Everybody has done the ‘fitness’ thing at one point or other. What’s an exercise regimen, diet, or activity that you tried, thinking you’d like it, only to discover that you…didn’t?
A Vignette
This is something I’m going to try doing on a somewhat regular basis, as a bit of writing practice, since I always feel that my descriptions could use some work….
I was working a shit job at the time. A warehouse job. I lasted four days before they showed me the door, but I remember that guy.
Four days, I don’t think That Guy changed his outfit once. White button-down Oxford shirt, tucked into navy blue dress pants (but a cheap brand). White sneakers that matched his shirt. And a navy blue windbreaker that matched his pants. There were two bulges in the windbreaker: his enormous key ring in the outer pocket, and the rectangle of a pack of cigarettes in the inner one.
That Guy was short and potbellied. His hair was white and was the most perfectly-combed hair in history. He had to use some kind of product.
I have no idea what his job was. I only saw him walk around the warehouse, constantly muttering under his breath, in a thick Italian accent. There was one phrase that he used, over and over and over and over again: “Alla that shit”. It was like a mantra for him: “Alla that shit. Alla that shit. Alla that shit.” Once in a while he’d stop and talk to the dude I was working with – never addressing me a single time – and he’d point and say “Move alla that shit”. It was never clear what, exactly, he was pointing to. One time he came back an hour later and said, “Didja move alla that shit?”
Dude I worked with said, “Sure did.”
That Guy looked, grunted with approval, and then waved in some other direction. “Start workin’ on alla that shit.” And then he walked off.
Of course we hadn’t moved a single thing.
Yeah, I remember That Guy.
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A to Z: Nielsen
I like randomness in music. It’s fun to hear works that are literally different each and every time they are played. Of course, there’s a sense in which all works are different each and every time they are played; the exact combination of tempi and specific blend of instrumental or vocal sonorities can never be matched perfectly, but true randomness in music is something that came along with the Modern era: improvisational works, experimental works that use random elements to determine their course, and so on.
One work that employs a random element to startlingly amazing degree is Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5. This work is not atonal, but it is most certainly modern in its sound, approach to even a traditional kind of harmony, and its treatment of melodic material. The symphony is in two movements, and the overwhelming feeling when listening to the work is one of strife and of the orchestra’s efforts to surmount it. It’s almost as if Nielsen’s score is trying to elevate itself above the violent concerns of our world.
This comes to the fore in the second section of the first of the Symphony’s two movements. It sounds like a traditional slow movement at first, but the clouds quickly gather, and then the random strife shows up in the form of the instructions given to the snare drummer. The snare is directed to improvise, wildly and loudly, more and more insistently, as if trying to disrupt the music entirely. The rest of the orchestra swells and swells, even as the snare drum thrashes about, until finally the orchestra overwhelms the percussionist. The effect is one of the most thrilling uses of improvisatory randomness I know.
Carl Nielsen was born and lived in Denmark, and he is generally considered the finest Danish composer. His work is partly a natural evolution of the classically Romantic approach of Brahms and Grieg, but he soon struck out in his own direction, so much so that Nielsen always strikes me as a late-Romantic, early-Modern analog of Hector Berlioz, in that he was a brilliant orchestrator whose music isn’t the easiest to crack into and whose approach can seem indulgent, but who is, in the end, deeply moving and involving.
Here is Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5.
Tomorrow: A side-trip…to Japan!
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On keeping perspective
A good article by Bruce Schneier:
As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something — anything — to keep us safe.
It’d be easy, but it’d be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators’ hands — and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.
It’s hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people — far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random — in this case involving an innocent child — senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.
But our brains are fooling us. Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That’s the very definition of news: something that is unusual — in this case, something that almost never happens.
Remember after 9/11 when people predicted we’d see these sorts of attacks every few months? That never happened, and it wasn’t because the TSA confiscated knives and snow globes at airports. Give the FBI credit for rolling up terrorist networks and interdicting terrorist funding, but we also exaggerated the threat. We get our ideas about how easy it is to blow things up from television and the movies. It turns out that terrorism is much harder than most people think. It’s hard to find willing terrorists, it’s hard to put a plot together, it’s hard to get materials, and it’s hard to execute a workable plan. As a collective group, terrorists are dumb, and they make dumb mistakes; criminal masterminds are another myth from movies and comic books.
Meantime, stop reading the news. It doesn’t help.
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Thoughts of Boston
I dearly love this city…honeymooned here…and it will always be Boston! #Boston #BostonForever, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.
Even though I haven’t been there in 16 years, I have a lot of fine memories of Boston.
Honeymooning there with my new Wife (still my current Wife). Shopping at Quincy Market, the Science Museum, the New England Aquarium. Boston Common. Seafood. Traditional dim sum in Chinatown (meaning, the kind of dim sum place where they wheel around the food on carts).
:: I remember construction everywhere when we were there. It was the Big Dig, as they called it. What a mess.
I remember walking into a store and having a clerk say, “How are you, ladies?” We had our back to her, and she saw two long-haired folks. (The Wife had long hair then.)
