Shuko the Champ – 2

Albeit a bit late, I’m giving a follow up to my previous post on Fujisawa Shuko.

Between 1960 and 1970 Shuko won 14 titles, including the Meijin twice, plus four unfortunate challenges for the same title. The Meijin was then the most important tournament in professional go.
Already such achievements were more than enough to make him one of the strongest players of the XX century.

Then a long hiatus followed: his results in professional tournaments were terrible, due also to a strong drinking habit.
He nevertheless made a comeback winning the 1st Tengen title in 1976, aged 51, at a time when all the title winners were players in their twenties or early thirties: it was said that you needed a lot of stamina to go through the best-of-five or best-of-seven title match.

But the best was yet to come.

You may remember from my previous post that Shuko, as the main professional representative that negotiated with the newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun the establishment and sponsorship of the Meijin title, was instrumental for the birth of that tournament back in 1962, and how he proceeded to win its first edition.

But fifteen years later, the professional go players were increasingly unhappy about the amount of sponsorship from the Yomiuri. Requests for a rise of the sponsorship were systematically turned down. Fed up with such behaviour, the Nihon Kiin (the Japanese professional go guild) took away the title from the Yomiuri and gave it to its competitor Asahi Shinbun, that was well prepared to pay much more for the exclusivity.
So in 1976 (while Shuko was winning the 1st Tengen title) a new Meijin tournament started.

The Yomiuri management realised what a big mistake they had made, letting slip such sponsorship to their competitors. So they decided to get back into the game by funding yet another tournament, the biggest of them all, both in term of money and in terms of complexity of organisation.

In 1977, the Kisei title was born, and it had the highest purse of all time – as of today, around 42,000,000 Yen.
Kisei means “Saint of Go”, and to win the title you have to go through four or five sub-tournaments, that involve almost every professional and that take several months to complete. The final is a best-of-seven match: in every game the players are allotted eight hours of thinking time each, so each game lasts two days.
Winning the Kisei really means being the strongest player of the year.

Everybody expected the young stars (Rin Kaiho, Takemiya Masaki, Kato Masao, Ishida Yoshio…) to win the first Kisei title, but, contrary to all expectations, at the end of the mammoth tournament the final was an affair between two veterans, Hashimoto Utaro (aged 70!) and… who else but Fujisawa Shuko?

Shuko won the 1st Kisei 4-1 and, to everybody’s astonishment (but not his, as he always boasted to be the strongest go player…), went on winning it other five years consecutively, beating the cream of the professional go: Kato 4-3, Ishida 4-1, Rin 4-1, Otake Hideo 4-0, Rin again 4-3.

The really incredible thing was that his results in other tournaments were still awful, as he kept on being drunk most of the time.
Shuko always said that he just needed to win four games a year to be on top of the go world, so a couple of months before the Kisei title he would go on the wagon, set himself straight, proceed to wipe off his opponents with is brilliant genius, and then get back to alcoholic celebrations for the rest of the year…

To be continued…

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Scottish Pixies

Now, I’m experimenting with videos…

Still from Scotland, three Pixies sending greetings!

A FilmLoop of Scottish pictures

I am trying to see how (and if…) FilmLoop works…

Here’s a bunch of pictures from Scotland. I’ll tell you later about the journey from Edinburgh to Edinburgh, via Borders, Fife, Angus, Grampians, Highlands, Argyll… Pictures of the House of Dun and from the Fringe are not here as they are shown in the posts.

The Loop hasn’t come out exactly as I had in mind, because it seems WordPress doesn’t accept the code for a bigger Flash looplet… Still, click on the Loop and go have a look at our pictures!

Tatty Bogos in the House of Dun

Back to our travel to Scotland.
When I was looking in the Net for interesting events in the Fringe I searched for a concert of Emily Smith, who is one of the most beautiful voices in Scottish modern folk.

She wasn’t performing in the Fringe, but she had a gig in Montrose, in another festival called The Hairst. She was supposed to play in something called “Ballads and Bothy Ballads” together with other artists. As she’s really good, we bought the tickets.

