Indian composer A.R. Rahman is one of the finer musicians to come out of the Subcontinent’s exploding film industry, and his prolific work has earned him an international following. Here is a selection from his score to the Chinese film Warriors of Heaven and Earth, “The Golden Age”.
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
(Sorry, I had this saved in Draft and forgot to publish it.)
You’re in charge of planning a big time-period specific costume party. You get to pick the time period, and further, let’s assume that everyone will be able to attend looking fully period-specific. What period (or historical locale) do you choose?
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Could I BE any more old?
Some cultural milestones make me feel old, but others do not. It doesn’t really bother me all that much to know that Star Wars is nearing 40 years old. But the fact that Friends first aired twenty years ago today? Now that hits me.
We didn’t catch onto Friends immediately. It was about halfway through that first season, maybe a little less, when we discovered it, because it wasn’t even on at 8:00 at that point. NBC’s major sitcoms at the time were Mad About You and Seinfeld, and Friends got sandwiched in between those two, at 8:30. I suspect we missed it initially because it was new and therefore we weren’t terribly interested in it, and Thursday nights were our night to go hang out at the local bar and have chicken wings. I’d set the VCR to record Mad About You and Seinfeld and ER, but it took a while for us to clue in that Friends was a decent show, too.
Once we did, though, I never looked back. To this day Friends is one of my favorite shows ever.
Here are a few random thoughts on Friends:
:: Obviously cast chemistry is important, and Friends caught that lightning in a bottle that eludes most ensemble shows. Maybe none of the actors are “great” performers, but there was chemistry between each and every one of them, and more as a group. It was so magical that the show could literally pair off any of its characters for some story or other. There were episodes that stuck Ross and Phoebe together, or Chandler and Rachel, or Joey and Ross, or Rachel and Phoebe, or…well, every permutation was explored and it always worked.
:: Friends did comedic misdirection better than just about anything I know. The best example of this is probably Ross’s famous wrong-name-at-the-altar moment, when after we’ve been made to believe that he’s really marrying Emily, that the door is finally and bittersweetly closed between him and Rachel, he says, “I, Ross, take thee Rachel….” That moment was an absolute stunner, and it was nearly equaled half an hour earlier in the same episode when Monica turned up in Chandler’s bed, or a year later, when Chandler and Monica, unsure of where they were in their relationship, find themselves impulsively at a wedding chapel in Vegas, ready to take the plunge, when the previous wedding lets out — and a very drunk Ross and Rachel, newly married, come bursting out. At its very best, Friends managed to make the punchline a delightful surprise.
:: Yes, Friends went on too long, but really, I didn’t care. It ended a season after it probably should have, with an ending that was somewhat bittersweet but still confirmed the sense that these six people continue being a part of each others’ lives, just someplace else, and that we weren’t watching anymore.
:: I saw somewhere recently — I don’t recall who or where, sorry — the question, “Why didn’t Joey succeed?” Joey was the spinoff show, after Friends, which actually debuted to good reviews and strong ratings but quickly withered on the vine and has now taken on a reputation not unlike AfterMASH. Frasier pulled off what Joey didn’t: take a single character from a just-ended, long-running ensemble show, move him all the way across the country, and tell stories about him in a new setting. Why didn’t Joey work?
Well, I don’t recall the same sense of being done with the whole concept when Cheers ended that was in place when Friends drew to a close, so there’s that — Frasier didn’t feel like so much an attempt to keep the notion alive that Joey did. Also, Frasier put Frasier Crane into a new job, talk radio, which allowed new types of stories to be told, where Joey was still a struggling (albeit less-so) actor. And then there’s the fact that Frasier was simply brilliantly written, and Joey wasn’t. Frasier created another brilliant ensemble, where Joey was just Joey-and-some-other-folks. Yes, Joey started off well, but it quickly petered out.
I do remember one very nice moment on Joey that was equal to anything on Friends. Joey lands two gigs at the same time: he’s the lead in Shakespeare’s Richard III, and the host of a musical cowboy revue. Joey worries and frets the whole episode, certain that he’s going to screw up the Shakespearean dialogue, certain that he has no place at all doing The Bard. But then, he takes the stage, and he nails that opening monologue, “Now is the winter of our discontent….”. He’s done it. Joey can do Shakespeare…and then the curtain rises to reveal the cowboy musical revue starting up behind him. He’s done the wrong role at the wrong place.
:: Yes, Chandler’s proposal to Monica made me cry.
