Uh-oh, Sean is not going to like this. Wow.

(Scroll down to the fourth news item on the page.)

Share This Post

Addendum to my post about yesterday’s NFL games below: according to some NFL big-wig, the refs really did blow the call at the end of the 49ers-Giants game. Apparently the receiver really was eligible, so it really was pass-interference; and apparently the holder on the kick really couldn’t have spiked the ball, because spiking is only allowed on a direct snap from the center and not on a long-snap.

What seems weird to me is that you can apparently report to the refs before the game, and say that you will line up as an eligible receiver on all field goals. I guess that was the Giants’ safety valve all along, but if that was the case, why didn’t Jim Fassel make a huge stink about it as the game ended?

Share This Post

Kudos to author John Scalzi, who serialized a novel on the Web some time back — and just had it picked up for publication by TOR Books, courtesy of editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

There is an unspoken assumption about written fiction appearing on the Web: that it is somehow inferior product that was not good enough to make it into the traditional print markets. This is certainly not true in all cases, and I’m not remotely equipped to even say if it’s true in most cases. I suspect that it’s not totally true: while Sturgeon’s Law almost certainly applies, and while the exact percentage might be skewed a bit — say, 93% crud as opposed to the classically-ordained 90% — it seems to me that there must be professional quality work out there, somewhere. (I’m talking about work posted directly to the Web, at the author’s expense. I’m not talking about pay-markets that exist on the Web, some of which are fairly good if not excellent.)

Some creators — notably those working with comics, like Scott McCloud — have been speculating on the future of the Web as a “post-publishing industry” alternative, where creators will be able to place their work directly in front of the eyes of their audiences without having to go through a “middleman”. Some people view file-sharing utilities such as Napster or KaZaA in this light. Other creators, though, post their work to the Web for more prosaic reasons: it’s been rejected everywhere else. This second camp is primarily responsible for the view of Web-content as being second-rate content, although the history of publishing — indeed, of art in general — is replete with examples of works rejected many, many times before finally catching on, somehow, somewhere. This is what Scalzi has done.

The only fiction of mine that I have posted to Byzantium’s Shores is a small sample from the first chapter of my novel-in-progress, and a very short story I wrote (and didn’t much like) in the wake of 9-11-01. (Links to these items can be found at left, under “Notable Dispatches”.) I posted them for different reasons, and I haven’t yet considered posting much more of my fiction here, because some of my stories are still at market and will be for some time. A while back, though, I did consider doing a serial project on the Web in a blog format. It was going to be a space opera, and I even wrote the first chapter of it and have it on my hard drive even now. I also tinkered a bit with the design for the weblog I would have used to create the thing, even selecting a few stellar photographs from some online repositories of Hubble Space Telescope images for a masthead. The story has tugged at my mind more than a little since then, and I’ve actually worked out some of the background in my mind. (In truth, a lot of the background would have been pilfered from another, older project that I am certain will never see the light of day except for a certain devious soul who lives in Washington, DC. He knows who he is….) But, I’ve waffled as to whether or not to undertake the actual project.

I’ve waffled in part because of the “two many directions at once” factor. After all, I do a lot of writing for Byzantium’s Shores, I have a novel on the front burner that is constantly simmering if not outright boiling, and there is always a short story or novelet going as well. I didn’t want to spread myself too thin by adding a serial work to the mix.

Additionally, there are other considerations pertaining to such a project that I haven’t really thought out. How should I approach such a work? I’ve considered doing it as an open-ended story, with no definite resolution in mind, rather like an ongoing comic book without the images; I’ve also considered the reverse, doing it as a definitively-planned story. Then there are problems of structure and point-of-view, which are also important concerns. Foremost here is the nature of the Web: most experts on such matters will tell you that, when posting text to the Web, “shorter is better”; we are told to keep it direct and to the point, with posts restricted to easily-digestible lengths. But then, considering the many sites out there that seem to generate high amounts of traffic despite consistent violation of the “shorter is better” dictum, perhaps this isn’t as much a concern as I’ve been thinking.

So…I don’t know. I like the story that’s in my mind, but I’m not sure if a Web-serial would be the way to go. We’ll see.

Share This Post

It’s funny to see the things I post, most of the time as a throw-away thought, that end up bringing a bunch of hits from search-engine results. Such is the case with my brief mention last week of the NFL playoff commercials, featuring actor Don Cheadle. I’m assuming that people are looking for a place online to view these ads. I’ve looked too, and I haven’t found them yet. If anyone locates them, I hope you drop me a line.

