Ahh, Hans Zimmer…one of the most vexing names in film music. It’s hard to really evaluate his influence, as his industrial approach has resulted in a strong homogenizing of the sound of movie music these days, but it’s likewise impossible to argue that he can write really good music at times. His score to Beyond Rangoon is just such a little-heard gem.
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
We’re building that so we can look at…Buffalo?!
Apparently it’s been 40 years since a big construction project unfolded near Toronto’s waterfront, resulting in the CN Tower.
Oddly, I’ve never gone up in the tower — we’re always doing other stuff when we’re in Toronto, and we go to TO less often than we should anyway. I’d love to go up there, though; as a kid, I remember when we’d always make the trek to the top of the Space Needle when we went to Seattle.
Anyway, more photos of the construction phase here. I guess I was wrong in that they didn’t build the thing complete, lay it down on its side, and then pull it upright.
(No, I didn’t think that.)
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Gardeners versus Architects
George RR Martin has some interesting things to say about writing. I agree with him, quite strongly, here. I may have issues with his books, but I think he nails this.
I, too, am more of a gardener in this metaphor than an architect. But GRRM notes that it’s important to do some architecture along the way, and I totally agree with that. I won’t outline an entire novel, but I’ll outline a particularly complex scene or sequence of scenes. In general, though, I love to just scatter little plot ideas and notions here and there, and see which things come back as important things and which don’t.
As I go back through the manuscript to Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), I am noticing a lot of those tiny little details that I just threw in willy nilly, and now some of them are striking me as having some potential down the line.
Writing is awesome!
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Sentential Links
Linkage!
:: The morning after the Poseidon disaster, the broke captain (Caine) of a cargo tug discovers the wreckage and takes his crew (Field and Karl Malden) aboard to look for salvage. At exactly the same time, a wealthy doctor (Savalas) also goes aboard, claiming he wants to assist survivors. But is that really his goal or does he have something more sinister in mind? (Wow…never thought I’d find someone who speaks positively of Beyond the Poseidon Adventure!)
:: Just think of the people your stories are helping.
Trust me–they’re out there.
:: Like two films in one — the first one on land when the inhabitants of Amity Island are forced to deal with a predator that’s slowly devouring its citizens one by one, to the three men (Chief Brody, Matt Hooper, and salty sea veteran Quint) going out to sea to try and catch the shark singlehandedly — Jaws is an absolute memorable classic of the history of the cinema. (The 50 Greatest Jaws quotes — and they purposely omit the one that everybody remembers! What a great movie. I need to watch it again. By the way, my favorite quote in the movie is the exchange between Brody and his wife, just before he sets out with Quint and Hooper: “What do I tell the kids?” “Tell them I’m going fishing.”)
:: Publishing is a business. As a writer, you are enaging in business with others, sometimes including large corporations. It’s not a team sport. It’s not an arena where there are “sides.” There’s no “either/or” choice one has to make, either with the businesses one works with or how one publishes one’s work. Anyone who simplifies it down to that sort of construct either doesn’t understand the business or is actively disingenuous, and isn’t doing you any favors regardless. The “side” you should be on is your own (and, if you choose, that of other authors). (Sage advice and well-worth remembering. And even though it’s only tangential to John Scalzi’s main point here, it’s along these lines that I always end up thinking that we should be really careful about the way we’re constantly pushed to “privatize” things. Introducing the profit motive is not always the best way to go about achieving certain goals.)
:: Oh, man, check out how terrified Les looks by the idea that even in the fictional world being weaved by Cable Movie Entertainment, Lisa might live! It’s almost as if her death was the foundation on which he built his entire artistic career and sense of self. It’s almost as if he has to kill her again every day in his mind in order to stay Les. It’s almost as if the thought of Lisa alive, standing before him, and seeing what he’s done with his life for the past decade fills him with a the darkest sort of dread. (Oh man, this particular storyline in Funky Winkerbean is beyond the levels of awfulness usually plumbed by this strip. Just the notion that a film company is going to fly the original writer out to the set after the script has been heavily revised, and after a crew has been hired and the film cast, is nonsensical on its face. The bigger problem with the whole storyline is laid out here, but Les’s reaction to Lisa surviving her death-porn movie is just too hilarious to let pass.)
:: For those who missed it (most of the world, as it has to be!) it was announced from the office of the Governor General of Canada yesterday afternoon that I have been named to the Order of Canada. (Huzzah! And let me say this, folks: If you love fantasy but you haven’t read GGK, you are failing at life.)
More next week!
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What if they crossbred corn with potatoes?
Iowa and Idaho are different places.
It’s funny, because I can definitely attest to the vexing thing this video addresses. When I tell people I went to college in Iowa — going all the way back to when I was a high school senior and I hadn’t even left for Iowa yet — I would occasionally get asked something along the lines of, “Wow…lots of potatoes there, right?” I’d then have to say, “No, that’s Idaho. Iowa has a lot of corn.”
