The Fredösphere

With two Alex Ross sightings under my belt, I can spot a trend. Alex's trademark look turns out to be coat but no tie. I'm not sure if the choice is aesthetic, practical, or political but he's gone tieless every single time I've seen him.

The latest event was The Rest Is Noise Stadium Tour, at Rackham Auditorium (not Michigan Stadium). Too bad Alex didn't post more snapshots of Rackham on his blog; it's one of the most intriguing buildings on the campus of the University of Michigan. Named after a major benefactor of the U, the building is noteworthy for its dignified neo-classical/moderne stylings and the not-to-be-missed shrine to Horace Rackham, a smallish oval sanctum sanctorum located close to the very center of the building. (A plaque on the wall informs the visitor of Horace's humility. No kidding.)

Alex's side-kick was the impressive Ethan Iverson, a pianist completely comfortable demonstrating the disparate styles of the 20th century. The day ended on a fun note (no! Twelve fun notes!) when Ethan asked members of the audience to shout out notes randomly to construct a melody that would become the theme for his concert-ending improvisation. An aggressive woman was first, shouting out "A double flat!" I thought, yeah, remove about 20 years of maturity from me, and I'd being doing the exact same thing.

On the drive home, the Wifeösphere and I speculated just how much of the improvisation was truly improvised. I suspect much of the form and many of the rhythmic gestures come from a "bag of tricks", which is de rigueur for such people. (Organists, especially, are expected to be able to improvise from a melody with no preparation, but few can do it as well as Ethan.) I admired the smart trick Ethan used to warm himself up to the melody, as it were: he began with a short, repeating pattern in the middle register and very slowly rang out the melody in the lowest register of the piano. The notes were so low, they were harmonically disassociated from the accompaniment. Voila! It didn't matter what the notes were. That arrangement could work for any melody at all. Neat.

My favorite line from the book made the cut and was quoted during the talk: the part about one needing a security clearance to understand Milton Babbitt's music. I was rather pleased with the Babbitt piano music Alex and/or Ethan chose for this show, and it changed my view of the old master of bleep-honk-snort.

Another surprise was the Ligeti (Alex pronounced it LIH-guh-tee; the rest of us better fall in line and stop treating it like a faux-Italianism: no more lih-JET-ee) which was quite dissonant, but showed a spark of wit I found very appealing. I have no doubt further listens will spread my love, something that hasn't happened so much for me with the that Ligeti vocal music made famous by Kubrick's 2001. Maybe the Ligeti piano piece was not as purely atonal as the example of serial music Ethan played, or maybe my implacable distaste for Schoenberg has something to do with the man's humorlessness. He certainly has a reputation for arrogance; am I hearing that attitude in the music? Is that possible?

So, I wonder how Alex feels, being on the receiving end of this review (assuming he notices)? The most entertaining part of his talk quoted (complete with verbal impressions) various bumptious critics, pro and con, reacting to Sibelius, who was, even by the extreme standards of our modern times, a polarizing figure. (I'm with Alex on Sibelius: pro.) Alex must be continuously aware of the possibility that a critic as high-profile, as prolific, and as quotable as himself must have expressed a misjudgment somewhere that a future Alex Ross will dredge up with relish. (Hmm. Dredge. Relish. Bad metaphor, bad!) Ah, well, we all have our occupational hazards.

Labels: Culture, local, Performance

You people are supposed to keep me informed about this stuff! My friend John finally got around to telling me about Baba Yetu, a World Pop treatment of the Lord's Prayer in Swahili. In our post-listen IM discussion, we agreed the song is an emotional chameleon, wherein sadness, happiness, grandeur and pure simplicity can be found, depending on who's looking. (Or I should say: depending on who you happen to be at the moment you're looking.) I hesitate to call a mere pop song great art, but like all great art, Baba Yetu leaves gaps that the audience may fill however they like.

John first heard the song while playing his favorite computer game, Civilization IV. It's the theme song. Very odd choice. I'm tempted to say: brave choice. It's got that Africa! Cradle of Mankind! vibe that kind of makes sense, and nobody (but you and I) will notice the religious specificity. (I guess some folks on the Civ4 design team researched Monotheism in their spare time.)

Labels: Compooters, Culture, Religion, VideoClip

Item One The gentlemen of SFF Audio become my heroes as they generously, lavishly, gratuitously link once again to my sci-fi jazz chamber opera They're Made Out of Meat.

Item Two (Or maybe that should be Item-a Two-a.) Cosh strikes again with a fresh take on the ol' see ourselves as others see us thing: Italian comedian Adriano Celentano sings very convincing, but fake, English. My best experience on this topic was meeting an Brit with the gift for imitation. I asked him to talk like an American, and his instant response—"Hey, you guys!"—gave me more self-knowledge in one second that a lifetime of experience.

Item Three Alex Ross mentions his The Rest Is Noise tour, which includes Ann Arbor. I'll be there, bud, me 'n' the Wifeösphere.

Item Four Terry Teachout quotes H.L. Mencken on the topic of book intoxication. I think I may be addicted to politics. Without much serious thought, I gave up my political blogs for Lent. I experienced a dramatic sharpening of my wits.* Suddenly, there was this to-do list in my head that was never there before. I found it impossible to ignore the tasks necessary to achieve my ambitions. I noticed that, when one is lazy, it takes forever to get anything done! An amazing discovery. It's sort of the reverse of that conservative kid in that Woody Allen movie who is cured of his political leanings when a brain tumor is removed.


*Although, to be honest, maybe it isn't the political fast that's doing it. Maybe it's fish oil.

Labels: Culture, They're Made Out Of Meat

This is precisely the headline I expected to read today: I'm not the messiah, says food activist.

In a related story, the Naked Chef finds that West Virginia is not exactly enthusiastic to accept his proffered nutritional gospel.

(This second story really stirred mixed emotions for me. My niece is currently working in WV as part of a program to incentivize school teachers to commit to at least three-year tours of duty in Appalachia. She reports shockingly high levels of resistance to educational achievement. And that's just the parents. OTOH, the region has a long history of various species of do-gooders swooping down to save them from themselves. These days I doubt if you could swing a dead cat there without hitting a social worker.)

Labels: Culture, Food, fun

That scraping sound you hear is my lazy rear end dragging itself to the keyboard to feed sweet wordlets to the loyal fans of Der Pfredöspher. (Hi, Tante Gertie!) Today, I bring a handful of webcandy; I hope soon to offer something more substantial.

Item One. Blogger Allen H. Simon describes a nifty programming idea: a concert of nothing but misattributed works. (I.e., Pseudo-Buxtehude, etc.) Then he goes and steps in it by attacking the Cult of the Composer. Yes, comments are open, and yes, the powdered wigs are flying. I'm sympathetic to the urge to demystify. Ultimately, composers are at the mercy of performers (especially dead composers!) and a stupid but well-researched performance cannot come close to an intelligently ideosyncratic one, in my opinion. Note the bad faith, or simple failure to understand the argument, of the purists who comment, and yet, I understand their fear as well. If only there were a way to prevent HIP (Historically Ignorant Performance) while letting the smart people have free reign. Perhaps a license of some kind could be issued. Shoot, if it were to be had from the Michigan Secretary of State's office, the long wait itself would weed out the lazy. Another problem: Solved! By the Fredösphere!

Item Two. I loved this quote found by Eve Tushnet:

Uyeda says that his approach to cocktail-making is grounded in the Japanese tea ceremony. It is an "adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order."
--"Tokyo, Cocktail Capital of the World," Hugh Garvey, in Best Food Writing 2009

Those words "adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence" ripped me out of, well, the sordid facts of my everyday existence, and wonderfully expresses exactly why I make art. Like the setting of the words of the Christmas angels, "Fear not! For behold. . . ." Or for that matter, the fantasy story about neurotic chiropractors that I wrote last week. (No; really.)

Item Three. Ten thousand thanks to David Price, my new best friend that I don't know. He gave me a very kindly review of my chamber jazz space opera They're Made Out of Meat, available as an electronic download for 89 lousy cents at Amazon. (Go buy the thing! Now! What are you waiting for?) He said my opera is "[p]layed absolutely straight by The Fredosphere, which is what makes it so great. The best $0.89 I spent all day." No notice has given me quite such a thrill, since so far as I know David is utterly unconnected to me (other than that whole "All Men are Brothers" thing everyone's talking about). Even Alex Ross linking to me, back in the pioneer days, although far more flattering, seems less shocking, since we are brothers of the blog, after all.

