Month: June 2011

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Something for Thursday

It’s getting hard to remember if I used things before or not, but in this case, I don’t care, because it’s one of my favorite works of classical music. I was a trumpet player, and in that vein, my favorite work — by far — is this concerto, written by the Armenian composer Alexander Arutiunian. It’s dramatic, lyrical, and redolent of Eastern Europe. After years of playing things like the concertos of Haydn and Hummel and earlier works from the Baroque period, to discover the Arutiunian was a breath of much-needed fresh air.

This is a terrific performance, even if the soloist looks utterly bored by the proceedings. His playing, however, indicates that he is not.

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Oh, James Newton Howard, NO!!!

I’m listening to James Newton Howard’s score to Green Lantern, and…well, I really hope that the rest of the movie rises above the music Howard has written for it.

Howard is one of the more respected composers active today — quite a few of the “Goldsmith was God” freaks at FilmScoreMonthly, for instance, seem to view Howard as Goldsmith’s heir apparent. But not on the basis of Green Lantern. Boy howdy, this score is awful.

Like many scores nowadays, this is a blend of orchestral and techno elements. I have no problem with this at all. What I do have a problem with is how depressingly conventional this score is. There is literally nothing distinctive about it. There is no sense of epic scope, to suggest Green Lantern’s blend of space opera and superhero genre. The action music could be slotted into nearly any action sequence in any film of the last twenty years; the “wonder” music for when Hal Jordan first flies as one of the Green Lanterns sounds like any other “wonder” music out there.

And worst of all, there is virtually no melody to be found here. None. There are some motifs that I heard several times, but nothing that ever develops into anything of substance. I recall when superhero flicks had themes. John Williams wrote one of the most famous ones of all time for Superman. Danny Elfman did a fine theme for Batman. Jerry Goldsmith wrote a good theme for Supergirl (it’s virtually unknown these days because, like most Goldsmith scores, it accompanied an absolute dog of a movie).

But these days? There are no big melodies, no big themes, just subdued motifs that you have to study the score to find and which aren’t remotely memorable when you do.

God, what a crashing disappointment. James Newton Howard can do so much better than this. He has done so much better than this. I truly, deeply hope that melody can make a triumphant return to film music one day soon. Michael Giacchino can’t do it all by himself.

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Unrealistic Expectations

The Buffalo Chow food blog has shut down. They’ve posted their reasons, but for me, there are several things worth noting here:

1. This is the second time they’ve shut down in the space of two years. The reasons given the first time were largely similar to the reasons they gave the second time.

2. They seem to genuinely believe that one blog could change the dining patterns of an entire city, in a fairly short time. Maybe I’m being uncharitable there, but I honestly can’t think of any other way to parse the fact that a single trip to Olive Garden destroyed their desire to write about food.

3. I wasn’t a terribly big fan of theirs, anyway, because of the tone of their writing. I didn’t get a sense of a true love of food. The tone there was almost always of the “Don’t worry, you heathen masses, here I am to show you The Light!” I hate that. No matter what the subject — music, movies, books, food, hand tools — I can’t stand it when people work from the assumption that I am in desperate need of the “voice of reason” to show me the error of my ways. Give me food writing like Anthony Bourdain — not in terms of voice, but in terms of passion and love of the food. Don’t give me a food blog that reads like it’s being written by Joe Bastianich.

4. For folks who seemingly intended for their reviews to serve as a resource for those in the area who want to look up reviews of local restaurants, removing all that material entirely is just a crappy thing to do. Don’t want to write anymore reviews? Fine. Delete them all and salt the earth where they once grew? Give me a break. (UPDATE 6-18-11: They’ve restored all previous content.)

5. Finally…well, that’s about it. Oddly enough, I didn’t realize that the Buffalo Chow folks were on Twitter until just last night, so I started following them — just in time to learn that they’d picked up their ball and gone home again. Oh well. But as I posted to Twitter immediately after I stopped following them again, people who assume that because I don’t care about something in precisely the same way that they care about it, I must not care about it at all bore me.

I’m reminded of a similar incident from years back, when I was active on the rec.music.movies newsgroup. One of the regulars at the time was a guy from Quebec who was getting his doctorate in music composition. It was nice to have an actual trained musician on the group — for a while. But very quickly, a tone started to infect his posts that became deeply annoying, very quickly. He would get curt sometimes, if not downright angry, at dissenting opinions from his own. If you liked a film score that he didn’t like, he’d get pouty about your failure to defer to the wisdom of the trained composer. (That the folks who wrote the scores he didn’t like were also trained composers never seemed to enter his mind.)

