Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog

There are a number of ways that iconic artists with 40-year careers can approach live gigs: the Lou Reed “I’m going to play my new album no matter how good or bad it is, but I’ll do Sweet Jane as an encore”; the Neil Young “I’m mostly going to play songs you know, but I’m going to mix it up a bit”*; or David Bowie’s perfect approach “I’ll play a selection of my hits, plus some of the better, but more obscure, album tracks, a few of the new ones (I know they’re not generally as good as songs from my peak, but some of them are worth hearing) and a cover or two (here’s an early Pixies tune)”.

Then there’s the Bob Dylan approach: send out a band all dressed in grey and black. Don’t show any close-ups on the big screen, ensuring hardly anyone can see you. Don’t dare speak a word to the audience. Play some well-known songs, but turn them all into soul-less blues-rock numbers. To say this was disappointing is an understatement. I’m not the biggest Dylan fan in the world, but I was looking forward to hearing him. Instead we walked out early and got an early train home (turns out we only missed 1 ½ songs anyway, and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ sounded just as good from the bus queue as it did from inside the venue).

That aside, this was a pretty good day festival. An easy train ride (and a dodgy walk along a dual carriageway) from London, set in Kent fields on the hottest day of the year.

The Magic Numbers are a perfect summer festival band: sunny and happy pop, and they have just enough songs to last a 30-minute set before you start getting bored.

I saw less (e.g. none) of Pete Docherty and Seasick Steve, because we were hiding from the sun (man, but it was hot; credit to the organisers for constantly publicising the water taps, and having plenty of medics on site – both were needed). I hear Docherty played a well-received set of his hits from both bands. Seasick Steve doesn’t do it for me, so that’s all I’ll say about him.

I’ve somehow never heard Laura Marling in spite of being a fan of a couple of the bands she’s associated with, but I enjoyed her set, without feeling greatly moved by it. Her voice is fantastic though, and I’ll have to give her more of a listen.

Mumford and Sons did their thing (interesting to see them playing above Seasick Steve, only a year ago I watched them play the second stage at Neil Young’s Hard Rock Calling, at the same time as Steve played the main stage). No new songs, but their stage act and set was tight and people were singing along, even well at the back of the crowd. Marcus won points for being as enthusiastic about being there as any of the audience, and could later be seen stageside watching Ray Davies.

Ray Davies was, of course, great – but if the gig had consisted solely of Ray playing ‘Days’ and then punching me in the face, I’d still consider it a great gig. Because, you know, ‘Days’!. Plus ‘Dedicated Follower’, ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘All Day and All of the Night’, ‘Victoria’, etc. Sure, the set could have been better – would have loved to have heard ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and ‘Village Green Preservation Society’, and setlist.fm tells me he played both at Glastonbury. Plus there was a little too much dull 12-bar blues-rock for my tastes – when you’ve written intelligent pop as brilliant as ‘Days’ or ‘Waterloo Sunset’, or basically invented new-wave guitar pop (well, maybe not, but work with me here) with ‘All Day…’ and ‘Really Got Me’ it’s a shame to hear those more dull and derivative tunes. Nonetheless, when it was good, it was very very good. (Also, I liked the fact that Ray was angry and ranty about his set possibly (?) being cut short, and seemingly refused to leave the stage – though he may have misunderstood what was going on, as he later started praising the organisers). On the other hand, he could probably do without playing ‘Ape Man’ again – decent tune but when you have a song with that title, in ¾ time, and you THEN mention ‘pretending to be in Jamaica’, well, it starts to look at best unfortunate and at worst racist…but I hope I’m wrong.

Which brings us back to Bob. I guess I get what he was trying to do: make it about the music (maaan), by taking the focus away from the people making the music. (Or conversely, maybe it was some kind of Brechtian alienation effect. I don’t know. Bob wasn’t talking). But it didn’t work for me. From what I’ve heard, fans were split – a lot of people thought it was a fantastic performance, so good for them. I’m sorry I didn’t feel the same way.

*which beats the earlier Neil Young. Apparently, when he was touring Tonight’s the Night, he played that (then unreleased) album all the way through. When fans protested or called for old songs, he told them that later on he’d play ’songs that they’d heard before’. He then played Tonight’s the Night all the way through again.

