http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/thoughts-on-acts-15-and-early-church-leadership
No surprises. His site is in my blogroll, right?
While I wait to hear some feedback from someone about the possibility of writing a sonata for tuba and guitar I can post links, eh?
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Friday, July 06, 2007
nostalgia and the arts
I saw Transformers this week and it has been interesting to mull over how loyalties formed in our younger years carry over into aesthetic allegiances. For me Transformers is a reminder that my aesthetics have changed. The shift is hardly perceptible in any given year but becomes very pronounced across a decade. I have gotten to the point where I'd rather watch a bad movie in good company than watch a great movie by myself.
And Michael Bay's Transformers is not exactly a "great" movie. And certainly neither was the original animated Transformers movie from the 1989s that I honestly couldn't finish watching when I tried watching it in my early 20s. When I was a kid I really, really, really wanted to see the movie but I couldn't figure out a way to see it when I was 12 and friends who saw it said that it was disappointing. I actually WANTED Optimus Prime to die. That might make me seem like a craven jerk among 1980s kids but that's what I wanted.
See, apparently unlike a few other kids I knew Optimus Prime didn't embody the best ideals of my childhood. I thought he was too squeaky clean, too perfect. He was so indestructible in the cartoons on TV my stepdad once asked why he even needed a bodyguard since he could apparently beat the bad guys all by himself. It was a curious question that nagged me at the back of my mind for the times I watched the show. Perhaps my stepdad simply burst the bubble of suspended disbelief.
Curiously, perhaps, what I hoped the cartoon would have that it never really had was moral ambiguity. Perhaps I was an unusual 12 year old boy, or perhaps I just had no idea where my kindred spirits were, those other 12-year-old boys who wanted the Decepticons to win once in a while so that there'd be some meaning to the victory of the good guys. That was my problem with the show, I guess, why I stopped being interested in Transformers. There was no real challenge for the good guys in battling the bad guys. The bad guys had plans so hair-brained it wouldn't have taken much to beat them.
I mean, how often did Megatron say "We attack ... at sunrise!" Now for those of you who remember Optimus Prime he's the kind of guy where if he was a guy would get up at 6 in the morning, eat his Wheaties, and go run around the track for thirty minutes just to warm up and great the bright sunshine before it even showed up yet. When Optimus Prime said "I have a plan" it was basically a signal for a jump cut. We weren't going to actually HEAR him explain the plan. My brother once said that when Optimus Prime says "Even the wisest of men and machines make mistakes." you might was well through in a parenthetical "even me" to just butter the toast already.
So when I heard that this kind of self-regarding Optimus Prime who didn't need any help, might actually die in the Transformers movie I looked forward to it. Well, at least I did ten years later when I was in my twenties. The battle was really basically a draw. And after a few seasons of cartoons on TV where Megatron's fusion cannon did diddley squat I was baffled that in the movie Megatron's gun, which did nothing more than create slivers of rising smoke on Ironhide's shoulder, can suddenly kill Autobots with one blast.
Where was this new and improved fusion cannon hiding for years? Behind FCC regulations? Why was it by 2005, per the setting of the movie, that the Decepticons somehow gained the upper hand decisively, so decisively that the Autobots had to abandon Cybertron and live on a moon base? No, really! What exactly were Megatron and the Decepticons doing right for season after season that they suddenly just managed to take over Cybertron? Did all the Autobots leave? It seemed like there were three Autobots to every two Decepticons anyway, so that MIGHT have made some sense. But it all seemed so spectacularly contrived that I think even as a 12-year-old I would have found it puzzling.
I mean, in comic book geek terms this is what you'd call a spectacular ret-con. Retroactive continuity on this grand a scale goes so far as to question beg the entire TV run that preceded the movie. Now you can probably tell, if you've read this geeky rant this far, that I was the kind of kid where instead of cheering the new-found elements of realism where even heroes can die I'd be skulking about the sorry excuse to sell more toys. In fact hearing that Optimus Prime got killed and that he was replaced with Rodimus Prime just began to fill me with a curious and sort of dreadful late childhood feeling that if I had gotten what I wanted, if I had gone and actually seen the Transformers movie in theaters as a kid, that I would have felt like I was conned.
Cartoons designed to sell toys is all right, if the cartoons are decently watchable and the toys are actually fun to play with. The combination of action figure, vehicle, and robot with the premise of a backstory explaining their reasons for fighting, that was a brilliant marketing idea.
But to contend that the cartoon and the movie that followed were or are better than a Michael Bay film ... sorry, guys, I just don't quite see it. In fact I'd have to say in hindsight, in terms of what I felt at the time, and in terms of how I feel now, Transformers as a pop culture phenomenon was cool for the time but it doesn't stick with me. If it sticks for other people that's cool. I guess I offer some heartfelt sympathy to anyone who thinks Bay slagged his or her childhood pop culture high water mark. George Lucas irrevocably destroyed the mystique of the Star Wars franchise for me with those prequels ... though I confess that by my mid twenties even the appeal of Star Wars was starting to fade for me. I've got the movies, the original theatrical cuts since Lucas finally consented to make those available.
But for the inner 12-year old I had long shifted my interests back to stuff I thought I had given up, comic book characters. The Batman cartoons from the 90s impressed me. They became my talisman, sort of, for the kind of cartoon I WISH I had been able to see as a kid. So my 20s were a sort of renaissance of comic book and cartoon appreciation. I didn't just have the cartoons that were practically the only game in town. I had options. I had access to anime, to well-done superhero cartoons, superhero cartoons slightly better than the average episode of Spiderman and his Amazing Friends.
I think it was Lewis who once, so it's said, stated that there are books that are worth reading at age 7 that are even more worth reading at 70. Or something like that. Whether or not C. S. Lewis said it or wrote it somewhat immaterial to me because I think that whoever said it might not go so far as to say that 70-year old men have even more reason to watch Transformers than 7-year-old boys. For some, though, I'm sure that's true. Maybe if I live to be 70 years old I'll enjoy Transformers cartoons as much as I did when I was 11 or 12. Maybe not.
I suppose that there may be some mechanism in the brain and soul that allows us to love hearing the same music over and over again, hear the same stories over and over again. I suppose at some level that is what the function of myth might be or of history, too. If so then I'd have to say that Transformers is so light to me and far from my heart that I can go watch Michael Bay's movie and feel that it is basically at the same artistic level as the original stuff. If others feel differently that's fine, too.
But I'm afraid I have never been able to completely get on the Optimus Prime bandwagon because he seemed simultaneously too perfect and oddly remote. Even Superman has more powers of empathy, depending on what version you're reading. There's a sense in which Optmius Prime and Superman seem like different versions of the same character, with Prime being the lesser entry in terms of pop cultural significance. It's as though an American culture of kids that thought it was a little too cool and sophisticated to keep rooting for Superman after Superman 3 turned to Optimus Prime.
I guess the trouble with nostalgia in the arts is that nostalgia is not the same as history. Ecclesiastes warns us, "Don't ask yourself, 'where are the older days that were better than these?' because it is not wise to ask such questions." I know there is a temptation for us to decide that people will go from bad to worse, just as the Bible says, but the Bible also warns us against nostalgia. I guess I'm still a Didion fan because even if I do believe God's eye is on the sparrow I don't think the old days were all that glorious.
And Michael Bay's Transformers is not exactly a "great" movie. And certainly neither was the original animated Transformers movie from the 1989s that I honestly couldn't finish watching when I tried watching it in my early 20s. When I was a kid I really, really, really wanted to see the movie but I couldn't figure out a way to see it when I was 12 and friends who saw it said that it was disappointing. I actually WANTED Optimus Prime to die. That might make me seem like a craven jerk among 1980s kids but that's what I wanted.
See, apparently unlike a few other kids I knew Optimus Prime didn't embody the best ideals of my childhood. I thought he was too squeaky clean, too perfect. He was so indestructible in the cartoons on TV my stepdad once asked why he even needed a bodyguard since he could apparently beat the bad guys all by himself. It was a curious question that nagged me at the back of my mind for the times I watched the show. Perhaps my stepdad simply burst the bubble of suspended disbelief.
Curiously, perhaps, what I hoped the cartoon would have that it never really had was moral ambiguity. Perhaps I was an unusual 12 year old boy, or perhaps I just had no idea where my kindred spirits were, those other 12-year-old boys who wanted the Decepticons to win once in a while so that there'd be some meaning to the victory of the good guys. That was my problem with the show, I guess, why I stopped being interested in Transformers. There was no real challenge for the good guys in battling the bad guys. The bad guys had plans so hair-brained it wouldn't have taken much to beat them.
I mean, how often did Megatron say "We attack ... at sunrise!" Now for those of you who remember Optimus Prime he's the kind of guy where if he was a guy would get up at 6 in the morning, eat his Wheaties, and go run around the track for thirty minutes just to warm up and great the bright sunshine before it even showed up yet. When Optimus Prime said "I have a plan" it was basically a signal for a jump cut. We weren't going to actually HEAR him explain the plan. My brother once said that when Optimus Prime says "Even the wisest of men and machines make mistakes." you might was well through in a parenthetical "even me" to just butter the toast already.
So when I heard that this kind of self-regarding Optimus Prime who didn't need any help, might actually die in the Transformers movie I looked forward to it. Well, at least I did ten years later when I was in my twenties. The battle was really basically a draw. And after a few seasons of cartoons on TV where Megatron's fusion cannon did diddley squat I was baffled that in the movie Megatron's gun, which did nothing more than create slivers of rising smoke on Ironhide's shoulder, can suddenly kill Autobots with one blast.
Where was this new and improved fusion cannon hiding for years? Behind FCC regulations? Why was it by 2005, per the setting of the movie, that the Decepticons somehow gained the upper hand decisively, so decisively that the Autobots had to abandon Cybertron and live on a moon base? No, really! What exactly were Megatron and the Decepticons doing right for season after season that they suddenly just managed to take over Cybertron? Did all the Autobots leave? It seemed like there were three Autobots to every two Decepticons anyway, so that MIGHT have made some sense. But it all seemed so spectacularly contrived that I think even as a 12-year-old I would have found it puzzling.
I mean, in comic book geek terms this is what you'd call a spectacular ret-con. Retroactive continuity on this grand a scale goes so far as to question beg the entire TV run that preceded the movie. Now you can probably tell, if you've read this geeky rant this far, that I was the kind of kid where instead of cheering the new-found elements of realism where even heroes can die I'd be skulking about the sorry excuse to sell more toys. In fact hearing that Optimus Prime got killed and that he was replaced with Rodimus Prime just began to fill me with a curious and sort of dreadful late childhood feeling that if I had gotten what I wanted, if I had gone and actually seen the Transformers movie in theaters as a kid, that I would have felt like I was conned.
Cartoons designed to sell toys is all right, if the cartoons are decently watchable and the toys are actually fun to play with. The combination of action figure, vehicle, and robot with the premise of a backstory explaining their reasons for fighting, that was a brilliant marketing idea.
But to contend that the cartoon and the movie that followed were or are better than a Michael Bay film ... sorry, guys, I just don't quite see it. In fact I'd have to say in hindsight, in terms of what I felt at the time, and in terms of how I feel now, Transformers as a pop culture phenomenon was cool for the time but it doesn't stick with me. If it sticks for other people that's cool. I guess I offer some heartfelt sympathy to anyone who thinks Bay slagged his or her childhood pop culture high water mark. George Lucas irrevocably destroyed the mystique of the Star Wars franchise for me with those prequels ... though I confess that by my mid twenties even the appeal of Star Wars was starting to fade for me. I've got the movies, the original theatrical cuts since Lucas finally consented to make those available.
But for the inner 12-year old I had long shifted my interests back to stuff I thought I had given up, comic book characters. The Batman cartoons from the 90s impressed me. They became my talisman, sort of, for the kind of cartoon I WISH I had been able to see as a kid. So my 20s were a sort of renaissance of comic book and cartoon appreciation. I didn't just have the cartoons that were practically the only game in town. I had options. I had access to anime, to well-done superhero cartoons, superhero cartoons slightly better than the average episode of Spiderman and his Amazing Friends.
I think it was Lewis who once, so it's said, stated that there are books that are worth reading at age 7 that are even more worth reading at 70. Or something like that. Whether or not C. S. Lewis said it or wrote it somewhat immaterial to me because I think that whoever said it might not go so far as to say that 70-year old men have even more reason to watch Transformers than 7-year-old boys. For some, though, I'm sure that's true. Maybe if I live to be 70 years old I'll enjoy Transformers cartoons as much as I did when I was 11 or 12. Maybe not.
I suppose that there may be some mechanism in the brain and soul that allows us to love hearing the same music over and over again, hear the same stories over and over again. I suppose at some level that is what the function of myth might be or of history, too. If so then I'd have to say that Transformers is so light to me and far from my heart that I can go watch Michael Bay's movie and feel that it is basically at the same artistic level as the original stuff. If others feel differently that's fine, too.
But I'm afraid I have never been able to completely get on the Optimus Prime bandwagon because he seemed simultaneously too perfect and oddly remote. Even Superman has more powers of empathy, depending on what version you're reading. There's a sense in which Optmius Prime and Superman seem like different versions of the same character, with Prime being the lesser entry in terms of pop cultural significance. It's as though an American culture of kids that thought it was a little too cool and sophisticated to keep rooting for Superman after Superman 3 turned to Optimus Prime.
I guess the trouble with nostalgia in the arts is that nostalgia is not the same as history. Ecclesiastes warns us, "Don't ask yourself, 'where are the older days that were better than these?' because it is not wise to ask such questions." I know there is a temptation for us to decide that people will go from bad to worse, just as the Bible says, but the Bible also warns us against nostalgia. I guess I'm still a Didion fan because even if I do believe God's eye is on the sparrow I don't think the old days were all that glorious.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Optimus Prime and Superman
They're both red and blue, super strong, aliens from other worlds who have come to protect us. Really, Optimus Prime and Superman aren't that different in concept. They stand for the same things, they're virtually invincible and they're so perfect it can be easy to not appreciate them.
I didn't like either character much when I was growing up. I was much more a Batman and Spiderman fan. But as time has passed I have managed to appreciate the two big red and blue guys. I suppose it doesn't hurt that I saw some actually cool Superman stories. I have to give credit to Paul Dini and company for finding a way to make Superman a character I could actually care about. And retroactively I've come to a somewhat more generous view of the character Optimus Prime even as my nostalgia for the actual Transformers cartoon has virtually evaporated.
We could say to ourselves that people are too cynical and sophisticated for heroes, for characters willing and able to fight for the oppressed and all that. But it seems that's just one of the lies we tell ourselves. We haven't become too sophisticated for heroes. We haven't become too jaded for being interested in someone to save the day. We may have gotten too obsessed with the idea that our heroes need to be just like us, which was not always a very high priority.
I didn't like either character much when I was growing up. I was much more a Batman and Spiderman fan. But as time has passed I have managed to appreciate the two big red and blue guys. I suppose it doesn't hurt that I saw some actually cool Superman stories. I have to give credit to Paul Dini and company for finding a way to make Superman a character I could actually care about. And retroactively I've come to a somewhat more generous view of the character Optimus Prime even as my nostalgia for the actual Transformers cartoon has virtually evaporated.
We could say to ourselves that people are too cynical and sophisticated for heroes, for characters willing and able to fight for the oppressed and all that. But it seems that's just one of the lies we tell ourselves. We haven't become too sophisticated for heroes. We haven't become too jaded for being interested in someone to save the day. We may have gotten too obsessed with the idea that our heroes need to be just like us, which was not always a very high priority.
Michael Bay's pending cinematic masterpiece
Or not!
Personally I think Michael bay was born to make this movie. I don't anticipate a movie that is going to be:
1) thought-provoking,
2) full of finely drawn characterization of dynamic and three-dimensional characters
3) grapple with the subtleties and ambiguities of acting as moral agents in an ambivalent or hostile universe
4) any basic continuity in narrative or moving parts
But you know what? I don't care. These were all shortcomings of the original cartoon. To suggest as some have that Transformers as a TV show broached on the issue of debate about preservation and stewardship of environmental resources and that the Autobots and Decepticons represent different attitudes about environmental utilization during the Reagan era as an allegory about something on the order of pantheism and dominion theology gone awry ...
Well, that's like suggesting that you are being fought over by two vampires and one vampire is the bad guy because he just wants to suck you dry and go home and the other is the good guy because he wants to suck the blood from you in measured meals and is asking for permission. They're both still blood-sucking vampires, right? I suppose one could be the "good guy" for asking permission.
I realize for some of you Transformers fans this analogy seems unfair and I don't pretend that it is. Hey, I liked the show when I was a kid, too, but it hasn't aged as gracefully as Batman and Superman cartoons from the 1990s or Pinky and the Brain. A lot of cartoons in the 1980s were made to help shill toys. That doesn't automatically count against them, really. But attempting to overlay a grander philosophical vision on a toy-line like Transformers only gets you so far.
There's probably nothing in Michael Bay's film that will be as painful and absurd to watch as some of the stuff I saw in the original animated film, let alone the stuff I didn't stick around to see when I tried watching the film at the age of 21 at the behest of a friend. I didn't even stick around for the part my brother-in-law told me about where all the robots start dancing to Wierd Al's "Dare to Be Stupid", which he described as the most poignant congruence of musical soundtrack and cinematic image he'd seen in a while. Hey, he's tougher than me, he watched the film to the end! I had to shut it off around the time Hot Rod became a central character because I was too flabbergasted by how cloying and annoying it all was. My apologies to anyone who loves the movie but it just didn't grab me.
But I have such low expcations for this Michael Bay film that if it's basically like The Rock I'll basically be happy with it. For now Hot Fuzz is still the film to beat for my experience of cinematic pleasure this year.
Personally I think Michael bay was born to make this movie. I don't anticipate a movie that is going to be:
1) thought-provoking,
2) full of finely drawn characterization of dynamic and three-dimensional characters
3) grapple with the subtleties and ambiguities of acting as moral agents in an ambivalent or hostile universe
4) any basic continuity in narrative or moving parts
But you know what? I don't care. These were all shortcomings of the original cartoon. To suggest as some have that Transformers as a TV show broached on the issue of debate about preservation and stewardship of environmental resources and that the Autobots and Decepticons represent different attitudes about environmental utilization during the Reagan era as an allegory about something on the order of pantheism and dominion theology gone awry ...
