Stupid Thoughts
I've been thinking lately about feedback. Not THAT kind of feedback, but the kind that happens when you get a microphone too close to a speaker that is outputting the mic's signal, or when you stick a video camera in front of a TV that is displaying the camera's signal. It creates a feedback loop.
And I've been thinking that we often characterize our senses as input channels to our brain.
So, when you look at your eye in a mirror, why doesn't it create a feedback loop?
Whatcha' Readin'?
I just finished Howell Raines'
The One That Got Away, a fishing memoir by a former editor for
The New York Times. I don't know exactly why I wanted to read this book. I've been fishing a grand total of one time in my thirty years. That was when I was a cub scout. I think I might have seen the author on
The Colbert Report.The most interesting part of Raines' story for this non-piscatory, (a cool word I learned while reading this), reader is the re-telling of the Jayson Blair scandal which occurred under Raines' watch. If you don't recall, Blair was the writer who got busted for inaccuracy and just plain "making stuff up" during the coverage of the D.C sniper story a few years ago.
But aside from that, I didn't get much out of this book. You can tell in many places that he is trying to elucidate the details of what he obviously loves about the act of fishing, the scenery of exotic locales, the metphor that it all represents, etc. But for a reader with no direct experience of these tings, it's really hard not to just see this all as a retelling of the life of leisure of a highly-paid, elite, east-coast cosmopolitan. Our worlds are just too different.
A Monstrous Pizza
A couple nights ago I made a monster of a pizza! It was a work of art, culled from what I happened to have on hand.
Ingredients from the ground up:
Boboli crust
Olive oil
Basil
Italin seasoning
Garlic powder
Oregano
Ricotta cheese
Pesto
Plain-old pizza sauce
Grated parmesan
Romano
Shredded cheddar w/ bacon
Pepperoni
Ground beef
Black olives.
Man alive! That was a thick pizza. It looked like The Big Country from Hideaway, except twice as thick. Provided for 2 meals...
Whatcha' Listenin' To? (Super-Size Version)
I’ve got a whole bunch of new-to-me music I’ve been listening to over the last couple of weeks. God bless the library! Here’s what’s been in my ears as of late:
Quintets for Clarinet and strings by Brahms and Weber, performed by Richard Stoltzman and the Tokyo string Quartet
I used to not like the sound of the clarinet. I used to think that it was a very plain, uninteresting timbre. Maybe it was due to my high school band days, when everyone seemingly played the “licorice stick.” But time has a way of eroding things, even our petrified beliefs and preferences, n’est pas? The sound of the classical clarinet, played by a skilled performer, can now present a sublime experience for me, thanks largely to how Mozart composed for it.
The liner notes for this album are right on: these two composers, Brahms and Weber, could not have written for this instrumentation of strings and clarinet more differently. In the Brahms piece, the clarinet melds with the other instruments to create a unique ensemble sound. The Weber piece is more like a technical show-stopper for the clarinet player, with the strings acting as accompaniment. To me, it sounded like the difference between wanting to communicate immense oceans of emotion welling up within vs. just wanting to create something pleasant and engaging to listen to. Music is great in that it can fulfill both purposes.
Alto Rhapsody, “Song of the Fates,” “Song of Lamentation,” and “Song of Destiny” by Brahms
As is probably obvious, I’m very methodical in how I approach new musical experiences. I’m very slowly working my way through all of the Brahms that is available through the library. Brahms is one of the many holes in my musical education, (as is just about everything I’m listening to these days.) None of the music on this disc really stood out to me. However, the text to a couple of the pieces was by Goethe, (translated), and I really liked it. I get the feeling that if you were a composer in the German Romantic era, the government issued you a copy of Goethe and you were obligated to set at least one of his poems to music. (Sweet T, or other German scholars out there, have you read much Goethe?) Get a load of the text to the Alto Rhapsody, describing a hermit::
But off apart there, who is that?
His path gets lost in the brush;
behind him the branches
close again,
the grass stands straight again,
the solitude swallows him up.
Ah, who can heal the pain
of one to whom balsam became poison?
Who has drunk misanthropy
from the fullness of love?
First despised, now despising,
he secretly wastes
his own worth
in unsatisfying egoism.
If there is in your Psalter,
Father of Love, a single tone
perceptible to his ear,
then revive his heart!
Open his cloud-covered sight
onto the thousand fountains
beside the thirsting soul
in the desert. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
The Velvet Underground and Nico by The Velvet Underground
Then there’s this album which is pretty far removed from Brahms and Romanticism and clarinets. This is another one of those albums often mentioned in “Best Of all Time”-type lists and it’s on the
Rolling Stone list. (If you’ve never heard it, you might know it by it’s banana on the cover.)
I did not go into this album expecting much, as their self-titled third album left me scratching my head, wondering what all the fuss was about. And I gotta say, I still wonder what all the fuss is/was about with this band, being hailed as THE artistic innovators of their time blah, blah, blah. But there are some catchy moments on here- “Waiting for My Man,” “Femme Fatale,” (which I first heard covered by REM on their
Dead Letter Office), and “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” And I can think of few albums that start with a better dream-like vibe than that created by the song “Sunday Morning.” I found the song “Heroin” to be a one-trick pony: the slow-fast movement apparently supposed to be mimicking the rush of drugs in the veins.
