Month: November 2003

I’ve started experimenting with digital music on the computer over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been burning some of my favorite film music CDs onto the hard drive, and then listening to the resulting tracks on the headphones while I write. I have to admit that it is a pleasurable way of doing things. It’s fairly nifty to be able to just use a couple of mouse-clicks to bring up a certain track, if that’s what I want to hear. But I still can’t see MP3s ever being my main, preferred means of listening to music.

First of all, they simply don’t sound as good as the CDs. I use MusicMatch Jukebox to rip and play, and I rip my MP3s at the highest available rate (160kbs), and even I – – as a relatively low-level audiophile – – can hear a noticeable dropoff in sound quality. They sound “good enough”, certainly; even “pretty good” and in a few cases, “pretty darn good”. But not as good. Secondly, the ad slogan used to be “Rip. Mix. Burn.” Well, I have never been one to “mix”; as I’ve noted many times before, I am primarily an album listener, so the whole “mixing” aspect isn’t that big a deal to me. I prefer to spend extended periods of time in a musical artist’s sound world, and one thing that worries me about the “Death to the CDs! Distribute everything digitally! Download your songs, and never darken the doors of a music store again!” crowd is the forcing of a Smorgasbord approach to music upon everyone.

Finally, there’s a minor technical issue that’s plaguing me. My MusicMatch player does a brief pause between tracks in a playlist, which seems perfectly normal, but there are times when that pause should not be there. This manifests itself, in fairly ugly fashion, in my playlist of the extended score to The Phantom Menace, in which long swaths of John Williams’s score are broken into fairly short tracks that play continuously on a CD player but which have audible pauses when played from the hard drive. This drives me crazy, and unless there’s a way to get tracks to play seamlessly, this means that I simply won’t be able to listen to a fair number of classical music works on my computer, because it’s not at all uncommon for classical recordings to have one long, unbroken work recorded as a number of shorter tracks that are to play without pause. I am not going to listen to Richard Strauss’s longer tone poems on my computer if I have to put up with myriad one-second breaks. Ditto Wagner’s operas. Or Mahler’s symphonies. And so on. (Now, if there’s a way to disable this feature or work around it, let me know and I’ll retract what I’ve said here.)

And that’s to say nothing of the whole “digital versus physical” media issue from a preservation standpoint, except to note that I’d almost bet money that ten or fifteen years from now I will still be able to listen to my CDs, but MP3s will be as useless as those old 5-inch floppy disks from the Apple II/Commodore 64 era. The whole MP3-thing is a neat addition to the music pot, but I don’t think it can support the whole dish without changing the dish so radically that I’m not even sure I’d want to continue consuming it.

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I’m gradually becoming a big fan of science fiction author Timothy Zahn. Like most folks, I suspect, I discovered him first through his series of Star Wars novels; he was the first author in the now sprawling enterprise known as “The Extended Universe” (i.e., the post-Return of the Jedi stories). In those books, Zahn displayed a real talent for fun, zippy space opera with a dash of mystery and neat SFnal ideas, and in his non-Star Wars books, that seems to be exactly the kind of thing he writes. So if you crave SF that’s fun and action-packed, Zahn’s your huckleberry.

I just read his latest book, Dragon and Thief, which is subtitled “The First Dragonback Adventure”. The start of a series, then: the dust jacket promises six books altogether. The title might lead one to expect a fantasy novel – – the dragon thing, you know – – but it’s not. This is pure SF, and it seems to be intended for younger readers. The SF genre has really been in need of a way for adolescents to come in – – Young Adult Fantasy is in great shape these days, mainly due to the rising tide created by Harry Potter, but there hasn’t been the equivalent for SF. Zahn’s new series might help to fill a big hole in the SF readership.

The story involves an orphan named Jack Morgan, who is eeking out an existence in space with the help of his intelligent space ship until he’s framed for a theft he didn’t commit. While on the run, he comes across an alien named Draycos, who is basically a dragon. Draycos is the sole survivor of an attack on his ship, and he wants to find the beings who are killing his people (the “K’Da”). Thus, Jack and Draycos join forces for mutual benefit – – including forming a symbiotic relationship, because the K’Da must have a host or they die within six hours.

There are some nifty SF ideas in the book, including some stuff involving dimensional perception, but Zahn keeps the technobabble from overwhelming the story and characters (too bad he never wrote for Star Trek…), and in typical Zahn fashion, he keeps the story moving constantly. This is a zippy read, the kind of short and fun adventure that can really be refreshing to read. If you have a young reader in the family or you know one, here’s an SF book that they will enjoy. And if you’re an adult reader who needs something light and fun, this is a good choice.

A couple of provisos:

:: Dragon and Thief is the first book of a series, so not all plot threads are resolved. It ends with the kind of “open-ended closure” that you find at the conclusion of each Harry Potter book, so don’t expect a total ending.

:: This book has one horrible cover. Really. I hope they get a new painting for the paperback, because the hardcover is ghastly. I seriously doubt I would have given the book a second look if I didn’t know who Timothy Zahn is.

