The Fredösphere

I'd like to  recommend to you a wonderful tool for surfing the solar system.  It's called Celestia and it 's an OpenGL-based application you can download for free.  It seems to be a project started by a guy with a surplus of brains and spare time.

Once you have it running, you can fly from planet to planet, or sit tight and watch, say, Ganymede slowly work its way past Jupiter.  Go to the options dialog and make the orbits visible; see Pluto's eccentric path and you will be forever cured of the ridiculous notion that it deserves to be called a planet.

Der Drubermensch mastered this thing before his fifth birthday and by playing with it he learned the names of the planets and their moons.  Did I mention it is wonderful?

Part I dealt with a painting of a 700-ft Christ knocking the U.N.  Part II considered the lingering presence of Jesus' graduation picture.

Part III is all about Christ Our Pilot.



This theme was huge in the art and especially hymnody of 19th century evangelicalism. Now that ocean voyages have very low risk, the metaphor has lost its power, but for our grandparents a storm at sea seemed an intense illustration of life's uncertainties generally.

As I have previously complained about Sallman's art, I'll make the briefest of mentions of this positively creepy depictions of the sailor and Christ--so perfectly calibrated to appeal to the unconscious ideals of a old-ladyfied people of all ages and genders. No, that wasn't the briefest of mentions, was it. Here is the briefest of mentions:  Yuck.

I chose a pilot-themed hymn text for one of my choral settings and I expect I will choose more in the future. I recall Garrison Keillor devoted one of his hymn medleys to this topic.  Titles include Jesus Savior Pilot Me -- With Christ in the Vessel I Can Smile at the Storm -- Sail On! -- for more, see this list of hymns with nautical themes. Christ as an anchor is another important metaphor, and sometimes Christ is a harbor, a Haven of Rest:

I've anchored my soul in the Haven of Rest, I'll sail the wide seas no more; The tempest may sweep o'er the wild, stormy deep, In Jesus I'm safe evermore.

Some of 19th century poetry's most annoying conventions were kept on life support well into the 20th thanks to these revivalist hymns.  Notice the indulgent use of "o'er."  Look around in these hymns and you'll find plenty an "e'er" too.

You know what a ship's pilot is, don't you? He is a specialist based in a harbor who knows its channels intimately. When a ship arrives, the pilot goes out to it by boat and assumes responsibility for steering it safely to its dock.  So the image of Christ the pilot bringing us safely through a storm on the high seas is a bit of a distortion. Oh well. Why did I point that out? Now I've ruined it for you, haven't I.

If you're tired of what you've seen so far and are looking for something with a bit more bite, hang on -- in our next installment I've got a very different kind of art from a very different kind of religion.  Stay tuned for VORA IV.

Can rock songs have Christian lyrics without devouring their own cloying selves in some kind of sick binge of self-contradictions?  I've known a lot of Christians who would say no.  Rob Long agrees:

I've listened to my fair share of it, too—long drive across the country; busted iPod—and there's something so weird about it. It sounds like regular bad music when you first tune in. The lyrics always seem like regular bad music lyrics, too—"I feel your body next to mine/ And that makes my whole life shine"—but after a second or two you realize that they're singing about Jesus, not some girl named Mandy, and the whole thing just seems, well, creepy. Because rock music—and most other forms of entertainment, when you really think about it—is fundamentally about carnal desire. And Jesus, when you really think about it, is fundamentally not.

On the other hand, my daughter has no problem with it at all.  Maybe she'll change her mind by the time she reaches her third birthday.

Here's what they are saying out there in arts blog land:

Mixolydian Mode presents punk rock's foremost accordionist and also mentions this list of the top 100 sci-fi books.  Of the latter, I have read 21, assuming I remember correctly that I have read Asimov's The Gods Themselves.  That I remember precisely nothing of it is no real evidence that I haven't read it -- we are talking about Asimov here.

It may be fun to keep an eye on this professor's experiment in involuntary blog servitude, which I would have thought would be unconstitutional, but hey, they're only students, it's not like they deserve to have rights or something.

"This will send my traffic stats through the roof!"  muttered Alan Brandt to himself as he lovingly crafted this post (scroll down to 24-Aug-2004) which includes the keywords "jailbait" and "sex" and "oldest profession."  He'll get visits as well from the vast hoard of people googling for "Bach" + "flashmob opera".

This one goes deeper than your usual post:  it's a claim about Wagner interpretation.  Those conductors who attend to detail and transparency are getting it wrong!  I suppose it relates to the whole business of "Wagner's orchestra plays the organ."  If only orchestras came with sustain pedals the way pianos do.

aworks has a lot to say about Ives' The Unanswered Question and helps explain why it's the only thing by Ives I appreciate.

Jessica Duchen thinks classical music will survive and liked the Proms and is (like me) one who compares the more austere schools of 20th century music to a certain emperor who was duped into unfortunate practice of parading around in public butt nekkid.

The progeny and I were at Barnes and Noble.  I browsed their music section and noticed they had just a very few orchestral scores:  a couple of Mozart Requiems, Le Sacre and also Les Noces.  That was pretty much it.  I'd love to know what odd combination of inventory decisions and purchases lead to that exact combination sitting on the shelf the day I happened to look.

Les Noces.  Now there's an odd duck.  It's one of Stravinsky's earlier works -- a kind of stylized one-act opera.  After several false starts, Stravinsky settled on an ensemble of percussion instruments, including pianos.  This sonic environment is astonishing in its richness; it sounds austere and elemental, but never barren.

I have a bit of history with this piece.  I didn't start collecting classical recordings until well into my high school years.  Somehow along the way, we acquired a record (vinyl of course; we're talking about the 1970s here) with Les Noces on the B side.  (My mother was an avid bargain hunter and I assume she got it at a garage sale.  Somewhere in Branch County, Michigan, there was a serious fan of 20th century music or someone who did not know what they were getting when they bought that record.)

I listened to the recording.  I liked it.  Somehow, the energy and the rhythmic drive grabbed my attention.  It was the first out-there music I ever enjoyed.  (I'm talking about a time in my life when even Tristan was a stretch.)  I'm pretty sure credit goes to the particular performance, lead by Pierre Boulez.  The whole ensemble completely mastered that score and were therefore free to inhabit its passion.  (A quick round of Googling didn't turn it up.)

A few years ago I listened to the piece performed by an Eastern European group and it wasn't the same.  It was lifeless.  Good thing I didn't hear that one first.

The Guardian likes Lenny Bernstein's version.

