The Fredösphere

I hope you all have run into Exclamation Mark by now.  This is a guy with an eye for beeeyotiful stuff, with a strong bias toward sci-fi art.

Did someone say sci-fi art?  I keep struggling with a way to express what this stuff does to me.  I look at it, and it immediately transports me to an alien world.  Call it Planet 1950s.

I'm starting to really get to know my way around that planet. I'm recognizing certain artists' looks.  Take this image, from the sci-fi art link above...



...and this one, from a page about the Rim Worlds Sequence.



Okay, that was obvious.  Same artist, same medium, same POV, same freakin' day, probably -- "Well, that wraps up that cover for Amazing Science Fiction Stories.  Say, I've got all these leftover teals and rusty reds on my palette; it would be a shame to waste them...."

Labels: sci-fi

I am glad these exist, but please don't make me buy or build one.

• The Digital Sundial.  Digital, but not electronic.  Frightening.
• The Lego Harpsichord.  Don't miss the mp3.  This one depresses me.  It's a musical matchstick cathedral.
  
• The Double Violin.  No, I'm not glad about this one.  Should have been killed at birth.
• The Glass Harmonica.  Ooh, now this one we'll let live.  Click on "albums" to get to the sound files.

Place the tips of your fingers gently on the edge of the plastic surface.  Frame your question carefully.  Wait while the answer is spelled out before your wondering eyes.

Yes, the powers of Google are supernatural.  I noticed I was getting an astonishing number of visitors searching for Nietzsche is dead.  It turns out that, for a while, I was the #2 expert in the world on that subject.  Wow.  Strange.  And the post they were visiting was crappy, even by my standards.

I also get a fair number of people looking for the lyrics to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah".  Heh.  And there are plenty of people interested in the art of Warner Sallman who may not get exactly what they were looking for when Google sends them here.

I was nosing around a list of great sci-fi and stumbled across this reference to novelist Charles G. Finney.  Saaaay, I recognise that name.  Let's find out more.  His best book is The Circus of Dr. Lao, written in 1934 and made into a movie with Tony Randall.  It has been described as somewhat plotless and I don't think I'm tempted to read the book, but some people remember it fondly:

Maybe it's the theme: people wouldn't know a miracle if it bit them on the behind. So what good are miracles? Did they save guys from getting "'dobe walled by Pancho Villa?" And what is a "miracle" in a skeptical yet superstitious world? Did miracles save the ancient gods and monsters from extinction? Who is Dr. Lao? Curator, pulp fiction "Chinaman," or the last of the gods? The relentlessly laconic author doesn't seem to care about these questions one way or another, beyond framing them....

Even the clumsiness of the novel is endearing. The entire final section (a virgin sacrifice to a defunct god), for example, is written in an overwrought pulp style that might be parody, and might be heartfelt. Who knows?

At this point in the article, I'm deeply disoriented and I'm seeing the computer screen through contra-zoom.  Could this possibly be the Charles G. Finney...but no, no, good heavens, of course not, Charles G. Finney -- the preacher and key actor in the Second Great Awakening -- died in 1875.  His writings were more along this line:

There was no fire, and no light, in the room; nevertheless it appeared to me as if it were perfectly light. As I went in and shut the door after me, it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face. It did not occur to me then, nor did it for some time afterward, that it was a wholly mental state. On the contrary it seemed to me that I saw him as I would see any other man. He said nothing, but looked at me in such a manner as to break me right down at his feet. I have always since regarded this as a most remarkable state of mind; for it seemed to me a reality, that he stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to him. I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance. It seemed to me that I bathed his feet with my tears; and yet I had no distinct impression that I touched him, that I recollect.

 

I must have continued in this state for a good while; but my mind was too absorbed with the interview to recollect anything that I said. But I know, as soon as my mind became calm enough to break off from the interview, I returned to the front office, and found that the fire that I had made of large wood was nearly burned out. But as I turned and was about to take a seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost. Without any expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that there was any such thing for me, without any recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in the world, the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed it seemed to have come in waves and waves of liquid love; for I could not express it in any other way. It seemed like the very breath of God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like immense wings.

O people, the waves of liquid love -- The waves of liquid love.

Aworks adds to the band name list with some classical/pop crossbreeds.

The fifty-voice Perth choir "Canzonetta" is singing their arrangement of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.  Hat tip to the A Cappella News.

The kids these days are asking, "who's Pink Floyd?"  Reminds me of a friend who found some Gen-Xers who didn't know Paul McCartney had been in a band before Wings.

Don't bother downloading that tease of a sound file; it's merely a radio interview and the music is not available.  In another gross oversight, they also failed to provide a downloadable movie file of The Wizard of Oz.

I hear the MacArthur Foundation will announce any moment now the winners of this year's "Genius" Grants.  I know the whole blogosphere must be abuzz will speculation on what kind of statement the Fredösphere will make.  I have prepared two versions.  I will release one of them once it becomes clear which is more appropriate. 

Will it be this one?

Once again the MacArthur Foundation has announced an array of hacks, weirdos, subversives and frauds as winners of its "Genius" grants, thereby confirming that its selection process could not be more corrupt and counterproductive.  The foundation seems perversely motivated to find the most worthy persons possible, then choosing people exactly unlike them in every way.

Or this one?

I would like to thank the MacArthur Foundation for awarding me one of their fellowships.  I am deeply humbled by this honor and amazed to find myself placed among such a stellar group of people.  I will endevor to live my life in a way worthy of the confidence this noble institution has placed in me.

Thanks to additional information from Scott Spiegelberg, I see the problem with my permalinks.  (Scott is a nice guy, really, especially when you consider he is unimaginably evil.)  The problem is an artifact of my decision to have my domain manager use a frame to redirect my traffic to the real location at comcast.net.

Using a frame meant people always got "fredosphere.com" when they bookmarked.  Beyond that though, frames are pains in the neck.  One nice thing about getting rid of them:  now you Mozilla users will see the adorably cute icon I made when you use tabbed browsing.

You are using tabbed browsing, aren't you?

Yikes.  First Alex Ross, then Scott Spiegelberg, accuse me of having no permalinks.  I have been slandered!