:: Friends created a lot of wonderful recurring characters, from Janice and Gunther to Ron Glass as Ross’s divorce attorney, who was flummoxed to get so much business from a single client.
:: Friends had my single favorite Christmas-themed episode of all time, when Ross dresses up as the “Holiday Armadillo”.
:: My favorite Friend? Chandler. Or Ross. Maybe Phoebe, or Rachel. Oh, and Joey. And Monica! But seriously, Chandler. I think.
Here are some of my favorite Friends moments. I could watch some of these all day.
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So this happened….
We adopted a retired racing greyhound.
A dirty secret: I have never been around dogs much at all, having never owned one, and therefore I have always been very uncomfortable around them. I’m a cat person, through and through; some part of me deeply sympathizes and even empathizes with all the Crazy Cat Ladies out there. Dogs are mysterious beasts to me.
But now, we have one. His name is Hurricane. No, that name does not make me less nervous about this whole thing. I’d quite frankly be more comfortable with a fat bulldog named Wilbur, but that just wasn’t in the cards.
As I write this, he’s been “our dog” for, oh, an hour or so. I’m sitting in my library while he whines from inside his crate. I guess we’ll figure this out. The Wife and Daughter are really excited. I’m just thinking I’ll hang out over here for a little while. I expect dogs will be like kids for me: actually having one will make me fine with the one we have, but I’m unlikely to be comfortable with others.
So, here’s Hurricane.
And here are Lester and Julio not being all that cool with Hurricane quite yet.
This ought to be one of my more interesting autumns, eh?
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Sentential Links
Linkage….
:: We very nearly woke up in a different world, kids.
:: His handwriting is a fingerprint. It says: “Him. And him only.”
:: It’s been a great four weeks. If you were a part of it, thank you for being part of it. (I look forward to reading Mr. Scalzi’s book…and hope that a future tour brings him closer to Buffalo! Come on, Mr. Scalzi! We don’t have cooties up here! And depending on which way the wind blows, our city smells like Cheerios.)
More next week!
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Sunday Burst
A few things for your consideration:
:: Liam Neeson’s global reign of violence.
:: A brief history of the dominion of the awfullest of apples, the Red Delicious.
:: Daily rituals of great writers.
More next week, if I’m so inclined….
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A Very Public Service Message
Instaweeks!
Time to disappear again down the photographic rabbit hole!
Let’s get the Flummoxing Felines out of the way first, shall we?
And then there’s some recent food and such. The Daughter nagged me into deep dish pizza (I already don’t make it all that often because it’s fairly labor-intensive, and I make it even less now that The Wife is on a gluten-free diet and this is a virtual memorial statue to gluten):
Ramen with fried egg. I only have Ramen a few times a year, because of the salt. But I do love it once in a great while. (Hey, you know what makes Ramen really awesome? Having it with some buttered rye crispbread on the side. You dip the rye crisp into the broth and it’s heavenly. That’s a combo I learned from my father, way way way back when. To really be emotionally authentic, it has to be the round rye crisp, with the hole in the middle. It comes wrapped in paper and you break off the piece you want. Not the nicely-cut rectangular rye crisp! That gives you the right flavor, but shapes matter, folks!)
I really love sugar-sweetened Dr. Pepper. It’s pricey (almost four bucks for a four-pack), but it’s a bit of a luxury. Just awesome stuff, though.
Labels on Asian food products make me happy.
The coming of fall means the reappearance of candy that isn’t easy to find other times of year, like Oh Henry bars.
The Daughter also confronted her first day of tenth grade with the requisite enthusiasm.
Fall is coming quickly! September was, like the months before it, cooler than usual (after an odd burst of hot weather to start the month). As the weather starts to turn cool, my fascination with the sky usually fires up a bit. I love the sky, and my normal shift at work starts each day when the sky is often doing some amazing things….
I don’t want the earth to feel neglected as I look up at the sky a lot, so here’s the ground.
I continue to do stick-figure doodles in my occasional free time at work. I make no claims to the genius of xkcd, but it’s a good way to make a few little points here and there. For instance, there’s a trope that shows up in fantastic fiction now and again that irritates the hell out of me:
(I’m looking at you, The Dark is Rising sequence!)
Diagramming the wisdom of Kenny Rogers:
I’ll be posting a review at some point, but this one sentence perfectly sums up my love of science fiction in general and my admiration for the series The Expanse in particular:
Patience, grasshopper!
