Welcome to the Brian and Marty Show - November 22/23

[@4-dman464]

4:00 One way into jazz: multitask while listening, let it in sideways. Another light step into jazz: via 1960s-70s mainstream film soundtracks. (Or '50s French New Wave.) Y'know: *Michel Legrand* 'Thomas Crown Affair' - - *Lalo Schifrin* 'Bullitt' - - *Quincy Jones* 'In the Heat of the Night' or 'The Hot Rock' - - *John Dankworth* 'Accident' - - *Roy Budd* 'The Carey Treatment' - - *John Barry* 'The Knack' or 'James Bond Theme' - - *Ralph Carmichael* '4D Man!' - - or any 1960s UK spy series TV theme, many on 45rpm. Most of those LPs got a repressing. Or watch Patrick McGoohan feature film *All Night Long* from 1962. Filmed in one warehouse, *All Night Long* merges a heavy modern *Othello* adaptation with on-set numbers from every jazzman passing through London - - Every so often Richard Attenborough stops talking & Mingus or Brubeck or Dankworth or Tubby Hayes or John Scott will do a number, then back to the heavy drama - - eccentric cult film. Same principle: Watching a feature film while the jazz score comes through sideways.

[@tokyorecordstyle]

WOW! Thank you for this long and thoughtful reply! Really appreciate you taking the time to offer all this artists and their works! Sideway, huh? That totally makes sense, letting it slowly seep in over time rather than the bombardment of all at once. I do often recognize iconic jazz tracks in soundtracks and themes songs, most recently in some of Spectrum Archives Japan Vinyl Tag list. Once again, thank you for taking the time @4-dman464!

[@4-dman464]

@@tokyorecordstyle yw, Brian, I think you're onto something with yr channel. (Sideways= Japanese iconography comes to mind only now: somehow I see a sideways zigzag motif as Japanese, whether watercolor brush strokes or sword-swipes translated to fashion or Japanese script or what, no idea where I picked up the association. Sideways & sporadic is also how Buddhism migrated from India & unpredictably became Zen in Japan with all its tangential koans never saying anything straight ahead.)

[@tokyorecordstyle]

I'm not sure I completely agree (which might say something in itself), but I've heard it said that English's preciseness is a better language for speaking on the sciences while Japanese's ambiguity is better suited for the humanities. There is also a lot to learn (and admittedly forget) about Buddhism's migration from India to Japan, when you visit Nara and Kyoto. Unknowingly, I might have followed the EXACT path while traversing my way from Varanasi to Tokyo, and I could concur, at least from an anecdotal and personal perspective, is there is a lot of unpredictably and sporadic "sidewaysness" along the way.

[@4-dman464]

50:00 What's the practical difference between a landslide & an earthquake? more concentrated? One is Top-down, the other is Bottom-up I guess.

[@tokyorecordstyle]

Thats a good way to frame it: "top-down" vs. "bottom-up!" An earthquake is all about movement in the Earth’s crust. Massive tectonic plates are grinding or slipping along faults, releasing energy in waves that shake everything above. A landslide on the other hand, is more of a surface-level drama. Gravity takes over when soil, rocks, and debris lose stability rushing down slopes, often triggered by things like heavy rain, erosion, and earthquakes. #geology :-)

[@4-dman464]

@@tokyorecordstyle Yes, torrential rain etc, I thought about it after posing the Q. Remembered when I trawled different fields to find Alternative creative nonfiction for PhD students: These seminars brought together postgrads of wildly differing research theses from different depts, so my challenge was to find diverse examples so everyone had an alternative go-to no matter what. Even in geology & archaeology: *John McPhee!* (He's the fellow who invented the concept of "Deep Time" as a geological measure. Excellent writer, his sentences aware of his readers.) e.g. *The John McPhee Reader* Here's what he said: "Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years - - fifty thousand, fifty million - - will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination to the point of paralysis." And here's how one book started: " *The poles of the earth have wandered. The equator has apparently moved. The continents, perched on their plates, are thought to have been carried so very far & to be going in so many directions that it seems an act of almost pure hubris to assert that some landmark of our world is fixed at 73 degrees 57 minutes & 53 seconds west longitude and 40 degrees 51 minutes & 14 seconds north latitude* - - *a temporary description, at any rate, as if for a boat on the sea* ." And that's how John McPhee brings the reader to George Washington Bridge at 9 o'clock in the morning.

[@tokyorecordstyle]

Had I not dropped out of calculus twice, both times for being utterly lost from day one, I would have a geology degree instead of one in environmental science with a minor in the former, and I also would have forfeited my lead of getting out with my undergrad in 3.25 years instead of 4. So... I'm not geologist, I was probably never destined to be a geologist, even my academic advisor at the time, a rock-climbing, plane-flying, paper-publishing, hang dog said, "just get the paper and get outta here" but my imagination was captured by the notion of Deep Time, Plate Tectonics, Pangea, Earth's Wobble, its magnetic field, Solar Wind, the Moon, volcanoes, asteroids, ice ages, dinosaurs, ancient mountain ranges, the Mid-Atlantic Range, Continental Drift, Centrifugal Force, Gravity (...not to mention evolution ...or the visible light spectrum ...or the human eye!), Matthew Fontaine Maury, Marie Tharp, John McPhee ...each one part of a story that blows my mind all day every day. Thanks for sharing that quote and for asking the question that sparked this conversation.