Month: April 2005

O the wonders of the Internet! Via this FSM thread, I was reminded of what just might be the best album cover of all time, that of the Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass record Whipped Cream and Other Delights:

And I further learn that the model pictured on that album cover has her own website, www.whippedcreamlady.com. She appeared on some other album covers, but the whipped cream one is clearly the best. And that’s because whipped cream rules. Even if it’s probably shaving cream in the photo, a substance which doesn’t rule nearly as much as whipped cream.

(But only the real thing, whipped up in a very cold bowl from heavy cream, or Cool Whip in a pinch. That aeresol can stuff sucks, except for use on top of coffee or hot chocolate.)

Share This Post

The daughter was watching Return of the Jedi the other day (which she selected because she likes the part where “the Emperor shoots lightning out of his fingers”), and when she got to the point in the final assault on the Death Star when the Millennium Falcon, traversing the Death Star’s superstructure, encounters a tight squeeze and loses the radar dish from it’s topside, I inadvertently pictured a bunch of guys sitting in the MF‘s cargo hold, watching a telecast of some sporting event when the dish went. Maybe a podrace:

GUY #1: Whoa! Sebulba’s in the lead!

GUY #2: What a comeback!

GUY #1: Here comes the finish! Here it is…any second now….

(Very loud metallic BONK, and the screen suddenly goes all snowy)

GUY #1: NNOOOOO!!!

GUY #2: Yeah, man! And I spilled my beer! Who’s flying this ship, anyway!

And a few minutes later, when the MF and Wedge arrive at the Death Star’s reactor, I suddenly wondered what must have gone through the head of the poor slob who was piloting that single TIE fighter that made it there with them. I guess he’d be relieved that alone of all his buddies he didn’t end up as a grease spot on the walls of the shaft. He’s probably breathing huge sighs of relief, and wiping sweat from his brow – until he realizes that Wedge and Lando are blowing up the reactor, and he needs to get his ass out of there, pronto. So he whips around and follows the Rebels out, figuring, “OK, you did this once, you can do it again….” And he almost does. He’s just so close, he can probably see the exit, when the flames catch him from behind.

What would be pretty funny is if that TIE pilot turned out to be Sebulba, the cheating pod-racer from The Phantom Menace. As he blows up, he could yell “Poo-doo!” one last time. (Yeah, I know, George Lucas would get roasted alive by the fans if he ever did this. But I’d find it slightly amusing.)

Share This Post

Lance Mannion on Roger L. Simon:

Simon could not achieve the popularity he’d have liked with his mysteries partly because he could not give in to readers’ expectations of blood, gore, sex, and violence. He had too much artistic integrity.

But now as a blogger he’s become what he steadily resisted being as a novelist.

A hack.

In the same post, Lance also provides this wonderful paragraph:

The other problem Simon has had in breaking into the top tier is taste—he has too much of it. Tact, too. He can’t be vulgar enough. He holds back on the kinky sex and graphic violence. But he’s not writing Agatha Christie style Murder Among Nice, Staid Dull People Living in Cozy Little Villages Where Just the Mention of Sex Causes Grown Men to Blush and Women to Feel a Little Faint Who Done Its. He’s writing Tough Guy Working the Mean Streets and Getting Laid A Lot When They’re Not Getting Beaten to A Pulp pulp style murder mysteries/thrillers. There are rules, and Simon doesn’t follow them.

Full disclosure: I’ve never read a Roger L. Simon novel, and I only read his blog when some other blogger that I do read links him, and that’s not that often. I just found this post pretty well constructed.

(And it occurs to me that if you just change a few of Lance’s phrasings around to alter the genres from mysteries to Science Fiction, it could be about Orson Scott Card. But I suspect that Card’s a better SF writer than Simon is a mystery writer.)

Share This Post

This may be the most clueless thing ACD has ever posted. Rather than actually address the suggestion that Greg Sandow is making, he instead goes for the cheap-shot insult.