That score of Les Noces was only 13 bucks.  Why didn't I just buy it?

The Bookish Gardener visited this site and left a comment.  In the spirit of extreme incestuousness by which the blogosphere is justifiably famous, I hereby link back to her:  Elvis Costello wrote the score to a ballet! I'm having trouble reconciling the photo of the author with someone with a deep knowledge of Elvis Costello's oeuvre.  But then, Dr. Joyce Brothers was an expert in prize fighting, so I guess it's possible:

Okay. Interesting story about how Joyce Brothers got on "[The] $64,000 Question." She went down originally and presented herself as a psychologist, and she had an expertise in something and, I'm not sure I remember what it was, but it certainly wasn't boxing. And they said to her, "Well you're wonderful as a personality but we're looking for those dramatic juxtapositions." The marine officer who is an expert cook. The shoemaker who knows about opera.

Or the pop singer who knows about writing ballet scores?  Elvis, there's an opportunity for you here.

I have this secret:  I see dead people!  I see them in the poems I read, because for some reason I am drawn to poems on morbid themes.  That's why I chose God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop (short version:  evil bishop kills a bunch of people, gets eaten alive by rats) as the text for my most ambitious choral composition ever.

So, courtesy of The New Criterion, I give you The Cremation of Sam McGee.

As the space probe Cassini passed through the rings of Saturn, engineers at NASA recorded the impact of space dust on the probe.  Someone came up with the idea of converting the data into sound.  Here is the result.

(If you think the title of this post is uncreative, just be glad I didn't go with my favorite, overused "Music of the Spheres" joke.)

We've all read about the breakthroughs made by late-19th century painters in the use of colors.  One thing they learned is how to communicate shape and shading through changes in hue instead of value (i.e., brightness).

In my day job as a programmer in computer graphics, I've been trained to view photorealism as the Holy Grail of my profession.  That's why I was so startled by  this paper on non-photorealistic lighting models for computer-generated images.  (For a nice summary, go straight to the introduction.)

It seems that by using hue to communicate shape in a technical drawing, one can preserve detail that would otherwise be lost in shadowy regions.  I don't know if theory or intuition lead the way here, but in any case this paper describes how the process can now be reduced to mathmatics (and from there, to computer generation).  Personally, I agree with the author that the images produced are beautiful (particularly as David Gelernter defines it.)

So Mr. Cezanne sir, here's a corkscrew to open that bottle. (Click on images for larger versions and more information.)

For a paper on computer replication of other artistic techniques, see this.  Or just sit down with Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and start playing.

The critics are still talking about that bit of crystal ball gazing they did a few weeks ago at ArtsJournal.com.  Here's Anne Midgette  at the NYT, and here's Kyle MacMilan at the Denver Post.

Midgette describes a friend who doesn't "like" classical music but was caught listening to Tan Dun (and not the music he wrote for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, either).  She didn't know anything about it except that she liked it.

I wish Midgette had taken a minute to talk about collaborative filtering.  As this technology takes off, it will create many more opportunities for people who are supposed to like Tan Dun to listen to him.  Previously, we relied on genre as a crude but useful tool to cull all music we probably wouldn't like from what we paid attention to.  With collaborative filtering, the genres become customized almost to the point where one exists for each person's individual taste.  It provides a way for someone to find that one Kronos quartet piece (and that one Dixie Chicks song and that one Latin motet by William Byrd) he or she happens, by a strange confluence of personality quirks and life experiences, to like.

Formerly, 5% of the population were classical music fans.  The day is coming, and is almost at hand, when 5% of each person will be a classical music fan.

The Maharincess came back from our church's Vacation Bible School singing a catchy song.  She's 2.5, so her version is a bit garbled and very truncated, but in the official version, the verse goes:

Every move I make I make in you,
You make me move, Jesus,
Every breath I take I breathe in you.
Every step I take I take in you,
You are my way Jesus,
Every breath I take I breathe in you.

The influence of Aristotle's Physics is so obvious it hardly needs mentioning.  But the chorus goes:

Na, na, n' na na na!
Na, na, n' na na na!

Hey, wait a minute.  That sounds a lot like another song.  The words to that one are:

Those soft fuzzy sweaters, too magical to touch
To see her in that negligee is really just too much
My blood runs cold, my memory has just been sold
My angel is a centerfold.
Na, na, n' na na na!
Na na na, n' n' na na na!

Oh dear.  But it gets worse.  On Sunday morning, the big people (who are in danger of knowing better) sing a song that's quite inspiring.  The chorus gets your blood pumping with these lyrics:

From the mountains to the valleys
Hear our praises rise to you,
from the heavens to the nations
hear our singing fill the air.

Again, its a nice song, really it is.  But then, there's an extended bridge in a mellower mood, with one word, sung over and over:

Alleluia, alleluia,
Alleluia, alleluia....

If you are familiar with the source material, it hits you:  take those exact notes and text, change the meter very slightly (from simple to compound) and you've got the chorus to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the lord
But you don't really care for music, do ya?
Well it goes like this: the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, and the major lift
The baffled king composing hallelujah
Hallelujah, hallelujah....

Well, that's okay, right?  It's not so bad, anyway.  It is religious in its own way, I guess.  But check out the second verse:

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to her kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the hallelujah

Heavens to Murgatroid.  What kind of music do these Christian songwriters listen to?  Was this borrowing deliberate, or subconscious?  Which would be worse?  And what does it say that I noticed?

Ionarts has more on The Scream:  it seems the strange red sky may have been based on a memory of the skies of Krakatoa, one of the monster volcanic eruptions in history.

He also has a copy of a version of The Scream that he stole from somewhere.  Follow the link to see what we surely must call The Moaning Lisa.

I intended to blog about the death of Elmer Bernstein but never got around to it.  Then I found out he was the composer of that score for The Sweet Smell of Success that bowled me over from the opening credits:

da DAH DUH da DAH DAAAAH!  da DAH DUH da DAH DAAAAH!

Now do you understand why I liked it so much?  (Sorry I couldn't find a more, uh, faithful reproduction.)  Apparently Elmer was one of the last of Hollywood's true artists.  And one of the first, for that matter.

Meanwhile, the Globe Theater is entertaining alternate theories regarding authorship of Shakespeare's plays.  Silly people, haven't they heard -- all those theories have been proven wrong.  Proven, you know, with computers.

The Scream has been stolen.  In a related acts of cultural vandalism, barbershop singing is catching on in Russia and Bjork is introducing bad makeup to Greece.