Labels: Creativity, Culture, Performance, They're Made Out Of Meat

How is it I made it to my forty-nth birthday (yesterday) without knowing it (almost) coincides (probably) with the birthday of the guy I was named after?

Bonus material: check out this truly horrifying bit of Prohibition History and the role of musicians in in predicting the future.

Labels: Composer, Culture, Futurism

Saturday, 23-Jan-10, 9:20am We enter the school. I'm surprised at the lack of crowds; already this is looking better than last year. I am holding a cane-sugar-sweetened Mexican Coke in a tall bottle of real glass, thus signaling I am not to be triffled with. Der Drübermensch checks in.

9:30am I chat with my friend Daryl. He, his wife, and son are the only people I know here. Soon they are distracted by tournament administration, however, and I am left alone. The first of many stretches of time to kill presents itself. I am not afraid. I am armed with novels, histories, notebooks and music manuscript paper. I know how to kill time. I am the time slayer. I will teach time to fear me.

10:10am Der Drübermensch's first game begins. I walk to the other side of the room. Der Drü has asked me to stay close by in past tournaments, but I see no other parents hovering today. I decide he has probably outgrown it. Also, as this is a local, non-rated tournament in a familiar location, the pressure is less. It is very unlikely I will need to kill a fellow dad out behind the school in a bare-handed contest of family honor at any time today. If I die, I die for points.

10:25am I glance up from the stage at the end of the caffetorium. From across the room I see Der Drü make a move. Did he just capture a queen?

10:40am My optimism was unfounded. Der Drü looses his first game. As is typical at this level, it was a war of attrition. In the end, his army of pawns was no match for an army of pawns plus one rook.

11:10am 2nd game. I think about Light, a novel by M. John Harrison, which I finished reading in the interlude. A literary SF novel; high probability of being my kind of book. Sheesh, what a chore to read. What Terry Teachout would call an eat-your-peas aesthetic experience.

11:35am Der Drü loses the see-saw battle. This is his first game ever that was truly close. His queen and support staff were converging on the enemy king, but his opponent's pieces were similarly deployed. In the end, it felt like Der Drü was simply one move behind. Check-mate on a crowded board.

11:45am Pizza. I try the new Domino's for the first time. They weren't lying. I move their pizza out of the Inedible column, into the Reasonably Good column. As I am loyal to the local company, this feels satisfying.

12:25pm Game 3 begins and the tournament is, incredibly, ahead of schedule. I begin reading René Girard's The Scapegoat. The sudden shift to a sympathetic author is bracing. I do not like you, M. John Harrison / I do not like green eggs and venison. (Note to self: edit out this self-indulgent crap later.)

12:50pm Loss #3. The first frustrating game for Der Drü, since it was played on a tiny board and its unfamiliarity made him overlook a line of vulnerability.

1:15pm Pizza slice #3. This is boredom eating. I run into Daryl; he and I discuss Bay Bucks, Social Credit Theory, and Chestersonian Distributism.

2:35pm Der Drü, on the cusp of his first win! But, what is this? Why won't he capture that knight (his enemy's last powerful piece) and finish the kid off? Why, having promoted a pawn, does he start promoting another? Is he toying with the poor kid?

2:50pm A break, and a dad is subjecting his son to a post-mortem. "What's your move here?" Silence. "Look. At. The. Board." Yikes. And yet, I can sympathize, although I generally confine my yelling to the inside of my head.

3:05pm René Girard's thesis emerges: myths are records of acts of violence against scapegoated outsiders: panics, persecutions & pograms in times of pestilence. Interesting.

3:10pm Round 5—or is it? why is the tournament director ordering all games halted? Where did Der Drü go? Ah, here he comes. All is well. The games begin.

3:18pm The Scapegoat, borrowed via inter-library loan, is marked on every page with notations. Who are these markers, these defiling scribblers in books they don't own? Makes me want to assemble a mob to find these offenders and subject them to some persecution.

3:42pm Game 5 is a chessathon. Der Drü ahead, then behind, then ahead again! Now, nothing but kings and pawns on the board. And just like the ending of that Searching for Bobby Whatshisname movie, Der Drü and the pint-sized Evildoer sitting opposite him are marching pawns down the board. Said pawns arrive in consecutive turns, just like in the movie! No joke. And now, Der Drü extends a hand, graciously offering a draw. That movie, again! Unlike that snotty little fool from the movie, my son's opponent accepts the offer. Stop searching, gentlemen: my son, the new Bobby Fisher, is alive and living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Labels: Culture, CuteKid, local, Mythos

The oldest musical instruments yet found are flutes made from bone and estimated to be—brace yourselves—35,000 years old. Wow. Then there's this tantalizing bit:

The sound produced by the flute "is almost identical to tones of the major scale played on today's flute," says Nikolaj Tarasov, a recorder specialist at the Music University of Karlsruhe in Germany. The five-holed instrument—carved from the bone of a griffon vulture—might be capable of expressing greater harmonic variety than the modern-day flute, he says.

Not enough information, people! It's almost exactly like our modern scale, only better???? How now, brown cow? Nevertheless, these flutes are seven more sticks in the eye of that arch-fiend and enemy of all tonality, M. Boulez. 35,000 years of brawny cave-man musicianship beats a few decades of etiolated, frenchified, 20th century intellectuals in my book.

The flutes were discovered in Hohle Fels, a cave in the Swabian mountains in present-day southwestern Germany. I expect the craftsman who invented them shouted "I have today made a discovery that will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next 35,000 years!" If so, he was right.

It would be too bad if these ancient artifacts are too fragile to handle. I'd love to hear something relatively recent on them. Something like the Bach B minor Sonata for flute and harpsichord. Shades of "To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence" and all that.

Labels: Culture

As a counterweight to Joseph Campbell's railing against religious literalists, I give you Rene Girard, as interviewed by Peter Robinson at Uncommon Knowledge.

Regretfully, the interview is not long enough (in spite of its having five segments) to allow M. Girard to get past mere assertions, so what he says will likely change no minds. Nevertheless, the interview serves as a pointer to his books, which I hope will be argument-rich. Beyond that, it serves as an interesting artifact: here's proof of the existence in the wild of an intellectual—a French intellectual, with a real, live heavy French accent— who is neither a Communist nor a nihilist (or both). By all indications, he's to the right even of Bernard-Henri Lévy!

Girard doesn't buy the Campbellian myth that the founding stories of Christianity are mere myth (although they are that, in the anthropological sense). Girard asserts that Christianity has additional components that makes it unique among religions. And if unique, than worthy of further understanding of the what, how and why of its uniqueness. (Hint: maybe unique, because uniquely true.)

Again, I must stress Girard never gets past his assertions, so those inclined to be annoyed by such should prepare themselves before following the link. (Perhaps the only truly safe route would be to shield one's eyes with a Joseph Campbell mask.) Nevertheless, it's worth it for the thrill of hearing some old French guy's quavery voice speak the unspeakable.

By the way, I've been a regular viewer of Uncommon Knowledge for a while now. Peter Robinson is such a gentle soul, it's hard to believe he's not a sap. Yet he regularly brings in heavyweight guests. I can especially recommend interviews with Shelby Steele and Richard Epstein who give provocative and persuasive analyses of President Obama's temperment.

Labels: Culture, Mythos, Religion

You don't need to be a fan of extreme missionary stories to be moved by the BBC's account of a ceremony of repentance and reconciliation 170 years after the Rev. John Williams was killed and eaten by fearful islanders in the South Pacific.

Labels: Culture, Religion

Those of you who devote your lives to memorizing the content of this blog will remember I am a fan of the book The Seven Basic Plots.  Author Christopher Booker drew much information from the anthropologist Joseph Campbell, one of the world's top authorities on myths and a man who famously influenced George Lucas' development of the Star Wars story line.

Long have I intended to watch Joseph Campbell's PBS specials, hoping an answer to the following questions would I find:

What is the purpose of myth-making in a culture?  What is its job?
What lessons can modern fiction writers learn from the ancient myths?

Finally, I've done it.  My local library has several Campbell videos to choose from.  I began with Mythos.  It's a 3-disc series but my library owns only numbers 1 and 3.  The first disc examined the psychological foundation of myth.  Campbell is an engaging speaker, with deep knowledge and a rare knack for teaching.  I found this part of the series very stimulating, even though much of it I didn't buy, as it relied heavily on Jungian and Freudian concepts which have lost much of their scientific cachet.  (Thad, my friend the psychology professor, tells me that the use of drugs in psychiatry has not so much refuted those two giants as rendered them irrelevant.)  The third disc was less interesting to me as it simply described certain myths without the  kind of analysis I was hoping for.  Here, Campbell's bias became more obvious, which is:  all traditions are equal and equally glorious, except the European/Christian tradition which is uniquely bad.  At the point Campbell mentioned "Jesus Christ" and "the speed of light" in the same sentence (by way of refuting the Ascension as a historical fact), thereby dropping a notch in my estimation.  That's one of my rules:  never fully respect anyone who uses the words "Jesus Christ" and "the speed of light" in the same sentence.

