanks to the miracle of the Internet, it can be, here:
The seats are the two dark open-cockpit notches at the very top of the hump. Were this a colour photo, it would reveal that the Italians chose to paint this aircraft a joyfully optimistic combination of sky blue (the darker front end in this photo) and sunlight yellow, thus steadfastly maintaining their sense of artistry in the face of so plainly abandoning any sense of flight engineering. If you’re wondering, it did indeed fly, it just flew at a speed slightly faster than that which any competent miler could outrun along the ground.
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We take you now to the Communications Office of some nameless Bush Republican (SNBR), who is in the middle of a telephone media interview on the subject of “If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.”
SNBR: “Yep, damned straight. In fact, look what we did to that girlie-girlie singin’ group, them there who’s d’ya call ‘em – Dixie Chicks? A couple years ago, we gave one listen to that there Maines-girl sayin’ how she was ashamed – ASHAMED, I tell ya – to come from the same state as President George Bush. And we jes’ crushed their career… What’s-at you say? 2007 Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year for “Taking the Long Way”? Yeah, well, like I was sayin’ you don’t say bad things about Mr Bush and not expect… What’s that? 2007 Grammy Award for Best Country Album for “Taking the Long Way”? Where was I? Oh yeah, you cain’t jes’ go out and bad-mouth our great President every time you step up to a microphone and… pardon? 2007 Grammy Award for Record of the Year for the song, “Not Ready to Make Nice”? Well, it don’t matter who you might be. If you gonna say nasty things about the President of these here United States, then we are gonna make you PAY! Big time! We left them there Dixie Chicks with no hope in HELL of ever takin’ their careers… Sorry? Say again?... the 2007 Grammy Award for Song of the Year for “Not Ready to Make Nice”? Well, we’re jes’ gonna push you and your songs lower than a snake’s belly in a dry gulch and good luck, good God-danged friggin’ luck, findin’ any work or any fan interest in anything you… How’s that again? 2007 Grammy Award for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group?... Well all’s I can say is good luck to ‘em. Cause they bad-lipped our great President and they are now jes’ so much burnt toast in this country! Damned straight! Now nice talkin’ atcha. Give me a call when this interview’s gonna run, would’ja? I wanna make sure you get my quotes right.”
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I bought “Taking the Long Way” the first day it was released in Ottawa. I bought it because its release came with a wave of media warnings and right-wing blogger blatherings that it was going to go nowhere, sales-wise, just because the Dixie Chicks had “dared” to offend the Bushites. I bought Neil Young’s exceedingly angry protest album, “Living With War”, which includes, for example, a song entitled "Let's Impeach the President for Lying", for pretty much the same reason. (OK, so I’m not much for making grand political statements, I know… and I got a hell of a pair of really good albums to boot, so it's not even like there was any sacrifice on my part. Such is protest in the New Millennium, I guess.)
But all’s I ken say is, one music awards program and five Grammies later – a win in every category in which they were nominated – to Natalie Maines, Marty Maguire and Emily Robinson, hey congrats, y’all!
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And finally, yet another movie to recommend.
“Wordplay” probably still has only a limited audience, but deserves a wider one. People who, for example, never saw “Spellbound” (the 2002 one, not the 1945 Hitchcock thriller with its astonishing Salvador Dali take on the descent into madness) would simply look upon you in stupefaction if you set out to tell them it was a completely mesmerizing documentary film about... the 1999 annual Scripps-Howard National US Spelling Bee Championship. But people who have seen it know that to be, indeed, true.
So I have some understandable expectation of some Baby Duckling stupefaction when hearing that “Wordplay” is a completely mesmerizing documentary film about... the American Crossword Puzzle Association’s 2005 edition of their annual National Crossword Puzzle Championship. But in fact not only is it fascinating, it is occasionally hilarious.
The puzzle that is at the heart of the competition is the New York Times Crossword Puzzle, and for a variety of reasons. For one, its present editor and the man who started the annual competition at age 25, Will Shortz, is the focus of this documentary. But he’s not its dominator, by any means. Along the way, we meet several people who are passionate fans of the NYT’s puzzle, including former US President Bill Clinton, New York Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, two musicians who tour as the Indigo Girls, and late-night TV's "The Daily Show" comedy news satirist, Jon Stewart.
Will Shortz’s life has been so completely immersed in crossword puzzling that, when he enrolled after high school in a university that allows a student to craft his or her own major, he was inspired to create for himself what became an eventual (and the world’s first) degree in the new – and now legitimately acknowledged – field of “enigmatology”.
We are also exposed to the jaw-dropping process by which frequent NYT puzzle creator Merl Reagle crafts a new puzzle. (“Jaw-dropping” in how easy it seems when he firsts puts pencil to the open grid on his paper, until you see him review what he needs to consider as he draws on literally years of having worked in the medium, including tapping a range of dictionaries from “the little one” to, if required, what would undoubtedly be the English language cruciverbalist’s equivalent of an appeal to the Supreme Court – the mighty multi-volume Oxford.) Eventually, with minimal editorial fuss from Shortz, Reagle’s work is published by the New York Times and we actually watch the above-named co-stars as each separately solves parts of the puzzle we viewers had earlier watched being created.
But that’s really only half the film. The other half is the 2005 annual competition and "Wordplay" is an equally fascinating, occasionally mildly disturbing, look at some truly unique personalities and how they fare during the high stress of that weekend. Serious crossword puzzlers (people who can knock off a typical NYT daily puzzle in under three minutes, and the monster Sunday puzzle in just over a quarter of an hour) are a most eclectic collection of people. One feels, for example, an odd blend of sadness and pride radiating from a previous national champion that we see in several scenes, Ellen Ripstein, who at one point describes snapping, “Well tell me just one thing in your life that you’re better at than anyone else in America”, to someone she says is now an “ex-boyfriend”.
I could go on, but I’ve often been accused of spoiling a viewing experience in the process of waxing enthusiastic about a movie or TV show. So I’ll simply urge you to see it; it’s available now for rent and I think I can promise that almost anyone who has in your repertoire of recreational activity any form of word puzzle-solving – not only crosswords – will find something to like, if not love, about this film.
Until la prochaine. (Don’t tell me I’m not bilingual!)