Gernika December 31, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : spain, Music, politics , 3comments
The history of Gernika
The story of the bombing of Gernika is told in the song. For more information see Wikipedia: Bombing of Gernika
The Music
The song was set to music and recorded in December 2006.
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Listen to or download < < GERNIKA.mp3 >> (11.8 Mb - 8 minutes 35 seconds)
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Thanks to individuals from the Stormcock list who volunteered to review an early recording and with their comments both helped and encouraged me to improve the production:
Andrew Watterson, Steve Pursglove, Jon James, Lorcan, John Ries, Kimberley, Amila, Gina, Ian.
The story of the song
Everything is true.
In April 2003 I went on a solo trip around the Basque region of Spain and France. Driving inland from east to west, I called in at the town of Guernica, and after some lunch I wandered towards the town centre and heard the sound of guitar music and singing. It looked like a street party, possibly a wedding. But every few minutes, somebody wound up an old air raid warning siren. I stood and listened to the south american folk singer for a while, and then a woman who was seated at the long table with her family beckoned me over.
“Would you like to sit down, have something to drink, some food. Do you know what this is about? Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Gernika, here” “Oh really?” We chatted some more. I had read a moving passage in my alternative guide book about the history of Guernica but hadn’t noticed the date. When the musician stopped, people looked disappointed but he had run out of songs. After travelling alone for a week I was appreciating the company there and moved by the occasion and I felt compelled to offer my fraternal greetings in the international language of music, but what kind of song would be appropriate? “Imagine” came to mind, and seemed to go down well. Then I quietly started singing “the internationale” acapella, holding the silent guitar. An older man at the back recognised the tune and stood up, earnestly making a fist and singing with gusto, then everybody else rose from the tables and seats and joined in.
As I drove on that afternoon, I began mentally penning the first few verses of the song. In the evening, at my hotel, the TV was showing that day’s footage of the destruction of Bagdhad and I finished the lyrics within the next day, I think.
Photos
The Internationale
The Internationale is one of the most widely recognised songs in the world but if you’ve never heard of it you can start here: What is the Internationale ?
The Lyrics by Andy Roberts:
It was nineteen thirty seven, the revolution already betrayed
But in Catalan and Basque lands,they struggled on, in their seperate ways
Now Franco was in with the Luftwaffe, Von Richthoven had an idea
If we send in enough of our new heavy aircraft,
we can create, mayhem and fear ( blizkrieg, shock and awe )
in Gernika, Gernika untested strategy
to bring down a nation in just a few ho-urs
let’s just try it and see ( just watch us and see)
The first act of modern warfare, where death and destruction
come raining down from the air
With god and his church backing both sides, they like their bread buttered that way
it was decided to saturate Gernica, and they chose to do it on market day
more bangs per buck, that’s the market way
Gernika Gernika firestorm technology,
how much would you need to destroy the whole town
let’s just try it and see
So you say the General was a monster, and the little Austrian mad
but how to explain Sarejevo, and now, what about Bagdhad?
We’ve bombs with onboard computers, to liberate the looters
Gernika, Gernika, New angle new technology (new precedent, new strategy)
What happens after regime change, let’s just suck it and see
I just happened to be in Gernika It wasn’t far out of my way
I heard the air raid warning siren, I didn’t know it was Gernika day
I sang John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, that optimist atheist hymn
When I started the Internationale every woman and man, stood up and joined in
In English and Spanish and Basque barely legal,
Outside the parliament you had to be there,
On Gernika day, in Gernika square
in Gernika, Gernika, assembled under the tree
making plans for Gernika, let’s just try it and see
Well the day after the fascists bombed Gernika the marketplace covered with meat
the architects of war looked down and they saw
a successful experiment
with broken hearts and body parts, strewn all over the streets
So they continued with Warsaw and Coventry, Then Dresden was razed to the ground
In just one night with a blanket of fire, by the RAF bomber command
not the last place, to hear that air raid warning sound
Then the Germans blitzed East London and the Americans bombed Japan
gone nuclear, to increase the fear, Civilian targets They proved that they can,
ever since Gernika, Gernika, new precedent, new strategy,
what happens after regime change Just watch them and see.
Gernika, Gernika, Gathered under the tree,
to remind the world about Gernika, in April 2003
With survivors decendents in Gernika, the last fight let us face,
For the internationale unites the human race.
The Chords
It’s an easy song to play, apart from some of the timings. Five main chords are used:
And here’s how they fit the words:
so all that’s left to figure out is the little D chord run on the A and D strings
Translation into Euskadi Basque by Igor:
“Gernika”
Mila bederatzireun ta hogeita hamazazpia zen
Iraultza jadanik saldua
Baina Katalunian eta Euskal Herrian
Borrokan ziharduten, bakoitza berean.
Franco Lutwaffe-arekin goxo zen
Von Richthoven-ek idea bat izan zuen
Nahikoa hegazkin bidaltzen badugu
Zalaparta eta beldurra sor dezakegu
Bat-bateko erasoa
Aztoramendua eta izua.
