A musical offering, for an online friend who last month lost her mother.
Books with facts in them
Some nonfiction notes:
:: I’ve always had a soft spot for conspiracy theories. I’ve never actually believed in any of them, but I’ve always like them in a lot of ways. The best ones are wild and wooly and complex, demonstrating a lot of knowledge of history just to make them work. But I tended to like conspiracy theories more before 9-11-01 happened; since then, I find a great deal of conspiracy theory unconvincing and even depressing at times. Maybe it was because the prime conspiracist event of the late 20th century, the JFK assassination, happened before I was born; seeing conspiracy theories take root amidst the rubble of an event that I lived through (9-11, obviously) has a very different flavor. Plus, I always enjoyed the more wild-and-wooly conspiracy notions, the ones that had JFK being killed because he was somehow involved with the UFO crash in Roswell.
As much as I’ve always been generally entertained by conspiracy theories, I’ve never found them convincing. Not a one. Fun to think about, interesting as a ‘what if’ exercise, but ultimately unconvincing, because I find that there are almost never actual arguments made for a conspiracy theory. There is rarely any evidence cited in favor of a specific conspiracy theory; instead, ‘arguments’ are made, usually in the form of questions, that are designed to make the ‘official’ account seem questionable, or unbelievable, or ludicrous.
I had a friend on Facebook who, one day, posted a kind of cryptic message, something to the effect of “Like this post if you agree that 60 is less than 150”, or something like that. The next day, he posted, “For those of you who agree that 60 is less than 150, you now admit that the Pentagon could not have been hit by a plane with a 150-foot wingspan, since the hole in the Pentagon was only 60 feet wide.” That logic made perfect sense in his head, and no amount of argument otherwise – did he really think that a plane throttling full-speed into the side of a building would leave an airplane-shaped hole, Wile E. Coyote-like, in the wall? — would budge him from his position. But never was there any sense of “This is who was really responsible for 9-11” in his arguments; it was all a mishmash of ‘How could a plane leave THAT hole in the side of the building?’ and ‘How could there be that much dust from the collapse of the twin towers?’ and a lot of other stuff that I suppose is convincing to some.
As time went on, this particular guy started embracing more and more conspiracy theories about recent historical events, right up to, and including, the JFK assassination. That’s where I get off the bus. And that brings me to the book Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground, by Jonathan Kay. This book is more of an exploration of the kinds of people who populate conspiracy-land, as opposed to blow-by-blow analyses of the conspiracy theories themselves. Most of the book seems to revolve around two distinct sets of conspiracy theories, the ones which happen to be the most prevalent today: 9-11-01 theories, and ‘Obama birth’ theories.
Kay seems to really want to go out of his way to point out just how reasonable all the various theorists are, and he strenuously avoids direct characterization of their views as, well, batshit crazy. But it’s hard to escape the impression that he really does think they’re batshit crazy, such as when he points out that one prominent figure in the 9-11 Truth community is treated as an authority on the 9-11 stuff, while his odd beliefs that the world is ruled by intergalactic lizards is mostly ignored by the Truthers. Kay also seems pretty convinced of the benevolent motivations of journalists, which in this day and age strikes me as fairly naïve.
Where the book is most effective is in the places where he traces the Truthers’ beliefs backwards, showing how they very often cannot resist just stopping at 9-11 – the event that jolted them into conspiracy beliefs – but tend to use 9-11 as a jumping point into the very long history of conspiracy beliefs. This means that if you start following the 9-11 conspiracy trail – go down the rabbit hole, as it were – you soon find yourself discussing Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and, of course, the assassination of President Kennedy. As Kay puts it:
I did drive away from the interview with one lesson solidly in hand: Scratch the surface of a middle-aged 9-11 Truther, and you are almost guaranteed to find a JFK conspiracist.
He might as well have omitted the ‘middle-aged’ proviso there; my afore-mentioned FB friend has gone on record as being a JFK conspiracist as well – and he’s in his early 20s. More recent postings – and comments offered to him by fellow travelers – are full of the usual suspects. Bilderberg. Trilateral commission. Lather, rinse, repeat…until the next traumatic event that hits the American consciousness.
