of mild interest

Papaya!

2011-12-12T07:57:00.001-05:00

This is pretty much the prettiest picture of papaya that I've ever taken:

PAPAYA!!!

Rice Cooker Popcorn!

2011-12-10T02:07:00.002-05:00

In this (to borrow a phrase from my friend Parker) Age of Gadgets, one often assumes that there is a specific device for each of your minute technological needs. Like, if you need to cook rice, you use a rice cooker, but if you need to make popcorn, you use a popcorn popper. Not so! Shelley has perfected the art of rice cooker popcorn! Behold:

Delicious!

My Last Pair of Boat Shoes

2011-12-08T01:07:00.006-05:00

I tend to track the fading away and retirement of various articles of my clothing, here on the blog, since, somehow, they always manage to breach the line of what is bloggable, in my universe. That, and I've pretty well managed to maintain a cartoon character's consistency of warddrobe for the last, say, 12 years, that calls for noting these passings as they happen. And this one, actually, is a pretty big one, to me.

I've been wearing (Dexter brand) boat shoes (aka docksiders, aka boat moccasins, aka loafers) as a primary foot covering since at least my junior year of high school, and probably earlier than that. This choice, like many aspects of my fashion, arose from my taking of a pair of such shoes from my father. At some point in High School, I even spray-painted an older pair of them gold, as an homage to that one fast runner guy that did the same thing in the olympics.

New pairs were always easy to come by, even after my feet got bigger than my dad's, thanks to a conveniently located (Dexter brand) shoe outlet store on the way to Fourth Lake in the Adirondacks that affored a Theodore Dreiserian luxury to my middle-class shoe affordings.

Other than a brief phasing-out of these shoes during my bad-back-having days scattered through my late teens, they remained a pretty consistent part of the ol' t-shirt & work pants warddrobe. But, at some point, the (Dexter brand) boat shoes stopped getting made, and the stores up in the A'dacks became generic shoe outlets. So I was left with a pair of what would be my last boat shoes. This being further complimented by certain life choices that have pushed my fairly strict vegetarianism into outright veganity this past year (so, like, no more leather shoes).

My Last Pair of Boat Shoes, as you can imagine, started to take a pretty severe beating, and were falling apart at the seams and wearing through at the soles. A last ditch effort was made in Georgia, before heading to Thailand, to get them repaired, which led to a semi-good-ol'-boy-network-facilitated caper to find a shoe repair guy that was up to the job and willing to do it fast. The outcome was maybe a little less than inspiring, but I at least managed to have some fresh traction-having-pieces installed to the soles:

Signs of repair/disrepair

But then came September (I'm drastically behind on blogging, I admit), and the tail-end of Thailand's rainy season. My Last Pair of Boat Shoes suffered a life-threatening injury, of some funky-ass mold growing up in them, after I unthinkingly left them sitting outside for a weekend. It doesn't take much, but behold the fatal blows they took:

Gross. Just gross.

Gross, up close.

So, there you have it. Until (if) I'm okay with buying new leather thing again, no more boat shoes. It's a bigger end of an era than any given t-shirt retirement, I think.

Time Log is Finished!

2011-11-26T22:28:00.002-05:00

Hey folks! I know a few of you have kept up with it anyway, but the Time Log webcomic just finished it's run on Thanksgiving! We're planning to bundle it up with the original print comic and try and sell the whole thing as a graphic novel (so if you're friends with any graphic novel publishers, let me know!). Anyway, it was a massive project that ran for over a year over there on the Audioshocker. So, hopefully, now that it's finished, any of you who haven't read it, or stopped part way, can go read and enjoy the whole story.

You can start from the beginning here.

Fille de Dieu, va, va, va!

2011-11-20T23:34:00.001-05:00

You probably wouldn't know this already, but for eight or nine years I've been tremendously under the spell of a mid-1930s oratorio written by Arthur Honegger called Jeanne d'Arc au Bucher, or "Joan of Arc at the Stake," which is almost never performed. It's a big, sprawling affair for large chorus, orchestra, several actors, and a few vocal soloists. There's a children's chorus and an ondes Martenot involved. It's only really viable when performed in French. Paul Claudel wrote the text, rooting the story in the scene of Joan of Arc about to be burned at the stake, but conveying her life in a series of wildly variegated flashbacks: tried and judged by barnyard animals, watching her fate sealed by a parodistic kings' card game, reuniting France in a hearty, allegorical folk festival. Honegger threw the kitchen sink at the project, creating a smorgasbord of dusky expressionism, passionate neo-baroque choral work, misty impressionism, and cheesy dancehall jazz, with bits of folk song, plainchant, and satirical neoclassicism added for good measure.

