Month: January 2004

Yes, that’s a new masthead image. I plan to cycle through some Arthurian-related paintings over the next few months for the masthead, in keeping with the Arthurian focus of the novel-in-progress. This one’s a tad large, but it’s also one of my favorite Arthurian images: Sir Bedevere cradling his dying King as the barge approaches to take Arthur to Avalon.

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Step One: You make her a mix tape or CD.

Step Three: You propose.

So what’s Step Two? I suspect it differs from couple to couple, but Andrew Cory found one possible answer.

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:: Space Waitress has a new look, after a few weeks in which I was getting a 404 every time I tried to visit.

And even better, she has a creepy anecdote about riding the bus.

:: John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is blogging. I don’t know too much about Barlow, but he seems interesting — especially since he got InstaLanche’d before he apparently even knew who Insty was. He also sent Eric Raymond into one of his spasms, which is always amusing. (via Steve at the Gamer’s Nook)

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A heart-shaped crater on Mars.

Yes, something from Mars is probably a pretty obvious choice for the first IotW of 2004, but somehow I’d never seen this image before. (I hope no one thinks the crater was purposely carved by the aliens who also carved that face into that mountain on Mars. I mean, that would just be screwy.)

In other Mars news, the orbitting Global Surveyor has apparently been able to photograph the landing sites for 1997’s Pathfinder mission and 1976’s Viking One.

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Some new stuff is appearing over on Collaboratory, not just by me but by the other contributors, including one new one and one old one who had disappeared from blogging for quite some time.

(For newer readers, Collaboratory is a group blog, launched more than a year ago, in which I participate. We tend to be very lackadaisical about posting there, however, so it gets updated in spurts — one of which seems to be happening right now. I really do want to at least try to post there several times a week, for the time being.)

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Via Josh Marshall I see this report on the way George Harrison was treated by his doctor before he died. Wow. (NYT registration required.)

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I still enjoy The West Wing immensely, having found that the show isn’t suffering nearly as much from the departure of creator and writer Aaron Sorkin than many predicted. One thing I really dig is the casting of the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Terry O’Quinn, who has been one of my favorite character actors for years, even before he was Peter Watts on Millennium.

In other casting stuff, I thought the use of James Cromwell as a former President in last night’s episode was superb, although the shots of him standing next to Martin Sheen made me wonder if Sheen is that short or if Cromwell is that tall.

I’ve also noticed that the show is delving into old character backgrounds not much mentioned since the first season, such as the appearance of Leo’s daughter Mallory on last night’s show, which I think may be due to the show’s recent release on DVD.

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Lynn Sislo had an interesting post about listening to music the other day, which reminded me of something I posted last March. It’s not so much about the “literate listening” that Lynn discusses, but about the very nature of how we listen to music in the first place. I’ve slightly edited it, both for clarity and also trimming out some stuff at the beginning that’s not terribly relevant to the point I want to emphasize.

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In another Usenet posting a few months back, someone wrote that the SACD format is unlikely to succeed because people just don’t have the time to properly listen to a CD; thus, the apparently-greater audio characteristics of an SACD recording are unlikely to gain traction. That’s an interesting observation: we don’t have time for music. But we have time for reading books, and watching movies, and painting or wood-working; we have time for TV and football games and March Madness and for all manner of other things. Why have we decided that music, alone of the arts, is something for which we don’t have time? Why has music been relegated to “soundtrack” status — something forever in the background, filling the aural silences in our lives but never really attended to in its own right?

In this, I am as guilty as the next person. When I was a music student, in high school and college, I used to make time purely for music listening — when I would put in a recording of, say, a Mozart violin concerto or a Brahms symphony and listen to the work, trying to follow the development of its themes in accordance with the forms in use in the works; or, I would listen to an opera by Wagner or Verdi or Puccini and try to trace the music’s impact on the dramatic structure. Sometimes I would close my eyes and listen; other times I would follow along in an orchestral score, noting the orchestrations and the notations expressed by the composer. The music was the thing; it was front-and-center. I don’t much do this anymore, though; even when I listen to classical music (which once again forms the bulk of my music listening, after several years in which film music took precedence), it’s usually on the headphones or the stereo while I’m writing. And when that’s the case, the music is taking the secondary position as far as my attention goes: I’m focused on the sentences and paragraphs that I’m generating, and only subconsciously attending to the musical phrases written by Sergei Rachmaninov and being conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy.

