Innominate - EasterCon Sunday

I've been ill, and thus not blogging for a while, but I'm back out of my sick bed now....

A bit blurry (but thank you to the chap behind the registration desk for taking the picture) - we spent the day as Holmes and Watson, and got an embarrassingly large number of Hall Costume tokens, since these costumes were assembled from fairly ordinary clothes which we happened to have in our wardrobes rather than anything specially made.

Sunday at EasterCon for us was Science Day! It was quite impressive just how many real scientists were at the Con, and at the Bio-hacking panel we had a group of speakers who were all experts in their fields, including one chap who works at Cambridge and was dressed in a smart blazer from The Prisoner - we saw him going round with a lady dressed in the striped cape from the series later. The discussion covered body modifications of all sorts, including having chlorophyll in your skin so you could take nourishment from the sun rather than eat food, and some of the possible consequences of various modifications.

After that, astronomy, with Seven New Planets! Squeeee!. On the panel for this discussion there was a space physicist and an astrophysicist - one looks at space within the solar system, and the other looks further away. The discussion wasn't just about the new planets discovered around Trappist-1 - it also covered human colonisation and sending robots into space.
There was a discussion about BREXIT and Science later in the evening, which we didn't go to, but which was reportedly well attended, if somewhat depressing. One of the things that came up was the possibility that the UK could be seen as a rogue nuclear state until things get sorted out, as at the moment, the UK comes under the EU committee on nuclear regulation, which will cease when the UK leaves the EU - and keeping the nuclear industry well-regulated is kind of important....

The Con had a pretty strong Disability in SF thread running through it, and so the next thing we went to was the Wheelchair Martial Arts Demonstration. I'd seen Al Davison in the dealers' room - as well as being an accomplished martial artist, he's an artist who works on comic books. I bought a pencil sketch of Jon Pertwee from him, and the Young Man was very pleased to find a graphic novel on his stall he'd been looking for, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. He also has a film background, and for a recent film that he worked on, he developed a choreographed fight scene between an able bodied man and a man in a wheelchair (himself). With the help of two able bodied martial artists, he demonstrated - how film fight scenes go for the larger, more visually interesting moves, whereas if a person is attacked in the street (and he said he used to get regularly beaten up by people who thought it would be funny to tip someone out of their wheelchair - until they actually tried it) they need to go for the fastest and most efficient way to end the fight, because disabled people often don't have the stamina for a long fight.
He talked about his background in martial arts - meeting a Chinese man and his sister when he was young, who had come to Britain when their village had been destroyed. They had survived only because of the man's habit of meditating by a waterfall at 4am, so were not in the village when everyone else was killed. After a long time when young Al went to watch the man do his practice every day, the man agreed to take Al on as a student.
He also talked about disabled people in film - if you see an amputation of a limb on film, it's almost always a disabled actor who has lost that limb on screen - but it's a lot more difficult for disabled actors to graduate to speaking roles. Years ago, he was one of a group of disabled actors who went for the casting of the starring role in My Left Foot - they were all taken out of the queue and sent home, and only able-bodied actors were considered. Conversely, the makers of Kingsman, more recently, actively looked for a double amputee to play the assassin with blades, and none of the double amputee actors available wanted to do it, so they eventually went for an able bodied actress and CGI. Although it seemed like a very cool idea, the amputee actors were concerned that the character was using their disability to maim others - and maybe it would have been better for the film makers to have re-thought that character.
It was a fascinating and thought-provoking session.

And in the afternoon, Pat Cadigan Explained it All For Us. I'd been vaguely aware of her name as an SF writer, but never really taken much notice of her work. And then when she was introduced as one of the Guests of Honour of the Con she greeted the audience with "I'm Pat Cadigan, bitches!" in a broad American accent and - well, what a fascinating woman she turned out to be! Her talk was mainly about her life, starting with some life-changing incidents involving anaphylactic shock, near death experiences, vaginal sponges which were not in a good place.... and her next sentence began "My son...."
She held the audience in the palm of her hand, talked honestly about her terminal cancer (she came to the Con with a carer), and is determined to enjoy life as much as she possibly can while she can.
I went straight down to the dealers' room after the talk and bought the only book I could see with her name on it - Synners.

We walked round the lake for dinner, back at the World Bar, where the girl behind the bar asked us if we were enjoying our weekend. She said she'd seen a few people with Con badges coming over, some in costume, so she was aware something was going on at the other side of the lake.

The last part of the evening was a world premiere! The performers were Pauline Haas on concert harp, and Thomas Bloch on three of the strangest instruments I've ever seen. They were the ondes Martenot (invented in 1919 by a wireless operator who wanted an instrument which could reproduce the sort of sounds a radio makes when you're trying to tune into something), the glass harmonica, which is 37 glass bowls, carefully graded to give different notes, on a revolving spindle - the principle is like rubbing your finger round the rim of a wine glass. This one is the oldest instrument, invented by Benjamin Franklin, and some classical music has been composed for it. And then there's the cristal Baschet, invented in 1952 to make electronic type noises acoustically - there are glass rods and an odd shaped gong. Basically, it makes the sort of sounds that were popular for 1950s SF B movie soundtracks.
It was a fascinating recital, with classical pieces, and film and TV scores - including the world premiere of the music for Blade Runner 2049 (though the film is not yet out, so the music may change between now and then). TV music included Twin Peaks, Being Human and Monk. Films were Chant d'Atalyante, The Elephant Man, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Fellini's Casanova and The Fifth Element, and Pauline Haas also played one of her own compositions, La Lyre d'Ys.
I bought Thomas Bloch's CD afterwards, and they were also signing pieces of sheet music for donations to the Con charity, Afghan Mothers.

