Shaw has sent me a mildly frightening link to http://www.housedavid.com/logia.html which reminds me a test Heinrich found some years ago to see whether the food you were eating was physically pure, morally pure, and spiritually pure. Or something. I wonder if that's still out there...
More proof of how peculiar things can be up north, after the maneating squirrel in Knutsford some weeks back, can be found at http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_727887.html?menu=news.quirkies.
In other news, Holly and I went to Matt and Phred's last night, after having a quick drink with Seb in Richmond Park's bar. Matt and Phred's is a Jazz club in town where Gavin, a friend and former housemate of Holly's, was playing. He plays the Double Bass and is really good, as indeed were the pianist and drummer he was with. Apparently they'll be playing there virtually every Tuesday from now on. Some random friend of theirs joined them on the saxophone for a few numbers; he was excellent too, though he did jiggle about in a way that was mildly disturbing. And indeed, I would think, unnecessary.
(Whenever I see people playing the sax I always think of Zoot from the Muppet Show, sadly picking up his horn to perform some appalling tune, and muttering in resignation 'Forgive me, Charlie Parker.')
The club itself was great, and I'll definitely be returning there. It's got a wonderful atmosphere, with its near complete darkness, mildly seedy red drapes against which the sparkly blue drums stood out in an alarming fashion, and general air of mild decay. Oddly, what used to be the front door is now the back door, and indeed is closed except in emergencies. When arrived to find it closed we stood there a while, thinking the place hadn't yet opened, and then went for a brief walk. On returning we noticed the sign saying the entrance was now on, I think, Tib Street, which is behind Oldham Street. It's not exactly the most obtrusive of places; while the old entrance has a large window beside it with 'MATT AND PHRED'S' in large neon red letters, the new entrance is distinguished only by the broken brickwork and graffiti that surrounds it.
Before we went in, Hol was telling me that while the place itself was really good, it was extremely badly run. It has closed and reopened several times over the last couple of years. She was rather understating things. In an interval Gavin spoke to us, and told us that while it was still called Matt and Phred's, only Matt still ran it. Himself and Phred (Fred?) had had a fight in which Phred had broken Matt's leg. Phred was now a thing of the past, while Matt walked with the aid of a crutch.
To his credit, Matt turned out to be a good barman, even with a gammy leg. However, it must be admitted that while his skills behind the counter were not inconsiderable, his skills on stage were sadly lacking. At the end of the night he foolishly got it into his head that it would be fun to join the lads on stage and jam with them. This was what we in the trade call an error. Out came a saxophone that had clearly seen better days, and with horn in one hand, wine glass in the other, and crutch dragging from his elbow, he shuffled on stage and began to play.
'Play' is not quite an adequate word to describe what he was doing. The saxophone made noises which I'm really sure it should not have been making. Hideous, tortured screeches and toots. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, like Christy Moore's (see Eamonn's anonymous comment on Tuesday December 10th), and his face grew redder and redder, matching the drapery. At one point I convinced that he was about to explode. That subsided, and he began forcing the saxophone to do a rather painful and unwilling impression of a pneumatic drill. He was completely out of time with the others at one point, which Gavin picked him up on to little avail; for several minutes afterwards Gavin was clearly suppressing his rage. Any anger on his part would have been thoroughly justified, since Matt was ruining what would otherwise have been a brilliant performance.
Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy it. I enjoyed it perhaps a little too much. A bit like at the performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead put on by our hall and Slems a couple of weeks back, it was all I could do not to laugh. Whenever I looked at Matt I quaked with laughter but kept my mouth shut until I got it under control, at which point I'd catch Holly's eye, and the two of us would be off again, doing all we could not to break down in fits of giggles. I had to just look down, focussing on my drink, since I knew that whether I looked at Holly or the stage I was bound to laugh. I had just managed to control myself when Holly lightly tapped my forearm and whispered 'Everone's leaving.'
Indeed they were. The people at all the tables behind us had all stood up and put on their coats to go. Admittedly, it was very late, but I really don't think they were going because of the time. They hung around for a little even then, presumably enthralleded by how bad Matt's performance was, and wondering in vain hope whether it was ever going to stop. Eventually it did, but they had gone.
I wonder what Matt thought when he finally opened his eyes to a half-empty club? Who knows, maybe this is how he clears the shop at the end of the night?
***
Apparently Eddie's reading from 'Herodotus' went down really well at the Christmas concert the other night, some people even thinking it the best part of the evening. I wasn't at the concert myself, as Heinrich and I were catching up on our internet backgammon - I won three games to his one, in a radical break with tradition, and when that was done I returned to my Christmas cards. I think I'll finish them today, with a bit of luck. I'm currently on what Lewis would have his Herodotus call 'Exmas' cards. My 'Crissmas' ones are finished. I'm told that the Warden and her husband were both particularly impressed with the passage Eddie read, since both have at one point or other studied Herodotus, and so get all the jokes.
Herodotus is great, the first historian and one of the all-time masters of digression. He's definitely a hero of mine. He can be in the middle of a battle description or some similar section which is crucial to his narrative when on mentioning somebody he'll feel an urge to tell an irrelevant and highly unlikely but nevertheless immensely amusing anecdote about them. He's a bit like Gaelic football commentators at home that way.
For example, at one point he describes the campaigns of the Persian Harpagus in Caria, which is basically in the bottom left hand corner of Modern Turkey. He observes of one group of Carians that there were also certain folk of Pedas, dwelling inland of Halicarnassas ; when any misfortune was coming upon them or their neighbours, the priestess of Athene grew a great beard. This had happened to them three times.
In his account of the heroic but doomed Spartan defence of the Pass of Thermopylae, he records perhaps the greatest one-liner in Antiquity. The Spartans were hopelessly outnumbered at the pass. At Thermopylae there were probably a couple of thousand Spartans, allies, and Helots - the enslaved native population of Lakonia - up against between one hundred thousand and a quarter of a million Persian troops. Herodotus records an even larger Persian force, well over three million men, and among the Greeks emphasises almost to the exclusion of all others the three hundred Spartans under King Leonidas. One of the three hundred, Dienekes, was evidently the Classical answer to Arnie or to Clint Eastwood. A soldier from Trachis was terrified before the battle and addressed Dienekes, nervously saying that he had heard that when the Persians fired their arrows there were so many as to blot out the sun. Dienekes smiled grimly and said 'Good. Then we can fight in the shade.'
Herodotus is particularly good on the stranger Babylonian customs, where not merely does he describe them, but he makes the odd deeply sexist joke. Temple prostitution was definitely the oddest one, whereby he relates that every woman who is a native of the country must once in her life go and sit in the temple of Aphrodite and there give herself to a strange man. In case you're confused by this, it means she'd have to be with any random bloke she doesn't know; it would hardly be the case that there was one deeply weird fella hanging round the temple who every woman in the country was obliged to shag. Though that would have been funnier. Anyway, the way it worked was that big gangs of women would sit in groups, marked out by bands of plaited string around their heads. Pathways were marked out, so that passing men could stroll among them and pick out the ones they fancied. Men picked their women by casting a silver coin of any value into her lap and saying 'In the name of the goddess Mylitta' - that being the Assyrian name for Aphrodite. The women had no say in who their partners would be, and having done this once they would go home and were apparently incorruptible for the rest of their lives. Herodotus ends this description by memorably observing that Tall, handsome women soon manage to get home again, but the ugly ones stay a long time before they can fulfil the condition which the law demands, some of them, indeed, as much as three or four years.
Nice.
No comments:
Post a Comment