Vibrations in Time

Last night I came home and put on some music. Note that this sentence can mean different things to different people; in my case, it meant something very different last night than it did a week ago. I've been a great fan of the iPod since its inception, to the point that I find myself the curator of a museum of iPods, from the first generation to the latest. This dovetails well with the clutter of my room and my listening habits: when I buy CDs I import them onto my computer, and throw them onto the iPod in uncompressed format. The CDs soon burrow under the cushions of the sofa, and then disappear forerver; computer hard drives and computers come and go with the turnover frequency of relationships (it's been a toss-up the last couple of years); and over the years my music collection is now stored on five iPods (that I really should back up, now that I think about it).

But last night what I did was I turned on my trusty old amp, which was hooked up to the monitor speakers I use for sound editing, and while waiting for the tubes to warm up, sorted through a pile of records and decided to put on Joni Mitchell's Blue. I pulled the record from the dust sleeve, put it on the turntable, and carefully brushed off the dust before clamping it onto the platter. I unclipped the safety latch from the moving coil cartridge and lowered the stylus point onto the edge of the spinning record, and heard a few seconds of what must be one of my favorite sounds in the world (contenders would be that of a cork being pulled from a bottle, or the muffled roar of jet engines roaring into life for take-off). Although the engineering behind it is well-documented, I've never ceased to marvel at how a miniscule stylus being wiggled around can separate into two channels and go on to replicate an illusion of space, one that is populated by a warm, living voice, instruments in the background, or an entire orchestra. I mean, I know how it works, but I don't really understand it, the way you don't understand £60 million: it just ceases to be meaningful as money. (If I ever do come into possession of £60 million one of these days I'll report back and tell you if it becomes any more comprehensible.)

As someone who was in the creative industry just as it was "going digital", I wrestled with the existentialist problems of digital versus analogue in my spare time, but didn't have much time to ponder it in the workplace. This meant that we ended up working with hybrid systems, and at the moment being a purist either way is just either obstinacy or silliness. Film still rules, but not to use non-linear editing would be uniminagable for me now. Between the purist simplicity of my manual turntable and the tube amplifier is a solid-state phono stage to get some gain on the weak signal from the moving coil cartridge. It's a gorgeous frankenstein, I swear.

And the great thing about vinyl is that it's ridiculously cheap. Actually, there's also ridiculously expensive "audiophile" vinyl, and I do admit to owning Sarah McLachlan's Afterglow and Mirrorball on 200g remasters; but audiophiles tend to be nutballs in general. Apparently there are people out there (perhaps with £60 million) who buy these £20,000 speakers or the price of a small apartment for a length of wire. I've complained about the unhelpfulness of computer forums in the past (as opposed to the excellent industry forums for imaging or design), but audio forums seem to be populated by phallus-toting men with more money than sense, who sign off each message with a list of their equipment (yes, really).

I spent a pleasant afternoon in Notting Hill trawling the second-hand record shops, and made a pilgrimage to Harold Moore's classical haven, conveniently opposite Metro Imaging labs. Although I was rushing to catch a show (Noel Coward's Hay Fever, at the Haymarket Theatre Royal, starring Judi Dench doing an impersonation of Norma Desmond), I managed to snatch up some Julie London, a Deutche Grammophon recording of Herbert von Karajan's Dvorak Nine, some EMI recordings of Sir Malcolm Sargent, the Beatles (Parlophone), and Edie Brickell.
Apart from the last, these were from the days when record labels actually meant something; well, they still do today, to recording artists, but in the industry that has consolidated down to the big four, it makes me treasure my Sinatra on Capitol and Piaf on Pathe that much more. (When I was looking for a pair of monitor speakers a year ago I nearly purchased, in a fit of loony nostalgia, a pair of huge floorstanders each as big as a wardrobe from Decca sound labs.) Listening to great vinyl is a bit of a religious experience, and I don't mean that just in the audiophile's sense that the sound was heavenly (it varies, really); I mean it in the sense that it's evocative of an era before DRM and rootkit installers.

As a product of my generation, vinyl will never be the main medium of delivery for my music, though I must admit that I actually haven't bought a CD for ages. Incidentally, of all the vinyl I came home with today, only one of them really makes sense as a purchase, and that's the Beatles: they are, after all, not available for download on the iTunes Music Store.

What you get for £126

If you want to know what it's like to have a brush with the mafia, just try being living in England for a bit at a residential address. At some point, a letter from an insitution known only as "TV Licensing" will shove a friendly note in your letter-box, informing you of the legalities of watching television in the UK. This will be followed by one that says roughly the same thing but in a less friendly tone, and is printed in red ink. Then comes the one that hints at patrols involving "sophisticated detection equipment", followed by the same wrapped around a dead fish, and so on, until, finally, an envelope arrives on which is written NOTICE HAS BEEN SERVED, and inside which is a picture of a relative holding a copy of yesterday's paper and a note informing you that a hit, I mean, a raid, will be carried out in the next 48 hours. At this point I capitulated and paid up, even though I don't own a television set and don't watch television. But the idea of being woken up by the blunt muzzle of an automatic being pressed against my temple with the rest of the squad rummaging through my lingerie drawer in search of a concealed television set was too much to bear.

The upshot of all this is that now that I've spent so much on my television license, I've decided I should watch television so that my £126 doesn't go to waste. Besides, I've been championing the form for the past few years but bypassing the medium; i.e., I think that some of the best writing, acting, and directing being done today is being done for television, but I've always watched it on DVD. This is partly because I've never had the patience to tune in at a particular time, can't stand commercials, and because I want Dolby 2.0 at the very least. Now that HD is coming to England, I might change my mind, but an HD box is probably the last thing I need now with examinations coming up.

