The Fredösphere

An article in Wired about a programmer and entrepreneur accused of murdering his wife is not a typical subject for the Fredösphere, but what the hay.  I found the story as compelling as a car wreck.  Please people, the lesson to learn here is:  mammas, don't let your babies grow up to be programmers.  The guy's poor wife -- between the husband and the best friend she was having an affair with (who was a bridesmaid at their wedding, and nope, that's not a typo), she has incredibly bad taste in men.  Or had.

The best part is that the programmer rails from prison against those who traffic in geek stereotypes -- even while his life tends to confirm the worst of them.  Yow.  I also liked the author's cute trick of quoting lines of computer code at portentious moments, which gives the story a technomage vibe.

Blogging is light as I prepare to lead my website to a new server, one with a decent amount of disk space.  (Thanks to my friend Jeremy for letting me squat on his territory.) It appears that Comcast will stop hardening its heart and let me go, now that the Angel of Death has taken the first-born of every Comcast family.  Or maybe it was the frogs, or the rivers of blood -- but in any case, I've done bumping my head against the 20-meg limit that Comcast imposes on this website they gave me free (with the purchase of a cable modem, of course).  Maybe I should of known better, but I never guessed a collection of mere html files could grow so big after three years.

One very nice benefit of moving is that my domain, fredosphere.com, will at last persist in the navigation bar at the top of your browser after the redirect, so when you change your bookmarks, it will be (I hope) the one and only time you'll ever need to do it.

I should also mention the other reason I am not blogging so much lately.  I have spent a lot of time lately completing my first serious forray in fiction writing.  It seems the prose bladder inside my mind is emptied when I work on my story, leaving nothing for this site. One topic I would like to consider here relates to the motivation I am feeling for my new artistic outlet.  Is it the thrill of the new? Are the tools for cranking out prose (keyboard, word processor) better developed than those for creating music manuscript?  Or -- frightening though it may be to consider it -- did I miss my calling by pursuing music composition? All I can say is, I find writing a story to be about ten times easier than writing a choral piece.

There are lots of possible reasons.  I write choral music with plenty of counterpoint. Maybe I would have an easier time if I wrote songs for soloist and piano.  (But I don't want to.)  Maybe I make things unnecessarily complex emotionally with my music; I do know I am weirdly free of aspirations to greatness in my story writing.  (I'd be happy to be labeled a pulp sci-fi author.)  Maybe I'm not a natural musician; certainly, reading a book is fun for me, but practicing an instrument (or -shudder!- performing) is work I tend to avoid.  Again, maybe there are too few composers to justify the development of good music-editing tools (or maybe I haven't found them).  Maybe I'm not as experienced criticising prose as I am music, and I'm living in a fool's paradise.  Or maybe -- just maybe -- those who can, compose, and those who can't, write prose.  (And I am finding out I am numbered among the can'ters.)  I do know that, after 90 minutes of writing prose late at night, I feel like I'm just getting started; after about 45 minutes of composing, I'm looking for excuses to quit.

This situation is disturbing.

Labels: Composer, Creativity

Paul Potts won the Britain's Got Talent semi-final last night.  Watch him do it.  He will appear this Sunday in the final, opposite a ventriloquist operating a singing, dancing monkey.  Think about that.  A ventriloquist and a monkey.  Paul, the contest is yours to lose.

The winner will receive a chunk o' change and a chance to perform before the Queen.  I imagine Her Grace is scrambling right now, demanding to know how she can circumvent the rules and vote multiple times.  Our royal person will not suffer the indignity of clapping for a mechanical monkey that sings Michael Jackson songs!  Show me how to run this bleeping vote-bot right nooooooow!!!

Let's speculate about what's going on, here.  The viewers were able to choose three of the eight semi-finalists.  Then the judges chose two of those three to go to the final.  I don't know anything about the third contestant the judges rejected, but come on -- a ventriloquist?  The judges say they chose him because of the variety nature of his act.  "Variety" -- that's an interesting way to put it.  I think the judges love Paul's voice, love his back story, and are greasing the wheels for him.  Not that he needs the help.  According to this report, bookies are already laying odds on whether Paul will score the Christmas number one hit in the UK this year.

We should keep in mind that this packaging of opera, the hype, the glitz, the screaming crowds, the silliness -- all the extra-musical ephemera that classical fans eschew -- is an example of opera returning to its roots.  It remains to be seen if Paul will make the commitment to return opera to its roots all the way.

