At the shores of the underearth sea with the deaf Scots drummer in the funny hat


 


And what did you learn today?
That the world is full of a number of things.
And I'm sure we should all be as happy as Kings. (Latin, L.A., Stephen)
It's one of those days that not even especially eclectic reading turns up wonders.
I learned of a woman named Evelyn Glennie , who is a classically-trained solo percussionist, who is a Scot, who is deaf, and who is, as of the 2007 Queen's New Years Honours list, Dame Evelyn Glennie.
I learned of the exploration of Lake Vostok , a lake the size of Lake Ontario buried under miles of Antarctic ice, looked at as not only a trove in and of itself, but the possible dress rehearsal for the ice-skinned oceans of Europa.
And I learned that there is a man named Moses who lives in Hawaii who makes hats out of paper bags. No, you'd better look.

It being the 21st century, I was able to go to eMusic , which, despite my repeated invocation of the iTunes Music Store, is a miraculous treasure house of the wild strange non-Big Media music out there, all in non-DRM .mp3 form. (The fact that they have nearly all of John Fahey's stuff, the Residents, Bill Nelson and Fred Frith was enough for me) They had a suite written for her called African Sunrise/Manhattan Rave, and while she's not Max Roach, she really is compelling at times. And deaf? Thinking about it, I realized that percussion can be placed in the mind and felt with the body, it's not all that outrageous. It worked for Beethoven, after all--and Beethoven played a percussion instrument. (In a place where the tones are not pre-quantized, the story would be different--I don't see how a deaf violinist could work.) Her stuff goes beyond novelty.

And beyond the fact that there's a similarity to reaching out to a 25 million year old lake through miles of ice to reaching out to the drum through a wall of silence, I learned that, contrary to my assumption both the Antarctic Vostok station and Yuri Gagarin's spacecraft were named for the ship of the Russian explorer with the considerable name of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen.

The transcendence of boundaries, the rising of art and science from the wildest places. All that and funny hats.

Life is good.

Posted: Sunday - January 21, 2007 at 01:13 AM        

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