The venue for the event was a place called the House of Dun – I didn’t look any further about it. We were expecting a “normal” concert in a “normal” venue so we were in for a big surprise when we got there in the evening of August 16.

The House of Dun is a stunning Georgian House with fabulous Victorian gardens, designed by William Adam in 1730, enlisted in the National Trust for Scotland!

We went from surprise to surprise: we were welcomed by the owners, complimentary glasses of wine were offered, the audience was no more than 50 people, the event was taking place in the Saloon and Dining Room, which had a big fireplace, was hung with family portraits and decorated with the most magnificent plasterwork on the walls and ceilings…

Then the artists came in, and simply sat on chairs facing the audience. One by one, they stood up and told a story or sang a song with voice alone, except a guy who accompanied himself with acoustic guitar and mouth harp. No mics, no amplification.
Only every now and then the singer was somehow accompanied by the others that hummed harmonies almost by themselves.
It was amazing! It was just like being among friends on a cosy and carefree night, and hearing the perfect intonation of all those solo singings was such a treat…

Stories were told or sung about lost and found love, hard work and frolics and drinks, ghosts and charmed tatty bogos that become beautiful lads when kissed by beautiful lassies…
I must say that I had some difficulties understanding everything, as when it wasn’t Gaelic from the Hebrides it was pure Scottish…
Funny stories set the audience roaring with laugh, sad tales produced more than one quicly hidden teardrop on many eyes…
What an evening! We just wished it never ended!

And now, let me introduce you the artists:

Scott Gardiner
A young guy from Forfar, who was the Master of Ceremonies and who sung funny and sad ballads from farmlands of the North East Scotland. If I understood correctly, one of the songs was about one of the very first combined harvester, boldly painted in yellow and red, that in the end killed its proud owner…

Margaret Bennet
A lady with a beautifully pure voice, singing songs, mostly in Gaelic, from her home island of Skye. Love, emigration, hard life… the lives of fishermen in joy and sorrow.

Emily Smith
She was the reason why we were there – we were just lucky that searching for a piece of gold we found a whole treasure.
She’s oh so good, at her ease both in strictly traditional ballads and in more modern songs.
Really, you should get some of her recordings!

Jim Malcolm
The guy with the guitar.
What astonished me was the ease of his voice, warm and expressive. We didn’t know then, but Jim is quite famous in Scotland, having also been the singer of the celebrated band Old Blind Dogs. In 2004 he won two awards by the Scots Traditional Music Society, as Songwriter of the Year, and as Scottish Folk Band of the Year with Old Blind Dogs.

Stanley Robertson
To some extent, the most astonishing number. Close to his seventies, Stanley is a tall, imposing gentleman with a powerful voice and a funny glint in his eyes. A natural storyteller, he also sung with unflinching assurance through some really harmonically and melodically difficult Gaelic tunes.
His were the ghost stories and the one about the poor Tatty Bogo that said “I loooooooooove you” to the beautiful lassie…

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RadioRock.To, your favourite PodRadio

As of next Monday, September 18th, RadioRock.To, your favourite Pod Radio will start posting a new Podcast every day. There are currently 12 podcaster, each one of them with her/his musical tastes, so that the range of musical offering is really wide. Pretty soon we will tackle classical music only.

Not only that, there will be regular features on a number of subjects, forums in addition to the current Guestbook, and other things…

Just stay tuned!

Changed some categories names

I’ve changed the names of some categories.

So now we have  “Tales”, “Journeys” and “MacFreak” instead of, respectively, “The Word”, “The World” and “Apple”.

Reason for such change is that if you search “The Word” you end up with millions of blogs about the Gospel, new-born christians, retrograde integralisms and the like.  Not at all to my taste.

If you search “The World” you get to geopolitics: very interesting, but not exactly what I had in mind.

“Apple” also is too wide a term… Besides, it is not my intention to talk much about Apple, as there are again millions out there that can do this much better than me.

Good time at the Edinburgh Fringe

Very well, here I am, writing my first “proper” post after my summer holidays in Scotland and a minor bout of laziness.
My good friend Ale, who manages the Angolo Nero blog, said in her comment that I had lost a good occasion to write a travelling blog. I don’t know… in retrospect, I can see a number of reasons why I didn’t even think of doing that.