Well, that's like suggesting that you are being fought over by two vampires and one vampire is the bad guy because he just wants to suck you dry and go home and the other is the good guy because he wants to suck the blood from you in measured meals and is asking for permission. They're both still blood-sucking vampires, right? I suppose one could be the "good guy" for asking permission.
I realize for some of you Transformers fans this analogy seems unfair and I don't pretend that it is. Hey, I liked the show when I was a kid, too, but it hasn't aged as gracefully as Batman and Superman cartoons from the 1990s or Pinky and the Brain. A lot of cartoons in the 1980s were made to help shill toys. That doesn't automatically count against them, really. But attempting to overlay a grander philosophical vision on a toy-line like Transformers only gets you so far.
There's probably nothing in Michael Bay's film that will be as painful and absurd to watch as some of the stuff I saw in the original animated film, let alone the stuff I didn't stick around to see when I tried watching the film at the age of 21 at the behest of a friend. I didn't even stick around for the part my brother-in-law told me about where all the robots start dancing to Wierd Al's "Dare to Be Stupid", which he described as the most poignant congruence of musical soundtrack and cinematic image he'd seen in a while. Hey, he's tougher than me, he watched the film to the end! I had to shut it off around the time Hot Rod became a central character because I was too flabbergasted by how cloying and annoying it all was. My apologies to anyone who loves the movie but it just didn't grab me.
But I have such low expcations for this Michael Bay film that if it's basically like The Rock I'll basically be happy with it. For now Hot Fuzz is still the film to beat for my experience of cinematic pleasure this year.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Duo Guitarinet
I haven't had a chance to listen to their CDs yet but I am happy to report I have a few CDs by them and their constituent members and I'm really looking forward to hearing their stuff. This is a guitar and clarinet duo (in case the silly but still pretty cool pun didn't tip you off) in Poland and I'm planning to send off the score and parts for my sonata for clarinet and guitar to them as soon as I can manage. I'm also going to see if I can find them a few things since they've been kind enough to send me CDs of theirs I haven't seen any American retailers selling their discs and it just so happens I can find CDs from an artist they'd like to hear more of but can't get from Poland. Since they have been so kind as to send me their music and want to look at mine I'm glad to help them out finding things I can find on my side of the pond.
I've been a little busy lately with some homework projects that I really should be working on but I figured I'd blog about this because in an earlier blog entry I mentioned the trouble I've had finding clarinet and guitar duos and now that I've found one I'm happy.
It is a curious but still pleasant coincidence or pattern for me that through my college years and even since then I have become friends with or had shared musical interests with people from central or eastern Europe. Some of my friends in town are of Polish descent and I have a friend in Croatia whom I don't hear from too much now but she and her husband and daughter, last I heard, were doing quite well. And I am going to make myself work on a little piece about Ourkouzounov for a local publication, which means I have a lot of listening to do to meet the local deadline. I was a journalism student, though, so I really should be able to handle it. It's not a sure thing the article will get printed but I think even just writing the article will be good for me.
In other news I have also prepared scores to send off to a viola and guitar duo and also a duo for flute and guitar. Perhaps it is the bane of composers that scores always take longer to prepare than we think they will but I've got scores and parts ready to send.
In other news, well, there's not a whole ton of other news about musical stuff that i feel like writing about. THis is pretty much it. I know Atanas Ourkouzounov worked with Shin-ichi Fukuda on a disc of Toru Takemitsu's music and some other pieces. Fukuda is FINALLY getting to recording more Takemitsu. Hooray! We only had to wait ten years. I'm trusting it will be worth the wait because Fukuda's other Takemitsu CD is incredible and Ourkouzounov's CDs are tons of fun. I'm willing to bet anything these two guitarists worked on together should be something fans of classical guitar should get as soon as it comes out on disc. I just don't know exactly when or what label but I've got the information that the recordings have been completed from a, what's the old jargon, a very reliable source. Best wishes to Mr. Fukuda and Mr. Ourkouzounov. I'll be getting the CD when I learn more of it.
I've been a little busy lately with some homework projects that I really should be working on but I figured I'd blog about this because in an earlier blog entry I mentioned the trouble I've had finding clarinet and guitar duos and now that I've found one I'm happy.
It is a curious but still pleasant coincidence or pattern for me that through my college years and even since then I have become friends with or had shared musical interests with people from central or eastern Europe. Some of my friends in town are of Polish descent and I have a friend in Croatia whom I don't hear from too much now but she and her husband and daughter, last I heard, were doing quite well. And I am going to make myself work on a little piece about Ourkouzounov for a local publication, which means I have a lot of listening to do to meet the local deadline. I was a journalism student, though, so I really should be able to handle it. It's not a sure thing the article will get printed but I think even just writing the article will be good for me.
In other news I have also prepared scores to send off to a viola and guitar duo and also a duo for flute and guitar. Perhaps it is the bane of composers that scores always take longer to prepare than we think they will but I've got scores and parts ready to send.
In other news, well, there's not a whole ton of other news about musical stuff that i feel like writing about. THis is pretty much it. I know Atanas Ourkouzounov worked with Shin-ichi Fukuda on a disc of Toru Takemitsu's music and some other pieces. Fukuda is FINALLY getting to recording more Takemitsu. Hooray! We only had to wait ten years. I'm trusting it will be worth the wait because Fukuda's other Takemitsu CD is incredible and Ourkouzounov's CDs are tons of fun. I'm willing to bet anything these two guitarists worked on together should be something fans of classical guitar should get as soon as it comes out on disc. I just don't know exactly when or what label but I've got the information that the recordings have been completed from a, what's the old jargon, a very reliable source. Best wishes to Mr. Fukuda and Mr. Ourkouzounov. I'll be getting the CD when I learn more of it.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Luigi Legnani
Who is this guy? A long dead Italian guitarist who I had never heard of or read about before this year thanks to a forum I visit for classical guitarists. This composer wrote 36 caprices for his Opus 20, and quite a few of them are in keys that inspire me. Like D flat, A flat, E flat, B major, F sharp major. This guy didn't chicken out when it came to the most brutal keys on the guitar! I like him already. That the music is light and airy and has absolutely nothing to do with my usually preferred composers like Shostakovich, Hindemith, Bartok, or Stravinsky is immaterial. In fact most of Legnani's stuff sounds at first listen like some kind of Haydn knock-off ... which is just fine because I love a lot of Haydn's music.
Not that I'll be PLAYING any of this music by Legnani any time soon. I'm not nearly that good in terms of chops. Anyway, here's a random discovery in the last week or so.
Not that I'll be PLAYING any of this music by Legnani any time soon. I'm not nearly that good in terms of chops. Anyway, here's a random discovery in the last week or so.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
revised plans
Well, it turns out Bauckham did us all the favor of not only plowing through the books of Enoch but also all the variant versions of the story that may be loosely dubbed the Testament of Moses or the Assumption of Moses, the latter title being pretty inaccurate since an assumption of someone who's already dead, well, kinda hard to describe as a genuine assumption on the order of, say, Enoch or Elijah.
More to write later but for not it's enough to me that I got through the 127 pages of exegetical study with all the alternate variations of Moses' burial and the background on the Aramaic vs the Greek forms of Enoch. Maybe I don't have to read all of 1-5 Enoch myself now that I know Bauckham did it 22 years ago!
More to write later but for not it's enough to me that I got through the 127 pages of exegetical study with all the alternate variations of Moses' burial and the background on the Aramaic vs the Greek forms of Enoch. Maybe I don't have to read all of 1-5 Enoch myself now that I know Bauckham did it 22 years ago!
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Bluebeard's Castle is awesome
Saw the semi-staging at Benaroya tonight and it's pure Bartok. I am amazed that an opera with just tw0 characters worked so well. If Pinter wrote opera ... no, Pinter isn't quite good enough to have staged such a fascinating story even if his stories can be as overwrought. It's surprisingly accessible music ... for Bartok, though the hall was anything but packed.
But I don't feel like blogging about this so much since I am about to embark on a sturdy journey through a commentary on Jude and maybe muster up the nerve to read 1-5 Enoch THIS weekend.
But I don't feel like blogging about this so much since I am about to embark on a sturdy journey through a commentary on Jude and maybe muster up the nerve to read 1-5 Enoch THIS weekend.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
1-5 Enoch is on hold ... but
Richard Bauckham rocks! Picked up his commentary on Jude and 2 Peter yesterday. It will serve as a fun study for my little Jude project.
Monday, May 28, 2007
nothing quite like paper
Even though you can download all kinds of public domain works for solo guitar by composers like Sor and Giuliani and do so for free I admit that the toughest thing to do is to take that laptop screen out on the road and about town. And the thing is that for the cost of printing a fairly large piece or set of pieces the old-fashioned bound book score is still the way to go. No loose pages floating away when you open the guitar case some slightly windy Seattle afternoon. You can shelve it somewhere and come back and know exactly what it is you're looking at.
So I have broken down and bought the studies of Sor and Giuliani. The right hand studies by Giuliani are sufficiently fantastic just going studies 1-40 I figured I should have them for the road. Travelling for work trips has reminded me that it might not even be bad to have a small cheap, backpack size guitar to take on planes as carry-on.
So I have broken down and bought the studies of Sor and Giuliani. The right hand studies by Giuliani are sufficiently fantastic just going studies 1-40 I figured I should have them for the road. Travelling for work trips has reminded me that it might not even be bad to have a small cheap, backpack size guitar to take on planes as carry-on.
1-5 Enoch, ow
I didn't quite realize how long this collection is. And I didn't think my digging into Jude would lead me to writings by the somewhat opaque Clement of Alexandria. Or maybe I just haven't really delved into patrology or "early Christian writings" as much as I should.
Instead I walked out to a park and waded along side the water by a retaining wall that keeps a rail line in place and hiked around in Seattle faux woods llistening to music by William Byrd, which was fun. I figured with a three-day weekend I needed ot get out o fthe house and spend a few hours in sunlight before tackling apocrypha and then I got hom eand had food and eralized I didn't feel THAT up to throwing myself into apocrypha.
Studying the historical and literary nature of Jude leads a person to read and write far more than the length of Jude itself would ever suggest. That's just the nature of researching ancient Christian literature that cites a couple of books of Jewish apocrypha.
Of course it was good for me to get out and get some fresh air and walk around.
Instead I walked out to a park and waded along side the water by a retaining wall that keeps a rail line in place and hiked around in Seattle faux woods llistening to music by William Byrd, which was fun. I figured with a three-day weekend I needed ot get out o fthe house and spend a few hours in sunlight before tackling apocrypha and then I got hom eand had food and eralized I didn't feel THAT up to throwing myself into apocrypha.
Studying the historical and literary nature of Jude leads a person to read and write far more than the length of Jude itself would ever suggest. That's just the nature of researching ancient Christian literature that cites a couple of books of Jewish apocrypha.
Of course it was good for me to get out and get some fresh air and walk around.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
A scintilating weekend with 1-5 Enoch
But it's probably going to be tomorrow that I try to read all this stuff. I'm committing myself to researching stuff about the epistle of Jude, which cites directly one apocryphal book (which, given ancient citation customs, means I feel obliged to eventually read the whole kit and kaboodle ascribed to Enoch). There's some debate as to whether Jude references The Assumption of Moses. Origen thought so but there's not really what we'd tend to call manuscript evidence of what the book entailed, though Clement of Alexandria seems to have a somewhat indirect reference to the content of the Testament/Assumption of Moses.
Jude's use of non-canonical literature presents a special can of worms since the citation of a non-biblical literary or historical source does not automatically canonize Hellenistic writers anymore than Jewish pseudopigrapha. But I've got a nice, long weekend here and I suppose I may be better off just going on a walk and reading stuff later.
Plus I haven't played guitar as much as I should, either, or piano. That's waht spending half the month in Los Angeles can do for you if you don't have a guitar you want to haul through Sea-Tac or LAX. I may just need to fix that later on if I'm going to do more traveling.
Jude's use of non-canonical literature presents a special can of worms since the citation of a non-biblical literary or historical source does not automatically canonize Hellenistic writers anymore than Jewish pseudopigrapha. But I've got a nice, long weekend here and I suppose I may be better off just going on a walk and reading stuff later.
Plus I haven't played guitar as much as I should, either, or piano. That's waht spending half the month in Los Angeles can do for you if you don't have a guitar you want to haul through Sea-Tac or LAX. I may just need to fix that later on if I'm going to do more traveling.
The Year of Magical Thinking
Yes, I know, it was published about two years ago but I took a while to get around to reading this. The subject was death and grief and since Joan Didion isn't exactly chipper at the best of times in her writing I wasn't sure I felt up to reading her book when it came out a few months after the death of my maternal grandmother.
But other than a short but striking anecdote in chapter 21 I got through without so much as getting misty-eyed. Not for nothing does Didion seem unusually remote in her personal writing. She's sort of like the oracle at Delphi, neither revealing nor concealing but merely giving a sign, and perhaps like Heraclitus notes that people who search for gold move much earth and find little.
She's the muse of the pointlessness of imposing our narrative on the world as a way for the world to make sense. Her leitmotiff in the closing chapters that no one watches the sparrows is obviously a counterpoint to the idea that "His eye is on the sparrow" as it has been lodged into our receding cultural memory by Mahalia Jackson's rendition of a famous song from the Gospel tradition in America.
Well, I do believe His eye is on the sparrow so Didion chooses to hang out in places I don't go to by profession. Still, I've never felt obligated to agree with a number of authors whose works have fascinated me. I'm hardly a pantheist but a lot of Miyazaki's films and certainly his comic book Nausica resonate with me.
Still, this is a book featuring Didion during what would have to be reckoned a more hysterical or irrational stage of her life dealing with the death of her husband of about four decades and with what she did not yet know at the time of writing would be the death of her only child. Now exactly why she and John Gregory Dunne named their daughter Quintana I don't recall and it's not a name I'd ever pick but it sure is a memorable name.
Well, I could blog about the book in more detail but I don't feel like it right now. It's late, as an old song puts it, and I also need to urinate. Blogging always gets obstructed at some point by biological imperatives and the need to pee is surely one of the more unavoidable ones.
But other than a short but striking anecdote in chapter 21 I got through without so much as getting misty-eyed. Not for nothing does Didion seem unusually remote in her personal writing. She's sort of like the oracle at Delphi, neither revealing nor concealing but merely giving a sign, and perhaps like Heraclitus notes that people who search for gold move much earth and find little.
She's the muse of the pointlessness of imposing our narrative on the world as a way for the world to make sense. Her leitmotiff in the closing chapters that no one watches the sparrows is obviously a counterpoint to the idea that "His eye is on the sparrow" as it has been lodged into our receding cultural memory by Mahalia Jackson's rendition of a famous song from the Gospel tradition in America.
Well, I do believe His eye is on the sparrow so Didion chooses to hang out in places I don't go to by profession. Still, I've never felt obligated to agree with a number of authors whose works have fascinated me. I'm hardly a pantheist but a lot of Miyazaki's films and certainly his comic book Nausica resonate with me.
Still, this is a book featuring Didion during what would have to be reckoned a more hysterical or irrational stage of her life dealing with the death of her husband of about four decades and with what she did not yet know at the time of writing would be the death of her only child. Now exactly why she and John Gregory Dunne named their daughter Quintana I don't recall and it's not a name I'd ever pick but it sure is a memorable name.
Well, I could blog about the book in more detail but I don't feel like it right now. It's late, as an old song puts it, and I also need to urinate. Blogging always gets obstructed at some point by biological imperatives and the need to pee is surely one of the more unavoidable ones.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
flying is beautiful
Al Gore, I know why you succumb to mighty hypocrisy by complaining about global warming and flying around in jets.
Flying is fun.
Now, to be sure, flying coach on Alaska Airlines where I hear the same songs over and over again before the flight isn't TOTALLY cool. I don't want to hear "I Believe I Can Fly" ever again if possible but since I've got two more business trips down to L.A. later this year I'm going to hear that stupid song at least two more times. I got it in the first half-minute that the guy believes he can fly. And I can't help noticing that Elvis can't help falling in love with me just before every flight and finally made a crack about it to one of the flight attendants who smiled. She had to put up with it more often than I ever have.
Whoever that loser is or was who did a slowed-down version of that Buddy Holly song, screw you, man! You ruined a fun upbeat little song about teen love by turning it into a laconic self-congratulatory ode to ... I don't know, 70s soft rock. I'm not even a big Buddy Holly fan and I just want to break the instruments of the people who messe with that song.
But flying is still beautiful. Feeling the mild force of gravity pulling you back as the plane accelerates to take-off speed. Awesome. No, really. I wanted to be a pilot since I was maybe nine years old and never had the eyesight for it. It's weird to think about because when I was about six my parents flew me and my siblings from the Northwest to ... let's just see the breadbasket of America ... and I was terrified. I'm sure I was the most obnoxious shrieking, crying little kid the people on that plane had ever seen or heard and my parents must have told me in no uncertain terms they were embarrassed by me being so afraid. Well, a few years later and I wasn't afraid of flying anymore and relished any excuse to be on a plane.
Even stuff like turbulence on a plane is fun! I'd rather be on a plane that buckles in turbulence and thereby proves the plane is pliant and not some stick to be snapped in half than to have the plane be totally fixed and rigid and eventually be some stick that snaps in half.
So business trips can be lame but flying is cool. Even Al Gore knows that.
At least we're not seriously considering banning all night-time flights as the British (or some of the British) have proposed. Some Brits are suggesting people have fewer children so as to avoid contributing to global warming. If this sort of progressive just never has kids, never gets on a plane, and avoids using fossil fuels then how will these ideas be passed on to succeeding generations?
They won't.
