This morning I received an email with a link to the website of composer René Gruss, who calls his music "urban classical."
Stuck out here in the backwoods, connecting to the Internet with stone knives and bear skins (Sorry, Star Trek joke) listening to music samples is often a problem. They play for 5 to 10 seconds at a time, pausing for a minute or more in between, therefore, I only heard very little of the first of these samples but what I heard, I like a lot.
I'm not surprised that I like the music because I have fairly broad tastes but I have to admit to being a little skeptical at first. I suppose this is an elitist attitude but I'm uncomfortable with the notion that anything can be classical just because the composer says it is. I've always believed that classical should be kept special and separate from ordinary music. It should be elite but, on the other hand, it seems like the gatekeepers, the "high priests" of classical music have lost their minds and barricaded themselves inside the temple, fighting off all potential converts and all the while wailing that nobody listens anymore. It's no longer about preserving tradition, insuring quality and keeping classical music special. I don't know what it's about but it all seems so artificial and somehow incestuous. It seems like the academics are afraid - terrified of giving up control and letting nature take its course. They claim exclusive rights to decide what classical music is.
The more I think about it, the more I think we should just drop the label "classical" for new music. Classical should only be applied to art music that has stood the test of time.
I read a lot about the impending demise of classical music. I think a lot of it is exaggerated but if the big recording labels and the big orchestras did come crashing down I think something much better could rise from the ruins. The future of music is on the Internet. Independent composers scratching for a few dollars is much closer to the way the music industry worked in Mozart's day.
The whole star machine that came to be in the 20th century is artificial. It raises and rewards the unworthy and distracts attention away from better artists and it's become so much a part of our way of thinking that we actually believe that numbers of albums sold is a good measure of quality. Somehow we need to change attitudes and get people to turn their backs on Sony and the like and to seek out independent artists and composers like René Gruss and other "mavericks". For elitists like me this is a pretty scary idea - that everyone gets to decide what the classical music of the future will be because, frankly, a lot of people's tastes are appalling, but that's the way it was done for hundreds of years before academics and corporate entities started telling us what to listen to. And the truth is, there's some pretty darn good stuff out there that few people know about. It's time to take back classical and art music.
I like Iraq's new flag but I'm trying not to get used to it because it appears that the Iraqis themselves are not happy with it. It's normal to resist change but the main problem seems to be that the blue stipes make it look too much like Israel's flag. (Oh my gosh! I just thought of something! The US flag has the same colors as the flag of France! We must design a new flag immediately!) Okay, fine. Whatever. If Jew-hating is so much a part of their cultural identity then having a more attractive flag than almost any other Arab nation isn't going to change their minds.
Actually, I was thinking that using a darker shade of blue might help and when I searched for a picture of the new flag I found this article which says they have done exactly that. It also says that the official story is that it has not been changed but that the colors had not shown up accurately in the newspaper picture. That, of course, could easily be true. I think they should have stuck with the "we changed it" line. Believing that their protests made a difference might have resulted in a more positive attitude toward the design.
I do sympathize with the Iraqis on one important point. The way the flag was simply thrust upon them was bound to be upsetting. Having several Iraqi artists submit designs and letting the people vote on them might have been better but there could be problems that way also. No matter what you do somebody's going to be unhappy and make a stink about it. I hope that after they've had a chance to get used to it they will willingly adopt this very attractive and distinctive flag.
posted by Lynn S @ 16:41
(category: News/Politics) 1 comment
Not So Lively Mozart
Yesterday I mentioned Mozart in my short list of composers of bright and lively music but some of Mozart's best music does not fit in the "bright and lively" category at all.
This morning I listened to the G minor String Quartet. This is an interesting and somewhat dark piece. The third movement, to my ears sounds graceful and tender rather than dark. The fourth and final movement is very intriguing. It starts out as dark and gloomy as you will ever hear in music from the Classical era but then a little more than two and half minutes in, the mood completely turns around - it's bright, lively, happy. What was Mozart trying to say? To me it seems almost humorous - a musical "gotcha!"
Changing moods in music is not all that unusual I guess but it seemed to be fairly new in Mozart's day. It was in the Romantic era, the 19th century, that most composers started playing around with emotions in music. Another mood changing piece by Mozart is his String Quartet in D minor. (K421) It's quite a ride, sometimes changing from the minor to the major key and back again in a single phrase. The musicians I know don't seem as impressed by this as I am so I guess it's really no big deal but it's sure fun to listen to.
What did you last read? Kiln People by David Brin. Very interesting story about a future in which everyone can make copies of themselves and literally be in two (or more) places at once. Thought provoking and entertaining. I was going to write a whole post about it as soon as I finished it but obviously I haven't gotten around to it yet.
What are you reading now? The Dahomean by Frank Yerby. Recommended by Baldilocks a while back. I'm about halfway through it now. Very interesting. Should I also mention the book I'm reading online? Nah. Not yet. It would be too embarrassing if I ended up not finishing it, although right now it doesn't seem at all likely that I will quit.
What do you plan to read next?
I'm not sure. Probably Brave New World, which my son bought a few months ago and I haven't read yet but there are a number of other new books (mostly sci-fi) laying around and it just depends on what looks good when I'm ready to pick up the next book.
What would you like to read, but don't have?
A long list but the first that comes to mind is The Scar by China Mieville. I read Perdido Street Station earlier this year. And as I was typing that I just remembered another one: The Da Vinci Code.
What would you recommend for others to read?
Oh wow... What a question! How about a list of a hundred? I don't know... Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle is very, very, very good and not well known. My all time favorite books are the first six in Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series. The original Dune trilogy is awesome so maybe that's really my favorite. Oh! And there's The World is Round by Tony Rothman. Another awesome sci-fi book that I don't hear much about. Other than sci-fi, The Covenant by James Michener; Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. I'd better stop now.
What's your favorite book from childhood?
That's another tough question. When I was little my mother read to me a lot. I guess, Grimm's Fairy Tales although a lot of the time I wasn't paying all that much attention. I liked cuddling with Mom and listening to her read but I often let my mind wander. When I got a little older I read a lot of Mom's Reader's Digest Condensed Books. That's how I first read Dear and Glorious Physician by Taylor Caldwell and I later bought the complete version. Another condensed book that I remember in particular was The Haunting of Hill House but I never read the complete version of that and can't remember the name of the author. Starting when I was about 13 or 14 I was hooked on Louis L'amour for several years. There was one titled Dark Canyon that I especially liked.
What book last made you laugh?
There were a few amusing moments in Kiln People and some really hilarious moments in Rhapsody by Elizabeth Hayden but I guess I haven't read any really funny books recently.
What book last made you weep?
I don't remember ever actually shedding tears over a book. I think I came close with The Death of Sleep by Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye. It's a sci-fi story about a woman who has horribly bad luck with cryogenic sleep.
What book last made you angry?
I can't think of any.
For a long time I've been listening to a lot of relatively quiet music - sometimes reverent or spiritual, sometimes somber or contemplative. Most mornings the first thing I have wanted to listen to is Palestrina. I haven't been listening to one kind of music exclusively of course. I always listen to a fairly wide variety but it's what I've been enjoying the most.
Just in the last few days though, I've been more drawn to livelier music. I've turned back to composers like Mozart, Vivaldi, Telemann and Myslivecek. Oh and now I'm getting a serious craving for more Myslivecek. I have the Violin Concertos Vol. 2 CD and it is fantastastic. Myslivecek was born in 1737, which puts him in the early Classical era. The little I've heard makes me think of Vivaldi - not because it sounds like Vivaldi, it doesn't - but the freshness, the brightness reminds me of Vivaldi. I will even go out on a limb and say that Mislivecek might even be better than Vivaldi. These concerti were only rediscovered in the 1980's which explains why they're almost unknown. Unfortunately Musica Bona doesn't seem to have nearly as many Myslivecek CDs as they had when I bought mine. (And holy cow! Their prices have gone up too!) Actually I have two. The other one is of music for winds and includes a piece by Haydn also. I don't see it in the list anymore.
Now let's see... What was I talking about? Mostly just rambling. I guess I'm in a spring mood - lively, pretty music to go with the fresh, green grass and new leaves and the colorful flowers blooming everywhere. But it doesn't always happen that way. The music that I'm in the mood for often doesn't go with the season or anything else at all. I'm just drawn to it for some mysterious reason.
Do you ever get so hooked on something that you have to listen to it almost every day? I do sometimes. I enjoy those obsessions and the works I get obsessed with almost always become "special" or sentimental favorites. The only exception was Ravel's Bolero. I was hooked on it for a short time when I was just beginning to listen to classical music but now I can't stand it.
Some of my obsessions (in no particular order) that are still favorites:
Mozart - String Quartet in D minor K421
Vivaldi - Concerto in G for 2 Mandolins
Dvorak - Serenade for Strings
Dvorak - Stabat Mater
Pärt - Stabat Mater
Svetlanov - The Red Guilder Rose
That's just a few off the top of my head. There have been others - a lot more by Mozart. I'm just still rambling because I haven't figured out yet how I'm going to end this post. Well, come to think of it, it's rather abrupt but I guess this is as good a way as any.
Here are some blogs that I have discovered in the past couple of days, most of them because they linked to the book list.
I Speak of Dreams - Informative, well written, focusing on education and parenting, which means if I keep reading there's a good chance I will get pissed off at it sooner or later but I haven't found any reason to so far.
The Sixth International - Lizards, spiders, travel notes, books... I haven't spent much time on this one. Those are just a few things I noticed as I scanned over it. There's a link to SpiderBlog, which is exactly what the title says it is: a blog about spiders!
Yorkshire Soul - Very British, frequently amusing, occasionally mildly obscene. I can't remember where I found it. I bookmarked it because of this picture. Hilarious. And then there's this. Steroids or Photoshop?
Crescat Sententia - A group blog of a dozen. Notable: A post on trios by Rachmaninoff; a brief comment on dress codes and several posts on fashion. (My solution to the high heel problem: don't wear them. A nice pair of plain flats in the right color will work just fine and your feet will thank you.)
Insect Journal - I linked to this one a long time ago and then there was nothing new there for weeks. He's been back for a while now with lots of pictures of creepy crawlies.
The reading list game is very popular right now I'm getting lots of great linkage because of it. It has also led to some good discussion. Some of us expressed embarrassment at how few of the books we had read; others have criticized the list.