Then he decided to take it upon himself to educate the denizens of the newsgroup, and started a series of posts about classical music for film music fans. It was all very condescending and arrogant and insulting, and as soon as he realized that everyone wasn’t lining up to thank him for having descended to our level to toss down his pearls of wisdom, he got very angry indeed, wrote a few more posts flaming everyone there (including me, which was odd because I hadn’t even responded to his posts in a while), and stomped off, never to be heard from again.

That’s what this was like. “A few years of blogging, and yet, Olive Garden is still busy!” Well, shit. Welcome to the real world. As Stephen King said in On Writing when he noted that Americans don’t tend to value their creative folk all that much, “it’s a case of tough titty said the kitty, ’cause that’s the way things are.”

And frankly, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if their fellow diners at Olive Garden actually liked their dinners just fine and didn’t want to admit it in front of their foodie companion.

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Under the hood….

Last week I reported on a problem with Blogger publishing. Now I’ve discovered another glitch: uploading photos stopped working. After some digging through Blogger’s help forums, I found this procedure which worked for me:

1) Go to Settings, Basic, scroll down and select the Old Editor and save your settings.
2) Then create a new post and upload a photo. You can save this test/new post as a draft, no need to publish it.
3) Then go back to Settings, Basic, scroll down and select the New Editor and Save your Settings.
4) This should hopefully now enable you to post/upload photos again with the New Editor.

I have no idea why this works, but it worked for me.

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Hee hee hee….

I’m not going to lie: I love that the Miami Heat lost the NBA Finals. I love that, after crowning himself “King James”, LeBron the Great was pretty much of a non-factor. I love that the supreme arrogance displayed when these guys put themselves together and declared that they were going to win seven championships came to naught.

Mostly, though, I loathe LeBron for the way he handled himself in leaving Cleveland last year. I don’t hate that he left Cleveland, in principle; star players leave their original markets all the time, for various reasons. Some leave because of money. Others leave because they just don’t feel that the management of their original team has a plan to improve and win. Still others leave for personal reasons, like when Chris Drury left the Buffalo Sabres four years ago. It happens. It sucks when you’re a fan and your team’s very best player leaves, but sports fans for the most part accept that it happens.

LeBron James could have left Cleveland in a classy way a year ago, but he chose not to. He chose to toy with Cleveland, and act like there was a chance he might stick around, and he refused to reveal his decision until several weeks into the free agency period, after most of the top free agents had already been signed around the league. Then he announced his departure. It was very hard to escape the impression that James did all these things because he wanted to rub Cleveland’s nose in it.

I also could have done without the comparisons of James to Michael Jordan. Now, to be fair, James himself wasn’t the one making these comparisons. But still — any such talk is silly. Maybe James is a better technical player than Jordan; I have no idea, but maybe, just maybe, he is. But the difference in the “intangibles” is so marked that it can’t be denied. Jordan is one of the greatest “clutch” athletes in the history of not just basketball, but sport itself. Jordan didn’t wilt in the spotlight; he didn’t disappear in the tough moments when the next basket or two might decide who takes home the trophy. And Jordan never left the final game of the NBA Finals without taking the trophy with him. LeBron James has done that. Twice.

This morning, James said something to the effect that all of his “haters” didn’t matter to him because they’d all be getting up in the morning with the same personal problems, and he’d just live with his family and make money and yada yada yada. Well, that’s true. But I got up this morning without most of the country engaging in schadenfreude at my expense. I got that going for me.

Which is nice.

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Sentential Links #249

Here we go!