You will find my permalinks by clicking on the time stamp at the end of each post.  I agree it is a little confusing, but other blog authors do it that way (like Mr. Spiegelberg himself, that perfidious trafficker in human flesh!) and that is the way (as I remember) Blogger sets you up by default.

Anyway, I give in.  I'll change my template to something less confusing very soon.  Meanwhile, those looking for my contribution to the whole Dancing About Architecture-themed, tag-teamed, 15' steel cage match of links should jump over here and then scroll up.

I just noticed this in That NYT Article On Blogging Everyblog Is Blogging About.  Quoth Wonkette:

''It's weird,'' she said. ''It's like discovering you can yodel. You know what I mean? I'm good. I really never would've known.''

In an effort to churn this "yodeling about film noir" thing a bit more, I was going to spend the weekend writing a country & western song/yodel about film noir.  The project was doomed on several levels:  my banjo skills are not what they should be; making the recording would take more time that the joke justified; and above all, the lyrics simply never came.  (Seems like there must be a hilarious rhyme with "noir" when it is pronounced "nuh-war" but I cannot find it.)

Waaaait, you say.  You were talking about yodeling, but then you said country & western.  To which I respond, do you not know about the great C&W yodelers from the 30s and 40s?  You may not know, but I know.  Oh, believe me, I know.

My mother's formative years overlapped with the big C&W yodeler craze.  She picked up the skill and maintained it long after others forgot about it.  Her occasional performances were an established fact of my childhood and I did not question them for a long time.  Eventually however, I became a teenager and started to notice that very, very few of my peers had mothers who yodeled.  Make that none of my peers.

I once read in the New York Times of a recital of Messiaen's organ music.  The reviewer described a piercingly loud note as expressing a "joy that is indistinguishable from terror."  Let me tell you, I have known an embarrassment that is indistinguishable from watching a rabid wolverine systematically gnaw your leg off over a period of three days.

Like everyone else, I survived my teen years and now, as an adult, I can look upon my parent's special characteristics with fondness and appreciation.  The simple fact is, without my mother's musical ambition for herself and her children, I would have never received entry into the glorious world of music.

Welcome, weary travelers from the land of The Rest Is Noise.  Sit down and stay a while.  Listen to my choral music if you like, or take in a paranoid dystopia if that's more your line.

Alex Ross apparently liked my line about "yodeling about film noir."  (Aw, shucks.  He likes me.  He really likes me.)  In a later post he said he disliked writing about other music critics because that is like "yodeling about yodeling."  Have you ever been bothered (like I always am) that a lot of lyrics of dance songs follow the pattern of "there's a brand new dance, and it goes like this...."  Why is it necessary to make the dance talk about itself?  It's almost -- you guessed it -- dancing about dancing.

Have you ever noticed the poverty of the language devoted to worship?  A lot of worship consists of "we praise you God," or "we worship you."  If I were God, I wouldn't have any patience with it.  "Stop talking about worshiping me and start doing it."  I suppose that's why I'm not God.

So there you have it:  worshiping about worshiping.  Is this a problem common to all languages?  Do we need a better understanding of what worship is?  Does this post need a clearer, more unified theme to keep it from losing all sense of focus?

Go to this article from the Hudson Review and you will find a quote from Hannah Arendt:

It is in [the nature of thought] to undo, unfreeze as it were, what language, the medium of thinking, has frozen into thought—words (concepts, sentences, definitions, doctrines), whose “weakness” and inflexibility Plato denounces so splendidly. . . . The consequence of this peculiarity is that thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics.

I am not even close to endorsing all the implications (or even claiming a full understanding) of what Arendt is saying.  I will say I was arrested by this idea that language, as the medium of thought, can freeze thought, and thought can unfreeze language.  It reminds me of my increasing reluctance to put my musical ideas into Finale, my music notation software.

I find Finale has a freezing action upon my music.  Once my notes are in the computer, it becomes a big chore (and an emotional struggle) to change them.

I also find that paper notation has the same effect, albeit much less.  Paper is a much more flexible medium.  When I want to defer decisions about precise notes, a squiggle or some other on-the-fly symbol can serve as a marker for my thoughts in their semi-formed state.  Furthermore, I can cross out unwanted notes, yet leave them visible as a record of what I have done.

Ideally, a composer hears all notes in all parts in his head.  The act of committing those notes to paper then is one of transcription, not composition.  Mozart and Britten could do it; some of the rest of us are not quite there yet. 

The composer of the future will have a MIDI port mounted in his forehead, so this will not be an issue.

Via Arts Journal, we learn that in 2006 we are going to have a very, very bad year.  That is assuming we survive next Wednesday:

As I write, fears focus on the asteroid Toutatis, a mountain-sized planetoid that is expected to pass very close to Earth on Wednesday, September 29, 2004. For months, the internet has been abuzz with woeful speculation that Toutatis will hit us rather than miss by a few Earth radii. Depending on where such an object landed, it might devastate a hemisphere—or worse. An impact at sea might send colossal waves, or tsunamis, roaring around the globe to smash and drown coastal cities from New York to Singapore.

I question the timing!  And there are other doomsday scenarios:

Depending on whose imaginings you sample, there is a terrifying risk that rising sea levels caused by global warming will put present-day seacoasts under water…North America soon will look like a tattered croissant…the San Andreas fault will give, with calamitous results for California…Antarctica and the Arctic will wind up on the equator…

Moving the equator around?  Oh, well, we know all about that, don't we.

…the Yellowstone caldera will erupt again…a huge undersea landslide will send monster waves crashing into shores around the Atlantic basin…we will freeze and/or starve in darkness as global oil supplies are exhausted during the coming decades.

He's trying to scare us.  He doesn't realize some of us like this kind of stuff.

I've never cared for Edith Piaf.  Pardon me, but her singing is the perfect expression of a certain personality type that needs to be slapped around.  Since I'm not one to give women the back of my hand, I find no attraction in it.  (My prefered medium of abuse is blogging.)

So I'm driving to work and I'm listening to WKAR Classical Music out of Michigan State University.  Carmen is the theme, and Mark Schwitzgoebel announces a Piaf song called Carmen's Story.  My expectations are low -- but then I hear it.  (You can hear a bit too, from track 21 on this page.)