The things that embarrass us are determined partly by the group of people we identify with and partly by the standards we set for ourselves. Mostly the latter I think but I could be wrong about that, or maybe it's not the same for everyone. If anyone had introduced this game at any of the several places I have worked, or in any group I've ever been in in "realspace", the embarrassment reaction would have been exactly the opposite. Most people would have read very few of the books on the list, if any at all, and many would wonder "why anyone would want to read any of this crap" if they didn't have to. For most of my life my interest in artsy stuff has been almost a "deep, dark secret." Not that I was ever really embarrassed about it ("smug" or "uppity" would probably be a more accurate adjective) but my tastes do tend to be a conversation stopper and that always makes for a little discomfort. But in cyberspace I am in awe of some of the people who link to me and I'm sometimes embarrassed about my educational background. (or lack of one)
Several people have criticized the list for various reasons. Too American, right author, wrong book and some authors that some commenters feel don't deserve to be on the list on the basis of merit. I don't think anyone is wrong. All such lists are at least somewhat arbitrary. One thing about it is that it makes you realize how many great books there are because everyone can always think of other books that should have been on the list. Interestingly, I found two other such lists of different books with the same instructions to bold the books you've read. Here is one. Unfortunately I forgot where I saw the other. I'm going to do this list and the other one if I can find it again but not right now. The lists are so long I'm going to wait about a week, or at least a few days, between lists.
I don't use headphones very often but I would really like to try these. But $300? Damn! I guess I can live without them until I win the big one in Powerball or something. (Which might be a while since I never play.)
Senior professors, research fellows, journalists, lawyers, medical professionals, Buddhist monks, managers, environmentalists, economists, social activists, financiers, and academicians made 15-minute oral presentations of about 45 papers during the seminar from February 18 -20 which was attended by more than 300 people, mostly young students, graduates and civil servants. The presentations were cablecast in two separate rooms for people who could not fit in the main hall.
“Although the concept of GNH was first pronounced by His Majesty the King in his speeches soon after acceding to the throne in 1972, it was, however, only in the last two decades that the concept was formally incorporated as a guiding principle in development policies and plans,” said the president of the Centre for Bhutan Studies and prime minister Lyonpo Jigmi Y Thinley inaugurating the seminar.
Hey, why not? It makes a lot more sense than many seminars I've heard of. Via Improbable Research.
I'm posting this as much for the single ladies as for the guys.
This is for the guys who escort their drunk, bewildered female friends back from parties and never take advantage once they’re at her door, for the guys who accompany girls to bars as buffers against the rest of the creepy male population, for the guys who know a girl is fishing for compliments but give them out anyway, for the guys who always play by the rules in a game where the rules favor cheaters, for the guys who are accredited as boyfriend material but somehow don’t end up being boyfriends, for all the nice guys who are overlooked, underestimated, and unappreciated, for all the nice guys who are manipulated, misled, and unjustly abandoned, this is for you.
Hey all you gals who keep complaining that all the nice guys are taken... Look around you. There are a lot of nice guys around. They're the ones of whom you say, "I love him but I don't love him; you know what I mean," or "He's a great guy but I just don't feel that way about him," or "I love him but only as a friend." Grow up. Life is not a storybook romance. Feeling "that way" (whatever that means!) is usually only a temporary condition but true friendships are forever. Go for the nice guy. In the long run you'll be happier.
Clear as black and white, Saturn's moon Iapetus is two-faced. One half is dark as coal and the other is as bright as fresh linens. Astronomers have puzzled over the stark difference since late in the 17th Century.
New radar observations hint at what's going on, but the mystery is far from solved.
Something else I was reminded of this morning. No doubt many of my highly literate readers will have read this already but if you have not read Dostoyevsky's The Brother's Karamazov (or even if you have and it's been a while) I urge you to read Chapter 5: The Grand Inquisitor. It stands alone very well and is well worth reading even if you never plan to read the whole book. Here is an excerpt, which might be a spoiler so if you want the full impact you might want to skip over this and go directly to the link above.
"He came softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognised Him. [...] The people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround Him, they flock about Him, follow Him. He moves silently in their midst with a gentle smile of infinite compassion. The sun of love burns in His heart, and power shine from His eyes, and their radiance, shed on the people, stirs their hearts with responsive love. He holds out His hands to them, blesses them, and a healing virtue comes from contact with Him, even with His garments. An old man in the crowd, blind from childhood, cries out, 'O Lord, heal me and I shall see Thee!' and, as it were, scales fall from his eyes and the blind man sees Him. The crowd weeps and kisses the earth under His feet. Children throw flowers before Him, sing, and cry hosannah. 'It is He- it is He!' repeat. 'It must be He, it can be no one but Him!' He stops at the steps of the Seville cathedral at the moment when the weeping mourners are bringing in a little open white coffin. In it lies a child of seven, the only daughter of a prominent citizen. The dead child lies hidden in flowers. 'He will raise your child,' the crowd shouts to the weeping mother. The priest, coming to meet the coffin, looks perplexed, and frowns, but the mother of the dead child throws herself at His feet with a wail. 'If it is Thou, raise my child!' she cries, holding out her hands to Him. The procession halts, the coffin is laid on the steps at His feet. He looks with compassion, and His lips once more softly pronounce, 'Maiden, arise!' and the maiden arises. The little girl sits up in the coffin and looks round, smiling with wide-open wondering eyes, holding a bunch of white roses they had put in her hand.
"There are cries, sobs, confusion among the people, and at that moment the cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral. He is an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light. He is not dressed in his gorgeous cardinal's robes, as he was the day before, when he was burning the enemies of the Roman Church- at this moment he is wearing his coarse, old, monk's cassock. At a distance behind him come his gloomy assistants and slaves and the 'holy guard.' He stops at the sight of the crowd and watches it from a distance. He sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead him away. The crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the old Inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on' The guards lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison- in the ancient palace of the Holy, inquisition and shut him in it. The day passes and is followed by the dark, burning, 'breathless' night of Seville. The air is 'fragrant with laurel and lemon.' In the pitch darkness the iron door of the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed at once behind him. He stands in the doorway and for a minute or two gazes into His face. At last he goes up slowly, sets the light on the table and speaks.
"'Is it Thou? Thou?' but receiving no answer, he adds at once. 'Don't answer, be silent. What canst Thou say, indeed? I know too well what Thou wouldst say. And Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old. Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? For Thou hast come to hinder us, and Thou knowest that. But dost thou know what will be to-morrow? I know not who Thou art and care not to know whether it is Thou or only a semblance of Him, but to-morrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have to-day kissed Thy feet, to-morrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire. Knowest Thou that? Yes, maybe Thou knowest it,' he added with thoughtful penetration, never for a moment taking his eyes off the Prisoner."
I was reminded of this when I was answering some comments this morning.
A Pagan died and, much to her surprise, found herself at the Pearly Gates facing St. Peter. He walked up to her and said, "Hello, and welcome."
She stared at St. Peter in complete confusion. "Wait a minute," she said. "I was supposed to end up in the Summerlands."
He smiled. "Ah, you must be one of our Pagan sisters. Follow me, please."
Peter gestured for her to follow him down a small path which went through the gates and down a bit to the left. They walked for a short while, then he stepped back and gestured her forward. Looking past his hand, she saw the verdant fields and forests of her desired Summerlands. She saw people feasting, dancing, and making merry, exactly as she expected.
While shaking her head in wonder, the Pagan happened to glance over to one side and saw a small group of people a short way away from the edge of the Summerlands. The people in the group were watching the revelers, but not joining them. Instead, they were screaming and weeping piteously.
The Pagan looked at St. Peter. "Who are those people?"
St. Peter replied, "Them? They're fundamentalists. They're a bit surprised to see you all there, so they stand there and carry on like that all day."
"Why? Don't they have better things to do?"
Peter leaned toward her and whispered, "They don't really have a choice. They're actually in Hell. God doesn't like being told what He thinks."
Last fall I was a little worried but I decided to give Peace a chance. Now things are looking more hopeful but it will be a while before we see anything impressive...
I always think of "heresy" and "heretic" as outdated words that are not generally taken seriously in America and other civilized countries but, considering that I live right here on the buckle of the Bible Belt, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by this:
A popular black preacher has been found guilty of the "heresy of inclusionism" after a year-long debate among his fellow bishops on whether non-Christians can be admitted to heaven.
Bishop Carlton Pearson, pastor of Higher Dimensions Family Church in Tulsa, Okla., was informed last month that he was preaching theological error and would not be allowed to preach at any of the churches connected to the Cleveland-based Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops Congress. The Joint College numbers about 160 leaders of independent black churches.
Independent, huh? An organization of "independent" anything is a bit of an oxymoron isn't it? Whatever. I guess I can understand any organization wanting to kick out a member who doesn't abide by the rules but I have a real problem with the whole idea of a church hierarchy. If an individual has been called by God to be a minister why does he need all these other people between him and God? If God speaks to his heart and says one thing but the bishop says the opposite who should he listen to?
I like this part:
...said the Joint College in a statement March 29. Despite "repeated, compassionate and loving overtures," it added, Bishop Pearson refused to quit preaching that doctrine.
"Compassionate and loving overtures" to force a preacher to stop preaching according to his beliefs, which are more compassionate than the official version. I have a hard time thinking of such "overtures" as compassionate and loving regardless of the wording and tone of voice used to deliver them. Oh well. Hopefully, now Bishop Pearson can go on preaching and be truly independent. If it weren't such a long drive his church is one I might actually attend.
posted by Lynn S @ 11:41
(category: News/Politics) 8 comments
St. Who?
I've noticed posts about St. George's Day on several UK blogs. I've heard of St. George, always in connection with knights and dragons, but other than that I don't know anything about him. It never even occurred to me that he had his own Day in merrie olde England, though it certainly doesn't suprise me, and now I feel like I've been missing out on something.
I've always been a fan of St. Patrick's day. It's a great low stress holiday. All you have to do to participate is wear green and, if you're really into it, go see a parade and then go out later and get drunk. St. George's day sounds like it might be another one of those kinds of Days but with a little more pomp. And, of course, dragons! How could you not love a holiday that has dragons?
I think we need to start a movement to celebrate St. George's Day over here in the States. Uh... what day was that again?