Jeff Tweedy (Wilco): The Union Chapel, Islington: 30 June 2010

One day, all concerts will be like this. A beautiful, intimate venue; a respectful, enthusiastic and knowledgeable crowd; and a singer who is only metres from the crowd, and engages in plenty of banter and discussion.

It might be too much to ask that every gig is also preceded by the singer’s spouse and young children walking through the crowd, writing down requests – but let’s ask for that anyway. If Jeff can do it, I’m sure other artists can as well.

Now I’m a big Wilco fan, have seen them nine times in four or five different countries. But anyone who follows their shows will know that they’ve tended to become a bit samey (though the recent 38 or 39 song shows they’ve played in the US have been more interesting – but not something duplicated outside of the US unfortunately). And they tend to lean heavily on the newer material – with only 5 or 6 songs from Summerteeth or earlier appearing in the set. That’s understandable, especially as most of the band joined during Yankee or afterwards. But still, I’d much rather hear some of the earlier stuff that I’ve never heard before than another run through of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart or Handshake Drugs.

So I was looking forward to seeing Tweedy solo, mainly because he was more likely to dig up the older Wilco stuff.

And I wasn’t disappointed: he started with Someone Else’s Song (last heard on my birthday at the Forum, performed without amplification), and it was great. Of course. Jeff dug out some other early classics (Remember the Mountain Bed, Someday Some Morning Sometime and California Stars among them, as well as a few Uncle Tupelo songs). But just as impressive was the reimagining of more recent, noisier Wilco tracks – Spiders sounded amazing done with just one guitar, as did Impossible Germany (which he stopped half-way through when he realised he couldn’t play Nels’ solo).

One of the highlights came early, when Jeff invited British folksinger Bill Fay up on stage to join him in a performance of Fay’s Be Not so Fearful - a long-time Wilco favourite. An especially moving moment for Jeff and for Bill, who obviously appreciated the crowd’s response. Another great cover was So Much Wine by the underappreciated Handsome Family (“one of my favourite country songs”).

I mentioned requests: Jeff has a fairly sardonic stage presence at the best of times, so even when he’s doing someone a favour, he injects a fair bit of mockery into it. As he read over the requests list: “some asshole named David requested ‘any Bob Dylan song’” (he played Simple Twist of Fate). Another woman was castigated for requesting a song off his first album – “I’ve made 10 records since then, what’s wrong with them?”. He played it anyway.

And I somehow managed to get into an argument with him about what one of his songs was called: I’d requested Not for the Season, which is what it’s called on the Wilco documentary; but it had been recorded by his side project Loose Fur as Laminated Cat. We had a short debate about this which ended, naturally, with Jeff taking the piss out of me and most of the crowd laughing. Oh well. He still played it anyway.

A great night, with only two bad points: we’re not allowed to take alcohol into the venue itself, though there’s a bar upstairs; and the absolutely appalling support act – “comedian” Patrick Monahan, possibly the least unfunny comic I’ve ever seen (Jeff bantering with the crowd for half an hour would have been much better). Never mind – the combination of poor support and lack of alcohol meant I could spend his set in the bar.

Serpentine Sessions, London, 29 June 2010.

The Serpentine Sessions are becoming one of my favourite London gigs; interesting bands in a pleasant environment in Hyde Park, with an outdoor stage allowing relaxed drinking in the sun before the main acts go on.

I’m embarrassed to see that Fionn Regan is a man; for some reason I’ve always read his name as a variant of Fiona. His folky stylings are perfectly fine, and I applauded at the time, but I’m really struggling to remember anything about what he sounded like. Given that the last three bands I saw in this tent were Mumford & Sons (a second-stage support for Neil Young), Big Star (RIP Alex) and Tindersticks, this is a bit of a disappointment.

But of course this time we’re there to see the headliner: crossing another one off my list of ‘great artists who I never thought I’d get to see live’. Patti doesn’t disappoint; after a slightly rocky start she’s soon playing with maximum energy. In a short, sharp set she plays most of my favourites: I would have loved to have heard Kimberley, off Horses, but I suspect she doesn’t play that much. And I’m going to take a wild guess that Rock ‘n’ Roll N****r doesn’t get any live airings these days (which is a pity because it’s such a great song, but it’s fairly obvious why). [Edit: setlist.fm has some recent sets which show that song, seemingly played as an encore instead of Land - I want both of 'em dammit!]