As for the football games themselves, this was a hell of a weekend. We had history, on several fronts: the second and fourth largest playoff comebacks in history, the Packers’ first ever playoff loss at home, the latest chapter in the miserable history of the Cleveland Browns, what is sure to be the first of many Michael Vick playoff games, and Jeff Garcia’s coming of age in San Francisco. All that, and a pretty impressive old-fashioned blow-out to kick it all off.

:: I’ve noted at several points this year that home-field advantage in the AFC is an almost guarantee of not making it to the Super Bowl. The way the Jets are playing, I think that the Raiders may learn this the hard way. I’m not sure when the last 9-7 team went to the Super Bowl, but the Jets could very well do it. I certainly think they’re capable of beating any of the three teams still alive in the AFC.

:: I finally got to watch Michael Vick play, and he is definitely impressive. His improvisational style of play reminds me of Steve Young in his prime and Randall Cunningham early in his career, in the way he very quickly scans the field and, if his receivers aren’t open, he takes off. But Vick is more physically gifted — by several factors — than Young or Cunningham, which makes him even more dangerous than those guys were when they went on the run. As long as no conservative coach comes in and tries to force Vick into being a pocket-quarterback, he could end up being one of the most exciting players in years.

:: There’s not much I can say about the Steelers-Browns game or the 49ers-Giants game that hasn’t been said elsewhere, except to note the lack of fundamentals that doomed the Browns and Giants. In the former case, it was the lack of a running game and therefore the ability to control the game’s tempo. In the latter case, of course it was the multi-faceted botching of that field goal attempt. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen more fundamental breakdowns on a single play: you had a bad snap, a holder who forgot that he could have just spiked the thing to get another shot, and ineligible men downfield. On the FOX postgame show the Giants were pretty well roasted for the breakdown on that play, but Jimmy Johnson had the best comments when he noted that the “ineligible receiver” penalty didn’t involve a single lineman, as is usually the case, but four or five guys who should have known better.

:: I don’t recall the exact date, but it’s fitting that the 49ers’ and Steelers’ comebacks yesterday fell roughly on the tenth anniversary of the greatest NFL comeback of all time, when the Buffalo Bills rallied from a 35-3 third-quarter deficit to beat Houston in OT, 41-38. That game was played in the wild-card round in January, 1993.

:: A few stats from Sunday’s two games are in order. The four teams scored a combined 19 touchdowns, with only 5 of those being rushing TDs. The four quarterbacks were a combined 84 for 178, 1469 yards, 13 touchdowns, and 5 interceptions. These four gentlemen, each of whom played valiantly, combined for a passer rating of 133.5. (Results courtesy this calculator.)

What a weekend.

Share This Post

Good God, here we go again.

I find it hard enough coming to grips with the idea of a Timothy McVeigh or an Osama Bin Laden — a person who has come to the belief that killing large numbers of innocent people, possibly killing oneself in the process, is a viable means of attaining one’s desired political or spiritual goals. But I’m truly at a loss for words — nay, rational thought — when I consider the fact that an entire culture of Palestinians has apparently drawn the same conclusion. To hear stories in the news of murder and horrible pain, of shrapnel and glass and blood in the streets, of the slain being people buying coffee and hopping the bus to work and eating lunch…and then to hear of the murderers being called “martyrs”, to see their deeds painted in heroic light, and to listen to a Paletinian spokesman condemning “Israeli aggression”…I end up wondering not at the continuing “cycle of violence” (with the feet on the pedals being, so far as I can tell, exclusively Palestinian), but at the fact of Israel’s continuous restraint.

I’ve always believed in space exploration and colonization, but it’s things like this that make me almost agree with George Carlin when he dismisses the notion with the sarcastic rejoinder: “Yeah, I’ll bet the rest of the Universe just can’t wait for us to show up.”

Share This Post

Now that 2002 is gone, it’s time for my yearly recap of my film music collecting activity over the past year, concentrating on the best new things to enter my collection. In past years I’ve posted this article to the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.movies, but this year I am inflicting it upon the blogosphere.

Disclaimer Number One: I have always believed that seeing the film is not essential to enjoyment and appreciation of a film score. Good film music should be good music first, and good music by definition can stand alone.

Disclaimer Number Two: This is not a summation of film scores for films released in 2002, but a summation of film scores I acquired in 2002, no matter what year the film came out.