Reading about it, talking about it, you feel like it's got to be arch and antiquated and essentially batty. In actuality, it's surprisingly earnest and deeply affecting. As I mentioned, it's barely ever performed. But lo and behold, the Baltimore Symphony Orchesta's conductor, Marin Alsop, picked it up this year. And she brought it to Carnegie Hall, too, so I could go with Maddie, which made me incredibly happy. And Mandy and Tabitha came too, although they didn't sit with us since they got their tickets later. Nate and I heard it in Vienna in 2001, when I visited him during his semester abroad. This is the trip when we heard ten concerts in the first seven days I was there, and among them was a German-language Jeanne d'Arc by the Wiener Symphoniker. I remember it as a concert we had a tremendous amount of fun with, since it's this nutty twentieth-century piece, but it wasn't for a couple of years that one of its principal melodies became re-stuck in my mind ("Fille de Dieu, va va va") and I went out to Tower Records at Lincoln Center to get it on CD. On further listening I found myself devastatingly absorbed in the music, and wrapped up in it in a fairly adolescent manner during a couple of years when I wasn't very happy.

Suffice it to say that I've been looking forward to hearing Jeanne d'Arc in concert since the Carnegie Hall schedule came out in March, and moreover since about 2003. Having heard it, I look forward to hearing it in concert again someday, and if someone told me today it'd be in 2021 then I'd be happy enough. It was great that I could bring Maddie, who enjoyed it enthusiastically (and had fun seeing Carnegie Hall for the first time, which very exciting).

Writing a descriptive walk-through of Jeanne d'Arc takes a while, and I'd recommend that the intrigued should get a hold of the Kent Nagano CD on Deutsche Gramophon and give the thing a listen. To describe some aspects of the performance: visually, the stage was remarkably crammed full of performers, with several risers full of choristers and the orchestra squished into the space in front of them. The actress singing Jeanne was the bilingual Caroline Dhavernas, who apparently played the lead role on TV's "Wonderfalls," although I never watched that show. She was perfect for the part, as far as I could tell (without understanding French, I mean), embodying a powerful, bullheaded, precocious, and still vulnerable young spirit. The chorus sang with wonderful strength and impressive precision, especially considering that it was a combined force of three university choruses (from Peabody and from Morgan State University). Certain acoustic imbalances inevitably came up with the solo singers or the ondes, but all in all the sound mix was OK. Honegger used an orchestra with 3 saxes in place of horns, which provide not only zest in the jazzy sections but also an exotic, clear, robust sonorousness when exposed in the orchestal texture, especially so when played in opposition to the chorus.

The early highlight of the performance was Jeanne's trial by the animals, which was appropriately raucous and honest-to-god funny, with a very game supporting actor braying out the donkey's role with a cracked voice and ondes-ist Cynthia Millar playing the related electronic hee-haws so that they were genuinely hilarious.

The seventh of eleven scenes, a short one, portrays Jeanne back at the stake, distant bells tolling as the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret come to her. To me it's always been the most moving scene, and musically it germinates the crucial "Fille de Dieu, va va va" theme, so it's a major crossroads of the entire work. And here there was a very scary flub, coming out of nowhere during a heretofore very tight performance. The saint soloists, I think it was, made an emphatic entry one or two measures early, thus prematurely jumping a key change, taking some fraction of the orchestra with them, and immediately unwinding the orchestra's coherence. For about half a minute the ensemble, heavy like a listing battleship, churned forward under a frightening threat of coming apart; the magnificent upward melodic streamers that were supposed to be pulsing through the high strings went slack and out of sync. But the center held, and control was regained. I've never been so terrified while attending a concert. For a few minutes I was put out that they booted my favorite half-minute stretch of the piece, but equanimity returned to me as always, mingled with a lingering ill ease that something else might go wrong. (This is an emotionally draining way to listen to a piece of music you love, incidentally.) Nothing else went wrong, happily, although in the back forty minutes there are more stretches where the sheer coordination of the full group becomes noticeably imposing; Alsop compromised on some pokey tempos and scooped these great big unambiguous downbeats out of the air. Jeanne d'Arc Bucher was not exactly composed with a 21st-century American orchestra's rehearsal-time resources in mind.

But the climactic scene was riveting: the chorus personifying hatred and sympathy in intense counterpoint, the desperate Jeanne consoled by the otherworldly saints' voices, the powerful chords of her transfiguration blazing beautifully out into the concert hall. Honegger concludes with a brief, indelibly touching choral epitaph on the words "Greater love has no man than he who gives his life for those he loves," or rather more mellifluously, "Personne n'a un plus grand amour que de donner sa vie pour ceux qu'il aime."

So that's Jeanne d'Arc, and despite having heard it live in Vienna and on CD innumerable times since then, I feel like I've finally heard it for the first time. Maddie can sing "Fille de Dieu, va va va" to me now when we're walking down the sidewalk, which pleases me to no end. I woke up at 4:30 this morning and couldn't fall back asleep, various out-of-order shards of Jeanne d'Arc coursing through my thoughts, along with an echo of the worry about the performance unraveling and a somewhat feverish idea of preserving new, authentic sonic memories from the concert hall in the face of the deeply ingrained but flatter sonic memories that come from years of listening to the same recording. Nineteen hours later my mind seems to have wrapped itself around the experience more completely. I don't feel like I completely understand the spell this piece casts over me. Maybe there's just got to be one piece that does that, but if it's Jeanne d'Arc then I'll roll with it, and just hope that it reappears in real life one of these days.

