Living in More Than One World

Although it’s been over for nearly a week, you can still find lots of material online to vicariously experience the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which is billed as the largest of its type in the world. Edinburgh is a lovely city, and I’m sure it was a great setting for this 17-day celebration of the written and spoken word.  There has been considerable coverage before, during and after the event in the British media; such as this September 1 report on guardian.co.uk and another, Scottish-centric one on the same day from the [Aberdeen] Press and Journal. Among the hundreds of authors featured this year were Garrison Keillor, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Karen Armstrong, Alexander McCall Smith, Tracy Chevalier, Margaret Drabble and Richard Dawkins. The media page of the festival’s site has lots of interesting material, including photos, blogs, and audio/video from 2009 and earlier years. I also liked the Staff Tops 10s lists. There are a number of archived stories about the festival from EdinburghGuides.com. Of course, J. K. Rowling is closely associated with Edinburgh and she read from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and answered questions at the 2004 Edinburgh Book Festival. The longtime director of the festival, Catherine Lockerbie, is stepping down this year and the occasion was commemorated in a poem by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Read more about it (and the text of the poem) at Magnus Linklater’s August 18 story on timesonline.co.uk, Carol Ann Duffy’s tribute to departing head of Edinburgh book festival. Next year’s festival dates are August 14-30, 2010. My new goal: to not just attend, but to be booked for a future Edinburgh International Book Festival.

The past weekend was not only notable as the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. It was also the weekend that one of my favorite bands, Fairport Convention, held its annual Fairport’s Cropredy Convention festival, in Britain. The long-running event regularly draws around 20,000 people. Besides the band itself – which has had countless members over the years — it attracts an eclectic lineup of performers, including former members of Fairport, especially Richard Thompson. For more background, see this Reuters blog posting. I’ve never been to the festival, but I’d love to attend one day. Fairport traditionally does a three hour closing set on the final evening, and this year their special guest during the set was Yusuf [Islam], formerly Cat Stevens. He is an old friend, and former Island Records label-mate of the band’s. See the account of the final set, including his quotes, in the local paper, the Oxford Mail.  Richard Thompson also did a solo set, and other performers included Steve Winwood, punk pioneers The Buzzcocks and a number of acts that are probably well-known to British audiences but not to most American fans. It sounds like a good-natured, sweet-spirited event. I have seen Fairport a number of times over the years, though not recently. I’ve written about them in my music days, though never interviewed them. Ditto for Thompson, whom I have seen perform in various incarnations (with Fairport, solo, with his own band, as part of Richard and Linda Thompson and even as a trio, with Andy Roberts, backing ex-Fairport singer Ian Matthews, in 1971). I interviewed Matthews a couple of times, in the ’70s. Thompson’s second four-CD career retrospective box set, Walking on a Wire, is released this week.  Saul Austerlitz of the Boston Globe has an interesting August 16 Q&A with Thompson about it, A troubadour of timeless songs. And to learn more about Fairport’s festival, consult virtualfestivals.com.

I’m back on the festival beat with last week’s WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) festival in the UK. This is yet another event that most of us can’t attend, but can learn a lot about online. It’s one of the premier world music festivals, and was the 27th time it has been held in the UK, where the WOMAD organization is based. They also produce festivals around the world, and I was fortunate to have attended two in the early ‘90s, in Toronto. Peter Gabriel is one of the co-founders of WOMAD, and though he doesn’t often play the festival, he was the headliner on July 25th. Check out the full lineup on the festival’s site to get an idea of the worldwide scope of the music on offer. Click on the artists’ names for brief bios and video clips from pre-festival performances. As with Glastonbury and Latitude, earlier festivals I wrote about, there were a number of stages and more on offer than you could have taken in at one time. Robin Denselow’s review on Guardian.co.uk notes the continued importance of African music to the event, especially this year with Youssou N’Dour and Rokia Traoré. On the BBC Radio 3 stage, one of the events I would have particularly liked to have seen and heard was Charlie Gillett with Special Guests, in which the BBC DJ and author was both playing some of his current favorite records and sharing the stage with various world musicians. I knew Charlie back in my music days in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and he is one of the most iconic figures in British music. Mark Hudson ends his review on Telegraph.co.uk with an interesting observation: “In an environment in which the bracingly unfamiliar quickly became the norm, the jangly guitar-rock of fresh-faced British indie band Black Swan Effect stood out as by far the most exotic fare of the day.”