Were my questions answered?  No, not completely.

I moved on to another, more famous PBS video:  Bill Moyers' interview of Campbell at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch, titled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.  This was even less interesting.  It quickly devolved into Hindu apologetics.  That's fine if that's what you want, but maybe they could have given the video a more honest title, like maybe Joseph Campbell and the Power of Hinduism and Buddhism Which Are Religions Far Superior to Christianity With All It's Annoying Dogmas and Neurotic Fixation On Sin.

Were my questions answered?  No, not at all.

My search for enlightenment continues.  I'll give one of Campbell's books a try.  I think I'll start with The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which I believe was the starting point for George Lucas.  In the meantime, I'll have to rely on this brief summary of "the hero's journey," complete with disco cheezeball Star Wars soundtrack:



So now I'm thinking about writing a story about some warrior dude who rips the arm off a monster.  A monster who wears black and breathes noisily, and uses an ill-defined, magical "force."  And whose name is Grendel.  Or Darth Grendel.  Or. . .well, obviously this is just a work in progress.

Labels: Culture, Fiction, Religion

More crazy awe: the announced Death of Cursive Handwriting has the curmudgeon (what a wonderful word, curmudgeon!  Makes me want to write it down 500 times.  In cursive) in me denouncing our feckless afterbearers who no longer learn that discipline.  Here's one link, but google the topic if you doubt there has been much hand wringing over the state of handwriting.

Mind you, I completely get the temptation never to learn the not terribly easy craft.  What I don't understand is the poor confused, lying zitbrains you find here and there who claim that block letters are faster. Obviously they haven't practiced their cursive enough to discover what a beautiful, efficient, and downright elegant (in the engineering sense, especially) technique cursive writing is.  Avoiding the tedious act of lifting the pen or pencil off the page once or more per letter is a wonderful thing.

And I would personally like to take this opportunity to denounce whatever pathetic (no doubt self-appointed) panel of so-called experts who were in charge of deciding what the official style for cursive letters would be taught to schoolchildren of my generation. In particular, I'd like to complain that the look of many of the capital letters are goofy, ugly, unwritable, tasteless, and/or generally exactly what you would expect coming from a bunch of education bureaucrats (the kind of people who spend their Friday nights memorizing tables of statistics published by the Soviet Union).  What's with that letter Q, looking like the number 2?  Why can't the capital F look like, you know, an F?  And, speaking as someone with the middle name Gero (a committee of one, no doubt) who therefore occasionally needs to write a capital G and make it look decent, I ask:  who's the genius who came up with that hopeless tangle of worms?  To write a decent G one must loop counter-clockwise, come to a full halt, then loop clockwise.  I've never seen any other person pull it off, and of course, most people don't even try:  most people have brains enough to abandon the system and write their capitals as ordinary block letters.  The capital requires an extra lift of the pen or pencil, so block letters cost almost nothing in time or effort, and look much more tasteful.

(The Time article linked above says a new system, the Zanerian alphabet, is much cleaner.  Sadly, not even that system is being forced upon our lazy spawn.)

I remember the shock I had recently of reading the handwriting of a college student who's penmanship seemed to be lifted right off a poster on the wall of a 2nd grade classroom.  To be blunt, it was the penmanship of a dork.  The kid should have figured it out by that late stage to break the rules, but still, can we agree?­­­­ He was the victim of educational malpractice.

Labels: Culture, Design

I interrupt the criminal neglect of my duty to my widespread blog audience (hi, Aunt Virginia!) to report on a trip to the Big House.

Michigan Stadium and I have experienced a rocky relationship, one consisting of a few hours together followed by more than 20 years of resentful separation.  My one previous visit remains a miserable memory:  packed into a row that was overfull before we squeezed into it; a complete inability to see the field, not to mention the players; enjoying only passes in a game that contained all too few (this was Bo Schembeckler's three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust era); and--worst of all--a growing suspicion I was in the presence of tens of thousands of fools, since attending a UM game was obviously a fool's exercise.

I'm honestly befuddled by the dramatic difference between that experience and Saturday's.  Although in the end zone, our seats gave us a perfectly fine view.  Getting into the stadium took time, especially because skybox construction interfered with some of the stadium entrances, but my expectations were so low, they were exceeded magnificently.

I would not have chosen to return to the Big House were it not for Der Drübermensch's pleading.  My fine young 10-year-old sports fanatic had been dreaming of this day ever since attending a tailgate party fund raiser for his boychoir last fall, where he found out that UM football is a very, very big deal.

Like the devout of all other religions, practitioners of UM football worship attend carefully to its rites and rituals, eschewing any deviation from tradition.  Of all details, I was most charmed by the gleaming white gloves worn by director Scott Boerma, which must have been a real sacrifice on what was a warm late summer day.  Note in the photo the band with its line of tuba bells; the student section behind them can be seen by the line of demarcation where the yellow shirt-wearing students end and the fatcat alumni in their center-field seats begin.  Note the luxury skyboxes towering above, which, even in their incomplete state, make the ancient press box look seedy by comparison.

Football is the stuff dreams are made of, and not doubt many in the crowd envy the (true) freshman quarterback who lead the defeat-weary UM team to a convincing victory.  Others might envy coach Rich Rodriguez whose name the crowd chanted.  For me, my moment of envy came late in the game when Neil Diamond's voice blasted from the speakers:

Sweet Caroline!
[ooh-ooh-ooh!]
Good times never seem so good

and 109,017 voices sang his song with him.  They'll be singing it long after the men of the gridiron are broken down old men, and forgotten.

Labels: Culture, local, Religion, Sports

Saline (emphasis on the second syllable, please), Michigan hosts a Celtic Festival every summer.  Think Renaissance Fair and you'll get the idea:  the creative anachronism crowd, but with more bagpipes.  We attended for the first time this year.  My impressions:

• The jousting competition was very satisfying, even if there were only three competitors. This is an expensive, high-commitment, weird, and rather dangerous sport.  I got the impression if one walks away from a tournament with only a few bruises and a sprained wrist, one considers the day a success. The time spent cantering and colliding is a small part of the whole; the riders spend a fair amount of time walking their horses into position. This means there's plenty of time to talk to the crowd, and inevitably trash talk has become an integral component of the entertainment. Also appreciated was the judge/master of ceremonies/FAQ answerer, a dead ringer for a bearded Jeremy Irons.  No fatalities, sadly, something that can happen when a splinter of balsa wood impales the brain via the eye slit.
• I couldn't help but notice the base drummer with obvious African ancestry among all the redheads in the pipe & drum bands, especially since he brought to mind the cover art from this sad, dreadful movie.
• Once again, the local high school provided instrumentalists, and by backing them up with a thumping electronic rhythm section, made them listenable from the point of view of the average audience member. See my previous paean to the Saline Fiddlers: same principle.
• The food was disappointing. Domino's Pizza had a booth, along with some Italian sub thing and a tent selling Hawaiian chicken of all things, and maybe I should have gone with one of those.  Instead I went to the trailer selling authentic Celtic food.  The Welsh pasty might have been good when it was fresh, but it sat around long enough for the puff pastry to turn dry as a Judge Bork martini. Sucker that I am, I obeyed the hype and also ordered a can of "Scotland's other national drink," a soda pop named Irn Bru that tastes like orange baby aspirin.  Not terrible, mind you, but definitely sub-fabulous.  Ah well, the Walkers shortbread cookies at the end redeemed the meal.
• People from the Society of Creative Anachronism really, really don't mind taking the time to explain their coats of arms.

Labels: Culture, local, LovableOddballs

I can honestly say this is one headline I never expected to read:

Hindu Monkeys Target Charlie Chaplin

The Little Tramp has been called many things down through the years (e.g. satyr, commie) but this is probably the first time he has been denounced as a Christian.

Labels: Culture, Little Tramp, Religion, Words of Power

The Grand Rapids Symphony and Chorus will perform Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls and also music from Wagner's Ring this weekend.  This is an impressive program I wish I could hear.

