tinkerFriends, I ask you in all sincerity: what is spam? What is spam, particularly in its modern form, of which the above is an example? I believe it is nothing more, and nothing less, than an art form. A completely new art form, that no one could have predicted just 20 years ago.
Rock slide alert! Clear the area!These guys have a problem -- they are slaves to the tyranny of the urgent. Yes, there is some value is saving trapped victims before they are crushed by falling rock. But. These rescue heroes need to step back and set some priorities, and figure out what's important from a long-term perspective. They need to be shouting things like:
Scan for trapped people! You've got it! I hear them!
Secure the climbing line!
Dude, the mountain is coming down! Good job!
We're in trouble! The clock is ticking!
Tectonic! Clear the fallen rock!
10-4! Rock slide alert!
They're trapped by the fallen rock! Keep digging! We'll find them!
We need semi-annual maintainence done on this rescue vehicle!"I got recordings of the John Adams' Violin Concerto and Tan Dun's Water Passion. Also a slew of books, including something by Roger Kimball; I think the title is "The Sexual Harassment of the Masters."
Let's get this paperwork done two days ahead of schedule!"
How often do you find choirs in Sci-Fi? I know of one memorable case, memorable because of its awe-inspiring goofiness and offensiveness. I'm talking about Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Our intrepid time-traveling humans have found the talking apes of the future hostile and have escaped into the Fobidden Zone. Therein lies the ruins of a New York City ravaged by a nuclear bomb blast. Underneath the city, they find a remnant human civilization so advanced they use telepathy (although they seem not to have the whole Lasik eye surgery thing figured out yet). The humans are hardly more simpatico than the apes; their whole society is organized around a sick worship of an atomic warhead. It is the culture of death ne plus ultra. When the apes attack the underground city and begin killing all the humans, the warhead is detonated, poisoning the whole planet and destroying all life. This ending was proposed by Charlton Heston, in the vain hope that it would prevent any more sequels. (Three more movies were made, each with a budget smaller than the last, for a total of five. Ah, the simianity!) Our concern is the bizarre worship service near the end of the movie. Much of what is present is famiar -- gothic arches, a pipe organ, pews, even the words are almost what you would expect: "the heavens declare his handiwork ...there is no speach or language where his voice is not heard...Praise him! Praise him!" but this is a warhead we're talking about:
Glory be to the bomb And to the holy fallout.This is supposed to be offensive and shocking and full of penetrating social commentary. One out of three ain't bad, I guess.
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| The nuclear blast melted the rock, but left the organ console unharmed. |
Labels: PlanetOfTheApes
I taped that Earthsea miniseries that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, and we've been watching it over the last few nights. A month ago, I asked, "is there any possibility that this mini-series will not be a crashing disappointment?" Apparently, the answer is: no.
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| Hi. My name is Bruce. I'll be your worship facilitator today. |
Labels: movie, PlanetOfTheApes
“What do you hear?”However, there is another one, on the subject of software engineering, that is ten times funnier:
“Reindeer,” I said. I shut the window and walked about. It was cold. Mamma sat up in the bed and looked at me.
“How would they get on the roof?” mamma asked.
“They fly.”
“Get into bed. You’ll catch cold.”
Mamma lay down in bed. I didn’t get into bed. I kept walking around.
“What do you mean, they fly?” asked mamma.
“Just fly is all.”
Mamma turned away toward the wall. She didn’t say anything.
Michaels stood up. "Then I will do it, my friend," he said formally. "I will do it for Prado, who was once great with the bugs. I will do it for the time we filled Prado's office with bouncy balls, and for the time Prado wore his nerf weapons in the marketing hall and slew all of them with no fear and only a great joy at the combat. I will do it for all the pizza we ate and the bottles of Coke we drank."
[W]ith The Great Wising Up came a more pernicious bad: a dangerous species of hubris that glories in debunking and devaluing all that's impalpable and unkickable; glories in devaluing the transcendent; a relentless demythologizing of all mythologies. And the manifest public expression of the spirit of the Christmas season was among one of its very first casualties.RTWT. "Unkickable;" is that a reference to Dr. Johnson's famous stone?
The local hands-on museum has a copy of a puzzle called The Vanishing Leprechaun. Put together one way, you see 14 leprechauns; put together another way, you see 15. The thing had me freaked out for a while. If you want to be freaked too, see it here. I finally decided that the solution to the mystery must be that one way, each leprechaun equaled fifteen fifteenths of a leprechaun, but the other way, each equaled fourteen fifteenths. Or something like that. I may have the math wrong, but I'm too lazy to work it out, although I suspect the denominator of the fraction needs to be the least common multiple of 14 and 15. The bottom line is, leprechauns are a continuous, not discrete, function. I've seen a explanation online (which I can't find anymore) which confirms my intuition, assuming I understood it correctly. If you have it figured out, you may be ready to tackle a more difficult puzzle: the mystery of The Oklahoma City Bombing Extra Leg.