The name of this genre must be Goofball Demonic.  I suppose I like it because Piaf is showing some spine and shouting, not wimpering her way one more time through whatever the French is for "smack me again, I'm a bad person."

The Rand Home Computer of 2004 is apparently a hoax.  A beautiful, beautiful hoax. 

Thanks to my friend Rick for emailing me the picture.

I'd like a few more details.  Right now I'm assuming the image is authentic and the caption is fake.  But maybe not:  what is that big TV up in the corner for?  Watching I Love Lucy reruns while you wait for your FORTRAN program to compile?

Reflections in d minor has a load o' links on the topic of Dancing About Architecture, that is, the age-old problem of how to talk and write meaningfully about music.

For the title of this post, I looked for words I could juxtapose from the link above, and I grabbed knitting and football.  Then it hit me:  certainly it is very possible to knit about football.  So let me give you some wackier pairings.  The template is: 

[performance or act of artistic creation] - About - [discipline, genre, or philosophy of art]. 

As it happens, I came up with seven, a very relevant number.

Yodeling About Film Noir
Woodworking About Virtual Reality
Chanting About Matchstick Cathedrals
Weaving About Anime
Boogying About Wabi-Sabi
Bowling About Columbine
Blogging About Postmodern Self-Reference

One of the enduring memories of my childhood is the trip to farm implement supply centers.  Part retail establishment, part repair garage, part auto dealership (one that sold vehicles with big wheels), it was an unusual place.  For you who have never seen one, I would say the closest cousin is a lumber yard.

Every single one of them had a glass case built into the service counter.  Inside the case were toy tractors, toy plows, toy combines and wagons and discs and hay balers.  (The balers came with a few tiny Styrofoam bales:  pure exotica.)

I craved those things, and looked at them lovingly while my dad picked up his plow points or showed off the latest mangled  piece of metal he had extracted from his combine.  I craved, but I never asked for one.  Kids of my time and place just knew asking was a waste of time.

But looking is free, especially if you are online, so check out these beeeyoootiful International Harvester tractors -- my favorite brand.  And some of you (like my friend Victor) will remember with fondness (or morbid fascination) the amazing triple-gas-tanked IH Travelall, which seems to have mutated and returned with a vengeance.

You simply must head on over to Alex Ross' place and look and the photo of Alfred Schnittke's tombstone.  If you follow the links to his essays on the composer's life, you won't be wasting your time either.

I'm performing surgery right now on my metastasizing bookmark list.  I've got this link to Dennis Dutton's essay on Kitsch which everyone should read.  There.  Now I feel free to remove the bookmark.

And while I'm rooting around in the dark, dusty corners of my browser, I'll pass on these funkadelic curvy skyscrapers (and tip my hat to Planetizen).  I tend to find wavy, "organic" forms in architecture repellent, but that's only because usually they seem incredibly crude and self-indulgent.  Sometimes they get the curves right, however, so call me inconsistent (and call me sympathetic to the owners of the buildings next door).  Speaking of waking up to find strange things next to you, Dawn warns young women everywhere of the dangers of fornicating with demons.

If you are in Ann Arbor, you may want to go see the University Symphony Orchestra perform Shostakovich Numero Fivo tonight.  It's free at Hill Auditorium.  (Oooh, sweet, sweet Hill Auditorium.)  They will also perform the Prometheus Overture by Beethoven, and Barber's Piano Concerto featuring Ming-Hsiu Yen, last year's winner of the Concerto Competition.  You should enjoy watching the carefully controlled energy of conductor Kenneth Kiesler.

I can't get away, alas.  I'm committed to sitting all evening in the township office discussing certain parcels of land of which I have about 3% ownership.  I'm not kidding.  If you think ordinary land deals are complex, you should try to get involved in one where dozens of people have equal say in the decision making.  This is all for a piece of land that's worthless, although adjacent to our property.  Our only interest is in making sure no one else gets control over it and decides to put a scrap metal processing plant there. 

Or worse, they could build a state hospital and move in all of Michigan's budding young Hannibal Lecters.  Naw, that couldn't happen, since we have one of those in our neighborhood already.

Arts & Letters Daily has a link to a new biography of Philip K. Dick.  I think I'm too afraid to read it...

As Dick grew older, ingested various drugs in ever-larger quantities, and indulged his compulsive passion for catastrophic relationships with women, these fantasies grew ever more bizarre, and ever more insistent on the illusory and adversarial nature of reality. But Mr. Carrere never wavers: With his concise, fluent prose and eye for psychological detail, he succeeds in making Dick’s psychoses not only understandable but even convincing. By the time Dick, in the last decade of his life, came to the conclusion that reality as we know it is an illusion used by the Roman Empire to numb the minds of Christians, the animating idea of his unfinished Exegesis, the reader feels as simultaneously trapped and enlightened as Dick must have at the moment of his epiphany. Mr. Carrere, through a remorseless and clear-eyed accretion of detail, makes this last madness seem both plausible and inevitable.

...but I guess I'll put The Man in the High Castle on my reading list.  How strange it is, that I have never read a word of Dick.  Once again, I rail at my folly and laziness, wasting all those hours on the effluvium of Asimov's incontinence.

[Memo to self:  think really, really hard about whether you want to keep that sentence as-is before you hit the send button.]

Speaking of creative kooks, we finished watching Vertigo last night.  I saw it years ago and loved it, but the intervening time and the loss of surprise drained the movie of suspense for me.  Thus I was in a position to notice its leaden pace, and how silly that contra-zoom trick looks.  (Hitchcock sure recycles it plenty of times.  "Hey, I paid good money for this footage!")  As a bonus, we get a few Freudian Words of Power from a white-coated doctor pronouncing the pronouncement:  Guilt Complex!  Sheesh.  Fortuantely, we visited San Francisco a year ago, so I was able to amuse myself by playing Name That Location.

The concert was hosted by a prominent music school, featuring some of its best student performers.  The program was devoted to works by one composer, a professor with an international reputation.

Among the performers was a soprano.  She was not a student, she had moved into town and set up an independent voice studio.  Clearly she wanted to be more than merely a voice teacher.  She had been busy finding performing opportunities on the fringes of college life.  More to the point, she had the kind of over-muscled body that, especially in a woman, signals ambition.