City Journal wanders into a strange (for it, not for me) neighborhood:  religion in science fiction.  Author Benjamin A. Plotinsky sees the genre shifting away from its more political focus during the years of the Heinlein hegemony.  Hat tip goes to He With Whom I Butt Heads, Gabriel McKee of SF Gospel, who says the article is a bit sloppy (and he has a point).  Meanwhile, McKee also dismisses Watchmen in three short sentences although the movie inspired in me much the same reverent (no joke) feelings that the book did and that completely swamped all my (legitimate) artistic, political and philosophical complaints.  I guess we'll have to settle for snippy snarking until the appeals process culminates with a ruling handed down from the magisterial Eve Tushnet.

Speaking of magisterial, Positive Liberty (how did I find you, PL?  I'm sorry to say I've forgotten) found Allan Bloom in two forms:  on video re Socrates and audio re Nietzsche.

My newest friend is Gareth Stack, a mercurial and intellectually peripatetic Irish being who sometimes adopts the nom de blogge "Professor Byron Frump" who nevertheless dares to call himself "confounded" by my "astrolabe of wingnuttery."  So, Prof. Frump, what do you make of today's goulash of themes and links?

Labels: Choral, Culture, movie, sci-fi

No blood was spilled, but the drama is undeniable:  Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett butt heads at a conference of philosophers on that whole God question.  The author begs to remain anonymous, fearing the effect on his academic career if he is outed for his religious beliefs.  Doth he protest too much?  Is his account one-sided?  Don't miss the comments for other opinions.

Labels: Culture, Religion

Shared torment has the power to bond strangers.  We arrived not early to the herding demonstration pen at the Detroit Kennel Club Dog Show on Sunday, and so with the rest of the overflow crowd we ignored the full bleachers and stood around the fence in the back.  From this position we could not hear the herder's lecture, but so what?  We came to watch the dogs.

Basenji:  A Study in Elegance

Border Collie:  A Study in Focus (the dog, not the snapshot)

It was after about 10 minutes of droning I, my family, and those standing near us became antsy.  A few exasperated words and rueful chuckles later, we realized we stood on common ground.  We few, we happy few, were a band of brothers.  We were one.  Meanwhile, the herder's voice would occasionally change pitch and volume, we would overhear something like, "okay, that's enough about the ducks!" and our hopes would rise . . . only to fall again.  The woman yakked for 20 minutes.  The sense of decorum and the lofty sense of dignity for which I am justifiably famous alone prevented me from shouting, "shut up and play yer border collie!"  Finally, we got to see the dogs in action; ten minutes of marching ducks up a ladder, down a slide and into a kiddie pool.  Okay, I guess it was worth it.

Far greater was our enjoyment of the whole dog show experience.  The DKC show, held annuallyat Cobo Hall in downtown Detroit, is a benched show (which I believe is unusual) which means all dogs are present in the hall for the full time the show is open.  Dog people are remarkably friendly and evangelistic regarding their dogs as a rule, so Der Drübermensch and the Maharincess got to pet their favorite breeds.  I was glad for a chance to see my favorites:  pembroke welsh corgis, schipperkes, and the regal borzois.  All the dogs are model citizens and you rarely hear even a single bark in the huge room, although hundreds of dogs are present.

Our Ford:  A Study in Neglect

Less inspiring was the walk to and from our parking place.  Downtown Detroit always infuriates and depresses me, but this promenade was special because we got to see the dreaded Ford Auditorium up close.  In limbo because it is too ugly and disfunctional for the DSO to use, yet too bound to car company politics and civic impotence (so the story goes) to tear down, the eye-sore (was there ever a time when it wasn't ugly, even when it was brand-new?) deteriorates and false rumors of plans for the site come and go as we all wait for the grim, faceless monster to get a clue and collapse on its own.

Labels: Architecture, Culture

Over at Sacred Space, which comes courtesy of the Irish Jesuits, the thought for the week calls us to make a particular reform:

As we move into Lent we might wonder if fasting has any meaning for us today. It has. It is really asking us to look at our relationship to food and drink. Jesus loved to eat with his friends. Meals were important for him. For families too, meals are a time when children watch and listen to their parents and vice versa. But family meals are in danger of disappearing, what with fast food and the lure of TV, which is sometimes left on even when the family are eating together. Like mobile phones in company, it reduces our presence to one another. For many families a good Lenten resolution would be to have meals together at least once a week, and expose themselves to the need for listening, sitting at peace, knowing how the rest of the family is, and going for slow rather than fast food.

Heavens to Murgatroyd, have things declined in Europe so much that one lousy meal per week together as a family is considered challenging?  Are they, perhaps, that bad for many in North America as well?  Australia?

No, wait.  Don't answer that question.

UPDATE:  It turns out video games are probably succeeding in teaching kids the skills they will need to survive in a post-apocalypse environment.  I'm feeling better already!

Labels: Culture, We're All Going to Die

I grew up just a few miles north of the border of Indiana, which also meant Amish country.  I've traded more than my share of Wacky Amish Rules anecdotes, like the horse-drawn buggy pulling a motorboat on a trailer, or the farmers who have phones in their barns (it's not personal, it's business!) but not in their homes.  I've laughed over the irony of amish.net and wondered what an Amish TV network would look like.  (Most likely, Twelve Angry Mennonites 24 hours a day.)  That's why I was surprised that a website like Futurismic could shake my glib understanding of how Amish relate to technology.  Their choices begin to make sense once you understand that the various compromises are all oriented toward solving the problem of avoiding any innovation that disrupts the cohesion of their community . . . and cheerfully adopting any that does not.

I've always understood (and slightly agreed with) their Luddite approach, but reacted with horror to the arbitrary legalism.  My mind has expanded a bit and in the future my grins over Amish men on rollerblades will contain a little less smirk in it.

Labels: Culture, LovableOddballs

Forgive me, but I for one am not ready to sign on so glibly to the idea that monkey butlers are better than human ones.

Now that we have that taken care of, let's move on to the subject on everyone's minds:  money.  I've been amused by the Depression-era Social Credit Party ever since I first heard of it and its zany policies of forbidding the service of alcoholic drinks on commercial aircraft flying in its airspace (that of the province of Alberta, Canada) which imposed upon Canadian airlines unusual disciplines of timing.&nbps; More profoundly weird than that, however, was the party's share-the-wealth experiment in "funny money." Actually called prosperity certificates, these were intended to stimulate economic activity by depreciating the longer they were held.  Hoarders, beware!  (It would be interesting to learn just how closely the SCP is related to the similarly bipolar Minnesotan Farmer-Labor Party, and why one drifted into the respectable right while the other into the respectable -- can I say that? -- left, but I am not the man to tell that tale.)

In light of this, I was surprised and amused to hear that, in these troubled times, the idea of a currency with an expiration date has gained, uh, currency again with an example from Austria cited.  At the same time, my friend Victor informs me of yet another weird experiment in roll-yer-own script, the Traverse City regional Bay Bucks. 

What is it about cold, forbidding climes that encourages the printing of money?  Now even the moon is getting into the act.

Labels: Culture, local

One of the benefits implicitly offered us by the Obama presidency is a radical rewiring of our country's racist hardware (if you will excuse the goofy meaphor).  It seems most people, espcially blacks, do believe the change has happened.

As usual, the Fredösphere saw the trend long before anyone else.  About five years ago I was at the library with Der Drübermensch and The Maharincess when a stranger about my age came up to me.  "I just love it when I see people bringing their kids to the library!  That's just great!"  The man was African-American, and I thought, "at last, we've done it!  We've ascended to a higher, post-racial plane of being!  Here, this day, a white man has been patronized by a black man!"  I know I'm being snarky here, but the honest fact is there was something exhilarating about the experience.

Anyway, congratulations to President Barrack Obama.  God bless 'im.

Labels: Culture

Over Christmas break, during a long drive from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to our vacation condo in Sarasota, Florida, there happened one of those coincidences that make life interesting and blogging easy. We were sitting in a positively charming little Scottish restaurant eating MacBreakfast when I leaned over to the Wifeösphere and asked, "did you notice the man who took our order was wearing a Hitler mustache?"

She had not noticed, although in her defense I'll mention the man was African-American; not only the low color contrast of black on brown, but the sheer culture shock of a Black Hitler made the mustache difficult to notice. Nevertheless, incidents like this one, or the Adolf Hitler birthday cake that was in the news at Christmas time, serve as a reminder of the enduring toxicity of all things Hitlerian. Hitler owns the franchise on Evil. He rules it. The attraction-slash-repugnance that surrounds Nazism, thanks in large part to the arrogance of the movement as well as its style sense (wouldn't communists be regarded with more dread if only they wore black leather decorated with skulls?) guarantees they will continue to be the first-call bogymen for novels, TV and films for the foreseeable future.