Ikea Person

2011-11-03T21:44:00.002-04:00

Jack asked me a couple of weeks ago, "I just randomly thought of that cartoon you made out of the Ikea people a few years ago. Do you still have that?" Indeed I do, and here it is for the blog, seeing as I'm better at dredging up old the old nonsense than generating the new these days. I originally conceived it as the beginning of some larger effort, but in its four-panel entirety it's a fine testament to what I could accomplish in an single evening in 2005 with MS Paint, MS Word, a scanner, and a stack of Ikea assembly instructions.

I may become an Ikea Person of sorts again soon since Kyle and I are in the process of finding an apartment and moving in together. (I'm referring to furniture shopping here, not heartbreak. Obviously!) It should be a pretty fun way to spend November, all in all.

RIP Bob Cassilly

2011-10-06T21:40:00.004-04:00

In following the NY Times' Steve Jobs obituary I noticed the obit for Bob Cassilly, whose name I didn't know but who was the creative force behind the St. Louis City Museum, among other freewheeling art installations. Cassilly died last week at 61 while doing some solo bulldozing at the cement factory site he'd been developing into another playground.

I'd say in memory that the City Museum is maybe the most fun place I've visited as an adult, or at least the one that legitimately made me feel like a kid. (Nate too, I know.) Reading about Cassilly's death immediately reminded me of Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin's freak stingray accident: here's a grown man pursuing this fun childlike wonderment, and tragedy strikes in a way that seems not only terrible but uniquely unfair. But I guess whimsy is like any other worldly quality, and you run the same risks in energetically seeking it out. I think you have to call that admirable, even while it's deflating.

In any case, there's only so much you can realistically leave behind, and if it's the City Museum then you've made a good go at it.

Dept. of Felicitous Sports Outcomes

2011-10-04T22:01:00.003-04:00

My office runs a fun little $5-a-week pick 'em football pool, and actually the office building itself runs another one where you don't have to put anything in. So that's double your chance to win! And I did win both this week, thanks to my uniquely accurate football insights. Consequently I am enjoying some modest but still unprecedented Tuesday cash prizes. Cash prizes improve a Tuesday. I will be spending the proceeds, essentially, on more pick 'em as the season progresses. But, if my football insights prove their unique accuracy again, well, that time it'll be all gravy.

It's also nice to get a few props in the office for something non-work-related. Picking football winners requires somewhat more skill than the dice game we play with Mom's family but somewhat less skill than, say, Battleship.

Fortunately I don't expect this to be any kind of gateway to organized sports gambling behavior, which I find completely repelling. It already kind of creeps me out that I cared about the total score of the Monday Night Football game, which is the tiebreaker that pushed me over the top.

In conclusion, it's nice to win things. Meanwhile, in the realm of "actual" football, for what that's worth, I've watched three out of the four Steelers games this year, and you can probably figure out my impressions about that without my saying anything.

Happy Shostakovich Day 2K11

2011-09-25T15:33:00.004-04:00

Renascence
Alexander Pushkin, trans. Laurence R. Richter

A barbarian artist uses his indolent brush
To blacken out a genius's picture
And his own illicit drawing
He traces senselessly over it.

But the alien colors with the passing years
Fall away like decrepit scales.
The creation of the genius under them
Emerges with all its former beauty.

Thus disappear the delusions
From my tormented soul,
And there arise within it visions
Of my innocent primal days.

That's the first of four Pushkin poems set in Dmitri Shostakovich's opus 46, which also happens to be where my Exhaustive Shostakovich project has been stalled out, by now, for longer than I initially had it going regularly. That blog is overdue for a renascence of its own, as indeed is my contribution to this one.

Nonetheless, I wish you all a happy 105th anniversary of the composer's birth. Here's hoping all our souls are less tormented by censorship and compromise than his.

I'm in Mountainous Northern Thailand!

2011-09-06T23:43:00.005-04:00

Having moved on from the massive urban climes of Bangkok to the smaller, calmer mountainous region of Thailand's "northern capital," Chiang Mai, it seems only right to keep updating my position, globally, at least slightly on schedule with its movements. So, here we are in Chiang Mai. I've already realized that I'm not the kind of person to take pictures, then put those pictures on a blog (sorry), or, at least not taking pictures that I then use on the blog to assist the narrative. So here's a picture of the sunset in Georgia:

The Sunset in Georgia

If Miami were the size of Bangkok, then Chiang Mai is St. Augustine. Even tho it's currently monsoon season, and therefore not tourist season, there's a sizable population of white people. Students, professional athletes, teachers, and retirees. Some of the old white men are disconcerting, but that's something one has to get rather used to in Thailand, apparently.

In Bangkok, we were always on the beaten path for tourists, but here in Chiang Mai it's a bit more of a free-for-all, except with most of the tourist scene taking place within the walls of the old city (part of the rationale for the St. Augustine comparison (tho, of course, I don't know how many of yinz have even been to St. Augustine)). I just took a walk today to sign up for a situational Thai language class, which I missed the first class of, but shouldn't be too far behind in, since I already learned how to say "Hello," "Thank You;" "Excuse me," and to count to ahundred.

