get mediaeval

This entry may at first glance appear to break my rule about no review longer than a haiku, although any thoughts of mine on the Mediaeval Baebes are bound to be less review than pure adulation. So call it an "Appreciation," with review to follow.

I feel like I've known about the Mediaeval Baebes for, well, forever, though I know that's not the case. Despite the ancient worlds of sound they create, they've only existed since the late 1990s.

If memory serves, I saw a Miranda Sex Garden video, oh, must've been early-mid 1990s or so, and was highly intrigued. I was only vaguely aware of the medieval/chivalric variation of goth, but the Katherine Blake-led trio that was MSG would've been attractive even if I didn't know anything about the genre that went along with it. I bought one of their CDs and knew they'd done another one that was all madrigals, oddly. But thought little more of them.

Then, in, oh, 1998 I guess, I became aware of Delerium, the Front Line Assembly ambient side project that blossomed into a sort of dark ethereal, highly world-music-sampled aesthetic. I think I saw them mentioned on a list of "If you like DCD or Enigma you might like…" though I'm fairly convinced the name alone and the cover art from Karma would've been enough to get me to give them a listen. Anyway, Delerium produced a couple (or a few) albums of wonderful music, balanced between their dark ambient early work, and more recent efforts that I have to say have moved a little too far into the light (or, dare I say, 'lite') for my tastes.

Finally we get to my first Baebes encounter. On Delerium's 2001 album, Poem, was "Aria," a song borrowing a Mediaeval Baebes song ("All Turns to Yesterday") and putting a beat to it. So I heard them for the first time in a heavily remixed and beat-added fashion, but really, it only took a week or so before Amazon was shipping me Worldes Blysse. And I learned (finally explaining an earlier paragraph) that behind the Baebes is Katherine Blake, having moved from Miranda and madrigals to something more difficult and interesting.

The Baebes are eight (sometimes more over the years) women, singing music that set very, very old texts in various languages, to new music that sounds (to an untrained ear, anyway) very, very old itself. Wild costumes, anachronistic spellings (there's nothing like a gratuitous "ae" to catch the attention of a romantic…it's kind of like umlauts for fans of heavy metal.) And, though I listen to old churchy choral music all the time, the Baebes are different. With classical choral stuff there's this sense of, I don't know, over-reverence sometimes, like the music sits on an altar and we just admire it from a distance. With the Baebes I've always felt like the music is somehow more alive, more approachable, maybe because at its heart it really is contemporary despite the texts; maybe just because they're young and beautiful and maybe because, for all their seriousness about the music, they refuse to take themselves too seriously. That's not to say the music is easy, with its complex harmonies and little in the way of instruments to hide behind. For all that it's very austere (indeed, a capella in many cases), it's at the same time extremely luxurious. Indeed, the best thing about the Baebes to me is the sheer number of contradictions they embody:

Austere and luxurious
Serious and eccentric
Sacred and profane
Light and dark
Simple and difficult
Old and new

I was pretty much hooked from track one.

In April, 2002, they played the Bottom Line Caberet in New York. My friend Abby was game enough to come with me for a lovely evening of music. And the following summer I went down to DC and dragged my sister (who lives there) to the Maryland Renaissance Faire (I'm still apologizing to her for that) because they'd be there. I was starting to feel like a groupie a bit, but it was totally worth it. Their music makes me happy.

One final anecdote. In mid-June of this year, I went up to the Cloisters for the first time in quite some while. This summer has had its share of hot, nasty days, but it's also seen some amazingly perfect weather in the City. And this June Saturday was one of those. I sat in one of the gardens there, in the sun, amidst the reconstructed ancient splendor of the place, flowers blooming, bees buzzing around, people coming and going, and I fired up the Baebes on shuffle on the iPod. And I swear, for that space of time, the music and the moment fit so perfectly I couldn't possibly have asked for anything else to make me more content. It's a rare feeling, and one for which I'm grateful.

I've never been the sort to go in for fawning adulation. I figure everyone has their job to do, and who am I to bother someone by forcing them to interact with me, even if I think what they do is really great, if they'd rather just kick back and have a private life when they're not explicitly performing. It's worth pointing that out, as it will hardly be evident from the fanboy gushiness of the rest of this essay.

Ironically, of course, the more I like and respect someone, the more likely I am to ignore that sentiment and bother them anyway. But the list of people I admire sufficiently that I might go (or have gone) so far as to impose on them for, say, an autograph, is quite short. Joss Whedon of course is on it. And so are the Mediaeval Baebes.

For the Mediaeval Baebes, a tanka (a haiku with two extra bonus 7-syllable lines, actually it's the older form; Japanese culture at some point decided it was too wordy)

For love of song, Baebes
Make strange, beautiful music
Unique in this age.
Romantic and Quixotic,
How could I not adore them?