This is a follow-up to my quick post on Friday. I own one CD of Prokofiev, (Conifer CDCF 173) one of the many unusual treasures found at Berkshire Record Outlet. At the time I bought it The Classical Symphony was the only piece by Prokofiev that I had heard and it was on my mental list of music that I probably want to buy someday. The symphony is included on this CD but what made me buy it was the Scherzo for Four Bassoons. "A Scherzo for Four Bassoons! You gotta be kiddin' me!" I thought. Well, the Scherzo turned out to be a short piece, 2:41 in length, and not incredibly interesting aside from being a piece for four farting bedposts bassoons.
Other works on this CD are the Overture on Jewish Themes, Op. 34b, the Concerto for Flute and Orchestra, an orchestration of his Sonata for Flute and Piano, and the Sonata for 22 Unaccompanied Violins in Unison, Op. 115. This last piece was composed in 1947, published in 1952, but the first public performance in the USSR was not until 1960.
Prokofiev, at least these few works that I have heard, is not the kind of music that stirs my soul and this would not be one of my "desert island discs" but it is a very nice album. I listen to it occasionally when I'm in the mood for something light and a little different.
The Postulate - Found via Technorati. The URL looks familiar. Is this someone I know already? Blog hasn't been updated regularly but what's there is very good reading.
S. K. Waller - Also found via Technorati. Various everyday topics, some old ad images. Nice.
Epitaph - This one's different. I'm not sure exactly how to describe it. Literary? Philosophical? I can't remember where I found it.
Admiral Quixote's Roundtable - Political commentary with occasional posts about other things, like chainsaws and HTML.
The Relgious Policeman - Is this blog really written by a Saudi Arabian man? Or is it too good to be true? It's very interesting anyway and I'll be keeping an eye on it for a while. I can't remember where I first saw a link to this relatively new blog.
I've known this for a while but I don't think I've mentioned it yet. Tiger has moved. His new blog is named Read My Lips. The new design is a little busy but at least he's fixed that annoying scrolling problem. Otherwise it is, like the old one, a very nice, friendly blog.
I have been making updates to my huge blogroll. I will eventually get around to uploading but I keep finding just one more thing to add or change.
One of the fallacies of sports is that people who chase a ball for a living are heroes. To play in the NFL, or in any professional sports league, is trying and taxing. The games require dedication, exertion and determination; exhaustion and pain are involved. But nothing that happens on a sports field can fairly be called heroism. People who get paid millions of dollars for chasing balls around while a crowd cheers may be daring and admirable, but they're not heroes.
Heroism is a much higher attainment than anything that occurs in sports. To be a hero requires taking risks and exposing yourself to jeopardy. Heroism requires nobility of purpose, some goal that is outside your own self-interest. And heroism may require sacrifice. Former Arizona Cardinal Pat Tillman, who died April 22 in Afghanistan, was a hero.
In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, Tillman left the NFL at the peak of his career, forsaking a multimillion-dollar contract and enlisted in the Army's elite group of Rangers. On Thursday, he and other U.S. and Afghan soldiers were searching for Al-Qaeda units about 25 miles from the city of Khowst, Osama bin Laden's base of operations in the late 1990s and still a place where Al-Qaeda remnants hide. There was a gun battle and Tillman was killed. Tillman was granted 27 years on this Earth. Many stories about his life are already available at the Arizona Cardinals website Also, anyone may post an expression of condolence there.
Composer Sergei Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891. I have heard only a few pieces by Prokofiev. I like his Classical Symphony (No. 1) very well but I have been told that it's not typical of his symphonies.
Have you ever looked at your blog and thought "What the hell happened here? This isn't me!"?Well, actually this is me, sort of, but I don't know what's up with the string of silly posts. Maybe it's just a Friday thing. (or maybe it's their fault) I usually don't post much on Friday if anything at all so I'm not sure what "normal" Friday blogging is like. I do have a couple of very serious things that I want to write about but I keep surfing and finding things that make me want to post something silly.
Oh geez! Can you believe they're at it again? The Blogosphere Battle of the Sexes is on again. Coming in via the back door, I first read this post at Baldilocks, then followed one of the trackbacks to I Love Jet Noise and found quite a party going on in the comments. You can follow the links from there to a few of the other combatants if you care how it all started. Me? I don't care. I have my mind made up already. The blogosphere is sexist. Everything is sexist. You have a problem with that?
Steve says he "HATES" smiley faces. How could anyone not love these cute little guys?!
I got most of these from Neco Graphics. They have (or had) hundreds of small gifs but unfortunately now every time I go there I see nothing but a bunch of red Xs where the images are supposed to be.
(Uh oh... something's not working. Several of those are supposed to be animated but they're not moving.)
I first spotted Michele's Worst Songs Ever post last night via The Llama Butchers. Robert and Steve are so prolific that finding the same post again a few hours later is just about impossible so this morning while I was looking for that post again I, at first, passed it and found a link to an earlier post of Michele's on the same topic. Well, you know I have to get into this. Wheeee... this is gonna be fun!
In this post Michele says, "Bad songs are generally regarded as such because of bad lyrics. Musicianship is secondary on this list." Well, okay, if you say so. I've always felt exactly the opposite. There are a few songs that I like for the lyrics but for me it's mostly about the music. Take away the music and about 80 - 90% of all lyrics are just plain dumb.
This will probably sound sort of strange but I often don't pay any attention to the lyrics and sometimes I can actually hear and understand the lyrics without thinking about their meaning at all. To give an example of this, for a while I liked Blue Oyster Cult's song Don't Fear the Reaper. The lyrics in this are easy to understand and even if they weren't the title should be enough of a clue but I listened to this song for months before I ever realized that it was about a guy trying to talk his girlfriend into committing suicide. I completely understood the words but for some reason the meaning just didn't sink in.
So, anyway, it would be very hard for me to make a list of worst songs based primarly on bad lyrics. I consider a song "bad" if it annoys me, usually either because it's too repetitve or I can't stand the singer's voice.
First, I want to respond to a few points from Michele's two posts. Starting with this one because it's the one I saw first. I sort of liked Half Breed. I'm not sure why. I suppose the lyrics are not the greatest but they're not the worst either. I agree about Torn Between Two Lovers. Whiney, broken-hearted love-songs are not my cup-o-tea anyhow and I can't relate to cheating songs at all. What is the deal with this song? Am I supposed to feel sympathy for this woman because she doesn't have the strength of character to not sleep around?
Regarding what Michele refers to as the "What the Hell?" song, those with apparently nonsensical lyrics - these are some of my favorite songs! Sometimes I try to figure out what the lyrics are supposed to mean. Most of the time I just enjoy the sound of the words. As I mentioned in a post about poetry, I like when words are put together in unusual ways.
Death songs? I guess I would have to take these on an individual basis. Some I like okay some I don't. Something that few people realize is that Last Kiss was never intended to be taken seriously. It was written as a joke. I heard this in an interview many years ago. A favorite of mine that Michele doesn't mention is Roger Whitaker's Last Farewell (sorry, I've been searching for the lyrics for 30 minutes; gave up) but although I liked it I had a problem with the lyrics when I was younger. I felt sorry for the girl who was being abandoned by this scumbag who cared more about "honor and duty" than he cared about her but I get it a little better now.
Geez, this is getting long and I haven't even thought about my worst songs list! One more. Seasons in the Sun - great song! I never could understand why so many people don't like it. A lot of people must have liked it though. It was the number one song for 1975 (or maybe it was '74. can't remember)
Okay, on to my worst songs list. I'm having a hard time thinking of any. It's been a long time since I listened to any of this stuff. I can only think of a few. Starting way way back....
Harper Valley PTA - Worst song ever! I hate everything about this song.
Almost anything by Linda Rhonstadt, especially It's So Easy and Poor, Poor Pitiful Me. I changed my mind. These two songs are tied for the title of Worst Song Ever!
Billy Don't Be a Hero - Just a typical sappy bubble-gum tear-jerker I guess but I had a friend in high school who really loved it and was always gushing about how SAD it was and how much she LOVED it and how it made her CRY every time she heard it, although I never once saw her cry while listening to it and after a couple of weeks of that I reached the point where I never ever wanted to hear that song ever again.
Smoking in the Boy's Room - qualifies on two counts: 1) I can't stand songs that repeat the same phrase over and over and 2) I hate bad attitude songs.
Let's see... what else? I know there are dozens of others but I guess I've blocked those memories. Feel free to add your most hated songs in the comments and if I think of any more I'll add mine there too.
There's no point in trying to ignore this because sooner or later someone would email it to me. The rules: highlight (or bold) everything in the list that you have read. This might be the most embarrassing thing I've ever posted. Oh well... might as well quit stalling.
Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22 Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad (I started this one twice but only made it about a quarter of the way through)
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm (But I've read 1984. Why couldn't that be on the list?)
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (? I've read two or three...)
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (ummm... I don't think so. I have read Tom Sawyer)
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son
UPDATE: My sincerest thanks to everyone who has linked to this. It's been my most popular post so far. And to think, I almost didn't post it! One thing I must clear up: I did not start the list. I found it at Accidental Verbosity. A reader named Paul posted in the comments below that it originally came from College Board.com.
I meant to mention earlier that today is Earth Day. I celebrated by planting a rose bush (Moonshadow) and taking a walk in the woods. Okay, to be honest, the rose bush just happened to arrive in the mail today and I live in the woods and I take a walk around the yard every day.
I guess Earth Day is associated, at least to some degree, with looney environmental activists but I think it's a good idea. We have an official day for just about everything so why not Earth Day? I am sort of a "tree-hugger" at heart. I don't chain myself to trees or vandalize SUVs; I don't even carry signs protesting President Bush's environmental policy. But I do my best to take good care of my little piece of Earth. If we all do that it will have a much more positive effect than all the waving signs and shouting.
And don't forget... all those protesters' signs are made out of trees.
posted by Lynn S @ 19:21
(category: News/Politics) 1 comment
Attention Website Designers
Here's a bit of curmudgeonly advice for website designers, both professional and amateur: observe the K.I.S.S. Principle.