I have grown tired of doom-saying from both the left and the right over the last ten years. Bill Clinton didn't institute martial law and take away all my civil liberties. When people who detest Bush 2 make the same claims I find it a little tough to believe them. Clinton was elected to a second term and is still unable to run again. I anticipate that happening with Bush 2, too. Clinton and Bush have more similarities on things like the environment and foreign policy than the haters on either side seem eager to notice. Clinton's handling of the former Yugoslavia doesn't seem to have been so different from anothe rmilitary venture that attempts to institute a new approach to government and social order in a region torn by centuries old ethnic conflicts exacerbated by the stupid foreign policies of colonialist European powers. :)
It sort of seems like the next presidential race is going to come down to people attempting to distance themselves from a war they voted for without formally declaring war (if memory serves). Congress seems like a strange branch of government sometimes, often wishing to simply not do what it is supposed to do according to the Constitution (and then finding ways to either blame other branches for not doing what they're supposed to do); or trying to get other branches to do what they should do themselves; or even have other branches overturn things they do that aren't constitutional. I'm not sure how anyone can or should run in 2008 with the position of having voted for permission to use military force but now distancing themselves from said vote. John Edwards was the only one I might have given a pass for the "I was young and dumb and that's why I voted 'yes'."
But in the end no one in Congress DESERVES a pass because if the President asks permission to use military force why didn't Congress go one further and discuss a formal declaration of war? Congress has been abdicating its constitutional role in deciding when formal sancation of military power is called for, and this for decades. What I find most annoying about Congress is that they whine about presidents doing what Congress keeps letting them do. Whenever the United States eventually falls according to whatever the Lord assigns through providence will historians look back and guess that the United States, as a political structure and social unit, dissolved slowly because Congress wasn't doing what it was constitutionally designed to do? Letting the president wage wars and the courts develop legislation the political parties didn't want to pass for fear of getting sacked at the polls? Decrying the expansion of government at election years and then keeping the status quo when it was self-serving?
I didn't really want Bush in office back in 2000. I thought both parties had demonstrated that the wealth within the party's constituents and adherents had picked the candidates rather than the candidates who might have been better. 2000 was a race between two white guys from families in the South who got their money from oil. I began to joke around some friends that a vote for Gore was a vote for war because of the Democratic track record on military interventions post World War 2 that never involved a formal declaration of war by Congress. Republicans did it, too, but not on the scale of Democrats, at least not until the last 20 years and even then not until more recently than people seem to think. Both parties are equally guilty on this overall but find it mighty convenient to blame the other party. As I've blogged earlier, Jesus was crucified by the vote of a bipartisan committee. I get tired of the Pharisees and Sadducees and temple authorities all pointing the finger at each other as though they didn't call for the death of Jesus themselves.
Flying is fun.
Now, to be sure, flying coach on Alaska Airlines where I hear the same songs over and over again before the flight isn't TOTALLY cool. I don't want to hear "I Believe I Can Fly" ever again if possible but since I've got two more business trips down to L.A. later this year I'm going to hear that stupid song at least two more times. I got it in the first half-minute that the guy believes he can fly. And I can't help noticing that Elvis can't help falling in love with me just before every flight and finally made a crack about it to one of the flight attendants who smiled. She had to put up with it more often than I ever have.
Whoever that loser is or was who did a slowed-down version of that Buddy Holly song, screw you, man! You ruined a fun upbeat little song about teen love by turning it into a laconic self-congratulatory ode to ... I don't know, 70s soft rock. I'm not even a big Buddy Holly fan and I just want to break the instruments of the people who messe with that song.
But flying is still beautiful. Feeling the mild force of gravity pulling you back as the plane accelerates to take-off speed. Awesome. No, really. I wanted to be a pilot since I was maybe nine years old and never had the eyesight for it. It's weird to think about because when I was about six my parents flew me and my siblings from the Northwest to ... let's just see the breadbasket of America ... and I was terrified. I'm sure I was the most obnoxious shrieking, crying little kid the people on that plane had ever seen or heard and my parents must have told me in no uncertain terms they were embarrassed by me being so afraid. Well, a few years later and I wasn't afraid of flying anymore and relished any excuse to be on a plane.
Even stuff like turbulence on a plane is fun! I'd rather be on a plane that buckles in turbulence and thereby proves the plane is pliant and not some stick to be snapped in half than to have the plane be totally fixed and rigid and eventually be some stick that snaps in half.
So business trips can be lame but flying is cool. Even Al Gore knows that.
At least we're not seriously considering banning all night-time flights as the British (or some of the British) have proposed. Some Brits are suggesting people have fewer children so as to avoid contributing to global warming. If this sort of progressive just never has kids, never gets on a plane, and avoids using fossil fuels then how will these ideas be passed on to succeeding generations?
They won't.
I have grown tired of doom-saying from both the left and the right over the last ten years. Bill Clinton didn't institute martial law and take away all my civil liberties. When people who detest Bush 2 make the same claims I find it a little tough to believe them. Clinton was elected to a second term and is still unable to run again. I anticipate that happening with Bush 2, too. Clinton and Bush have more similarities on things like the environment and foreign policy than the haters on either side seem eager to notice. Clinton's handling of the former Yugoslavia doesn't seem to have been so different from anothe rmilitary venture that attempts to institute a new approach to government and social order in a region torn by centuries old ethnic conflicts exacerbated by the stupid foreign policies of colonialist European powers. :)
It sort of seems like the next presidential race is going to come down to people attempting to distance themselves from a war they voted for without formally declaring war (if memory serves). Congress seems like a strange branch of government sometimes, often wishing to simply not do what it is supposed to do according to the Constitution (and then finding ways to either blame other branches for not doing what they're supposed to do); or trying to get other branches to do what they should do themselves; or even have other branches overturn things they do that aren't constitutional. I'm not sure how anyone can or should run in 2008 with the position of having voted for permission to use military force but now distancing themselves from said vote. John Edwards was the only one I might have given a pass for the "I was young and dumb and that's why I voted 'yes'."
But in the end no one in Congress DESERVES a pass because if the President asks permission to use military force why didn't Congress go one further and discuss a formal declaration of war? Congress has been abdicating its constitutional role in deciding when formal sancation of military power is called for, and this for decades. What I find most annoying about Congress is that they whine about presidents doing what Congress keeps letting them do. Whenever the United States eventually falls according to whatever the Lord assigns through providence will historians look back and guess that the United States, as a political structure and social unit, dissolved slowly because Congress wasn't doing what it was constitutionally designed to do? Letting the president wage wars and the courts develop legislation the political parties didn't want to pass for fear of getting sacked at the polls? Decrying the expansion of government at election years and then keeping the status quo when it was self-serving?
I didn't really want Bush in office back in 2000. I thought both parties had demonstrated that the wealth within the party's constituents and adherents had picked the candidates rather than the candidates who might have been better. 2000 was a race between two white guys from families in the South who got their money from oil. I began to joke around some friends that a vote for Gore was a vote for war because of the Democratic track record on military interventions post World War 2 that never involved a formal declaration of war by Congress. Republicans did it, too, but not on the scale of Democrats, at least not until the last 20 years and even then not until more recently than people seem to think. Both parties are equally guilty on this overall but find it mighty convenient to blame the other party. As I've blogged earlier, Jesus was crucified by the vote of a bipartisan committee. I get tired of the Pharisees and Sadducees and temple authorities all pointing the finger at each other as though they didn't call for the death of Jesus themselves.
return to L.A., a corporate culture and my blood sugar
I can't say that this second mandatory business related training trip was that much more useful than the first but developing rapport with my mostly equally-bewildered colleagues counted for something.
I have also gotten advice from two good friends that one key to living in Los Angeles can be summed up thusly:
Don't drink the water.
More to the point, don't drink the tap water. Ever. Bottled water. I know there are environmental worries that bottled water is so Amerian and irresponsible. Los Angeles tap water sucks. You can drink glass after glass and it might never slake your thirst.
On the other hand, I'm starting to wonder if that's a sign of me having blood sugar problems rather than Los Angeles tap water being awful. It doesn't have to be a strict either/or here, though.
I didn't get nearly as much reading as I had planned on getting done over the week. The whole slowly building rapport with co-workers couldn't be ignored even by me and I have to admit I don't tend to care about mingling or building rapport with people in general in a lot of ways. But I did manage to finally read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Perhaps I can blog about that later but right now I don't feel like I have a ton to blog about it. It IS 3am after all.
I suppose reading a book about death has gotten me thinking about mortality. Diabetes runs on both sides of my family and both grandmothers died of complications related to diabetes if I recall correctly.
I shouldn't be finding myself so unable to concentrate, learn, and remember things lately but that's where I'm at. My best guess is that it's a blood-sugar issue and a potentially serious one. I discovered that having beef jerky to get some protein in my system was initially successful but disastrous a couple hours after I had the food. By contrast, having yogurt helped keep me moderately alert for hours before I had any other food. So chalk that up to being a gimme that the salt content must have dehydrated me or something so that the initial protein boost benefit was decimated by salt. The more water I drink the more clearly I'm able to keep focused but it presents the problem of having to go pee that liter of water I had earlier in the day.
To me blogging is not an inherently personal enterprise or it shouldn't be because broadcasting your personal experiences shouldn't be anyone's business (except perhaps by sending emails that are not necessarily that secure). But here I am, anyway, blogging about something I normally don't like to blog about, anything particularly "personal".
Why do I find the idea of divulging personal information in a blog so distasteful? Well, I feel it's needless to explain. Still, I guess I'd have to chalk this up to the belief that the internet should be a resource for information that may interest or help people and I don't see how divulging information of a purely personal nature in something like the blogosphere usually does that. I can't say I've got better things to do with my time than read the blogs of friends or family even though it's true that I hardly ever read blogs by friends or family. It's not meant as a personal slight against them--they just have my phone number and email address already so I don't see much reason to convey personal things on a blog I could convey to them.
But since I've not been blogging because of business related travels and because I've made discoveries about my health as side effects of dealing with what I'd have to call the corporate culture's approach to food I find myself writing about this stuff even though I hadn't planned to. Some corporate cultures have some bad legacies in terms of food, at least for me. The carbos and caffeine approach of "continental breakfast" is a major pain in the ass. After seven years in this company setting with not nearly enough exercise it seems to have exacted a frustrating toll on my brain. It's reminding me the hard way that advice to avoid caloric drinks and exercise consistently is advice I should have taken from a doctor five years ago. I did, sort of, but not enough and not consistently enough. But I'm still relatively young (33) so it's not as though I don't have some time to get cracking on this.
The first business trip was awful not just because the training was mostly worthless to me but also because that first trip I felt like my brain was dead weight until MAYBE 5pm, right when the training was over. I began to discover patterns that were signs of sleep apnea but also of things that suggest my blood sugar is screwed up. This last trip has just wrapped up and I felt better this week because I began to deliberately avoid carbohydrates in favor of vegetables and protein. This has had some pretty dramatic results in my ability to remember and learn things this week ... or at least it would if the training this week wasn't just as semi-useless as the other training period before it. I have, to use an analogy, been inducted into the beauties of a phone book that has addresses and phone numbers but no names. There are also some late-breaking discoveries that have my colleagues justifiably freaking out that a vendor is planning to set up a huge project based on what the vendor understands to be the needs of the client and not on the actual needs of the client.
I could wax at a small length about how and why this has happened but I really don't want to since it's all proprietary stuff anyway and because I just got home. I didn't pick up Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, and Spiderman 2.1 last weekend to come home THIS weekend and write a whole ton about a business trip I didn't really like. Then again, this wouldn't be blogging if everything I blogged reflected on things I was carefully thinking about.
I have also gotten advice from two good friends that one key to living in Los Angeles can be summed up thusly:
Don't drink the water.
More to the point, don't drink the tap water. Ever. Bottled water. I know there are environmental worries that bottled water is so Amerian and irresponsible. Los Angeles tap water sucks. You can drink glass after glass and it might never slake your thirst.
On the other hand, I'm starting to wonder if that's a sign of me having blood sugar problems rather than Los Angeles tap water being awful. It doesn't have to be a strict either/or here, though.
I didn't get nearly as much reading as I had planned on getting done over the week. The whole slowly building rapport with co-workers couldn't be ignored even by me and I have to admit I don't tend to care about mingling or building rapport with people in general in a lot of ways. But I did manage to finally read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Perhaps I can blog about that later but right now I don't feel like I have a ton to blog about it. It IS 3am after all.
I suppose reading a book about death has gotten me thinking about mortality. Diabetes runs on both sides of my family and both grandmothers died of complications related to diabetes if I recall correctly.
I shouldn't be finding myself so unable to concentrate, learn, and remember things lately but that's where I'm at. My best guess is that it's a blood-sugar issue and a potentially serious one. I discovered that having beef jerky to get some protein in my system was initially successful but disastrous a couple hours after I had the food. By contrast, having yogurt helped keep me moderately alert for hours before I had any other food. So chalk that up to being a gimme that the salt content must have dehydrated me or something so that the initial protein boost benefit was decimated by salt. The more water I drink the more clearly I'm able to keep focused but it presents the problem of having to go pee that liter of water I had earlier in the day.
To me blogging is not an inherently personal enterprise or it shouldn't be because broadcasting your personal experiences shouldn't be anyone's business (except perhaps by sending emails that are not necessarily that secure). But here I am, anyway, blogging about something I normally don't like to blog about, anything particularly "personal".
Why do I find the idea of divulging personal information in a blog so distasteful? Well, I feel it's needless to explain. Still, I guess I'd have to chalk this up to the belief that the internet should be a resource for information that may interest or help people and I don't see how divulging information of a purely personal nature in something like the blogosphere usually does that. I can't say I've got better things to do with my time than read the blogs of friends or family even though it's true that I hardly ever read blogs by friends or family. It's not meant as a personal slight against them--they just have my phone number and email address already so I don't see much reason to convey personal things on a blog I could convey to them.
But since I've not been blogging because of business related travels and because I've made discoveries about my health as side effects of dealing with what I'd have to call the corporate culture's approach to food I find myself writing about this stuff even though I hadn't planned to. Some corporate cultures have some bad legacies in terms of food, at least for me. The carbos and caffeine approach of "continental breakfast" is a major pain in the ass. After seven years in this company setting with not nearly enough exercise it seems to have exacted a frustrating toll on my brain. It's reminding me the hard way that advice to avoid caloric drinks and exercise consistently is advice I should have taken from a doctor five years ago. I did, sort of, but not enough and not consistently enough. But I'm still relatively young (33) so it's not as though I don't have some time to get cracking on this.
The first business trip was awful not just because the training was mostly worthless to me but also because that first trip I felt like my brain was dead weight until MAYBE 5pm, right when the training was over. I began to discover patterns that were signs of sleep apnea but also of things that suggest my blood sugar is screwed up. This last trip has just wrapped up and I felt better this week because I began to deliberately avoid carbohydrates in favor of vegetables and protein. This has had some pretty dramatic results in my ability to remember and learn things this week ... or at least it would if the training this week wasn't just as semi-useless as the other training period before it. I have, to use an analogy, been inducted into the beauties of a phone book that has addresses and phone numbers but no names. There are also some late-breaking discoveries that have my colleagues justifiably freaking out that a vendor is planning to set up a huge project based on what the vendor understands to be the needs of the client and not on the actual needs of the client.
I could wax at a small length about how and why this has happened but I really don't want to since it's all proprietary stuff anyway and because I just got home. I didn't pick up Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, and Spiderman 2.1 last weekend to come home THIS weekend and write a whole ton about a business trip I didn't really like. Then again, this wouldn't be blogging if everything I blogged reflected on things I was carefully thinking about.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
a battle of will against my old HP all-in-one printer/copier/scanner
HP sucks
I mean they really suck.
Too bad I've got one of their units. It's not that Vista has presented any problems necessarily as that HP hasn't bothered to remedy some things or I'm not aware of the remedies. I just tried printing out bus directions to a friend's house and it's taken two hours to get my machine to interface with machine. It's pretty damn annoying. Now I'm not sure I'll get to sleep in time to go to the friend's place at a semi-reasonable hour for normal people.
Why was I working on this? Well, it's nice to be able to print if you misplace stuff that you printedand want to make new copies. Now that I've discovered where said misplaced printed items were I feel even dumber for not having figured out how to get my special HP beast to work as designed. I'm tired. I have a three-day weekend and for the most part my three-day weekend has not been completely muffed in the first day by HP making crap ... but it was getting close. We'll see if I'm awake enough after noon to visit as planned.
I mean they really suck.
Too bad I've got one of their units. It's not that Vista has presented any problems necessarily as that HP hasn't bothered to remedy some things or I'm not aware of the remedies. I just tried printing out bus directions to a friend's house and it's taken two hours to get my machine to interface with machine. It's pretty damn annoying. Now I'm not sure I'll get to sleep in time to go to the friend's place at a semi-reasonable hour for normal people.
Why was I working on this? Well, it's nice to be able to print if you misplace stuff that you printedand want to make new copies. Now that I've discovered where said misplaced printed items were I feel even dumber for not having figured out how to get my special HP beast to work as designed. I'm tired. I have a three-day weekend and for the most part my three-day weekend has not been completely muffed in the first day by HP making crap ... but it was getting close. We'll see if I'm awake enough after noon to visit as planned.
more travels to the city of angels (possibly named Asmodeus)
I have to admit I didn't enjoy Los Angeles much on the business trip last week. There were no clouds, it was too hot, and the tap water was more to die of than to die for. Still, the restaurants were pretty good. Still, $1.50 for pop from a vending machine is insane, especially since up here in the Emerald City you can find ghetto/bargain bin copies of the same soda for 25 cents a pop, literally. I mean, come on, it's all carbonated water and corn syrup, right? Except maybe Mountain Dew, the great wake-me-up that burns as it goes down your gullet.
One thing I have learned is that things have changed a lot since last I rode in an airplane. I am not making this up but fourteen years ago when I last flew from Sea-Tac they let me on the plane even though I had no driver's license and no state identification of any kind. They just let me on the plane! Now I dread the prospect of even having loose change in my pockets! I had to throw away an average sized bottle of shampoo I was foolish enough to have brought because I've never stayed in a hotel where they, you know, have those weird little bottles of shampoo and stuff. And toothpaste? I have to say Colgate must be making a killing now or something. It makes me feel simultaneously old AND naive, not that I have ever been particularly worldly wise or anything.