And for their new album, Mirabilis, here's my review:

To lovely voices,
Baebes now add more instruments
For lush, magic songs

gloomy joe quote of the day

I've been doing a lot of soul searching over the past two days. And mostly it's really made me fairly miserable, I have to say. But it's also provoked some interesting thinking and correspondence with friends. My favorite thing I said today was in an e-mail to an old friend from grad school:

When in our youths we make rash vows about casting aside mediocrity at every opportunity, I think it's in part because we don't realize that mediocrity is very, very comfortable.

haiku review: "her long black hair," by janet cardiff

A word is warranted, I suppose. Janet Cardiff is a an artist who makes sound recordings, audio tours of a sort, except instead of simply describing places and pointing out things of interest, they combine stories and stream of consciousness and very carefully chosen ambient sounds in a way that...well, I'm crossing the line between description and review, no?

Anyway, she has recorded a walk through Central Park, available for free from Thursday through Monday from a kiosk courtesy of the Public Art Fund.

Just like living in
Someone else's mind a while
A strange, lovely tour.

camp laszlo

While I am characterized by any number of odd and inexplicable behavioral traits, one of the most such is probably the degree to which I hated my last name growing up. Nowadays of course I realize it's actually very cool, and its unusualness (in the US anyway) is a key contributing factor to that coolness. Of course, it's not the easiest name in the world to spell; my mother spells it "L-A-S-Z-as-in-zebra-L-O" which gets the point across. I tend to default to the pretentious (in the US anyway) but mostly understandable "L-A-S-zed-L-O" if I'm talking to someone who's likely to speak a little British, or else I spell it mom's way, but, being me, substitute in "zombie."

I pronounce it a little differently than the rest of the family, too; everyone else uses a hard A, while I use a sort of in-between semi-soft A, like "Lah-zlo" I don't have any clue which is more likely to be authentic, though given the sheer number of vowels Hungarian has, they're probably both equally distant from the real "a."

In any case, back to the hating. I will admit that there was a time in my life when, young and lonely and stupid, I wanted nothing more to fit in and seem, well, like everyone else I knew. Whieh, when one grows up in a hick town in Hawai'i, involves having a last name like Watanabe or Liu or Manuel or Keawe, far more than it does having one like Laszlo. So I hated it, pretty much up until college, when people started telling me how cool it was. And I started believing them.

It was quite some time before I found any Laszlos who weren't related to me. A few of them are pretty good. Discovering them helped overcome at least this aspect of my self-loathing. For the edification of others unfamiliar with the many Laszlos out there (and variants thereof), I present a brief best-of list.

Victor Laszlo is probably the most famous of Laszlos...the least important vertex of the greatest romantic triangle in all of cinema. My freshman year of college, I convinced much of the floor of my dorm that Casablanca was based on a true story and that Victor was some sort of distant uncle or cousin, and that Aunt Ilsa wasn't nearly as glamorous as Ingrid Bergman. Of course this was before the Internet, so such claims were far harder to confirm or disprove than they would be today.

In Hungary, Laszlo is far more common as a first name; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the graphic designer and photographer from the early 20th Century, is perhaps the most famous first-name-Laszlo. It was from his name that I first learned that if I wanted to be really pretentious I could spell my name with accents over both the "a" and the "o." Luckily I'm not that pretentious, at least not yet.

The geekily enjoyable Val Kilmer movie "Real Genius" was home to another Laszlo, or at least Lazlo. He was the weird guy who lived in the main character's closet, or at least in a set of rooms accessed through the main character's closet.

Then there was Erno Laszlo. I don't remember where I first encountered the cosmetics brand, maybe it was Macy's. I do recall that wherever it was, it was still early enough in my life that the sight of another Laszlo still took me somewhat aback. But it was late enough that I certainly didn't go around bragging to anybody about "Uncle Erno." At least, not in a serious way.

One would think that I would be thrilled beyond words by Roderick Anscombe's decision to name his bloodthirsty serial killer "Laszlo, Count Dracula." One would be wrong. I loved the title, but the book was, frankly, kind of sucky. Plus that's one less title available for my hypothetical spellbinding gothic thriller bestseller of, say, five years from now.

In my professional life, my one contact with a Laszlo has been Laszlo Systems, a Bay Area company that produces software that aids in the creation of rich internet applications. Oddly I've never gotten the story of the name's origin out of them when we've talked; there was no founding Laszlo or anything, it seems. However, I do make a point of reminding them that I'm readily available if they want to create a Chief Figurehead Officer role for me.

I will wrap up this brief tour of Laszlos with the inspiration for this essay, Cartoon Network 's near ubiquitous subway ad campaign promoting one of its new summer series, "Camp Lazlo." The eponymous Lazlo in this case is unfortunately neither a vampire nor a gloomy technology analyst. He's not even Hungarian (or Czech, a la Uncle Victor), but for some reason Brazilian. He's a nonconformist monkey who upsets things at the regimented summer camp to which he's been sent. The theme song, to the tune of "There was a farmer who had a dog…" unfortunately involves the endlessly repeated refrain "L-A-Z-L-O" which will only create a whole new generation of people predisposed to that spelling, and not the more consonant-heavy one that my family prefers.