For those of you who are not blessed with the necessary evil known as Norton Internet Security let me tell you about one of its features. It blocks various stuff like applets, flash animations, Active-X Control and so forth. It gives you a choice to block or not to block and this is actually one of Norton's least annoying features but, depending on the website, it can become extremely annoying. Every time you access a website that has an Applet, Flash or whatever, a dialog box pops up asking you whether you want to block it or not.
I don't mind very much if the site has only one or two of these little goodies, or even three if it's otherwise a very good site, but I frequently come across sites that have every little feature its uber-geeky little designer could possibly pack into it and I get a flurry of these dialog boxes, one after another after another after another. I sometimes have to sit here clicking Okay over and over again for nearly a minute before the site will load and there's usually no getting out of it. Once you've clicked on a link to one of these hellish websites you can't simply say "screw this" and close the window and get on with your life. You have to either keep clicking okay until the silly thing runs out of boxes or else restart the computer.
So, I have a message for anyone out there who has a site that is overloaded with Applets, Flash animations and so forth: If your website has more than three of these little toys I will not visit it a second time. If you are interested in having people visit your site (as opposed to just entertaining yourself with cool, geeky Web toys) then clean it up. Or in other words, K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Addendum: If you don't have Norton or something else blocking stuff the kind of site I was complaining about above will just take an unreasonably long time to load and often make your PC lock up or do weird things. The bottom line is the same: If you want people to visit your website, simplify.
We had storms last night. The bad stuff mostly went around us but we spent most of the evening watching the weather coverage on TV. We watched the local Fox affiliate because we had been preparing to watch "24". When we have storms here the weather guys just stay on the air non-stop until it's over. Not to imply anything about the quality of TV programming in general but I don't mind at all. The weather coverage is actually quite fascinating. 20 years ago they were drawing lines on a wall and now they have computers that can show you exactly what street the tornado is on and where it will be five, ten or twenty minutes from now.
Well, I was going to blather about all the cool technology for another paragraph or two but here it comes again so I'm shutting down now. I think most of it will go to the south of us again but I hear thunder.
I have been neglecting birthdays lately. Here are some for the past few days.
Peteris Vasks (b. April 16, 1946) I have heard only two works by this composer. The first was his earache inflicting solo flute piece, Landscape With Birds. The other is the equally strange but much more listenable Gramata Celllam for unaccompanied cello.
Franz von Suppe (April 18, 1819 - May 21, 1895) - Everyone who hasn't been living in a cave all their life has heard parts of Suppe's Light Cavalry Overture. My favorite of his many lively compositions is the Poet and Peasant Overture. Also notable is Morning Noon and Night in Vienna which was brilliantly conducted by Bugs Bunny in the 1959 film Baton Bunny.
Miklos Rozsa (April 18, 1907 - July 27, 1995) Probably best known as a composer of film music. I have two Rozsa CDs; one has a violin concerto and a cello concerto, the other, two string quartets and a sonta for two violins. Not favorites of mine but I do enjoy them occasionally.
Germaine Tailleferre (April 19, 1892 - November 7, 1983) I have her Sonata for Violin and Piano in C sharp minor on a two CD set of music by women composers but I haven't listened to it in a long time and barely remember what it sounds like.
I don't understand picky people. Oh, I can understand not liking a few foods. We all have our food prejudices. Kids are notoriously picky eaters and their objections extend beyond the food itself to the way it is served. My mom was always pretty tolerant and let me get away with all kinds of food silliness but it wouldn't have mattered how strict she was; I would rather have died of a severe beating than to eat so much as a single pea that I suspected of bearing a microscopic particle of mashed potatoes. Now I have no idea why. Why do kids make such a big deal about two different foods touching?
My grandson is a typically picky kid. Not that I don't expect illogical pickiness from a four-year-old, but he disappointed me recently when he rejected my oatmeal-raisin cookies. To me, oatmeal-raisin cookies are one of the ultimate warm hug foods. When I think about it though, I guess I can understand how someone who has not been clued in on the cultural background that makes oatmeal-raisin cookies a warm hug food might object to a lumpy cookie with black wrinkley things in it. It's interesting that the inexperience of the young can lead to both great daring and uncontrollable revulsion. A kid who has no fear of running out in front of a truck to retrieve a ball that rolled out into the street will freak out when asked to eat wrinkley black fruit or peas that have touched potatos.
Most kids eventually outgrow many of their food prejudices. It's impossible to completely understand kids anyway even though we have all been kids ourselves. What really puzzles me are extremely picky adults. Of course, it goes without saying that I'm not including people with food allergies or other medical conditions, either minor or serious, that make eating certain foods inadvisable. It is also reasonable to excuse any objections to foods that are alien to one's culture. I suppose I must also excuse anyone who would rather not have their tongues seared by "hot" peppers, although, personally, I think such people are wimps. And, as I said in the first paragraph, we all have a few dislikes. I don't expect everyone to like everything.
With that understanding in mind, I have to say that I am utterly flabbergasted and appalled at how picky some people are! I can understand anyone not liking beets or broccoli, for example but how can anyone hate beets and broccoli and squash and green beans and onions and sweet potatos and a long list of other foods. I mean, one person going through their entire lives never eating dozens of common, everyday foods. How can anyone live with such lack of variety?
In addition to rejection of specific foods there is pickiness about how food is prepared. Again, I can understand a certain amount of pickiness. I don't like over-cooked vegetables but if I'm a guest at someone else's table I politely eat what is served without complaint as long as it's not too extremely bad. We once had a guest at a cookout, one of my son's ex-girlfriends, who literally almost had a full-blown panic attack because we didn't have any ketchup. (Yes, I know how strange that is. My family doesn't consider ketchup an essential condiment. Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don't.) The point is, this girl literally could not eat until someone went to the store (the nearest one being five miles away down a curvy backroad) and brought back ketchup. That girl was a major-league nut case and therefore perhaps not the best example but I've known other people who would always make a bit of a scene about their food prejudices, just like little kids do.
Maybe I'm biased but I think such extreme pickiness is abnormal. There ought to be some kind of 12-step-program for picky people. "Hello, my name is Michelle (the aforementioned ex-girlfriend) and I am a picky person. I want to be cured of my pickiness and learn to live a normal life." And of course there should also be support groups for the families of picky people. "Thank you, {sob} thank you. It's so good to have someone to talk to. So few people understand what it's like to have your best culinary creations rejected by the people you love... to have to share a table with people who hate all your favorite foods... it's so hard... {sob}...
From The Reading Experience: " No matter how many such thinkers are piled atop one another, the belief that "all writing is political in one way or another" is just a way of justifying one's own preference for politics and polemics over literature. I understand why some people prefer these things... but simply repeating the formula that all writing is political doesn't make it so." Great post. Go read it all.
A lengthy post on the Jew Google bomb project. More here and here. Also, my thanks to Semantic Compositions (same post) for introducing me to the term "Elvis factor." (Only 10% huh? That's better than I thought.)
Deb posts a review of two books by Orson Scott Card.
A two-parter on The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions, here and here.
posted by Lynn S @ 09:32
(category: Just Links) 1 comment
19 Apr 04
Artsy Linkage
There's a lot of weird and creepy art at Cipango. Here, here, here and here. And that's not all so go have a look around. (Some other recent images might not be work safe.)
I've known for years that "Albinoni's" Adagio wasn't really composed by Albinoni but it seems that it might be even more not composed by Albinoni than I had previously realized. Graham Lester links to and quotes Chambermusic.org:
It is a great irony that one of the most famous pieces of baroque music, Albinoni's Adagio in G minor for Strings and Organ, is not by Albinoni, nor is it in fact baroque. It is an original composition by Albinoni's 20th-century biographer, Remo Giazotto, published in 1958. Giazotto claimed to have based the work on a fragment of a lost trio sonata by Albinoni (hence the justification for publishing it under his name), but all subsequent efforts to trace this fragment have failed, and some have suggested that the "fragment" story might be a Giazotto concoction as well. Even though the work does include some baroque procedures - the walking bass line in octaves is reminiscent of Bach's Air on the G String - the style of the Adagio is not at all typical of Albinoni. But one outcome of this work's remarkable popularity has been to focus attention on the life and music of the real Albinoni.
Very interesting. I like the famous Adagio but I like the music that was actually composed by Albinoni even better.
Today is the ninth anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. Michele has a nice post about it.
Since I live in Oklahoma I feel like I'm expected to say something about it but I actually haven't thought about it much and I'm not sure what to say. In April 1995 I was still in Virginia, preparing to move out here. I won't say that it didn't affect me at all but I was different then. The news didn't interest me a whole lot and I rarely got very worked up about things that happened hundreds of miles away.
The Oklahoma City bombing was a kind of first in our history, similar to the way that September 11 was a first. Things like this just didn't happen in America. We have crime, we have serial murderers, to our shame we've even had a few large riots but politically motivated large-scale mass murder of innocents was something that only happened far away, across a vast ocean in backward little dictatorships. It wasn't something we had to worry about personally. So, yes, the OKC bombing was a brief shock but those of us who were not directly affected soon got over it. Arrests were reassuringly swift and, with the court proceedings that followed, helped return us to the normal state of the world, in which "things like that don't happen in America but when they do we have laws and courts to deal with the situation."
Michele wonders: "How quickly things fade from the big picture. I can find very few news articles about the anniversary. So far, nothing on tv. A Google news search doesn't bring up much. I wonder how soon 9/11 will become the same - just another date, just another memorial service, something relegated to page 12."
That does seem to be happening already and not fast enough for some people - those people who were already demanding that we "get over it" while the ruins were still smoking - but Sept. 11 was different. OKC may have been a first but we had ways of dealing with it. It did not significantly change our perspective on the world. I think, in time, most of us will no longer make a big deal out of the date, 9/11. It will eventually be remembered as something that happened a long time ago, like Pearl Harbor, and our children and grandchildren will have no idea what it meant to us. We may forget how much the world has changed but the changes will stay with us nevertheless. That's the difference. Sept. 11 brought about change in a way that OKC did not.
