Gorillas and bears

[imomus]

Last week BBC Radio 4 transmitted a documentary about the great french singer-songwriter Georges Brassens (1921-1981), the man with the walrus moustache who shot to fame in France in 1953 with a rude song about a hanging judge and a randy gorilla. The 30 minute documentary is archived on the BBC's site in RealPlayer format:

The Man With The Famous Moustache

It's a good basic introduction to Brassens for English speakers. I talk about why Brassens has been important to me in a couple of essays:

The Electroacoustics of Humanism

Le Grand Jake (Jake Thackray obituary)

Prompted by an entry about Broadcast on Toog's blog, I've also been listening to broadcasts by Broadcast, perhaps in a spirit of nostalgia for that school of 90s 'cold wave' represented by Stereolab, Komeda, and The Sound Gallery as well as people like Portishead and Goldfrapp: that place where the Easy Listening revival was less about capturing the warmth of the Beach Boys (High Llamas etc) and more about evoking the Cold War vibe of 1960s spy thrillers scored by John Barry and Ennio Morricone, or BBC Radiophonics, or weird children's TV shows like The Singing, Ringing Tree, a spooky production from communist East Germany (Potsdam, actually, right outside Berlin) which seems to have supplied the inspiration for the Mark Wallinger exhibition 'Sleeper' currently running at the Neue Nationalgalerie at the Potsdamer Strasse here in Berlin.



Wallinger dresses up each night as a bear, which is the symbol of Berlin, and wanders around the glass cube of the Mies-designed Neue Nationalgalerie. He did the same in London for the opening of the Frieze Art Fair, which just finished yesterday.

Mark Wallinger dressed as a bear Quicktime stream (available from 22.00 into the small hours each night until October 22nd).

Going back to 90s Cold Wave (and of course Wallinger also came up in the 90s), what interests me is that a lot of the people making that music (and I was very marginally involved) have transitioned, since then, into making 'sinister folk music'. You can hear the transition happening in Broadcast's broadcasts; they're playing Stereolab-like 60s French and Italian electronic formalist pop by Roger Roger and others, but also folk tracks by Vashti Bunyan and Comus. Of course, St Etienne's Bob Stanley also made this switch from lounge to folk, and so did I, although it's odd that people like Stereolab didn't. These cultural shifts are fascinating, and even the people who make them can't quite explain why they do. It's just 'something in the air'.

Comments

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

While it is well-known that female fertility declines with age as a result of impaired egg quality, researchers are finding that a similar reduction in fertility takes place in men. At the University of Washington, in Seattle, Narendra Singh and his colleagues found that as men age, the percentage of their sperm with highly damaged DNA increases. At the same time, apoptosis, or programmed cell death, of the damaged sperm becomes much less efficient, contributing to the increase of damaged sperm.

Sixty-six men between the ages of 20 and 57 participated. Forty of them were patients recruited from an infertility program and 26 were sperm donors or young men seeking to freeze their sperm. Potential subjects were excluded only for prostatitus, prior cancer treatment, or lack of sperm. All subjects’ semen samples were analyzed for standard semen quality parameters according to World Health Organization protocols. Portions of each semen sample were retained for sperm DNA analysis and apoptosis assessment.

The only age-related difference found in semen analysis results was that younger men had a much higher percentage of motile sperm than older men. Total number of sperm and sperm morphology (shape) were not affected by age.

DNA testing revealed that older men had a significantly greater percentage of sperm with highly damaged DNA than younger men. This finding stood, even when the age groups were configured differently- that is whether the dividing line was placed between 25 and 26, 35 and 36, or 43 and 44, the older group always had more DNA damage. At the same time, other testing found that apoptosis, the body’s mechanism for selecting out damaged sperm and eliminating them, becomes less efficient with age. The appearance of a subject’s sperm had no bearing on the degree of DNA damage it exhibited.

The researchers note that age is only one factor contributing to DNA damage in sperm; other environmental factors include cigarette smoking, alcohol and caffeine consumption, and chemical and radiation exposure.

Anthony Thomas, Jr., MD, President of the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology (SMRU) commented, “Unfortunately we can’t stop age, but men who are putting off fatherhood might want to consider their lifestyle choices to minimize their risk of infertility, or perhaps revise their timetables. It takes healthy sperm to make a healthy baby and with more research, we can perhaps determine how to best protect sperm from DNA damage.”

Singh et al, Effects of age on DNA double-strand breaks and apoptosis in human sperm, Fertility and Sterility, Vol.80, No.6, December 2003.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Charles. I'm just picturing you sitting there in the Kensington Library copying that all out of Fertility and Sterility magazine painstakingly before making your way to the internet cafe.

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

Whatever. At least the information I'm copying doesn't contain severe errors, unlike the gametes of someone I could mention.