Sandow has been suggesting that classical music writing in the media should, at least occasionally, focus on the background details of the musicmaking. He provided an example a while back, and solicited e-mail responses. He quotes mine in the most recent post, but here’s what I wrote in full:

I just read your blog entry that mentions conductor Semyon Bychkov, whom I have admired for quite some time. I have a local reason, however: I live in Buffalo, and in the late 80s Bychkov was music director of our Philharmonic. His tenure here saw the BPO undertake a European tour and several well-received concerts at Carnegie Hall, and he displayed an affinity for Shostakovich even then – the Fifth Symphony was a staple of BPO repertoire of the time (and it was the first piece Bychkov recorded, with the Berlin PO).

I actually met Bychkov once when, while still in high school, I attended a BPO concert which included Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. The second movement was played wondrously, but the performance was marred by the most horrible outbreak of audience coughing and throat-lozenge unwrapping I have ever heard. It was so bad that Bychkov actually addressed the audience after the movement was done, scolding them on their lack of decorum and then saying, “For those of you who missed that movement the first time, we will now play it again.”

I mention that anecdote because it actually plays into your post’s theme about the “Behind the scenes” stuff appearing in reviews. In this case, I remember an article in the Buffalo News mentioning Bychkov’s repeat of the movement, noting that doing this required the orchestra musicians to be paid overtime for going over by twelve minutes or whatever. I personally found that fascinating.

I don’t get the attitude you encountered about “behind the scenes” stuff. In addition to classical music, I’m also a sports fan, and sports fans are in my experience always fascinated by the “back room” details — things like how trades get done, why this player is drafted instead of that one, why this play is called instead of that play, why the defense lines up in one formation instead of another, et cetera. I can’t imagine why the classical music press would assume that all classical music lovers are interested in is the music itself, and not interested at all in the mechanics of bringing it to fruition. One of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read is on precisely the “behind the scenes” stuff in a symphony orchestra: “Season With Solti” (the author’s name escapes me). The book is thirty years old by now, so I assume the picture it paints of a big-city symphony is no longer anything close to the way things actually are, but it’s still amazing to me, and I can’t imagine that classical music lovers wouldn’t be equally fascinated by this kind of thing.

I once pitched a freelance article – – not commissioned, alas – – to a local magazine that would have been “Behind the Scenes” at the BPO. I wanted to profile what the orchestra librarian does. I wanted to see how program notes are compiled, and how rehearsals are held, and so on. I even envisioned a series of such articles, going behind the scenes at other art locales – – art galleries (ever wonder about the guy who actually has to physically hang the paintings?), theaters (what’s the life of the costume maker like?) and so on.

Of course, that’s not what ACD decides to address at all – he instead decides to make fun of the Entertainment Weekly readership, as if Sandow is suggesting that classical music needs to appeal to that crowd or some such thing. He’s not. It’s not about the classical music version of “celebrity gossip”; Greg Sandow isn’t hankering after which conductor is sleeping with which pianist or whatever. It’s about things like Helen Radice‘s posts about the day-to-day concerns of a harpist. Or Forrest Covington‘s recent adventures with getting a simple thing like a copy of a CD with his own music on it. Or Scott Spiegelberg‘s thoughts on teaching the next generation of musicians. Or Fred Himebaugh‘s writings about the concerns of a composer of choral music. Or Ilka Talvi‘s postings about the operations of a symphony orchestra. In fact, that last is probably the perfect example of what Greg Sandow is getting at.

Either ACD knows this, and he’s just being pissy for the sake of being pissy, or he doesn’t know that, in which case he has completely missed the point. In either case, it’s advantage: Sandow. As near as I can tell, ACD simply skimmed Sandow’s post, saw the words “Entertainment Weekly”, and fired off his post without devoting one more second of thought to it than that.

Share This Post

Since I disagreed pretty forcefully with Craig in the last post, I should note that I agree with him here.

Last week in Niagara Falls, two teenagers decided to hold up a pizza delivery guy. Their potential windfall, however, turned to spectacular bad luck when it turned out that this particular delivery guy was carrying a gun (for which he had all the necessary permits). The pizza guy fired, killing one of the assailants.

I later saw on the news that one of those creepy impromptu memorials had been created at the scene. I generally don’t like these types of memorials to begin with, but erecting one in the honor of a person who was killed while committing a crime makes it clear to me that maybe we ought to be spending our memorial-constructing time a bit more constructively.