We're staying in a little guest house that's just outside the old city walls, around a corner and down a leafy path. It's quiet and quaint and all around quite nice. Also, earlier this summer, I went to Niagara Falls with Dan and Shelley. Here's a picture of that:

"Slowly I turned, step by step..."

We had hoped to go on the Maid of the Mist, but didn't wind up having time in the end, since we drove all the way to Burlington, VT that day. So this is as close as we got.

Eventually I'll get caught up on the picture front, and have more to say for Chiang Mai and Bangkok.

Off Continent

2011-09-02T06:23:00.002-04:00

The view from our first digs in Bangkok.

Sports-News of the Age

2011-09-01T21:28:00.007-04:00

Nate and I allude to this occasionally, but we conduct a hearty and frequently voluminous e-mail correspondence largely consisting of jokes about the Pirates or Steelers, which we generally don't share around since it's a twin humor feedback loop thing. We have the most fun, in our fashion, with minor players whose names suggest a goofy alter ego, like onetime relief pitcher Anthony Claggett or minor-league outfielder Larry Broadway.

Such was the case last year, briefly, for a Pirates pitcher named Dana Eveland, who we agreed had an impossibly womanly name. Eveland wasn't on the Pirates long but is on the Dodgers now, and happened to beat the swiftly tanking Pirates tonight. So with that background, I share with you the following example of Twin Feedback Sports Humor, in the form of an email exchange spanning fifteen months. I continue to be jealous of Nate's command of old-timey-sounding language.

--------------

Jack to Nate, June 7, 2010

June 7th --- Spectators of this afternoon's baseball match between the Pirates and the the Cubs encountered an unexpected sight, as the home club introduced to the pitching-mound one Dana Eveland, recently of Canada. Perhaps the Chicago men of more broad-shouldered frame were bearers of the occasional guffaw, and if so their disbelief is easily understood. Allowed several innings of presence upon the diamond, however, Eveland was soon seen to be capable at their sport. The elegant windup of Eveland was prelude to a swift, tapering throw, brought off with style and gracious velocity.

How should the devotee of baseball regard this new development in roster-stocking? Perhaps his eyes turn first to the box-score, where the numbers coolly present an unsympathetic portayal of hits registered, runs scored, and not a win by the hosting club. Nevertheless, in at least one progressive sports-writer's view there is much to be lauded here. Why, it may even be noted that today's thrower received rather more success than many of the men the Pirates had of late written into their lineup cards! No doubt, this sportsman alleges, the competitive spirit shall align with the equality-minded spirit of our age; and more than some several hundred ballpark-visitors shall remember this game as the original appearance of Dana Eveland, first woman base-baller.

CORRECTION, June 8th. Dana Eveland is not a woman base-baller. The Pittsburg Telegraph-Courier regrets the error.

--------------

Nate to Jack, September 1, 2011

"Hell hath no fury like a Woman Scorned" — Lady Revenges Pirates Club.
Pittsburg Advertiser-Post, Sept. 1, 1911
Carlson Gillcuddy, sport reporter.

PITTSBURG, Penn. — Brooklyn pitcher Dana Eveland, a woman, today deflated the spirits of the Pittsburg Pirates, the now entirely masculine team that earlier dismissed her services.

The lady Eveland surrendered but one batted run to the rival baseballers while pitching through eight of nine innings. The shamefaced Pittsburg men in attendance attest that the flash of her eye and the red of her cheek betrayed a revengeful mind, and that an unusual aggression showed in her leg-kicks even through the billowing drapery of her hooped skirts.

The mood among the Pirates players themselves as they shifted their uniforms in their changing-pit below the bleachers after their unmanning was even lower.

"It is G———d poor baseball," proclaimed center-fielder Andrew McCutchen, his uncharacteristically coarse language bringing a crimson flush to the Gay Scotsman's face beneath his neatly oiled whiskers. "That such a creature as cannot even achieve a full beard, with all respect to the young Mr. Presley, should even be permitted to take the field is insult enough. But that in the event we could not even meet ball with bat speaks of our wretchedness as athletes as well as members of the male species."

Pittsburg manager Clint Hurdle could be seen upon his dugout-bench sucking a tooth and then twirling his mustaches with a fiery glint in his eye up until the bottom of the sixth inning, at which point he expired of black lung.

Their loss to the delicately wristed female ball-thrower furthered an ignominious season for the Pirates, they having previously lost in Chicago to a trained bear and in Milwaukee to a German.

--------------

Well, we think it's funny, anyway.

Quakin' Postscript

2011-08-24T22:12:00.000-04:00

For the record, you're not supposed to evacuate from an office building during an earthquake. Just get under a desk and away from stuff that might fall on you. And don't stand in a doorway like they tell you when you're a kid: that's not actually safe.

Next up: hurricane preparedness! The west coast is the better of the two coasts this week.

Quakin'

2011-08-23T20:08:00.005-04:00

Today's East Coast temblor registered at the seventh-floor facilities of Big Seagull as a noticeable office wobbling, a perplexing vibration not strong enough to physically disturb anything. It continued for something like ten or fifteen seconds. Several seconds after it stopped, everyone was gathering around the corners of our nondescript beige hallways to verify that it "wasn't just me." So there's the initial presentation of a rare seismic event. Judging from news reports the experience varied widely by what kind of building people were in at the time.