Imagine the confusion that arose when I started dating a native Iowa girl whose family had since relocated to Idaho!
I never quite understood why so many people over here in the Northeast got that wrong. It’s tempting to think that this is a symptom of the whole “Flyover country” thing, when it’s assumed by folks not on one of the coasts that the people on the coasts pretty much view everything in between as just the stuff you “fly over” on the way from NYC to LA.
But here’s the thing: when I actually got to Iowa, people would ask where I was from. Even though my hometown was sixty miles south of Buffalo, I found it easier just to say “Buffalo, New York”. This would almost always get a response along the lines of, “Wow, all the way from Manhattan to Iowa!” or “Why would you leave NYC to come to Iowa?” I’d have to explain that not only is Buffalo not one of the Five Boroughs, it’s actually far enough from NYC that I could drive to Cleveland and back in the time it would take to drive one-way to NYC.
I suspect there’s not a person alive in this big country of ours who doesn’t have a story like this. We’ve got a lot of geography and a lot of unique place names. For instance, there are almost two dozen places named “Pittsburg” in the United States, but only two that spell it “Pittsburgh”!
And since I went from Buffalo, NY to study at a school in Waverly, IA — there are both a Buffalo, IA and a Waverly, NY.
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Sunday Burst
Strange and weird and oh so awesome!
:: First, something downright scary: Adolf Hitler’s official photographer managed to save shots he had taken (which Hitler had ordered destroyed) of Hitler practicing his wildly-gesticulating speaking style. No crowds, no audiences at all…just Hitler in a room, wearing a suit a banker might wear, rehearsing his techniques for capturing the imagination of a beaten and broken nation. Hitler’s evil was so pronounced that it’s often hard to come to terms with the fact that he was a guy who worked at it.
:: Watch this in HD, in the bigscreen version. I also muted it and played other music while I watched it. I guy piloted a drone into the middle of a fireworks display.
Wow.
(I’ve seen this video linked and featured in a number of places, and in each instance, there’s a debate in comments as to whether or not this was actually a dangerous and potentially illegal thing to do in the first place. I honestly don’t know, on either count.)
:: Cal collects a sequence of comic strips and titles the sequence, “Cat Owners Will Undertand”. Yup, I do indeed understand!
More next week!
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This is why we can’t have nice things, America!
This tweet may be the most perfect blend of geek and gallows humor I’ve ever seen. If you get this, you are my people.
Alex Kintner waves a heartfelt Happy Fourth of July to America. Hi, Alex! Wave back to Alex, everyone! pic.twitter.com/iUttlQrBSW
— Steven Awalt (@RedBeardSteve) July 4, 2014
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Symphony Saturday
Next up: Felix Mendelssohn.
Mendelssohn is a composer I’m not terribly familiar with, I’m sorry to say. Like many of the great musical prodigies, he lived quickly and died young, when he was only 38 years old. In those thirty-eight years he produced a large amount of music with a great deal of staying power: orchestral music, choral music, piano works, and sacred music. I remember playing one of his Songs Without Words back during my piano playing days in high school and college, and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto is one of my favorite works of classical music, ever. That concerto is seriously amazing, and if you have a chance, seek it out — as one of the most popular of all concertos, there are performances a-plenty to select from on YouTube. That work is full of gorgeous melody and some truly magical moments.
But we’re about Mendelssohn the symphonist today, so here is his Symphony No. 4. It’s the third symphony he wrote, but he was never quite satisfied with it, so it pretty much stayed in a drawer until after his death. (Side note: People who complain about George Lucas futzing with his movies should really read up on the history of classical music sometimes. There are a lot of beloved works that had multiple versions, and works whose “final” versions are only “final” because those are the versions that existed when the composer died.) This symphony is often called “the Italian”, because it was intended by Mendelssohn as something of a musical depiction of the feelings from his trips to Italy. Mendelssohn wrote a lot of music like this, what I call “travelogue” music — music that’s not intended as precisely pictorial in nature, but music that is inspired by specific places, in which he strives to capture what he feels as the character of those places in his own musical language. It’s important when listening to a piece like, say, Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, to remember that we’re hearing the impressions of a foreign land as channeled through the brain of a German. This problem arises again and again, throughout a great deal of the history of classical music. The filtering of ethnic or national character through a foreign musical language is a constant.
So, the Italian symphony doesn’t sound particularly “Italian” to me, but as noted, that’s not really Mendelssohn’s goal. It does sound like what it is: a danceful, rhythmic symphony with a great deal of charm. Here is Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony.
Next week, we’ll hear another Mendelssohn work, and then we’re off to the Land of Liszt!