Month: June 2004

Lynn Sislo wants to know why people hate sandals, and S-Train agrees with her. Hell, I don’t know — I love sandals, myself. I have a pair of Reebok athletic sandals and a pair of faux-Birkenstocks that I bought at Penney’s years ago — I’m thinking, maybe even ten years — and yet they’re still holding together and are comfortable as hell. I live in sandals from roughly May until September.

Of course, anything I have to say in terms of fashion sense might best be taken with a granular quanity of sodium chloride. (Witness the photos of myself here!) Suffice it to say that I decided years ago that “comfort” is the overriding paradigm in what I’ll wear, barring stuff specifically required for work, and I make all judgments on that basis. That goes for my “nice” clothes, too: if they’re not comfortable, I don’t wear them. Hence the fact that I own exactly one necktie.

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For reasons passing understanding, I’ve always found screenwriter Joe Eszterhas to be a fascinating figure. This, despite the facts that in any interview of his I’ve ever read he comes off as a complete boor, and that with the exception of Jagged Edge — which came out almost twenty years ago — I have never liked any of the movies that resulted from his scripts. Not even Basic Instinct, which is the most poorly-constructed mystery-thriller I’ve ever seen.

(Caveat: I have not seen Showgirls.)

I guess that ultimately I just find something fascinating, almost morbidly so, about a guy who not only produces crap but is proud to produce crap, and gets paid huge money to keep right on producing crap.

So I checked his memoir out of the library last week. It’s called Hollywood Animal, and I’ve just finished the first chapter. My reaction?

Wow, what an ass.

There’s really nothing I can directly quote to illustrate what I mean; it’s more the overall tone that’s amazing in its ass-ness. It’s the tone of a guy who is supremely confident that what he does is of great worth, and of contempt for those who have not managed to achieve what he’s achieved. And there’s his sexual fixations, which get to be a little much. At one point he relates an incident where he walks into some restaurant and sees William Goldman with some studio execs, whilst Joe — our hero — is with a stunning blonde. Ha! Take that, Goldman or whomever!

I have little intention to finish this book, seeing as how it’s way longer than my interest in Eszterhas would likely prove sustainable. (It’s 724 pages long. But the paragraphs tend to be very short, rarely more than three sentences.) But I do recommend the first chapter, just from the perspective of someone who can’t bear to miss a good slow-motion train wreck when one’s unfolding somewhere.

(BTW, here’s a bit of evidence that I take film music very seriously. At one point, Joe Eszterhas lists a bunch of native Hungarians who ended up in Hollywood, working in the film industry. He omits the man who is my personal favorite gift of Hungary to Hollywood, composer Miklos Rozsa.)

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In the Household, all is in preparation for the arrival tomorrow of the In-Laws*, who will be in town for six days. Posting will, undoubtedly, not occur as frequently as in other, In-Law-free days.

* They’re my in-laws, and they’re fine people. No horrible in-laws in this family.

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Sean‘s found a new batch of blog toys….

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I’ve been trying to decide which CD of mine — out of the multitudes — I wanted to discuss next in this sporadic series, but then I heard a bit of news on the classical station while driving home that made it pretty much of a no-brainer.

Violinist and conductor Iona Brown has died.

Brown was very closely associated with Sir Neville Marriner and his orchestra, the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and I have a number of recordings of Brown in action with that very ensemble, including a set of Mozart’s violin concertos that I admire greatly. But no recording of Marriner’s and Brown’s is more prized in my collection than this collection of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a recording which I prize in turn for the presence on it of the finest performance I have ever heard of what I consider to be Vaughan Williams’s masterpiece, “The Lark Ascending”.

I first heard this work live, at a concert given in Buffalo’s Kleinhans Music Hall by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. I don’t recall who the violinist was, but the piece struck me a serious blow. I had never before encountered the English pastoral tradition in music to that point, and it was shocking to me. Never had I heard music of such gossamer tranquility, music that seemed to me the musical equivalent of one of those Japanese paintings in which four or five lines in black ink on white paper somehow manage to depict a flower in blossom. And yet, “The Lark Ascending” isn’t merely just a fifteen-minute work of tranquility and softness: there is melody and development within it, and Iona Brown’s performance on that CD is absolutely captivating.

Incidentally, after reporting Iona Brown’s death, WNED played this very recording of “The Lark Ascending” on the air, with the announcer reporting that today is actually the seventy-third anniversary of the work’s premiere (in its more-familiar orchestral version).

The CD also includes a lush recording of Vaughan Williams’s famous “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”, a fine “Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves'”, and closes out with “Five Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus'”. This CD is as fine a disc as I own, in any musical genre.