We're taking der Drübermensch to three classical concerts this year.  We'll hear Peter and the Wolf at the DSO in November, and a kiddie koncert by the AASO (with an instrument petting zoo -- ooh, he'll like that!) in the spring.  First up, in October, is the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the Concrete Bunker, performing Le Sacre and others.

Two days ago:  "are pianos in orchestras?"

One day ago:  "Oh, I really hope I'm done with my piano lessons by October."

Gradually I figured it out.  He wants to play the piano with the orchestra!

For the first time, I felt that pang of pity that I'm sure occurs many times in the life of a parent.  This disappointment will be slight.  Eventually he will get a chance to perform somewhere.  But life has many other tricks up its sleeve.  The human condition lies it wait for him.  His enemy is a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.

I have no choice.  I'm locking him in the house forever.  He'll be safe here.

Lileks takes about five unrelated threads and weaves them into a gorgeous mosaic.

[Perhaps there's a way I can disguise my shame in using that metaphor.  Must.  Adopt.  Tone. Of.  Self.  -Deprecatory.  Irony.]

Today he's covering the repulsive shallowness of the pop culture and its acolytes, and he's on fire.  If only Jerry Falwell had half of Lilkes' meterosexual hipness, the history of the late 20th century would have been written very differently.

I really do prefer the bad old days, when celebrities had to lie. Because it least it meant that there was some standard to which they were obliged to pay lip service.

Yes.  We need some kind of system.  Call it a tax.  Or tribute money.  Except it wouldn't be paid in money, but hypocrisy.  So vice could pay it.  To virtue.  Sort of.  I dunno; I don't quite have this pulled all together, but when I do, I'll let you know.  I'm sure it will be brilliant.

No magazine really reflects the world as I see it. They either magnify an interesting portion beyond its importance, or float off into irrelevance. Which is why I prefer the internet. Every day, a thousand pages. We make it. It’s our magazine. It’s the true pop culture, and the only question is how long it will take before the democratization of information makes the old celebrity paradigm irrelevant.

In the future, everyone will be hyperlinked for fifteen minutes. And that’s a good thing.

Yes, a very good thing -- if I get my turn.  So, how about it mister big internet footprint guy sir, I link to you, and you link back to me.  Seems fair, right?  Perfectly symetrical, I think.  Downright symbiotic.

I saw a documentary on Nazi art called Architecture of Doom at Blockbuster and brought it home.  Last night I watched the first half.

We're promised a view of the Nazi aesthetic and the importance Hitler et al. placed on art as part of an attempt to reinvent German culture.  We get some of that, but they spend a lot of time talking about doctors and euthanasia.  And, as others have already complained, the naration and production values are uninspired.

Hey, if you don't want to talk about architecture much, then I suggest maybe you don't want to put words like, you know, architecture in the title.  And don't merely assert that Hitler's own designs were tasteless and then show a couple of still photos; give us some analysis.

Oh well.  I complain too much, and I don't claim this post has the dicipline of a real movie review; here's the real thing.  We see enough from the annual Nazi art exhibitions (particularly in the heroic statuary) to get confirmation of a certain creepy fact about conflicted Nazi attitudes about ... well, just read this article that Arts & Letters Daily featured a few weeks ago.  And I should give the filmmakers credit for something else:  if not for them, and the "research" (3 minutes worth of Googling) I did for this post, I would have never learned the unrelated fact that architect Antonio Ricci designs his buildings in certain ways so he can travel to the Deep Umbra and attain full Nephandi mage status.  Good for him!

I think I'm getting close to a breakthrough on my faux-Celtic choir piece.  Two nights ago I wrote a melody that seemed pretty close to workable basis.  I decided to stop there and go to bed early.  I would wake up early the next morning, grab my notebook, and put the finishing touches on it.

I have found those first few minutes after waking each day are times when my mind is clearest and least distracted.  However, doing anything, even taking time to shower or eat, can clog the gears.  Somehow it seems important to keep lying in bed.  Anticipating this, I put my notebook on the bedside table.

That night (two nights ago) my son decided to have a nightmare.  He was pretty irrational and loud, so dealing with him took a while.  That killed any hope for me of falling right back to sleep.

A couple of hours later, the Maharincess lost her pacifier.  For her, this is a major emotional crisis.  I had to find it and get her tucked back into bed.

A while later, the dog started barking.  That's rare, but when it happens, it's a problem since he sleeps right in the master bedroom.

And can I also take this time to mention that during the previous morning, the wifeosphere got up early and forgot to turn her alarm off?

Thus were my plans for early rising defeated.  Sheesh.  Betrayed by my own.  They're all disloyal.  My enemies now recruit within the sanctum of the familial unit.  Oh, how cunning and remorseless they are.  Then it hit me!  The strawberries!  I ran down to the icebox, and sure enough, I couldn't find them.  They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the icebox DID exist, and I'd have produced that key if they hadn't of pulled the Caine out of action.  Enraged, and more than a little frightened, I pulled out a pair of steel ball berings and spun them obsessively until I calmed down.

Coda:  this morning I awoke early after an uneventful and restful night, grabbed my notebook and in a few minutes transcribed a flawless version of the melody.  (Well, flawless by my standards.)  I'm ready to procede.  Look upon my works, O my enemies, and despair!  Ha!

Some guy named Carl has a blog called Between the Coasts.  We should add him to the list of people who rate Shostakovich as the top composer of the 20th century; also check out his micro guide to the best of the Shostakovich symphonies.

Looking at the Fredömeter, I see that Britten and Stravinsky are still tied for first, but Shostakovich is trending sharply upward.

Speaking of John Adams, while vainly looking for a link in my previous post, I came across this interview I've seen before.  It's a fascinating read and as a bonus it's got plenty of short sound files of his music.  (Don't miss his jaw-dropping song "Three Weeks".)  Heck, you can watch the interview on tee-vee if your bandwidth is of sufficient manliness.

Speaking of manliness, in a not very related development, German men are no longer allowed to stand and deliver.

And completing this detour into irrelevancy, if you are not the alpha male type, you may want to apply for this undignified job.

Back to John Adams:  can someone explain to me why I don't own this CD yet?

A while back I mentioned I'm writing a choir piece based on an Irish poem.  I thought I could get it done easily, but that securing the copyright permission would be hard.  Boy, did I have that backwards.