Have you ever seen a Hitler mustache in the wild? Of course not. Have you ever wondered why they never call them Charlie Chaplin mustaches? Of course not.

Nazis calibrated ever detail of their movement to maximize both evil and the appearance of evil, so some people have reacted by trying to quarantine Hitler, defining him as a kind of unique, unrepeatable monster who cannot and must not be understood. If a movie or book examines him too closely, critics worry that Hitler may be "humanized."

Norman Spinrad is not worried. In order to write The Iron Dream in 1972, he had to get inside Hitler's head in a way few would attempt and fewer could pull off. The Iron Dream is nothing less than a novel from an alternative universe plus an "Afterword to the Second Edition by a fictional critic. In that alternate universe, a young, passionate veteran of WWI immigrates from Germany to New York City, becomes a science fiction illustrator and fanzine editor, then writes a Hugo-award-winning novel. That novel--which makes up the bulk of Norman Spinrad's book--is called Lord of the Swastika. It's author is . . . you guessed it.

Think of the months Spinrad spent on this project! This Lord of the Swastika is 240 pages long. All that time, he immersed--wallowed--in the Hitler mindset! I can think of only one comparable effort: The Screwtape Letters, wherein author C. S. Lewis imaged how an experienced demon might mentor a rookie tempter through a series of advisory epistles. But Lewis' book is very short, and intentionally so, as he explained. "It almost smothered me before I was done. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it."

How Spinrad maintained his oxygen supply while diving in the murk of Hitler's brain is anyone's guess. Lord of the Swastika is a relentless cycling of a short list of obsessions: hygiene, manly strength, tight black leather, mass spectacle, and above all, violence. It is porny to a degree that I fondly hope has never been surpassed anywhere. It describes a future Earth despoiled by nuclear fallout and overrun by degenerate mutants who are dirty, smelly, ugly, weak, and surrounded by squalor. The burden of the story lies in the need of the true humans to purify themselves by destroying the mutant infiltrators and the mind-controlling "Dominators" who lead them. This the humans accomplish only when a hero of unusually pure genetic stock rises to take control of the government and launch an unspeakably bloody war against the whole world.

The battle scenes are especially self-indulgent. Although the warfare is mechanized, the climaxes inevitably require hand-to-hand combat, where the hero, named Feric Jagger, smashes the brains of his enemies with a giant metal truncheon of magical power.

The afterword, written by the fictional critic "Homer Whipple" has stolen much of my fun by making the most obvious points. There we find a catalog of Hitler's obsessions, with violence and hygiene battling for preeminence. There's also the kooky emphasis on the design of flags, buildings, pageants and uniforms, always attributed to the hero, which makes sense when you remember the attention Hitler paid to details like the cut of military uniforms.

We are also told of Hitler's reputation as a Don Juan at science fiction conventions, and this fact is compared with the subtext of passages like this:

He chanced to look at Best; the young hero was married to the controls of the tank and to his machine gun. His face was set in a steel grimace of determination; in his blue eyes was a fierce and iron ecstasy. For an instant their eyes met and they were united in the comradely communion of battle, transfigured together in a red mist beyond time or fatigue. Through the metal of the tank, the common weapon which they shared, their souls seemed to touch and merge for an instant in the greater communion that was the racial will. All this took place in the blink of an eye; their beings were not for an instant distracted from the sacred task.

Yowie. There are Freudianisms as well: the outstretched-arm salute, a tall reviewing stand, and a rocket that ends the novel "on a pillar of fire to fecundate the stars." All this is described by "Whipple" who then writes:

What is open to dispute is whether or not Hitler was consciously aware of what he was doing.

Great stuff, but marred slightly by the reader's sure knowledge that such a negative essay would never be included along side the novel it criticizes.

Still, verisimilitude is mostly maintained. The essay's author is ignorant where he ought to be. He firmly believes a society based on the violent enforcement of racial purity is impossible. He is not even sure Hitler is an anti-Semite. He suspects it, but Hitler's anti-communism argues against it in light of the communists' recent murder of five million Jews.

Also unnoticed by our friend Mr. Whipple is the pun in the name of the hero, Feric Jaggar. The first name obviously refers to the Latin ferrum for "iron." But why Feric? The naïve translation would "ironic." It looks like author Spinrad is sharing a joke with us over the head of his alter-ego Whipple.

Whipple cannot know the effect of his last sentence, described by Theodore Sturgeon in the book's (real) introduction, as "the most eloquent and penetrating shout of indignation I have ever experienced":

No, although the spectre of world Communist domination may cause the simpleminded to wish for a leader modeled on the hero of Lord of the Swastika, in an absolute sense we are fortunate that a monster like Feric Jaggar will forever remain confined to the pages of science fantasy, the fever dream of a neurotic science-fiction writer named Adolf Hitler.

Whipple is also unaware of the weird parallels between events in the novel and events in our own (real--at least, let's hope we're real) time line. Feric Jaggar's rise to power and conquest of the evil empire of the east follows Hitler's. Jaggar's lieutenants can be identified; Himmler, Röhm, and the amusing-yet-sinister Goebbels have fictional representatives. That Hitler, who moves to NYC in 1919 in the alternative time line, could have anticipated these characters and their fates is impossibly prescient. Spinrad may have meant it as another sly joke, but it comes off as a bit lazy or self-indulgent.

The funniest page comes at the beginning, the one where "Other Science Fiction Novels by Adolf Hitler" are flogged. But the fact is, I chuckled on almost every page. That's why I'm surprised Theodore Sturgeon blasted a rival critic who wrote of The Iron Dream that it "ceased to be funny after the first twenty pages" with a one-word paragraph leaden with sarcasm:

Funny!

They're both wrong. I found it hilarious from beginning to end. I suppose that means I'm a bad person. But we knew that already.

Labels: Culture, sci-fi

The Washington Post is talkin' 'bout my generation, and it's "green" in the least complimentary sense of the word.  I'd like to think I am an outlier; the bad news is that I had to use a Thesaurus to come up with this (lame) blog title; the good news is . . . I know how to use a Thesaurus!

(Tip o' the hat to my unusually bright coeval Renewable.  At least I think he's my coeval.)

Labels: Culture

Neal Stephenson's Anathem sits at the intersection of science fiction and choral music, so naturally I'm going to blog it repeatedly.  However, there's more going on with this book (I'm about 70% of the way through its 900 pages, btw) that needs to be talked about.

Good or bad, lovable or hateful, this book is very unusual.  (If it were just an ordinary novel, not SF, I'd have to call it extremely unusual.)  Anathem has the chance to become a movement book.  Like Stranger in a Strange Land and a very few other novels I could mention if I took a while to remember them, Anathem presents a way of life that is very seductive and somewhat achievable.  (Much more achievable than SIASL, where you need to learn how to communicate with the dead and manipulate matter with your thoughts if you really want to get with the program.)

It will take a lot of stars getting into alignment for any significant Anathem monastic communities to get organized.  I'm not saying I think it will happen; only that Anathem is that rare book where such a movement could be even possible.  Plus, it's not like SIASL made much of a mark on our culture, although it did at least introduce one word into common use (common among geeks, that is).  And that's nothing to sneeze at.

Stephenson's goal (if it was a conscious goal) to write a movement book will be helped along a bit because it was inspired by the work of an organization already in place:  the Long Now Foundation.  Stephenson is on video reading from the book and answering questions at a Long Now event.  Cantors in funky robes are thrown in for fun.  The music they sing is inspired by mathematics.  Some of it doesn't really work for me on a musical level, frankly, but it's worth something as a curiosity and a kind of proof-of-concept.  Give them time.  I may even try my hand at it too.  After I finish the 3 or 4 other projects clogging my queue.

Labels: Choral, Culture, Fiction, sci-fi

By way of Terry Teachout, it's Frank Lloyd Wright appearing on What's My Line:



I have nothing profound to say on the subjects of architecture, the death of the middlebrow (one of Terry's pet subjects) or, surprisingly, megalomania.  Instead, I'd just like to point out those amusing little sequinny-buttony things the producers added as decoration to the perimeter of the female panelists' blindfolds.  A little detail no one would even think to use today.

Labels: Architecture, Culture, VideoClip

Somebody's seen significant parts of the Watchmen movie and liked it a lot.

Eve Tushnet's impressionistic take on the book was my first (and, come to think of it, still my only) encounter with serious Watchmen criticism and hints at layers I didn't notice.  Must.  Read.  Watchmen.  Again.