You get what you’d expect/hope for really – Redondo Beach, great versions of Free Money and Till Victory, plus Because the Night, Pissing in a River – only Redondo Beach was a bit shaky; plus a handful of covers: the Stones, Jim Carroll’s new-to-me People Who Died (a defiant punk blast through a list of, well, people who died (“they were all my friends”) with added namechecks for Fred Sonic Smith, the Ramones, and Robert Mapplethorpe) and a joyous singalong Perfect Day. The main set ends with a blast through People Have the Power that made me want to quit my job and find some barricades to man, and the encore is a frantic rush that begins with Patti’s beat poetry, continues through Land, and then melts into Gloria.

Only 15 songs, but at least 7 or 8 of them were quite wonderful, a good mix of the expected and the unexpected. Definitely a good fun night.

Lexis has published this Report (PDF, 231 pages).

The articles cover a range of topics, from applying Peter Drucker’s theories to Twitter, professional organisations to roving reference, and with (naturally) a fair bit of focus on the publisher’s products.

I’ve only started looking through it, but found the article about digitization efforts at the Combined Arms Research Library, and the subsequent involvement of the wargaming community, interesting.

Via Law Librarian Blog, who notes the brevity of the articles.

Sometimes the internet is vile, or pointless, or a time-sink.

Sometimes the internet is pretty great: a few days ago, I finally met an old friend for the first time [a concept that is really only possible in the internet age].

And sometimes the internet is truly great. A few days ago a thread was posted on Ask Metafilter* by a concerned member, fake. Acquaintances of his had arrived in the US on a temporary working visa, but the promised job in Washington had fallen through, and their contact wasn’t responding to their calls. Instead, they were told to meet another man, at midnight, in a bar in New York. The women wouldn’t heed fake’s warnings, and got on a bus to New York.

This rang obvious alarm bells with many site members, so they jumped to help. Within a few hours, a member who worked in trafficking prevention had become involved. Others offered advice and provided information on anti-trafficking resources in New York. (All this while fake was driving across the south-west of America, updating the thread by phone).

I’d been following the thread from the start; I went to bed with things looking pretty bad, but by the time I woke up things were mostly solved: someone had phoned the women on the bus and convinced them not to go to the meeting, and another Metafilter member had met them at the station:

Knowing what I do about 20-ish women who are in NYC for the first time (been there, drank that) my strategy was not to try to convince them of anything. Instead, I provided them a fun third alternative to Sketchy Boss and Nagging Dad-type (no offense, Fake, you were incredible throughout). I emphasized that I didn’t care what they did, or who they met, I just wanted to hang with them and have fun and go out. Sheesh!

Right now, these women are staying with this Metafilter member, internet fraud detective squad, station number 9, who canceled a job interview to spend time with the women. Metafilter members have been sending her money to help the women. A quite extraordinary example of how people who have never met can come together to help each other. Makes me proud to be on the same forum as these people.

Links: Original thread; Discussion thread (because Ask Metafilter threads must be specifically focused on a particular question, discussion has moved there); Newsweek article.

*The Q&A section of the website Metafilter. I’ve been a member for years; Jessamyn is one of the admins.

The last few months have been spent travelling between London and New Zealand, in order to renew our visas. I still can’t quite understand why I’m required to leave the country in order to apply for a new visa: it means that instead of working in London, earning money and paying tax, I’m not doing anything productive. It means that instead of spending my savings in London and helping the local economy, I’m spending them on plane tickets and helping Air New Zealand. I just can’t see the logic.

That said, there were positives: we got to spend time travelling round NZ, catching up with all our friends and family (Rhonda hadn’t been home since we’d been away, so it was obviously great for her to see her family). And Nelson in summer is a lot more appealing than London in the middle of winter.