:: From 9-11 to a slightly less controversial topic: Evolution! I was motivated to read up on evolution after a fairly depressing, but really very predictable, recent discovery of mine that my church’s pastor is a dyed-in-the-wool creationist. (I know, that’s not really the shock of the century. But still….) So I read through Richard Dawkins’s book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. I had never read any Dawkins before, and now that I have, well…let’s just say that I continue to pine for the loss of Carl Sagan.
I have no problem at all with Dawkins’s arguments or beliefs (although I am not convinced by what little I have read of his arguments against religion). The Greatest Show on Earth is full of appreciation for, and evidence of, the evolutionary view of biology. I’ve always found something deeply beautiful, satisfying, and just true about evolution. It’s a theory that is so powerful, so persuasive, and so majestic in its revelation of what is possible in this universe of ours that I almost always find it terribly disappointing to encounter people who would rather believe that God just put all the various species here, fully formed. “There is grandeur in this view of life,” Charles Darwin wrote (quoted by Dawkins). I just don’t find any grandeur in a literal reading of Genesis.
What gets me about Dawkins, though, is his writing tone. I don’t much care for smugness, even if it’s coming from someone I agree with passionately, and there’s just a smug tone that runs all through the book. There are even places where Dawkins dials this up to eleven, such as this, which precedes a discussion of a fairly technical experiment some scientists performed:
Lenski and his colleagues exploited that opportunity, in a controlled way, in the lab. Their work is extremely thorough and careful in every detail. The details really contribute to the impact of the evidence for evolution that these experiments provide, and I am therefore not going to stint in explaining them. This means that the next few pages are inevitably somewhat intricate – not difficult, just intricately detailed. It would probably be best not to read this section of the book when tired, at the end of a long day.
Ye Gods. I recommend this book if you’re looking for a good summary of the evidence in favor of evolution (and that evidence is staggeringly one-sided). But if you’re looking for a poetic treatment of science, well…Richard Dawkins is, sadly, no Sagan or Feynman in that respect.
:: Finally, just because the title caught my eye at the library, I checked out a book called Record Collecting for Girls by Courtney E. Smith (who, according to her bio blurb, spent time working for MTV amongst other musical pursuits). It’s a pretty amusing book, which is as much a book of advice for woman music collectors as it is a collection of possibly helpful insights into women that men might find helpful. She has chapters on music for specific stages in relationships, her thoughts on the music media’s constant quest for “the next Madonna”, rules for maintaining a Top Five Artists list (“You must own all the full-length albums released by any artist in your Top Five”, “Artists cannot be in your Top Five Artists of All Time if they only released one album”, et cetera), and a lot more.
I always enjoy reading books like this. Smith’s writing style is blunt and opinionated and fun; like the best music writing, it works even if one isn’t all that familiar with the music being written about (I’m a good test case for this). My favorite chapter, which made me laugh a lot, was a chapter that explores in some depth Smith’s unbreakable rule: Never date a guy who likes The Smiths too much.
I have more of a love/hate relationship with The Smiths. Sometimes their songs are just perfect for a foul mood or a clever moment. Sometimes they exasperate me to the point where I consider poking out my own eardrums with a Q-tip.
…
If you ask a man who his favorite musicians are and he starts naming people you don’t know well, the first thing to do is check out their songs, right? I urge you to listen to the lyrics closely; they can be telling. Most guys I know claim to listen more for the music than the words, but if they really love an artists, you can bet they know the lyrics sheets up, down, backwards, and inside out. So, if you listen to someone’s favorite music and hear references to gruesome murders, painful breakups, and intense feelings of isolation, then you would presume this man is a bit of a sad bastard, would you not?
Now, I have zero idea if this is accurate in any way, as I have, to my knowledge, never even heard a song by The Smiths. But then, I probably wouldn’t be too successful dating a girl who was really into Black Sabbath.
