The Fredösphere

I have discovered the least masculine activity ever:  spending Memorial Day planting pansies.  Yow.

In that spirit, I'm goin' all teary-eyed over Colby Cosh's adoption of modern blogging software.  My little boy is all grown up!  Cosh also figures out we home schoolers are not all "religious creeps and misanthropes" -- although some of us are, and don't you dare deny it!  Some of us still read Jack Chick after all these years.  (J.C. is well documented at the fascinating and often exasperating 10 Zen Monkeys, which I will also mention [in a post hopelessly unable to stay on-topic] interviewed Douglas Rushkoff, author of a graphic novelization [that's a graphic novel ... ization, not a graphic ... novelization] of the Bible.  It is Rushkoff especially who earns for 10 Zen Monkeys the adjective "exasperating," but not everything he says is nonsense, although hilariously he has discovered the fundamental message of the Old Testament is how to develop a monetary system that doesn't exploit people.  Which is an amazing coincidence, because Rushkoff's pet project is promoting something he calls open source currency.  He also references Joseph Campbell's monomyth, which ties in neatly with a fascinating book I'm reading right now called The Seven Basic Plots, which is summarized nicely at Only a Game.

Oh, and guys?  The Israelites didn't build an arc, they built an ark, okay? 

Wow, it's cold in here; I must have left a parenthesis open.  Let me close it now.)

Labels: Culture, Religion

Fair's fair.  (Be sure to follow this link; it's brilliant.)

In other news, his name is Wen Suchen, he travels the world in a flying ship of his own design, he is invulnerable to the most advanced weapons of the day, and he nurses a serious attitude of misanthropic independence.  No, there are no moody pipe organ recitals, but otherwise, it's Captain Nemo Does China, it's an alternative history of Chinese Science Fiction, and yes, he had me going there for a few minutes.  China's answer to Burroughs, Lovecraft, and many others also get reviewed.  Nice spoof, Jess.  (Hat tip Gravity Lens.)

Labels: Culture, sci-fi

The Vocal Arts Ensemble of Ann Arbor sang my Ben Franklin piece Saturday night, and they did a great job.  The audience laughed their heads off, but that was a good sign, considering it was a comedy number.  I enjoyed watching every choir member lean forward as they approached the punchline ending with the word "cows" to make sure no one missed it.  (Really.)  I've been promised a recording, and you'll be the first to hear it when I get it.

(I'm not being rude by failing to link to the VAE website, incidentally, since they don't have one.  Well, actually they do have one, but it hasn't been updated since something like 1934, I think.)

Director Ben Cohen is especially good at programming, and I can commend to your attention The Choral New Yorker by Irving Fine, a setting of poems from a high-culture magazine called ... called ... well, the name escapes me now, but I think it had something to do with Newark.  The "Newarker" maybe, although that doesn't seem quite right.  Check out especially "Hen Party" which you can read here by scrolling about half way down.

Labels: Composition

Story tellers search continually for fresh ideas for their stories.  Always looking for some new deposit to mine.  The creators of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo found some gold, and started digging:

In the year "3001.5," the world is controlled by the "Chrome Dome Empire" under Csar Baldy Bald the 4th, who has launched the EMBB Edict: Everybody Must Be Bald. To that end, he's sent out his Hair Hunters, soldiers who reduce the populace to skinheads, regardless of gender or age. But when a young pink-haired girl named Beauty is threatened by the Hair Hunters, a tall, improbably muscled man with a humongous blond afro appears and rescues her.

Using his nose hair as a weapon. And harnessing his martial art "Snot For-You."

Another well-worn tool for breaking writer's block is the random word generator.  Here's a passage from Peter and the Wolf given the Crazy Lib treatment:

Early one fortnight, Lawrence opened the gate and went out to the big orange valley. On a branch of a big popsicle sat an unconventional cat, Lawrence's mother. "All is short, all is short!", chirped the cat roughly. Yes, all is short. Just then a squirrel came conceding round. She was glad Lawrence hadn't groped the turkey baster and decided to take a nice swim in the deep skerry in the valley.

Story tellers would do well to heed the submission guidelines for Escape Pod, a podcast of new sci-fi and fantasy stories:

EP is a genre ‘zine. We’re looking for science fiction and fantasy. Please don’t send us anything that doesn’t fit those descriptions. And by the way, we mean SF/F on a level that matters to the plot. Your story about a little boy receiving a balloon before his heart transplant may be touching literature, but it probably isn’t something we’re interested in, even if you edit it so that the balloon’s an alien and the heart came from Satan.