Well... this certainly went off in a direction I didn't plan on. Even here in Oklahoma I haven't heard as much about the anniversary as one might expect. I've only heard it mentioned once or twice. The 10th anniversary will probably get more attention since we all love those nice round numbers. Michele's post has pictures of the memorial and links to more. I haven't been to it. I have mixed feelings about memorials. The history of the world is full of death and atrocities. If we continue to put up a memorial for every war, every scene of mass carnage, how long before the world is full of memorials and there is no more room left for concert halls, art galleries, shopping malls, homes? If every spot where someone died tragically is sacred ground, where will we live? There is something morbid about the whole idea of memorials and yet, we seem to need them. I can't imagine anything else on the footprints of the WTC twin towers or on the site of the OKC federal building. I guess we should have memorials for the really big things but I don't feel any great need to go visit them myself.
posted by Lynn S @ 13:16
(category: News/Politics) 3 comments
Another Blogs vs. Traditional Media Post
In a post cleverly and appropriately titled Directing Traffic, Michael J. Totten notes that a link from another blog results in more hits than a link from one of the big media sites like The Washington Post or The New York Times.
I've noticed that too. When The Guardian put me on their list of "interesting blogs" I thought I had Arrived! I was being promoted to the A-list. I eagerly anticipated the thousands of new visitors. That fantasy only lasted for a few hours. Even a link from a blog that gets less traffic than mine will generate more hits than the link from the Guardian did.
I think I have figured out the reason for this. The people who blog or who read blogs regularly are the people who truly get the Internet. There are a lot of people who use the Internet without really getting it. They check their email once or twice a day at most and often forward chain mail. They might visit a few fun sites recommended by friends and maybe even participate in one or two discussion forums. They like being able to check the news and weather anytime it's convenient for them. But they are completely unaware of most of what's available on the Web because one thing they do not do is follow links. They tend to stick with the same few sites exclusively in a sort of "brand loyalty."
The people who are attracted to blogs are link followers. The people who are attracted to traditional media sites rarely click on links, therefore, a link from a traditional media site will generate relatively few hits compared with a link from a blog.
It disappoints but no longer surprises me that it is so difficult to introduce people to blogging. When I tell family and friends about this site they might visit once just to be polite but they never comment and they never come back. They either don't understand that there's an on-going conversation between websites or they simply have no interest in such a thing. I, personally, can't understand either of those perspectives.
I think link-following or non-link-following, and therefore blog interest or no blog interest, must be a built-in personality trait. It seems to be related to one's normal level of curiousity. Are you curious enough to follow the link and find out more? Are you willing to take the reporter's word for it or do you have to go see for yourself?
Crisis Mode, formerly Birdland59. Tagline: "Searching for Truth and Beauty...in all the wrong places."
BLOG Regular - Found in my referrals. Unfortunately, I can't read Italian so I can't tell you anything about it except that it's a very nice looking site and at least some of the posts are about classical music.
If you're a vegetarian, or especially a vegan, you might find this post offensive but I'm just quoting so don't blame me.
"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein...
Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride."
—Anthony Bourdain
I sort of lean toward the "The body is a temple" side myself but, as everyone knows, temple gods demand regular sacrifices of animal flesh.
I received an email from Robert hoping that some of my well-informed readers can help him find a movie. He wrote:
I am trying to remember the name of a movie - French, I think - made some time in the late 80's or early 90's about the life of a Baroque viola da gamba builder/composer/performer. The title starts with something like "Tu Le Monde..." Beyond that, I have no recollection and not enough info to go googling. However, the movie got fantastic reviews at the time and I would be interested in tracking it down.
Brian has posted a picture of a very photogenic modern art work and asks if anyone can identify it. This won't help Brian but when I saw the picture I immediately thought of this.
After you've gotten through all of those keep scrolling and be sure to read the section with the header "Try reading this out loud" and below that, "The Basic Classical Music Collection" both of which I've seen before. You don't have to be a theory geek to get these.
I finally decided to play with the self-timer on my camera. This is me wearing my most recent sewing project. Aside from the subject matter, the biggest problem with this picture is the sun. Lightly overcast days are better for outdoor portraits. The wind didn't help any either. It could have been worse though. Pictures taken with a timer are notoriously awful.
Here is a rather curious search. The first thing it brought to mind was the idea of musical traffic lights but I doubt that's what the searcher was looking for. There were a few interesting results though.
And here is the jackpot as far as I'm concerned. From Acoustics.org:
In the mid seventies, Voss and Clarke [1] investigated the long-term variation in pitch and loudness in various kinds of music that mankind has produced. Much to the astonishment of the acoustic community, they found the same 1/f-noise behavior in almost all of this music. (This sort of spectrum indicates that there is roughly twice as much acoustic energy at a given low frequency than there is at a frequency twice as high.) So, why was this particular time variation so appealing to our ears? What was music trying to imitate? It wasn’t until about a decade ago that researchers investigating complex systems realized that 1/f-noise was related to self-organized criticality (SOC), which is the term given to systems with behavior that fluctuates between predictability and unpredictability. SOC was discovered everywhere: the fluctuation of the water level in the Nile, a pile of sand sliding down as grains were added, the fluctuation of the stock market, road traffic flow, etc. Is it possible that we like this critical balance between predictability and unpredictability so much that we reproduce it in our music?
Fascinating. I'll have to try to read the rest of that after the caffeine kicks in.
Two nights in a row I have been seriously aggravated by a sitcom and stopped watching within the first five minutes.
Last night it was Whoopi. I actually liked this show pretty well. I've always liked Whoopi Goldberg and the Iranian guy in the show is funny, but lately the show has gotten too political and last night was the last straw. Rita, Whoopi's brother's annoying girlfriend, started up with that tiresome and childish whine about the failure to find WMDs in Iraq and... Okay, that's enough I'm not even going to go there tonight. I changed the channel. End of story.
Tonight at 8:00 it was The King of Queens. I watch this once in a while. It's okay; mildly amusing sometimes. I can't remember the names of the couple in the show. This evening when I first turned to it the woman was frustrated and depressed about her job search and decides she just wants to take a break and have some "me time." She has a list of things she wants to do including reading The Great Gatsby and starting a business making designer cell phone cases. Her husband is completely supportive. So she stays home and five minutes into the show all her plans are forgotten and she's on the couch watching some daytime talk show and I get up to go fold laundry. The dryer is running so I can barely hear the TV, which pleases me quite a lot.
About halfway through the show I sneak a quick look and she's sitting at the piano in her bath-robe slowly hitting keys at random and looking very bored. I go back to folding clothes. A few minutes later, with about seven or eight minutes of the show left I go back for another look. This time she's working on making designer cell phone cases or, to be more accurate, she is using her dad and one of his friends as slave labor to make cell phone cases. Okay, this looks slightly more promising so I decide to sit down and watch the end of the show. Big Mistake! (Okay, small mistake. It was just a TV show, no need to get too dramatic about it) They made a big joke of the whole cell phone case idea. She had these things that look like they were made by an elementary school art class and she invited a bunch of friends over for a sales party and everyone just sits there looking uncomfortable because she's so pathetic. There also seemed to be a running joke about the fact that she was not reading The Great Gatsby.
I am beyond sick of that sort of thing. For the last 20 years or more Hollywood has been going out of their way to make housewives look like pathetic losers. I worked for years and I regret most of it. I should have stayed home and raised my kids. Now I sometimes feel a little guilty. My kids are grown and don't need me to take care of them anymore so what am I doing here? But that's Hollywood talking. I am not pathetic. My days are full. Full of reading, music, sewing, outdoor stuff and of course, the usual housewifey things. My days are so full I could use another four hours or so. Yeah, I do waste a lot of time on the Internet but you won't ever find me zombied out in front of the TV or in any way bored. The idea that only a "real job" is fulfilling is ridiculous. What I'm doing now is more fulfilling than any job I've ever had. There's a good chance I might go back to work someday but right now this is working for us. It works for a lot of couples and has been working for thousands of years. So here's my message to working women: I'll respect your choice if you'll respect mine.
(I really need to just quit watching TV)
UPDATEJames looks at sitcoms from a male perspective. I agree. The clueless male is probably the number one sitcom cliche these days.
I usually try to avoid profanity here but the opening lines of this post is so hilarious I can't resist. (slightly censored to prevent the wrong kind of search referrals.)
By now we've all heard Bush's press conference. I missed part of it because I flipped past it a couple times thinking it was a porn flick, because the press corps was filled with a bunch of d_cks, c_nts, and _ssh_les.
Jim Croce's first album was supposed to end his musical career before it ever got started. In 1966, the young folk artist was planning to marry his sweetheart, Ingrid. As the oldest son of a large Italian immigrant family in the Philadelphia area, Croce was expected to use his college education for a respectable, financially stable line of work.
But the plan backfired -- 500 copies of the album quickly sold out among fans who heard Croce play at local bars, and Croce then devoted himself to music.
Now, 31 years after Croce's death in a plane crash, Ingrid Croce and their son -- also a musician -- are re-releasing the album, "Facets," ...
I like this form of communication. I don't mean just blogging; I mean typing and sending my words out into cyberspace and reading words that others have put out there, whether it's on a blog, a message board or email. It works well for me and I usually get more out of it than I do face to face conversation. Disadvantages? Almost none as far as I'm concerned.
One of the more annoying individuals I have known via discussion forums, a religious conservative - actually a preacher if I remember correctly - used to get into religious discussions and then when it became apparent that he was not going to be able to persuade anyone else that his viewpoint was the correct one he would always say that such topics could only be discussed face to face, not over the Internet. My thinking is that he was probably a talented speaker who was usually able to out-talk his opponents in person and he was not comfortable with the level playing field of an online discussion forum. I won't say that he was deliberately lying about his motives. For him the Internet is probably not the best means of communication because it does not allow him to use the talent that he relies on the most: speaking. The annoying part was that his statement included everyone, not just himself.
What is a disadvantage for some is a great advantage for me and I have been known to deny that there are any disadvantages at all but recently I thought of one undeniable problem with online communication: knowing whether or not you have made a connection.
Email is the worst. Spam has made it almost unusable. If you send an email and don't get a reply, you have no way of knowing whether the person is just ignoring you or your email was the victim of an over-zealous spam filter. But even on message boards and in blog comments you can never know for sure why you didn't get a response.
I admit that I don't respond to every email and every comment and I feel guilty about that. Usually if I don't respond it's because I can't think of anything to say. I assume that's the case with most of the people who don't respond to my emails and comments. I understand and I never get bent out of shape about it but there are times when I'm really hoping to get an answer or I would just like to get someone's attention because I like them and it's a little frustating not to get a response. (No, I'm not talking about anyone in particular so please don't ask if it's you.)