I didn’t care for this book:
Our next door neighbors are doing construction on their house. Looks like they’re adding on so their elderly dad or dad-in-law can move in with them. It started with the removal of a couple of trees that would have encroached upon their house’s expanded footprint. Which meant…lumberjacks!
And let me tell you, folks, it’s always fun to listen to guys like this talk. No swearing, just a funny run of comment through the job. At one point, a fellow who has climbed thirty feet up and is cutting branches off shouts down, “Uh, I think I cut the wrong thing!” Whoops.
My next car will likely be something bigger than my current Buick Century sedan (although not monstrously huge, just a bit bigger). Still, if I had money right now, I’d find this jalopy enticing. It’s sitting at a VW dealership just down the road.
I sorted my washers and bolts. Actually, I didn’t sort all my bolts, just the quarter-inch, twenty-count thread ones, because that’s what I use the most at work. This is exciting shit, folks.
Here’s a screw I ran up against at work. I have a set of bits for tamper-resistant screws, which are basically normal screws with really oddball heads so they’re tamper-resistant simply by virtue that very few people own the drivers to budge them. This thing was even too obscure for me, though. I got it off using needle-nosed locking pliers and a lot of salty language. I don’t recall what it was on, but there was nothing about the gizmo that screamed out “Holy shit, we gotta keep the riffraff from removing this screw! Grab that center-pegged pentagon screw! That’ll stop ’em!”
I knocked off one major project at New Casa Jaquandor: replacing the dining room light fixture with something better. The old fixture was a perfectly nice fixture, but it was misplaced. It wasn’t well-suited for hanging above a dining table, being a low-hanging fixture with a single halogen lamp that shone straight down, casting a fairly small pool of light on the table instead of illuminating the room. No such problem with the new fixture, which is (a) awesome, and (b) so bright that the next big project will be converting the existing switch to a dimmer.
And, of course, there’s the usual stuff of my life…writing, overalls, writing in overalls, et cetera and so forth.
And these last, because even though I’ve posted them here already, I think I’ll need them in the future:
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How do I get to Carnegie Hall?
A reader asks a good question:
How much should a 10-year-old trumpet player practice daily?
As in all such things, it depends. Such guidance should really be given with the advice of the kid’s music teacher, who knows a lot better than I what kinds of material are being practiced, what skill level the kid has reached at this point, and so on.
For instance, 10 years old put a kid roughly in the area of 5th grade, which likely means they very likely have no more than one year of trumpet playing under their belt. That’s not a lot. If they started in 4th grade and have been playing a year, then twenty minutes a day is probably reasonable. If they’re just getting started this year, then twenty minutes a day is probably more of a goal to reach by the end of the year than a perfect starting point; for beginners, fifteen minutes is probably a good starting point. I would try to get to twenty minutes by the end of the year, and then try to reach 30 minutes a day by the time they’ve reached junior high. If they’re still playing in high school, and if the kid is showing real interest in playing, then the target should be an hour a day. And all this might well be tossed out if it turns out that the kid has some serious passion for music, because then they’ll want to practice more than any arbitrary goal anyway.
Studying a musical instrument is something that requires discipline, but it also requires motivation. It’s easy for practice, especially for beginners, to settle into a drudgery that’s just something to get through as quickly as possible. For most kids, music lessons start as a social thing, in school, as part of a band; the act of sitting in a room by oneself “practicing” isn’t really something that a 10 year old kid has a great deal of experience with, so it’s hard for them to get the habits down, and learn how to practice. My own experience was that I spent the better part of a year or two just flailing around, not really practicing much, until teachers and my older sister took some time and showed me how to practice. Giving a kid a piece of music and saying “Work on this” is well and good, but if the kid doesn’t know how to work on it, then practice time becomes a boring exercise in playing through a piece badly a few times and then putting the horn back in the case.
I had a teacher once who had me working on some concerto or other — maybe the Haydn, maybe the Arutunian — and he said to me, “You can play this concerto just as well as Maurice Andre can. (Maurice Andre was one of the greatest trumpet players of all time.) You can play every note just as cleanly and precisely as he can. You know what the only difference is? He can do it faster than you can.” This teacher taught me to slow a piece down to the point where I could play it perfectly, even if that meant slowing it down so much that it was unrecognizable. Then, he said, gradually increase the speed. If you find you can’t play it perfectly at a certain speed, back it off again and work at it until you can. Eventually you get it so you can play it up to tempo. (And at the same time, this process develops all the various skills along the way so the next piece won’t take so long to get to tempo.) That’s what I mean by teaching how to practice. This guy, Mr. Rudgers at the Bristol Hills Music Camp, showed me a good way to work at a piece. It helped.