The poem was translated from mediaeval Latin and published in the late 20s, so the copyright status was dicey, and I knew I could not make any assumptions about it.  The translator is now dead and doesn't have much of a footprint on the internet.  My one lead was that a university library in Ireland lists her manuscripts in its holdings.  So I emailed the library, and got a reply within two days.  The librarian gave me the address of the translator's niece, now an elderly woman herself, but still very much alive, in charge of the translator's estate.  The librarian also volunteered to contact her and let her know who I was -- the soul of helpfulness.

So I sent a letter to the niece in Ireland, and got a reply in about two weeks.  She gave me permission to use the poem for free.

Folks, it's not supposed to work that way.  In spite of what you might think about the Library of Congress, there is no information center that can definitively tell you that a work is in the public domain.  Copyright holders need not register their copyrights or advertise them in any way.  They can sit back quietly and nail you when you assume too much, if they want to be jerks about it.

Fortunately, few people want to be jerks.  But the uncertainty creates problems.  If you want to compose vocal music, you need texts to set, and you will either have to go on these treasure hunts or restrict yourself to texts that date unambiguously from before 1923.

If you want to enter a choral composition competition, you will likely need to certify in some way that you have permission to the text you have set.  Ditto if you are looking for a publisher.

Anyway, I got the permission and started serious work on the composing.  Now I find myself in the middle of the worst writer's block I've ever experienced.  I can generate ideas, that's not the problem; it's just that all my ideas are flawed, or lead to dead ends, or are inappropriate for this text, or just plain stink.

I hope this isn't part of a long term trend, but John Adams says it is.  (Darn.  I'm sure I read somewhere John Adams saying composition has got harder and less certain as he has aged.  Google is not helping me.  I can't find a link.  So much for ending this post with a nice punch.)

Two Americas.  In one, the blue bloods who donate big bucks to UMS, or who can afford subscriptions, get to order their UMS tickets early.  In the other, poor starving artists like me who deserve the good seats wind up in the second balcony nursing bloody noses because we have to wait until Monday to order.

Excuse me, Mr. Fredösphere sir, but as a member of the technological elite who can order UMS tickets online, you don't have to wait until Monday.  You can order this Friday.

Ah!  Now there's a elitism I think we can all agree with!

So, the wifeösphere and I are in intense negotiations over which events we will attend this year.  Follow the link above if you want to see the whole schedule; here's what we're looking at:

October 
Paul Taylor Dance Co.  This is a family performance and we've promised Der Drübermensch he can attend a few orchestral concerts this year.  I'd like to know what kind of music ensemble the dancers tour with.  The program promises Le Sacre will be included -- hey!  I could finally get to see it.
November 
Kremerata Baltica, a chamber orchestra.  They are playing Shostakovich and Schnittke.  The latter's instrumental works are unknown to me, but his Choral Concerto only grows in my estimation every time I hear it.
January 
Lahti Symphony Orchestra.  Canadian pianist Louis Lortie will play concertos by Tchaikovsky (#3) and Prokofiev (#1).  That will be good.  And we'll get to hear Sibelius #2 again -- can they outplay the Israeli Phil, who performed it last season?  Will their security detail be as impressive?
Audra McDonald.  We had tickets last year but she canceled on us when some movie offer came along.  Like some codependent abuse victim, we may get tickets again.
February 
Lorin Maazel and the New York Phil come to town for two concerts.  Will we choose Mozart & Mahler (#5), or Dvorak & Bartok (Concerto for Orchestra)?  Or neither?  Why am I not excited by this?
Soweto Gospel Choir.  I'm not excited about this either, but we gotta have some choir music in this list, right?  And unlike the Trio Mediaeval or the Le Concert Spirituel this won't be at St. Francis, the most painful concert venue in town, and that's worth something, right?
Midsummer Night's Dream by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Choir of the Enlightenment.  This is a semi-staged performance with Mendelssohn's famous incidental music.  Okay, now I'm excited.  Here are the details.
March 
Dan Zanes.  He performs folk music for kids.  But will Der Drübermensch like it if he doesn't bring violins and oboes and tubas and all that orchestra stuff?
Oslo Philharmonic.  Okay, this Previn/Mutter concerto has me curious, and the Afternoon of a Faun would be very easy on the ears.

Why is it, every year, the cram so many of the concerts I care about into February and March?  I will give them credit for scheduling nothing during Holy Week.  In 2003 Tom Sheets conducted the Brahms Requiem on Good Friday and I had to give my tickets away, and this year Bill Bolcom's lollapalooza fell on Maundy Thursday.  Church Musicians Not Welcome, I guess.

We'll probably go to half these.  We'll have to rely on what is provided by the Ann Arbor or Detroit orchestras for kiddie koncerts.  Once again, I'll miss the vocal offerings, because most of them are all-early music and that's too hard on my attention span.  Somebody please tell UMS to bring back the modern choir music.

Two weeks ago I showed you the house built by Green Stamps.  Today I'll give you three more of Ypsilanti's stately homes.

This second empire monster can be found on Grove St.  It was built by John Gilbert in 1860.  It was restored in 1987 and now contains appartments. The lawn is a vast, empty green rectangle; apparently its current owner is the least ambitious landscaper in history.  The house looks great, however.  But say, what's that thing peeking over the top?  It's a tower!  In the back?  This is the front of the house we're looking at, right?  Maybe the tower was positioned to overlook the slope that heads down to the rear and left side.

One more odd detail:  off down the hill a bit, apparently a part of the property, sits a seedy 50s-era motel -- "Yates", or "Tates", or "Bates", I think it was called.  Very strange.  And the old woman's voice I heard screaming "Norman!" from a second-floor window gave me the creeps, to tell the truth.


On my walking tour I found these two houses within a few blocks of each other, south of Michigan Ave.  Both are neoclassical examples on corner lots, with the impressive columned porch of each facing the side.  Yes, even in the second house, the entrance (which you can't see, even if you click to see the larger version) is at the narrow end of the house.  The second house also appears to be a johnny-come-lately to the classical style; I'm betting that porch is an addition.  Also note the way the ionic columns lack bases, which is unusual.  I really like the urns and the unrestrained folliage of the first.

I'm calling these houses neoclassical rather than greek revival because the capitals and grand scale of the round columns seem more Roman than Greek to me.  However, I admit I can confuse the two styles sometimes, and the more I read on the subject, the less I seem to know -- a common experience as I get older.

We watched House of Sand and Fog over the weekend because Movielens told me to.  (And if you haven't figured out the awesome wonderfulness of the whole collaborative filtering thing, I suggest you read up on it.)  And another reason was because some bozo movie reviewer named Roger Ebert in some provincial backwater called Chicago said it was good.