This post has choral content. Stay with me.
Have you heard about/seen this group [called The Polyphonic Spree]? I happened to be channel surfing one night, and caught one of their pieces on Austin City Limits. I think it lasted 10 minutes at least ("It's the Sun" or something like that).Is it a cult? Jeff is not exactly the first person to ask the question. Regarding Jeff's wife's warning (a hypothesis which has not yet been disproved): the content-free lyrics leads me to doubt they are of the devil. Basically, it's half prog rock, half groovy mysterioso*, and half peace & love music from the 60s, but with better synthesizers.
I couldn't figure out if they were eastern mystics, or some kind of cult, or just making fun of it, or what. But I couldn't turn it off (Tracey was insisting...she was claiming it was demonic, but I told her I thought they might be making fun of something). The combination of visual experience (weird jerky synchronized motions) with the odd music just sucked me in.
Don't get me wrong when I tell you that Tom, while being a very nice guy, is the devil. Think about it. He won't hurt anyone, and he will charm everyone, and he will just make us lower our standards.The experts at Yahoo who devote their lives to studying this kind of thing reluctantly conclude that band founder Tim DeLaughter is not a cult leader -- indeed, he has only one wife (so far). Perhaps the factoid that sums it up best is that they have performed in a Unitarian Church -- which proves just how sinister -- and benign -- they are.
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| Umie says, "Hey now it's the sun and it makes me smile All around, all around! Ba dada ba da!" |
First, a pool table update. The wifeösphere's awesome web searching prowess enabled her to find a very nice miniature pool table that Penny's is selling for half-off. We drove up to the Twelve Oaks Mall last night and nabbed one. If Amazon gives us the promised refund, our far superior new possession will cost us nothing more in the end. Very satisfying. The table is not really marketed for kids, so I'm calling it a miniature instead of a toy, but the kids love it.
Tallulah Bankhead is elected Speaker of the House.
Pope Edward VIII abdicates his position after falling in love with a Protestant woman.
American President Strom Thurmond sends his regrets to Fuehrer Adolf Hitler on the death of Adolf Eichmann.
Wyoming becomes the first state to grant men the right to vote.
I usually choose to keep things light 'n' fruity here at the Fredösphere. Touchy subjects like religion and politics get ironic treatment from me. The fact is, I'm probably just cowardly or lazy; the serious posts take too long to write when I'm trying to do them properly, and when I'm in a hurry I manage to write something offensive or crude. Today is different. Today, I'm going to tackle something serious. Today I'm going to write something that expresses the Core Value of the Fredösphere. Today's post is all about
destroying my enemies.Der Drübermensch has wanted a pool table for a while, so the wifeösphere picked one out on the internet and ordered it for his birthday. We unpacked it yesterday. You can look at the miserable piece of trash they call a pool table if you like. When used as designed, the cue ball cannot roll with enough force to move a ball on the other side of the table. We were spared the agony of using it as intended, however, because some thoughtful engineer saw to it that a key part would break after about a half-hour of use. Finally, the surface of the table is warped and flimsy (I hesitate to call it cardboard because that might give you a false impression of strength and stiffness) so the balls tend to huddle despondently in a low spot in one corner. We're returning this piece of junk, and I now call on all visitors to the Fredosphere to form yourselves spontaneously into a vast army to ... uh ... well, I guess military action would be overkill. Here's the plan: I'm asking all my readers to spend a few minutes today (let's make it 5:00p.m. EST) to simulataneously not buy this pool table. We will rock the world of internet commerce! This is the day the gods of on-line purchasing will remember with dread! I will drink the blood of my enemies from their skulls! Metaphorically speaking! Ha, ha!
Life is warm, life is earnest;I survived Chuck E. Cheese. I found the birthday party side of the room, with its video and giant animatronic mouse, far more distracting than the game and play structure side. In fact, that giant mouse, whose mouth and eyes moved to the music, was strangely compelling. And it came to pass therefore at the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltry, dulcimer, and all kinds of music, I fell down to worship the statue of Chuck E. Cheese, whose head was of gold, and whose arms and torso were of pizza, and whose thighs were of iceberg lettuce tossed in fat-free ranch dressing....
If you're cold, turn up the furnace.