Labels: VideoClip, vocal

Alex Ross blogs a mobile phone salesman from South Wales named Paul Potts who brings "Nessun dorma" to Britain's Got Talent, a UK version of American Idol.  His back story has a hint of Cinderella in it, and he gives a spellbinding performance, although he enjoys an unfair advantage in that he gets to sing the greatest freeggin' love song that ever got wrote.  Plus, it's refreshing to see someone allowed on TV with ordinary good looks that haven't been surgically "perfected."

I must confess, however, to having a soft place in my heart for another amateur interpreter of Puccini, Stephen Miller.  Part of Stephen's charm is his approach to self-packaging, which, like Paul's, is not yet perfect.  (Hint to Stephen:  a few simple Photoshop commands can fix the red-eye and nasty aspect ratio issues in your thumbnail photo.)

Of the many permutations of Three Tenors, one that's new to me is the Three Redneck Tenors.  What's that, you ask?  Why, gosh darn it, yes -- they've got their own version of "Nessun dorma."  It's a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n' roll, a little bit bad, and it's just about the most toe-tappin', gooder-than-grits, and hotter-'n-a-goat's-butt-in-a-pepper-patch version of "Nessun dorma" I ever seen:  there's something about cummerbunds with mullets that's cuter 'n a sack full o' puppies.  They do Beethoven's 5th as well, which isn't quite as dreadful as it should be, although it suffers from the same problem as that of all musical jokes:  a punch line that lasts three minutes is never funny.

Labels: VideoClip, vocal

It's a graphic novel about a space-dude held hostage on an alien ship.  The all-blue, all-female crew have big hair, foxy ears, and unusual mating habits.  Am I tempted to link to it?  Maaaaaybe.  The (very) bad news:  author Arioch (aka Jim Francis) has been writing/drawing/computer-graphing the book since 2001, and chapter one is still incomplete.  Target date of completion is as futuristic as the storyline.

When I was a kid, we had comics with Aquaman and Wonder Woman.  Today's kids have superheroes like Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi.  Postpone the apocalypse!

Labels: sci-fi

Some non-music fun via Stumble Upon:

Screw all this global warming talk!  What are we doing now to prepare for the eventual heat death of the universe?

You know me.  I'm a sucker for weather pr0n.

I knew Lynne Rosetto Kasper.  Lynne Rosetto Kasper was a friend of mine.  This website is no Lynne Rosetto Kasper.

Labels: fun

Phor your Phriday phun, it's that Honda choir commercial, take two!

Meanwhile, some music composition toys, found via Stumble Upon.  (You do have the Stumble Upon add-on with your Firefox browser, right?  Right?)  By some amazing coincidence, both these computer-based music generators compose in a minimalist style.  What are the chances of that???!

Is this called The Pixel Plant?  Or DMF?  I dunno, but it needs no explanation.

Grotrian Pianos, however, needs plenty of explanation.  Fortunately, the mouse-over help instructs you to bringen sie neue tönen ins spiel and also to wählen sie aus den vorgegebenen kompositionen aus.  (That is, "bring your new tone into play," and "thy whales were to be going out composing toboggans," if my German can be trusted -- and if it turns out he can't, I'll order him beaten.)

Labels: Composition, fun

Michael Blowhard may be the most important composer working today.  This bold, uncompromising visionary refuses to traffic in notes of any kind; instead, he writes music...without music.  It's a daring answer to the challenge implicitly given by Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words:  Michael Blowhard's Words Without Songs.

I hesitate to single out any one paragraph by this emerging master, since they are all brilliant, but this passage I found unusually moving:

I've been an artsfreak since the late '60s and have been reading criticism since that time. Some bloggers strike me as being as articulate and slick as the pros -- Alan Sullivan, Jon Hastings, and Architecture and Morality's Corbusier, for example. Some other bloggers strike me as people who could be pros if they wanted to. If Fred Himebaugh (of the Fredosphere) were doing music criticism, he'd be my favorite music critic. John Massengale routinely gets off descriptions of places, buildings, and architectural controversies that are clearer, more vigorous, and more engaging than anything you'll find in the slick architecture magazines.

I've been pounding the music criticism beat for many years, and I thought I had seen it all.  Thank you, Michael, for bringing a tear of joy to this jaded critic's eye once again.

Labels: Composer, Culture

Quoth Terry Teachout:

I don't know whether it's possible to teach this lesson to young writers. The older I get, the more I wonder whether anything can be taught to anyone.

I didn't get the feeling this is a "people never learn" rant, but rather a "everyone is ultimately self-taught" rant.  Which is something I've been thinking about lately, myself. 

Jessica Duchen writes novels, but she writes biographies too.  I've got her take on Fauré reserved at the library right now.  (Hey, Amazon:  did you eliminate the accents as some kind of cost-saving measure?  His name ain't "Faure.")

Labels: Culture