If you read Ebert's review, you will be told that the tension of the movie lies in the sympathy you will feel for all characters in the conflict.  You will be deceived.  On one side you have a hard-work and responsibility; on the other you have repulsive fecklessness and the emotional intelligence of preschoolers.  I wished the latter had shown a bit more sang froid and a little less whininess and tendency to panic.

The characters in this film are fascinating and the performances are all excellent, with Ben Kingsley's Colonel Behrani standing out as a flawed but ultimately strong, almost heroic figure.  The movie fails in the plot, which has holes as big as the Caspian Sea.  Several times the characters are required to make the worst (or most unmotivated) of all possible choices so the dramatic denouement can be reached.  (And it was the county government--apparently Marin county government--that screwed up; why can't they just sue them? The bureaucrats sit there in their fancy-pants administration building and they can't figure out that business taxes should apply to people who, you know, have businesses.) The contortions of the plot, plus my lack of sympathy for the feckless weenies on one side of the conflict (and have I mentioned already that they are feckless?) caused me to disconnect emotionally from the movie fairly early on.  Only Kingsley's handling of the Colonel's increasingly desperate situation kept me watching. At last: Kingsley proves he can handle the strong-willed Asian leader type.

I can't recommend this movie.

Over at Andante, David Salvage struggles with the problem of good taste.  (Darn, I can't find a permanent link.  If you're reading this and you are from the future, look in the archive around August 2004.)  When a friend likes some music that you recognize as derivative, what do you say?

Salvage spends time beating back the beast of postmodern relativism.  He does it with assertions and the whole thing is unsatisfying.

What I would have liked to see is some kind of discussion of hierarchy based on experience and expertise.  Here's what I mean:  find some innocent rustic for whom music means a few pentatonic tunes played on a dulcimer or a mouth bow or something.  Now sit him down in front of this website and play him a midi file of the Pina Colada Song.  First he will be disoriented until his ear becomes acclimated to understanding chromatic intervals.  (This is a genuine problem for some people and is analogous to people from the western music tradition hearing microtones in music for the first time.)  Gradually he will come to understand the new musical language as he listens obsessively to repeated playings of this gorgeously sophisticated music.  From there he can begin to appreciate the complex ways in which multiple instrument sounds are combined.  He will also be dazzled by the pristine perfection of the computer's pitch and rhythm.

Is a point beginning to emerge from this thought experiment?  Nothing seems derivative to someone who is ignorant of the original material.  We must keep in mind which problems are caused by ignorance, and remember to think of ignorance mostly in terms of handicap, not vice.  (Although we should keep in mind that willful ignorance can exist, and it is a very ugly thing.)

Let's also consider twelve-tone music.  the simple fact is that there are very few people who have a natural interest in it.  All the rest of us must study music theory for years -- years! -- before we get it.  And for some of us (like me) even that is not enough.  Can we all agree that some music places too many demands on the listener?  That promoting that music will never become anything more than research without development?  Apparently, that's something that pioneers like Schoenberg and Boulez never understood.  To fans of twelve tone music:  now is the time to accept that it will never be, can never be, a commonly accepted sound.  Your efforts to make this music is not wrong, and you are not my enemy by doing it.  But please understand:  I am not yours if I ignore you.

Which is something I'm not doing right now as I compose this hysterical bit of incontinent drivel.

BTW check out this scholarly debate regarding a Neanderthal bone flute that may be evidence of a very ancient preference for the common diatonic scale.

I blogged a while back about buying First Lensman by E. E. "Doc" Smith.  Since today is Sci-Fi Thursday (not to be confused with Antipope Thursday) I thought I'd follow up with a mini review.  First, you may want to read this plot summary if you need it.  Here's a more detailed summary of the whole Lensman series.

This book is non-great.  It is non-good.  It avoids badness barely.

Yes, I've been told Doc Smith was the first author to move the action outside of our solar system.  I grant you, that's an achievement.  But if you want people to still read your stuff 50 years after its written (you know, the current day, when people really are traveling between the stars) you better pay attention to plot or character development.  Preferably some of both.

A number of things were embarassing, like the authors ignorance of the group dynamics of national elections, or the way the bad guys are unable to anticipate obvious tactical innovations, or that one small spaceship's crew consists of eight military men and one cook (I guess the microwave oven was broken), but hey, you expect any old sci-fi novel to show it's age in that way.

There are two more fundamental weaknesses.  First, we're introduced to some awsomely wise and powerful aliens who can predict the future and manipulate it.  In the first chapter therefore, we find out that

SPOILER ALERT

the good guys are going to win.  Not only are they going to win, but this godlike race will choreograph every step along the way to victory.  Shoo, I've never seen an author purge the suspense from his novel quite so quickly or ruthlessly.  In some highbrow novels, that might be okay.  Maybe Doc Smith is an early, precocious postmodernist who is experimenting with plotless fiction.  Maybe he's one of those etiolated aesthetes who care only for character development and eschew action.

No. 

The conceit of First Lensman is that the gods are recruiting certain individuals of exceptional intellect, benevolence and will power to form an elite cohort to police the galaxy and establish Civilization.  They are given "lenses", devices that allow them to read minds.  Pretty cool, but my problem is with the title character, Virgil Samms.  We are told over and over (and over and over) that he is the great man of his age, that all who know him freely acknoledge the superiority of his mind and character.  We are told it, but we are never shown it.  The Virgil Samms that the reader comes to know seems to be pretty average, frankly.

Too bad.  I really like fiction that is innocent of the difficulty in human space travel.  The whole space opera genre had my hopes up.  I won't be reading the other books of the Lensman series.  Looks like I need to keep looking if I want to find the Wagner of early sci-fi.

I wanted to follow up on my previous post and mention this particular sci-fi book cover. First, that spaceship: do you suppose Glamorous Glennis was the model? It's got that orange color, and the teardrop shape. Maybe I should check the date...naw, I don't want my beautiful theory destroyed by some ugly fact.

What really stopped me was a feeling -- saaaaay, haven't I seen that picture before? I've read that book! Now, I remember precisely nothing about the plot, but that picture I'll never forget. There's something about the young spaceman that radiates innocence and vulnerability; it's that earnest blond head enclosed in a fragile glass case. The wicked shape of the hammer, and the anonymity of the hooded attacker adds to the horror. You see the spaceman is a moment away from a shattering death.

Let me guess: I suspect the artist intended me to identify with ... uh ... I'll side with the victim.

Thanks to Reflections in D Minor who provided this link to a series of covers from classic sci-fi books.