:: John Williams, 2002. I always start my summation with Williams, because he is the composer who launched my fascination with film music that began in 1980 when I used my allowance, saved over a number of weeks, to buy the double-LP of the soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back. Williams is the composer to whose music I most often return and whose work I still most anticipate, although I now feel that he is on the back side of a remarkable career. Of course, that is a statement that requires qualification: it sounds bad to say that a baseball player’s average has dropped thirty points over the last five years, but if he was hitting .387 five years ago, that means he’s still hitting pretty well.

Williams opened 2002 by conducting the premiere performance of his theme for the 2002 Winter Olympics, at the opening ceremonies, on his seventieth birthday. That’s a hell of a way to spend one’s birthday, to be sure, and Williams’s entire 2002 had that same whirlwind quality, with no fewer than four new film scores appearing, along with several new releases of his concert works and the news that he is composing an opera commissioned by Placido Domingo. I haven’t yet heard Williams’s score to Minority Report, but I’ve heard good things about it. His newest score is Catch Me If You Can, which is enjoyable if light; Williams was a jazz musician before becoming a classically-motivated film composer, and that jazz knowledge comes into play in Catch Me…. The score album is entertaining, and the score sounds like a hybrid of Williams’s typical sound and the sound James Horner applied in his score to Sneakers.

Less successful is his effort for the second Harry Potter film, for which he had a collaborator. I did not buy the CD; instead, I listened to the album via a streaming audio that AOL provided before its release, and I found it overly reliant on the themes from the original film (themes that I never found all that compelling to begin with) and some new material that sounded recycled from earlier Williams scores, such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The best Williams score this year, and perhaps the best film score of the year as far as I have heard (although there are some highly-regarded ones that I haven’t heard yet) is Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Williams doesn’t break much new ground here, but he begins to blend the sound he developed in the 1990s – primarily with scores like Nixon — with the sound of the classic trilogy, with fascinating results. The main contribution of this score to the Star Wars musical world is the love theme for Anakin and Padme, a ravishing minor-key variation on his original Star Wars main theme. The score’s action music is also wonderful, although it’s taken me a long time to decide that I do, in fact, like it. There was some consternation in film music circles when the film’s final third turned out to be mostly scored with music tracked in from Williams’s score to The Phantom Menace, but this didn’t bother me that much – the music, as used, worked well (except for one notable use of Yoda’s Theme at a point when such makes no dramatic sense at all). That said, I do wish that the film’s final battle scenes could have been completed in time for Williams to actually compose new battle music, but the compromise brokered here is not remotely the disaster that many film music fans think it is.

I should also mention an old Williams score that saw new, and much deserved, light this year: his score to the 1970s horror film The Fury. This brooding, scary music is excellent work indeed from Williams’s greatest period (the late 1970s and early 1980s), and this score, combined with his Dracula and some of the darker cues for Close Encounters of the Third Kind make me wish he would get to score another full-fledged horror film.

:: I had another good year for collecting the filmscores of Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, who is best known for his scores to Hayao Miyazaki’s wonderful anime films. I missed out, unfortunately, on seeing Spirited Away — it only played here for a week, and we simply couldn’t get free that week to see it. Grumble, grumble…and wait for the video. I did get the score album, though, and it is a delight, full of Hisaishi’s wonderful ability to combine a Japanese folk sound with Western orchestral colors. The other Hisaishi scores I acquired this year are Kiki’s Delivery Service, which has a lot less Japanese color (appropriate to the film’s setting in an unnamed European city) and the Symphonic arrangement of his score to Laputa: Castle In the Sky. (It’s a common practice with anime-related filmscores to have multiple releases, one featuring the actual music tracks from the film and one featuring a rearrangement of the film’s music into longer suites, called “symphonic albums”. These symphonic albums are always welcome, but the OST albums are not to be discounted. Where money is not a factor, a listener is well-advised to acquire both.) Both Kiki and Laputa are treasures. Most of Hisaishi’s music is only available on fairly expensive import CDs (Spirited Away is a welcome exception), so collecting him involves something of an investment. But I’ve never spent the money on a Hisaishi score and not felt I was getting my money’s worth.

(News this week is that Hayao Miyazaki is already at work on another film, which means another Hisaishi score sometime in the future.)

:: The other huge name in film music today is Jerry Goldsmith. I found his newest score, Star Trek Nemesis, to be a huge disappointment, and I enjoyed delving in Goldsmith’s past more. An expanded edition of his wonderful score to the Ah-nuld SF flick Total Recall came out this year, and it’s a highly enjoyable effort, both exciting in its action parts and evocative of the “sense of wonder” that is SF’s most important, but also most elusive, quality. Goldsmith’s more important achievement this year, though, was his weathering of a fairly serious illness.