This is not a new problem; Leonard Bernstein noted it years ago, in his book The Infinite Variety of Music. (Speaking of which, that book — and its companion volume, The Joy of Music, are outstanding “introductory” books on classical music.) As he wrote: we hear too much music. Bernstein differentiates between hearing, a passive activity in which one is dully aware of the presence of sound, and listening, an active process where one’s attention is focused on the music or sound and is mentally processing what one is taking in. It’s hard to argue with this. Car stereos, Muzak in the malls, oldies blaring at “Johnny Rockets” as we eat our burgers — we are so constantly surrounded by music, in what I think is an attempt to make the general technological cacophony of our world more palatable, that it can’t help but relegate all music to background-status. Thus, sitting down to read a book or watch a DVD seems a valid activity, while sitting down to listen to a Beethoven string quartet seems an extravagance. Even when we try to do it, we begin to fidget and feel uncomfortable — we should be doing something, dammit, because we’ve been conditioned somehow to believe that listening does not constitute doing something. We now seem to believe that listening to music is not, in itself, a real activity.

And it isn’t only classical music that suffers because of this; popular music and rock suffers as well by our inattention and by our insistence that music should be accompanied — whether by a raucous stage show, or by a video, or by a drive through suburban Syracuse or wherever. And in the case of film music, a genre which I dearly love and which is almost universally ignored, it’s even worse: we bring our downgraded view of music in general to bear on music that is actually supposed to be supportive of some visual element. Thus, where for many the idea of sitting down to listen to the Beethoven quartet is an extravagance, the idea of sitting down to listen to a Jerry Goldsmith filmscore is ludicrous. (A sizable portion of my film music collection, if not an outright majority, consists of scores to films I’ve never seen. This fact is invariably met with incredulity, to which my response is, “It’s music, and if it’s good music, what the hell do I need a movie for to appreciate it?”)

I’m not sure what the remedy is, but one clue I’ve found is that since I went from driving a car with a CD player to a car without one, I listen to music very infrequently while driving. Mainly, when driving I now listen to NPR or, if they’re talking about something uninteresting, ESPN Radio. (If both are talking about something uninteresting, I’ll check out the classical station and then the Oldies station, in that order of preference.) And I try to make some time each day not for music, but for silence. It seems to me that if we’ve made our world too noisy, and if our appreciation of music suffers because we’ve made it part of that noise, then perhaps part of restoring music to the esteem it deserves as an art form is to restore silence. Maybe we can’t get rid of all the noise in our lives, but maybe we can do a better job of choosing what that noise is and what form it should take.

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BTW, in the same post linked above, Lynn refers me to a music blog I hadn’t seen before, Symphony X. She’s right: if you have any interest in classical music, you should be reading this one.

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Something that interests me about the ongoing march of technology is the way new gizmos tend to reflect the design of similar gizmos on the Sci-Fi movies and TV shows of yesteryear. The canonical example is probably the way those cell-phones that flip open look like obvious analogues to the old communicators on Star Trek (before the design was refined to a breast-badge that you thwack when you want to talk to someone — I always wanted to see a new Starfleet recruit with “directional issues” habitually whack the wrong breast, but I digress).

Anyway, remember how on the alien spaceships and in their command centers in all those movies and shows, instead of display screens, they always gleaned large amounts of information from either screens or globes that displayed nothing but swirling colors? Well, behold the ambient orb, a frosted-glass globe that you can configure to shift color depending on the data you want, er, “colorized”.

Feel free to use this post’s comments to make jokes about what George W. Bush would do with such a gizmo in the Oval Office!

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On the basis of a strong recommendation from Will Duquette, I tracked down a copy of a novel called Bridge of Birds, which is a fantasy set in medieval China. I’m only about forty pages in, but so far the book is a delight, and I read a passage last night that hit me in just the right spot. The speaker is Li Kao, who in the novel is a sage with “a slight flaw in his character”.

“He was an oaf name Procopius, and the wine had not improved his appearance. ‘O great and mighty Master Li, pray impart to me the Secret of Wisdom!’ he bawled. A silly smile was sliding down the side of his face like a dripping watercolor, and his eyeballs resembled a pair of pink pigeon eggs that were gently bouncing in saucers of yellow wonton soup. ‘Take a large bowl,’ I said. ‘Fill it with equal measures of fact, fantasy, history, mythology, science, superstition, logic, and lunacy. Darken the micture with bitter tears, brighten it with howls of laughter, toss in three thousand years of civilization, bellow kan pei — which means dry cup — and drink to the dregs.’ Procopius stared at me. ‘And will I be wise?’ he asked. ‘Better,’ I said. ‘You will be Chinese.'”

Bridge of Birds seems to be one of those books that has fallen through the cracks in spectacular fashion; despite the fact that it won the World Fantasy Award, I had never heard of it until Will mentioned it. Barry Hughart seems to be a recluse; here’s a website devoted to him which includes the original draft of Bridge of Birds and a fairly depressing interview in which Hughart describes the reaction a film executive had at the idea of making a movie of this book.

Maybe the current rise of interest in Asian cultural matters will bring Hughart’s books (of which there seem to be only three) to greater light.

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