As an experiment, I tried to see if I could work 3 days/week remotely. And it worked out pretty well. Most places we stayed at had wireless internet, so it was trivial to get online and login via our remote Citrix connection. If not, I could head to cybercafes. I got something of a shock when I checked internet access at Wellington Public Library – not only is it not free, it’s more expensive than most cybercafes; not to mention that most actual cafes have free wireless these days.  Is that a gap in WPL’s service, or is something that the private sector is providing adequately?

The only problem with remote access was with some applications that didn’t work with Vista, but in general it was easy enough to run a current awareness service, write newsletters, and update intranet pages and Knowhow from New Zealand. I managed to answer a few reference questions as well, though not as many as I expected (our London office is the main information service for the firm’s European and Asian offices, so we often get inquiries outside of UK office hours).

The visa renewal itself, though stressful (a minor error can lead to your application being refused, with no refund) went quickly and smoothly enough, and I give credit to the British High Commission in Canberra, whose staff processed the application very quickly, and updated me via email so I knew my passport was on its way back to me [meaning I didn't have to rebook my flight back to London out of fear that the passport wouldn't turn up in time].

So we’re back in London for the foreseeable future. It’s a three year visa, we’re looking at staying here until at least after the Olympics, and probably making our way back south at the end of the northern summer in 2012. We have a nice flat in a fairly quiet side street between Brixton and Clapham (Google Maps view below; for fairly obvious privacy reasons I haven’t used my own house number; this isn’t the exact house). And we’re only minutes walk from the White Horse and the wonderful Windmill, a fine live venue.

View Larger Map

To the Luminaire last night for a rare performance by 72-year-old surf guitar legend Dick Dale (haven’t heard of him? You probably heard his music in Pulp Fiction).

The usual weekend upgrade work meant the Jubilee Line was closed. A 20 minute walk in the rain from Kilburn Park wasn’t ideal, but hey – it’s for Dick Dale, right?

The tiny Lumi was full of a mixed, excited crowd – old rockers, metalheads, 20 and 30 something indie kids - by the time Rhonda, Matt, Alex and I got there, just before the main support act. SmallGang were an interesting choice to support Dick Dale; being more of an indie-rock outfit. Opinion was wildly divided: Alex couldn’t stand them, Matt thought they were great, and I was somewhere in-between. Given the right kind of luck, I could see them being big – there’s definitely an audience for their Snow Patrol/Bloc Party/Interpol style tunes. That stuff doesn’t really grab me, but I can’t deny that they did it well. What might lift them above the mundane is the presence of two singer-guitarists. I’m guessing each singer sings his own compositions. Those sung by the second singer have more to them, a sort of edgy, angular sound that reminds me of Pavement. They’re on Youtube (Wrong Side; Cockpit) and MySpace (listing Will Oldham, the Smiths, Smog, Beefheart, Wilco and others as influences, which I couldn’t really hear, but whatdoiknow?).

A short wait spent arguing the merits of SmallGang was followed by a burst of distorted lead guitar from offstage, and a drummer and bassist took their places on stage, before DD himself strode through the curtain. The crowd went mental and DD launched into his set. He kicked off with some of the old style surf guitar instrumentals, before switching to covers of classic tunes, twisted up and spat out with his signature tremolo picking. He ranged over the whole range of 20th century American popular music: Fever, Smoke on the Water, House of the Rising Sun, and, gloriously, California Sun, heavier even than the Ramones version, which had me jumping around with a huge grin on my face. He bantered with the crowd, he improvised constantly (the drummer and bassist were basically following along with his shouted directions, as he played) and he finished 90 minutes later with a version of Amazing Grace that nearly had me in tears. Breathtaking.

I’m a regular gig-goer. These days, I tend to go to a lot of quieter gigs. Maybe someone like the Fleet Foxes; maybe a smaller act playing a 200 capacity venue like the Luminaire, often a solo artist.

One of the obvious features of attending a quiet gig is that, if people in the audience start talking, the rest of us really notice it. I’ve seen the Fleet Foxes three times, and each time audience noise has detracted from the performance. When they supported Neil Young, there was nearly a fight in the audience between someone who insisted on talking loudly, and another fan who was telling him to shut up.