The Japanese demonstrate once again the advanced state of their civilization. American culture tries vainly to catch up, by the expedient of large arrays of LED lighting! (Just keep scrolling down!)
I noticed a couple of posts that are stuffed full of deep thoughts: You know me as a Haydn hater, and a nice long post by Something Old, Nothing New hasn't really changed that, but after reading it, I realize the Haydn situation is more complex than I realized. Here are a few things we learn:
Not every Haydn symphony was intended to be a fart joke. Haydn wrote operas. There is a reason you didn't know that. It's really all Beecham's fault.The comments are fascinating also, since all three of them (so far) are by intelligent-sounding people who don't pay any attention to classical music. SONN deserves a medal just for getting this trio interested. Frequently I get impatient with certain austere 20th century music, but the author of aworks loves it, and he clearly has a bigger brain than I, so maybe I should try harder to get it. Last week he gave a respectful summary of anti-20th century stuff written by Nicholas Tawa, Richard Taruskin, and the blogger Promethean Antagonist (the last who associates atonality with nihilism, and probably war, famine, pestilence, and salt-sucking shape-shifters). Attempts to offer a systematic theory about the avant garde, pro or con, usually disappoint. Listen to it if you like; I only ask that you don't adopt any kind of superior pose as you do. That's why I admire aworks. His tastes are far different than mine (Nancarrow? Cage?????) but his enthusiasm and soft-sell promotion is hard to distrust.
The blogger "Waterfall" at A Sort of Notebook has given me a link, so I'll return the favor. It turns out she was blogging about musical keys and their personalities on the same exact day I was. Let me remember, was I wearing my tinfoil hat that day. I don't think so! Waterfall and I must be victims of the same world-wide mind control experiment. There can be no other explanation!
Both MikeZ (in the comments section) and the wifeösphere (verbally) reacted badly when I called synaesthetes "freaks." I guess maybe not everyone thought my little joke was funny. Really, I'm not prejudiced against synaesthetes at all. It reminds me that just the other day, I drove by the place where Michigan houses its synaethetes. Ours is a humane, progressive state, so it does what it can to help those people learn to lead productive lives. They did a good job of making the whole complex not have that "institutional" look; you hardly notice the razor wire at all. And while I'm at it, let me assure you that I am not racist in any way either. Yesterday's post on the Four Freedoms is getting more positive reaction. A. C. Douglass quotes it, and Steve Hicken adds one to the list: Freedom from the Ache for Accessibility.
My new music and drama work for Maundy Thursday is underway. I've been working on it for two weeks now, and I am on fire. Yet I spent the entire summer in a compositional slump; what happened? I attribute the change to The Four Freedoms:
Freedom From Greatness. My friend Dave (a fellow amateur composer) and I like to talk about what we call the Masterpiece Syndrome. He and I are always dreaming of writing that one bold, visionary piece of music that will make the whole world fall to its knees in awe. What an inspiration killer. It makes an artist extremely peevish. Under its spell, I sit at the piano, staring at the keys for minutes, then finally play a single note. "F-sharp," I sigh, "what a cliché!"
Freedom From Complexity. The Kwest for Komplexity is a disease closely related to the Masterpiece Syndrome. Whenever I find myself thinking "...and then here I will put two minutes of really sophisticated, really complicated stuff that will be real impressive..." I know I'm in trouble. What will follow is an hour of throwing notes at the computer monitor to see which ones stick, followed in turn by a playback session that reveals a big shapeless blob of soulless nonsense. Heed this warning: do not compose this way. It is a waste of time.
Frankly, I blame the Rite of Spring for this. Now, its not Stravinsky's fault; anyone able to seize the chance to write a revolutionary work like that would be crazy not to. But that piece imposes a heavy burden on the rest of us: don't try to copy it. Don't even let it influence you, certainly not in any of the obvious ways. Sadly, many have not resisted that temptation; many Rongs of Spring have been spawned to no effect other than to confuse and frustrate poor, innocent audiences who never hurt anybody.
Writing for the members of my church saves me from this. I expect they will be the canonical group of alert, intellegent, and sympathetic listeners who are nevertheless not up on the latest trends in high brow music and not interested in being schooled in them, certainly not while they are sitting in church.
Freedom From Eternity. A recurring theme of Michael Blowhard's blogging is the way commercial motivations improve certain artists' work. Working to please someone else imposes a certain discipline that is lost when one has complete artistic freedom. (See also Masterpiece Complex.) A related benefit to working for others is that ol' debbil: the deadline. I'm spending a heck of a lot more time lately on writing music than usual; hey, I've got a lot of pipe to lay between now and mid-January. Not only is it good for getting the thing actually written, but that concentration of effort into a shorter span of time is a quality booster as well. Ideas don't get forgotten when the gaps between composing sessions are fewer, and the overall vision for the work will have less time to drift.
