Today is National Pie Day, huzzah!
Sadly, this is also the day that the Captain and Tennille announced that they are divorcing, which I find quite a bummer. But I can tie that into National Pie Day, too:
Happy National Pie Day, folks!
Something for Thursday
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
A couple brief thoughts on “selfies”
I’ve been hearing and seeing a lot of discussion of the “selfie” phenomenon online the last few months. Selfies — self-photographs, for those not up on the lingo — have certainly become a lot more popular of late. I take my fair share myself, which is an odd development for someone who once loathed having his picture taken. Oh well.
I have a hard time seeing selfies as a bad thing, really. I think their explosion springs from a couple of sources: first, the fact that everyone now walks around with a camera on them at all times, thanks to their cell phones. I remember when cameras in phones was the newest thing, and now…aside from those cheap “Makes calls only” phones you see advertised in Parade Magazine — the cheap ones geared to people who literally don’t want to do anything other than make calls with their phones — do they even make standard phones without cameras in them? No idea. Anyway, a camera is no longer something you have to choose to take with you when you go someplace. It’s no longer a case of, “Hey, we’re going to Mount Rushmore today! Make sure you pack the camera!” So there’s that.
Secondly, I think that selfies are a natural reaction to something that was said of the Internet for years: that as a primarily text-driven medium, it was often hard to discern mood and temperament just via the words on the screen. A joking tone might be missed entirely, and getting to “know” someone without ever seeing their face always had an incomplete feeling. There was a layer of opacity, created by the Internet, through which it could be hard to really determine what a person was like. Not that everybody is pasting selfies to every thing they say, but I do think that as the Internet becomes more and more of a social thing — and by “Internet” I also mean all the various social networking doodads that are primarily used on mobile devices — it becomes easier and easier, and this more and more common, to include photos of oneself in one’s various interactions.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on selfies. Well, not quite: I’m not sure why more folks don’t use their camera app’s self-timers, opting instead to photograph their own mirrored reflections, I don’t understand the whole “duckface” thing, and really, when you think about it, “selfie” is a kind of goofy word. I think there’s a study to be done of the Internet’s tendency to reduce its lingo to the shortest possible words, often making up new words entirely if there’s not already a short-enough word to do the job.
And no, I’m not including a selfie in this post. Just because.
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Sentential Links
Linkage!
And it’s time to do something about it. Starting now. (I’ve been struggling with ditching guilt as well. I’m getting there!)
:: This man will be on the Justice League.
Blurry lines. Evil is very relative. (Wow….)
:: Rest is the key. The day is easier to face when rested. And I’ve spent years being unable to rest.
Rest and breathe. (SamuraiFrog is doing quite the service in his writings about anxiety, because he’s documenting what it’s really like to mount that battle. This is important. It really is. I salute his brave writing on the subject.)
More next week!
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The Most Beautiful Sight In Sports
Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!!!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Here’s a terrific post about a key scene in one of my favorite movies, Say Anything.
When people think of Say Anything…, the first thing that pops into their head tends to be the boombox scene. That’s understandable—grand romantic gestures are one of the things the movies do exceptionally well, in part because a movie can just cut away and ignore the less stirring aspects. As a thought experiment, try imagining how Lloyd Dobler’s “In Your Eyes” serenade must have ended. The camera dramatically tracks in on him standing there with the boombox held over his head, then moves on to the next scene. We never see the moment when he concludes Diane isn’t going to rush out and fling her arms around him, decides he’s stood there long enough, turns off the music, gets in his car, and drives back home. Now imagine that same moment from Diane’s perspective. See what editing accomplishes? In a way, though, grand gestures are easy. It’s taking the first step that’s truly difficult, and that difficulty is one of the many things that Say Anything…, in all its adorable awkwardness, gets exactly right.
I still consider Say Anything the finest teen romance film ever made.
And by the way, that post is part of a series called Scenic Routes that examines specific movie scenes. I haven’t read too much into it, but on the basis of the Say Anything post, it looks like there might be some nifty commentary there!
Also by the way: in the scene discussed above, my favorite touch is Lloyd’s ordering of his young nephew into the corner to remain silent while he makes The Most Important Phone Call Of His Life.
:: This looks neat. I won’t be doing this at Casa Jaquandor any time soon, though. I shudder to think what our two fat and dumb lummoxes would do to structures like this. Those of us who live our lives in the presence of cats well know how often the stereotype of cats as “graceful and elegant creatures” turns out to be completely untrue.