So there's one big disadvantage of online communication but don't we sometimes have similar problems in real-space? If you're face to face with someone you can assume that they hear you but if you get only a vague response - "yeah," "uh-huh," "I guess so," etc. - the conversation doesn't move forward. You're likely to drop the subject and move on to something else without ever getting any real response from the other person. That leaves you with the same kind of disconnected and frustrated feeling you get when no one responds to your online attempts at communication. Is that person offended and trying to hide it? Are they afraid of offending you if they tell you what they really think? Do they simply have no opinion? Are they just distracted and thinking about something else? Body language and tone of voice don't help as much as many people think it does.
So I guess I've come full circle. Whatever disadvantages there are in online communication, there are the same or similar disadvantages in face to face conversation. However, the advantages and disadvantages, as well as individual preferences, vary for different individuals. Personally, I think I would rather not know why I didn't get a response to a message than to have someone sitting a few feet away from me, looking at me and listening to me, but not responding.
Household Opera posted a couple of very nice poems. Besides the poems, I was delighted to find this:
The students have taken to wearing flip-flops and lobbying to have class outside, I've been seeing croci and violets and even daffodils, and the trees outside the building where my office is have red buds, which make them look from a distance as if a warmly-colored mist has settled on their branches. (bold mine)
Considering that I'm a bit obsessive about using the "correct" plural for Italian derived musical words (concerto/concerti, cello/celli, etc) it's surprising how often I'm surprised by new odd plurals like croci.
By the way, the redbuds have been blooming here for a while. They grow wild here in Oklahoma. I love the clouds of light purple mist in the early spring woods. The dogwoods, another native tree in this area, are also blooming now.
Here's an interesting discussion about question marks and the ways different languages indicate that a written sentence is a question. I've always liked the upside down question mark in Spanish.
I don't read much poetry even though it does interest me. I guess that's because I'm interested in so many other things. Poetry takes time. You can't read through it quickly like you would an essay or a story. You have to read it slowly... stop and think about what you read... then read it again. I'm usually too impatient. I read a poem like I would read anything else and then wonder what it was I just read.
Even when I do take the time to read it as it should be read, I often don't get it. I like to read words that are put together in interesting ways and I enjoy the images some poetry brings to mind but trying to find the deeper meaning is confusing. It seems like you would have to be able to read the poet's mind to understand what he (or she) intended.
A few years ago, long before blogging, I discovered that a lot of people are writing poetry that doesn't rhyme and I got excited and thought I'd give it a try. After a couple of dozen "poems" I decided that I'm not, and never will be a poet. As with all other artistic activities, I suck. Life is not fair.
Following links from USS Clueless I found: Bastard Sword, a great looking blog with some good posting too. I liked the Andy Rooney fisking and there are more song parodies like the one above. iRi. I haven't spent much time at that one yet but it looks interesting so I thought I'd go ahead and mention it.
Anyway, encouraged by what Lynn Syslo says here about it, I put on one of the CDs I have of Arnold's Ninth Symphony. I chose the one by Vernon Handley, and was especially struck by the second movement, the Allegretto. The whole thing is great, but this movement especially is particularly beautiful.
The bad news is that I am now listening to the Naxos version of this piece, conducted by Andrew Penny. I'm at that same second movement. And the impact is nothing by comparison. Handley finds a stillness which I found extraordinary. Penny goes for a more "swirling" effect, but for me the result is very earthbound and mundane by comparison.
I love that second movement and I find Brian's comments very intriguing. The Naxos recording is the only one I have heard so, naturally, I now have a desperate craving to hear Handley's recording. I usually try to avoid the temptation to get multiple recordings of the same piece but adding to the temptation are the other two pieces on the disc: Concertino for Oboe and Strings and Fantasy for Oboe Solo. I haven't heard either one of these. Of the few of Arnold's works that I have heard, all but two have been disappointing (The 9th Symphony was my introduction to Arnold.) but these make me very curious.
The cover art, which Brian was thoughtful enough to post, is also interesting. I've always liked the Naxos cover. Now that's interesting. Apparently you can listen to the Naxos recording online. (or most of it. The 4th movement is over 20 minutes long) I knew that they let you listen to older works but, last time I checked, no mid to late 20th century music. Hurry - go listen before they change their mind.
UPDATE: Maybe not. Naxos website doesn't seem to be working properly.
Byzantium's Shores linked to Phileos, with the note: "a blog whose viewpoint I don't entirely share but which also provides quite a bit of nifty linkage". Since I don't entirely share Byzantium's Shores viewpoint I thought Phileos might be interesting so I had to take a look. I think I found the viewpoint that Byzantium's Shores doesn't share but which I do, another viewpoint that's a little different from mine, but mostly I found lots of interesting, fun and politically neutral links. Go have a look around.
On Mondays this almost seems like a real job. You know how it's always sort of hard to get back into a work frame of mind on Monday's? Well, sometimes it's hard to get back into a blogging frame of mind even if I didn't take a weekend break like I often do. It's not that I don't want to do it; I just sit down at the computer and think, "What now?"
I would have posted a little earlier but I spent some time writing letters. The subject wasn't something I want to mention here but I think writing letters is a good idea. Whenever you have a problem or you see something wrong in the world, write letters. Forget email. Even if it weren't for the spam problem there's nothing like writing a real letter. If you send an actual, physical letter someone will have to handle it. And if thousands of people write letters to the same offices then a lot of someones will have to handle a lot of letters and maybe someone important will notice and wonder what everyone is so worked up about. That's my theory anyway. So let's test it out. Everyone write letters. Maybe we could start with that school thing in the previous post.
Yesterday we had Easter dinner at my sister-in-law's house. It was just a small get-together. Our family gatherings are not like they used to be when the older generation was hosting them. There's ususally a smaller group but there's something else too. I'm not sure what it is. We always have a nice time but it never seems like a special occasion anymore.
Something sort of interesting came up in conversation yesterday. Quite a few of our relatives live in or near a nice but ultra-conservative little town in Arkansas, right on the Arkansas-Oklahoma state line. Someone mentioned the proliferation of dollar stores and tattoo parlors there. On the way out of town I made a point to look around and sure enough, all along the main drag it was tattoo parlor, dollar store, tattoo parlor, dollar store, tattoo parlor, dollar store, with quite a few small video stores and the usual fast food places in between. So I got to thinking... it's economically the perfect situation. People on the Arkansas side, which is dry, go to Oklahoma for gambling and drinking and people in Oklahoma, where tattoo parlors are illegal, go to Arkansas to get tattooed.
Well... that's probably not as interesting as it was when I first thought of it. I'm almost to the point of talking about the weather so I guess this is enough for now. I can't believe it's already 1:30 in the afternoon! What happened to the morning?
The idiocy is spreading. I first found out about this nonsense from S-Train. Then a couple of nights ago I heard on TV that Tulsa schools have also fallen victim to the wave of pink-phobia that is sweeping the nation. I decided to see what Google could come up with. Not as much as I expected. A school in North Carolina that has already banned red, white and blue (what the...!!!???!!!) are considering adding pink to the banned colors list.
(Yale Diva links to and comments on an unrelated story about men wearing pink.)
I have to cut this short for now but expect more later. This is not funny anymore and I am on the warpath now!
UPDATE: (4/12 - 7:12am) I hate it when I have to stop in the middle of a rant and lose my momentum. This thing, getting all worked up about kids wearing pink is beyond stupid. Kids have been dressing like their favorite singers for generations but when black kids start dressing like a rapper that automatically means they must be in a gang? Why isn't anyone saying this is racist? Maybe we've worn out the race card, using it when there's no actual bigotry invovled. Maybe there really is a problem with gangs in some schools. So the gang problem is just going to go away if kids are not allowed to wear "gang colors" anymore? What kind of dumbasses are running the schools these days?
You know, we talk about the lack of freedom in some other countries and wonder why they don't rebel. Well, just look around you. Every week, it seems like, we have another stupid law or rule restricting our freedom and we just bitch about it for a few days or laugh it off and get used to it. Why don't we ever do anything about this stuff? Oh this is just petty stuff. Who cares if kids can wear pink to school or not, right? Well it's all just petty stuff until we wake up one day and realize we can't do anything without the government's permission.
posted by Lynn S @ 19:06
(category: News/Politics) 3 comments
Erik is working on his Easter menu. Looks interesting. My family would never go for any of that fancy gourmet stuff even if I could find all the ingredients.
Recently found: James Hamilton, a blog about "psychotherapy,neuroscience and current affairs".
Grow a Brain another recent find, with some amusing ads. Great photo. I'm going to try to remember to look carefully at the ads before I sit down on a public bench.
Jerry recommends a pair of new campaign songs for the presidential candidates.
Folks in Arkansas are always so polite - even peeping toms.
Pharyngula answers lots of questions. I'll skip the first set for now and start with those he found at Fembat. (hmmm... I may have to do some looking around there later)
1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:
"...shifting from link to link made it hard for such..." From Sassinak by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Moon. (I sort of cheated a little but this was way too cool a question to waste on a dictionary)
2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?
The wall.
3: What is the last thing you watched on TV?
Survivor.
4: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is:
7:45
5: Now look at the clock; what is the actual time?
7:38
6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 (I swear I didn't plan it this way.)
7: When did you last step outside? What were you doing?
About 20-30 minutes ago. Dumped used tea leaves on the compost pile.
8: Before you came to this website, what did you look at?
Nothing yet this morning. I first saw these questions last night but didn't want to take the time then so I went straight to them first thing this morning.
9: What are you wearing?
Aw, damn! I should have dressed for the occasion. Just sweats.
10: Did you dream last night?
Yes.
11: When did you last laugh?
Not sure. I think it was yesterday watching a little video that one of my sons made with the digital camera.
12: What is on the walls of the room you are in?
Not much.
13: Seen anything weird lately?
Not really. I guess this is the weirdest thing I've seen lately. (The image is not really moving. Honest!)
14: What do you think of this quiz?
It's better than most Friday Fives, but that's not saying much.
15: What is the last film you saw?
We didn't rent any last weekend so it's been two weeks. I'm not exactly sure. The last one I remember was Schindler's List.
16: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
First? Oh gosh, I don't know! Probably dinner because we'd want to go somewhere relaxing and talk about what to do with all that money.