What is it about this art that is so beautiful?  It's got a hook into a part of me that longs for ... for something.  Maybe it's The Island!

I love the way the space ships have curves.  I love cars that have curves.  Curves seem to have disappeared from our cars sometime in the late sixties.  Why?  Why is the styling of the PT Cruiser such a rare achievement in the contemporary environment?  Probably because they consume a little more steel.  Accountants can measure steel consumption, and they can't measure beauty and style.  They can measure the effects of a loss of beauty, as customers become bored and drift away, but that doesn't happen in the short term and understanding the cause and effect requires subtlety and judgement.

Lead and Gold has said it all better.  Here's a great explanation of the danger to large companies when they become seduced by cost cutting, and also see the links found here.

Hey you atheists:  your side is losing!  Haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw!

(Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily, which is always scrupulously fair to believers, even though editor Denis Dutton appears to be a skeptic.)

Thanks again to my friend Rick who found Joe Wolfe.  Joe has arranged Stairway to Heaven as though it were written by Schubert, Mahler, Bizet, Beethoven, etc.  Sound files are provided, but be warned the student orchestra contains, well, students.  I guess the London Philharmonic wasn't available that day.  Not included is a Stravinsky arrangement, so I'll provide it here (turn up your speakers):

DMP dmp dmp dmp dmp DMP dmp dmp DMP dmp DMP dmp dmp dmp DMP dmp DMP DMP....

Rick found Joe at a blog called All Night Surfing, which is too frightening to link to, but hey, who cares, I've already skimmed the good stuff for you:

Assasinations Foretold in Moby Dick (call it the Moby Code)
Radio Guy (a collector of "oddball and scary scientific stuff")

Okay, Terry Teachout, I'm going to take your word for it and put Peter Heyworth’s biography of Otto Klemperer on my reading list.

For those of you who cannot be bothered to follow the link, I'm talking about a mid-century conductor who became famous for stern, solemn and downright spooky interpretations of the great German orchestral standards.  That doesn't grab you?  How about a story of a life that includes brilliance, bar brawling, escape from genocide, bipolar disease, multiple religious conversions and embarassing/horrifying accidents (like a brain-damaging fall from a stage or self-immolation)?  You still find that dull?  What if I told you we're talking about Colonel Klink's father?  Now are you interested?

I spent 2003 reading composer biographies and I learned a few things.  Yes, I learned about Silbelius' alcoholism and Prokovief's ditching of his first wife and Copland's boyfriends and Stravinsky's constant money squabbles and fights with old friends from St. Petersburg who were jealous and provincial and how he ditched his first wife.  But what I really learned is that there are a lot of second-rate biographies to be found.  It seems that a writer will get the gig because of his closeness to the subject, not because of his writing skill.  And when the subject is merely famous, like Sibelius, even a large library won't have many biographies to choose from.  Only with a figure with a certain prescence in the pop culture, like Bernstein, will you find a good selection.

I liked Howard Pollack's take on Copland, but loved Humphery Burton's Leonard Bernstein.  I recommend you read them together, now that I know how much their lives were, uh, intertwined.  For Stravinsky I haven't yet found anything I thought worth finishing, and I haven't even looked at Robert Craft's writing because I doubt it can be sufficiently objective.  For coverage of Sibelius, Prokofiev and Ravel I had to rely on brief biographies from this series by Phaidon, but the authors recruited are not the best.

My pick for the winner of the biography contest is Humphrey Carpenter's Benjamin Britten:  a Biography.  Scroll down in the link and you will see Kirkus Reviews found it "first rate, if less than magisterial."  I can't say I felt the deprivation from this magisterium deficit.  I thought the book was the right length with the right combination of sympathy and honesty.

I thought you should know this.  I just looked up Pink Floyd at the Ann Arbor library website.  (I hoped to reserve Dark Side of the Moon but it turns out they don't have a copy.)  Well, look here:  according to them, Pink Floyd is a "musical quartet."  And here I was thinking all these years that they were a rock-and-roll combo.

I bought this CD "...Against the Dying of the Light" at Borders downtown last Sunday on impulse.  I didn't know the group but I liked the selection of pieces.

Cantus (whoa, is that a Frank Gehry background in their group photo?) started as a student group at St. Olaf in 1995 and took of from there.  There is no conductor listed anywhere, although the staff includes an executive director (tenor Michael Hanawalt) and an "artistic coordinator" (bass Erick Lichte).  Lots of chamber groups in the instrumental world do without conductors, but for a vocal group, or any group this big (ten performers) it seems an odd choice not to have a dictator running the show artistically.  (I infer the "coordiator" in Mr. Lichte's title indicates reduced authority.)

They sing with a full vibrato which is somewhat out of style in many places but continues to be the norm (I believe) in the Lutheran choral strongholds of the upper midwest.  So no one would mistake them for Chanticleer.  By using vibrato consistently, they give up the kind of creepily precise tuning that Chanticleer achieves.  (I mean creepy in a good way!)  I've heard the dynamic dodectet can even dial in tunings for different styles of music -- pure intervals for Renaissance music, equal temperment in some other cases.

Veljo Tormis is here making another appearance in my CD collection, and they chose two works by Sibelius, who is not the most interesting choral composer.  Randall Thompson's "Alleluia" makes an appearance at a brisk pace.  I've never heard it arranged for male choir; it works well.  Invocation by Debussy comes near the end and marks the only time a piano is heard.

Andante picks up the continuing debate: did Shostakovich insert secret anti-Soviet messages into his music?  Paul Mitchinson says no.  Mark Jordan says not so fast.  Now that I've finally reached the point that I am really interested in his music, I would love to know the truth.

In any event, we can all agree Shostakovich's life must have been filled with misery and terror, and we cannot judge someone whose suffered under pressure we've never felt.  But his generation's faith in the revolution, long after all evidence pointed to disaster, is a black box to me.  But not to everyone.  Leon Botstein makes a revealing comment in this Andante interview:

Shostakovich was like you or me, an ordinary person without the capacity for heroism. He wanted to have a career, but was always an idealist about Socialism and believed it could build a new world of brotherhood, justice, humanity and the rest. Socialism, after all, has a real point — it's attractive, unlike Nazism.

Yes, Nazism is unattractive, everywhere and at all times.  That explains why Hitler had all those thousands of animatronics at the Nuremberg rallies instead of real live people.

Of course Botstein means Socialism is attractive to himself and others like him.  In 1916, it was almost forgivable to imagine that transferring unlimited power to the State was the way to achieve a just society.  In 2004, it is not.  We succeeded in driving fascism to the fringe; what are we waiting for?