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The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus in Kleinhans Music Hall, Buffalo, NY.

I found this nice image of the entire orchestra in action — they were performing Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (the “Resurrection” Symphony) in 2001, so there’s the whole band on the stage at once. Kleinhans is an amazing concert hall, and the site linked by the image — the home page of Scott Parkinson, the BPO’s principal trombone player — has a nice gallery of Kleinhans-related images. Check out this one, an architectural model of the hall, with roof removed so that both concert venues — the main hall and the smaller Mary Seaton Room, used for chamber music recitals and the like — can be seen.

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Check out the latest at Laputan Logic: a scientist realized that the energy output of the very early Universe could be interpreted as sound waves, plugged into the computer, and organized as a WAV file. Thus, you can listen to what the Universe “sounded” like when it was less than 400,000 years old, here. This is cool beyond belief.

(And you science-minded folks who haven’t been reading Laputan Logic need to get with the program. Starting with myself.)

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Go here to see the poster and hear a clip of the theme song for Hayao Miyazaki’s upcoming anime film Howl’s Moving Castle.

That song — the clip you can hear, anyway — is gorgeous.

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Michael Lopez ruminates a bit on what he’d do to the current education system in the United States if he were to become Emperor.

As I read this, I get the feeling that there’s quite a bit I disagree with, quite a bit I agree with, and quite a bit that I think sounds good but am unsure if it can really be made to work. I’m pretty sure I disagree with allowing corporal punishment on the part of schoolteachers and officials, for example. Even if, as Emperor Michael would stipulate, said punishment would only be enacted upon a parent’s authorization of same.

Maybe I’m just the victim of conflicting impulses. I am constantly appalled by the abject stupidity constantly put on display by our society, and our willingness to embrace dumbness over smartness (a good example being that I just used two words that don’t exist), but then, I read some history and I am not at all sure things have ever really been different. I suspect that humanity really does boil down to what George Carlin said — “a few winners, and a whole lot of losers” — and that we tend to elevate the past over our own times because we remember the winners and forget the losers.

Anyway, I’ve just consumed an entire blog post and not really said anything. So go read Michael’s post, because he at least says something.

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I’m listening to John Williams’s score CD to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban right now, and while he has yet to really win me over with his music for this series, this score is getting really close. I mean, really close. There’s a lot of good stuff here. (I think that a lot of my problem with these scores might just boil down to the fact that I just don’t like “Hedwig’s Theme”, which is the overarching theme of the series thus far.)

Prisoner of Azkaban is, as many commenters have noted, when the series starts getting a bit darker, and likewise, Williams’s music gets darker too, which I find to be a substantial relief. As much as I love John Williams, I’ve never really been able to reconcile myself to his “happy” music, which dominated the first two films of this series.

On this CD, the first few tracks are pretty scattershot, with a rambunctious pastiche of a classical waltz in the second track (“Aunt Marge’s Waltz”), a bizarro bit of swing-band stuff in the third (“The Knight Bus”, which actually reminds me of Alan Sylvestri’s work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit), and culminating in a medievally-styled song called “Double Trouble”.

Then, finally, we get to the “meat and potatoes” of the score, and it arrives literally with a bang: track #6, “Buckbeak’s Flight”, opens with a thunderous passage for timpani, and then we’re into the kind of string writing Williams is so good at: a lush minor key melody soaring in the violins over a churning harmonic background in the lower strings and rhythmic woodwinds, punctuated by an ascending horn motif. All the Williams trademarks are here, in a way that they have been absent from the first two scores of the Harry Potter series. Later on, though, Williams is called upon to return to the faux-medievalism of “Double Trouble”, which makes for a finely varied listening experience on CD.

John Williams does a lot more wholesale borrowing and homage-paying to his classical forebears in the Harry Potter scores than in other scores of his, which irks some but doesn’t bother me, really, since a key aspect of the Harry Potter stories in the first place is the way J.K. Rowling freely mines tropes from just about anywhere she can find. I mean, we’re talking about what is pretty much a standard “British boarding school” story, mixed with children’s horror elements, the good old English ghost story (Rowling has surely read a good deal of M.R. James, or I miss my guess), and even classical mythology and alchemy. Williams’s pastiche-approach to scoring these films seems appropriate, seeing as how the stories are pastiche to begin with.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to hearing what Williams comes up with for Goblet of Fire, which is in my opinion the best of the books thus far. I can’t wait to hear how Williams scores the scene when Dumbledore tells Harry, “I am your father.”

(No, that didn’t happen.)

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