I also went there as a kid several summers in a row, from 1982 to 1985 or so, because my father had annual computer courses he took…someplace. I remember doing a lot of hoofing around downtown Boston with my mother and sister. We tracked down Paul Revere’s grave, and later that same day, his house (with the help of the single nicest cop I’ve ever met). I remember Old North Church, and walking from the Science Museum to the USS Constitution. On that particular walk, we went past a brownstone on the doorstep of which was the first passed-out drunk I ever saw, the empty bottle on the ground just out of reach of his fingertips. I always wondered if he drained it, or if it ran out where it fell as he collapsed.
I remember clam chowder…at McDonald’s. I remember falling in love with public transportation in general and trains in particular. I remember the paddleboats, Faneuil Hall, and a restaurant called the Magic Pan.
Boston is a great city — it was today before the bombings, and it is today after them.
I just wanted to say that.
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A to Z: Messiaen
I haven’t heard much of Olivier Messiaen’s music. I have a recording of his massive Turangalila Symphony that I haven’t played in well over a decade, and I’m not sure I’ve ever owned a recording of the work on tap for today, the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, or in English, Quartet for the End of Time. But I have heard this piece before, so it’s not entirely new to me.
But it sounds entirely new, because this is one of those pieces that you probably have to study closely to really tease out what’s going on. It’s not an easy work, by any means. As a Quartet, it’s obvious that the work is scored for four musicians, but it’s not a string quartet. Instead, it’s scored for a clarinet, a violin, a cello, and a piano. That’s a very odd grouping, to be sure, and it’s partly that which creates this work’s very unusual sound.
Messiaen, as did many of the greatest 20th century composers, tended to engage in a lot of experimentation, going well beyond traditional thought on melody, harmony, and form. He was an incredibly academic composer, in the best sense of the word; he was influenced by travels and studies that took him all over the world. Thus Messiaen’s music is almost truly world music. You can’t pin Messiaen into any simple nationalistic compositional school.
The Quartet for the End of Time has one of the most amazing stories behind its genesis that I’ve ever heard, and I’ll just go ahead and quote Wikipedia here:
Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered World War II. He was captured by the German army in June 1940 and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany (now Zgorzelec, Poland). While in transit to the camp, Messiaen showed the clarinetist Henri Akoka, also a prisoner, the sketches for what would become Abîme des oiseaux. Two other professional musicians, violinist Jean le Boulaire and cellist Étienne Pasquier, were among his fellow prisoners, and after he managed to obtain some paper and a small pencil from a sympathetic guard, Messiaen wrote a short trio for them; this piece developed into the Quatuor for the same trio with himself at the piano. The combination of instruments is unusual, but not without precedent:Walter Rabl had composed for it in 1896, as had Paul Hindemith in 1938.
The quartet was premiered at the camp, outdoors and in the rain, on January 15, 1941. The musicians had decrepit instruments and an audience of about 400 fellow prisoners and guards.[1]Messiaen later recalled: “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.”
It’s a difficult, modern work – but it’s also an unmistakably human one, an elegiac meditation on the nature of the Apocalypse. Here is the Quartet for the End of Time.
Tomorrow: to Denmark we go!
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Remember to delurk, all you lurker-type folks!
Sentential Links
Again, I’m going to rely on the master list of A-to-Z blogging participants for this week’s linkage. Check them out! There’s a lot of good stuff being done out there in Blogistan. Anyone who says that blogging is dead isn’t paying attention, and anyone who ignores personal blogs is losing out on a lot of great insight and writing.
Links!
:: HWMMS: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaa! (Electric flickers.)
Me: (LEAPING FROM THE COUCH therefore spilling my glass of water all over the remote controls, which apparently is more important than the fact I thought my Husband just got electrocuted and I need to learn to be more careful.)
:: Follow your writer’s dream; do everything within your power to make it come true. (Good advice! I shall now track down every agent I’ve queried and kidnap their dogs and/or children, with a representation deal as ransom!
No, I won’t do that. Sheesh.)
:: The letter L makes me think of South America. That’s became of Fernando Lamas, and llamas . . . and my old Roger Corman buddy, Lucho Llosa. (This blogger is doing A-to-Z on Roger Corman. That…is…awesome.)
:: One of the advantages and frustrations of being a writer is how little people in your own family actually read what you write. Today, it is an advantage. It means I can write about my oldest child. (What a lovely tribute!)
More next week!
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The sun will come out, tomorrow! Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be ETERNAL DAMNATION!!!!
NOOOO!!!!!
Here’s what transpired:
1. I learn of the existence of a BBC show called Sherlock.
2. I hear good things about the BBC show called Sherlock and make a mental note that it could serve well for viewing when our regular teevee shows are in reruns or hiatuses (should that be ‘hiati’? Look that up, self….).
3. In January all our shows go to hiatus or in reruns, so we need something to watch.
4. I say, “Hey dear, there’s a show I heard of called Sherlock. It’s apparently Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, simply moved into the modern day. I hear it’s really good. Wanna try it?” She says sure, so off we go.
5. I notice that the first episode is 90 minutes, roughly.
6. I discover that the second episode is also 90 minutes. Wow, BBC shows must be really long! And there are two entire seasons to watch! This ought to take a while.
7. I learn that each of those two seasons has exactly three episodes, and that having watched three episodes, we are halfway through the existing series.
8. I react accordingly, below the fold.
KHAAANNNN!!!!