Gernikan, Gernikan
Gerrate modernoa deitzen dugun horren lehen urratsa
Non heriotza eta txikizioa
Zerutik euria legez datozen.
Jainkoaren Eliza alde biak babesten
Horixe baita gustatzen zaien era
Gernika itotzea erabakia zen
Eta zeregina, merkatu-egunean
Burutzea hautatu zuten
Irabazi handiagoak lortuz
Horixe da merkatuaren bidea.
Gernika, Gernika teknologia badugu
Hiri osoak berdintzeko baina honek zer dakarren
Ikusteko da.
Generala munstroa zela diozu, beraz
Eta austriar ttipia, eroa
Baina nola azaldu Sarajevo, lehen
Eta Bagdad, orain?
Gernika, Gernika
Azken guda-teknologia
Erregimen-aldaketak zer dakarren
Ikusteko da.
Orain ordenagailudun bonbak badira
Arrapakariak askatzeko.
Juxtu Gernikan nintzen
Ez nebilen urruti
Bonbaketa-turruna joarazi zuten
Sarri. Gernikaren eguna heldua zen.
John Lennon-en “Imagine” abestu nuen
Ateoen ereserki baikor hura
Internazionala hasi nuenean
Emakume zein gizon oro
Tentetu eta bat egin zuen
Gazteleraz eta apenas legala den euskaraz
Juntetxearen kanpoaldean
Gernikako plazan.
Gernikaren egunean, Gernikan
Faxistek Gernika bonbakatu biharamonean
Merkatugunea haragiz estalia
Gerraren arkitektoak
Beherantz begiratu eta ikusi zuten
Experimentu arrakastatsua
Bihotz zartatuak eta gorpu
atalak
Kalean barrena.
Warsaw eta Coventryrekin jarraitu zuten
Dresden lurrarekin berdindua izan zen, ondoren
Suzko estalki batez
Britainiarren aginduz
Ez azken lekua
Bonbaketa-turruna entzuten.
Alemanek London ekialdea txikitu zuten
Amerikarrek Japonia, gero
Bonba
nuklearrez
Beldurra handiagotzeko
Jomuga zibilak
Ahal dutela frogatu zuten
Gernikaz geroztik.
Notes from the translator:
PS: Hi Andy, just a couple of notes. First, the proper name of writing the town’s name is its Basque name, Gernika; “Guernica” was popularized after Picassos’s picture but is actually the Spanish form of writing it. Second, the poem is good but is not totally accurate: Gernika wasn’t the first civilian target bombed deliberately. It was the first… in a European “white” town but the “nice” Italians did the same to Ethiopians and Eritreans when they tried to get rid off the occupying boot. But they were blacks, just a little detail a lot of people forget 
it is known that even Churchill justified the Italian actions when in places like Africa.
Picasso’s Painting
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Videos:
I don’t know how many other songs there are about Gernika, I found one. This is a Basque agit-punk-reggae band called ‘Kortatu” singing “Gernika”. Notice that while I adopted the correct local spelling for the name of my own song, I use the english pronunciation “gUrrrnikuh” rather than the indiginous “Gerneeeeka” as sung here.
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This one seems to be genuine newsreel footage from the franciosts or nazis showing the bombers taking off, possibly from Burgos.
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And this is a musical clip from the feature film “The Tree of Guernica”
Happy New Year December 31, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Music , 2commentsLike most New Years recently, I’ll be staying in, enjoying good company, food and drink and then watching Later with Jules Holland - Hootenanny!.
I used to like Paul Weller back in the 80s, ( not so much Marc Almond) but he and Amy Winehouse weren’t very impressive on the BBC proms a few months ago. The rest of the lineup is quite promising though.
So, A Happy New Year to anyone still checking blogs at this time…
Do you want to hear some predictions?
Update:
The Paul Weller/Amy Winehouse duet of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” was very enjoyable, as were Lily Allen, Madeleine Peyroux, and the Zutons. Highlight though, must have been Ade Edmondson’s Bonzoesque (with trumpet) version of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” which he claimed was the first time the song had every been performed on British TV without getting banned. But on Bedazzled, you can view a movie of a performance from September 4th 1976 on the Granada TV show “So It Goes”. So maybe I got it wrong, or it was a first for the BBC, or with a trumpet or something.
Reviewers required - Song December 28, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, Music , comments closedThe internet has revolutionised the distribution of music, and is doing the same for promotion. Now I am seeking to include the network earlier on, in the creative process itself.
I have a new song in an advanced stage of amateur pre-production and I’ve kind of lost the ability to hear it fresh, now. So I thought I might ask for some kind of peer reviews. Would you be willing to listen a couple of times and reply with your thoughts in the next two or three days please? Great!
The song is a serious one, just over eight minutes long, and I’d be grateful for feedback on first impression, followed by any more detailed criticism which might help me to make decisions and improve the mix for release. If you are interested in having a go at this, please leave a comment here or drop me an email and I’ll get the mp3 to you by this evening, December 28th. Thanks.
update 30.12.2006 :
Many thanks to the 5 responses already to my request. That should be plenty enough for this version, thanks. I’ll be getting on with it.
2 very useful reviews received back so far.