Music at WorldCon - and Queues

There was a whole filk "track" to the WorldCon programme that we managed to miss entirely, with concerts running from Thursday afternoon to Monday night - though we were entertained in the queue to register by a chap playing a ukelele and singing "Who the Bloody Hell was Tauriel?", a musical critique of the Hobbit films.
The queue, by the way, moved at a reasonably fast rate, and there were plenty of volunteers marshalling the queue, unlike certain ComicCons my Young Man could mention (four hours in the queue, and volunteers who didn't know what was going on and didn't have access to a radio). Here it went smoothly, and with good humour, and the people behind the desk (also volunteers) were working as fast as they could.
I was talking later to a lady who had spent five hours volunteering on that first day - she had gone off to a talk she wanted to see after a couple of hours, come back, seen that there was still a need for help, and pitched in again. She said that the organisers hadn't realised that everyone would come at once on the first day - but they rose to the occasion and got through it, despite only having one sharpie! More sharpies arrived on the second day, to write names on badges that hadn't been printed, mainly for the people who were only coming for the day.
Queues for events, and the escalators, were also well managed, with volunteers coming along and making sure that people knew how late the previous event was running (the play before the Astronomer Royal's talk over-ran, for instance) and making sure, too, that people with mobility problems were sorted out properly. I was very impressed that the lifts were reserved for mobility scooters and wheelchairs and people with related mobility problems, and there were spaces in each room for mobility scooters to park that were nice and central, rather than being corralled into one corner or at the back. There were quite a few mobility scooters zipping around, as well.
There were also talks about music, and other concerts happening around the convention - I hadn't known, for instance, that Iain Banks, who had been one of the Guests of Honour until his untimely death, was a musician as well as a novelists, although I was aware of his book Espedair Street, which is about rock musicians. There was also a pipe and tabor workshop for the medievalists - I thought about going to that one, but left it too late to pre-book (there were limited places available).

And then there was the Philharmonic Orchestra.
ExCel has a huge Auditorium - even with the thousands of people at the Con, no event managed to fill it completely - and it also has a large stage with three big screens above it. And this is something else impressive about this sort of Convention - the tech volunteers who were able to manage the sound desks and lights and man the cameras that fed into the screens live, and even provide film clips to go with the music at the concert.
I think I'm right in saying there were something like 86 musicians on the stage, drawn from the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Britten Sinfonia. They had an open rehearsal in the afternoon, and the concert on the Friday evening.
They alternated between well-known film, TV and game music and classical pieces, and it really was a superb evening. The standing ovation they got at the end was thoroughly well deserved. For instance, they ended the first half with Mars and Jupiter from Holst's Planet Suite, which are so well known, and they made the music exciting to listen to. The Song to the Moon, from Dvorak's Rusalka, was accompanied by film footage from the Apollo 11 mission that I'd never seen before.
In the second half there was a tribute to Iain Banks by a composer who was a friend of his, Gary Lloyd, who wrote The Bridge Redux, named for the Forth Bridge and Iain Banks' novel The Bridge - this finished with a crescendo that the audience were invited to join in with, as loud as we could!
The Hugo ceremony also featured music, from violin and guitar, as the names of all the SF novelists and creators and well-known fans who had died in the previous year were projected onto the big screen overhead. They even managed to include Robin Williams. I didn't manage to catch the name of the piece they played, but it was beautiful.
And there was dancing - period jazz and swing from the Brideshead Ballroom Stompers after the Retro-Hugo Awards, which were given for SF from 1939, and a Regency ball the following afternoon (I saw several beautiful Regency dresses and a few gentlemen in period costume around the halls).
So there really was something for everyone!

The Music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold

The very first LP I ever bought with my own money, way back in the mid 1970s, was called Captain Blood, and was a collection of classic film scores for Errol Flynn films. Captain Blood itself was represented by a short piece called Ship in the Night. Captain Blood and his pirates see a ship in the distance one evening.
"Where is she going?" one of them asks.
Errol Flynn gazes after the stern lights with melancholy longing. "England," he says. "Where we may never go...." (cue romantic Korngold score).
The record also had music from The Sea Hawk, one of my favourite pirate films of all time, including the bit where it turns briefly into an opera - the English galley slaves have taken over the Spanish ship, and they all start singing about being bound for the shores of Dover! If I were ever on Desert Island Discs, that would be one of my eight records, and the nearest thing to opera that I'd choose.
The Adventures of Don Juan is on there, by Max Steiner, and various other films like The Sun Also Rises - and to finish it all off, there's The Adventures of Robin Hood (my favourite Robin Hood film of all time), with what is supposed to
be the most complicated trumpet solo in any piece of film music.

Wonderful as all this was, and I still listen to the record regularly, it was only part of a set - the first Korngold record of the series got the other bits of Sea Hawk and Robin Hood, and I've been looking for it ever since.

Today, I was chatting to one of my colleagues at work when I happened to look down at the LPs she had leaning against her desk. One of them was The Sea Hawk. I looked closer. I beamed in a delighted way. There it was, with two galleons pounding each other with cannon fire on the front cover: The classic film scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, including the other bits of Captain Blood, Sea Hawk and Robin Hood, and with other films like King's Row and The Constant Nymph.
Even better, there were two other records with it. Elizabeth and Essex, more Korngold scores, has Errol Flynn and Bette Davis on the front cover, and includes music from The Prince and the Pauper, Deception and Anthony Adverse.
Captain from Castile is the classic film scores of Alfred Newman, and has a large portrait shot of Tyrone Power on the front cover, on a background of Spanish soldiers and (presumably) Incas or Aztecs. That one includes music from Wuthering Heights, The Song of Bernadette and The Robe as well as Captain from Castile.

I bought the lot, on the spot, and I'm looking forward to a quiet evening communing with the record player!