Being in Los Angeles for one week gave me great appreciation of the beautiful overcasts and mild, regular precipitation in this beautiful, beautiful town.
One thing I have learned is that things have changed a lot since last I rode in an airplane. I am not making this up but fourteen years ago when I last flew from Sea-Tac they let me on the plane even though I had no driver's license and no state identification of any kind. They just let me on the plane! Now I dread the prospect of even having loose change in my pockets! I had to throw away an average sized bottle of shampoo I was foolish enough to have brought because I've never stayed in a hotel where they, you know, have those weird little bottles of shampoo and stuff. And toothpaste? I have to say Colgate must be making a killing now or something. It makes me feel simultaneously old AND naive, not that I have ever been particularly worldly wise or anything.
Being in Los Angeles for one week gave me great appreciation of the beautiful overcasts and mild, regular precipitation in this beautiful, beautiful town.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
an open blog entry to Matanya Ophee, thanks for 'Repertoire Issues'
http://www.guitarandluteissues.com/defossa/repertoire.html
Here's hoping he doesn't mind that I just blatantly link to his article/lecture transcription.
I doubt we'd ever meet or get along. I've a fairly theologically and politically conservative guy with a white mom and an American Indian dad who has always grown up in the Northwestern United States so if I ever met the guy I don't know if we could have a conversation for long before one of us said something that put the other on edge. Since it's exponentially unlikely I'll ever meet the man that's fine.
But this presentation he gave, this article he published about repertoire issues in classical guitar completely changed the way I think about my instrument, the guitar, and about how I approach composing for it. I went to college and sang in choirs and I learned music from organists and conductors and only eventually did I ever study, for just two quarters, with a classical guitarist. The vast majority of my musical education came through non-guitarists and the most important books I read on music had nothing whatsoever to do with the instrument. How on earth can a guitarist get something out of George Oldroyd's The Technique and Spirit of Fugue? What about Kent Kennan's book on Baroque Counterpoint? Hindemith's Craft of Musical Composition or A Composer's World? Kennan's orchestration treatise? John Verral's monograph on counterpoint?
It would be nice to say the guitar and guitarists had a bigger role in my musical education but Ophee is right, chamber music is where you really learn stuff when you study or play. I learned more about how to approach composition singing in choirs than playing guitar. Studying English sacred choral repertoire, including the remarkable modulatory patterns in William Harris' Faire is the Heaven taught me a lot. My composition instructor was a conductor who played clarinet. But it was studying the quartets of Bartok, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Haydn, and Beethoven where I learned the most about how to put music together. I studied symphonic repertoire, string quartets, piano cycles (Messiaen's Vingt Regards, Ludus Tonalis, Beethoven's Op. 111). Now I can't play any of the stuff to save my life except the first three movements of Ludus Tonalis because as an instrumentalist I am mostly self taught as a guitarist and a pianist.
And the thing is, to me that shows that how you learn your techniques doesn't matter. It has also shown me, alas, that after a decade of studying the greatest chamber music around I am at a loss to think of chamber music for the guitar that is as cool as Bartok's 3rd quartet or Hindemith's Op. 22 quartet (THAT piece is incredible). The thing is there ARE amazing works for guitar that have it playing with other instruments and the pieces that survive long enough to get recorded more than once deserve to be recorded way more often than they are.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Sonatina can't be over-played, not in the way chamber music gets recorded by guitarists.
Ditto for Histoire du Tango, to a lesser degree.
Toward the Sea is wonderful.
When is someone going to record Aubert Lemeland's Duo Variations for viola and guitar again? Seriously, this is a wonderful piece and I have no idea why GSP is still able to sell it year in and year out and yet I've seen no sign of anyone recording it. It deserves to be recorded again even if I think the ending is a little weak.
Koshkin's sonata for flute and guitar is cool and it's actually been recorded twice but to my knowledge never in the United States. Someone should fix that and I don't have the chops for it.
Atanas Ourkouzounov deserves more attention State-side. Then again that could be said about a lot of really good European composers. Thanks to Colt Valenti I am going to have to take his recommendation to explore the works of Angelo Gilardino (sic?) here when I'm not travelling out of state and have some time to pick up a few more recordings and scores.
But for budgetary reasons (planning to get back to my very expensive alma mater) I probably need to do a moratorium on scores and CDs for a while even if I doubt I'll follow through.
And I've gotten sidetracked from my earlier thoughts. Ophee's article seems like it will be as true twenty years from now as it was about seven years ago when I stumbled across it. And it was probably as true the year I was born as it is now.
Anyway, this man's article inspired me to start writing as much chamber music for the guitar as I could . Whether or not it's really any good remains to be seen. I can say that I've found the email addresses of four oboe and guitar duos, two viola and guitar duos, I admit to having not bothered with flute and guitar duos much as yet because that's the one realm of chamber repertoire for guitar that is actually at risk of being over-represented. I've bought a few CDs of flute and guitar music that frankly weren't that interesting. But music for BASSOON and guitar? That's another story. I have a sonata for bassoon and guitar in c minor I still need to work on. If I weren't trying to get on-the-job training out of state and weren't having to brush up on my guitar chops for the wedding of some friends I could probably take the time I need to finish that sonata for bassoon and guitar this year.
And then there's brass instruments. There's nothing. I mean, there's just about nothing. There's a French horn and guitar duo that Volkmar was kind enough to point me toward and I've got that--too bad I don't have a French horn player around to play the piece with because then I'd have a musician I could work with for fine-tuning my still seminal sonata for horn and guitar. I know from Frank Campo's work that even trumpet and classical guitar works are possible, though I can't find Two Studies anywhere and Frank Campo's email doesn't work anymore. I don't even know if he's still alive. This, friends, is why you take aural dictation classes in college! If the composer's work is out of print and he/she isn't even alive anymore how are you going to learn how to play a wonderful piece that exists only on a recording? That's right, you have to transcribe the whole thing yourself, which may be what i have to do!
I told a fellow I know at my church I would eventually write a piece for us to play. He plays tenor trombone. As an American with the complete works of Blind Willie Johnson ... I'll just leave it at that. By now you can figure out what my funnest stunt for THAT sonata is going to be and Nadia Borislove half-way beat me to the punch already. And since this city has a symphony that premiered a great tuba concerto by Samuel Jones you can bet money I've got the study score for that concerto and will one day, I hope, compose a duo for classical guitar and tuba.
And in case it's not obvious how much this resembles the precedent of another composer's work I'm not going to spell it out if it isn't already obvious. Ophee's advice about guitar repertoire happens to coincide with some ideas proposed by a favorite composer of mine, and both together got me thinking that rather than do what all the other guitarists are doing I'd like to see what I can get done by actually not focusing on the usual solo repertoire at all but focusing just on chamber music as much possible. It's obviously one of my pet obsessions besides theology and cartoons.
And as far as that goes I have finished a sonata for clarinet and guitar and have been kind of stuck over the last year because clarinet and guitar duos are astonishingly rare in classical music. In jazz, not so rare and I have started pitching my sonata to the jazz set even though it's not exactly jazz. It's an hommage to Ellington with spots for improvisation so I hope it's close enough to jazz for the jazz set because most classical guitarists I've come across don't necessarily show me that the get what a jazz sound would work out to be. Okay, Tom Baker and Colt Valenti and Michael Niccolela are all local examples of guitarists who can play whatever style they want but that doesn't mean I have reason to think they'd be interested in playing my stuff as such. By the way, brief plug, Colt's CD is fun. Look him up and check out his stuff.
If I have a fantasy of putting out a CD it's to put out a CD of all chamber music. Half the stuff would be mine and half the stuff would be music that has inspired me to write. Then again, I don't have the chops because I've been too lazy to build up my solo technique and because I've been too busy composing. I'm starting to understand what Robert Muczynski was getting at when he said his piano teacher thought he composed too much and his composing teacher thought he practiced piano too much. You can get so bent on one you don't do as well as you could at the other and if you try to split the difference between the two all the time your learning curve is long, slow, and steep.
But when I hear what else is out there in the world of guitar repertoire I don't usually regret taking the long, slow, steep and since 1997 mostly self-taught path. My theory professor and composition professor gave me the tools to figure out my tonal sound as I go and the rest has been following the advice of my guitar teacher that I knew enough after two quarters with her to learn whatever techniques I wanted and that I should only learn techniques when I had something MUSICAL to do with them. Maybe that's why I can't play tremelo and can't play fast but feel comfortable playing a three minute piece in B flat staying close to the nut.
Something I've learned looking at chamber repertoire has me buidling an ad hoc theory for why there's so little of it for guitar compared to solo repertoire. It's not that the chamber music is exactly bad but it does seem like guitarists love to avoid the keys that come most naturally to a lot of other instruments, especially woodwinds, let alone brass (which are avoided for obvious problems of the sheer volume brass instruments produce). But why should that be? Why should there be so many string quartets in B flat major yet any time a violinist and guitarist play together all the pieces seem to stick to keys that can be comfortably executed with a maximum of open strings? It explains why no one plays Lemeland's Duo Variations, which total eight minutes in playing time and are all in D flat. If classical guitarists spent as much time mastering the ability to play in any key as they did in playing fast or flourishing stuff some of these little gems in unfriendly keys could get better represented.
But I'm just ranting beyond any organized thoughts now and I do need to get some sleep. Mr. Ophee, you might never hear my music, and if you hear my music you may not like it, we may never meet and if we do we might not get along but if you're out there and by any chance happen to come across this blog that really has nothing to do with you. Your writing has inspired me to do what a musician in Seattle told me is "filling a vacuum that doesn't exist."
The vacuum does exist because if the measure of a standard for the guitar repertoire is something that has been played to death, or something that is over-represented on CDs then the number of "standard" chamber works for oboe and guitar is pretty small and it's been more than a century since Coste wrote La Montagnard. It's possible no one has written a sonata for tenor trombone and guitar so someone should. My composition professor liked to say that before Beethoven wrote the Fifth Symphony we in the West didn't know we needed it. Well, at the risk of sounding too confident by light years, maybe the reason we don't have a standard repertoire piece for tenor trombone and guitar is because no one has written it yet. If the piece is worth playing I like to think eventually it will get played. It's at least worth trying for because that's more fun than listening to the same Bach and Albeniz transcriptions year after year, no disrespect meant to either great composer keyboard-player.
So, anyway, thanks Matanya Ophee. Maybe if I'm actually any good at this you may eventually hear a piece of mine.
Here's hoping he doesn't mind that I just blatantly link to his article/lecture transcription.
I doubt we'd ever meet or get along. I've a fairly theologically and politically conservative guy with a white mom and an American Indian dad who has always grown up in the Northwestern United States so if I ever met the guy I don't know if we could have a conversation for long before one of us said something that put the other on edge. Since it's exponentially unlikely I'll ever meet the man that's fine.
But this presentation he gave, this article he published about repertoire issues in classical guitar completely changed the way I think about my instrument, the guitar, and about how I approach composing for it. I went to college and sang in choirs and I learned music from organists and conductors and only eventually did I ever study, for just two quarters, with a classical guitarist. The vast majority of my musical education came through non-guitarists and the most important books I read on music had nothing whatsoever to do with the instrument. How on earth can a guitarist get something out of George Oldroyd's The Technique and Spirit of Fugue? What about Kent Kennan's book on Baroque Counterpoint? Hindemith's Craft of Musical Composition or A Composer's World? Kennan's orchestration treatise? John Verral's monograph on counterpoint?
It would be nice to say the guitar and guitarists had a bigger role in my musical education but Ophee is right, chamber music is where you really learn stuff when you study or play. I learned more about how to approach composition singing in choirs than playing guitar. Studying English sacred choral repertoire, including the remarkable modulatory patterns in William Harris' Faire is the Heaven taught me a lot. My composition instructor was a conductor who played clarinet. But it was studying the quartets of Bartok, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Haydn, and Beethoven where I learned the most about how to put music together. I studied symphonic repertoire, string quartets, piano cycles (Messiaen's Vingt Regards, Ludus Tonalis, Beethoven's Op. 111). Now I can't play any of the stuff to save my life except the first three movements of Ludus Tonalis because as an instrumentalist I am mostly self taught as a guitarist and a pianist.
And the thing is, to me that shows that how you learn your techniques doesn't matter. It has also shown me, alas, that after a decade of studying the greatest chamber music around I am at a loss to think of chamber music for the guitar that is as cool as Bartok's 3rd quartet or Hindemith's Op. 22 quartet (THAT piece is incredible). The thing is there ARE amazing works for guitar that have it playing with other instruments and the pieces that survive long enough to get recorded more than once deserve to be recorded way more often than they are.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Sonatina can't be over-played, not in the way chamber music gets recorded by guitarists.
Ditto for Histoire du Tango, to a lesser degree.
Toward the Sea is wonderful.
When is someone going to record Aubert Lemeland's Duo Variations for viola and guitar again? Seriously, this is a wonderful piece and I have no idea why GSP is still able to sell it year in and year out and yet I've seen no sign of anyone recording it. It deserves to be recorded again even if I think the ending is a little weak.
Koshkin's sonata for flute and guitar is cool and it's actually been recorded twice but to my knowledge never in the United States. Someone should fix that and I don't have the chops for it.
Atanas Ourkouzounov deserves more attention State-side. Then again that could be said about a lot of really good European composers. Thanks to Colt Valenti I am going to have to take his recommendation to explore the works of Angelo Gilardino (sic?) here when I'm not travelling out of state and have some time to pick up a few more recordings and scores.
But for budgetary reasons (planning to get back to my very expensive alma mater) I probably need to do a moratorium on scores and CDs for a while even if I doubt I'll follow through.
And I've gotten sidetracked from my earlier thoughts. Ophee's article seems like it will be as true twenty years from now as it was about seven years ago when I stumbled across it. And it was probably as true the year I was born as it is now.
Anyway, this man's article inspired me to start writing as much chamber music for the guitar as I could . Whether or not it's really any good remains to be seen. I can say that I've found the email addresses of four oboe and guitar duos, two viola and guitar duos, I admit to having not bothered with flute and guitar duos much as yet because that's the one realm of chamber repertoire for guitar that is actually at risk of being over-represented. I've bought a few CDs of flute and guitar music that frankly weren't that interesting. But music for BASSOON and guitar? That's another story. I have a sonata for bassoon and guitar in c minor I still need to work on. If I weren't trying to get on-the-job training out of state and weren't having to brush up on my guitar chops for the wedding of some friends I could probably take the time I need to finish that sonata for bassoon and guitar this year.
And then there's brass instruments. There's nothing. I mean, there's just about nothing. There's a French horn and guitar duo that Volkmar was kind enough to point me toward and I've got that--too bad I don't have a French horn player around to play the piece with because then I'd have a musician I could work with for fine-tuning my still seminal sonata for horn and guitar. I know from Frank Campo's work that even trumpet and classical guitar works are possible, though I can't find Two Studies anywhere and Frank Campo's email doesn't work anymore. I don't even know if he's still alive. This, friends, is why you take aural dictation classes in college! If the composer's work is out of print and he/she isn't even alive anymore how are you going to learn how to play a wonderful piece that exists only on a recording? That's right, you have to transcribe the whole thing yourself, which may be what i have to do!
I told a fellow I know at my church I would eventually write a piece for us to play. He plays tenor trombone. As an American with the complete works of Blind Willie Johnson ... I'll just leave it at that. By now you can figure out what my funnest stunt for THAT sonata is going to be and Nadia Borislove half-way beat me to the punch already. And since this city has a symphony that premiered a great tuba concerto by Samuel Jones you can bet money I've got the study score for that concerto and will one day, I hope, compose a duo for classical guitar and tuba.
And in case it's not obvious how much this resembles the precedent of another composer's work I'm not going to spell it out if it isn't already obvious. Ophee's advice about guitar repertoire happens to coincide with some ideas proposed by a favorite composer of mine, and both together got me thinking that rather than do what all the other guitarists are doing I'd like to see what I can get done by actually not focusing on the usual solo repertoire at all but focusing just on chamber music as much possible. It's obviously one of my pet obsessions besides theology and cartoons.
And as far as that goes I have finished a sonata for clarinet and guitar and have been kind of stuck over the last year because clarinet and guitar duos are astonishingly rare in classical music. In jazz, not so rare and I have started pitching my sonata to the jazz set even though it's not exactly jazz. It's an hommage to Ellington with spots for improvisation so I hope it's close enough to jazz for the jazz set because most classical guitarists I've come across don't necessarily show me that the get what a jazz sound would work out to be. Okay, Tom Baker and Colt Valenti and Michael Niccolela are all local examples of guitarists who can play whatever style they want but that doesn't mean I have reason to think they'd be interested in playing my stuff as such. By the way, brief plug, Colt's CD is fun. Look him up and check out his stuff.
If I have a fantasy of putting out a CD it's to put out a CD of all chamber music. Half the stuff would be mine and half the stuff would be music that has inspired me to write. Then again, I don't have the chops because I've been too lazy to build up my solo technique and because I've been too busy composing. I'm starting to understand what Robert Muczynski was getting at when he said his piano teacher thought he composed too much and his composing teacher thought he practiced piano too much. You can get so bent on one you don't do as well as you could at the other and if you try to split the difference between the two all the time your learning curve is long, slow, and steep.
But when I hear what else is out there in the world of guitar repertoire I don't usually regret taking the long, slow, steep and since 1997 mostly self-taught path. My theory professor and composition professor gave me the tools to figure out my tonal sound as I go and the rest has been following the advice of my guitar teacher that I knew enough after two quarters with her to learn whatever techniques I wanted and that I should only learn techniques when I had something MUSICAL to do with them. Maybe that's why I can't play tremelo and can't play fast but feel comfortable playing a three minute piece in B flat staying close to the nut.
Something I've learned looking at chamber repertoire has me buidling an ad hoc theory for why there's so little of it for guitar compared to solo repertoire. It's not that the chamber music is exactly bad but it does seem like guitarists love to avoid the keys that come most naturally to a lot of other instruments, especially woodwinds, let alone brass (which are avoided for obvious problems of the sheer volume brass instruments produce). But why should that be? Why should there be so many string quartets in B flat major yet any time a violinist and guitarist play together all the pieces seem to stick to keys that can be comfortably executed with a maximum of open strings? It explains why no one plays Lemeland's Duo Variations, which total eight minutes in playing time and are all in D flat. If classical guitarists spent as much time mastering the ability to play in any key as they did in playing fast or flourishing stuff some of these little gems in unfriendly keys could get better represented.