Nadolig LLawen December 24, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , 3commentsNadolig LLawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda.
Blog flowers December 21, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, blogs and community , add a commentVia Anthony Mayfield , via Data Mining I found this topic visualisation mechanism at Neoformix. You can paste in a load of text and get back a drawing which represents in visual form, some kind of analysis of the relative weight of different topic types contained within the text. The next stage might be to be provide a list of URLs and get back a matrix of such flowers, so that patterns across multiple blogs or other texts might be recognised.
This one is from selecting all text in the current front page:
And this one is from a text dump of my previous Movable Type blog which was hosted at ultralab and so is currently offline, but will be republished in a few days on Wordpress 2.
What does your blog flower look like?
Martin Cleaver, masterfully. » Blog Archive » Wikis compared to Email, Discussion Groups and Blogs December 21, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , add a commentMartin Cleaver identifies and explains one of the salient features of the type of practice which can be enabled by wikis.
Martin Cleaver, masterfully. » Blog Archive » Wikis compared to Email, Discussion Groups and Blogs
Wikis are Negotiation tools.
* Wikis are means for a group to truly negotiate over meaning, align on values and build action plans together. The open nature of Wikis, where anyone can move or reword content facilitates collaborative idea structuring. The very lack of structured barriers between postings enables the next person to cut & paste conversation fragments around the wiki . Working on the same document (rather than linking between posts, or tacking on yet another comment) creates a workspace for situated cognition, where participants are forced to co-author the document. Co-authoring, in turn, ensures participates find a wording that summarizes the content, first by acknowledging differences and often by bridging through super-ordinate, more profound, concepts that explain a dilemma.
Cider videos December 17, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : video, cider, Wiki , add a commentIn my role as technology steward as well as convenor for the ukcider community, I need to keep an eye on mainstream developments on the web. Now 2006 was the year that webstreaming video really came of age, especially since the format wars were finally settled with Flash coming out the winner, and YouTube the social video platform of preference. So people are starting to post links to videos in the mailing list which others can then watch and share the experience. But just as with Flickr for still photos, only a minority in the community are actually going to sign up for an account, learn how to upload, tag, favourite, playlist and join groups etc. Others will just consume.
So I’ve added a plugin to the ukcider mediawiki to enable it to display videos from YouTube and GoogleVideo directly onto the page, which means that in future it will be possible to add relevent media to the narrative text within the pages of the dynamic work of reference and generally wonderful thing that is the cider wiki
For now, here’s a page with a few choice cider videos:
http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Cider_Videos
Oh you pretty urls December 17, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress, blogs and community , 1 comment so farI finally got around to fixing the permalink structure on this blog today, by implementing “pretty URLs”. Wordpress caters for this very well, but I had problems with the way my hosting service deals with .htaccess files, trying to force script me into making directories password protected. I also wanted to make sure that existing links to the old numbered permalinks wouldn’t get broken by the process of renaming to the like of “http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2006/12/07/tornado-hits-london/” from what used to be the ugly URL: “http://distributedresearch.net/blog/?p=192”
For those reading via RSS or aggregators, the process may have caused the 10 most recent posts to be repeated as unread, I’m sorry about that.
Oh, and there’s also a speech synthethiser “podcast’ version of the text in each post, courtesy of talkr which Linda asked for on Acting to Improve. It’s an interesting experiment listening to a mechanical female voice trying to read what I’ve written but I’m not sure if I should keep it. What do you think?
Who longs to lead a normal life? December 15, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a commentHu is the president of China? (sorry)
Bao Xishun, the world’s tallest man, who was recently called in to rescue dolphins by reaching into their stomachs with his arm, longs to lead a normal life according to People’s Daily Online.
Bao was born in 1951 into a herdsman’s family in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. His family is said to be descended from the offspring of Genghis Khan, but he and his five siblings had a simple childhood.
Until the age of 15 he was of normal height, but then he went through a massive growth spurt, reaching 2.1 metres by the time he was 20. He developed rheumatism when he was young, as he often slept outside on the grassland with legs uncovered.
He shut himself off from the world until 2004
Bao remains shy: ” I want to live a normal life like my father, who is 94.”
Who else would like to lead a normal life? It often sounds tempting to me. First, find yourself a normal planet with normal people on it and then go and live there. Should be easy, but is it?
In Five Years’ Time December 14, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog , add a commentOn the schools-it forum:
I would be interested in your views on IT infrastructure etc that would be appropriate in 5 years time. In particular, what technologies should we be looking at for seriously getting computers into students’ hands for the
whole school day?
By today’s standards, this is a long range forecast.
In five years time wireless internet access will be everywhere whether
you provide it or not. Students will arrive already equiped with their
own online identity, a large network of peers and their own individual
preferences for devices, media and platforms. The most important thing
you can do for their education will be to make sure they have access to
good food and that nobody gets in the way of their interactions with
each other and the whole wide world.
So make sure the plans include a proper kitchen, plenty of smaller
private areas, and points for recharging batteries. Try to keep the
teachers well out of harm’s way by distracting them with plenty of
video conferencing suites, coffee machines and suchlike.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
