[Links]
[links] Link salad wishes it had a pencil-thin moustache
The United Mistakes of America — On our license to err.
Ça planait pas dans sa voix — This piece about a Belgian lawsuit over the original recording of Plastic Bertrand’s “Ça Plane Pour Moi” is both hilarious and bizarre. Read the comments, too.
Sunset, Shadowrise — A fascinating image from central Australia.
Get Ready for Steerable Photon Guns — “Steerable Photon Guns” would be a great name for a rock band.
New Planets Highlight Orbital Resonance — From the department of learning something new every day.
Gingrich to give speech drawing on ‘lessons’ from anti-war secular socialists Orwell and Camus. — The synopsis of the event at the AEI website notes that Gingrich will draw “on the lessons of Camus and Orwell” to “describe the dangers of a wartime government that uses language and misleading labels to obscure reality” The man behind the GOPAC memo is going to talk about this? Irony is not only dead; it’s been dismembered, burned, and its ashes scattered over the RNC offices.
Santorum’s Classless Society — More bizarre rhetoric from the Right. Besides which, isn’t that a Marxist phrase?
?otD: Facial hair or clean shaven?
7/29/2010
Writing time yesterday: 1 hour, 45 minutes (revisions, WRPA)
Body movement: 50 minute suburban walk
Hours slept: 8.0 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 4/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
Posted: 4:50 am Thu July 29 2010 |
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You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
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Cora
July 29th, 2010 at 5:09 pmI’ve always been amazed how eagerly the American right has embraced George Orwell, considering that Orwell was a committed socialist. And just because he disliked the totalitarian manifestation of socialism in Stalin’s USSR does not mean that he suddenly disagreed with the whole concept or that he suddenly became an ardent conservative capitalist. After all, at the end of Animal Farm the Stalinist pigs and the capitalist farmers are indistinguishable.
As for the Plastic Bertrand lawsuit, the accents of singers can vary between recordings, live performances and normal speech. For example, I have observed that British singers with strong regional accents often sound a lot more RP in recordings than when they perform live or in interviews. I suspect that there was and perhaps still is pressure to suppress the accent for the recording, but it comes through again in less controlled circumstances. Some also lose their regional accents over time. Compare interviews with members of the Beatles or Rolling Stones from the 1960s with those from today. Or look at how Daniel Craig (not a singer, but same thing) used to sound before he landed the Bond role with how he sounds today.
I’m not a specialist in French at all, but even I know that the people of Northern France, i.e. the region around Calais and Lille, have a distinctive accent, recently popularized by the Dany Boon film about the “ch’tis”. Plastic Bertrand, meanwhile (and I can’t believe I actually googled the man), was born in Brussels which is on the Northern edge of the Wallonie, the French speaking part of Belgium. If he had hailed from the French-Belgian border, his accent might have resembled that of the ch’ti on the other side of the border. But Wallonian French is different from French French, even Northern French French.
Besides, it’s not exactly new that the people on stage are not necessarily the ones singing. Frank Farian, the producer mastermind behind Milli Vanilli and Boney M., has been doing this since the 1970s. And there are one or two international pop stars whose voices sound so different between their earlier and later career and between recordings and live performances that I have my suspicions.