On the other hand, some venues attract crowds who respect the band, and each other: the San Francisco Bath House in Wellington is excellent in this respect – thinking of gigs by Andrew Bird and (again) the Fleet Foxes where the crowd is quiet (but equally I’ve seen the Black Lips and Broken Social Scene at the same venue, and people have no problems making some noise). I’ve seen Jeff Tweedy from Wilco perform unplugged (completely without amplification) and the entire audience stand silently, so that everyone could hear.

Some venues like to encourage the crowd towards silence, notably the Luminaire in North London, which takes a fairly extreme approach:

Eight months must count as one of the longer breaks from blogging that hasn’t turned into a permanent break. 2009 has been a fairly tough year and I haven’t felt much like writing, or like I had much to say.

So I’m reinventing this as more of a personal blog, though maybe focusing on music and books and travel more than the day-to-day minutae of my life. I’ll still be mentioning library-related news that interests me, but it won’t be the main focus of the blog.

With that, I thought I’d post a few pictures from the Library of Alexandria, which I visited last month while holidaying in Egypt.

The library from Fort Qaitbey across the harbour.

Front of the library

Three NZ librarians outside the library

The library (known as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina) is fascinating, a very impressive architectural project that is clearly intended to evoke the original Library – “dedicated to recapture the spirit of openness and scholarship of the original”, as the website says. As well as a large multi-lingual book collection, it contains museums with impressive collections of Egyptian antiquities (not as large or impressive as the huge museum in Cairo, but nonetheless very interesting). There are also art galleries/exhibitions, research centres, and even a copy of the entire internet. Yes, the Bibliotheca contains a mirror of the Internet Archive – apparently the only one in any library, worldwide.

The Internet. The whole thing.

The library collection itself is housed over multiple staired floors, each without a ceiling, so that one can stand on the highest floor and look down to the bottom, like standing on the top of a pyramid.

Interior view looking upwards

The books are shelved by Dewey, which leads to some interesting problems. One of the more well-known flaws of DDC is in the 200s (Religion) class, where Christianity takes up almost the entirety of the class. As the Bibliotheca is in a Muslim country, it shouldn’t be a great surprise that books on Islam, which is allocated a solitary number in DDC,  predominate (to the point that 297 takes up probably 90% of the space allocated to the 200s).

A fraction of the shelves devoted to ‘Koranic interpretation’ (Dewey 297.1226).

The collection itself is also interesting, being multi-lingual but mainly Arabic and English. I can’t speak for the Arabic books, but the English collection left me curious about the collection development policies. Under the American literature section there are the usual suspects that one would expect in a research library – but also several shelves worth of Sweet Valley High books.

I got the impression that the collection had been built by donations as much as by a serious collection policy; a shame considering that a lot of money and design expertise had gone into the building itself.

I was pleased to see New Zealand represented, even if only a little – the NZ history section contained Michael King’s popular and acclaimed Penguin history of NZ; and a Claudia Orange book on the Treaty of Waitangi – both of which would be among my first choices for a NZ history collection. The only other book was a biography of [former Prime Minister] Helen Clark. I found a few examples of New Zealand literature – Patricia Grace seemed popular.
 

 Study section, with computers 

I have no idea how I took this picture, there aren’t really florescent lights in the sides of the shelves. This another part of the 297s.

All in all it was quite fascinating to see inside this brand new, internationally-focused library. It’s definitely one of the highlights of a visit to Alexandria. Unfortunately the entry fee (yes, really) means that poorer Alexandrians might find it difficult to access their own library. (4 Egyptian pounds is about £0.50/£.075; a significant sum where average wages are around $10/day).

Free Legal Web is a new UK site. Its homepage states:

We have a thriving web of free-access legislation, judgments and other materials on OPSI, the Statute Law Database, BAILII and government websites, and thousands of useful free guides, articles and updaters published by solicitors, barristers, law firms and private and third sector law publishers. But it is incomplete and unreliable and it is not joined up – it is not practically accessible.

FreeLegalWeb is a project designed to deliver a web service that joins up and makes sense of the law and legal commentary and analysis on the web, providing a substantially more reliable, useful and efficient service to both lawyers and the community at large than is currently available.

Via Law Librarian Blog.