I have little sympathy, really, for the kid who got killed. People who commit crimes run the risk of dying violently, and I see no reason to erect a memorial for it.

(Actually, it’s not just inner-city crimes, either. Not far from my home there’s a makeshift roadside memorial for three teenage guys who were killed in a car crash that was later found to have at least partially resulted from the driver of the car engaging in road-rage. That accident was nearly four years ago, and the makeshift memorial is still tended with all the regularity of a shrine to a Catholic saint. And then of course there is “Custer’s Last Stand”, the site of which is now referred to as the Battle of the Little Big Horn, probably for reasons of political correctness, but again it’s a shift I don’t have a problem with, because honoring a general who got his men completely routed because he basically made one idiot move after another for about a week doesn’t seem right to me.)

Share This Post

I disagree with Craig’s thesis in this post so strenuously that I almost wonder if he wrote this post to get me to break my hiatus a day early. So I’m doing the next best thing: writing my response a day early, but not posting it until later. Score!

Here’s his thesis:

Public libraries might be an example of an institution designed for an earlier time that doesn’t make as much sense now as then. It’s perhaps just another luxury we’ve grown accustomed to. We’re used to its being free — the knee-jerk response is why should I pay for something that the government will give me. Maybe it shouldn’t.

Let me be blunt here: as much as I adore the Buffalo area, if this community decided to do away with its libraries entirely, that would be my official last straw. I’d leave as soon as humanly possible.

What a society values, a society is willing to pay for. The fact that we’re still willing, albeit less so and more grudgingly lately, to pay for free access to books, periodicals, government documents, films, and music recordings says to me that we still value those things and view their widespread availability as a good thing. There would, I think, be a very big fundamental difference between a society that views reading as sufficiently important and universal a right to pay for libraries and one which takes the view that your reading should be limited to only those books you can afford.

It’s easy to say things like “Look at all the books available for free on the Web!” and “Look how cheap you can buy just about any book on Amazon!” But really, that’s not at all the same thing. To take the first claim: sure, there are sites like Project Gutenberg that make the texts of many public domain books available online. But they’re not free, not really: I still have to pay for my computer, and I still have to pay for the Internet access I use to access Project Gutenberg. That’s not free – – at least, it’s not in the same sense “free” for me to read Anna Karenina on Gutenberg that it would be “free” for me to walk down to the library and check the book out with my library card. And as ubiquitous as the Web seems to those of us who get to use it every day, the cost of being able to go online is a very real cost indeed. I know people who simply can’t afford Internet access.

(And this is to say nothing of the fact that there are nowhere near the same number of books available for free online as there are at my own local library branch, much less the entirety of, say, the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library system.)

As for books being cheap on Amazon or other online sources, well, that’s a troubling thing to say, in my opinion. I don’t make enough money to buy every book I want to read. That’s a simple fact of life: I will probably never make enough to buy a copy of every book I want to read. So, when it comes to buying books, I have to be pretty selective. (The high price of graphic novels is a real sticking point with me – – those damn things are absurdly overpriced, in my opinion, which annoys me because there are a lot of them that I would like to read.) But that’s just buying books. When it comes to reading books, I don’t have to be so selective, because there’s the library. My personal reading life would be severely hampered if I had to limit myself to reading only those books which I could afford to buy. And I’m not even that badly off: I have a roof over my head, and I can still get to Borders every now and again. But I don’t buy nearly as many books as I used to, because I have other things to buy: food, drugs for Little Quinn, diapers, cat litter, et cetera. Because of the library, though, I don’t have to limit my reading. That’s a big thing to me: the fact that I don’t need to own every book I read opens up huge vistas of reading to me.

Frankly, I’m always astonished when people tell me that they never go to the library because they like to own every book they read. That attitude completely baffles me. If there’s a service that can provide you, free of charge, with access to more books than you could ever read in a lifetime, why rigidly insist upon owning every book you want to read? Just from the standpoint of not having paid for every book I’ve checked out and not liked, I think I end up ahead. I hate buying a book that turns out to be a stinker.