Back in January I read Amanda Ripley's The Unthinkable, about the behavior that people exhibit during disasters and emergencies. Although the Earthquake of Ought-Eleven is clearly neither a disaster nor an emergency, our office behavior was immediately recognizable from Ripley's account. First, people touch base with each other. Next ensues an undirected, nervous, slightly giddy milling around. Someone opined quickly that if we were supposed to get out of the building, the building management would announce it over the intercom. (Passive, instruction-following behavior!) I stated to a small collection of people in the hallway that it wouldn't do any harm for us to walk down to the street, even if it were nothing; my boss said something generally approving of the idea and then said she was going back to her office to get her purse. (An impulse to collect belongings!) Although I could tell a fair number of people wanted to leave the building, no one from the area did, until I walked downstairs with two younger coworkers about two minutes later. (Apathy! Reluctance to alter the crowd behavior!)

Of course, despite having read Ripley, I hadn't yet learned where the emergency stairs in our office were. Others knew. We had a fire drill two Fridays ago, but instead of pointing out the stairs, the fire drill guy just collected us by the elevators and told us to learn where the stairs were. By "fire drill guy," incidentally, I mean a representative of some company the building outsources its fire drills to.

On the sidewalk, there was similar milling behavior, with everyone on their smartphones checking for info. The first news came from Twitter, naturally. (You know, back in my day, people just opened their car doors on the street and played the news radio with the volume all the way up.) Even before I'd walked downstairs someone had learned at least the Twitter basics, that there'd been an earthquake felt as far south as Virginia.

On the sunny sidewalk, where I loitered for ten minutes trying to collect rumors, I wondered darkly whether Washington may have been hit by a nuclear explosion, or how one would theoretically face a tsunami in midtown Manhattan. (My imagination just tracked unhelpfully to Deep Impact, of course, a movie almost as practically unhelpful as it is shitty.) It looked like a small percentage of the surrounding office buildings had emptied. Back in the office, I was moderately nervous and felt an imaginary sway to the building until about a quarter after three.

I still have no idea how you're supposed to react to an earthquake in Manhattan. (Coworker 1, afterwards: "Do you go underground somewhere? . . ." Coworker 2: "No, that's for tornadoes.") Slate's impressively quick-reacting Explainer says you're not supposed to do anything other than duck and cover. And sometime I need to re-read Ripley and, you know, actually apply the information this time. Today's going to seem like a quirky footnote in retrospect, but if this had been some kind of actual emergency it wouldn't have gone down so well.

I'm in Rural Georgia!

2011-08-15T17:01:00.006-04:00

There's something about the phrase "I'm in rural Georgia!" that is just really pleasant to say. It's similar to "rural juror" but not quite as hard, and it's also one of those places that I never would have guessed that I'd be. But I made a quasi-pan-Asian soup today with a bunch of fresh ingredients (the highlight being the lemon thyme and jalapeno pepper) that I was really pretty proud of. Having just re-watched Tampopo with Dan and Shelley and few of Dan's other friends, I'm super proud of having prevented the soup from boiling while also cooking the rice vermicelli in separate, totally boiling, water.

Also, a couple of (well, bratty) Southern teenagers ate my vegan sweet potato yellow curry, which was, apparently, fairly unprecedented behavior. Also, I made a beautiful green curry served over purple rice last week. So I'm on something of a look-at-me-I'm-a-m-f-ing-damn-fine-cook high now.

I think that it brings me to an understanding of why some people (and a couple people I know) take pictures of food (they lovingly call it "food porn") for general sharing (in person on fancy-pants smellulars or on, like, blogs). But, of course, I didn't digitally record any of these small feasts, other than with this small feat of braggadocio right here.

Rural Georgia isn't close to anything, but speaking of Georgia (Athens, Georgia (birthplace of a lot of serious musical awesomeness)), I saw Jeff Mangum perform last weekend in a small-ish (500 people at the sold-out concert) Unitarian church in Burlington, Vermont. Which was beautiful and amazing and just as good as it possibly could have been. It probably deserves its own post, but I figured I'd better mention it now in case I don't get around to it (but now that Jack's blogging again, it reminds me to be blogging again too (after the usually summertime slowdown)). I lingered with a bunch of other fanboys who were after autographs to thank him for singing his songs. He double-checked to make sure I really didn't want his signature on something, since I had waited so long (I didn't). It's nice to know how normal and supernormal some humans can be at the same time.

