Puttering in the Study

Battlefield Detectives: Gallipoli

Just (finally) got to watch the Battlefield Detectives episode on the Gallipoli campaign in World War I.  The theory is that the geology of the site doomed the British campaign from the start.  Makes clear that the Allies didn't know the terrain, and thus selected landing areas that were ideal defensive positions, and the troops couldn't advance as they had planned.  Then lack of water and poor terrain made further advances impossible, and brought about serious disease.  I think they overstate the geology aspect - the real culprit was poor planning.  What they desperately needed, and didn't have, was adequate topographical information, and sufficient water supplies.

Good episode.  Made me want to learn more about the subject.

Ommadawn - Mike Oldfield

This was a mistake - I ordered Exposed and Amazon shipped me a hybrid that had back cover art for Exposed but front cover and CD for Ommadawn.  I actually enjoyed the album very much.  It's lower key that most other Oldfield instrumental, but offhand I can't recall a bad track.

Islands - Mike Oldfield

This 1987 album was one of the last I bought on LP.  I listened to the tape the other day, and recalled correctly that side 1, which is instrumental, is very good - Oldfield at his best - while side 2 is several sub-par vocals.

Incantations - Mike Oldfield

I got this to try and get the background to the live versions of it on Airborn and was a little disappointed.  It still seems to me that the portions of this album that are on Airborn are the best, and they benefit greatly from the forced editing to fit one side of an album.   There's a lot of filler here, and ideas that to me just didn't pan out.  Part of it is very good, and part is not.

Platinum - Mike Oldfield

After listening to my old cassette of the American version of this album, Airborn, I ordered the UK original, and have thoroughly enjoyed it.  The title track, which has four sections, is the highlight, and is still one of my all time favorites.

The Separation - Christopher Priest

This book started out as an alternative history to World War II, which always annoys me.  I know what I know and I'd prefer that fiction stay with the historical facts and riff off of those, i.e. Forester's Hornblower and Tim Powers' stuff.  It just sort of lagged along until suddenly one of the brothers, a RAF bomber pilot, gets summoned by Winston Churchill.  At that point, the book got pretty good, and stayed that way till halfway through - where it turned out it wasn't an alternate history at all. 

Hmm.

Then the story started with the other brother, and the alternate history starts up again.  Then stops.  The starts again, and back and forth till it seems like it's running fine, and then it starts over again.  I thought it was going to make sense in the end, and it absolutely didn't.  And I can't figure out how to piece the two together.  So while the writing was good, and I enjoyed reading it, it just didn't end up making sense as a whole.  It was basically two parallel stories - essentially a short story collection.  I don't mind there being an alternate reality, but there has to be some consistency within the reality, and here there never was. 

Everyone Is Here - Finn Brothers

I have been interested in the Finns ever since I got Tim Finn's self-titled CD in 1989 by mistake.  I was looking for a song that said something about "been there, done that, what's next" and thought this was it.  It wasn't, but it's been one of my favorite CDs ever since.  Tim later rejoined his brother Neil's band Crowded House (they were previously together as Split Enz), and I really liked their 1991 album Woodface (I actually saw them live in Deep Ellum one night).

Unfortunately, I haven't been too interested in the Finns' later albums either individually, as Crowded House, or as the Finn Brothers and this album is no exception.  It's not bad at all - it's just a lot of singing in harmony with songs where the vocals sounds more like chanting than melodies.  Singing for the sake of singing, and not because the songs go anywhere, which is what my taste seems to require.  They're just remarkably homogenous, and I get borde of the harmony and of Neil's voice.  And while this is generalization, it seems to me that their very best best work is together as Crowded House, then Tim individually (can't opine on Neil individually - haven't gotten any) and at bottom, as the Finn Brothers.  I wonder if working together they just reinforce each others' ruts.  I think they need a producer that can challenge them to do something different.  But if you really like their style, you'd probably really like it.  It just didn't do a lot for me - I was glad to finally make it all the way through a second time so I could write this post and get it out of the changer.