A couple of weeks ago I happened upon this blog by an Islamic cleric by sheer, random chance. It was one of the “Ten Most Recently Updated” blogs listed on the Blogger main page when I logged on. You never know what jewels you’re going to find amongst the personal diary/juvenilia blogs.
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John Hardy is always posting fascinating stuff, of which this post about Japanese sword lore is especially notable.
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I’m back in the game again: after a cooling-off period, during which I waited for all still-extant rejection slips to wend their way through the United States Postal Service to my door (two of which had to go through not one but two forwardings), I’m sending four stories out today. (Actually, one went out last night as an e-sub.) One of these damn things has to sell sometime.
I also finished the book I wasn’t liking very much last night. I’ll probably write the review either tomorrow or Wednesday, hopefully for inclusion in next week’s edition of GMR. This means that I can finally embark on my “Short Fiction Month” later today. I am going to offset the Short Fic Month so as to run into June. (And it now occurs to me that we’re heading into that time of year when the “Best Of 2002” anthologies should start showing up in bookstores.)
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It occurs to me that I should read up a bit on linguistics and etymology, since I love language and since I am attempting to become a Writer (as opposed to a small-w writer, which is a person who writes but doesn’t get paid). Anyway, a couple of recent observations from the lingual district of Blogistan are on tap.
:: I’m sure I’ve indicated before that I find blog to be, itself, an ugly word. I just don’t like it, and I deliberately avoided using it in the early days of Byzantium’s Shores. I would use euphemisms like “e-journal” and such. I’ve since accepted the word, even though I still don’t like it and even though I still question its necessity in the first place. But now I see some other words used to describe blog-related technical processes that just make me wince.
For instance: the RSS service I signed up for last week refers to its software “scraping” its registered blogs for new content. I’m sorry, but this just sounds like a medical procedure to me, and not a very pleasant one.
“Now, Mr. Simpson, please take these pills so we can start the procedure. You won’t feel a thing. We just need to…scrape your blog.”
“Ewwwww! Are you sure that won’t hurt?”
“Not at all. Please take the pills.”
“What are they?”
“Ten thousand milligrams of ibuprofen.”
:: But I have to say, this one I like. It’s a new bit of political slang, and I find it just hilarious. I wish I knew who coined it, but its genesis is in the liberal annoyance that so much ink has been spilled over the last decade about the sexual exploits of Bill Clinton. The word?
The Clenis. (Example in context.)
This word is often followed by a TM symbol, to signify that it’s virtually become its own trademark.
:: This is an old one, actually, but I don’t like the sound of “skins”. (As in, “Download some new skins for your browser”.) For some reason, I inevitably think of going out and killing a beaver or something similar and then decorating my computer with its pelt.
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Oh, and speaking of the “$374K-a-year, Top One Percent” thing — I’m no expert on economics and I’m not particularly inclined to work through all the math on my own (yeah, I’m lazy that way — it’s not that I’m bad at math, but when it comes to math I’m not very patient at all). So, as income disparity grows and more and more of our nation’s wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, would it not follow that if these trends are allowed to proceed unchecked, than that $374K/year figure will actually go up? In other words, is the cut-off line for the Top One Percent going to keep going up?
I’m wondering because if someone manages to move from, say, $65K/year to $150K/year over ten years or so, but the Top One Percent figure rises disproportionally as well — actually, I’m not sure exactly what that would mean. If anything. Any ideas, anyone?
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The other day I bitched eloquently expressed my annoyance at the removal of composer Alan Silvestri from the upcoming film Pirates of the Caribbean. In so doing, I realized that I haven’t listened to much of Silvestri’s music lately, so I did a bit of “crash listening”.
Silvestri is generally viewed as a “B-level” composer. He’s not one of the masters, like John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith, but he’s a solid professional who always turns it good work which is generally very accessible but also has more of a distinctive voice than some of the duller composers working today. I think that viewing Silvestri as a “B-level” guy sells him a bit short; it implies that what he does isn’t as good as the greats, whereas I think what he does is a bit different. Thus, if Williams and Goldsmith are the Wagner and Verdi of film music today, I see Silvestri not as a Bellini (a second-rate guy) but as a Sir Arthur Sullivan (a first-rate guy who’s not doing hugely profound work by design and intent).
Silvestri’s work tends toward pastiche, mainly because a lot of the films on which he works tend toward pastiche. But pastiche isn’t something on which we should a priori discount or look down upon; and it’s my view that when Silvestri is allowed to go beyond pastiche (which isn’t all that often, admittedly) he can hold his own with anyone. So here’s a general rundown on the Silvestri scores with which I’m most familiar. This is not exhaustive, but I think it captures most of his biggest profile scores.
:: Romancing the Stone. This was the first of Silvestri’s scores that I recall noticing. It’s notable for its use of Latin-American sounds, reflecting the film’s setting of Colombia, as opposed to the more “Korngold-esque” style of adventure scoring.