But I'm just ranting beyond any organized thoughts now and I do need to get some sleep. Mr. Ophee, you might never hear my music, and if you hear my music you may not like it, we may never meet and if we do we might not get along but if you're out there and by any chance happen to come across this blog that really has nothing to do with you. Your writing has inspired me to do what a musician in Seattle told me is "filling a vacuum that doesn't exist."
The vacuum does exist because if the measure of a standard for the guitar repertoire is something that has been played to death, or something that is over-represented on CDs then the number of "standard" chamber works for oboe and guitar is pretty small and it's been more than a century since Coste wrote La Montagnard. It's possible no one has written a sonata for tenor trombone and guitar so someone should. My composition professor liked to say that before Beethoven wrote the Fifth Symphony we in the West didn't know we needed it. Well, at the risk of sounding too confident by light years, maybe the reason we don't have a standard repertoire piece for tenor trombone and guitar is because no one has written it yet. If the piece is worth playing I like to think eventually it will get played. It's at least worth trying for because that's more fun than listening to the same Bach and Albeniz transcriptions year after year, no disrespect meant to either great composer keyboard-player.
So, anyway, thanks Matanya Ophee. Maybe if I'm actually any good at this you may eventually hear a piece of mine.
Jerry Falwell is dead
I didn't care for his style and often thought his substance was problematic, even as a basically conservative Protestant evangelical type who happens to dig an Anglican's work. But it still galls me that Christopher Hitchens is doing his Hitchens thing on Slate, Slate is running the list of all the stuff Falwell said they consider stupid, racist, and whatever else; and it turns out Westboro Baptist Church ... yes THAT Westboro Baptist Church plans to picket Falwell's funeral because they say he was a liar and a false prophet.
Still ... I don't know, even if I grant that Hitchens has a great point ins aying that you can say any dumb-ass thing you want as long as you're a reverend (it's hard to avoid this point when I consider stupid things Sharpten, Jackson, and Robertson have said on different sides of the political divide) ; and even if I were to agree somehow that Westboro Baptist is right to say Falwell made prophecies that didn't come to pass; I still can't muster their enthusiasm. Hitchens is so passionately atheistic he tries doing hatchet jobs on the Salvation Army and his main complaints are that a hundred years ago there was corruption in the ranks and they were stupid-looking uniforms. He also thinks no one should use "charity" to deal with the problem of homelessness or unemployment and that society should take responsibility ... which sounds like something an English immigrant to the United States with heavy socialist leanings would say. With declining birth rates who on earth will pay the taxes needed to subsidize THAT welfare state? If we keep aborting them or forestalling their birth or saying no one should have those kids because of their net lifelong contributions to carbon emissions why not just wipe ourselves out with some genetically modified strain of polio or something? Or just put it on the open market for any freaks with a grudge?
That seems too pessimistic and absurd. How did I get to this from Falwell? Oh, right, Hitchens.
I don't get him. Considering how rabidly he opposed the FIRST Gulf War his support of the second, given that he's still more or less the atheistic liberal in many ways he was fourteen years ago, his zeal for the battle against Islamofascism given his leftist cred has puzzled me. Maybe he's just so anti-religion he's willing to abandon his leftist background so that Islamofascists can get bombed. He makes for interesting reading, though, even when he I think he's totally wrong. I don't think he's wrong about militant Islam by any stretch of the imagination but I've just seen him use some remarkably weird arguments against religion in general that I think hurt rather than help his ideas.
As for Falwell, well, I don't think people should be throwing parties because he's dead or picketing his funeral. If someone at Westboro Baptist dies I guess if everyone who has had a loved one whose funeral was picketed by WBC went and picketed that funeral of a WBC member who died ... that would be a big picket.
What happens when Westboro Baptist reaps what they've sown? It seems too nasty to contemplate, actually.
Still ... I don't know, even if I grant that Hitchens has a great point ins aying that you can say any dumb-ass thing you want as long as you're a reverend (it's hard to avoid this point when I consider stupid things Sharpten, Jackson, and Robertson have said on different sides of the political divide) ; and even if I were to agree somehow that Westboro Baptist is right to say Falwell made prophecies that didn't come to pass; I still can't muster their enthusiasm. Hitchens is so passionately atheistic he tries doing hatchet jobs on the Salvation Army and his main complaints are that a hundred years ago there was corruption in the ranks and they were stupid-looking uniforms. He also thinks no one should use "charity" to deal with the problem of homelessness or unemployment and that society should take responsibility ... which sounds like something an English immigrant to the United States with heavy socialist leanings would say. With declining birth rates who on earth will pay the taxes needed to subsidize THAT welfare state? If we keep aborting them or forestalling their birth or saying no one should have those kids because of their net lifelong contributions to carbon emissions why not just wipe ourselves out with some genetically modified strain of polio or something? Or just put it on the open market for any freaks with a grudge?
That seems too pessimistic and absurd. How did I get to this from Falwell? Oh, right, Hitchens.
I don't get him. Considering how rabidly he opposed the FIRST Gulf War his support of the second, given that he's still more or less the atheistic liberal in many ways he was fourteen years ago, his zeal for the battle against Islamofascism given his leftist cred has puzzled me. Maybe he's just so anti-religion he's willing to abandon his leftist background so that Islamofascists can get bombed. He makes for interesting reading, though, even when he I think he's totally wrong. I don't think he's wrong about militant Islam by any stretch of the imagination but I've just seen him use some remarkably weird arguments against religion in general that I think hurt rather than help his ideas.
As for Falwell, well, I don't think people should be throwing parties because he's dead or picketing his funeral. If someone at Westboro Baptist dies I guess if everyone who has had a loved one whose funeral was picketed by WBC went and picketed that funeral of a WBC member who died ... that would be a big picket.
What happens when Westboro Baptist reaps what they've sown? It seems too nasty to contemplate, actually.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Why do Protestants suck at classical music now?
I have been thinking recently about how in the 20th century the great innovators have been Catholic or Orthodox or Anglican (which is not quite Protestant as American evangelical Protestants identify the Anglican church). So my question of late is why we Protestants are so bad at being musical innovators? Sticking to just the Judeo-Christian side of things for now:
Schoenberg was Jewish, possibly a very secularist Jew but a Jew nonetheless.
Webern was Catholic
Stravinsky was Russian Orthodox
Copland was Jewish (though not really observant)
Gershwin was Jewish (though also not particularly observant)
Benjamin Britten was Anglican (I think), though old-school Anglicans wouldn't likely like him
Messiaen was Catholic
Penderecki was Catholic
Arvo Part is Orthodox
Steve Reich is Jewish
Dave Brubeck (just to pick an unusual case) is Catholic
Of course you get the more Buddhist strain in Cage and Glass and others but I'm not counting them partly because I'm not looking at the role of Eastern Asian religion as such, and because I don't like Cage and I don't like Glass! I also don't count John Tavener as Christian because I've read enough recent interviews with him that he doesn't seem to embrace anything fundamental to any variation of Christian thought. I suppose I could count Boulez, sort of, as having a Catholic background but he's more practically an atheist and here I am interested in considering the works of composers were actually participants in the religion they identified with. Messiaen almost represents an opposite of Boulez by being a child who became attracted to Catholicism in a far more nominal family whereas Boulez rejected the religion of his parents.
What I am wondering lately is who the Protestant innovators in classical music are. Perhaps i should suggest "orthodox" Protestants, that's to say composers whom evangelicals would identify as actually being Christian in life and doctrine (which is why they would discount Britten who was not only gay but had what may have had some tendency toward pedophilia).
So what Protestant composers have made substantial contributions to classical music whom the average evangelical Protestant could look to as having done something noticable? Um, John Rutter? Last I heard anything about him or written by him he seemed to describe himself as agnostic but who knows a good market for mainstream music when he sees one. Frank Martin "might" count if he weren't dead since around the time I was born; and if it weren't for his being so obscure no one knows about him who isn't keenly interested in choral music at some level.
And none of these possible candidates is exactly cutting edge.
So it seems, to risk a generalization, that atheists and Buddhists have their moments but that a lot of far-out classical music still got written by people from within the Christian fold. It doesn't seem to suffice to say that these were all guys rebelling against a particularly old-school church because the composers who did that just disassociated with their church to some level (like Rachmaninov). Stravinsky rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church; Messiaen never left the Catholic Church; Penderecki didn't write that giant Credo setting just to solve a musical problem; and secular Jews are still Jews in terms of heritage because unlike Christians and Christendom a person can often consider themselves Jewish by heritage even if they don't believe in any kind of God, an interesting subject in its own right that I won't get to here.
It just seems to me that Protestants haven't been on the leading edge of classical music since possibly Mendelssohn and Bach. That's a while back! Ours is an era where contemporary classical music is just not very popular compared to older stuff. I see concert halls filling up with more people to hear Beethoven or Brahms than Messiaen or even Bartok. I just can't quite get my head around why Orthodox and Catholic composers, despite seeming to be more parochial in doctrine to Protestants, or just not being "real" Christians to American Protestants, seem to be more capable of producing musical geniuses in classical music.
I don't think the explanation of rebellion against tradition makes sense. Stravinsky did compose Rite of Spring as an imagining of a pagan Russia but when he returned to the Russian Orthodox Church he was serious and he didn't just stop writing music that is now classic stuff. Penderecki writing the Passion According to St. Luke in a Soviet regime wasn't exactly a wimpy gesture, was it?
It's not that Catholics and Orthodox composers have a sense of history Protestants don't. Bach is indisputably the greatest composer the Western heritage has given to us (Beethoven's still a distant second). But what was it about the Lutheranism and German regions of Bach's time that enabled Bach to be Bach? It seems history as institutional memory doesn't explain everything. Family history could explain some aspects of Bach's genius, especially since multiple generations of the Bach family had been professional musicians and Bach had access to music ranging across Western Europe. My speculative guess is that Protestantism produced incredible classical music because it had, not to put too fine a point on it, a more catholic view of the musical legacy of the West in the past than it has now. Bach could assimilate the tonal and pre-tonal harmonic languages of the old and new styles available in the Baroque era.
I think this capability of composing within multiple styles may be some kind of key to a catholic grasp of Western musical culture. Stravinsky was a stylistic chameleon, so much so that Adorno disliked that aspect of his work. Messiaen assimilated such drastically heterogenous influences as Baroque music, late Romantic works, Asian music, bird-song, and the early modernjsts. Penderecki was similar. What enabled them to assimilate such wildly disparate cultural and historical periods of music into what we can now see as unusual but finally coherent musical voices? Well, I'd like to say their faith and I'd say that's true, but it seems Protestants have faith but DON'T accomplish this in classical music very well. I wonder if the problem may be that Protestant pay lip service to the idea that in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. This would be a huge irony because Catholic and Orthodox churches aren't exactly as free-wheeling in practice about things like the ordination of women based on what little I know about them.
I suppose it may come down to what Chesterton wrote, that in Christianity the soldier and the pacifist both have their part and by not giving supremacy to either both are given their rightful time and place. Some Christians get this about music ... and some Christians don't. To some degree it seems that Protestant groups rose along nationalist lines. As a reaction to abuses and shortcomings in the Catholic Church's use of power and influence that's understandable but it may have, so to speak, swung too far the other way. And I guess that as the child of an inter-racial marriage I see no inherent value (personally) in being proud of one culture at the expensse of another, or really in seing any particularly huge value in either cultural legacy I got from my white and non-white ancestors. Not that I have no interest at all but to me it is not the essence of the Christian faith, which is that those distinctions we have traditionally divided over as humans don't have to be points of division in Christ.
Schoenberg was Jewish, possibly a very secularist Jew but a Jew nonetheless.
Webern was Catholic
Stravinsky was Russian Orthodox
Copland was Jewish (though not really observant)
Gershwin was Jewish (though also not particularly observant)
Benjamin Britten was Anglican (I think), though old-school Anglicans wouldn't likely like him
Messiaen was Catholic
Penderecki was Catholic
Arvo Part is Orthodox
Steve Reich is Jewish
Dave Brubeck (just to pick an unusual case) is Catholic
Of course you get the more Buddhist strain in Cage and Glass and others but I'm not counting them partly because I'm not looking at the role of Eastern Asian religion as such, and because I don't like Cage and I don't like Glass! I also don't count John Tavener as Christian because I've read enough recent interviews with him that he doesn't seem to embrace anything fundamental to any variation of Christian thought. I suppose I could count Boulez, sort of, as having a Catholic background but he's more practically an atheist and here I am interested in considering the works of composers were actually participants in the religion they identified with. Messiaen almost represents an opposite of Boulez by being a child who became attracted to Catholicism in a far more nominal family whereas Boulez rejected the religion of his parents.
What I am wondering lately is who the Protestant innovators in classical music are. Perhaps i should suggest "orthodox" Protestants, that's to say composers whom evangelicals would identify as actually being Christian in life and doctrine (which is why they would discount Britten who was not only gay but had what may have had some tendency toward pedophilia).
So what Protestant composers have made substantial contributions to classical music whom the average evangelical Protestant could look to as having done something noticable? Um, John Rutter? Last I heard anything about him or written by him he seemed to describe himself as agnostic but who knows a good market for mainstream music when he sees one. Frank Martin "might" count if he weren't dead since around the time I was born; and if it weren't for his being so obscure no one knows about him who isn't keenly interested in choral music at some level.
And none of these possible candidates is exactly cutting edge.
So it seems, to risk a generalization, that atheists and Buddhists have their moments but that a lot of far-out classical music still got written by people from within the Christian fold. It doesn't seem to suffice to say that these were all guys rebelling against a particularly old-school church because the composers who did that just disassociated with their church to some level (like Rachmaninov). Stravinsky rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church; Messiaen never left the Catholic Church; Penderecki didn't write that giant Credo setting just to solve a musical problem; and secular Jews are still Jews in terms of heritage because unlike Christians and Christendom a person can often consider themselves Jewish by heritage even if they don't believe in any kind of God, an interesting subject in its own right that I won't get to here.
It just seems to me that Protestants haven't been on the leading edge of classical music since possibly Mendelssohn and Bach. That's a while back! Ours is an era where contemporary classical music is just not very popular compared to older stuff. I see concert halls filling up with more people to hear Beethoven or Brahms than Messiaen or even Bartok. I just can't quite get my head around why Orthodox and Catholic composers, despite seeming to be more parochial in doctrine to Protestants, or just not being "real" Christians to American Protestants, seem to be more capable of producing musical geniuses in classical music.
I don't think the explanation of rebellion against tradition makes sense. Stravinsky did compose Rite of Spring as an imagining of a pagan Russia but when he returned to the Russian Orthodox Church he was serious and he didn't just stop writing music that is now classic stuff. Penderecki writing the Passion According to St. Luke in a Soviet regime wasn't exactly a wimpy gesture, was it?
It's not that Catholics and Orthodox composers have a sense of history Protestants don't. Bach is indisputably the greatest composer the Western heritage has given to us (Beethoven's still a distant second). But what was it about the Lutheranism and German regions of Bach's time that enabled Bach to be Bach? It seems history as institutional memory doesn't explain everything. Family history could explain some aspects of Bach's genius, especially since multiple generations of the Bach family had been professional musicians and Bach had access to music ranging across Western Europe. My speculative guess is that Protestantism produced incredible classical music because it had, not to put too fine a point on it, a more catholic view of the musical legacy of the West in the past than it has now. Bach could assimilate the tonal and pre-tonal harmonic languages of the old and new styles available in the Baroque era.
I think this capability of composing within multiple styles may be some kind of key to a catholic grasp of Western musical culture. Stravinsky was a stylistic chameleon, so much so that Adorno disliked that aspect of his work. Messiaen assimilated such drastically heterogenous influences as Baroque music, late Romantic works, Asian music, bird-song, and the early modernjsts. Penderecki was similar. What enabled them to assimilate such wildly disparate cultural and historical periods of music into what we can now see as unusual but finally coherent musical voices? Well, I'd like to say their faith and I'd say that's true, but it seems Protestants have faith but DON'T accomplish this in classical music very well. I wonder if the problem may be that Protestant pay lip service to the idea that in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. This would be a huge irony because Catholic and Orthodox churches aren't exactly as free-wheeling in practice about things like the ordination of women based on what little I know about them.
I suppose it may come down to what Chesterton wrote, that in Christianity the soldier and the pacifist both have their part and by not giving supremacy to either both are given their rightful time and place. Some Christians get this about music ... and some Christians don't. To some degree it seems that Protestant groups rose along nationalist lines. As a reaction to abuses and shortcomings in the Catholic Church's use of power and influence that's understandable but it may have, so to speak, swung too far the other way. And I guess that as the child of an inter-racial marriage I see no inherent value (personally) in being proud of one culture at the expensse of another, or really in seing any particularly huge value in either cultural legacy I got from my white and non-white ancestors. Not that I have no interest at all but to me it is not the essence of the Christian faith, which is that those distinctions we have traditionally divided over as humans don't have to be points of division in Christ.
ah, the virtues of Berkshire Record Outlet
There are some drawbacks. You REALLY have to know exactly what you're looking for if you're going to bother at all. And it's a crapshoot if you don't know what you're looking for or are just experimenting because I've gotten some snoozer CDs through them. And you have to order a minimum amount before they'll let you buy anything.
But it's worth it to have them around because if you're looking for stuff that's out-of-print or overstocked you can save an INCREDIBLE amount of money getting stuff that just slipped off the regular market. What do I mean? Well, I mean that you can (right now at least) get the COMPLETE keyboard works of William Byrd and the COMPLETE piano music of Olivier Messiaen through BRO for about $74 counting shipping and handling and tax. That's FOURTEEN CDs! Wanna know how much it would cost to get the same stuff new through Amazon.com? Try $200. Even getting the lowest prices through third-party vendors you'll pay at least $110 not counting shipping and handling, which means that the savings you get for getting the two box-sets through Berkshire are pretty incredible.