RIP William Sleator

2011-08-08T20:56:00.004-04:00

The Sunday New York Times ran an obituary for William Sleator, the young-adult fantasy/sci-fi writer behind Interstellar Pig and other books. We shared a light, rambling reminiscence about his books once already in this space. I'll take the time to amplify my esteem for Interstellar Pig, which beyond its excellent title is a childhood book I remember remarkably well, owing to its magnificently shaped plot and enjoyably creepy atmospherics. There's so much for the young, nerdy reader to enjoy: competition among aliens invaders! Role-playing board games! Mystery solving! Sentient lichen! I want to say I read it first at age 8 (which seems early, if I've gotten that right), and then later around age 14 or so (definitely later than the reading level), and it more than stood up both times. I still love how the hunt-and-chase plot morphs into a pretty high-concept reveal at the end, and how Sleator develops the inscrutable character of the titular Pig itself. I'm simultaneously disappointed and relieved that the story hasn't been relaunched as a 3D movie yet.

Obituaries like this always make you realize how much of a person's life you didn't know anything about, and given the description of Sleator's alcoholism (plus an early death, at 66) there are surely some dark spaces there. The obit's mention of the title of his autobiographical kids' book, Oddballs, reminds me that I read that too, somewhere around the age of 12. His books definitely clicked naturally into place in our mid-childhood reading habits.

Matt Stairs, Retire in Peace

2011-08-04T23:13:00.006-04:00

Former Pirates (and about a dozen other teams as well) giant-bat-swinging wish-he-was-on-my-softball-team veteran journeyman Matt Stairs announced his retirement on Thursday. There's a fine post-mortem over on America's favorite conservative-morals-machine sports internet.

I think Matt Stairs is easily the best Canadian to have ever played for the Pirates, probably the best to ever grace the majors with his oh-man-that-guy-is-awesome beer gut, casual demeanor, and always-swing-for-the-fences attitude. I feel like such a dude for liking him, but that's the way it is.

I try to keep my enjoyment of professional sports complicated (there's a lot not to like), but I--and this comes from liking music, being a musician, I think--do like the fact that sports is a way to see people who are really good at something do that thing that they're really good at. And think of how good Matt Stairs really must have been to keep himself in the majors for 18 years on little more than his ability to hit home runs (that he was never even that good at (he does hold the MLB record for pinch-hit homers, and he hit 20 homers for the Pirates the year he was with us, but that's still just more than one pinch-hit home run per year played)). Maybe not the most well-rounded of players, but, seriously, that's a hell of a career.

And, of course, most of you know Stairs only more recently for his heroics and awesomeness for the Phillies. But I've been on the bandwagon since he was a Pirate, and I'm sad that he's not playing anymore. Earlier this summer, I was in Pittsburgh, watching a Buccos game against the Nationals on TV, where Stairs hit a pinch-hit walk-off single against the Bucs, that was what should have been a home run that instead just bounced off the right field wall. Still won the game, but I had the thought then that, oh man, he was getting old. But I didn't know he'd be out of the game this soon.

Way, to go, Matt Stairs. Baseball sucks now.

And, yes, there's also this:

Let's Learn about Beet Nutrition

2011-08-02T19:01:00.002-04:00

My friend Dan and I made dinner the other night at his place up in Washington Heights (he's subletting through the end of summer), and although we did not cook beets, the conversation turned to beets at one point. And I realized we had very different impressions of beets' nutritional value, Dan having heard that they're a superfood, I having thought that they're made more or less the way Dave Chappelle describes purple drink (sugar, water, purple). Of course we both understand that beets are delicious.

But what is the true story here? Well, it's probably on the Internet. Googling "beet nutrition" will run you into some light content-farm congestion. (Sample first sentence: "Beets are delightful for their color and flavor as well as for their beet nutrition.") It sounds like the real answer (here's a website with a bar graph, for example, which indicates that science is happening) involves B vitamins, antioxidants, and manganese. I'm guessing it's the antioxidants giving them the superfood rep, and I don't believe in antioxidants; so beyond that it sounds like you've just got some second-tier vitamins and minerals. But, that's still not a bad package (fiber, deliciousness, purple). And I have no idea what manganese does, biochemically, but sure, let's all make sure we're getting enough manganese.

Anyway, again, no beets were consumed Sunday night, or really for a while, by me. (Back in like October, Maddie and I cooked a huge tureen of borscht from a surprisingly complicated Veselka Cookbook recipe, a moderate success that I remember fondly because I hadn't stopped eating pig yet and it had a pound and a half of pork shoulder in it. We also indulge now and then in this one brand of really awesome pickled beets.) Dan had made an oven-roasted gazpacho so we had that with fish tacos and homemade mango salsa, and then it turned out he'd made a three-berry pie the night before (!) so we had cold, refreshing pie out of the fridge. All of this was awesome. I haven't been cooking very responsibly in 2011 without Maddie's involvement, but cooking simply and sociably seems to help.

Oh, I Got the Information, All Right

2011-07-31T11:21:00.001-04:00

James Gleick's The Information is a worthwhile read, but I was left a bit cool towards it in the end. The book takes a sweeping look at information science, which largely took shape alongside the development of communications technology and early computing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It's an impressive traversal, and much of the recent thinking on information — its existence as a physical phenomenon, its relation to entropy and importance in quantum mechanics — is exciting and heady stuff.

Unfortunately Gleick includes some incongruous detours, and wraps up the book by steering it into a discussion of Internet age concerns that's much weaker than his science writing. As a result, it feels like the main thread of the book disappears early, and even Gleick's sense of the word "information" reverts to a generic use. It's disconcerting, especially since he so well elucidates information's modern refinement into a precise, subtle scientific concept.