Reminds me of my idea for the theoretical ultimate in soft sci-fi:  if one of Jane Austen's novels contained a space alien as a minor character.

Labels: Creativity, sci-fi

Michael Blowhard noticed our political class exhibits a certain herd instinct, and wonders why.  My first reaction was to blame an overabundance of vacuous but ambitious people, but I have to admit I follow the crowd myself sometimes (jumping on, and then off, the Giuliani bandwagon, for example) and vacuous-but-ambitious is not what I am.  Well, not ambitious anyway.  Fortunately, Durham U. has done the research (via Futurismic).

In other fluff....

Joymaker?  Age of the pussyfoot????  Who would guess this is all about something as mundane as scheduling?  (Albeit computer-assisted, web-aware, mutually interacting scheduling.)

Okay, now I understand what this odd little joke is all about.

The count of known exosolar planets increases all the time.  Who can keep track of them?  Here's the tool you need.  To the list, add this strange discovery, made of exotic "hot ice."  (We still have not located the "hot fuzz" planet.)

It's ironic that an article about typeface might contain a typo, but I'm pretty sure that's what happened here:

Sometimes a typeface is already living on the premises when you show up, and it just seems mean to evict it. "We use Baskerville and Univers 65 on all our materials, but feel free to make an alternate suggestion." Really? Why bother? It's like one of those shows where the amateur chef is given a turnip, a bag of flour, a leg of lamp and some maple syrup and told to make a dish out of it.

Labels: Culture, fun

Once technical mastery is achieved, all artistic flaws are character flaws.

Discuss among yourselves.

Labels: Creativity

Singer/Songwriter Jonathan Coulton has found a way to make a living (a modest living) in today's Noösphere.  The NYT has the story.

Labels: vocal

Very cool:  Terry Teachout is writing an opera.  (Aren't we all.)

I'm glad to say I've adopted Google Notebook as a tool for organizing projects, which mainly means a place to store bookmarks to poetry I'd like to set, snippets of lines I've written myself, and titles of works I'll probably never get around to writing (but who knows?).  I've needed a project organizer for a while, and especially lately, as I've become more serious (more is a relative term here, people) about writing science fiction.  Fans of this plot, rejoice:  I'm writing it.  I even have a audience of non-zero size already in place, ready to read it.  Teaser:  imagine Augustus Caesar sitting in Albert Einstein's lap.  (This Albert Einstein.)

Beyond that, I harbor special ambition to combine my two main interests into one project.  No, I don't mean anti-popes and synaesthesia, I mean composing and sci-fi.  I don't mind sharing with you my working title -- Space Opera -- since it has almost certainly been used already.  [Accessing ... accessing ... --yep!  Darn.]  I've got some plot ideas that I think are a teeny bit original, so I'll keep quiet about them.  Sadly, considering how long it will take me to write this thing, it's only chance of attracting interest will be as a piece of retro-futurism.

On a related note, yes Don, you're right:  this is the greatest shampoo commercial ever.

Labels: Composition, Creativity, sci-fi, VideoClip

Another collaborative filtering site, RatingZone, bites the dust.  Weep and wail -- although I must admit I disliked its results, which were too recent-blockbuster-centric for my taste.  Probably it never attracted enough users to unskew its database.  Still, a sad day.

Which sadness is only compounded greatly by James Lileks exasperating news.  Yes, we now learn his reassignment is in the context of a major layoff.  But still.

I other news, I found Michael Kaulkin's shameful confession exhilarating.  I, too, have found myself in rehearsal confronting a flow-interrupting question which I could not answer because I just didn't care about the music to that level of detail.  Kaulkin puts it nicely:

I’m R&D and the orchestra is Sales. Are they adequately selling the piece to the audience? That’s what really matters.

Finally, a teaser:  it looks like I may leave all you loser musicians without a backward glance and take up a new, much more lucrative, career.  As a sci-fi author.  Details to come.

Labels: Composer, sci-fi

Homeless no more:  my friend and very occasional guest-blogger Joshua Shank has launched a new website.  Among other things, he's keeping us informed on his premieres.  So many premieres ... so young, yet so successful ... don'tcha just hate 'em?

Meanwhile, I suggest you hum the song "You're the Queen of my Double-Wide Trailer" softly to yourself as you have a look at this.  Also seen at Gravity Lens:  retro-futuristic postcards circa 1900.  As someone put in in the comments section, all speculation about the future "describes the present, with tailfins."

Labels: Composer, sci-fi