Here is what it boils down to: I view reading as probably the most fundamental right that exists, beyond the “biggies” of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Free access to books is, as far as I am concerned, an essential part of a democratic society, and it’s absolutely essential to a society that maintains its belief that anyone can accomplish anything as long as they work hard at it. The day we decide that reading is something that must be paid for by each individual reader is, to me, the day we decide that we’re no longer a democratic society. There are people out there, many of them, real people, who don’t have enough extra pennies in their budget per month to afford more than a single mass-market paperback novel. The idea that these folks can still go to their library and check out a hardback copy of, well, any book at all signifies to me a big part of the greatness of this country.

Maybe America will eventually decide that libraries are, as Craig suggests, a mere luxury. But it would be heartbreaking to me to learn that my country had decided that reading is a mere luxury. And make no mistake: that’s what it would mean if we collectively decided “No books, unless you can pay for each one.” This is a tough country we got here, folks – – we’ve built a nation around a mix of egalitarianism and libertarianism, which is not always the best of mixes. But as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to reading, the more egalitarian, the better, and free libraries are the best way to accomplish this that I know.

(Now, the issue of whether the B&ECPL system is too bloated is an entirely different one. I think it probably is. But shutting them entirely? To me, that’s pure insanity.)

Share This Post

…And so ends another break in the posting here. Thanks, all, for keeping the traffic up (especially the searchers, who yielded such interesting searches as this — I wanna know what she’s wearing! — and this) . And now, on with the fun, starting with a spoiler-filled review of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, penned by filmmaker and Star Wars geek Kevin Smith.

Share This Post

As noted at the top of the sidebar, I’m going to be on a brief hiatus for a few days. Regular posting will resume next Wednesday. For now, do be sure to visit the fine blogs linked in the sidebar (with some additions to come sometime in the next week or two), because there’s lots of good reading there. Keep visiting here, too, so the traffic doesn’t drop off completely (by the way, I cleared 90,000 hits a few weeks back), and make sure to catch up on The Promised King.

And if anyone has any posting suggestions for when I return, by all means, leave ’em in comments. I have some ideas, but it’s always fun to solicit ideas from the thronging hoards. If you have any questions you’re dying to ask, or stuff you’re dying to see me drone on endlessly about, plop ’em in comments and I’ll cull through them upon my return.

Share This Post

As one might expect, since I’m a liberal I’m pretty much against the elimination of the estate tax, and basically for one simple reason: it’s income, and if we’re going to tax some income, we should damned well tax all income. I see no earthly reason why I should have to pay taxes on every dime I earn from The Store, and yet someone else should have to pay zero taxes on money they earn because someone else died. Ditto for capital gains and everything else: as far as I am concerned, if you come into money, it should be taxed. Period.

Now, obviously you can’t feasibly tax every monetary exchange that exists, or else we’d have an IRS agent present at every garage sale. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not swayed, either, by the idea of “double taxation”, because it’s not the money that is taxed, but the people earning it. I have no problem with person A deciding that they want person B to have all their money after they die. Fine. But the idea that person B has some reasonable right to get all of that money tax-free seems totally bizarre to me.

End of rant.

Share This Post

Michelle posts a bit of porn. Well, it’s a kind of porn, if you like fine writing supplies. Stop that! I haven’t bought one yet! (But I’m gonna.)

In comments to this post, Michelle expresses an interest in joining the proud ranks of fountain pen users. I should probably do a longer post on fountain pens one of these days — maybe after the hiatus — but for now I’ll just mention a couple of decent fountain pens that aren’t terribly pricey that are good for a first-time fountain pen user.

(By “not terribly pricey”, I mean, “they can be bought for under $50.00”. It may seem ridiculous to spend that much on a pen, but consider: with proper care, a fountain pen can last pretty much forever. If you write a lot, the thing will pay for itself many times over. And besides, they just look so much cooler than boring pens from aisle six at Office Max.)

First, there’s the Sheaffer Prelude, which is one of my favorites. It has nice weight (I like my pens to have a bit of heft), and the grip is nicely done. The Waterman Phileas is also nice, and a bit lighter. And a really nice value is the Rotring CORE, which looks really bulky but balances and handles very nicely.

Of course, if you start using these, you run the risk of becoming a fountain pen collector, which is a seriously bad thing to become. Really. It’s horrible. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. (Well, I would. But only on real meanies.)

Share This Post