I’ve written about a variety of festivals (music and otherwise) that I would have liked to have attended, but found that following on the web was the next best thing: the Aspen Ideas Festival, Glastonbury and The Guardian Hay Festival. Now there is another British entry, the Latitude Festival, which I had not heard of until now, but is four years old. It’s already over, having run from July 16-19. Check out Mark Savage’s Latitude festival is a class act and other BBC coverage. NME.com and others covered the solo set by Thom Yorke of Radiohead, in which he gave the debut of a new song, “The Present Tense.” (I used to read NME, then in its pre-online, weekly print-only days, as often as possible back in my music days of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Especially at first, it wasn’t easy to find in the States, so it’s a sign of the times how readily available it is on the web.) Check out the complete list of acts appearing on multiple stages; including four music stages, with the Pet Shop Boys, Regina Spektor, the Pretenders, Grace Jones, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds along with many others. There was also literature (including Orwell: A Celebration, billed as “an unprecedented theatrical tribute to the work of George Orwell”; Geoff Dyer, Blake Morrison and many others), plus films, comedy, cabaret and more. For additional media coverage, see The Guardian, The Independent and other UK media outlets.

A nice place to be this week, starting two days ago and running through July 5, is the Aspen Ideas Festival. A large and diverse group of big thinkers from academia, business, law, science, government, nonprofits, the arts, architecture, media and more have converged in Colorado for what looks to be a highly stimulating event. Since most of us can’t be there, the next best thing is following it online at the festival’s website and on the blogs from Atlantic Online. The Atlantic is a co-sponsor of the event, along with the Aspen Institute. Just a handful of the more recognized names from the 200 speakers and moderators: Madeleine Albright, James A. Baker III, Stephen Breyer, David Brooks, Marian Wright Edelman, Thomas L. Friedman, Howard Gardner, Frank Gehry, Alan Greenspan, Sandra Day O’Connor, Tim O’Reilly, Susan Rice, Charlie Rose and Eric Schmidt. You can see the entire list of the speakers and moderators, with photos and thumbnail descriptions, on the festival site. The Aspen Daily News has an interesting piece reflecting on the first day of the festival, and looking to possible highlights from the upcoming speakers. You can view videos from the festival on the Audio Video Library portion of the festival site. One of the several that are available now is Google Looks at the Economy: In Conversation With Eric Schmidt, in which Google’s Chairman of the Board and CEO is interviewed by Kai Ryssdal, host of “Marketplace,” on American Public Media. We are fortunate to live in an age where we can have a virtual experience of these major events (including music and literary festivals, and to some extent, professional conferences) that we can’t attend in person.

Most of us will not be able to attend Britain’s annual Glastonbury Festival, which starts Thursday. But we can live vicariously by checking out the festival’s extensive website, and the media coverage that’s already begun.  Today, The Independent has Elisa Bray’s The guide to Glastonbury. She notes that there will be 177,000 people and 300 bands, playing on 10 main stages and a dozen smaller ones. Guardian.co.uk has a page with news, blogs, videos and weather updates. The full lineup on the festival’s site is pretty amazing; there will be so many choices that it seems like it would be hard to decide which artists to see and which ones you’d have to miss. The Pyramid Stage has some of the biggest names, such as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Madness, Fleet Foxes, Lily Allen and many more. The Acoustic Stage sounds particularly appealing, with the likes of Roger McGuinn, Fairport Convention, Ray Davies and the duo of Gary Louris and Mark Olson. I particularly like the fact that there is a John Peel Stage, in honor of the late BBC DJ. It has Echo and the Bunnymen, Jarvis Cocker and many more. The official site has a history page going back to the first festival, in 1970. More media coverage: The BBC has a page on the festival and Ian Youngs’ The secrets of Glastonbury’s line-up, in which he notes that festival organizer Michael Eavis, who has run it since the beginning, “may be one of the coolest 73-year-olds around…” He was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People this year, complete with an essay about him by Chris Martin of Coldplay. Eavis’ daughter Emily now also organizes the festival. The Glastonbury coverage is a reminder about what a wonderful place Britain is for music and pop culture.

It’s back to guardian.co.uk today for a double-treat: its extensive, ongoing coverage of the Guardian Hay Festival in Wales, running from May 21-31, as well as The Book that changed my life, in which Nicole Jackson interviews 28 festival participants, who each provide a paragraph on their crucial reading. The event is primarily literary, but features a wide array of public figures: authors, poets, comedians, architects and politicians.  There is also Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The main page has a considerable amount of video and podcasts, as well as blogs and articles about the festival. One of the presenters has proved unexpectedly timely: poet Ruth Padel, who in controversy resigned her position as the first female Professor of Poetry at Oxford University only nine days after being elected.  Read more in the Guardian’s May 26 interview, Ruth Padel: Oxford poetry smear campaign could have been a conspiracy. She is also the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and you can see a video of her reading from Darwin: A Life in Poems. The Book that changed my life surveys a cross-section of people, including the novelist Zoe Heller, historians Simon Schama and Antonia Fraser, and Alain de Botton, whom I featured in an earlier post. I’ll leave it to you to read the books that changed their lives and those of the other interviewees, but suffice to say that it’s a pretty eclectic and surprising list. It would be wonderful to attend this festival in person, but for most of us that’s not practical. Thank goodness we live in an age when technology allows us the next best thing.