17: Tell me something about you that I don't know.
I wear a size 8 shoe. (Sorry, I don't know what that is in European sizes. It's big but not terribly huge.)
18: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
That's the toughest question so far. I'm not sure what "regardless of guilt or politics" means. I liked the first part of Pharyngula's answer - education. I'd take that a little farther and say, mandatory "classical education" for everyone everywhere in the world. Children would be taught the basics, reading, writing, (in at least 2 languages) math, basic science and history and how to do research. The rest would be just reading and discussing the classics. Not necessarily only Western classics but everyone everywhere in the world would have the same curriculum. (Yes, I know... I'm a bloody imperialist.)
19: Do you like to dance?
I never learned how so I guess the answer is no.
20: George Bush: is he a power-crazy nutcase or some one who is finally doing something that has needed to be done for years?
He IS finally doing something that has needed to be done for years but in some ways he is a nut case or maybe just an idiot (his position on stem cell research, for example) and, like all people in positions of power, looks out for his own interests.
21: Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?
I have no idea. We never could think of a name we like and we have joked that it's a good thing we didn't have a girl because we would still be calling her "hey you."
22: Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?
My first child is a boy and his name is Mark.
23: Would you ever consider living abroad?
No way! Fifteen or twenty years ago I might have said 'maybe for a short time' but now I just want to stay put. I don't even like going on vacation all that well.
An age old pastime, looking for shapes in the clouds. Horses, elephants, dragons, poodles. I rarely see those kinds of shapes in clouds. I enjoy clouds as abstract sculptures in the sky. It's fascinating how substantial they look sometimes. It's hard to believe it's only water vapor.
These pictures were all taken of different parts of the sky on the same day within approximately half an hour.
Today's classical composers have an image problem. They are seen as inhabitants of an ivory tower, writing complex music for a small sect of performers who play for even tinier audiences, and shunning the concerns of "ordinary" amateur musicians and listeners.
[...]
But there has always been another side to musical modernism. There is a hidden repertoire of pieces written by 20th-century composers for amateur musicians, and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group are celebrating this in their latest concert.
[...]
How can composers restore that link between their music and their audiences? Contemporary Music-making for Amateurs, an organisation founded in 1993, has tried to help solve the problem by commissioning works for non-professional players: it is responsible for most of the pieces that appear on the BCMG's programme.
Finches Wings points to an interesting site called Chivalry Today, the goal of which is to "reawaken The Code of Chivalry." There you can find the Seven Knightly Virtues, The Cowboy Code and more, including a short list of historical documents.
Observe the unkempt, rabid mob charging around in Iraq at the moment: how many of them have access to twenty satellite premium sports channels on a high definition plasma screen? None, that's how many. If they did they would all be at home sprawled on the couch instead of running riot around the streets of downtown Mesopotamia on a Tuesday night waving placards featuring the bearded visage of some dangerous Islamic cleric.
That's it! Plasma screens and satellite dishes for everyone! Hey wait a minute... I don't have a satellite dish or a plasma screen. What am I doing here? I should be out rioting.
posted by Lynn S @ 16:34
(category: News/Politics) 2 comments
Assimilation
T-Steel posted something recently that is related to an idea that's been simmering on one of my mental back burners for quite a while. It's about The Borg and assimilation.
Getting hit in the face with reality like we were on September 11, 2001 has a way of spoiling a good fantasy. Why should reality spoil fantasy? After all, it's only fantasy; it's not supposed to have anything to do with reality. But to enjoy a good fantasy, especially a futuristic one, requires that one be able to suspend disbelief and at least temporarily feel that someday, somewhere, somehow, this fantasy could really be true. This now presents a problem with Star Trek because it was not just a fantasy about starships, transporters, phasers and aliens that look strangely similar to humans except for a few superfluous facial ridges; it was a fantasy of the "perfect" society and involved a lot of political ideology.
In spite of the fact that many episodes of Star Trek were obviously intended to make a point, until fairly recently I had never thought of the Borg as anything other than a typical sci-fi plot device: the apparently undefeatable foe who, nevertheless, must be defeated. But then the world got shook up and a lot of people started shouting and, amoung the many things they started shouting about, one was respect for other cultures. So now, I keep thinking I see a political message in the stories involving the Borg and I'm not sure I like it.
Intelligent dialog is not one of the Borg's strengths. "Resistance is futile," and "You will be assimilated," cover almost every situation. I guess when you're the strongest you don't have to talk to anybody. I'm sure someone out there thinks that the U.S. is the Borg. That can be easily dismissed with a bored yawn. Sorry, we've heard the like too many times in the past two and half years. The fact is, we go out of our way to respect other cultures. If I visited Saudi Arabia I could not walk around bare-faced and with several inches of thigh exposed but a woman from Saudi Arabia is free to cover her face when she is visiting the U.S. So exactly who is doing the assimilating?
The message of the Borg episodes of Star Trek, the message that I would like to address, is that assimilation is bad. What does assimilation mean? When the Borg "assimilate" another culture that culture disappears completely. They either become Borg, indistinguishable from other Borg, or they are destroyed. But is that really assimilation and is that what we do in America? Or is it just a twisted moonbat fantasy? Does not that which is assimilated become a part of the whole, thus adding to and changing the original?
But now I'm approaching thin ice. Since I was born into the dominant culture I can't just openly state that assimilation might not be a bad thing. How would I feel if I were the one being assimilated - the one who was expected to abandon my language and culture in order to fit in? Only a bigot would walk around wearing a t-shirt that says, "Welcome to America, now speak English dammit." And yet, wouldn't it be a lot more convenient if we all spoke the same language? And doesn't it seem awfully primitive and tribal to be divided into separate neighborhoods based on the different ethnic groups we belong to? Why can't we all just live side by side and - yes, I'm going to say it - Why can't we all just get along?
Imagine total assimilation. Imagine both black kids and white kids enjoying rap and hip-hop music. But that's already happening, isn't it? Imagine a black dude with dreadlocks playing Beethoven. But wait! What about Awadagin Pratt? That's happening too. Suppose I decide that a hijab would be the perfect solution for a bad hair day and I just throw one on and go the mall. Some of them are quite pretty, don't you think? So why can't I wear one if I feel like it? Ah, here we have a problem. I "can't" because the hijab means something. If I wore one I would be telling the world that I'm Muslim and since I am not I would not feel right wearing one. But what if there was a big secular fashion movement and a lot of women started wearing Muslim style headscarves just because they're a pretty solution to a bad hair day? Assimilation.
Assimilation American style involves both give and take. Every group that has come to America has added its own bit of spice to the pot. Some people believe that traditional cultures must be preserved intact without any "imperialist" American "corruption." I suppose that makes sense if you're running a museum.
If we have corrupted other cultures we have also been corrupted by other cultures. Take away every non-European influence and what would we have? I don't know but it certainly wouldn't look like America. Some cultures are more resistant to assimilation than others or maybe there just hasn't been enough time yet. Maybe someday we will be free to take advantage of that perfect solution to a bad hair day. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Well... since I'm just a typical WASP maybe I'm not qualified to say.
posted by Lynn S @ 14:37
(category: News/Politics) 5 comments
This week's Carnival of the Vanities is up. It confused me at first. It showed up in my referrals this morning and then I remembered that I had submitted one of my silly little posts on the spur of the moment but looking through the Carnival list I couldn't find the link. I finally discovered that he used the title of the post instead of the name of this blog or my name. His introduction was a little confusing too but maybe that was my fault because of a comment in the email I sent. I wasn't expecting to piss off anyone except maybe a few ORU people, if I get lucky.
Anyway, if you're here via the Carnival of the Vanities, welcome, stay a while, look around, enjoy.
A very high proportion of what I would call truly great music – and I think a lot of people would agree – was written between the late 1780s and the late 1820s. This covers Mozart’s later work, the entire second half of Haydn’s published output, most of Beethoven and all of Schubert. It has to be 41 years, in order to start with Mozart’s great string quintet in C Major (1787) and finish with Schubert’s (1828).
Expecting any other period to come close to that probably never-to-be-repeated Golden Age would be a lot to ask – but is there really nothing in the last forty years?
Aworks responds with a year by year list of music from the last forty years. Michael Brooke and The Rambler also respond. I have heard very little contemporary music so I really don't qualify to participate in this little game but that has never stopped me before. I haven't heard most of the works in the lists linked above so I'm not talking about those lists specifically.
In my several years of experience hanging out on classical music discussion forums I noticed an amusing senario that was repeated over and over again. Someone will ask if there is anything worth listening to in the last forty or fifty years (or, more often, declare that there is nothing worth listening to in the last forty of fifty years) and fans of contemporary art music respond with lists of exactly the kind of music that turns many people off contemporary art music, thus confirming the impression that composers stopped writing beautiful "serious" music shortly after 1900.
I wish I could respond with my own list of beautiful music written in the past forty years but, as I said, I haven't listened to very much at all, good or bad. I have two CDs of Elliot Carter's music and it is interesting. I've heard Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians; it has a compelling rhythm. But if you're looking for more of the beautiful, intricate melodies and emotional experiences found in the greatest pre-1900 music you will be very disappointed in the likes of Carter and Reich. But I do have a couple of recommendations of my own.
Alan Hovhaness' music is too beautiful for most contemporary music afficianados. Can you get a better recommendation than the disdain of stuffy academics? Is this "great" music? I don't know. Who cares? It's the most purely beautiful music that I have heard from the past half-century.
Sir Malcolm Arnold - It truly puzzles and disappoints me that Arnold's Symphony No. 9 (1986) is not considered one of the greatest symphonies of all time. It is very bleak and sparse and an unmistakeably modern sound but still very listenable. I didn't immediately fall in love with it but after several listenings it became one of my favorites. Arnold's Fantasy for Cello is another of my favorites - lighter than the aforementioned symphony. If you like unacommpanied cello you really must hear it. His other compositions that I've heard have not appealled to me nearly as much. More on Sir Malcolm Arnold.
Arvo Pärt is relatively new to me. I can't tell you how much I adore his Stabat Mater, one of my top three or four favorite choral works. It is sparse, surreal and addictive.
We can't know what will be considered Great Music in the future. Ultimately the listeners decide what will be remembered. So listen. Find something you like and share it with someone else. You will be influencing music history more than any critic or musicologist can.