(Hmmm…come to that, I have no idea if The Wife is into Black Sabbath at all….)
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Mr. Williams
Check out this list of Top Ten John Williams filmscores, which actually picks some very interesting scores, including a couple from Williams’s very early career. I haven’t even heard all of them! There are two here that are completely new to me.
The list’s writer, Matt Zoller Seitz, does make a couple of minor errors along the way, but in his defense, only a true film music geek would catch them. (Ahem.) In discussing Superman, he says this:
Williams revamped this score in “Superman II” and “Superman III.” Alexander Courage (“Star Trek: The Original Series) stepped in for “Superman IV” but based his work around Williams’ familiar themes.
This is actually incorrect; Williams had nothing to do with Superman II or III; instead, in a cost-cutting move, the producers had a composer named Ken Thorne come in and provide scores based substantially on Williams’s themes from the first film. (With a much smaller orchestra, also, which is why the score to Superman II sounds, well, really bad in my ears.) Thorne would get to do some more original work for III.
And then, in praising Williams’s score to Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Seitz says:
Greater still is the moment where Anakin becomes a hero (and the Sith lord Palpatine’s latest catch) by piloting the emperor’s crumbling starship back to Coruscant. Williams superimposes “Duel of the Fates” — the prequel cue that expresses the tension between the dark and light sides of the Force — over the optimistic “The Force Theme,” which we associate with Luke in chapters IV-VI; this cue foreshadows both Anakin’s moral failure in the second half of “Sith” and his belated redemption in the “Return of the Jedi.”
What’s wrong here is that the music in question was actually written for The Phantom Menace, and was re-used for this scene in Sith. There are several places in Attack of the Clones and in Sith where music is tracked in from TPM (and come to that, there are a couple places in Return of the Jedi which use tracked-in music from The Empire Strikes Back).
But those are mere quibbles. Check Seitz’s list out — it’s a good selection of Williams, and it doesn’t always stick to the obvious stuff.
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Poor old Constantine….
A song about Roman Emperor Constantine…sung to the tune of “Come On Eileen”. You can’t make this stuff up, folks! Thanks to a good friend of mine who sent it my way on Facebook…I’m trying to figure out if she sent it to me because of the Byzantium reference, or the fact that the original video to “Come On Eileen” features a bunch of folks in overalls. Or both!
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The Loneliest Monk
The birthday of jazz great Thelonius Monk was just last week, on the 10th; Monk would be 94 now. I learned this when I saw this on Facebook. It’s a couple of pages of advice Monk gave to a fellow musician.
This kind of thing always makes me terribly happy — getting a glimpse into the mind of a great musician is wonderful, because the real record of what was in their minds is in their music, obviously, but music doesn’t always tell you concrete things about the world. In fact, music rarely tells you concrete things about the world.
I’ve noted before that I’m not the best jazz listener out there. I enjoy good jazz, but I’ve always found that jazz exists for me at a bit of a distance. My relationship to jazz is not unlike my relationship with early classical music of the music of the Baroque era — often I can’t deny its quality, but I find it difficult to get to the emotional center of it. This isn’t always the case, though, as with this piece of Monk’s.
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You learn something every day!
Whilst on break at The Store today, we observed our coffee bar employee making a smoothie that looked particularly tasty. When we asked her what flavor it was, she told us, “Peach and raspberry. It’s a Peach melba”. This got us on the topic of the word “melba”. What does that mean? Is there a flavor called “melba” that pairs particularly well with peach? And is this flavor any relation at all to those little slices of dried bread, called “melba toast”?
So in a moment of downtime later on, we did some Googling and found out that in the late 1800s, there was an opera singer — a soprano — named Dame Nellie Melba. Apparently Dame Melba had quite the career, and she was especially beloved in her native Australia, as she was that country’s first international music superstar. A French chef invented four foods in her honor, including a dessert called “Peach Melba”, and, believe it or not, Melba toast (which he created for her during a time of illness, when her diet was restricted).