First, I didn’t want to bring with me my somewhat battered, modem-powered, beloved old PowerBook G3.
Second, Internet cafés in Edinburgh are a bit costly. They could even ask 1 pound sterling for 20 min. Let’s say that the bargain is about 1,50 – 1,20 pounds per hour. It is still a bit expensive, if you ask me.
Third, Internet cafés can be found only in big cities – not in the middle of Glen Coe, just to make an example.
Fourth, and most important, I usually want to be totally immersed in my journeys. I do not like to filter my experiences through writing about them, or through filming them. I can write about them later. That’s why I am here now.
I took some pictures, though…

Now, let’s start with Edinburgh and its festival, or festivals, I’d better say.

This year was the Fringe 60th anniversary. Numbers at the end of the fair are impressive: 71 million hits on the website, more than 1,5 million tickets sold, 333 venues (proper theatres and halls, churches, pubs, yards, cellars, caves…), more than 28000 performances, more than 17000 artists…
More than 1800 shows, from comedy to music, from theatre to children’s shows, from dance to art exhibitions; and many other events, including food, wine and whisky tasting plus some show or other, Shakespeare at breakfast (free coffees and croissants), pub crawling with accompanying music, you name it.

Anybody can present a show at the Fringe. Its staff is very helpful, suggesting procedures, ways for finding a venue, and so on.

But a great deal also goes on in the streets.

There’s the crowd in High Street (part of the Royal Mile ), where hundreds of youngsters hand you flyers of shows, doing their best to tell you why you shouldn’t miss it. In 15 minutes you can collect a bookful of flyers… Most of the times it’s the artists themselves that do the job.

Then you have all sort of buskers, jugglers, acrobat, street artists in general. Just wandering around you can enjoy yourself for a whole day.

The Mound is another venue for artists showcasing their performance. So if you’re not sure whether something is worth the ticket, you may be lucky to see an excerpt.

I saw there a showcase that was almost the whole show (that was going on in an important theatre), by a Japanese collective called “Jump!”: they mixed martial arts, clownerie and music in a nice package.

We didn’t see many shows: even going for cheap tickets you can reach quite an expenditure seeing something every day – as you would like to do…
Then some shows we wanted to see (Jason Byrne, Ed Byrne – no relatives, Danny Bhoy) were sold out even before the start of the Fringe.
These are the things we managed to see:

CHANBARA
A Japanese show mixing taiko drumming and sword (katana) choreographies. The latter were performed by the group that worked with Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill’s sword scenes.

MUMMENSCHANZ
The legendary, beautiful, playful show of mime, mask, puppetry by the Swiss-Italo-American group. I last saw them at the end of the Eighties…

DAVID O’DOHERTY
A stand-up comedian from Ireland smashing corporations and human stupidity in general, aiding himself with a cheap Casio toy keyboard…

ANDY PARSON’S INTERNATIONAL INDOOR CHAMPIONSHIP MOANING
ROTFL for one of the best stand-up comedians and his ferocious social and political satire.

EDDI READER
A superb Glaswegian folk (but not only) singer, one of the mellowest, honey-toned and at the same time powerful voices I’ve ever listened to. After having done backing vocals for, among others, Eurythmics, she embarked in a solo career that has topped (IMHO) in 2003 with an album of songs based on Robert Burns poems.
The concert was absolutely fantastic. She was in top form and the band followed suit. Just perfect.

BOTH SIDES OF THE BAR
A play staged in a pub, about a successful actor, his fiancé (to whom he’s unfaithful) and a wannabe actor who has to work in the pub to support himself and who’s secretly in love with the other’s fiancée… Sort of fun, the three actors were much better than the play itself. I confess I went because of the free beer included in the ticket…

And then there’s Edinburgh itself, its museums, pubs, gardens…
Beautiful, full of life and of kind people.

A city that doubles its popolation during the festivals month and still manages to look normal, as if guests from the whole world just belonged there and were part of the city texture.

A joy to be there.

P.S.

Re-reading everything, it may seems that I picked up the Scottish spirit for parsimony, but I strongly deny such hint…