Yeah, I know, it's pretty nerdy to make a sales pitch for a website that sells cut-out, overstock, and out-of-print classical CDs on a blog. Oh well, that's what blogs are for and if no one else reads this, big deal.
Of course I don't get most of my CDs from here. Most of what I've picked up is new stuff sold either through huge vendors who need not be named or stuff I have to order directly through tiny labels or even some of the artists themselves. But as the Preacher put it, to everything there is a season and when you want to get box sets of the complete keyboard works of a great English Renaissance composer and a great avant gardist from 20th century France Berkshire Record Outlet is at least worth checking out. By the way, be willing to wait at least a month for delivery. They can deliver things much faster than that but they can't guarantee that they can deliver much faster than that. Comes with the territory of selling what they sell. By the way, their selection of Heinrich Schutz is a bit less than awe-inspiring, though they have a couple of discs that are cool.
Now that I've got so much Messiaen and Byrd I hope to listen to the stuff. THAT will take a while. Since I'm trudging through Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone's book on Messiaen (which I honestly hoped would be more of a page-turner than I had any reason to expect) I figure I can listen to a bunch of the composer's music, too.
But it's worth it to have them around because if you're looking for stuff that's out-of-print or overstocked you can save an INCREDIBLE amount of money getting stuff that just slipped off the regular market. What do I mean? Well, I mean that you can (right now at least) get the COMPLETE keyboard works of William Byrd and the COMPLETE piano music of Olivier Messiaen through BRO for about $74 counting shipping and handling and tax. That's FOURTEEN CDs! Wanna know how much it would cost to get the same stuff new through Amazon.com? Try $200. Even getting the lowest prices through third-party vendors you'll pay at least $110 not counting shipping and handling, which means that the savings you get for getting the two box-sets through Berkshire are pretty incredible.
Yeah, I know, it's pretty nerdy to make a sales pitch for a website that sells cut-out, overstock, and out-of-print classical CDs on a blog. Oh well, that's what blogs are for and if no one else reads this, big deal.
Of course I don't get most of my CDs from here. Most of what I've picked up is new stuff sold either through huge vendors who need not be named or stuff I have to order directly through tiny labels or even some of the artists themselves. But as the Preacher put it, to everything there is a season and when you want to get box sets of the complete keyboard works of a great English Renaissance composer and a great avant gardist from 20th century France Berkshire Record Outlet is at least worth checking out. By the way, be willing to wait at least a month for delivery. They can deliver things much faster than that but they can't guarantee that they can deliver much faster than that. Comes with the territory of selling what they sell. By the way, their selection of Heinrich Schutz is a bit less than awe-inspiring, though they have a couple of discs that are cool.
Now that I've got so much Messiaen and Byrd I hope to listen to the stuff. THAT will take a while. Since I'm trudging through Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone's book on Messiaen (which I honestly hoped would be more of a page-turner than I had any reason to expect) I figure I can listen to a bunch of the composer's music, too.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Spiderman 3 review
People seem really divided about this film and either love it or hate it, saying it's fun or awful. I think that as a fan of Spiderman comics who owns issues 1-137 in reprint I'd have to say that we be honest about the source material, there's stuff that's patently cheesy and stuff that is, believe it or not, touching. Ever since the first Spiderman movie came out there have been people like Josh Feitt or other authors at The Stranger who seem to forget the patent goofiness and unreality of the basic conceit of Spiderman and would have preferred something grounded in "reality". Well, we have Kieslowski films for that, don't we?
I think this third installment of the franchise is easily the weakest so far because it wasn't written with non-fans in mind. I also have this hunch that Sam Raimi wanted to make one movie and Sony and Avi Arad wanted to make sure he made this other movie, too, and Raimi was, for the first time in the franchise, left trying to split the different. The result is a hybrid of what to me are two movies that don't quite gel but which tends to reflect both the strengths and flaws of the source material and even improving on it in some ways while detracting from it in others.
The movie opens up with Parker waxing rhapsodic about how everything in his life works now. Peoplpe like him as Spiderman, and he's got the girl of his dreams, and everyone gets along with him. Not everyone gets along with him for those who have seen the first two movies so in the first few goofy minutes we're clued in that Peter is self-deluded. We didn't even need to see Spiderman 2 (the most fun of the three by quite a stretch) to grasp this if we just remember how the first Spiderman movie ended.
Spiderman comics and Sam Raimi are not generally subtle so we know that because everything is hunky dory for Peter Parker something bad is going to happen and that something bad turns out to be, unsurprisingly, Peter Parker. I know that by now anyone knows the evil black goo from outer space shows up via meteor and just happens to land near Peter Parker. Why, where, and how this evil meteorite shows up is never explained it's a kind of diabolos ex machina, if you will. It's one of the central problems of plausibility and continuity in the story but I go with it.
Why? Because Venom is, in every variation, basically a form of sentient evil that is thrown in as a plot device. The original story line is something on the order of Peter Parker going to the wrong intergalactic vending machine and getting a brand new black suit that happens to be a nasty sentient symbiotic space goo that brings out his bad side.
Okay, think about that for a moment, the bad side of Peter Parker? At Parker's worst he's whiny, self-absorbed, unable to understand other people's problems because he's tied up in himself and his own situation. The worst in Parker is, admittedly, never Darth Vader levels of evil, let alone (thank God) the absurdly cackling Palpatine. I've read George Lucas' comments that Spiderman 3 is a silly movie with not a lot of story there but I chalk this up to Lucas harping on the one film Industrial Light and Magic didn't do all the special effects for. Sorry, George, but soul-bereft special effects marathons with patched-together plots are no longer strictly your domain. Spiderman 3 has its flaws but it's nowhere near the collosal failure of pop cultural imagination that were the unwarranted episodes 1 through 3.
Still, this third Spiderman film reflects more than the others the flaws inherent to the source material. I think Raimi must have started the film with the plan to have Sandman and Harry Osbourn's role as the new Goblin as front and center and that Sony and Arad wanted him to put Eddie Brock in to make sure that if this was really going to be Raimi's last Spiderman film they'd throw in a ton of fan service by including Gwen Stacy and her dad, Captain Stacy, as well as the Venom story line.
This overstuffed quality shows, but it's not as bad as the overstuffed nature of issues from the comics. No one who has a working brain, even a Spiderman fan, really wants Sony to put out a live-action Spiderman film with the Sinister Six. The budget just to get those villains working would preclude having any story.
I'd say my brother put it well when he described this new Spiderman film as the return of the Jedi of the franchise. I've seen it twice and enjoyed it both times. I think that since the main story is about Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson Raimi sticks with what is central to the three movies. In the first film the relationship was only recognized as a possibility and Peter withdraws from the opportunity to have that relationship out of fear. In the second film he begins to see what the consequences of that decision, which he thought was taking the responsible path, led to. By the end of the second film it's been revealed that MJ has a big "kidnap me" sign on her back so that any Spiderman foes kidnap her anyway there's a moment where Peter and MJ decide they can be together.
Which, naturally, becomes the problem the two have through the third film. Just agreeing to go steady doesn't mean either character is up for the task. Parker believes he's ready to propose to Mary Jane and when MJ gets skewered in the press for her turn as a singer in a musical she vents her frustration to Peter who tells her to just shrug it off. It's not like Peter ever shrugged off self doubt and frustration in the previous two movies so we're given a very obvious set-up where Peter's over-confidence and buck-up advice alienate his girlfriend. Parker's a bad listener and a great talker in much of this film.
In a way this shows that what many call "emo Parker" isn't really emo at all in a way. And what transpires through the film between Peter and Mary Jane are an alternating series of break-up gestures (intentional or unintentional, coerced or voluntary). The biggest gaffes the characters take come in the form of Peter kissing a woman while suspended upside down at a Spiderman appreciation day parade, in sight of MJ. This is a small gesture in terms of actions but a big one in terms of the history Peter and MJ have together. Since I've been a fan for years of the idea that evil at its heart is banal as well as radical I think this works. Peter isn't just less scary than he thinks he is, he's worse than he thinks he is but in ways he doesn't consider. He doesn't kill people like the Green Goblin did, or put the lives of the whole city at risk the way Doctor Octopus did, but he's willing to ignore how his girlfriend is feeling by offering advice based not on listening to where she's at but by beginning from where he's at.
In a sense when comics fans and film critics have commented about the banality of the relationship I agree, and I also think that to some degree just how callous Peter and MJ are to each other in the film in their respective self-absorbed states may indicate how great an influence the romantic comedy has had in shaping our cultural imagination. That's something I enjoyed about this movie. Peter and MJ do and say things to each other that appear in romantic comedies, and even within that other genre we aren't exactly "told" by the narrative that these things are good to do to each other. The difference here, as I perceive the film, is that in romantic comedies lies and selfishness are often presented as proof of true love in Spiderman 3 Raimi presents these kinds of things as evidence of the corruption of true love. We've had these characters in two previous movies, enough time to show them in the third movie at their worst and best.
I think that for non-comics fans the complaints about coincidence make sense. For Venom fans they need to look in the mirror! He who smelt it thine own self dealt it, as Zorac put it. There were too many villains but too many coincidences and any variation of the origin of Venom? Well, that's just the flaws of the source material.
I never have understood why Venom (the evil black sentient suit) is impervious to all kinds of injury and stronger than Spiderman but somehow vulnerable to "sonics" and "fire". Is that why Venom fans complain about the symbiote arriving in the form of a meteor? Wouldn't such a symbiote incinerate before hitting the ground? As for sonics ... what for? More than one critic thought the idea of Spiderman beating Venom with a tuning fork seemed stupid. Well, yeah, because it is but that's a problem with the very nature of Venom as far as I'm concerned. If sound was really the cause of the symbiote's demise you'd think that the symbiote would shriek up a storm at the jazz club before Parker decides he has to take off the suit. I think it makes more sense to treat the black suit as a metaphor for Parker choosing to indulge in his worst character traits and desires rather than as some kind of actual character.
There's a sense in which Raimi dropped the ball by trying to give fans what they wanted rather than going for what he wanted in the earlier two films. This should be a warning to other film-makers ... or possibly to studios that once you let a director have a three-picture deal you should let that director do whatever he or she wants. Yes, I'm thinking about Christopher Nolan's pending trio. The guy got me to like Ra's al Ghul and the Scarecrow. I suspect he'll be okay handling the Joker and Two-Face.
Overall the themes of the futility of revenge, bitterness, and how we destroy the relationships we care about most through refusing to acknowledge our own weakness, envy, and resentment seemed a good match for the material. The Sunda-school moralism people have complained about in this new Spidey movie, well, it's in the comics. I'm a fan of the comics so I came away pretty happy with the film both times, even though I know the film is a mess. The jazz club scene that a lot of people can't stand I actually like not because it isn't dumb but because it's here that Parker discovers how selfish and self-absorbed he can be and just how little trust and consideration he has had for Mary Jane. Going to the place where she works because she got sacked from a theater production and humiliating her by upstaging her at her own workplace and showing up with the girl she was jealous of earlier in the movie, that's bad.
The Peter and Harry arc was the most fun and could have had a little more development. Sandman felt a bit out of place, like he had more story than there was any chance to use. Yet paradoxically it seems Raimi didn't have a whole lot he could do with the character, which is why it turns out Sandman killed Uncle Ben, as it turns out, and that by accident. The running motiff through the film is, to put it in starkly religious terms, everyone is tained by their own sin, even the heroes, and that the heroes who fail to recognize their culpability for the sins they committed threatens to destroy them as heroes.
It's telling in the flashback scenes of Parker confronting the man he thought killed Ben that he's not wearing a mask even though in the original film he was wearing a mask and a make-shift spider outfit. This is a nice device in story-telling, the distorted flashback where we get not what really happened but a presentation of how the character felt about what happened. Parker can't admit to himself that he feels guilty of having murdered someone as far back as the first movie. He knows it about himself and he's obviously shared enough with Mary Jane that SHE can see that he feels guilty about that but he can't even admit it to himself. This provides a context for why what Peter does to MJ is so bad, despite complaints from some viewers that MJ seems too bitchy and not worth the trouble. Neither character is necessarily deserving of each other throughout the movies because there are some glaring character flaws in both of them all the way through. It's actually in the third film that they are forced to confront their own failings and not just the real or perceived failings of the other.
Ditto for Harry, which is one of the reasons i really enjoyed the film. I could have done without the deus ex machina of the butler explaining things at the last minute but as the extended cut of Spidey 2.1 shows, Harry's story arc got short shrift in the second film even by cutting out a few brief moments that really humanize him. Of all the characters in the three films he's probably the only one who may even have a sense of how double minded he really is.
This was a movie that tried to do a little too much. I still enjoyed it, though, and even saw it twice. It's not even close to the joy ride that Hot Fuzz was, though, which so far is the most fun I've had seeing a movie this year. There's absolutely no chance the next Pirates of the Carribean movie is going to be even half as much fun as Hot Fuzz was. In fact if Sony relaunches the Spiderman franchise later on they could get Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg to script future Spiderman movies. These guys are funny enough and have enough knowledge of genre film and fiction. Not that it'll ever happen, of course, but the guys who made Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz could make a pretty kick-ass Spiderman movie. Spiderman doing a running kick to the Vulture's face isn't that different from something that happened in Hot Fuzz.
I think this third installment of the franchise is easily the weakest so far because it wasn't written with non-fans in mind. I also have this hunch that Sam Raimi wanted to make one movie and Sony and Avi Arad wanted to make sure he made this other movie, too, and Raimi was, for the first time in the franchise, left trying to split the different. The result is a hybrid of what to me are two movies that don't quite gel but which tends to reflect both the strengths and flaws of the source material and even improving on it in some ways while detracting from it in others.
The movie opens up with Parker waxing rhapsodic about how everything in his life works now. Peoplpe like him as Spiderman, and he's got the girl of his dreams, and everyone gets along with him. Not everyone gets along with him for those who have seen the first two movies so in the first few goofy minutes we're clued in that Peter is self-deluded. We didn't even need to see Spiderman 2 (the most fun of the three by quite a stretch) to grasp this if we just remember how the first Spiderman movie ended.
Spiderman comics and Sam Raimi are not generally subtle so we know that because everything is hunky dory for Peter Parker something bad is going to happen and that something bad turns out to be, unsurprisingly, Peter Parker. I know that by now anyone knows the evil black goo from outer space shows up via meteor and just happens to land near Peter Parker. Why, where, and how this evil meteorite shows up is never explained it's a kind of diabolos ex machina, if you will. It's one of the central problems of plausibility and continuity in the story but I go with it.
Why? Because Venom is, in every variation, basically a form of sentient evil that is thrown in as a plot device. The original story line is something on the order of Peter Parker going to the wrong intergalactic vending machine and getting a brand new black suit that happens to be a nasty sentient symbiotic space goo that brings out his bad side.
Okay, think about that for a moment, the bad side of Peter Parker? At Parker's worst he's whiny, self-absorbed, unable to understand other people's problems because he's tied up in himself and his own situation. The worst in Parker is, admittedly, never Darth Vader levels of evil, let alone (thank God) the absurdly cackling Palpatine. I've read George Lucas' comments that Spiderman 3 is a silly movie with not a lot of story there but I chalk this up to Lucas harping on the one film Industrial Light and Magic didn't do all the special effects for. Sorry, George, but soul-bereft special effects marathons with patched-together plots are no longer strictly your domain. Spiderman 3 has its flaws but it's nowhere near the collosal failure of pop cultural imagination that were the unwarranted episodes 1 through 3.
Still, this third Spiderman film reflects more than the others the flaws inherent to the source material. I think Raimi must have started the film with the plan to have Sandman and Harry Osbourn's role as the new Goblin as front and center and that Sony and Arad wanted him to put Eddie Brock in to make sure that if this was really going to be Raimi's last Spiderman film they'd throw in a ton of fan service by including Gwen Stacy and her dad, Captain Stacy, as well as the Venom story line.
This overstuffed quality shows, but it's not as bad as the overstuffed nature of issues from the comics. No one who has a working brain, even a Spiderman fan, really wants Sony to put out a live-action Spiderman film with the Sinister Six. The budget just to get those villains working would preclude having any story.
I'd say my brother put it well when he described this new Spiderman film as the return of the Jedi of the franchise. I've seen it twice and enjoyed it both times. I think that since the main story is about Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson Raimi sticks with what is central to the three movies. In the first film the relationship was only recognized as a possibility and Peter withdraws from the opportunity to have that relationship out of fear. In the second film he begins to see what the consequences of that decision, which he thought was taking the responsible path, led to. By the end of the second film it's been revealed that MJ has a big "kidnap me" sign on her back so that any Spiderman foes kidnap her anyway there's a moment where Peter and MJ decide they can be together.
Which, naturally, becomes the problem the two have through the third film. Just agreeing to go steady doesn't mean either character is up for the task. Parker believes he's ready to propose to Mary Jane and when MJ gets skewered in the press for her turn as a singer in a musical she vents her frustration to Peter who tells her to just shrug it off. It's not like Peter ever shrugged off self doubt and frustration in the previous two movies so we're given a very obvious set-up where Peter's over-confidence and buck-up advice alienate his girlfriend. Parker's a bad listener and a great talker in much of this film.
In a way this shows that what many call "emo Parker" isn't really emo at all in a way. And what transpires through the film between Peter and Mary Jane are an alternating series of break-up gestures (intentional or unintentional, coerced or voluntary). The biggest gaffes the characters take come in the form of Peter kissing a woman while suspended upside down at a Spiderman appreciation day parade, in sight of MJ. This is a small gesture in terms of actions but a big one in terms of the history Peter and MJ have together. Since I've been a fan for years of the idea that evil at its heart is banal as well as radical I think this works. Peter isn't just less scary than he thinks he is, he's worse than he thinks he is but in ways he doesn't consider. He doesn't kill people like the Green Goblin did, or put the lives of the whole city at risk the way Doctor Octopus did, but he's willing to ignore how his girlfriend is feeling by offering advice based not on listening to where she's at but by beginning from where he's at.
