While we’re cleaning off DV tapes so that we have plenty of them available for Fasnacht, I came across this clip in Windows MovieMaker (.wmv) format, which should satisfy the curiosity of those of you who have been wondering about the recurrence of the “Sheep are eating my rosemary” theme. Non-broadband users, beware: this clip is 6 megs of pastoral sunshine, birdsong, and baaaaa-ing. Not to mention little lambies running around in the green spring pastures behind our house. (I hope to later catch some video of that most dreaded of rural manifestations, the “Lamb Gang”, i.e. about twenty lambs running around like crazy together.)
So I’m sitting here working on this book, and all of a sudden it’s getting to be time to go away to Basel, in Switzerland, for Fasnacht.
Fasnacht is a regional Swiss version of the Lenten carnival tradition, related (somewhat) to Mardi Gras and its cousins. But about Basler Fasnacht, more can be said than just that, and I’ve said some of it elsewhere, so I’ll quote:
…Fasnacht takes some explaining. It�s more than just the carnival tradition which runs through other parts of Europe. It can start the week before Shrove Tuesday, and may run through until the week after, depending on local preferences. And Fasnacht has very much its own character in each of the cities which celebrate it.
Some cities do it twice�once for the Catholic population, once for the Protestants, on different weeks (so that each group can go to the other�s party?). In Basel it�s an intensely adult preoccupation: razory verbal wit overlies the outrageous costumes, and underlies the rest of the celebration, in the form of the zeedel,the long skinny printed handbills of rude and loony dialect doggerel handed out by costumed marchers to passersby; and also as schnitzelbaengg, the sudden satirical theatre which breaks out without warning in bars and restaurants, and on the street. There are adult dangers, as well. In Basel, at Fasnacht, as long as you�re masked (meaning complete-body disguise), you can go up to anyone you know, put on a squeaky high voice, and tell them exactly what you think of them. They�ll have no comeback: traditionally, retaliation against someone who gave you a piece of their mind at Fasnacht just isn�t done.
Here, more than elsewhere, the �pressure valve� quality of carnival tradition makes itself plain�and the continuity of medieval tradition, too, when at four in the morning all the lights in the city suddenly go out, and the massed “cliques,” the formally-constituted parade groups, stand all over the city in their hundreds and thousands, drumming and fifing the Morgestraich: the slow, stately Basler call to arms. On a freezing February night, in the pitch darkness, with the drumbeats and the shrill fluting of the fifes rattling off the old buildings around you, you find it unnervingly easy to believe that you�ve fallen into the fourteenth century, and that the enemy is outside the city walls yet again, waiting to sack the place. When something of the kind might happen any year, you take your Carnival pleasures seriously. You might not taste them again…
This year, Fasnacht starts on March 10th: at 4 AM, as always. Besides my book work, I’ll try to do some blogging from there. I’ll also try to post some video. Here, as a foretaste, linked to the photo, is a little video from last year: the first couple of minutes of Basler Fasnacht. (This is Windows MovieMaker format, by the way. I’m still working out how to make the software excrete MPEGs.)
…They started a little early, last year. Normally the city’s streetlights don’t go out till the first four-o’-clock stroke of the great bell in the Muenster, but last year somebody at the power company got too excited (I think) and turned the lights off a bit early. (This is why, in the beginning of the clip, the camera bobs and swoops all over: I wasn’t ready.) You can hear the crowd go “Yeah!” — and then the fifing and drumming breaks out in a huge fugal racket as, for just these few minutes, every clique in the city plays the same piece of music, the “Morgestraich” proper: “reveille”. One small clique walks by the camera with their laderne, a painted lantern covered with satirical art by one of the city’s graphic artists.
Their costumes (hard to see in the lighting of this clip: sorry) are themed to match the lantern, and on their heads they wear lanterns with related designs, some of them lit from inside by electric bulbs, some by candles. Some also carry staffs with lighted lanterns on them. There will be at least a hundred cliques, possibly more, doing this kind of thing between 4 AM and dawn on the 10th. They will march with their laderne in a big parade, the cortege, on Monday afternoon, and again on Wednesday. Tuesday is children’s day, when parents parade informally with their children: that day the laderne are displayed in the plaza outside the Muenster, so that everybody can closely examine the astonishing artwork on them. But between Monday morning at 0400, and Thursday morning at 0400, the fifes and the drums will never stop by night or day. There’ll be food and drink in the streets, parties, balls, the huge concert of guggemusik, which is music played badly (on purpose) on massed band instruments, and general carrying on. The streets will be knee-deep in confetti every night, and it’ll all be gone again every morning. (One way you know it’s time to go back to Fasnacht is that you no longer find confetti in your clothes when you’re doing the laundry.)
Some Baslers, bored with it all, leave town.
But thousands of people come to Basel from all over the place for the Morgestraich — the largest number in recent years, on a weekend when the weather forecast was good, was 250,000 — and among them, among relatively few English-speakers, we’ll be there.
Watch this space for further developments. More details can be found at http://www.fasnacht.ch/?pm_1=21&mid=21 (check the sidebar for more English-language info). They also have a page with links to the various sources for live streaming video and audio, here.
It’s a fair question. Keeping it simple (because that way I can understand it):
RSS is short for either “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”, depending on who’s telling you about it. It’s a way to “syndicate” your blog, making it available to many more readers than would normally see it because it was merely linked to in someone’s blog or web page. Producing an RSS version of your blog makes it possible to send it as “news headlines” (or in longer formats if desired) to one of the various news aggregator sites where blogophiles and others can quickly gather information from websites and blogs that interest them. If your blog interests a person, he or she can have his or her news aggregator software pick up your blog immediately when it’s freshly published. (This whole thing is an oversimplification of many more complex issues, and I beg the indulgence of bloggers far more educated in RSS than I am.)