The composer was present; indeed, he was the MC for the event.  Somehow the soprano had finagled a spot in the program.  She was to sing an aria from the Great Man's hot new opera.  It was a Big Chance.  Her business plan depended on this, on Getting Noticed by Someone Famous.

She sang the aria.  It was designed to be a showpiece, so naturally it was difficult.  The soprano certainly did not sing it badly; this is not the story of a train wreck.  (For one of those, I refer you to the incomparable Florence Foster Jenkins.)

Her performance was simply less that wonderful.  Truthfully, the quiet, high note at the end exposed her incompletely developed technique.  It sounded strained.  She made it sound hard.

Her performance training failed her at that point.  She could not hide her bitter disappointment.  She slunk off the stage.  Her dream was shattered.  The composer returned to the stage to introduce the next piece.  He said nothing about the aria, but he had ears and eyes just like everyone present.

It's been many months since that night of disappointment but I still think about it from time to time.  Did she recover?  Did she put this lesson to some good use?  Did she redouble, redirect, or simply give up?  The tragedy for a woman performer is that the clock ticks with cruel rapidity.  I never found out what happened to her.

Steve Hicken at Symphony X loves Blue Rhythm by William Duckworth, and he quotes New York critic Kyle Gann who calls it "absolutely sop-shelf postminimalism," and says "if you're not wowed, well, I guess postminimalism's just not for you."  Go and listen to the sound file.

Wowed ain't what I am, yet, but let me go on to caveat this thing to within an inch of its hairsbreadth.

First, I think the recording in the link is disappointing in its insufficient splendiferousness.  Frankly, the performers sound like they are playing inside a large wood crate.  That in itself may account for all of my problem, although maybe I'm so fundamentally biased toward vocal music that I can't fully appreciate the sound of a violin and piano.

The fact is, I am wowed by William Duckworth's music, when it happens to be for choir.  I fell in love with his Southern Harmony, bought the CD, and eventually forced (at gunpoint) my church choir to sing two movements of it.  (Both were sung in a concert setting.  Only one, Turtle Dove, was appropriate for a worship service.  And no, I'm a Lutheran, not some nut-job pagan who worships little white birds; the name of each movement comes from the hymn tune's name, not the text.)  Those scores were printed (photocopied really, from the look of them) on an on-demand basis and were freakin' expensive.  Then it turned out I underestimated the music's difficulty, and that made for some high-tension rehearsals, a situation that still bothers my conscience.

Uh, Mr. Fredosphere sir?  When have you ever not underestimated music's difficulty?

Amazon has some snippets of Southern Harmony for your listening pleasure.  If you're not wowed, well, I guess using your ears to listen to vibrations traveling through the air isn't for you.

Maybe Duckworth's vocal music mesmerizes me because the irregular repetition (remember, this is postminimalism, so the feel of the music similar to minimalism but the patterns are not rigid) is perfect for word play and startling juxtapositions of meaning.  Without that to latch on to, my ear will need to attend more carefully to the notes themselves to find out what Hicken, Gann, et al. are enjoying.

The Haiku form performs several jobs in our kollective kultural konsciousness.  It's the symbol for a kind of extreme refinement of expression;  it's a poem's poem.  This makes for great irony, as when Garth observed

This is really weird.
We're looking down on Wayne's place,
But it's not Wayne's place.

or when people (like my friend Rick) survive boring meetings by recording the minutes in Haiku, or when a certain pork product ... oh, why don't I just give you a link.

Haiku also serves as a symbol for the ultimate in terseness.  I believe it no longer deserves this distinction.  We need to realize that band names are a form of poetry, and that Band Name is the most terse of all possible poetic forms.

Indeed, the terseness makes it the perfect form for today's microscopic attention spans, which explains its ubiquity.  Indeed, I'm almost ready to assert that in some cases, bands have been formed for the sole purpose of justifying the existence of the name.  If you've heard some of the bands I have, you know there is no other reason.

A band name works best as poetry when printed on a poster and stuck to a wall or a kiosk on a busy street corner.  Its terseness means the old method of printing a bunch of examples in a book does not work.  The mind (or at least, the modern mind with its itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny attention span) cannot absorb the full effect of many band names in one sitting. 

At this point, I wish I could send you to the webpage of band names that a former co-worker used to maintain, but apparently he gave up on it.  This was for proposed band names, not real ones, and demonstrated Band Name in it's most purely poetic expression. 

No, wait!  It was well-hidden, but I found it!

After reading a few dozen of the names (and the page has thousands) the mind simply stops working.  I submitted a few names to the list; I recall Anthropomorphine got me some nice compliments, although a few seconds of Googling reveals the pun has been discovered or stolen by one or two others in the intervening years.

What are the rules that the form imposes on the would-be poet?  I don't claim to have found the exhaustive list, but here are a few:

• Limit yourself to three words (or maybe four, if one is an article:  Toad the Wet Sprocket).
• Non sequiturs are easy and work well in the ironic age we live in.
• Don't rip names from today's headlines.  The Miami Relatives may have seemed like a good name when Elian Gonzalez was in the news, but it isn't.
• If you can find a term of art from some subculture that is only dimly known to the general public and has a certain goofiness when ripped from its context, you may have a winner.  See Charismatic Megafauna below.
• Avoid all intellectual (and especially philosophical) pretention.  See Orthogonal To Blackness below.
  

Thanks to Alex Ross, we now know that some string quartets are following these rules.

Here's a list of names I've come up with over the years.  To avoid fatigue, I'll limit myself to the very best.  (Yes, that means I have others that are even worse than the ones you see here.)

Anthropomorphine
Bat-Winged Boston Terriers
The Day the Ivy Died
Electroschlock
Beyond Chocolate and Vanilla
Charismatic Megafauna
Dog Dish
Orthogonal To Blackness
Guppies Be Good
Pitchforks and Torches
Tragicomic Flatulence
Where Egos Dare
White Like Ike

Need I point it out?  Replace "band" with "blog" everywhere it occurs in this post and most everything I wrote is still true.