In a sense when comics fans and film critics have commented about the banality of the relationship I agree, and I also think that to some degree just how callous Peter and MJ are to each other in the film in their respective self-absorbed states may indicate how great an influence the romantic comedy has had in shaping our cultural imagination. That's something I enjoyed about this movie. Peter and MJ do and say things to each other that appear in romantic comedies, and even within that other genre we aren't exactly "told" by the narrative that these things are good to do to each other. The difference here, as I perceive the film, is that in romantic comedies lies and selfishness are often presented as proof of true love in Spiderman 3 Raimi presents these kinds of things as evidence of the corruption of true love. We've had these characters in two previous movies, enough time to show them in the third movie at their worst and best.
I think that for non-comics fans the complaints about coincidence make sense. For Venom fans they need to look in the mirror! He who smelt it thine own self dealt it, as Zorac put it. There were too many villains but too many coincidences and any variation of the origin of Venom? Well, that's just the flaws of the source material.
I never have understood why Venom (the evil black sentient suit) is impervious to all kinds of injury and stronger than Spiderman but somehow vulnerable to "sonics" and "fire". Is that why Venom fans complain about the symbiote arriving in the form of a meteor? Wouldn't such a symbiote incinerate before hitting the ground? As for sonics ... what for? More than one critic thought the idea of Spiderman beating Venom with a tuning fork seemed stupid. Well, yeah, because it is but that's a problem with the very nature of Venom as far as I'm concerned. If sound was really the cause of the symbiote's demise you'd think that the symbiote would shriek up a storm at the jazz club before Parker decides he has to take off the suit. I think it makes more sense to treat the black suit as a metaphor for Parker choosing to indulge in his worst character traits and desires rather than as some kind of actual character.
There's a sense in which Raimi dropped the ball by trying to give fans what they wanted rather than going for what he wanted in the earlier two films. This should be a warning to other film-makers ... or possibly to studios that once you let a director have a three-picture deal you should let that director do whatever he or she wants. Yes, I'm thinking about Christopher Nolan's pending trio. The guy got me to like Ra's al Ghul and the Scarecrow. I suspect he'll be okay handling the Joker and Two-Face.
Overall the themes of the futility of revenge, bitterness, and how we destroy the relationships we care about most through refusing to acknowledge our own weakness, envy, and resentment seemed a good match for the material. The Sunda-school moralism people have complained about in this new Spidey movie, well, it's in the comics. I'm a fan of the comics so I came away pretty happy with the film both times, even though I know the film is a mess. The jazz club scene that a lot of people can't stand I actually like not because it isn't dumb but because it's here that Parker discovers how selfish and self-absorbed he can be and just how little trust and consideration he has had for Mary Jane. Going to the place where she works because she got sacked from a theater production and humiliating her by upstaging her at her own workplace and showing up with the girl she was jealous of earlier in the movie, that's bad.
The Peter and Harry arc was the most fun and could have had a little more development. Sandman felt a bit out of place, like he had more story than there was any chance to use. Yet paradoxically it seems Raimi didn't have a whole lot he could do with the character, which is why it turns out Sandman killed Uncle Ben, as it turns out, and that by accident. The running motiff through the film is, to put it in starkly religious terms, everyone is tained by their own sin, even the heroes, and that the heroes who fail to recognize their culpability for the sins they committed threatens to destroy them as heroes.
It's telling in the flashback scenes of Parker confronting the man he thought killed Ben that he's not wearing a mask even though in the original film he was wearing a mask and a make-shift spider outfit. This is a nice device in story-telling, the distorted flashback where we get not what really happened but a presentation of how the character felt about what happened. Parker can't admit to himself that he feels guilty of having murdered someone as far back as the first movie. He knows it about himself and he's obviously shared enough with Mary Jane that SHE can see that he feels guilty about that but he can't even admit it to himself. This provides a context for why what Peter does to MJ is so bad, despite complaints from some viewers that MJ seems too bitchy and not worth the trouble. Neither character is necessarily deserving of each other throughout the movies because there are some glaring character flaws in both of them all the way through. It's actually in the third film that they are forced to confront their own failings and not just the real or perceived failings of the other.
Ditto for Harry, which is one of the reasons i really enjoyed the film. I could have done without the deus ex machina of the butler explaining things at the last minute but as the extended cut of Spidey 2.1 shows, Harry's story arc got short shrift in the second film even by cutting out a few brief moments that really humanize him. Of all the characters in the three films he's probably the only one who may even have a sense of how double minded he really is.
This was a movie that tried to do a little too much. I still enjoyed it, though, and even saw it twice. It's not even close to the joy ride that Hot Fuzz was, though, which so far is the most fun I've had seeing a movie this year. There's absolutely no chance the next Pirates of the Carribean movie is going to be even half as much fun as Hot Fuzz was. In fact if Sony relaunches the Spiderman franchise later on they could get Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg to script future Spiderman movies. These guys are funny enough and have enough knowledge of genre film and fiction. Not that it'll ever happen, of course, but the guys who made Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz could make a pretty kick-ass Spiderman movie. Spiderman doing a running kick to the Vulture's face isn't that different from something that happened in Hot Fuzz.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
mood music
Listening to Vespertine by Bjork. The first half of this album is pure genius. The second half, well, I don't recall so clearly but I've been listening to it lately so I get to find out soon, don't I?
I have to confess that by and large I have had no real interst in what most would call pop music. I got American V and plan to get American IV by Johnny Cash and I got the Green album by Weezer. I got some Jeff Buckley but Vespertine is the most recent pop album I now own. After surveying about a thousand years of Western music it's just hard to find a reason to pay attention to pop music unless a friend or family member mentions something to me. Coldplay is okay, not so awesome I would be sure of owning one of their albums but maybe that'll change.
Bjork sort of reminds me of Peter Gabriel in a way because her lyrics seem completely secondary to musical ambience.
Also revisiting the Blanton-Webster band of Ellington. Warm Valley is one of the greatest jazz ballads ever written.
Well, I get to do travelling this week and if the training is as problematic as I fear it might be I'll bring some big long book I need to read along the way. I've been reading, slowly I'm afraid, Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone's book on Messiaen. And eventually plowing through the unabridged City of God is on the to-do list.
I have to confess that by and large I have had no real interst in what most would call pop music. I got American V and plan to get American IV by Johnny Cash and I got the Green album by Weezer. I got some Jeff Buckley but Vespertine is the most recent pop album I now own. After surveying about a thousand years of Western music it's just hard to find a reason to pay attention to pop music unless a friend or family member mentions something to me. Coldplay is okay, not so awesome I would be sure of owning one of their albums but maybe that'll change.
Bjork sort of reminds me of Peter Gabriel in a way because her lyrics seem completely secondary to musical ambience.
Also revisiting the Blanton-Webster band of Ellington. Warm Valley is one of the greatest jazz ballads ever written.
Well, I get to do travelling this week and if the training is as problematic as I fear it might be I'll bring some big long book I need to read along the way. I've been reading, slowly I'm afraid, Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone's book on Messiaen. And eventually plowing through the unabridged City of God is on the to-do list.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
the strange nexus of parody, hommage, and idiom: or a Hot Fuzz comment that turns into comments about ragtime
On Tuesday night I saw the movie Hot Fuzz, directed by Edgar Wright and co-written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, the guys who gave us Shaun of the Dead. Awesome. Simply awesome. The local paper The Stranger filed a review by Andrew Wright that had the complaint that the movie was a bit slow and could have been better with 20 less minutes. Yeah, right. The movie is easiest to sell as a send-up of Michael Bay but enough distinctly British cop/detective movie conventions are being sent up by the film that I think Wright just misses the point, which isn't a big deal because the movie is amazingly funny. In fact I find it more of a viscerally enjoyable comedy than Shaun of the Dead. The story-telling is tighter and there are more jokes but they are woven more organically into the fabric of the narrative than even in Shaun of the Dead, which ought to be saying something even if people have no reason to take my word for it.
In fact even speaking as a Spiderman fan (comics, and the movies) I'd be hard pressed to imagine how on earth Spiderman 3 could be more fun than Hot Fuzz. Now I want to enjoy Spiderman 3 and will give it a good shot but I think I've already seen the funnest movie I'm likely to see all year. Wright and Pegg could tackle just about any genre next and I'd go see it.
One of the problems we composers have is that we tend to write music at the very limits of our technical capacity as musicians, which means we have to spend a whole bunch of time practicing what we ought to be able to play ourselves. A music teacher once told me about this inevitable paradigm and that it is one of the ways we know that Bach and Beethoven were amazing masters of the keyboard. Writing the fugues Bach wrote suggest a certain, base-line of technical mastery at every level. If that was Bach writing at the general limits of his technical facility then his technical facility in mind and body was simply awesome.
Well, my technical and theoretical facility is considerably less awesome than that, especially as a self-taught pianist. In fact there are some things that so daunt me I'm avoiding them for at least about a year, like choral writing. Certain types of musical writing lay bare your limitations so mercilessly I can see why composers don't dig them. I've heard Copland didn't enjoy choral writing and when I hear his choral writing I can see why! Beethoven's choral writing was just plain awful. And there are other composers who write sublime choral music who can't be trusted to write at the same level of genius in instrumental genres. At the risk of sounding like some kind of Phillistine I've yet to hear an instrumental work by Poulenc that is anywhere near as amazing as his choral writing, which is where he sounds most distinctive and capable to my ears. Much as I love hindemith's music at so many level his choral music is almost invariably a bore.
It seems the great composers manage to write consistently enough across the different expressive media of art music that they remian fairly well-represented and wrote consistently. No one who composes mostly for one instrument, even the piano, seems to establish as much of a musical legacy. And often people who excel in one expression of musical literature for one instrument become established in the repertoire but at a very limited level. Scott Joplin is here to stay because of his ragtime but any detailed study of piano repertoire reveals that structurally there isn't much to composing in that style once you've got the basic technical facility down. What makes good ragtime hard to write is that the formula is so hard to exploit with any real invention because Joplin and others did so much.
My solution was to retain Joplin's strict approach to the structure and drastically alter the tonal vocabulary. Not that any one has heard a ragtime I've written or even could from this blog but it seems like people who have tried writing ragtimes could explore ways of unifying themes. Ragtimes are so disparate in cross-thematic motific relationships within any given ragtime that the genre is defined too readily by a set of cliches in h armonic movement. The second strain invariably seems to get built around an oscillation of the dominant to tonic in the tonic key. There's usually no real connection between themes which means you get a very cut-and-paste effect, like any kind of ragtime strain could be put together. It's sort of like rolling dice. Any combination could work and it wouldn't effect the ragtime feel.
But what if you worked to ensure that a ragtime was bound by some over-arching thematic paradigm? I toyed with one ragtime that had all of its strains derive from the motific material of two themes from a sonata form I had written a few years ago. I liked this idea a few years ago and I still like it. If Americana as a genre has any potential whatsover (assuming it ever did) then it seems like one way to develop that potential would be to find American popular musical idioms that could be reasonably substituted for forms in the traditional sonata cycle. And I'm sure it's been done thousands of times. It just seems that what hasn't always been done is finding ways to get these forms to sound like something that isn't artificial.
And if they are really FORMS then why stick to the tritest variations? I decided to write a ragtime where almost everything was in a minor key. Ragtime is really about the raggy rhythms and the structural relationships than about being in a major key. Joplin experimented with minor themes in subsidiary strains of his ragtimes so why not write ragtimes where the prevailing mood is minor? Better yet, why not also do this while establilshing a thematic connection between the strains instead of just throwing in any old melody that will plug in the requisite structural spot for a ragtime?
So my solultion for this was to compose a ragtime where the same four measure gesture appears in different forms in each strain, a kind of hybrid of ragtime with a few arbitrarily settled on techniques from twelve-tone. The initial strain employes the four measure motto in its primary form; the second strain employs the motto in retrograde; the third strain (the C of AABBACCDD) employs a retrograde inversion in relative major which is the only place where the piece sounds most like a traditional ragtime except for the fugato part; and the fourth strain is built from the inversion of the four-measure motto.
And, as I mentioned earlier, where I finally settled on a fairly traditional major key ragtime idea for the C strain I offset this by making heavy use of the lydian mode (an inevitable outgrowth of using the retrograde inversion of an idea in C dorian),. I also offset it by employed a fugato in which one of the other key gestures of the first strain becomes the basis of a fugato where voices enter at the tonic, then the leading tone, and then the submediant respectively to create a three-voiced sort of exposition that leads to a very trite but satisfying ragtime gesture. This is to say that as I see it I made the trite ragtime passage more interesting by withholding it until the third and, if you will, climactic strain of the rag.
This is all very geeky as far as music goes. I can't expect anyone to care about this the way I care about it because you didn't write the ragtime. I like ragtime and I enjoy trying to play the stuff. But I also feel that a composer can pay hommage to ragtime and drastically alter any number of its elements while still being faithful to the core of the material, writing a sort of novelty piece and a serious piece at the same time. Come to think of it, I guess I'm thinking about this as a composer and a musician because Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are so good at doing the equivalent in their movies. They can make a send-up of the action genre while writing a movie that is itself simultaneously a perfectly good (and even better than average) exponent of the very genre that is being sent up. That's a rare gift. If I could do that at a musical level, making fun of ragtime conventions in the process of writing an actually decent rag, I'd be happy to be able to do so.
In fact even speaking as a Spiderman fan (comics, and the movies) I'd be hard pressed to imagine how on earth Spiderman 3 could be more fun than Hot Fuzz. Now I want to enjoy Spiderman 3 and will give it a good shot but I think I've already seen the funnest movie I'm likely to see all year. Wright and Pegg could tackle just about any genre next and I'd go see it.
One of the problems we composers have is that we tend to write music at the very limits of our technical capacity as musicians, which means we have to spend a whole bunch of time practicing what we ought to be able to play ourselves. A music teacher once told me about this inevitable paradigm and that it is one of the ways we know that Bach and Beethoven were amazing masters of the keyboard. Writing the fugues Bach wrote suggest a certain, base-line of technical mastery at every level. If that was Bach writing at the general limits of his technical facility then his technical facility in mind and body was simply awesome.
Well, my technical and theoretical facility is considerably less awesome than that, especially as a self-taught pianist. In fact there are some things that so daunt me I'm avoiding them for at least about a year, like choral writing. Certain types of musical writing lay bare your limitations so mercilessly I can see why composers don't dig them. I've heard Copland didn't enjoy choral writing and when I hear his choral writing I can see why! Beethoven's choral writing was just plain awful. And there are other composers who write sublime choral music who can't be trusted to write at the same level of genius in instrumental genres. At the risk of sounding like some kind of Phillistine I've yet to hear an instrumental work by Poulenc that is anywhere near as amazing as his choral writing, which is where he sounds most distinctive and capable to my ears. Much as I love hindemith's music at so many level his choral music is almost invariably a bore.
It seems the great composers manage to write consistently enough across the different expressive media of art music that they remian fairly well-represented and wrote consistently. No one who composes mostly for one instrument, even the piano, seems to establish as much of a musical legacy. And often people who excel in one expression of musical literature for one instrument become established in the repertoire but at a very limited level. Scott Joplin is here to stay because of his ragtime but any detailed study of piano repertoire reveals that structurally there isn't much to composing in that style once you've got the basic technical facility down. What makes good ragtime hard to write is that the formula is so hard to exploit with any real invention because Joplin and others did so much.
My solution was to retain Joplin's strict approach to the structure and drastically alter the tonal vocabulary. Not that any one has heard a ragtime I've written or even could from this blog but it seems like people who have tried writing ragtimes could explore ways of unifying themes. Ragtimes are so disparate in cross-thematic motific relationships within any given ragtime that the genre is defined too readily by a set of cliches in h armonic movement. The second strain invariably seems to get built around an oscillation of the dominant to tonic in the tonic key. There's usually no real connection between themes which means you get a very cut-and-paste effect, like any kind of ragtime strain could be put together. It's sort of like rolling dice. Any combination could work and it wouldn't effect the ragtime feel.
But what if you worked to ensure that a ragtime was bound by some over-arching thematic paradigm? I toyed with one ragtime that had all of its strains derive from the motific material of two themes from a sonata form I had written a few years ago. I liked this idea a few years ago and I still like it. If Americana as a genre has any potential whatsover (assuming it ever did) then it seems like one way to develop that potential would be to find American popular musical idioms that could be reasonably substituted for forms in the traditional sonata cycle. And I'm sure it's been done thousands of times. It just seems that what hasn't always been done is finding ways to get these forms to sound like something that isn't artificial.
And if they are really FORMS then why stick to the tritest variations? I decided to write a ragtime where almost everything was in a minor key. Ragtime is really about the raggy rhythms and the structural relationships than about being in a major key. Joplin experimented with minor themes in subsidiary strains of his ragtimes so why not write ragtimes where the prevailing mood is minor? Better yet, why not also do this while establilshing a thematic connection between the strains instead of just throwing in any old melody that will plug in the requisite structural spot for a ragtime?
So my solultion for this was to compose a ragtime where the same four measure gesture appears in different forms in each strain, a kind of hybrid of ragtime with a few arbitrarily settled on techniques from twelve-tone. The initial strain employes the four measure motto in its primary form; the second strain employs the motto in retrograde; the third strain (the C of AABBACCDD) employs a retrograde inversion in relative major which is the only place where the piece sounds most like a traditional ragtime except for the fugato part; and the fourth strain is built from the inversion of the four-measure motto.
And, as I mentioned earlier, where I finally settled on a fairly traditional major key ragtime idea for the C strain I offset this by making heavy use of the lydian mode (an inevitable outgrowth of using the retrograde inversion of an idea in C dorian),. I also offset it by employed a fugato in which one of the other key gestures of the first strain becomes the basis of a fugato where voices enter at the tonic, then the leading tone, and then the submediant respectively to create a three-voiced sort of exposition that leads to a very trite but satisfying ragtime gesture. This is to say that as I see it I made the trite ragtime passage more interesting by withholding it until the third and, if you will, climactic strain of the rag.