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Actually, I’m not at all sure how “weird” this is — it’s just one of those cultural differences. Anyway, when one reads a lot of cookbooks and food history, a theme one quickly detects is that foods of necessity in one era eventually become foods of delicacy for the next. Case in point: In Cambodia, spiders are a gastronomic delight.

As I note, this is really more of a cultural difference; I’m sure there’s some staple of American diet that the spider-munching Cambodians would find nauseating. But it was a slow week for weirdness online, so that’s what I’m going with. Bon appetit!

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I watched the film Almost Famous the other day, and I really enjoyed it. Films about rock music have a tendency to go overboard with their sense of the cosmic importance of it all; or, on the other hand, they can err too far on the other side, which if you’re intending to make a comedy like This is Spinal Tap is fine, but if you’re not, well, it can kill you.

This is a film that explores the lifestyle of a touring rock band that hasn’t quite yet made it, and its effect on a young man just entering this world. With the film’s endless bus rides, the strange groupies who make this band the center of their existence, the odd doings at various concert venues, and the occasional forays into sex and “what it all means”, I suddenly realized after watching it that Almost Famous is actually Bull Durham, but about minor-league rock-and-roll instead of minor-league baseball. Cameron Crowe (who wrote and directed) brings the same sense of affection for the subject matter to Almost Famous that Ron Shelton did to Bull Durham, with much of the same effect: one realizes, watching this film, that there are entire lives being lived in the rock music world that only once in a while, and very briefly, come into contact with the rarefied air of the Led Zeppelin’s and the Rolling Stones of the world.

The story is inspired by Cameron Crowe’s own life. A 15-year old boy named William Miller somehow gets Rolling Stone Magazine to give him an assignment: get an interview with up-and-coming rock band “Stillwater”. Through a long line of delays and stalling efforts, though, William ends up actually joining the band on its tour through the United States, during which he often calls his mother to tell her he’s OK. (She is very worried about him; she completely distrusts the rock music world and at every interaction tells her son, “Don’t take drugs”. Good detail there: a lesser writer would have used the more commonly-known construction “Don’t do drugs”.) And along the way, William falls in love with a groupie who goes by the name Penny Lane (played by Kate Hudson, who may be the most luminous person on earth today), who is already in love with Russell (Billy Crudup), the band’s guitarist, who is in turn a guy whose heart is in the right place but nevertheless continually blunders and mistreats people.

Almost Famous is a virtual study in naivete. William is naive about pretty much everything; Penny Lane carefully constructs an air of wisdom about her, but it is eventually exposed as pure sham; William’s mother is naive in her exclusively-negative view of the rock world; Russell is naive about pretty much all of his interactions with others; et cetera. The movie conveys a world in which everybody is wise about some things and totally clueless about others, and the only real difference is in the way some people’s areas of cluelessness are more disastrous than others.

I’ve read a few reviews of Almost Famous since I watched it, and I’ve read some that take the view that Crowe’s depiction of the rock world is too positive, and that the film is lacking in “edge”. I don’t know about that — I can sort of see their point, but I suspect that Crowe adopted this tone purposely, because he’s a guy who has made it big from pretty much the beginnings that we see for William. I just don’t think that extra “bitterness” would help this movie; in fact, it would add a certain false note, a kind of “If I knew then what I know now” quality that’s not always appropriate, because not every lesson needs to be learned in the manner that one learns not to touch a hot stove.

Now, if Cameron Crowe ever wants to make a movie about that period in rock history that does have more edge to it, all he has to do is make an entire film about rock critic Lester Bangs, who shows up as a supporting player in Almost Famous (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman). Now there is a movie I’d like to see.

(Incidentally, I’m now dipping into the book Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. This guy was fascinating. You can tell a good writer when they captivate you while writing about music groups one knows nothing about.)

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Here are a few films that I’ve always liked, and yet I don’t see mentioned all that often in various forums or in real-life. They’re the kinds of movies that sit on the shelves at Blockbuster, unloved, or tucked away a safe distance from the “New Releases” at your local Media Play. They might even be in the bargain bins….but they’re actually really good movies that deserve to be seen more than they are.

:: Real Genius. The ultimate “Science nerds in college” movie, with some of the best dialogue I’ve ever heard. It features Val Kilmer before he became a really big name as a brilliant college physics student who has slacked off into eccentricism, top secret government defense schemes, gonzo practical jokes that only the Physics Nerds could come up with (such as using a quarter-sized slice of frozen nitrogen to get pop out of the vending machine), and more.

:: Top Secret! Another early Val Kilmer movie, made by the producers of the Airplane and Naked Gun movies. You can’t dislike a movie that lampoons World War II espionage flicks and includes a cameo by Peter Cushing as a Swedish bookseller with a horribly misshapen eye.