My dear friend Rick sent me this urgent information and I just couldn't keep it from you.

Yesterday I stopped at Borders downtown to browse, something I rarely indulge in these days.  Within seconds I had spotted two discs I badly wanted.  For now I'll discuss Accentus Transcriptions.  Follow the link and you can listen to some sound samples.

We saw Accentus chamber choir a few years ago at St. Francis church in Ann Arbor, one of the least enjoyable spaces for a concert.  We were able to sit close to Accentus so the sound-swallowing accoustics weren't a problem and our only complaint was the torture racks they call pews.  (They seem to date from a time when all Americans were four feet tall.) 

Oh, and let me complain about the grossly inadequate toilette arrangements at the church, which are shared with the performers.  Yet, if I didn't have to stand in line for so long, I would never have had the chance to stand next to William Bolcom, or hear him remark that the noise of the crowd was like a performance of aliotoric music.  Poor Bill, he found himself in a dull, awkward situation and made the best with the material he had to work with.

Accentus is big for a "chamber" choir.  It was founded by some effeminate-looking guy named Laurence Equilbey.  (Please, please follow the link and read a bit of it; I'm making a joke here people.)  I think it was this choir that opened my ears to the possibility that a choir's low end can sound with real authority if only the director has the drawing power (read:  the money) to attract a sufficient number of ultra-low basses.  Almost all amateur choirs, even the very good ones like we have at the University of Michigan, follow a bell curve distribution, meaning the very high and very low voices are rarer that you want.

Although Accentus is French, it lacked the expected continental classiness in its deportment, with plastic water bottles at their feet and a certain informal interaction with the conductor.  But hey, almost anyone can get punchy after a few weeks on tour, so maybe that's what was going on.

And what's with these Gallic noses, anyway?  I think I finally figured out how they can look so big without seeming to be very long.  The nose is long because it starts very high, up above the eyebrows.  This extends the total length but allows the tip to be located about where it should be.  Glad we got that settled.

An album devoted exclusively to choral transcriptions from instrumental music is risky, but this one works.  The Barber Agnus Dei is a demanding beast that pushes the limits of range and breathing.  A few years ago, we in the Ann Arbor Cantata Singers gave it a try and gave up after two rehearsals.  The Mahler Kein deutscher Himmel, from the Adagietto of Symphony No. 5, is included so the French can maintain their reputation for decadence -- the liner notes describe a link to A Death in Venice.  Oh, good.  But hey, they sing it wonderfully.

The one track I can't get out of my head is Soupir by Maurice Ravel / Clytus Gottwald.  I recall during the concert, I suddenly thought wait, what are those very high, very gentle pitches?  I wondered if they were overtones from a moment of harmonic perfection, then I concluded someone was whistling.  This reviewer calls it a "vocal whistle" supplied by a few sopranos.  Hard to believe.  Mesmerizing.

In the last few days, the news from the world of religion has adopted a disturbing, sometimes morbid, theme for some reason.

Kids in Hertzogville, South Africa got a day off from school in anticipation of the imminent resurrection of the currently dead Paul Meintjies, as predicted by a local prophet.  A local priest, obviously dealing with some serious faith issues, has disagreed, saying it was "highly unlikely that Meintjies would be resurrected."

An Oslo pastor has reluctantly reported a vision that the Olympics in Athens will result in a "bloodbath."  That's so typical.  Norway is just crawling with religious zealots.  Next door, a pastor in Sweden doesn't appreciate the life sentence the judge gave him for ordering his nanny to kill his wife.  A cell phone is involved, as you would expect.

Nigerian police have arrested 30 witch-doctors after finding 50 bodies and 20 human skulls.  Competing witches in Tanzania have killed but seven so far.  Okay, let's quickly move to the next story before I crack some really, really tasteless and insensitive joke....

Nobody dies in this one, so far as I know, but the second musical in as many years on the life of L. Ron Hubbard is about to hit Broadway, called Moonchild.  The previous musical was called A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, but you knew that already.

Authorities are getting off their collective duff, as well as their respective duffs, and investigating accusations of sexual abuse and forced marriages in a cult known as "Canada."  No, wait.  I think I got that mixed up.  You better read it for yourself.

And in case you skeptics are feeling smug right now about all this religion-inspired foolishness, just remember:  the worst crimes of all are usually inspired by atheistic governments or people who attend Wagner operas.

Let's return, shall we, to that Henry Mancini album I mentioned yesterday.  It consists of tapes raided from Henry Mancini's junk drawer.  This was an era (late 50s) when the music had class, but not taste, if you know what I mean.  (If you do, please tell me.)  Follow the link and listen to the sound clips.  I'll sink my snarky teeth into those five tracks.  Beware if you listen to the clips for Windows Media:  oops!  Instead of tracks 3-5, you will get tracks 4-6.  You do get to hear Molly Bee from track six that way, singing flat of course.  Somebody held their finger too long on the forward button of the Discman.

Eartha Kitt, Moon River.  This song more than any other will transport me to another world -- a beautiful yet strange world full of Twainesque river boats, bog flora, and sophisticated jazz clubs peopled by elegant, lonely dreamers.  Wearing bunny suits.  Under water.  This track is a harmonic convergence of song and artist.  Please note I did not say singer, but no slam intended.  No really, none.  I'm in awe of how she murmurs her way through it.  I've tried that technique enough to know that I can't pull it off and never will.

Rod McKuen, Natalie.  Dude, take better care of your voice.  It sounds like your nodes have grown vocal chords.

The Anita Kerr Singers, Too Little Time.  The lyrics really ought to be We're trapped ... in tin ... we're really trapped ... in tin....  No folks, they're not singing from inside a metal can, they're singing through a Zube Tube!

Georgie Griffith, Sometimes.  A track to demonstrate that the female vocalists on the album cannot reliably sing on pitch.  Eartha is an exception, naturally, as you will remember that what she is doing doesn't count as singing.

Henry Mancini, Love Theme From Sunflower.  Mancini conducts this instrumental number.  The recording is a sad mess, with distortion overwhelming even the moderately loud sections.  You don't really hear the distortion on this short, low-quality clip, nor will you get a chance to dig the short harpsichord solo.

This album is odd and uneven, yet cool.  By selecting mostly recordings not used in other albums, producer Rod McKuen ended up with a quirkly collection that skews toward the rejects.  But rejects can reveal a lot about an era and its art that the polished product cannot.

