The Fredösphere

As the Fredösphere enters its second year of operation, I feel a need to take stock, to summarize, and to remind.  I.e., I'm feeling lazy today, so what you get is a compilation episode.

The Fredösphere's first year was characterized by an unhealthy interest in bad religious art, a category that overlaps (only partially) with religious-themed sci-fi, which contains a subset of one element called bad sci-fi movies prominently featuring atonal sacred choral music and Charlton Heston.  And now is a good time to mention Neotech.

I should own up to the antipopes, and dominant males performing scary rituals in darkened caverns, killer kangaroos and dominant females making scary noises in darkened clothing.

I blogged my exposure to sensitivity training, musical instruments of delicacy and rare sensitivity, the Three Bs, secret cardinals, dreams about domestic architecture, and other things too diverse to classify.

I somehow missed a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2004; my gracious concession speech may help me next time around.  That year also saw the birth of my third-born, Umie the Umlaut.

My celebrity guest-bloggers included "Wobegon Boy," Ian Moss, and Joshua Shank.  Charles Finney did not guest-blog here, since he died in 1875.

I did not spare you exposure to extreme experimental counterpoint geekiness, my Maundy Thursday magnum opus, or the Dance-Chant Continuum.

I admit to my shame that my two lame attempts to attract attention from The New Criterion crowd (via photoshop slander) pretty much failed.  Benjamin Britten and Henry Fonda and a certain famous exploding zeppelin also got the photoshop treatment.  This photoshop lie fooled some people, however.

In the category of Well, That Got Their Attention, we find Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah sung in church and yodeling about film noir and the Four Freedoms and the plainchant of Twisted Sister and the band names list, and my West Michigan travelogue and exposing corruption among the Jedi and most of all:  the character of musical keys.  For the category of This Deserved More Attention Than It Got, I humbly nominate Impressionism for Gearheads.

I remembered fondly certain sci-fi classics involving a teenaged twerp who bosses around the whole country, space opera, and squirting air through your meat, plus vintage sci-fi art, the music of Forbidden Planet.  I was less fond of the Holy Church of the Order of the Red Painted Breast and the Temple of Bad European Pop Music.

Finally, I deserve a medal for my efforts to promote unknown composers like Havergal Brian, Johan Joseph Fux, and Fred Himebaugh.