Another thing is that you never know if, or when, the motivation is suddenly going to strike. A kid might frankly suck at the trumpet for two, maybe even three, whole years before they wake up one morning and decide that they’d rather not suck anymore, or that Wow, that other kid is really good and hell, I can be just as good as that kid if I work at this and hey, maybe practicing isn’t so bad in the first place. I know that can happen, because that’s the way it was with me: I was a shitty trumpet player and got made fun of relentlessly by the other kids in band because I was shitty until I decided “OK, I am now going to work on not being shitty.” That’s not a decision you can make for your kid. Eventually everybody decides they’re going to be good at something. If it’s music, great. If not, then at least they’ll hopefully learn enough to have a greater appreciation for music in the future. And besides, a person can be passionate about more than one thing. My active life in music is long over, and occasionally that’s a source of rare regret for me, but had I stayed in music, it well may be that a couple of princesses never take to the stars. Who knows.
I’d also suggest that parents should not treat practice time as a daily home recital. All the parent should really do is enforce the agreed-upon duration of the practice session, and that’s about it. Unless you’re a musician yourself, don’t say anything, other than an occasional “Hey, I can hear that your sound is getting a lot better!” Do not say anything like “Gee, Timmy, that one piece you played sounds like you need to work a lot more on it.” Believe me, Timmy knows, and shame is not the emotion you want Timmy carrying into his interactions with music. And even if you do know a lot about music…back off anyway. It’s really for the best. Parental expectation is also not a great thing to have to struggle with when you’re also trying to remember the fingerings for D-natural and A-flat. (Along these lines, unless the instrument is the piano and therefore the thing is wherever it is, let the kid practice in their room or some other room with a door. Don’t make them practice in the living room while you’re there paying bills or watching the evening news or making dinner in the adjoining kitchen. Practicing should not be done with an audience, and the only reason practicing should be heard by parents at all is to know that it’s getting done.)
Let’s see, what else? Oh, yeah — when I say “twenty minutes a day” or “an hour a day”, I don’t mean each and every day. Practicing seven days a week isn’t wise, in my opinion. Now, passion may arise and then the kid will practice every day because they love playing, but even then, I’m of the view that a day off is good. It’s good mentally, for what I hope are obvious reasons, but it’s also good physically. Playing an instrument involves the use of muscles, and in quite a few cases (especially among the wind instruments), the muscle use is strenuous indeed. If you don’t believe me, watch a great trumpet player sometime, or a horn player, or an oboe player, or any instrument. Making air vibrate the way it’s supposed to inside a wind instrument requires making the muscles of one’s face and neck do things that they don’t normally do. Those muscles are collectively referred to by the word embouchure, and like all such muscle groups, they can be overstressed, injured through misuse, and worn out. The effects of a hard practice session or rehearsal on a trumpet player’s embouchure are similar to the effects on a weight-lifter’s muscles after a lifting session, so for the exact same reason, wind players should take a day off here and there, or if they do play, it should be something low-stress, like long tones in the low register. That’s more the equivalent of stretching than exerting. I always found, though, that after a week of playing several hours a day (between group rehearsals and practice sessions), taking a day to not play at all (often Saturdays while I was in college) made me a lot stronger when I played again on Sunday.
For a 10-year-old, it’s probably best to set a daily time as practice time, as much as that’s possible. Eventually it will hopefully become sufficiently ingrained that they’ll practice on their own, but to start with, the expectation that every day at, say, 5:30 they are to go practice for their fifteen or twenty minutes will help. Maybe let them not practice on Fridays or Saturdays, or some other weekday if they’re on a soccer team or something like that.
And finally, maybe try not calling it practice. I once knew a drummer who said, “I don’t practice. I play.” The word “practice” just has the sound of required daily boring routine. Saying “Hey, Timmy, it’s 5:30! You need to go play your trumpet for a while!” simply sounds better than “Hey, Timmy, it’s 5:30, you need to practice.” Practicing sounds like what you do until you’re good enough to play. Maybe we’d have better luck with our kids and their music lessons if we enforced the idea that it’s all an act of play. I have a notion that we call it practice because in that way we can trick our ever-so-Puritan American minds that we’re not actually wasting time learning to play music, and I say, the hell with that. It’s all play. Playing is good.
So let your kid play.