And what's with Rod McKuen as a poet?  His lyrics in this collection are some of the most prosey poetry ever.  When he Quest For Directness goes bad.

Remember that Symphony X post I blogged about, the one with the complaint about critic Kyle Gann?  Well, Gann and other critics have participated in a panel discussion that was going to become the subject of one of my posts.  Well, the New Criterion's blog Arma Virumque is prodding me to do it.  (It's got lots o' links to follow.)

It is kind of funny the way the panelists spend time at first undermining the legitimacy of the question, "why is there no big musical idea that dominates music at the moment."  It's so predictable.  And yet, if anyone cared to ask me, I'd probably do the same.

The New Criterion link also examines a long quote from Alex Ross of the New Yorker (which reminds me, why don't we have an Ypsilantier or an Ann Arborer?  Oh wait, we do, but everyone stopped reading them after Tina Brown ruined them) which dissects the current orchestra mess.  It would be nice if some structural reforms could revive audience interest in classical music.  Assuming structural reforms are possible anytime before we die.

And the link also references Alex Ross' reports from Bayreuth:  Wagner's dog cast in bronze, Was Elmer Fudd A Nazi, Parsifal juxtaposed with rotting rabbit corpses -- sheesh, this one link does it all!  I should skip the blogging and redirect this URL straight to TNC.

(And don't miss this follow up post by Stefan Beck, the clown prince of ... of ... of a word that means clever young arts journalist and rhymes with "crime".)

Oh my.  I just found out I won a contest I barely remember entering.  My entry is among the winners of this caption contest.

I think I won't tell you which one is mine -- I'll let you guess.

And at this time I would like to express my remorse, and apologize to my family and friends who have been hurt by my reckless and selfish act of winning this contest.  I am so sorry.

Here's an assignment to all you Flash Animation experts out there:  I want to see a website that will accept a string of text and map it onto the headline in that famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" picture.  I'm talking about a variation on what these guys are doing.

And regarding my previous post:  yes, I know Eartha Kitt was Catwoman, not Batwoman.  Right now blogger.com isn't letting me get in and edit existing posts, so I can't fix it.  Oh the shame.

We saw Holes last night, a movie that delivers pure cinematic satifaction.  I'm not being sarcastic; I loved it.

I suppose it helps that the source material was a kids' novel, and therefore on the short side.  I didn't feel the loss of any key material.  (Louis Sachar converted his own novel into the screenplay; Ayn Rand did not have as happy an experience in a certain movie I've seen ten times.  [BTW look for Sachar in a cameo as Mr. Collingwood.])  Oh, if I had to quibble, I'd say the various plot elements got resolved a little too quickly at the end, but otherwise, it was perfect.  It manipulates your emotions in a way I don't mind; unlike My Big Fat-Free Greek Salad Dressing or whatever you call that movie we saw last week, which was fun but a little too manipulative.  Or maybe I liked Holes because the manipulation was not exclusively aimed at those of the female pursuasion.  Call it a Mr. Holland's Opus without the embarassing music.

As we watched the credits scroll by, we saw lots of familiar names:  Sigourney Weaver, yes, Henry Winkler, yes that was really him, Jon Voight, one of those actors you've seen everywhere but can't remember where, Tim Blake Nelson, I'm sure he was in O Brother Where Art Thou, Eartha Kit ... Eartha Kit!  Batwoman!  The chick who sings Moon River on this album!  (Go there and have a listen.)  A brilliant casting move.  She's got the voice and looks that are sultry and spooky; perfect for a fortune teller.  And even now, in her 70s, she's still got that certain confidence -- call it a feminine swagger -- that is attention-getting and that some men find exciting.

Sometimes the national security types will ask us bloggers to stop blogging.  Here's one example.

About a month ago this guy from the CIA calls me, and asks me to stop blogging.  Something about my blog undermining the national will to live.  My reaction is basically, hey buddy, this is America.  I realized, if I stop blogging, then the terrorists will have won.

I liked this thread on creativity.  As is often the case in ruminations like this, it mostly enlightened, and even when it was wrong, it still acted as a stimulant.  (Or maybe it just acted like that famous depressant, alcohol -- it made me stupider in a way that made me think I was brilliant.  No, if true, it would be painful; therefore, I believe it is false.)

One fundamental assumption bothered me -- that pursuing your dream must always be top priority.  It was never made explicit, but I certainly got that vibe from reading it.  This line was telling:

The pain of making the necessary sacrifices always hurts more than you think it's going to. I know. It sucks. That being said, doing something seriously creative is one of the most amazing experiences one can have, in this or any other lifetime. If you can pull it off, it's worth it. Even if you don't end up pulling it off, you'll learn many incredible, magical, valuable things. It's NOT doing it when you know you full well you HAD the opportunity- that hurts FAR more than any failure.

A good point, but someone ought to state the caveat:  if the necessary sacrifices include God, your family, people, and other rather important stuff, then your dream has a name, and He Is Moloch.  (Ignore that angry shouting you hear coming from the next room; it's only the wifeösphere complaining; something about me blogging too much.  Sheesh -- doesn't she realize how important this is?)

The best parts are the exhortations to forget about success.  "If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being 'discovered' by some big shot, your plan will probably fail."  Ah.  Yes.  That's probably true.  Thanks.

This being the second in a series of posts about religious art, very broadly defined.

In my previous post on this topic, I promised you Jesus' graduation picture. Here it is. Hey, that's what we called it at the Christian liberal arts college I attended, and really I'm just trying to make fun of a work of art that, c'mon now admit it, deserves some deconstructing.

The artist is Warner Sallman, and the guy is just everywhere. There's a certain generation of churchgoers for whom Sallman is The Source for religious imagery. Go to this list and see Christ At Heart's Door. Is there a church basement anywhere in the civilized world that does not have this picture hanging on the wall? From the same list, see Christ In Gethsemane, Jesus the Children's Friend, or Christ at Dawn. In every case, we get the blue-eyed, jut-jawed winner of the Best Nordic Head contest.

I'm not writing this to make fun; well, not only to make fun. It's just that I think Sallman's ubiquitous vision did real harm. Thanks to his efforts, a certain group of people raised in churches decorated with Sallman prints found it marginally easier to dismiss Christianity as a club for old ladies and the old ladyfied at heart.

From the same link, check out The Boy Christ. If you are not revolted by that kandy-koated kid, there is something wrong with you.

Whew. I'm done. Let me use one more Sallman installment as a transition to a happier topic:

Next time on Varieties of Religious Art: Christ the Pilot! Don't touch that dial!

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt