Month: April 2004

Radio astronomers are making a lot of progress in studying the center of the Milky Way lately, gaining their best measurements yet of the forces at the center of our galaxy — forces that are driven by a black hole with a mas equal to four million Suns and a diameter of 14,000,000 miles. (That white dot in the picture, made by the Very Large Array, signifies the location of the black hole.)

Radio astronomy is essential to studying the galactic core because the region is so shrouded by dust that visible-light telescopes, like Mount Palomar or the Hubble Space Telescope, can’t see into it. But radio telescopy has other difficulties to overcome: radiation emissions from the core are heavily distorted by all the forces at play there, so the task is compared to “trying to spot a yellow rubber duck through the frosted glass of a shower stall”.

The amount of knowledge about our universe that can be gleaned from tiny wisps of data collected on the surface of our backwater planet, and the care with which that data is organized into knowledge of the cosmos by scientists, never ceases to astound me.

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Surfing around MSN this morning, I see that Sesame Street is 35. Of course it’s a staple in our home, what with a four-year-old present. (I wish they’d make some new episodes, but I’ve been largely spared since I started working at The Store.)

I think it would be funny if they did a cross between Sesame Street and West Side Story. Maybe there could be a rival street named for a spice — say, Coriander Avenue — with its own set of Muppets who do stylized musical battle with the crew from Sesame Street. Maybe it’s just my warped imagination, but a death-match between Elmo and Fozzy Bear sounds pretty funny to me.

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Fans of Japanese cinema, especially samurai and gangster movies, may enjoy this profile of Japanese actor Seizo Fukumoto, who apparently has died onscreen more then twenty thousand times. Goodness, that’s a lot of dying. I wonder if people recognize him on the street and ask him to “die” on the spot, kind of like how people would approach DeForest Kelley and ask him to say “He’s dead, Jim”.

Fukumoto’s most high-profile role, apparently, was in last year’s The Last Samurai, in which he does, in fact, die. (I haven’t seen the movie, but the article spoils it.) Come to think of it, I wonder if South Park‘s Kenny is a small tip-of-the-hat to this man? I know that the South Park creators are well-steeped in an astonishing amount of pop-culture. Anyone know?

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The Burst of Weirdness is also a Burst of Goodness: Warren Ellis is having another “Hack the Filthy Monkey” game. He starts with this picture, the slogan of which is the wonderful “The filthy monkey, it plans”. Then he solicits people to Photoshop it and alter it and do whatever with it. Great stuff ensues. Start here and go down. (Or up, depending on whether he posts more by the time I post this.)

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It seems to me that modern science has not done nearly enough research into what I call the “Women Make That Look Good” Phenomenon. I’ve long noticed that in any work environment in which employees are required to wear a uniform, the women of that operation always look better in that uniform than the men. This is no less true at The Store. The main uniform is this white dress-shirt that’s kind-of tuxedo style, with a short, stiff, rounded collar. The women of the store, for the most part, look great in this shirt. The men, though, look like…guys in white dress shirts. There’s got to be a Ph.D. thesis in this for some enterprising scientist!

(In fact, I’d generally say that women almost always look better in men’s clothes than men do. The only exception? Neckties. I can’t stand neckties on women, and whenever I see a woman wearing a dress shirt with a necktie, I’m reminded of that line of Harrison Ford’s from Working Girl: “You’re the first woman I’ve seen at one of these things who dressed like a woman, not how a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman.”)

(Oh, and the necktie thing only applies to standard neckties, not bow-ties. I have no opinion on cravats, as I have never seen a woman wearing one.)

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Well, I’m not really sure on the particulars, but since I’ve asked people for Google-bombs myself (Buffalo blog!), I figure I should help William Burton out with his. So, Asus tech support.

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Speaking of Mulan in the MOB! post below, I see that over on MovieWave, James Southall has put up a review of Jerry Goldsmith’s score to that film. Southall is a decent enough writer, if you’re looking for a film music review site, but in the course of reviewing every Jerry Goldsmith score in existence (in conjunction with the composer’s seventy-fifth birthday two months ago) he has proven so over-the-top in love with nearly every note to emerge from the pen of Jerry Goldsmith that for me it has totally compromised the usefulness of his site. His Mulan review provides yet another example of this kind of thing, when in the course of lamenting the small amount of Goldsmith’s music present on the original Disney Records CD release, Southall writes this:

“Unfortunately, the score is given scant time to prove itself on the album, with just 25 minutes of running time in addition to an orchestral suite of the song melodies; this is particularly unfortunate given that it’s probably the finest score ever written for an animated movie.” [Emphasis added.]

Mulan is a perfectly nice film score. Good melodies, solid 90s-era Goldsmith action music (although, frankly, 90s-era Goldsmith action music tends to all sound the same to me). But the finest score ever written for an animated film? Give me a giant, colossal break here. Just off the top of my head, I can name a bunch of animated films that boast scores that are superior to Mulan‘s.

Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away — in fact, any Joe Hisaishi-scored Hayao Miyazaki film has a better score than Mulan. Among Disney movies, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Bambi and The Rescuers Down Under all boast better scores than Mulan. (To be fair, these scores are generally more integrated with their songs than Mulan is, but that is part of their strength, especially in the case of Peter Pan, which is a score of such charming complexity that its CD never fails to delight me.) Atlantis and Dinosaur both had really good James Newton Howard scores, and both are better than Mulan‘s.

How about the brilliant Pixar movies? Randy Newman’s work on the two Toy Story films is outstanding, and Thomas Newman’s score to Finding Nemo most definitely outpaces Mulan.

Among non-Disney animated films, The Prince of Egypt has an excellent score by Hans Zimmer, who actually can write good music when he’s not outsourcing his own duties. Michael Kamen’s score to The Iron Giant is one of the high-points of that man’s career (sadly cut short last year by the Damned Grim Reaper). The much-derided Ralph Bakshi animated version of The Lord of the Rings has a score by Leonard Rosenman that is generally very highly praised by film music lovers (although, admittedly, I have never warmed to it). And then there’s the great Carl Stalling: pick just about any of the many five-minute Looney Tunes cartoons for which he provided his wonderful pastiches of classical repertoire, and you’ll hear music superior to what Jerry Goldsmith did for Mulan.

I’ve read MovieWave for years, and I knew Southall when we were both regulars on rec.music.movies. For me, he started going around the bend when he posted a rather mean-spirited review of Howard Shore’s score to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, a review in which he relentlessly complains about other people liking Shore’s work more than he does (at one point, calling such people “masturbatory”). And he’s thrown out similar digs in more recent writings, such as his more recent review of the score to Legend, again by Goldsmith: “A more recent trilogy of film scores that go with hobbits and elves does not even approach the ambition or scope of Goldsmith’s Legend.” This statement is so deeply at odds with what I hear in the LOTR scores that I’m not sure the gap can even be bridged; and besides, few things irritate me more than when someone adopts the “Here I am, the Voice of Reason which you are so fortunate to have!” kind of tone.

I’ve mentioned before, in passing, the fetishizing of Jerry Goldsmith’s music among filmscore fans. (Just go look at the FilmScoreMonthly message boards these days. One would almost think that a requirement of the shipping process for Varese Sarabande’s recent limited-edition Goldsmith CD box set was that people buying it have to post a message to the FSM board upon delivery of the set.) Southall is one of the biggest, loudest voices in the Goldsmith cheering section, which is fine, but he seems to think his voice should drown out all others, which is not. Especially if he’s going to take others to task for “masturbatory praise” in one review and then pronounce Mulan, a score which I think unlikely to be remembered in future years except by die-hard Disney or film music fans, “the finest score ever written for an animated film” in another.

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“First Rays of Light Illuminating the Youghiogheny”.

The Youghiogheny River starts in Maryland and flows north, into Pennsylvania, where eventually it empties into the Monongahela River, which in turn joins the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. The Youghiogheny flows through some remote wilderness country, and it boasts a good number of rapids that have made it a very popular river in the northeast to whitewater boaters (kayakers, canoeists, and annoying people in rafts).

The river’s most distinctive feature comes at the town of Ohipyle, PA. Here, the river bends sharply and then sharply again, making a feature called “The Loop”:

In this short stretch of river are four or five individual rapids, and it is common practice for boaters to “put in” at the top of The Loop, “take out” at the bottom, and then hike back to the start and do it all over again.

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Terry Teachout tells a NYC cabbie to take him to Carnegie Hall, and the cabbie doesn’t know how to get there.

Now, maybe he’s new to the area. Terry might have questioned him: “Do you know how to get to Madison Square Garden? LaGuardia? Grand Central Station? Lincoln Center? The Hello Deli?” Maybe he doesn’t know crap about Manhattan. Maybe he was just filling in. Maybe he was one of the Apprentice contestants on a future challenge.

Maybe.

A little hope here, folks.

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A couple of good posts over at Reflections in D-minor (well, they’re all good posts over there). First, she has a couple of Rachmaninov clips available (but only for a day or two). I adore Rachmaninov, and strongly recommend the recordings of his symphonies with the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy. If you can only get one of the symphonies, get the #2 in E-minor, which for my money is one of the greatest symphonic works of all time. Andre Previn’s recordings of the symphonies are also pretty good. For the piano concertos, I’d go with Previn’s recordings — with Ashkenazy playing the piano. And look for the tone poems, such as Isle of the Dead and The Bells.

(It’ll also help in listening to Rachmaninov if you familiarize yourself with the Dies Irae chant, which fascinated him. He quotes it in many of his works.)

Also, if you have any interest in the music of Antonio Vivaldi, Lynn has a few ideas there, too. I confess that I simply can’t stand Vivaldi — The Four Seasons drives me mad, and there was some Mass or something I had to play in college that I likewise detested. But then, the whole Baroque thing does very little for me; even Bach is a struggle most of the time.

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