Here is what Dame Nellie Melba looked like:
And there you have it. There really was a person named Melba, much beloved in the musical realm in her time, but whose name lives down to us today in culinary terms.
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Never minded….
Yesterday I mentioned that my birthday is also the date of release for The Beatles’ Abbey Road. Sheila O’Malley points out that just a couple of days earlier is the date of release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, the seminal album from 1991 that changed the landscape of rock music for good.
Here’s the thing: I never liked Nirvana. I didn’t hate Nirvana, mind you. But Nirvana made absolutely zero impact on me, one way or the other. It was the strangest thing: a cultural touchstone that slid right past me, and to this day, it remains a touchstone that remains outside my own experience. I eventually came to the Beatles, but I’m not sure that I’ll ever come to Nirvana.
Part of it was the timing: I was in college, which you might think would make me more attuned to this kind of thing at the time, but I was studying music at the time, and my musical passions were almost entirely focused on classical music. At the time I hadn’t started exploring Celtic music, and I’d stopped listening to rock almost entirely. I was totally unaware of that Nirvana was, what they represented in terms of the evolution of rock music, how they represented a break from what had gone before…all of it. Nirvana was, for me, a band with an album. Same as any other band with an album.
Part of this, though, was something else, something that I’ve been mulling over for a while. I’ve come to realize over the last few years that one of my personal idiosyncrasies is that I just don’t tend to explore movements in popular culture as they’re happening. Books come out that are viewed almost immediately as deeply important, no matter the genre, and I just file them away for future reference. Ditto movies, and music, and even teevee shows. Highly-regarded fantasy novels come out, and it takes me years to get around to reading them (The Lies of Locke Lamora, The Name of the Wind). I like Stephen King, but of his last dozen or so novels, I’ve only read Lisey’s Story (post forthcoming), and I’ve never read any of his Dark Tower books. I yield to no one in my love of Star Wars…and yet I haven’t read a single “Extended Universe” novel in fifteen years.
Music? I couldn’t even tell you what I’ve missed. At work, a couple friends and I like to play with Internet trivia quizzes when we’re on lunch break. Sometimes we do music quizzes — “Identify the song clip” and that sort of thing — and when we do, I’m generally useless for answers once we get to music past, say, 1990. Oddly, I’m more well-versed now in pop music than I’ve been in years, mainly through osmosis from what The Daughter listens to.
Teevee is the same way. I’ve yet to watch a single episode of The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, or even The Sopranos. And I’m not sure I ever will, because at this point I’m not sure my interests will ever take me there. And that’s what it’s all about, really — the fact that I tend to follow my interests with little or no regard for what the “cultural movements” are. This isn’t to say that I deliberately avoid what’s popular; I know people who do that, and I think it’s silly — I tend to see a lot of validity in the “fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong” argument — but when I note things that are popular, my reaction tends to be, “Huh. File that away for future reference.”
Anyway, happy anniversary, Nirvana and Nevermind.
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“Let’s pee in the corner!”
Apparently REM has called it quits as a band. Stop it, Yoko! It’s not funny anymore!
Seriously, though, I’ve always rather liked REM, although they were never a huge favorite of mine. I have a few CDs of theirs around here somewhere, but I am in no way whatsoever familiar with the majority of their output. But I did always like what I heard from them. My favorite song of theirs was “Everybody Hurts”:
But my very favorite thing REM ever did was actually this:
Best wishes, REM! Let the reunion rumors commence!
(For those baffled by the post title, this ought to clear it up.)
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YARRRR!!!
“Excitement is created by rhythmic accuracy”
So said a music teacher I had once, who was trying to convince those of us under his baton that a piece of music played cleanly and accurately at a slower tempo will sound faster than the same piece played sloppily at a faster one. It’s a hard lesson to internalize, but, listen to the rhythmic precision on display in this performance of Shostakovich’s Festive Overture. It’s something to behold. This is a piece that will not be convincing in any way if the performers are not working with the utmost precision in mind.
That’s one of my favorite pieces, by the way.