Here are some nibbles:

Characters even present more than one opposing worldview within the book, while remaining believable, consistent characters. Jon's affirmation of the worth of an individual human life, when he speaks with Laurie on Mars, conflicts with his remote, utilitarian acceptance of Veidt's scheme at the book's climax; but both these moments feel like they came from the same character, a being shifting between Jon Osterman and Doctor Manhattan. Rorschach's denial of any intrinsic meaning to the patterns and suffering in life, in his speech to Malcolm, is more obliquely in conflict with his actions at the climax (in which he seeks to uphold an absolute vision of justice that implies conformity to a preexisting, objective pattern), but again both moments feel utterly true to life.

[...]

The pirate comic is the most obvious example of linkage. It doesn't function in Watchmen's plot as "The Mousetrap" does in "Hamlet," but it does or should affect readers' understanding of Veidt's plan and the role of hope in the book. The pirate comic is a story of despair as a self-fulfilling prophecy: The castaway assumes that the black freighter's crew has devastated his hometown, and so he himself causes the carnage he feared. Veidt assumes that without his hideously gory intervention, the world will end, and so he himself causes the book's greatest destruction.

Tushnet links to a couple of posts at "Unqualified Offerings" whoever that is.  One is interesting in light of the political season we are in (here in the USA).  Alan Moore is strongly anarcho-communist; maybe it would be fair to call him a neo-trotskyite.  That's my understanding, anyway.  A reader writes in:

I found your comment that Watchmen "as with many leftist critiques of the Cold War the Soviet Union is strangely invisible" to be interesting for two reasons. Mostly, I'm a leftist myself (most would say "far leftist") and my initial reaction to Watchmen was that it was a critique of the left from the right. Veidt is clearly one of those on the far left who would be willing to do anything at all to avert war. Rorschach, on the other hand, is clearly of the right wing and is also clearly the story's ultimate hero. I thought that his final words about "one more body in the foundations" was a particularly telling comment about many leftist's view of what it takes to achieve peace. More than that, I saw it as a comment on the Soviet Union's bloody purge policies.

...and the blogger replies:

Me, I think Moore sees both the despicable and admirable aspects of Rorshach and regards him, mostly, with fascinated horror. But respect. (Rorshach is damned clever, and can be droll.) I think it's a deliberate irony that Kovacs turns out to be right about so much that is going on.

Exactly.  Rorschach's conservativism is a highly truncated kind (and maybe more to the point, his humanity is truncated) and Moore knows that.  Rorschach's heroic role in the story is unconventional and equivocal to say the least.

Labels: Culture, GraphicNovel, movie

I'm probably the only right-winger in the country who watched this video and was primarily frightened by the bad counterpoint:

Labels: Counterpoint, Culture

Via SF Signal I found some anecdotal evidence that students have not yet quite given up the reading habit.  Look at this reading list!  Like some who left comments, I've got to wonder if this sample skews smart, but even so, wow.

Labels: Culture

So, what's modernism good for, anyway?  Gas stations, definitely.  (Hat tip to Design Observer.)

I have the unusual pleasure of owning one of the few (the only?) anti-MacArthur-Grant rants referenced by a future grant recipient.  Congratulations to Alex...although, I'm a little confused; you are neither a hack, weirdo, or fraud, so by process of elimination you must be a subversive, but that doesn't seem quite right either.  Maybe I need to reevaluate this whole Genius Grant racket.

Michigan composer Michael Daugherty gets a mention by Charles T. Downey, but that picture I barely recognize.  A bit of my father's family seems to be sneaking into Daugherty's looks, which may hint at a long-forgotten, distant relationship.  Cousin Michael ... I should be so lucky.

Labels: Composer, Culture, Design

I'm listening to some Sibelius right now on a disc from the local library.  It's made by Ondine, a label out of Helsinki.  Having an eye for detail as I do--that is, an eye for detail so long as it is irrelevant--I noticed this warning in fine print on the cover:  "Unauthorised copying, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting of this record prohibited."  Unauthorized lending?  Is my local library engaging in unauthorized activity here?  Should the library expect a raid from the Helsinki stormtroopers anytime soon?  I'm just relieved that unauthorized borrowing was left off the list.  Yikes.

Labels: Culture

You might expect me to link to news of Ananthem, the new novel by SF author Neal Stephenson, because I'm a fan of SF and a huge fan of NS, and, yes:   perhaps I will get around to it eventually.   Today, instead, I'd like to link to an interview with NS about the book because of this comment:

I asked Stephenson whether he felt that cell phones in our own world might represent a wrong turn, technologically speaking. He said:

I couldn't live without mine. But the etiquette and the interface are lagging behind the technology. Introduction of new technology often leads to disruptions in manners that can take a generation or more to play out. We're in one of those awkward times now.

I now own a cell phone, but only because the Wifeösphere bought it for me.   However, it is almost never on, and frequently I forget to take it with me.   I resent the appalling manners of many cell phone users--exactly why does a cell phone justify you cutting me off in mid-sentence just because it happens to be ringing?--and, to reinforce the point NS is making elsewhere in the interview, constant conversation is a distraction from serious thinking. Gee, you'd almost think people were looking for a distraction.

Labels: Culture, sci-fi

Via The Standing Room via this is sippey:  the most wonderfully stoopid promotion of high culture by a big fat corporation, evar:

Labels: Culture, Food, fun, VideoClip

A new angle found by SciFi Scanner, and a perfect topic for the Fredösphere:  Ancient Christian Paintings Give Evidence of Space Alien Visitation.  It sounded kooky, but then I saw the painting first cited:  The Baptism of Christ by Aert de Gelder.  I'm not sure who, but somebody's phoning home in that painting.

Meanwhile...

My son is enjoying a Boychoir retreat this week, and I was privileged to observe a special educational demonstration given to the boys by John Churchville, a local expert in classical Indian drumming.  It's amazing what just one hour of explanation can do to greatly increase one's appreciation of an art form.  Hey, here's an idea:  we could introduce music education into the public schools and effect an explosion in classical music interest among the general population!

Anyway, John's demo was info-packed and conducted with grace, even when the boys in the front row fidgeted or experienced gastric indiscretions thanks to the meal of tacos and refried beans consumed just minutes before.  Oh, and then there was the "please back up; I can feel your breath on the back of my hands" moment.

John showed us a video of his teacher, pandit (i.e., pundit, sort of like the Indian equivalent of a Ph.D.) Swapan Chaudhuri.  I found the following video which seems to be the clearest picture of the master employing the one-handed roll characteristic of his region's style of drumming.  See it for the first time at about 1' 30"; in most videos the hand moves too fast to see that he's flapping the right hand in a left-to-right movement, using the thumb and forefinger as one "drumstick" and the other three fingers as the other. 



Am I the only person who sees a bit of Harlan Ellison in Chaudhuri's face and posture?

Boychoir conductor Tom Strode mentioned the influence of Indian Music upon Olivier Messiaen.  If only Messiaen had Youtube, think of how much more he could have achieved!  Although, in that case, we may have had the Messiaenification of the following--which is too disturbing to contemplate!

Labels: Culture, Religion, Renaissance, sci-fi, VideoClip

The Catholic Church:  they've made some ... changes.  (Tip o' the red hat to the Sci-Fi Catholic.)

Meanwhile...

I'm going to get all Alexy Rossy on you and muse for a bit about the health of orchestras in the heartland.  We spent the weekend with some friends in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and on their advice attended the "Picnic Pops" concert of that city's Symphony.  This is not the kind of event I would choose on my own, and I admit the first half disappointed.  Grofé, Gottschalk:  the programming choices were neither canonical nor bold, but they did fit the New Orleans theme, necessitated by the guest appearance of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

PHJB isn't really my thing either, but they were at least compelling.  This concert gave me a chance to think hard about something I've been wondering about:  is Dixieland Jazz the only example of a truly popular countrapuntal style?  Where else do casual listeners tolerate so much independence of voices?  Is there a secret we lovers of counterpoint ought to learn and exploit?  These are not a rhetorical questions; if you have insight, please leave a comment.

The outdoor ambiance (on a ski slope) facilitated dancing, which really made the evening for my daughter and me.  Generally speaking, the best parts of the experience (landscape, picnic atmosphere, alcohol for those imbibing it, guest artists playing jazz at a very high level, kinesthetic interaction) had nothing to do with this idea that paying 100 instrumentalists to play together all at the same time is the right thing to do.  Still, the concerts are genuinely popular, and Grand Rapids has the corporations (Chase Bank) and the aristocracy (the De Vos family) to keep it funded, so bully to them.  I'll have to attend one of their regular concerts and report back.  (Hint to the GRS bosses:  Sibelius might lie at the exact center of the intersection of my and the popular tastes.)