So if ever I watch teleivion now it's on my computer, as a little window on the screen (the resolution of my monitor is higher than broadcast resolution, so resizing it looks horrible). What does one get for £126? Without a decoder box, fairly terrible stuff, the worst of it being reality television involving extremely unattractive people, mixed in with the occasional BBC gem. This is what got me started on BBC programming, which in recent times has moved away from the type of fare it used to produce, which could charitably be described as "soothing" (try watching their adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast). The most noticeable example of this change in BBC style is the new Doctor Who, which now for a change the Americans are trying to download on Bittorrent. I'd previously dismissed it as hardcore sci-fi, which, like opera as a musical genre, the best of which I like but most of which bores me. But the writer of the new series, Russell T. Davies, was quoted as being a Buffy fan and wanting to reclaim the genre. So I watched.

Its lineage from Buffy isn't the female heroine; for that, only Alias does it for me so far (on this point I concur with Anne Billson's book on BtVS, though I disagree with most of it); it's about good writing: shifting in a moment from funny to frightening; operating on a scale both intimate and human, and Saving the World (which both Buffy and the Doctor do on a weekly basis). Unfortunately, Doctor Who is pretty new, so I couldn't go on a seven-season marathon the way I did with Buffy. (Incidentally, American seasons are around twenty-two episodes of forty minutes each; British seasons are ten episodes usually about an hour long, since there are no commercials, which also means that they don't follow the four-act structure of American teleivision.) The second season is now airing, with a new actor playing the Doctor with a new swagger; the new season definitely has an air of confidence about it, as well as a very obvious budget bump.

And since I found myself home on a Saturday night, and with a television license withering away, I decided to fire up my little digital receiver and tune in. When I turned the sound down at the end of the episode, I could hear the same music through the walls and realized that my next-door neighbor was watching it in his flat, as were people in homes and pubs all over Britain. So this is what it's like to watch television. So how much is that HD box again?

bbc.co.uk/doctorwho
How much do you enjoy television?

The Royal Hunt for an Opinion

It's a terrible thing, I know, but I'm the sort of person who is easily swayed by reviews. In the past, I'd swoop into London for a week or so and take in plays like a junkie on a binge, evenings and matinees all; and the bible by which I swore would be the capsule review I found in that particular week's issue of Time Out. I admit that this has led to some particularly horrifying disasters, such as Jerry Springer: The Opera, to which I dragged my friends, kicking and screaming, on the basis of a positive review (it's even more horrible than the title might suggest). But in general Time Out reviews are reliable, which can actually turn into a problem: because they're usually so trustworthy, there's the danger of falling into lazy complacency and allowing them to form your opnions for you.

These days, now that I have the luxury of watching plays at my leisure, I actually miss out on more plays than when I would parachute sporadically into the country. Even worse, I now have the time to buy the paper every morning (okay, every afternoon), and sift through the contents at length with my breakfast cup of tea. This is what living out in the country does to you. One of these days I might actually take to ironing the paper before reading it. And it is thus that the authority of Time Out has been replaced by that of the Guardian, which I thought highly of but never really warmed to as a website, but is wonderful in its paper form: the nifty size! Those pert little sidebars! That neat modern typeface!

Alas, on more than one occasion I have not been able to stop myself from reading the review of a play before watching it, which was what happened with The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Actually, I can technically claim that I saw it before reading the review, but this was ten years ago and might even have been in translation. I couldn't even remember what the play was about; I do remember though that it was one of the plays that made me fall in love with the medium of theatre. The present production of The Royal Hunt of the Sun at the National Theatre is a resurrection of a 1964 play (yes, I cribbed that date from the Guardian review), with Trevor Nunn directing. Like an adulterer who decides he might as well get in a few extra boinks before telling his wife, I decided that I might as well go for broke, and read all the reviews. Then I went and saw the play.

I'm not going to trot out a statement about the play retaining its relevance and vsince 1964, since I wasn't around to see it in 1964; and relevant to what, anyhow? What I will say is that I probably have changed less than I might have thought in the span of ten years, and that what I loved about the play then is what I loved about it the other night: the almost operatic spectacle and pageantry that is theater in its oldest form, yet none of it gratuitous. I loved how a group of men can climb onto a bare wooden stage and with the aid of two swathes of cloth, hey presto, they are climbing the Andes. Most of all I loved how Peter Schaffer tightened the drama of civilizations and cultures in a complex relationship between two men.

So yes, I'm a weak person, and easily swayed by authoritative reviews, peer pressure, friends with strong opinions, etc. But once in a while I come across a piece that engages me so directly that I like or dislike it in the face of authoritative approval or disapproval. I'm not saying it's a perfect evening: yes, Peter Schaffer can be excessively talky; and I felt Trevor Nunn was gilding the lily with the strobe lighting at the end of the first act ("bet you didn't have this in 1964!"). I'd watched it with a friend that I had hijacked, who had in turn hijacked one of her friends, and because I'd flown back into the UK just the night before neither of them had any idea what we were all watching. Perhaps one of the best compliments that can be paid to Schaffer's writing is that it is the sort that polarizes people, or at least one tends to feel strongly about; one thing you will not leave the theatre wanting for is an opinion. I was watching the play with eyes as fresh as those of my friends sitting beside me, as though I hadn't seen it ten years ago, as though I hadn't gone and cheated and read those reviews.

But as for my little cultural quandary, I have the perfect solution: rather than desisting from my new daily ritual of disassembling the Guardian with my breakfast (I manage to do this despite not having a subscription by buying the newspaper in the evening and reading everything one day late), I'll try and see everything in previews. Then again, I could learn how to have an opinion of my own despite having read the reviews.