Freedom From Rumination. This is related to Freedom From Eternity. Over the summer, I had two texts picked out for choral works. I loved those poems, and spent a lot of time thinking about how to set them, but for various reasons I delayed in getting down to business. The result was I became bored with those projects before getting to the stage of, you know, actually writing notes on the page. What a disaster. Those texts may be permanently ruined for me.
With this new project, I spent just about one week organizing my text and letting musical themes play in my head before putting the quill to parchment. Muuuuuuch better.
I'm not one of those synesthetes, those freaks who associate colors or odors with certain notes or keys (and whom should probably just all be killed). Nevertheless, like a lot of people (perfectly normal, healthy people who deserve to be allowed to live) I do feel each musical key naturally "harmonizes" with a certain emotional state. Even the tin-eared Nigel Tufnel knew that D-minor was the saddest of all keys.
| C major | classical | A minor | pure | |
| G major | wholesome | E minor | lonely, remote, ancient | |
| D major | optimisitc | B minor | serious | |
| A major | happy | F sharp minor | noble | |
| E major | lyrical | C sharp minor | desperate | |
| B major | frenetic | G sharp minor | really desperate | |
| F sharp major | manic | D sharp minor | who the heck writes music in D sharp minor? | |
| C sharp / D flat major* | gorgeous, complex | B flat minor | romantic | |
| A flat major | elegant | F minor | something between romantic and pedantic: call it prodamtic! No - call it Wagner! | |
| E flat major | earnest | C minor | pedantic | |
| B flat major | clumsy | G minor | stolid | |
| F major | it barks | D minor | on the sadness scale, this one goes to eleven |
Attention, fellow musicians of the bløgösphère: somebody noticed us. Now it's about time I looked up what "sui generis" means. Please, please let it be a compliment.
Okay, Terry, here's my list of must-have pieces:
Britten A Ceremony of CarolsI think my list is a little less tied to the present than Terry's. For example, it has been many months since I've listened to the Messiaen (although I think I'll pull it out soon, now that its on my mind). On the other hand, the strong bias toward vocal music is more than general preference; I've been staying away from pure orchestral listening lately (like Sibelius #3 or Shostakovich #10) because it screws up my a cappella writing. Getting a choir to produce orchestral colors is impossible when one is reluctant to use whips, so it's best if I don't have those sounds ringing in my head right now.
Daugherty Jackie O
Durefle Requiem
Gorecki Miserere
Mancini Moon River
Messiaen Apparition de l'Eglise Eternelle
Nystedt O Crux
Poole Wymondham Chants (tracks 5-8)
Prokofiev Alexander Nevsky
Rachmaninoff Vespers
Ravel Daphnis et Chloe
Schnittke Choir Concerto
Tavener Lamentations and Praises
I am a composer by temperment, which means I am drawn to the virtual world of notes on paper. A disadvantages of this is that I tend not to get involved in live performance.
You can download Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey right here. Well, actually it's not Stanley Kubrick's. It's just like Stanley Kubrick's, except it's about 10% of the length, it's got helpful subtitles so you know what the heck is going on, and it's realized in flash animation. Then there's also a cool site for fantasy aircraft. Most are old-fashioned futuristic visions, but in a few cases inventors made serious (and frightening) attempts to build these things. (And why is it the French were behind so many of the very weird designs? I think I just answered my own question.) For the short version, just have a glance at my personal favorites:
The Gyroptere - based on the shape of a winged maple seed, it was to be capable of vertical take off and landing. The Bel Geddes Airliner - with a dining room, bar, solarium, games deck, and staterooms for 606 passengers (plus a crew of 155!). I was nevertheless dismayed to find no evidence of an on-board swimming pool anywhere in the design drawings. Rotary Zeppelin - just look, it's too weird to describe (but not too weird to have been proposed by two different inventors). Miss May - another air liner. "With Space for Hundreds of Passengers, the Air Liner It Is Predicted, Will Be Built Entirely of Metal and All Parts Will Be Enclosed Including the Motors." But what will enclose the enclosing parts? Oh, never mind.(Tip o' the hat to Ghost of a Flea.)
Alex Ross has a nice photo of the tip of the Empire State Building, and based on another photo at this post, I'm guessing he took the picture right from his own apartment. A midwesterner* like me can only imagine a life where you can see the Empire State Building just by looking out your window.
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Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