One final bit of weirdness:  ever since reading the excellent Benjamin Britten biography written by Humphrey Carpenter, I can't help associating BB with Grand Rapids, since that city was, implausibly, bizarrely, the scene of ... well, apparently we don't know exactly what, but it was where ... oh, go read the book.  Still, the idea that this very conservative, very Dutch (Corrie ten Boom Dutch, not modern-day Amsterdam Dutch) town was destined to become a landmark in Britten's personal oddysey is something I couldn't quite put out of my mind as violinists sawed away, patrons sipped wine from plastic cups, the sun set, and my kids frolicked on a swing set off in the distance.

Labels: Counterpoint, Culture, local

It is in the cold light of a post-July-Fourth morning that we can shake of the effects of that drunken orgy of patriotic jingoism we so recently indulged in, and reflect soberly on an interesting question:  why do so many nationalistic songs have lyrics that, on close analysis, reveal themselves to be crazy?

(And we don't normally give them close analysis.  Perhaps our fear, or better, our piety prevents us from probing.  Or, most likely of all, these words are too familiar to be understood, just as one cannot focus on an object that is too near the eye.)

Let's start with The Battle Hymn of the Republic.  Unless my interpretation is way off, the song seems to posit the idea that the U.S. Civil War is nothing less than the harbinger of the Apocalypse.  Shiloh, Manassas, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg...Armageddon.  Forrest, Jackson, Lee, Davis...Satan.  I'm sure those persons immersed in the events found these progressions compelling and believable, but why do we today still sing "mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; he is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored"?  God metes his punishments to each nation sooner or later according to his mysterious timetable; just because it happened to be our turn for a lickin' in 1861 doesn't mean the whole world is coming to an end.

Next, consider Jerusalem:



It poses a question:  did Jesus Christ visit England as a youth, and does not that event portend a special destiny, a special burden placed on the shoulders of the English people, one which endows them with a greater dignity and mission?  Short answer:  no.  The British Empire was unusually cool, as empires go, but William Blake was nuts when it came to the whole Joseph-of-Arimathea-Brought-Jesus-To-England thing (as he was nuts about so much else [William that is, not Joseph]).  On the other hand, I'm inclined to give Jerusalem as many bonus points as needed to offset what the lyrics lost, because I think it is about the most mind-blowing tune ever written.  Plus when the second verse kicks in, with it's burning gold and its chariots of fire--wow!  All is forgiven.

The U.S. national anthem also asks a question.  (Isn't that a sign of insecurity, by the way?  Why can't we have a national anthem that asserts something rather than begs for affirmation?  Deutschland über Alles doesn't begin with an Ist, after all.)



In it's obsessive concern for the flag, the anthem never get around to discussing any other attribute of our nation, or noticing anything else beyond the flag's wave status, so no crazy philosophical or theological idea emerges, but as has been observed many times before, the tune is awkward and unlovely.

Most national anthems have lyrics belonging to what might be called the "purple mountains majesty" school:  lots of talk about the landscape, culminated with a promise before God to defend the country.  The beauty of O Canada is marred by a particularly lame (and so quintessentially Canadian) vow to "stand on guard for thee," a timid, passive phrase which has never been dumped, although that's what they did to the old, unofficial anthem "The Maple Leaf Forever" wherein "Wolfe the dauntless hero" is celebrated for crushing the francophones.  I guess the feeling was, it was only a matter of time until les Québécois noticed.

For England, it's not just Jerusalem; the country scores of twofer of kookiness with this verse from God Save the Queen:


...and some countries' anthems get bogged down in historical controversies that probably seemed terribly compelling at the time--here is Andorra's:


Well, la...tee...da.  Here's the Netherlands:


Come on people, get over it.  Then there's Poland, still dancing on the grave of some guy who's been dead for over a century:


I look forward to hearing verses that describe the many positive side effects of Hitler and Stalin.  Furthermore, it doesn't help matters that the national hero of Poland is named Dabrowski, who sounds like he should be famous, if he were famous for anything, for being the best bowler in Chicago.

Algeria's patriots adopt a favorite strategy of my kids:


...which is, if no one is paying attention, TURN UP THE VOLUME!  Other miscellaneous oddities include Austria (Land of Hammers! -- but hey, nice melody for once, Wolfgang; too bad the lyrics are, gasp! sexist) and Iceland (a reference to the solar system gives the song a nice sci-fi vibe); Turks worry that their "coy crescent" may "frown" (gee, I wish my life was that uncomplicated) and the Mexicans denounce "Masiosare" who wants to make their country "dirty with his plants."

Finally, we come to the Japanese, whose anthem is the most ... Japanese ... of them all.  The lyrics are a tanka, a 5-line, 31-syllable poem:

May the reign of the Emperor continue for a thousand, nay, eight thousand generations and for the eternity that it takes for small pebbles to grow into a great stone and become covered with moss.

...in other words, it's about a rock garden.

</cynicism>

Labels: Culture, fun, Poetry

Why isn't everyone in the Bløgösphère linking to the Joshua Bell busking scandal ... of 1930?

Labels: Culture

Christianity Today speaks of curry with worshipful tones.   (Hat tip to A&LD; I hope this link didn't get Denis Dutton in trouble with his fellow skeptics.)

I love Indian food because it is perfect.  It's stews comfort me, and its spices bedazzle me.  It achieves the impossible contradiction:  it is exotic comfort food.

(And speaking of Denis Dutton, check out his screen saver image.)

Labels: Culture, Food

Slate explores an underappreciated branch of African-American music:  the space alien mythos.  I was pleased that Sun Ra, the one practitioner I knew about, is prominent (but I suppose everyone knows about Sun Ra, Saturn's favorite son) and was previously treated by Slate to an exclusive profile back in 1997.  (Wow, did the internet even exist back then?)  Anyone who feels alienated may find solace in science fiction, which is why I was addicted to an embarrassing degree to the Roswell series on the WB network years ago.  Gosh, I blush at the memory.

Labels: Culture, sci-fi, vocal

My good friend Victor sent me this:

Choosy mothers choose Obecalp

This sentence caught my eye:

Franklin Miller, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, is skeptical. "As a parent of three now grown children," he said, "I can't think of a single instance where I'd want to give a placebo."

As a parent of two children, I think Mr. Miller's last sentence there could be made more accurate by removing all the words that follow "think."

Labels: Culture, fun

The election is still in the future, but the main contenders have emerged, so pundits are looking at their maps and making their predictions.  Each state's voting trends are examined and regional biases are weighed.  The fairness of the whole system is debated.  Dark claims of past cheating resurface.  Self-appointed experts flog their computers in the hope they will predict the outcome.  Yes, it's time to calculate the Maths of Eurovision Voting.

(The Eurovision Song Contest is one of my favorite topics; it is Exhibit A that proves Europe has a vulgar and immature culture compared to the U.S.  See my previous posts on the topic.  Also, have a look at this year's presumptive winner, the Swedish team fronted by Charlotte Perrelli, who continues the baffling and dismaying trend toward American Idol levels of quality. Hey guys, yer undermining my claims!  I've got a nice, plausible narrative going here, and you're ruining it.!  [OTOH, note that the Swedes have chosen to sing in English, the Native Tongue of all true pop singers--and not just any English, but good ol' Middle-Americanese {"Love will surrrrrrvive!"}])

Labels: Culture, vocal

Tim Stone must be one of the underappreciated geniuses of the internet:  He attempted to recreate the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic ... using Microsoft Flight Simulator!

“Although the actual time occupied in my Transatlantic flight was under 16 hours, it may be fairly said that it took ten years to accomplish” John Alcock

JUNE 4
Ten years? I want to do this thing right but there’s right right and there’s undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome right. Ten days will have to suffice for prep.

(Spotted by Colby Cosh, he of the eagle eye.)

Labels: Culture

The title says it all:  The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized.  (Hat tip 2Blowhards.)

Meanwhile...

Rene's Apple will have what Ann Althouse is having:

I'd rather see a show where philosophers descend on a woman with a perfect exterior and rip into her for her intellectual and spiritual failings, put her on some kind of internally transformative regime, and turn her into a human being of substance. Can we get that?

...and furthermore...

Man Babies.  Plus, have a look at Nazis on the Moon.