Der Drübermensch wanted to look at houses last night. This is a desire he doesn't express every day, so I wanted to act on it. I concluded the best way to do it and keep the whole family entertained was to take them all to downtown Saline, Michigan, which is about 10 minutes away. We would look at a few houses, then get treats at the Drowsy Parrot, an ice cream parlour on Ann Arbor Street right at the heart of down town.

First thing, we stopped and photographed this landmark on the west side. It and its lawn and outbuildings occupy an entire large block; you simply can't miss it as you drive in on Michigan Ave. It is the one unforgettable building in the whole town.

It must have been at the outer edge of town when it was built. Now it is still near the edge but well within a residential neighborhood. The historical marker says William H. Davenport, a leading merchant built the house in 1875, at a cost of $8500. William Scott was the designer.

Because of the presence of the marker, and because the house is so well maintained, it has the feel of something owned by a historical society. Yet we were shy about walking up the drive for a better view. This sign had a lot to do with it.

Der Drübermensch is nothing if not a relentless quantifier. He asked me how many stories are in the tower. I told him three and a half. That bumping up of the top windows is odd, but a good move to get the proportions of the facade right.

Labels: Architecture

We saw Master and Commander in the theater with the brother-in-law-osphere's family months ago and the best part by far was the trailer to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  Slate gives us a nice linkapalooza of the critical buzz.  Their Salon quote especially caught my eye:  "a fancy mechanical toy than a work of art we can warm up to."  Aaaaah, I know just what they mean:  a great movie indeed.

Sky Captain goes on the very short list of movies I must see in the theater.  (M&C was not on that list, but hey, if you're married and I say "family politics," I'm sure you will understand.  And heck, I liked M&C.  I just didn't like paying $18 for me and the little womanosphere to see it.)

On the other hand, it may make sense to wait and see if a "Phantom Edit" version of this film.  You know, one where you never have to look at the one truly artificial object in this movie:  Angelina Jolie.

More annoying than the French, and more annoying than choirboys:  it's French choirboys.

A Cappella News says the sleeper hit Les Choristes will be released in U.S. theaters on January 14.  Quoting The Telegraph:

Les Choristes, which promises to be the French cinema's biggest international hit since the off-beat Parisian comedy Amelie, has done for the image of choral singing what Billy Elliot did for ballet and the musical Riverdance for Irish dance.

...and what Lord of the Dance did for an oily egomaniac with a taste for contract disputes.

Fay Jones has died. 

At the command of this modest resident of Arkansas, ordinary dimensional lumber assumed a sublime expressive power.

His best-loved buildings are woodland chapels:  Thorncrown and the Cooper Memorial Chapel.  Here is a biography with photos. 

Thanks Fay.

Someone at Choralnet is collecting stories about choirs on tour.  Ah, the joys.  Here are some things she has learned so far:

When your bus breaks down, it will either happen after midnight, or in the middle of nowhere, or both.

Four years of undergraduate choir touring, and that never happened to me.  I see now I was lucky.

Bus drivers are either brilliant/heroic/resourceful or sleazy/creepy/crooks. There is no in-between.

Again, I was lucky.

Some choir members can rise to an occasion and save the day. Some choir members cause said "occasions," usually because of  mental instability (ranging from nymphomania to shoplifting) that you could have predicted ahead of time but didn't think you could legally do anything about. And if someone is going to get lost or separated from the group, it will nearly always be the person you could have guessed would get lost or separated.

Here I was very unlucky.  I don't remember a single nympho on any tour I ever went on.  Although I was always either lost or too busy shoplifting, so who can say for sure?

Sometimes animals walk into churches during concerts. They are never dangerous and always funny.

Those weren't animals.  Those were Lutherans.

My buddy Rick, responding to my ritual denunciations of Tom Swift, sent me this link to a tribute to sci-fi author Hugh Walters.  Rick said he read three of Walters' books in grade school, and would have read more if his home town of Marquette, Michigan* had a better sci-fi-books-for-kids delivery system in place.

Walters' aim was to "educate painlessly" and inspire kids to pursue scientific careers.  Unfortunately, the illustrators of his books show evidence of needing some education of their own, and I won't insist it be painless.  And while we are at it, the guy who designed the website needs some schooling in the proper selection of a non-distracting background.

About that "Boy Astronaut" series:  why does it almost make sense?  Obviously no one is going to write a Boy Dentist or Boy Urologist book, but that's mainly because no one wants to read about dentists or urologists, whatever their ages.  But among the high-status positions, being an astronaut is one job subject to a certain -- how do I put this nicely -- let's call them extra-competence considerations.  After all, we've had a teacher astronaut and (I think) two legislator astronauts, so really, it's only a matter of time until we get our woman-psychologist-who-is-also-an-expert-in-boxing astronaut and our talk-show-host astronaut and our antipope astronaut, and yes, eventually, we will get our boy astronaut.  No doubt it will happen during a Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

*We're talking about a seriously remote outpost on the northern shore of the northern peninsula of Michigan.  Get your maps out people, Michigan has a northern peninsula!

I promised that today would be antipope Thursday.  I started writing a post chock-full of links to various wack-jobs and their conspiracy theories involving John XXIII and the Priory of Sion or Paul VI wearing some breastplate, or the very, very bad man John Paul II who, among many other crimes, has been soft on Lutherans.

I intended to make fun, once again, of Michael I of Kansas and those who would take his claims half-way seriously, as well as the claims of Johnny-Pauly-come-lately [oooh, that was clever!  I like it] types like Linus II and Pius XXIII.  (The news blackout on Fredosphere XXIII continues to be rigidly enforced, however.  How vast the power of the dark forces arrayed against me!)

But the whole exercise just made me feel dirty, so I'm not going to do it.  Making fun of religious kooks is just too easy and too nasty.  Instead, I'll simply advise those who think they need this kind of information to go see A Saintly Salmagundi, a blog that has antipopology right in its mission statement.  And for those of you who need more mathematical rigor in your theological musings, I refer you to the guy who first discovered that

The antipope is an operator like the pope is an operator, one the inverse of the other, related by a conservation law, the conservation of action = energy.time.

and

Red and blue as colours on the political spectrum. This is people behaving as bosons (representative of late 19th century India?). When we become fermions, we rise above natural number states 'containing' a natural number of particles (ie with energy = mass of n particles) and move into transfinite (structured) states which may be represented as eigenvalues of a certain wavefunction (operator equation).

and above all

The key concept of religion is warmth, the thermodynamic equivalent of love.