:: Last week, FOX Sports — I’m assuming as part of their coverage of the Seattle Seahawks’ playoff game — showed a bit of footage that turns out to be one of those ideas that’s so obvious that I can’t believe nobody ever thought to do it until now. The idea? Well, you know how at public markets and places where they sell really fresh fish, as in “right off the boat”, the workers will through whole fish to one another in a kind-of blue-collar seafood ballet? Well, someone actually attached a camera to the fish itself, so here’s what it’s like to be tossed about by fishmongers!
I first saw this here.
Stay weird and awesome, Internet! More next week!
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Symphony Saturday
And now, we come to the Colossus that overshadows pretty much the entire history of the symphony since he put his pen to paper: Ludwig van Beethoven, whose nine symphonies represent one of the greatest of all human artistic achievements. I’m not going to feature all nine in this space — we’ll just do four, over this and the next three weeks. And where else to start than Beethoven’s beginning, his Symphony No. 1 in C Major.
At this point, Beethoven is still very much the Good Little Classicist, still standing firmly in the tradition of Mozart and Haydn, which is why this symphony clocks in at a nice and respectable 25 minutes. You can already hear hints of the independent streak that will lead Beethoven in deeply original and fascinating directions, such as his substitution of a forceful scherzo for the usual minuet. He hasn’t quite started to quite push against the boundaries yet, but you can tell that the boundaries won’t hold him back. This genial work is where it starts.
Pay special attention to the opening of the fourth movement, which is one of my favorite moments in all of classical music. Beethoven has the orchestra flirt with the major scale, making the music sound almost tentative, as if the orchestra itself isn’t sure of what to do — and then they hit on one of Beethoven’s most effervescent melodies as all the confidence comes flooding back. It’s one of the most charming moments in music I know, and it stands against the usual stereotypical picture of Beethoven as the moody genius shaking his fist at the heavens.
A special word about the performances I will be using for the Beethoven portion of this feature: they are all taken from the complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies performed at the BBC Proms concerts in 2012, with Daniel Barenboim conducting the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. This group is a youth orchestra comprised of students of Middle-Eastern background, and it was created not so much to promote peace as to demonstrate the kind of cooperative effort that is the true basis for peace. Maestro Barenboim has said of the orchestra:
The Divan is not a love story, and it is not a peace story. It has very flatteringly been described as a project for peace. It isn’t. It’s not going to bring peace, whether you play well or not so well. The Divan was conceived as a project against ignorance. A project against the fact that it is absolutely essential for people to get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it. I’m not trying to convert the Arab members of the Divan to the Israeli point of view, and [I’m] not trying to convince the Israelis to the Arab point of view. But I want to – and unfortunately I am alone in this now that Edward [Edward Said, Barenboim’s partner in forming the orchestra] died a few years ago – …create a platform where the two sides can disagree and not resort to knives.
I don’t know to what degree an orchestra can help foster peace, but this is a wonderful orchestra. Their sound and musicianship is as professional as any I’ve heard. More on the orchestra’s background here.
Next week: Beethoven Unchained!
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Instaweek
Something for Thursday
I’ve been a bit heavy on the orchestral stuff of late, and I imagine I’ll continue in that vein as the year goes by; I seem to be in a real mode of rediscovery of my love of orchestral music. But that doesn’t mean I won’t mix in other genres on occasion, such as today, when we have a bit of prog rock. I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I enjoy prog rock, although I don’t have nearly as much of it in my collection as you might think. I do respond to the long-form music, the dramatic gestures, and the focus on poetry and sheer scale in prog rock. Pop tunes are nice, but I love to lose myself in a good prog rock album.
Such an album is Steven Wilson’s The Raven Who Refused To Sing, which came out last year. Wilson is the lead singer of a group called Porcupine Tree, but he also has a vivid solo career, and this album is a part of that. It’s a stunner of an album, grabbing right from the very beginning with a couple of percussive guitar riffs before settling into the album’s epic first track, which is quite the epic track indeed: by turns fast and driving, slow and meditative, hard-rocking and jazz inspired. This sets the tone for the album’s hour-long running time, which is as cohesive and coherent a rock album experience as I’ve heard in years. I can’t recommend this album highly enough.
Here’s “Luminol”, the first track from The Raven That Refused To Sing.