There is a lot of bad news coming out of Iraq lately and I don't want to downplay that too much. People are getting killed every day and that cannot be dismissed or excused. But you read those stories everywhere. That's not all there is. Read these notes from Iraq:
Iraq at a Glance, March 27: Yesterday, my friend and I went to Al-Mutanabbe St., this street is famous, located in the center of Baghdad.. it’s full of books, it’s one of Baghdad traditions.. On Friday, many educated people go by this street to purchase books.
There’re many vendors, most of them are enlightened and educated, some of them have the Master degrees in Art, science, some of them are teachers, engineers..etc,
[...]
There are some buildings under maintenance and others under construction..
I came across foreigners who were purchasing some books, a women said to her friend: “ wow.. Wonderful, nice and cheap”.. they liked the place, if you see it you’ll like it too, it’s interesting.
The best point now is NOTHING PROHIBITED in Al-Mutanabbe St., you can find different types of books, regarding politics there are different books for different parties, authors and so many thoughts and opinions.
During the ex-regime the vendors were showing only books that must not interfere with ‘ Baath Party principles’ ! , at that time the Baathist books were sooooo cheap and always covered with dust and never been respected !!
Iraq Now, (American) April 5: See, our soldiers are every bit as smart as--and in many cases, better educated than--journalists of comparable age and experience levels assigned to cover them. I know this is a hard idea for a lot of journo-types to swallow, because so many of them have grown up steeped in condescension towards us working class rubes who were somehow "seduced by the siren song of Jingoism."
... What the soldiers found particularly noxious was the lack of interest in the positive accomplishments--the rebuilding of schools, the rebuilding of a banking system, the training of Iraqi law enforcement personnel, the capturing or killing of mid-level insurgents.
Iraq the Model, April 5:
Where will all these voices -that can see only this moment- be going when the smoke fades away and victory become the prize of the free?
Our enemies want us to live this bloody moment and to lose the spirit that looks forward to the future. Despair is all we can get if we fall in this trap, and I want to point out that this doesn’t include everyone; it doesn’t include the soldier of the coalition fighting in the battle and doesn’t include the Iraqi policeman who was attacked yesterday and had his station burnt, and it doesn’t include me and my comrades who decided to fight as long as it takes. We’ll deal with the situation wisely and toughly if it needs.
[...]
I will not be trapped in the moment. I will not just look through a magnifying lens on the small events -although it’s needed- and forget the whole picture. And I will always look for the future, which should be bright because we are right and we know what’s good for the Iraqi people and how to do it.
Nabil's Blog, April 1: the Iraqi football team played a very bad match against Palstine the team which all its player are professional and they are playing in an Uruguay team. The Iraq team was very bad and the player were very slow so the match ended on 1-1 for each teams
Iraq & Iraqis, April 5: left the man working to attend the bank for some business and in my way I saw:
Communication workers trying to fix phone cable….Two buses full of university students about to go to a picnic…..Traffic Police trying to enforce more order in the streets…….Teen girls walking to school……….Gardeners taking care of public squares……….Many building workers working in Mamon communication tower….People shopping.
And many other normal people and normal daily life actions. And it wasn’t in one place; it was in Bayaa area, Mansor area, Dora area, Karada area, and these about 25 % of Baghdad….. And in office there were nobody is absent they all came to work and they are from all over Baghdad. And we made many joke about what happened and we were sorry it happened.
All what we heard about the clashes was from TV (Arabiya & Jazira). I am not saying it didn’t happen, but it was exaggerated.
Sun of Iraq, April 3: I want to tell you the Islamic religion do not accept in this barbaric attack, and all of people in Iraq do not accept that barbaric attack, we wand to build our country and we want to make a good friendships with all the world and specially with USA and UK that because we are get our freedom with (USA and UK) help.
Please USA Please UK stay and help my people and save them from the bad and barbaric creatures, the barbaric creatures are a black point must erase it.
Kurdo's World, March 31: some words about President Bush..
the guy is damn funny... I don't care about what they say about him but he is the one who managed to destroy two tyrant-istan in the world (Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq and Taliban's kill-istan in Afghanistan)...
why people can not see this bright side of him ? Even if it was for his country's interests, he has made the free world a big favour by destroying Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
I know this will have absolutely no effect on the amount of spam in my Yahoo mailbox (which continues to grow) but it's still cause for minor celebration. Could we have some more please?
posted by Lynn S @ 13:12
(category: News/Politics) 2 comments
Nearer the Source
As I was commenting on this post last night I came up with a theory. Now I want to make clear that this is a completely baseless, off-the-wall theory but it makes a lot of sense to me.
What made me think of this is that Charles seemed a little surprised at my smart-alec remark about people in Oklahoma wanting to burn the Easter Bunny at the stake along with witches, democrats and assorted other non-right-wing folk. Then I remembered that Charles lives somewhere around Oklahoma City. Since that's the state capitol you would think that would be the center for lunacy but it doesn't seem to be.
You see, we have moonbats here in Oklahoma but, unlike most of the rest of the country they are of the Right-wing variety, not the Left. Now I'm not talking about ordinary Christians here - I'm talking about serious moonbattery. According to these people the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and absolutely anything to do with Halloween is not merely harmless, meaningless fun for the kids; it's Evil. Even if the kids have no idea that the Easter Bunny is really a pagan fertility symbol, having fun with the Easter Bunny, Easter egg hunts and so forth is still a mortal sin. Nothing. But. Evil! Period. (Come to think of it, just about anything fun is a mortal sin)
Anyway, I could give you a long list of weird and scary beliefs (Don't even get me started on creationism and anti-separation of church and state) and I'm always being surprised by beliefs that I hadn't heard of before, but this is getting a little off track. My theory is that the closer you get to Oral Roberts University the higher the concentration of Right-wing moonbats. ORU is located in Tulsa so there are more RWMb's in Tulsa and the surrounding area. In other words, ORU is to the Right what Berkeley is to the Left.
Now that I've written that it seems so obvious that I now expect someone to come along and say, "Well, DUH! You just now figure that out?" But maybe some of you from other parts of the country, who are more familiar with Berkeley's reputation, will understand now what we have to put up with out here. It's exactly like living near Berkeley but on the opposite end of the political spectrum.
posted by Lynn S @ 08:03
(category: News/Politics) 5 comments
4 Apr 04
An Old Favorite
It's been a long time since I last read Exclamation Mark. I thought he quit but he's been back for several months. His wife Elly has a blog also. She's currently on the warpath against some inconsiderate neighbors. We lived in apartments and in suburban neighborhoods for years. Oh the stories I could tell! Maybe I will sometime.
A few minutes ago we heard big BOOM somewhere to the north of us. A short time later three police cars and a fire truck came flying up the road in front of our house. If we were betting folks we'd all be betting it was a meth lab. We don't see any suspicious fire or smoke anywhere though.
I found Texas Best Grok via my referrals. Of course I've read the word grok before and know what it means but for some reason "Texas Best Grok" sounds like an advertisement for some kind of ethnic food that you don't usually find in Texas - something like a soup or goulash, probably Klingon in origin.
Actually, Texas Best Grok is a very good blog that has nothing to do with Klingon cuisine - although you might find the occasional recipe.
This sort of thing really makes me hot under the collar and what makes me even more hot is that no one ever does anything about it except complain and put up with it.
I deleted the grammar quiz post because there was some problem with the graphic and I thought it was tacky looking. I probably missed something when I copied and pasted. I got the same result that Jay got. I was surprised because some of the questions were hard and I wasn't sure if got them right or not. It was like being back in school. I don't want to be known as a "Grammar God" anyway. I think I would prefer something less blasphemous... like "Grammar Nazi" or "Persnickety Old Schoolmarm."
Last night I saw a commercial on TV for some piece of legislation. I wasn't really paying attention but it had something to do with the phone company and as one of their reasons why they think we should support it, they talked about similar legislation that had "brought broadband to rural Oklahoma" and actually said something about Oklahoma being a leader in bringing broadband to rural areas. Well, that certainly got my atttention! Hey! Hello? I live in rural Oklahoma; where the heck is my broadband?
Now let me clarify something. I do live a rural area, about 30 minutes away from the nearest Wal-mart, (depending on how bad the traffic is in the crappy little town we have to drive through to get there) but I'm not exactly out here all by myself. It's a fairly well-populated area. It's sort of like a suburban neighborhood except that the yards are a whole lot bigger, the houses don't all look alike and a lot of people have cows, horses, goats, emu and so forth in their yards. We have public water and even cable TV (well, we don't have it but it's available) but unfortunately no broadband and the primitive phone system only allows us to connect at 28.8 and that's on a good day.
So anyway, I saw this commercial and like I said, I wasn't paying much attention so I thought they were talking about a referendum that was going to be on the ballot - after all, they were trying to get me to support it - so, just making a smart-alec remark, I said that I was going to write to the organization that made the commercial and tell them that if I could get broadband by election time I would definitely vote for their legislation. Then I thought, hey, why not? I could really do that. But by the time I got up this morning I had forgotten the name of the organization. I did remember the number 1119 though so I looked it up and found that it's Senate bill 1119, not a Proposition that we get to vote on.
Oh well, there goes my chance to get broadband, but if I see the commercial again or if I can remember the name of the organization I'm still going to write to them and chew them out for making that ridiculous statement about rural broadband in Oklahoma. Maybe they're thinking of Broken Arrow or Sand Springs as "rural." I need to straighten them out.
posted by Lynn S @ 09:04
(category: News/Politics) 2 comments
1 Apr 04
Rachmaninov (1873-1943)
Sergei Rachmaninov was born on April 1, 1873. (Another Rachmaninov site) For a long time I didn't pay much attention to Rachmaninov. Then I made a lucky find: a CD made from 1929 and 1934 recordings of his Piano Concerto No. 2 and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with the composer himself on piano! I almost instantly fell in love with this recording, especially the piano concerto.
Later I bought a 3 disc set of Rachmaninov's music for unaccompanied choir, including Vespers, and it is some of my favorite vocal music. Unfortunately I haven't gotten around to much of Rachmaninov's other music. I have a recording of his Cello Sonata, which is nice but doesn't really do much for me.
Uh oh... My firstborn is thinking again. Could some of you scientific types go over there and talk to him before he hurts himself. (I know it hurt my head just reading it.)