:: Important work continues on restoring and releasing the classic, and sadly neglected, film music of yesteryear. In many cases, the original tracks are being unearthed in the vaults of the major studios – the ones who care about such things, anyway; some studios are apparently totally uninterested in such things, and are allowing the tapes to dissolve into that vinegary sludge that old magnetic tapes become – and remastered for the digital age. The best such release, from my point of view, is Miklos Rozsa’s score to the Biblical epic, King of Kings. Other Rozsa releases this year include the original tracks to Ivanhoe (the music to which was done admirable service in a fine rerecording by Intrada a few years back) and Lust For Life.

Where original tracks are no longer available, a secondary possibility lies in making a new recording entirely with a modern orchestra from the original score. Rerecordings sometimes take a back seat with film music collectors, but if film music is good music and ergo can stand alone, then it follows that, like classical music, film music can stand up to different interpretations by different conductors. Rerecordings are also frequently the only way to make the music available to modern audiences, and are especially valuable on that basis. I don’t own the recording yet, but I have been told that the new Chandos recording of the film music by great English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of the finest such recordings to come down the pike in some time. I look forward to getting this one.

Rerecordings, though, like recordings of classical works are not always perfect. My biggest film music disappointment of the year was in the recording of Erich Wolfgang Korngold scores conducted by Andre Previn. Korngold’s music has long been near-and-dear to my heart, with its brilliant orchestrations, sweeping melodies, blazing fanfares and excitement evident in nearly every bar. Sadly, Previn leads the London Symphony Orchestra in a bass-heavy recording that blunts the impact of Korngold’s great brass writing, and he selects tempi that are invariably too slow to allow the music to really take flight. Most unforgivably, Previn omits the male chorus (“Strike For the Shores of Dover”) from The Sea Hawk, an omission that makes absolutely no sense. The nearly thirty-year old rerecordings of this material made by conductor Charles Gerhard are still the gold standard here. Previn is a great conductor, and he has a great deal of Broadway and Hollywood experience as well as experience on the classical podium, so the lackluster results of this recording are all the more mystifying. The album is technically proficient, but almost totally lacking in fire, which is the essential quality of Korngold’s music.

:: Film music took something of a back seat for me this year as I turned my attentions to bolstering my classical collection – something that was aided and abetted by my inexplicably-delayed introduction to the Naxos label. Classical music has always formed the center of my musical life, but in recent years it had taken a secondary position to film music. This year, though, I became more interested in longer musical works with a concentration on structure and form, which are typically the two areas least well-served by film music. The most notable additions this year to my film music collection in 2002, apart from the ones already listed, are:

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Howard Shore. (I’ll have much more to say about this one once I’ve seen the film.)

Possession, Gabriel Yared.

Gigi, Frederick Loewe (music) and Alan Jay Lerner (lyrics).

The Warsaw Concerto and other Piano Concertos from the Movies, a Naxos collection.

Powder, Jerry Goldsmith.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Alan Sylvestri.

The Rescuers Down Under, Bruce Broughton.

:: What film music events are in the future that I’m looking forward to? Rerecordings of scores by Dimitri Tiomkin, for one. At the end of 2003 we’ll have Howard Shore’s completion of his work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, when The Return of the King arrives. I’m not sure what John Williams has in the offing; it would depend, I suppose, on whatever Steven Spielberg is working on. We’re still two-and-a-half years from hearing Williams’s final excursion into the galaxy far, far away in Star Wars Episode III. And the biggest film music event for me, in the short-term, is the reissues this coming February of all of the scores from the James Bond films (up to GoldenEye), some of which – most importantly, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — will be expanded releases containing music long unheard except for in the films.

The year 2002 was pretty good for me, in terms of film music. I’m looking forward to more good things in 2003.

Share This Post

Coolness and uselessness, in easy downloadable packages: Alien Fonts.

Share This Post

I’m always a big fan of NPR’s program Talk of the Nation, especially when the topic deals with something other than, say, Iraq. There were a couple of good ones in the last couple of weeks: a program where Neil Conan spoke with some fairly young writers about their initial experiences in publishing; a short and humorous (and hunger-inducing) segment about the relation between Jewish people and Chinese restaurants; and a fascinating progam on lost literary classics.