Pax upon you.

Well, if Art Linkletter says it's good, then it's good!

Yesterday I wrote a long post on the Tom Swift Jr. books.  It was too long, really.  I tried to stuff too much into that thing.  I could (should, really) go back and trim the thing down, adding an apologetic postscript at the end.

Or I could write more today.

So let's start with this "Chow" character.  He's the Aunt Gertrude for you Hardy Boys readers:  Chow is a nurturing but definitely non-parental presence.  I'm wondering about the very odd decision to make Chow a man.  He's very low on testosterone and frankly, he's stupid.  I'm also wondering about what it says about Tom's security and self-image that he needs to keep a court fool like Chow on the payroll.  Chow's ethnicity is problematic -- at first the name made me think we were getting some kind of horrifying Asian stereotype.  But no, we're told he's from Texas and the name merely refers to food, the only thing Chow understands.  Analyzing his speech for hints of his origins is hopeless; the writers can't seem to get a handle on the Texas twang, and it comes out as Middle America Moron.  Memo to Chow:  dish up all the chili you want, but please don't talk.  Please.

"Bud and I are taking off right away for a little experiment," Tom told Chow.

"With those folks from another planet?" Chow asked eagerly.  "You mean you got that lil ole gadget figured out so's you kin talk to 'em?"

Tom told him that the "gadget" was to be radio impulses in the form of mathematical symbols.  They would convey a message to the space beings.

"A message about what?" Chow asked.

"It's clear," Tom replied, "that the only reason these people haven't visited us is because they don't know how to penetrate our atmosphere without being crushed to death."

What's the matter with 'em?" Chow asked.

I think they may have very light bodies,"  Tom said, "and be highly paramagnetic."

"What's that?" the cook demanded.  "See here, Tom, you ought to talk English to me."

With the practiced gesture of an aristocrat, Tom swung his riding crop across Chow's face, applying just enough force to maximize the old man's shame while minimizing his physical pain.

"You forget your place, Chow," Tom remarked quietly.

I'm still not over the way eighteen-year-old Tom barks orders, and everyone just obeys.  Tom wants the FBI to decrypt his enemies' communications?  They'll get right on it, Tom!  Tom wants the US Navy to lend him some ships?  Here they are, Tom!  This just can't be real in a day when most guys emerge from adolescence in their mid-thirties.  Move the action to the Middle Ages, and maybe we will believe it.  Tom Cardinal Swift and His Amazing Automatic Indulgenator!

Which reminds me:  I think tomorrow is going to be another Anti-Pope Thursday.  You won't want to miss it.

This concludes my exposé of the dark underbelly of boy's lit, although I reserve the right to rescind this declaration at any moment if I think of more funny stuff to write.  For something similar on the even more disturbing world of pandering to girl's fantasies, I direct you to Michael Blowhard and His Incredible Aquatomic Website.

The One They Call Lileks has a series devoted to deconstructing the covers of Tom Swift Jr. books.  Being one of those market followers (abeit a mouth-foamingly envious one) I put down that Klemperer biography I was told to read, postponed that James Cain novel, and picked up Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship.

This stuff is pornography.  Let me explain.  A while back some friends came over and we watched some tornado videos.  There is no plot and no character development in these things; they get straight to the action in a very disciplined way.  Hence, my friends called it "weather porn."

Well, our friend Victor Appleton II creates books under similarly disciplined strictures.  He knows his audience -- 10-year-old boys -- and he knows what they want.  They want lots of gadgets and they want a protagonist slightly older than they to play with those gadgets and otherwise fulfill all their fantasies.  Those fantasies do not include sex, of course, so this book is porn only by analogy, but like those tonado videos, the analogy is a close one.

If there's no sex, then what's with the girlfriends?  Tom is dating Phyl, sister of his side-kick Bud.  Bud dates Sandy, sister of Tom.  (Incest certainly has its conveniences.)  Anyway, the girls fly out (Sandy is an expert pilot in her own right) to visit the boys on the island that the Federal Government gave the eighteen-year-old Tom as a location for his spaceport, laboratory, manufacturing facility, plus living quarters for the hundreds of adults who work for him.  (Yes, Tom's role in the organization seems to be a combination of CEO, chief design engineer, test pilot, and head of security.)   The girls get a tour, and then the evening is given over to some relaxation:

Three sets of tennis, with Tom and Phyl the victors, preceded a swim.  Then came dinner and dancing.  Finally it was time for Sandy to pilot her parents and Phyl to Shopton.

"We'll be back to see you take off in the rocket ship," Sandy said as she waved good-by.

"Indeed we will," Phyl called.

And that's it.  I never read Tom Swift growing up but I devoured the Hardy Boys mysteries as fast as I could get my hands on them, and they follow the same formula:  gadgets, authority figures benign and distant, no bed-times or funding shortages, and heroes with an awe-inspiring ability to get adults -- even the police -- to give top priority to carrying out their orders.  (It is a formula that is easily parodied [raunchy humor alert] and lends itself to abuse at the hands of modern crossover franchise cash-cow milking machines.

(Hearafter refered to as M.C.F.C.C.M.M.)

Ten-year-old boys emphatically don't want to hear about girlfriends qua three-dimensional characters.  Thus, Tom and Bud's entire romantic lives are encapsulated in the five sentences I quoted above.  (How I remember squirming with embarassment as I would read similar passages in the Hardy Boys books.)  So why are the boys given girlfriends at all?  It's because any being who fulfills the boyish ideal of super competence and precocious maturity simply must have a girlfriend -- she is a required accessory.  Tom would be unworthy of the reader's unalloyed adulation otherwise.

Phyl's role in Tom's life exactly corresponds to that of Tom's slide rule.  He picks it up and fiddles with it just long enough for us to envy the confident ease with which he handles it, then he puts it down and forgets about it -- and so do we.

Greetings to all those visiting from the Carnival of the Capitalists, and thanks to Josh Cohen for including me.  (Josh's site is this week's Capitol of the Carnival.)