:: Back to the Future, I, II, and III. Silvestri’s work on this trilogy is actually pretty interesting. It’s known best for the main BTTF theme, which is a big, brassy melody that’s most often scored as a march and motif for Marty McFly’s adventures. However, the trilogy’s wide-range between time periods allows Silvestri to indulge in 50s style madcap comedy stylings, sci-fi adventure, and even Western-style Americana. It’s all in great fun, even if the BTTF theme gets a bit repetitive.
:: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Here Silvestri does pastiche-to-the-max, what with his take on comic noir, cartoons, jazzy hard-boiled romance, and more just plain madcap foolery. He breaks absolutely no new ground in this score, but with this much fun being had, he doesn’t need to.
:: The Abyss. While Silvestri is best known for his long-standing relationship with director Robert Zemeckis, this score to James Cameron’s undersea SF thriller is one of my favorites. I love how Silvestri is able to suggest the unknown vastness of the world beneath the sea, capturing both the fear and the wonder down there. The action writing isn’t his best – serviceable, but not particularly notable – but the other stuff is gold. (And it’s my firmly held opinion that The Abyss is far, far superior to Aliens, a film whose near-classic status I find incomprehensible.)
:: The Bodyguard. Yes, it had an Alan Silvestri score. This film isn’t just the source of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”, which held sway as the Most Overplayed Song In History between 1992 and 1997 (when “My Heart Will Go On” seized that title). Here Silvestri wrote some noirish, bluesy music that I’m not sure was ever released on CD.
:: Forrest Gump. Silvestri really indulged his penchant for Americana in this film (which I still like, even though it’s probably the most hated Best Picture in history). The score is one of Silvestri’s most accessible works, full of melodies that are mostly characterized by simplicity, as befits the film’s main character. There are two soundtrack albums for Forrest Gump: one features Silvestri’s score, and the other is the song-compilation album (I will have more to say about song-compilation albums in another essay, someday.) The song-comp CD includes a suite of Silvestri’s music, which basically consists of the suite he wrote for the film’s end credits with a prelude of Forrest’s Theme, played mostly on the piano before the strings swell and take it over. This is my favorite of all of Silvestri’s melodies. I love how it offsets with the gently syncopated piano background, and I love how the piano continues to elaborate on the theme and provide background coloring even when the strings take over. As for the rest of the score, it’s pretty much mainstream Silvestri, and that End Credits suite actually covers pretty much all of it.
:: Contact. My favorite of all of Alan Silvestri’s film scores. This one is deceptive, sounding much simpler than it really is. In fact, if one listens to the End Credits suite from Contact immediately after listening to the same suite from Forrest Gump, one might initially think that Silvestri has fallen victim to the James Horner self-quoting trap. But the differences quickly become apparent, as the main Contact theme (Ellie Arroway’s theme, I suppose) is punctuated by soft horn calls that imply, to my ears, Ellie’s constant wishing for the stars. And there are passages in this score that capture the “Sense of cosmic wonder” that dominated everything Carl Sagan ever wrote (he wrote the original novel on which Contact is based). There is also some excellent suspense music, accompanying the scene where the alien transmission is first received. Silvestri builds the suspense nicely, but without loud histrionics; this befits the conflicting impulses in the SETI researchers (“Oh God, I think we’ve found it!” versus “Oh God, this can’t be it.”) This probably sounds trite, but Silvestri’s score to Contact always makes me want to go off into a field and look up at the night sky.
:: Castaway. Silvestri and Zemeckis took a chance on this one: they left a great deal of the film totally unscored. There is virtually no music in most of the film, and all of the island sequences are unscored. The music only really starts up again when Tom Hanks finally gets off the island on his raft. At that moment, Hanks has done everything in his power, and now he is putting his fate in other hands. Thus, the music of the film is quasi-religious in nature. It isn’t specifically liturgical, but I find it has a very solemn, hymnic feel. There’s not a lot more I can say about it.
The largest-profile score of Silvestri’s with which I am unfamiliar is The Mummy Returns. I have heard that it is an excellent adventure-film score, but I have also heard the complaint that anyone who has dipped into film scores at all will know: “They left the best part off the CD!” (That’s another issue I’ll delve into some other time.) Silvestri also wrote music for the TV series CHiPS. The wacky music you remember from those chases on the LA Freeway system, and the goofy stuff that accompanied those freeze-frames of everybody grinning at the end of every episode? Yep, Silvestri. But don’t hold it against him. Everybody starts out somewhere.
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I’m pretty sure that my mother has no idea that I write this blog, so I’m not going to use this space to observe Mother’s Day in her honor. But I will thank all of your mothers, who raised you all to have such discriminating taste as to read Byzantium’s Shores. And now, as Yoda said: Pass on what you have learned! Save you, it can!
ummm….yeah….
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Wow….first posts on atheism, and now SDB is once again spanking Apple Computer. It’s like old times over on USS Clueless!!