The High Wood

On Thursday night, I took my mother to see an André Rieu concert at the Olympic Stadium. She is something of a fan of his so it seemed a good thing to do for her birthday. In case you have never heard of him he is a violinist and entertainer.

Whatever else might be said about him, André certainly understands big. His ‘stage’ was a full-sized reproduction of the facade of a Venetian palace. On the upper floor, above the orchestra, was a dance floor where the Viennese ballet danced several numbers. There were ice-rinks in front of the wings where ice-skaters (I’m not sure of their nationality) skated in counterpoint to the dances. There was even, at one point, a carriage drawn by six white horses doing a lap of the arena. Four very large video screens were mounted on the front of the facade.

It is the presence of these screens which gives away the major problem – the Olympic Stadium is big. Big enough for Olympic events and games of football. Big enough, indeed, for the facade of a Venetian palace.

We were in the reasonably cheap seats in the middle of the football pitch. The orchestra stage was raised so you could see them OK although you only saw the top half of the ice-skaters. But although you could see the orchestra they looked tiny. More expensive seats were available back up in the stands but one side of the stadium is a long way from the other side so, while you would have been able to look down on the stage a bit, everyone would have looked very small indeed. Only the really expensive seats just in front of the stage would have had anything like a good view.

So you ended up looking at the giant screens a lot. There is no doubt the camera-work was excellent – he has been touring a long time now and it was a slick act. Everyone in the orchestra smiled and laughed a lot – possibly a bit strained in places but very professional. There was friendly mucking about and André is a good entertainer who kept the crowd with him.

I liked the music too. There is nothing inherently wrong with tunes you can hum and we got a lot of the well-known classics. There was even an Andrew Lloyd Webber number and while this is one more than I would included, I could put up with it.

The forecast thunderstorms never materialised (a good thing when you are seated in the middle of the arena) and it was a pleasant evening. By leaving before the encores finished we even managed a quick getaway rather than having to fight the crowd of 20,000 and the inevitable traffic jams.

But somehow, when the music has of necessity been heavily amplified (and the stadium was not built with acoustics as a primary design feature) and when you have to watch the video screens in order to properly see what is going on, you can’t help wondering if you might be better just buying the DVD and watching it in comfort.

I don’t regret doing it and we both enjoyed it but I don’t think either of us would do it again.

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Last weekend, Pamela and I were at a miniature Science Fiction convention in Sydney called Freecon. I have posted a few photos here. A few days after that was Remembrance Day. In Binyon’s immortal works – “age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn”.

Looking around the convention room the years had condemned a lot of us but although age was doing its best to weary, a bunch of die-hard fans struggled on. I do not, by the way, count myself among them, however old and weary I might be. I found Cons pretty dull back in the seventies and occasional visits over the intervening years have not changed my opinion.

Still, for Pamela this is work. A number of these people are her potential customers and influential ones at that. People whose opinion on what constitutes a good book counts for something in SF book-reading circles. I was along as moral support and photographer.

I actually spoke at the 2007 version of Freecon (there’s a blog entry here) and thought I might have to again but in the event I wasn’t required. This may be partly because I bailed out of the Sunday sessions due to terminal exhaustion (age having wearied etc).

The days of the old-style convention must be numbered. The punters are growing older and cons will eventually go the way of other out-dated institutions. But there are still lots of fans out there – SF and Fantasy books are selling well let’s not even talk about films, games, comic books (sorry, graphic novels) and small furry toys.

A lot of it has moved online. Most of your favourite authors have blogs where you can keep up with their ideas and contribute your own. There are fan sites, chat rooms, author sites, gaming sites. Probably there are small furry toy sites. You can be a lot closer to your author than used to be the case and it is less necessary to spend a weekend listening to only occasionally interesting panels to be so.

As a not particular fan of cons I can but approve. People will still get together – however good online communication is it doesn’t quite compare with meeting actual physical people – but the format is changing. And about time too.

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There are a number of well-known ‘quotes that never were’:

• Alas poor Yorrick, I knew him well
• Elementary, my dear Watson
• Play it again, Sam
• Beam me up, Scotty
• It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it

and so forth

But I was distressed to find the other day that one of my favourite quotes was bogus.

We trained hard . . . but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralisation.

It is attributed to Gaius Petronius Arbiter (c.27-66 A.D.) who is believed to be the author of the Satyricon.

Alas, it ain’t so. A complete and entertaining deconstruction is given by Jim Reeds at www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/petronius.html.

I mourn its departure from the lexicon but, as Reeds so pithily puts it, "if mankind lost the Petronius quote we could repair the damage by clipping out Dilbert cartoons". Hmm. Maybe I could attribute it to Scott Adams?

Or maybe I’ll continue attributing it to Petronius regardless. A good myth deserves to be perpetuated.

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