:: Dead Again. A thriller with supernatural overtones, a witty script, and a half-dozen “Gotcha!” revelations along the way. It’s also one of those thrillers that’s fun to immediately watch again after you see it the first time, so you can reinterpret all of the early stuff in the light of the secrets unveiled later on. This is my favorite Kenneth Branagh movie. (Patrick Doyle’s score is a barnburner, too.)

:: Grand Canyon. This is a powerful drama about a circle of people from disparate walks of life in Los Angeles. Their lives intersect in surprising ways, and each person in their own way feels that not-uncommon modern sense of life spinning out of control.

:: The Man Without a Face. Since I keep getting hits for people looking for explanations of Dead Poets Society, allow me to plug this film again, which is a far better movie about the student-teacher dynamic. Leave the “Robin Williams angling for an Oscar” movie on the shelves and watch this one instead.

:: Broadcast News. I haven’t seen this one in far too long. I have no idea how accurate its portrayal of TV news may be (although Aaron might — care to weigh in?), but I really dig the interplay of the lead characters. To this day, the line “A lot of alliteration from anxious anchormen placed in powerful posts!” is one of my favorite lines in a movie of all time.

:: Far and Away. OK, this may qualify more as a “guilty pleasure” than an actual good movie. It’s the kind of story you’ll find in numerous versions in the Romance section at Borders, but so what? It’s engaging and fun, and it’s got one of John Williams’s most underappreciated filmscores.

:: Hear My Song. Here’s a movie about a shady Liverpool concert promoter. How shady is he? Well, he spreads the word that Frank Cinnatra will be playing his club. (Hey, it’s not his fault if it sounds the same as the other guy!) And he constantly appeals to older Brits for help by saying things like, “I grew up in peacetime. I haven’t seen what you’ve seen!” Anyway, this guy ends up going in search of a legendary singer who fled England for tax reasons. I really can’t describe the plot any farther than that, except to say that this is one of those movies that leaves you totally satisfied. You have British humor, Irish singing, con games, and two tender love stories. Next time you’re looking for a “date movie”, check this one out. Trust me. (Trivia note: the lead is played by Adrian Dunbar, who would later play Senator Bail Organa in The Phantom Menace — but his scenes were either cut or not filmed, and the role was recast for Jimmy Smits in Attack of the Clones and, presumably, Episode III.

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The Phaistos Disc.

This strange object was unearthed in the ruins of the ancient city of Phaistos, in Crete, in 1908. Numerous mysteries surround the Disc’s origin and meaning, which has apparently not yet been conclusively deciphered. (Claims of deciphering have been advanced, with some claiming the Disc’s writing is a prayer, while others maintain that it is a mathematical proof. Details here and here.) The Disc’s nature is mysterious partly because no other similar artifacts have ever been found, and because the nature of the characters inscribed on the Disc — showing little, if any, variation — imply that the Disc may actually have been “struck” as an example of ancient typography. The Disc dates to 1700 BC.

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Nefarious Neddie is continuing his crusade to explain The Matrix. Check it out, those who want to know why Agent Smith seems to really like charcoal-gray.

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If you gotta wait two months between posts, make it good when you return.

Of course, this seems to stand in contrast to Rule #43, which reads: “If you’re good at blogging, don’t wait two months between posts”.

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Via The Modulator I see an article by Ted Rall that’s pretty breathtaking. Reading it, I can certainly imagine the arteries that are just a-poppin’ at places like LGF and that Rottweiler guy. I’m sure they’re taking it as a “This guy wants Americans to die!” type of thing, but I don’t think that’s quite what Rall is saying: rather, I think he’s trying to make the case that Iraqis really want Americans to die, and thus, we should get out of Iraq immediately. He’s using a provocative viewpoint to illustrate his belief that Iraqi resistance is likely to get more focused and more energetic, that American forces are likely to face a more and more difficult road, et cetera. Basically Rall’s piece is saying, again very provocatively, that we’re headed toward a full-bore quagmire. Agree with that message or not — and I don’t, entirely (although I think the possibility for “quagmire” exists in greater likelihood than the Administration and its supporters admit) — I don’t think this piece supports a reading that implies Rall’s delight in American soldiers dying.

Generally, I’m not a fan of Ted Rall’s: I think he tends to strive for provocation for provocation’s sake; his views are so far to the left that his starting point often seems to be an assumption of Hitler-like evil on the right; his cartoons and writings often strike me as the rhetorical equivalent of that Monty Python sketch with the two “Great White Hunters” who use high-tech artillery to kill tiny animals (“We use an AK-47 to kill mosquitoes. Now, some people ask why we don’t just use a flyswatter. Where’s the sport in that?”). Plus, I just plain don’t like his artwork. And even if I think that Rall is making an argument here that isn’t quite what the LGF crowd thinks he is, and even if I think that he’s merely using a rhetorical device known as “changing the viewpoint”, I think it shows some pretty poor taste in writing a piece like this for the general consumption on Veterans’ Day.

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Tuesday was the Space Waitress’s birthday. I hope it was happy.

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