Some of the early chapters are the most interesting, partly from the interest of seeing a modern analytical apparatus applied to premodern activity. Gleick aptly begins by discussing West African "talking drums," an intervillage communication system that was unbested before the telegraph in its delivery speed. As much as any later system it can be analyzed as encoded information, in this case an approximation of speech using only its syllable patterns and tone, high or low. The translated content seems loquacious and overly poetic at first, but as Gleick describes it, it's a now-familiar matter of building in redundancy to prevent error. The alphabet gets an early chapter too, maybe relating a bit less to rarefied information flow but certainly representing an easily overlooked phenomenon of information encoding. (And not an inevitable one; unlike, say, agriculture, the alphabet was only invented once.)

There's a wonderful chapter on Charles Babbage, nineteenth-century Englishman and scientific polymath who invented a steam-powered computer tantalizingly out of practical reach. He kept an equally fascinating correspondence with Ada Byron, daughter of the poet, who as an incredibly talented mathematical amateur even more overtly conceived of computing and programming before it really existed as such. (You get a strong sense here of the western world not exactly taking full advantage of its female minds.)

As for the modern science, it's not particularly easy to wrap your mind around it, but Gleick writes well about the things that are going to go over your head. The useful nickel takeaway, as I absorbed it, is understanding information as a property of physical reality, an inherent quality of organized existence in opposition to entropy. I will admit to still being somewhat fuzzy on the details. And I find quantum computing interesting, but for now I will mostly have to take people's word for its operation.

Reading The Information reminded me that I never actually got around to reading Chaos, beyond looking at the color plates of the Mandelbrot Set. Maybe that'll go on the reading list at a later date.

Livin' in Astoria

2011-07-30T17:20:00.001-04:00

[Transcribed from steno pad.—ed.]

So Astoria, today, is finally feeling like the excitingly enjoyable environment that I knew I was returning to. This is three weeks in, post-move: the key seems to be finally logging a full and pleasant Saturday. The past two I spent returning to New Haven to finish cleaning the old apartment, dispatching some non-viable furniture items, and painting over in bright white the favored mild interior tones of my now-past habitation. All of that during the hottest days of the year! So it's good that it's over and done with. With Maddie in Atlanta I get to pass a day by sleeping in, biking around for an hour (following a utilitarian bike route through Long Island City and over the less-than-atmospheric Queensboro Bridge, and back), and ordering a frappe and some crepes at a brunch place on 30th Avenue. That's gotten me as far as 2 PM, as I write this down via steno pad. It's sunny and hot, but after a big rain squall yesterday evening it's not as oppressive as it's been. Which is a relief: moving into NYC in the middle of July asks a certain perseverance of you, heatwise.

The move itself, back on, what, July 10, went surprisingly smoothly, basically thanks to Maddie, who rolled up her sleeves and identified the necessary level of shit-getting-togetherness several beats before I did. And then she was there packing and shlepping and giving me verbal directions while I parallel parked a 17-foot U-Haul truck on a city street. That's some kind of quality time, somewhat less relaxing than our week vacation in her hometown San Mateo, CA, shortly beforehand. I will have to describe that enjoyable hiatus in more detail at a later time. Since I can't take any other summer vacations this year, thanks to the three-month wait stipulated by office PTO policy for new hires, I'll have to re-live the old vacation vicariously by describing it.

My apartment is quite small, especially my bedroom, and Job One is currently obtaining enough small storage-type pieces to finish putting things away coherently. My roommate, Kate, is as friendly and considerate as advertised, and of course as a flight attendant she's been away about half the time. So far, the strategy of coordinating apartment time with people's various flight schedules has worked out pretty well. Maddie's about eight blocks away, and it's predictably easier to negotiate that trip than the two-plus hours from Connecticut. Getting to hang out on weekday evenings is a predictably nice perk.

My commute to Weekday Workplace Neighborhood & Co., Inc., is a little longer than I expected, about 35 minutes door to door. But it's an easy one, and the subway time means I'm already back to reading at my early-decade amount of material, having fairly plowed through Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale, Karen Russell's excellent first novel Swamplandia! (on loan from Nate), and James Gleick's The Information, which came recommended from Pete. The N/Q trains (or the R, if I'm coming from Maddie's) let out at Times Square, an avenue west of work. It still strikes me as a goofy thing to go to Times Square if you're intending to have a workday, as opposed to gawking around and being a tourist. I've taken to calling the area Crazy Midtown, to distinguish it from the calmer Lower Midtown where I used to work. The Workplace itself is located in 500 Fifth Avenue, a handsome art deco skyscraper caddy-corner to Bryant Park and across from the lion-fronted New York Public Library building. Crazy Midtown is a fun place to be in the afternoon, as you lunch in the park surrounded by several hundred other business-y people doing the same thing. Somehow there are enough folding chairs provided.