This is all very geeky as far as music goes. I can't expect anyone to care about this the way I care about it because you didn't write the ragtime. I like ragtime and I enjoy trying to play the stuff. But I also feel that a composer can pay hommage to ragtime and drastically alter any number of its elements while still being faithful to the core of the material, writing a sort of novelty piece and a serious piece at the same time. Come to think of it, I guess I'm thinking about this as a composer and a musician because Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are so good at doing the equivalent in their movies. They can make a send-up of the action genre while writing a movie that is itself simultaneously a perfectly good (and even better than average) exponent of the very genre that is being sent up. That's a rare gift. If I could do that at a musical level, making fun of ragtime conventions in the process of writing an actually decent rag, I'd be happy to be able to do so.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
a cold spring
Though the sky is pale blue and clear, and the sun shone most of the day, today felt more like a mild winter than spring. I sat out on the porch today with my guitar in hand and was grateful the strings were nylon and not steel! After half an hour of playing tonight my fingers became so cold they almost felt numb playing barres and crossing strings. My fingertips as they slid and scrapped across the strings felt like they were pressing against not nylon but steel.
But it was nice to hear the guitar ring out from the porch and hear the sound of bright new strings mingling with the sound of birds and distant traffic. And even a cold sunny day is bolstered by a loud major chord. It was a cold spring today but with music it still felt like spring.
But it was nice to hear the guitar ring out from the porch and hear the sound of bright new strings mingling with the sound of birds and distant traffic. And even a cold sunny day is bolstered by a loud major chord. It was a cold spring today but with music it still felt like spring.
finishing a piano sonata as a self-taught pianist, doubtful pedagogues, and studies for right hand
Well, after ten years I've decided to let the piano sonata drop. It's done as far as I'm concerned. It's got a number of flaws but I think that by cutting out at least half a minute of material I've cut out everything that I would now consider extraneous from its form. There's a sonata form with one theme; an aria (ABA) with its own theme and a transition that leads attaca into; a fugue in which the exposition has a subject and second countersubject derived from the themes of the preceding movements.
The sonata form begins in C major but ends in F sharp major while the second movement is in B major and modulates to C major for the beginning of the fugue. The conceit behind the sonata is, if you'll bear with me, that there can be one form and theme for a groom and one form and theme for a bride and, so to speak, the fugue is where the two themes are transformed into contrapuntal elements of a fugue that doubles up as a kind of wedding march. It's pretty nerdy and this doesn' t mean that it sounds great or anything but after ten years of working on it I figure I'm done. Maybe a year or two down the road after some dedicated piano practice I'll try to write another piano sonata.
The biggest obstacle hasn't been a knowledge of sonata form or other musical forms but simply that I am a self-taught pianist. Years ago I attempted to study privately at college but the professor most interested in taking me on as a student had a tour that tied up his time; he said another professor who would have time would probably be too demanding for my skill level; and the only remaning professor literally told me they were saving their teaching spots for more worthy students and that it didn't matter if I taught myself how to play Joplin or Bach that they weren't taking me on as a student. It also didn't matter that the chair of the piano department had told me I could study with any professor I wanted as far as he was concerned.
In hindsight I'm still pissed about getting treated in such a way but I am also glad I didn't study with that dismissive prof. One of my friends in college studied piano with this professor and was told to employ a set of pedaling gestures in a piece and when a time to play for others came up my friend did as she was told. Another piano student pointed out that the pedaling was distracting and loud and the professor turned on my friend and said that was true and that had to be fixed and that my friend shouldn't have settled on those pedalings. Blaming your student for your own unmusical decisions as a pedagogue is pretty low. Eventually this professor earned a reputation as a less than capable pedagogue and musicologist so that seven years later when I came across a woman who studied at the same college she told me she only took a certain musicology class after friends had assured her that this particular professor was NOT teaching it. It would be nice to say that people who get doctorates really know what they're talking about but it's only true in a lot of cases, not all.
Which is my long whine about an unnamed piano teacher to explain that when you have to teach YOURSELF how to write a piano sonata with no outside help from any actual pianist it takes a long time and you don't know for sure if what you've written necessarily even works as piano writing. Another reason to call it a decade and see if maybe I can persuade someone to play the thing.
I have also taken something of a break from composing even for the guitar to focus on technique development and also to have that done so that I can play some music for the upcoming wedding of some friends of mine. To that end I decided to join a classical guitar discussion forum. This one, specifically:
http://www.delcamp.net/forum/en/index.php
I don't have a ton to contribute there but that's not necessarily THE reason to join a forum like this. It's just fun to read and learn and sometimes share a few things.
It was there that I discovered Mauro Giuliani's 120 studies for the right hand. I've played through the first 34 as of last night and surprised at how fun they are considering it's just switching back and forth between C and G7! If you want to really give your right hand a work out as a guitarist of any style I heartily endorse Giuliani's studies. Your right hand feels pretty warmed up playing through fifteen or twenty of them. Eventually the plan is to be able to get through all 120 one of these days.
Revisiting Hebrews lately. Not much to say about that right now because there's too much to digest in the epistle and just sit down and blog about just a few hours after waking up. I've been taking a page from my roommate which is not so hot in the getting actual sleep department.
I think this will suffice for this blog entry.
The sonata form begins in C major but ends in F sharp major while the second movement is in B major and modulates to C major for the beginning of the fugue. The conceit behind the sonata is, if you'll bear with me, that there can be one form and theme for a groom and one form and theme for a bride and, so to speak, the fugue is where the two themes are transformed into contrapuntal elements of a fugue that doubles up as a kind of wedding march. It's pretty nerdy and this doesn' t mean that it sounds great or anything but after ten years of working on it I figure I'm done. Maybe a year or two down the road after some dedicated piano practice I'll try to write another piano sonata.
The biggest obstacle hasn't been a knowledge of sonata form or other musical forms but simply that I am a self-taught pianist. Years ago I attempted to study privately at college but the professor most interested in taking me on as a student had a tour that tied up his time; he said another professor who would have time would probably be too demanding for my skill level; and the only remaning professor literally told me they were saving their teaching spots for more worthy students and that it didn't matter if I taught myself how to play Joplin or Bach that they weren't taking me on as a student. It also didn't matter that the chair of the piano department had told me I could study with any professor I wanted as far as he was concerned.
In hindsight I'm still pissed about getting treated in such a way but I am also glad I didn't study with that dismissive prof. One of my friends in college studied piano with this professor and was told to employ a set of pedaling gestures in a piece and when a time to play for others came up my friend did as she was told. Another piano student pointed out that the pedaling was distracting and loud and the professor turned on my friend and said that was true and that had to be fixed and that my friend shouldn't have settled on those pedalings. Blaming your student for your own unmusical decisions as a pedagogue is pretty low. Eventually this professor earned a reputation as a less than capable pedagogue and musicologist so that seven years later when I came across a woman who studied at the same college she told me she only took a certain musicology class after friends had assured her that this particular professor was NOT teaching it. It would be nice to say that people who get doctorates really know what they're talking about but it's only true in a lot of cases, not all.
Which is my long whine about an unnamed piano teacher to explain that when you have to teach YOURSELF how to write a piano sonata with no outside help from any actual pianist it takes a long time and you don't know for sure if what you've written necessarily even works as piano writing. Another reason to call it a decade and see if maybe I can persuade someone to play the thing.
I have also taken something of a break from composing even for the guitar to focus on technique development and also to have that done so that I can play some music for the upcoming wedding of some friends of mine. To that end I decided to join a classical guitar discussion forum. This one, specifically:
http://www.delcamp.net/forum/en/index.php
I don't have a ton to contribute there but that's not necessarily THE reason to join a forum like this. It's just fun to read and learn and sometimes share a few things.
It was there that I discovered Mauro Giuliani's 120 studies for the right hand. I've played through the first 34 as of last night and surprised at how fun they are considering it's just switching back and forth between C and G7! If you want to really give your right hand a work out as a guitarist of any style I heartily endorse Giuliani's studies. Your right hand feels pretty warmed up playing through fifteen or twenty of them. Eventually the plan is to be able to get through all 120 one of these days.
Revisiting Hebrews lately. Not much to say about that right now because there's too much to digest in the epistle and just sit down and blog about just a few hours after waking up. I've been taking a page from my roommate which is not so hot in the getting actual sleep department.
I think this will suffice for this blog entry.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
travelling
For the next month or so my blogging is likely to be intermitten. I found out i have work related travel plans. I will, true to comic book geeky self, make sure to catch Spiderman 3 before I have to be goin' to California with an achin' in my heart. Not really any ache but I just felt like quoting one of Led Zeppelin's over-exposed songs. But at least it's the Led Zeppelin song and not that incredibly stupid not-quite-remake Pearl Jam did ten years ago. Why they never got sued is beyond me ... maybe Page and Plant just have so much money they don't care.
Been watching sci-fi stuff lately. Mainly X-Files, one of the masterpieces of genre TV ... at least right up to the movie and then Carter should have dropped the show and gone on to new stuff. And a friend introduced me to Heroes, which I am enjoying immensely. It didn't seem too promising when I saw bits of the pilot on TV last year but I discovered the problem with pilots is that all they're doing is set up, not fleshing out characters for a series in ways that, unfortunately, always matter. Or maybe I just don't watch enough TV to know these things. Anyway, I gave the pilot and an episode or two a shot and found I really dug the show, particularly HRG and Claire for reasons I can't really explain. I just found myself liking those two characters a lot and the further along the series has gone the more I like those characters.
Well, that's about enough for now.
Been watching sci-fi stuff lately. Mainly X-Files, one of the masterpieces of genre TV ... at least right up to the movie and then Carter should have dropped the show and gone on to new stuff. And a friend introduced me to Heroes, which I am enjoying immensely. It didn't seem too promising when I saw bits of the pilot on TV last year but I discovered the problem with pilots is that all they're doing is set up, not fleshing out characters for a series in ways that, unfortunately, always matter. Or maybe I just don't watch enough TV to know these things. Anyway, I gave the pilot and an episode or two a shot and found I really dug the show, particularly HRG and Claire for reasons I can't really explain. I just found myself liking those two characters a lot and the further along the series has gone the more I like those characters.
Well, that's about enough for now.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Proverbs 17:6, The Incredibles, and a random excursus into Gen 9
Children's children are the crown of old men; and the glory of children are their fathers
If Brad Bird's film The Incredibles can be said to hinge upon any simple paradigm that really goes beyond the initial premise of a family of superheroes this would be the basic premise. To some degree the deeper fantasy or wish-fulfillment we have watching a movie like The Incredibles is not really that our parents would be super-heroes but that they would do and say and be for us something like what Bob and Helen Parr are for their children. The significance of this is, I think, actually extremely hard to overstate and its basic concept is nothing less than one of biblical proportions, encapsulated in a simple proverb.
And this is a proverb that we can't spiritualize away by making an appeal to how God is our heavenly Father who is our glory, though that would certainly be true but there are passages like Ezekiel 44 (in other words "And it shall be unto them for an inheritance: I am their inheritance: and ye shall give them no possession in Israel: I am their possession." So if God promises to the priests in Ezekiel to be the possession and inheritance they receive and through Christ believers are a chosen people, a group of priests, and a holy nation then we can see how Ezekiel 44 is fulfilled in and through Christ, our posession. Which is to say that we have no need to spiritualize a proverb like Proverbs 17:6 as though it were chiefly having a locus other than this life and our flesh and blood parents, grandparents, or grandchildren.
We live in an era, however, in which consider parents a glory is not only not encouraged but in many respects either not practical or essentially impossible. Abusive parents can't be thought of as a glory to a child at all. If the father is the glory of his son or daughter and he is a drunkard or an abuser or an all around bad man then what kind of glory is that to a child?
What kind of glory, indeed, because a parent who does not in some way contain the image of God is no glory at all. But this is a pretty brutal double-edged sword because what it means is that for those of us who would be tempted to see no glory in the parents we have received through Christ's providential hand it means that we are not thankful to Him for His provision even if with it terrible things have also come. As Job put it, shall we accept only good from God and not accept evil?
And sometimes that evil includes our parents. It sounds morbid and nasty and perhaps it is. Conversely, that anyone could get the idea of presenting a family in a film that are a bunch of superheroes and present them not just as a family of "supers" but a family of loving supers, that's interesting. It can be interesting for who refuses to buy the premise as for who chooses to. At the risk of employing some form of ad hominem the people who seem least likely to buy the premise may truly be least likely to have had any sense that their own parents could ever be like Bob and Helen Parr. Conversely, by the same measure the people most likely to find this appealing may also be least likely to have remembered experiencing anything like that in their own lives. Once again, a double-edged sword, so it's best to infer nothing particular in the end, isn't it, about those who do or don't buy the premise.
But it is the nature of wisdom literature in Scripture that you have to study it a long time and reflect on it a long time and the proverb often exposes you rather than you being able to necessarily expose the proverb, at least at first. Studying the wisdom literature more and more enables you to understand it better.
I think at the bottom of things we all wish at some level that our parents could be, were, or are able to help us figure things out, solve problems for us. If we don't then what right do we have to claim that we, as Christians, see God as our Father? Or Mother for that matter? If Proverbs 17:6 is just bunk because of what we experienced are we missing the point of the proverb? Is the proverb even true? Why? Perhaps it's just an epigrammatic disclosure of desires in our hearts that can't and won't go away no matter how much we persuade ourselves otherwise. Perhaps the more we seek to dismiss the input and significance of parents the more we find ourselves enmeshed in their influence, even reflecting qualities about them without noticing it?
And in a way the cryptic tale of the curse on Canaan may be illuminating here. Canaan may have displayed a greater proportional quality of a vice than his father Ham, which may have been why Noah cursed him and not his father, who in Genesis 9 announced to the rest of the family that he had seen Noah drunk and naked. This would be a moment where the father is most certainly not a superhero! But his curse, if you will, seems to be used by God to exact a startlingly multi-generational punishment for what appears to be a multi-generational sin which seems to be somehow exploiting or capitalizing on a parent's moment of weakness, sin, and self-humiliation as an opportunity to speak badly of them or reveal this to other family members.
Or it might not, I don't really know exactly what's up in Genesis 9. But it seems that whatever Ham did involved Canaan for Canaan to have been cursed.
Well, this is sort of a rambling, directionless discourse on a couple of verses and the utterly tangential link they have to a movie I like and it's kind of late.
If Brad Bird's film The Incredibles can be said to hinge upon any simple paradigm that really goes beyond the initial premise of a family of superheroes this would be the basic premise. To some degree the deeper fantasy or wish-fulfillment we have watching a movie like The Incredibles is not really that our parents would be super-heroes but that they would do and say and be for us something like what Bob and Helen Parr are for their children. The significance of this is, I think, actually extremely hard to overstate and its basic concept is nothing less than one of biblical proportions, encapsulated in a simple proverb.
And this is a proverb that we can't spiritualize away by making an appeal to how God is our heavenly Father who is our glory, though that would certainly be true but there are passages like Ezekiel 44 (in other words "And it shall be unto them for an inheritance: I am their inheritance: and ye shall give them no possession in Israel: I am their possession." So if God promises to the priests in Ezekiel to be the possession and inheritance they receive and through Christ believers are a chosen people, a group of priests, and a holy nation then we can see how Ezekiel 44 is fulfilled in and through Christ, our posession. Which is to say that we have no need to spiritualize a proverb like Proverbs 17:6 as though it were chiefly having a locus other than this life and our flesh and blood parents, grandparents, or grandchildren.
We live in an era, however, in which consider parents a glory is not only not encouraged but in many respects either not practical or essentially impossible. Abusive parents can't be thought of as a glory to a child at all. If the father is the glory of his son or daughter and he is a drunkard or an abuser or an all around bad man then what kind of glory is that to a child?
What kind of glory, indeed, because a parent who does not in some way contain the image of God is no glory at all. But this is a pretty brutal double-edged sword because what it means is that for those of us who would be tempted to see no glory in the parents we have received through Christ's providential hand it means that we are not thankful to Him for His provision even if with it terrible things have also come. As Job put it, shall we accept only good from God and not accept evil?
And sometimes that evil includes our parents. It sounds morbid and nasty and perhaps it is. Conversely, that anyone could get the idea of presenting a family in a film that are a bunch of superheroes and present them not just as a family of "supers" but a family of loving supers, that's interesting. It can be interesting for who refuses to buy the premise as for who chooses to. At the risk of employing some form of ad hominem the people who seem least likely to buy the premise may truly be least likely to have had any sense that their own parents could ever be like Bob and Helen Parr. Conversely, by the same measure the people most likely to find this appealing may also be least likely to have remembered experiencing anything like that in their own lives. Once again, a double-edged sword, so it's best to infer nothing particular in the end, isn't it, about those who do or don't buy the premise.
But it is the nature of wisdom literature in Scripture that you have to study it a long time and reflect on it a long time and the proverb often exposes you rather than you being able to necessarily expose the proverb, at least at first. Studying the wisdom literature more and more enables you to understand it better.
I think at the bottom of things we all wish at some level that our parents could be, were, or are able to help us figure things out, solve problems for us. If we don't then what right do we have to claim that we, as Christians, see God as our Father? Or Mother for that matter? If Proverbs 17:6 is just bunk because of what we experienced are we missing the point of the proverb? Is the proverb even true? Why? Perhaps it's just an epigrammatic disclosure of desires in our hearts that can't and won't go away no matter how much we persuade ourselves otherwise. Perhaps the more we seek to dismiss the input and significance of parents the more we find ourselves enmeshed in their influence, even reflecting qualities about them without noticing it?
And in a way the cryptic tale of the curse on Canaan may be illuminating here. Canaan may have displayed a greater proportional quality of a vice than his father Ham, which may have been why Noah cursed him and not his father, who in Genesis 9 announced to the rest of the family that he had seen Noah drunk and naked. This would be a moment where the father is most certainly not a superhero! But his curse, if you will, seems to be used by God to exact a startlingly multi-generational punishment for what appears to be a multi-generational sin which seems to be somehow exploiting or capitalizing on a parent's moment of weakness, sin, and self-humiliation as an opportunity to speak badly of them or reveal this to other family members.
Or it might not, I don't really know exactly what's up in Genesis 9. But it seems that whatever Ham did involved Canaan for Canaan to have been cursed.
Well, this is sort of a rambling, directionless discourse on a couple of verses and the utterly tangential link they have to a movie I like and it's kind of late.
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