For a while now I've wanted an excuse to submit something to the Carnival, but as an arts & music blogger I didn't think I had a chance.  Then I posted a picture of a Capitalist in a dunce hat, and suddenly I had the hook I was looking for.

For some appropriate background music go download some sound clips from Nixon in China.  I especially like the chorus "The People Are the Heroes Now," which is straight out of the Little Red Book.

Head over to the New York Times and have a look at our new Poet Laureate.  The guy is wearing blue jeans.  We pay him good money, and he's wearing blue jeans.  The wreath of bay leaves he is supposed to have on his head is not visible in the photo at all.  How contemptible.

How much poetry are we supposed to get for all our tax dollars he's getting?  What's the rate per word?  How long are his coffee breaks?  Where's the bureaucrat that checks his time card?  These are the obvious questions -- why is no one answering them?

I am reluctant to say anything about this anniversary of the atrocity (please don't call it a tragedy) of 9/11 for fear that my usual shallow tone will sneak in.  My where-were-you story isn't much; I was driving to work when I heard Bob Edward of NPR announce first the one tower, then the other, was hit.  Of those much closer to the destruction, I suppose I can relate slightly to those who have suffered from survivors guilt because they skipped work or were heading in late and missed it completely, although my lateness was part of my routine schedule and not because of goofing off.

Like so many, my office mates and I didn't work much that day but scraped around for whatever information we could.  (You may remember CNN's homepage was hard to download.)  I do recall staggering backwards while someone in a group of co-workers mentioned a tower had colapsed.  At that moment someone else tittered; it was grossly inappropriate but I don't particularly want to lay blame on them.  My generation (not to mention my profession:  computer programmer) seems unusually ill-equipped to respond with appropriate emotional expressions in such extreme situations.  The laugh was pure fear and akwardness.

At this point I'll simply direct you to Rod Dreher's remembrances, writen minutes after the event, especially this part:

One minute later, the south tower fell in on itself. I nearly fainted. It ... well, I can't describe it now. I'm too shaken. Everybody on the bridge screamed. Some collapsed in tears. A woman started to vomit. My knees went weak, and a huge plume of soot and smoke barrelled toward us. I decided to turn around and go home.

A stout black woman, covered with sweat, screamed to no one in particular, "Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess! It ain't over people!"

There was one person at least who's training gave her a framework for the events, and the means to express it on the spot (however much it may have confused her hearers).  She probably lived her whole life up to that moment having never quoted the book of Revelation to strangers in a crowd.  Yet when the moment came, she was ready.

I found this gem via The New Criterion.  Now that's what I call art!

Previous installments of this series covered the 700-foot tall Jesus and Jesus' Graduation Picture as well as the Pilot Theme in revivalist hymns. Today we take turn down a different path -- a darker path.

This figurine depicts two Red Guards from China's Cultural Revolution forcing a scholar into a humiliating and submissive posture. The dunce cap says "counter-revolutionary" and the board says "Down with Counter-Revolutionary Capitalist." That red bugle thing is supposed to be a megaphone. Go here for several larger views.

The source is the bizarrely named zitantique.com which sells communist memorabilia from China. Go there and see all the posters and ceramics and Little Red Books they have. It appears the owners of this website have no nostalgic feelings for the Cultural Revolution, which is a big relief. Still, there's something deeply creepy about trading in this stuff. A friend of mine who married into a Chinese family said of these figurines ... well, I'm not going to put it into print, so I'll just replace the offensive part with a word chosen at random: frost. With that modification, he said, "this is frosted. Really."

Here's a description from another figurine:

This gruesome large Chinese Color ceramic sculpture depicts one Red Guard holding down an alleged Counter Revolutionary Leading Scholar. A unpleasant reminder of the Cultural Revolution, or otherwise known as the 10 Year Chaos, this sculpture described the common scene that took place during the Cultural Revolution where many scholars and experts were denounced Counter Revolutionary and were released of their posts, many could not stand the humiliation and later committed suicide. The Red Guard, as depicted in this color ceramic sculpture, is seen wearing a Cultural Revolution Liberation Army hat, a Red Guard armband, the Summer Cultural Revolution Red Guard uniform, and holding a gun on one hand, while on another hand, the Cultural Revolution Red Book. His one leg is resting on the shoulder of the Scholar. The Scholar is wearing a dunce cap that says the following: "Down with the Stinky Intellectual" and a white board that says "Counter Revolutionary Leader Scholar."

I hope no one doubts that this is religious art. As so often happens, the religious motivation overwhelms the aesthetic judgment, so that, although some of the posters still have the power to stir the emotions, the ceramics are unfailingly crude and repulsive. This is the original Party of Hate.

So, you ask if we can formulate a new rule: if it is bad art, must it be religious art? Well, when you consider Star Trek ... but I should really save that question for VORA Part V.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

First, read this.  Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily.

Now, consider Europe.  Europe is over, people.  In 50 years there won't be any Europeans left to run the place.  Now, we could leave it to the Muslim immigrants, but frankly (and no offense) I just don't trust them to keep three millenia of classical, Christian, modern and post-modern civilization in a well-preserved state.  I expect the outcome would be a lot of saints sans noses in the continent's Cathedrals.

Meanwhile, here in the good ol' U S of A, we've got plenty of people.  We have a large, influential group of people in government and media -- lawyers, bureaucrats, artists, etc. -- who tend leftward politically and reasonably feel they should be running the place but are doomed to declining electoral power due to demographics.  Let's ignore the question of whether and how that is a good or bad thing.  My feeling is, let's make the USA a kind of breeding ground for Europe -- or call Europe a kind of safty valve for the US.  The US will become fully what it already is in part:  a huge suburb designed for child rearing.  Meanwhile, those who are done with their child-rearing years, and especially those who plan never to have kids, will be simply relocated to Europe.  They get the climate, culture, cuisine and politcs that suit them.  Politics everywhere become less contentious.  Everyone is happier.  What's the downside?

I see a period of vulnerability for Europe if we wait for its aboriginal population to disappear.  We should really act soon.  We have learned recently that Bush is destined to be reelected, evn though he is a deformed hunchback with Tourette's syndrome.  He has a full second term, waiting for an agenda to fill it.  Call up the marines, Mr. President!  We're gonna storm the beaches of Normandy once again!