Labels: Culture, fun, Futurism, movie, VideoClip

In an earlier post I commented with pleasant surprise on a Swedish composer's attempt to create an opera on a science fiction theme.  Commenters assured me this was hardly the first composer to attempt such a feat.  Daniel Wolf cited as ancient an example as Haydn, which impressed me to no end.  Those of you familiar with my Haydn animus won't be surprised my mental picture of Haydn as a space opera-tor is that of the salt vampire of Planet M-113.

Anyhoo, I'm pleased to add another work to this growing list:  Jacques Offenbach's adaptation of Jules Verne's Le Voyage dans la Lune.  Wikipedia has the details, including a wonderful photo showing costumes and a set from the original lush (but to the modern eye, goofy) production.  Kudos is due (hey!  I conjugates that verb real good!) to io9 for dredging up this information (especially considering that deep historical perspective is not what you expect from a Gawker-related site) in a terribly interesting roundup of info on Georges Méliès' groundbreaking 1902 SF film A Trip to the Moon, which itself was recycled in a trippy music video by The Smashing Pumpkins called Tonight, Tonight:



And I suppose I'll have to comment on The Man that Fell to Earth if I ever get up the courage to watch it.

Space.  And opera.  What else have I overlooked?

Labels: Composition, Culture, Futurism, movie, Opera, sci-fi, VideoClip

It was too true to be good.  Or something.

Meanwhile...

Roll over, Edison:  some French guy made a vocal recording that predated yours by 17 years.  What is odd, from our modern point of view, is that, although the recording device was invented in 1860, no playback method was attempted (or even contemplated, apparently) until recently.  (Title on the A side?  It's "Au Clair de la Lune.")

Also...

Der Drübermensch and his fellow members of the Boychoir of Ann Arbor were joined in concert by the hoary heads of the University of Michigan Men's Glee Club.  It was a great chance for the boys to hear what kind of sound a 100+ member ensemble can make in a medium-sized church (in this case, St. Paul's Lutheran of Ann Arbor).  Also on display were the ancient customs that give the club it's appealing Gemütlichkeit:  the concert-ending school songs, the use of finger snaps for applause, and especially the elaborate body piercings, especially the wearing of elephant tusks in the nasal septums, which look terribly painful and are probably illegal, but which are worn with panache even when they cause awkward situations in doorways.

Okay, so I made up that last part.  Hey, I gotta give the guys some reason to complain each time I blog them, don't I?

Finally, let me praise the conducting of Paul Rardin, who combines control with enthusiasm (were those his fists I saw flying around?) in a perfect combination.  He offered a miniature seminar on vocal leadership in this one concert.

Labels: Choral, Culture

Well, smack my gob.  Who knew the world-wide Christian conspiracy was so insidious?

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Russian Orthodox church?"

I could go on.  The irony--the sheer symmetry--boggles the mind.

Labels: Culture

Frequently wrong; never boring:  Camille strikes again, and this time, her topic is Presidential politics (hat tip to 2Blowhards):

Obama has seemed tentative in countering the Clintons' trademark mudslinging, but perhaps coolness and poise are what the nation needs after eight years of George W. Bush's lurching braggadocio. Obama hasn't figured out how to stay classy while delivering wicked stiletto thrusts -- a talent mastered in spades by British politicians produced by the Oxbridge debate culture.

I wonder if she had this particular example in mind:  the cool brutality of William Hague as he mocks Tony Blair and Gordon Brown while even the Labor MPs laugh along ruefully and admiringly.  My fellow Americans, can you imagine--can you dream in your wildest fantasies--our political culture producing this kind of wit and intelligence?  I can't.

Labels: Culture

Two makes a trend?  Composer James MacMillan and writer David Mamet find they no longer fit comfortably inside the box labeled "left-wing."  These epiphanies are not headlong rushes to some other well-defined opposing ideology (thankfully).  Instead they seem to be, like Michael Blowhard's earlier experience, an adoption of skepticism toward all -isms.

But enough of this boring unimportant stuff.  I want to know how I can turn my TV into a 3D VR display using a head-mounted Wii remote.  Take it away, Jonny Lee!

Labels: Culture

It's the Wiki of Obsolete Skills!  (Via SF Signal.)  It's, you know, all that stuff we know how to do, but our kids couldn't do if their lives depended on it, like dialing a rotary phone or putting a needle on a vinyl record. 

It's a wiki, so think up your favorite and add it to the list.  Mine might be the hand-engraving of musical scores.  A friend of mine from the UM School of Music, was famous for her scoring by hand that truly could not be distinguished from plate engraving.  (A tragic waste of time really; she did it because she loved the precision of the work, but she spent hours per page on it.  Not a good example of setting proper priorities.)

Another interesting case file from the History of Hand-Engraved Music is that of Imogen Holst (daughter of Gustav), whose own compositional career was arguably stunted by her slavish work as an underpaid assistant to Benjamin Britten.  Some of her friends grew to resent the time she spent copying Britten's instrumental parts, but she seemed content, and he was happy to take advantage of that.

I'm glad to see that the Copying Assistance Program of the American Music Center has been renamed the Composer Assistance Program.  I was always sad whenever I thought about that pile of grant money sitting around, dedicated to the cause of helping composers do something that can be achieved these days by selecting the proper item from a pulldown menu in Finale or Sibelius.

I suggest a new fund be created, one dedicated to helping struggling composers remove Vista from their computers and upgrade to XP.  Now there's something that would really stimulate the productivity of composers.

Labels: Culture

Everyone's linking to the amusing BBC interview of a couple of European critics attempting to take down a notch Alex Ross' beautiful book The Rest Is Noise.  Kyle Gann has an elegant and gracious (gracious to Alex, anyway) rebuttal, and he quotes Alex's cool line about the German music tradition now resembling a crime scene.  Sequenza21, where I first saw the link, has a more varied discussion in the comments section.  It's all fascinating; it is a crime scene itself.

Have I commented on the book yet?  If I haven't, well, I liked it so much, I even recommended it to the Wifeösphere, who has only so much time and interest for classical music (beyond my own, of course).  Nuts to detailed descriptions of the music; we don't need more of that whole Dancing About Architecture stuff; inspire us to curiosity, then let us go directly to the music itself.  This, Alex has done.  He's even made me want to give Messiaen's thorny Canyons another try.

Labels: Composer, Culture

My previous post described a visit to an indoor soccer match.  Today I'd like to look more closely at some of the extra-soccer activities.

Before the players are introduced, the crowd is warmed up with an announcer, a woman with a screechy voice designed to prevent you from ignoring it.  (That it, like every other sonic event of the night, is pumped out at 110 decibels only adds to its inexorableness.)  The troupe of dancers/cheerleaders/actresses/models/whatevers run out and hop around.  Let's not linger by examining the psychology that permits a young woman to adopt that role; nor let us think too hard about the self-esteem of the gentlemen who dons the habit of the team mascot, in this case a anthropomorphized spark plug called Scorch.  Instead, consider merely the team owner's belief that such things, as well as the clouds of mist and the exaggerated hype surrounding the announcement of the players' names, are all a net economic positive, contributing to the organization's bottom line.

Yes, the cheer leaders, the mascot, the throbbing rock music, the announcer that seems to think he is describing the lineup for the battle of Armageddon:  all these are necessary accouterments for a modern pro sporting event.  And pray tell, why?  Because, for the average spectator, there is not sufficient interest in the sport qua sport to attract a crowd.

That's right, people.  Sport in its pure form cannot survive as a commercial venture.  It must be gussied up.  It must include appeals to the average person's vulgarity.  This is a sign of desperation, pure and simple.  It is clear to me, based on this one Friday night experience, that the long-term prospects for pro sports is bleak.  Bluntly, it ain't gonna survive.

Oh, there will always be the reliable core, those faithful fans of the pure game, who will turn out no matter what.  You see them at games, sitting there in the front row at the 50 yard line or at mid-court.  They can be identified by their formal evening wear, and by the way they shush those around them who chant "we will, we will ROCK YOU!" because they want to savor the subtle nuance in every sound of the ball striking human flesh, or racket, or wooden bat.  They can divine from such sounds, to a degree that we vulgar people cannot, important information about the players and their skill.

Such hard core fans will never be enough to justify financially a pro team, however.  They are, at best, only 2 or 3 percent of the population.  The other, ordinary fans are notoriously fickle, and will soon wander off to other diversions.  For now, the dancing girls and the comic relief of the goofy mascots will slow the hemorrhaging, but already the temptations mount; there are symphonic concerts to attend and mp3s of choral music to download.

Alas, Babylon.

Labels: Culture