:: I would have thought that the price of a comic book increasing over 1000% over the past thirty years, or short-sighted decisions allowing comics to lose 99% of their retail outlets over that same time, or the increased emphasis on violence and gore, or bizarre editorial mandates to continually reboot their product might have had a heck of a lot more to do with downward sales. Nope, it’s actually the fault of fans who care about the stories they’re told. Mea culpa. (Interesting thoughts on the DC Comics reboot. I like that he mentions the “dream season” of Dallas. I was a fan of the show at the time, and boy, did it feel cheap. The worst aspect of it was that in the last four or five episodes of the “Dream Season”, the writers had started a storyline that they’d intended to continue in the next season — involving an old ranch hand coming to work at Southfork who may or may not have actually been Jock Ewing with a different face — but since the season had been rendered a dream, that storyline was cut off. But the writers really really really liked that idea, so what did they do in the new, non-dream season? They started that same storyline over again, to the point of using the exact same actor as the old ranch hand who may or may not have been Jock Ewing with a new face. All they did was change the name of the character!)

:: And I did love it—even more than Ender’s Game. It has aliens and spaceships and an intelligent computer. It has distance between the stars measured not in kilometers but in years. It had the fascinating comparison of human, ramen, and varelse. I wish I still loved it, I really do. But you can’t unsee the man behind the curtain.

:: If fantasy and science fiction movies like 2001 and Lord of the Rings and Star Wars can feature classical music scores-some existing, like the Strauss Also Sprach Zarathustra for 2001, or some created, like Howard Shore’s gorgeous compositions for LOTR-then why is classical music missing in novels? This is the question that begins a lot of panels on the topic of music in speculative fiction.

:: Now of course, some of you will point out that Sam Raimi wasn’t making that movie for kids, that he was making a serious and mature Spider-Man film for grown-ups and I have no business showing it to a little kid and expecting her to be entertained…but before you do, take just one minute to think about the implications of trying to argue that kids should have no right to watch a Spider-Man movie and be entertained by it. Okay? Okay.

:: For someone who professes to disdain Internet writers, Richard Schickel is one hell of an effective troll.

:: Draped between the doorknob and the sink, blocking the door so it couldn’t open very far, was a diamond-patterned rope, like one of those very thick velvet ropes that blocks movie theater entrances. A rope? A slimy rope with scales? In my bathroom? What? No, it wasn’t a rope; it was…moving! My brain was trying to register what this thing was in my doorway. My hand was mere inches away from it, my fingers on one side of the door knob, his body wrapped around the other. It moved again. I was moving too. FAST. In the opposite direction. And screaming. LOUD.

:: I also had to smile about the fact that I am currently at war with dandelions in my lawn, yet one of the sweetest memories of my life is seeing my first born boy at about six months old grinning from his kingdom of dandelions many moons ago. (1975 to be exact!) In one case they were a beautiful field of precious yellow flowers. In another setting they are evil devil blooms I must eradicate.

:: But I find I do remember that melancholy little scene fairly often, usually when it’s late at night — as it is now — and I starting thinking about the open road, with all the promises and disappointments it embodies. The American mythology, Kerouac’s seductive road, along which you might reinvent yourself or find your true self. Or you might find nothing more than a lonely young man and a stray cat each hoping for a little company beneath the unearthly glare of a florescent light… (Posts like this are why I hope blogging never dies out completely.)

More next week!

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Saturday Centus

Wow — we get two hundred words this week! It’s like that episode of Seinfeld when Kramer adopts a highway, and decides that means he can make his highway all roomy and luxurious by removing the center stripe. Two hundred words! What luxury!

Anyway, it’s back to science fiction this time:

Norah looked down at the waves lapping gently at the base of the wall. Here, it seemed rather prosaic – almost Earthlike – but there were other places along this wall’s length where enormous waves, born from fathomless depths, smashed each day against the wall’s foundations with more force than any wave that had ever been recorded back on Earth.

“How old is the Wall, Professor?”

“The Wall was built long ago. Those who built it would be like gods to us.”

“Why did they build it?”

“No one knows.”

Why would they build such a thing? What possible use could there be for a wall running the entire length of a planet’s equator, restraining all of that world’s oceans to its northern hemisphere? The magnificent majesty of it! The sheer arrogance to attempt a construct like this, and the staggering skill to actually do it.

Back on her ship, Norah wept. The Wall was beautiful. But the Prophet of Mars had spoken:

“Only God may remake worlds.”

Norah pressed the detonator, and flew away without looking back as the oceans surged through a thousand breaches. God’s will be done – but she’d remember the Wall intact.

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Something for Thursday

Sticking with songs pertaining to all our fine local watering holes, here’s one of my favorite country songs. I’m not a big fan of the Oak Ridge Boys, but “Y’All Come Back Saloon” is really pretty terrific.

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