Publishing a blog in an RSS version involves taking a normal HTML-formatted blog and turning it into one formatted in XML instead (see here for what an XML page can look like). There are various formats or “flavors” of RSS: 2.0 is the newest one: Blog*Spot uses 0.91. There are a lot of issues about RSS publication which I don’t yet understand, having other things to think about all day, like books and cats and husbands, and sheep not eating my rosemary bush again this year (it’s spring…the lambs get in through the fence, and their moms follow them, and eat my garden…). But I’m working on it.
More general data can be found here and here and here and here and here.
Now excuse me, because I swear I can hear sheep in the front yard again —
…Or at least, Rory Bremner imitates it. Got RealPlayer? Check out this link with Bremner’s truly creepy take on Tony Blair at Camp David.
More clips from the fourth series of “Bremner, Bird and Fortune” are here. I really hope that soon they put up the one from the other night, the one with Tony having his weekly meeting with the Queen. The writing was particularly incisive…and the actress doing HM has her down as pat as Bremner’s got Blair.
This makes me smile. Duane Poole is an old friend, one of my former story editors on “Scooby-Doo” and various other Hanna-Barbera cartoons. (For a while, people at H-B thought I was one of his pseudonyms.) Duane’s always a busy writer, and when Peter and I were staying with him last year, he was in the middle of this astonishing piece of work. Duane is a super writer and a funny, funny man: I suspect that his sense of humor will be one of the things that makes this particular show work….
Via the inimitable and invaluable BoingBoing: a campaign I feel I could get behind. I almost wish I had a frequent-flyer account with Delta, so that I could cancel it. But I’m definitely never flying with them again. (See also the complex, but fascinating and scary, article on the statistics behind the fact that the CAPS so-called “screening” system is actually less useful than random searches.)
Meanwhile, still no RSS feed. Bear with me, I’ll get it worked out eventually…
Okay. Okay.
I like Sailor Moon (the original anime, not the idiotic English-language dub). When I get in a self-examining mood, I file this particular liking away with various other strange fondnesses, like the one for the gently revolving Hamsterdance hamster, feeling that no human being needs to be completely rational about all the things they like. The SM thing, in particular, occasionally manifests itself as WinAmp skins like the one here. Otherwise it remains a fairly quiet part of my life, stacked with various DVDs on the bookshelf and mostly taken out for evaluation or enjoyment, like the rest of the anime in the place, when Peter isn’t around to be driven crazy by it.
However…something new turned up today, on the Geisha asobi blog. Something that gives even me pause, fervent crypto-otaku that I am.
Sumo wrestlers dressed up as the Sailor Senshi. (To say nothing of Queen Beryl. But then again I’ve usually felt that as little should be said about Queen Beryl as possible.)
And not just the Senshi. I’m going to have trouble thinking of Tuxedo Mask in quite the same way as before after seeing this webpage…
Hmm. This is interesting.
TNN is starting to air the series, unedited and without “bugs ‘n’ bars”, starting on March 3. Would anyone be able to score me a tape of “Where No One Has Gone Before” in this format? Obviously I’ll cover your costs. Please drop me a note via the comment box.
In the next day or so I’m going to try adding an RSS feed to this thing. (I’m not sure why: the Blogosphere will hardly wither away for lack of my blatherings. Maybe just to see if I can. I can always turn it off…. Typically, though, initial experiments have produced nothing even slightly RSS-like.) There will probably also be some gratuitous fooling around with fonts and CSS, so don’t be surprised. (I’d also welcome any suggestions on why the blog looks so abysmal in Netscape 7 — i.e., why the main body lettering gets so small, and why the menubox on the right goes straight down to the bottom of the page…) Doubtless I’ve screwed up the CSS somewhere.)
Meanwhile, some unexpectedly cheery news. Last year we wrote a four-hour miniseries based on the Nibelungenlied for an independent production company based in Germany. Today we had a conference call with the people who run the company, and they let us know that production deals with a major Hollywood studio and a TV network have now been sorted out. A director is about to be attached to the project: preproduction should start in May.
Yeehah!
…Here’s something neat, by the way: the countdown music from BBC News24. Slight echoes of Kraftwerk, though (to my ears) also haunted somewhat by the ghost of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop…
And then there’s this. Function, heck: I’d visit this site just for the way the eyes behave. I’m strangely reminded of Monty Python. If that thing starts gnashing its teeth, leave!
This, uh, unusual Flash animation appeared in BoingBoing earlier in the month, but I really want to offer the link to those of you who need something, uh, unusual today. (Peter speaks pretty good French, and started to attempt a translation of the chorus: “This morning / A rabbit / Bought himself a gun: / We have created / An assassin…” At this point he began muttering in some other language entirely, and left the room.)
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Comet NEAT (a long-period comet, newly discovered — aka C2002/V1) happened to be within view of the LASCO instrument of the SOHO solar probe at the same time that the Sun threw a minor fit in the shape of a CME — a coronal mass ejection. Look at that tail pop out!
More data on this felicitous flyby is at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article381.html, courtesy of Astrobiology Magazine.
Something else lovely to look at: check out their slideshow of “the Sun as Art.” I briefly thought the first one was the Eye of Sauron from the films, until I remembered that the pupil on that version of the Eye is slitted.