But when I read all of the hype about this and other bands, I can’t help but expect something other than merely some “catchy” songs and a “dream-like” beginning. Those two specifics are really me just trying to be positive. For as much hype as surrounds The Velvet Underground, you would think that your mind instantly doubles in size when you hear this album and life is never the same from that point on. Well, unfortunately, that’s not the case, as it has been for most of my
Rolling Stone experiences thus far. And that actually makes me kind of sad. Is it all really just 100% subjective? Is there no such thing as an “Objective Classic,” as these lists would have us believe?
From what I can gather, this band just happened to be coming up in the right scene at the right time.
But Andy Warhol’s seal of approval aside, I’ll take the Mothers of Invention’s
Freak Out! or Pink Floyd’s
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, (previous mention of which drives a lot of traffic to this site for some reason), both released within the same year as this album, as much more countercultural, revolutionary albums in regards to their overall sound.
Hotel California by The Eagles
I wanted to hate this album. Yeah, it’s on the
Rolling Stone list, but I always dismissed The Eagles’ populist music as fodder for the soft-rock Delilah-listening set. Which reveals me to be an elitist music snob. But I gotta say I can see why it’s so beloved. I don’t think it’s important music like, say, Brahms or the Velvet Underground are “important” for being all artistic and what not.
But this album is pretty much chock-full of textbook pop songcraft, the discipline of a handful of chords and a singable melody and some words, by which the end result is something pleasant to listen to. But the simplicity of this music is deceptive. This record was produced with the full height of what was possible in the studio at the time. There is an overall sheen that sounds like “LA” to me--layers of guitars, both acoustic and electric. Even string arrangements! It’s hard to really listen to the song “Hotel California” anymore just because of it’s omnipresence on the radio back in my high school days, but I have a new appreciation for the song “New Kid in Town.” This album has a lot going for it: variety, (ballads, straight-ahead rock, different singers and soloists), huge background vocal layers, Don Henley’s voice…”Victim of Love” is the weak song of the set sounding like the verse of one song that was in the works grafted onto a totally separate chorus, but I gotta say that overall, I think I “get” what they were attempting to do with this album.
Achtung Baby by U2
It’s yet another “classic.” I know a lot of people who regard this band as saviors of rock n’ roll, the band that made sliced bread irrelevant. I’m not one of those folks. I like a couple of their albums. I think
The Joshua Tree and
War are fantastic. But my devotion to them stops there.
This album took me back to my sophomore year in high school, when we would rush to Wendy’s for lunch in our allotted 45 minutes in Keith Cato’s car, which didn’t have a functioning stereo, but he kept a boombox in the back seat. And I remember this disc being on heavy rotation. The song I absolutely love from this collection is “Who’s Gonna Ride Your wild Horses.” You’re not likely to hear a more triumphant chorus.
One of these days I should write about the song “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World,” and how it’s strikingly similar to REM’s “Undertow,” off their
New Adventures in Hi-Fi album, from the bass groove up to the vocal phrasing. Anyway, this album was a collection of songs from an era when I stopped listening to popular music. I still don’t think I missed much in those years.
That’s more than enough for now. I’ve got one more album I want to write about, but it’s going to take some time…Until then, my friends.
A Brief Nerd Moment...
I watched a really good episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation a few days ago about a lone Borg survivor of a crash landing. While on board the Enterprise he slowly learns to view himself as an individual entity. Yet he also discovers that friendship can help him get rid of the loneliness that he feels while being away from the collective and all of their "voices" in his head. This produced lots of thoughts about identity, the self, the other...
A subplot was the enterprise crew's wrestling with the ethics of using "Hugh," (as the Borg boy comes to be named), as a carrier for a virus to infiltrate and eventually destroy the Borg when he rejoins them. There are all kinds of ethical issues at play in this episode-is it ok to destroy an entire race if they are literally and totally incapable of anything other than destroying humans and their way of life? Is all sentient life valuable? Once Hugh has become self-aware, is it ethical to let him return to the collective?
I really liked this episode because of its alternating portrayal of Hugh as isolated and lonely and as a killing machine who would "assimilate" you at the first command by the collective.
Who am I kidding? Every moment for me is a nerd moment.
Time, Space, and Halo
In last week's
Time Steve Rushin wrote a great essay called "The Waiting Game." It's about waiting in lines in our culture and around the world. The main thrust is that the rich can
choose to either wait in line or not. There are things like line passes and first class, etc. available for those with the resources.
This is all an interesting counterpoint to a principal I learned in college: your net worth determines the amount of
space your allowed to occupy, i.e. the size of our house, car or personal space protected by body guards, etc.
This article says that the
time you waste while waiting is in direct relation to your financial well-being.
So, it appears that the rich have control of TIME and SPACE.
Interesting.
Also in the issue was this photo below, of developers of the game
Halo at Bungie software. It made me laugh inside. How many womern can you count?
Listen to "Something's Coming" while reading this post...
Oh, man. It's that time of the year again. Can you feel it like I can?
It's that lump-in-your-throat feeling of expectation. It's just beyond tangible. It's something you
feel without touch. You just
know that somewhere around the corner, coming up, is cooler weather, lightness. The promise of future change is whispered around you: a wisping of leaves on a sidewalk, brought slightly to life on the breeze. Grayer skies on the horizon...
And if you're like me, you think "Yeah, right. We'll see..."
But you know fall has always come before.
It's inevitable.
Just a matter of time...
More animal news
While working outside today I was visited by a furry little friend-a lonely little black cat with white socks.
After stopping to say hello for about three minutes, my eyes started to itch and I remembered why I can't have pets.
It's too bad. I like the idea of having a friendly watchcat lazing around on the back porch, watching the world go by.