Share This Post

If you’re interested in reading some classic science fiction, but instead of selecting titles from the 100 Best SF Books you wish to confine your selections to a single author, and if that single author happens to be Robert A. Heinlein, then check out this ranking of Heinlein’s novels by Heinlein-fan Kevin Drum, otherwise known in bloggoland as CalPundit. I’ve only read a smattering of Heinlein’s short stories, but Stranger In A Strange Land and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress have been on my reading list for some time. I think I’m going to nudge them up in the order.

(By the way, CalPundit has quickly become one of my favorite blogs, both for his intelligent content and for the fact that since he lives in California, the time-zone difference usually means that there is something new to read on his blog when I get up in the morning. That role used to be served by Den Beste, but somehow I can’t seem to wrap my mind around an SDB essay at eight in the morning. Generally I have to wait until around eleven or so before I’m ready to inflict words like “Jacksonian” upon myself.)

Share This Post

Now that we’re a few days into 2003, I’m wondering about the whole “New Year’s Resolution” thing. I’m not sure if I have any “resolutions”, or merely plans that involve things I’ve been doing all along.

Firstly, there are the traditional “health” related resolutions. I’m waiting to see the anticipated spike in the number of people working out at the gym; there were a lot more names than usual on yesterday’s sign-in sheet, but one day doesn’t comprise enough of a sample. Getting in shape and eating healthy was my resolution last year, and I’ve stuck to it, so I’m well on the way to making it a “lifestyle” thing as opposed to a “resolution”. I’m still in that “willpower” phase, when I could theoretically dine on a pizza and a pile of chicken wings, so I choose not to rather than not have the option even occur to me because I find it gross. But I’m getting there.

If there is anything I’d actually call a “resolution” for myself this year, it’s to finally get going on becoming a freelance writer. It’s something I’ve been kicking around for a number of years, but I’ve never taken the plunge (obviously). This will probably be the biggest fallout, for me personally, of the year 2002: my ultimate realization that I can’t stand working for other people. I’ve been in management, and I’ve been a “cubicle drone”, and quite frankly, neither camp is any more admirable than the other. Cubicle-drones do tend to be self-centered, and they do need to often be dragged kicking-and-screaming into any kind of teamwork, and they do tend to get so relaxed in the way they’ve always done things that they recoil in horror at the smallest change in the daily routine. But managers don’t know nearly as much as they like to pretend they do; they really do make decisions in a capricious nature, often without a lot of forethought — or any forethought at all (if you ever have a manager use the sentence “It was a business decision” as justification for a decision, you could bet your life savings that they have no idea why they’re doing it other than a whim or hunch), and Sturgeon’s Law applies to managers just as surely as it does to cubicle-drones.

So, having decided that I don’t care for either horn of the bull, I have decided that I will not enter the arena. Thus, I’m going freelance this year. The only problem is money, and that means getting a job just to secure my initial financing, and then dumping it. (No, I’m not going to admit as much in interviews. I’m not that insane.)

In the arena of my fiction writing, I plan no slowing down in that regard. My goal in 2003 is to produce at least one piece of salable fiction. I’m hoping to sell at least a story or two, and I am so close to finishing the current draft of the novel that I am setting Tax Day — April 15 — as my deadline for when I begin shopping the thing around, either to agents or publishers.

As for my reading this year — as Stephen King says, “Reading is the creative center of the writer’s life” — I want to get cracking on The Brothers Karamazov, and I also want to read The Iliad, The Odyssey, and perhaps revisit some Shakespeare. I’m also devoting a good deal of energy to catching up on science fiction. I read a lot of SF in high school, but I concentrated instead on fantasy during college and afterwards; now I want to return to SF, especially to some of the works on this list (which I wouldn’t have seen if not for Scott — great find!). I’ve read a number of them, but not as many as I should. Fortunately, I own a bunch of them.

And at last, there is Byzantium’s Shores. I hope to move the blog sometime this year to a server with its own domain name, and switch to Movable Type. I would have done it already, except that I didn’t want to blog for a while and then quit, so I wanted to see if I was in it for the long haul. I appear to be doing just that, with this site’s one-year anniversary (!) little over a month away. I don’t have any specific ideas for entries now, except for a series of articles that I want to do honoring the bicentennial of the birth of Hector Berlioz, my favorite classical composer. Other than that, it’s “write ’em as they come”, which seems to me more satisfying, anyway.

So, bring on 2003!!

Share This Post