Those adorable Krauts are flirting with violence again.  Get your assasination tee shirts here!  Apparently bestellen means best seller.  How could anyone who speaks German be evil?

We watched The Company over the weekend.  The wifeosphere liked it okay; I was mesmerized.

Since when do they let peek-a-boo nudity into PG-13 movies?  Obviously I've been living a sheltered life.

This movie is a great introduction to dance.  Those who are interested but can't see themselves staying interested throughout a two-hour live performance should really see this movie.  The dances are offered in nice, bite-sized portions with plenty of variation in the camera angles to keep our teeny-tiny attention spans amused.  Between the dances we get the faux-documentary view of the characters that populate a fictional dance company in Chicago.

Ah, the characters!  Neve Campbell played a key role in making this movie happen, but she doesn't let her character (a young dancer on the rise) take all the attention.  At the center of the action is Malcolm McDowell who plays the pompous company director.  We've seen this type of person in a Robert Altman film before.  (Maybe these people are in all the Altman films; honestly, besides The Company I've only seen The Player and Gosford Park, but my puny sample shows a 100% hit rate.)  I'm talking about the kind of person who objectifies people utterly.  These guys are all hat and no cattle, where hat is understood to mean  I-It and cattle means I-Thou. 

Altman gives us no plot, and I don't see why he's so stingy.  The movie ends with a big premiere, but there are plenty of plots and none of them receive any kind of resolution.  I just had an idea -- maybe Altman wants the dances themselves to be what sticks in our brains the next day.  Maybe he's being generous that way.  Maybe he's having an I-Thou moment after all.

We devoted much of our three-day holiday weekend to cleaning up the garage.  We had allowed several years worth of junk to accumulate there and the effort took on some of the spirit of an archaeological dig.  Hmmm ... here's evidence this civilization had developed to the pizza stage ... make that the really, really stale pizza stage.... 

So we hauled a huge pile of junk out to the edge of the road.  And it's incredible.  Some nice men in a big truck came along and took it all away!  Amazing.

Now our garage floor is swept clear of junk and dirt, and I can say about it what I always say about my mouth after I have brushed my teeth:  so clean you could eat off of it.

Earlier today I blogged about this sci-fi short story site.  From there it was a hop, skip & jump (minus the skip and the jump) to this best-of site for short stories on-line.  I hunted around for some classic stories and ... heeeeey, that name, Lester Del Rey, that sounds familiar.  Ah, I remember:  he showed up as the author on several sci-fi covers I blogged about here and here.

I recommend you read this Del Rey short story, with a creepy post-apolcalyptic world from a dog's POV.  Now look at these covers from Del Rey novels:  one with "marooned" in the title, one with a wrecked space ship, and, heck, another one with a wrecked space ship.  (He's also got one with a mermaid, but that's not consistent with today's thesis so we'll just declare that one an outlier and move on.)  Looks like we've got an apocalypsist on our hand!

What is it that's so cool about loneliness and being cut off from civilization?  Why do I secretly half crave (well, one-sixteenth crave anyway) a life of wandering from city to city, looking for canned food and signs of survivors?  Can an extrovert possibly share this fantasy?  Am I a bad person?

Mad Max ... The Stand ... guys like Del Rey -- obviously I'm not the only one.

Following up on the previous post, in the "How could I miss these?" category:

• Free Short SF Online (hat tip:  Reflections in d minor)
• Photos of the North Korean Mass Games (hat tip:  Things Magazine)

And speaking of that place Where Satan Has His Throne, you can read all about the wonderful kindergartens and free child-care provided by its president.  Of course that would be not Kim Jong Il, but rather Kim Il Sung "who, though dead for 10 years, is still President For Eternity."  You can also find out that any problems that exist in North Korea (and of course they don't exist) is the fault of Confucianism and the war crimes of the United States, if you rely on Prof. Bruce Cumings.

Thanks to Reflections in d minor for letting us know about Things Magazine.  The magazine's entry from September 6 seems especially fruitful:  I especially recommend the time-traveling stock trader, the UFO in Siberia, Clarence Schmidt's House of Mirrors (with a hodge-podge approach to design that recalls some of the software I get to maintain at my day job), a very satisfying line-up of bashers of Frank Gehry.

Go to September 2 for a list of bad buildings and a sensible opinion on just how far architects can shape public opinion (short version:  some, but not as much as they want).  Among the bad buildings are ... the Gherkin!  But I like the Gherkin!  It's got curves!  And Poundbury!  Not my precious Poundbury!  Just because HRH says it's good doesn't prove it's bad!

(No points awarded for those who observe the seeming inconsistency of my preferences.  You must think on a more profound level, people:  the rule is, if Le Corbusier was against it, then I'm for it.)

Musical Perceptions reviews a review of The Cambridge Companion to John Cage -- now I'll review the review reviewer:

Every new thing I learn about Cage reminds me that he wasn't a hack going for the cheap shock or drug-induced silliness.

Granted.  I don't doubt he was sincere, so the music wasn't hackwork.  Sophomoric is the adjective I would choose.

He had a genuine love for music, and wanted to create music that meant something to him and others.

Undoubtedly.  He certainly had the commitment.

We can't ask any more of a composer.

Oh, yes we can.  Here's a quote from the book:

Shultis's citation of a 1927 quotation from Mies van der Rohe is more provocative: "Is form really an aim? Is it not instead a product of the design process? Is it not the process which is essential?" Anyone who has even a slight familiarity with Cage's conception of structure, process, and form in his early music, or who knows the duality between object and process that informs all of his chance music, will immediately recognize how deeply such sentiments as Rohe's could have affected the young composer.

If process is the essence, then why attend the performance?  Cage's music reminds me of certain sketches from Saturday Night Live in its declining years, which I found were a lot funnier when I described them to a friend afterwords than when I watched them.  The concept is clever and amusing, but doesn't survive its realization.

In my graduate school years I was one of several singers asked to join one of the wind ensembles in a performance of John Cage's Renga.  The score consists of drawings of Thoreau placed on a grid, with the X axis as time and the Y axis as pitch.  Each drawing is chopped up into short line segments and the segments are distributed in a scattered manner among the various performers.  Additionally, a simple color code indicates which passages are lo