Work is going well. I'm on a learning curve, but the job is quite similar to what I was doing at YUP, so I've been a quick study. I was just assigned my first project on Thursday, which is good, since it means I'm transitioning out of the initial editorial odd jobs I've been helping out the other editors with. I've been installed in a temporary cubicle in the interior reaches of the seventh floor, where the air conditioning and fluorescent lighting are crisp and consistent and obliterate any sensation of time or weather. I won't be in the cubicle forever, although I'm not sure how long it'll really be. The college books division has been undergoing a big expansion (I'm one of a slew of new hires, including two other people with my job description), and the company intended to secure more office space in the building while this happened. Plan A fell through, and the rumors about an early-autumn Plan B aren't particularly detail-rich.

But the cubicle isn't bad, although I have no phone line. Grudgingly, I admit that I'd like to be accessible by telephone at work. In the adjacent cubicle is the department assistant, Sophie, who's a Swarthmore grad from '10 and knows the whole music department there. The greatest cubicle risk is total social disengagement, but I finally learned to do work whenever possible at the open-area conference table directly outside my cubicle; here people will pass by and say hello. Now if any actual conferring needs to take place at the table, well, then I go into the cubicle and put headphones on and do my work while listening to symphonic Martinů, or something else with a musical texture that's chattery enough to blot out background conversation. In general, the interpersonal vibe is good in the office, and I'm of course surrounded by the simpatico kind of editorial personalities I've come to appreciate in the publishing world.

So that's the general shape of things. This is probably enough blogging for now, if you can still call it "blogging" when you're writing in a steno pad in a café. (The activity did intrigue the waitress, who asked if I was a writer, and after a brief explanation of what I was writing remarked "Oh good, I hoped it wasn't, like, a poem or a breakup letter." Pete, I guess you can make of that comment what you will. At least when I told her my brother was a poet, it seemed like she did find that to be cool. I guess you don't see people handwriting things in public much, but I can't make myself consider it to be unusual behavior.) But Astoria is interesting, it hasn't changed from when I loved it five years ago, and being in New York is a fine thing even in the brutal middle of the summer.

Cave Movie

2011-07-25T23:15:00.001-04:00

One of the perks of moving to New York City (oh right, that little thing, which will deserve some more commentary soon) is that the IFC Center cinema is still showing Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which I'd thought I'd maybe missed my chance to see in the theater. I knew it would be right up my alley, but still I was surprised how beautiful it was onscreen. I wouldn't have thought 3-D could be that luscious, and Herzog even works artfully with its rough edges and flaws. In some of the shots of people inside the cave, the flattened or collapsed layers of the film provide a surreally warped visual. I can only imagine that Herzog's intentionally playing with the effect.

Beyond the wonder of seeing the 30,000-year-old artwork itself -- and it's a real service to everyone that a film this enveloping was made of it -- the moving aspect of the film, to me, is watching its observers react to it. It's amazing that art this vibrant exists in such a deep reach of human prehistory, but it's equally amazing that it can still genuinely move an audience.

The music, by a Dutch cellist named Ernst Reijseger, is canny in its ancient-meets-postmodern vibe, especially for being courageously exposed during the longer art-watching shots.

And Herzog's trademark kind of loony epilogue is delightful, what with the looming nuclear cooling towers and the mini-nightmarish shots of albino crocodiles and the careening Herzog-style voiceover. I suppose in ten years we'll all have 3-D television sets and we can rewatch the film, but for now I'm happy to have seen it as intended.

Happy Birthday Herrmann!

2011-06-30T01:48:00.001-04:00

This being the 100th birthday of the late Bernard Herrmann, at least for another hour or so on this coast, it seems worth noting again that he's an exceptional film composer. The links have rotted from this four-year-old post about his Hitchcock film overtures but my affection for them remains the same; I wish the copyright holders would just put those opening credits on Vevo and let them stand freely as short film pieces, which they do pretty well.

Vertigo remains my favorite of Herrmann's film scores, narrowly beating out Psycho and Taxi Driver, so it's intriguing to hear it serving as a spacey femme fatale signifier in the obligatory, batshit-goofy prologue to Lady Gaga's recent "Born This Way" video. (In fact, based on the slow statement of the main theme I believe it comes from Esa-Pekka Salonen's recording of Herrmann suites with the L.A. Philharmonic, a disc that I've gotten a ton of mileage out of although its extreme tempos have worn on me a bit.) As a pop appearance of a Herrmann score it's not nearly as charming as the Psycho sample in Busta Rhymes' "Gimme Some More" from a dozen or so years ago, but it points to a continuing place in the popular imagination for Herrmann's work, or at least for the orchestral cinema music which he exemplifies.

Sechzehn Blumen für Leopold

2011-06-16T14:58:00.001-04:00

Here is my obligatory Bloomsday post. Rejoice in the day! If you haven't yet read the epic, densely scatalogical modernist tome that is Ulysses, there's still time before midnight.

Here is also my more or less annual recommitment to getting my "Molly Worth" whatsit back onto the web in its full glory, such as it is. Former President Reagan shall not have died in vain to give me the day off work on which I Photoshopped that together.

Today's Jellyfish News

2011-06-06T19:25:00.000-04:00

. . . Or, not really news per se, but an interesting jellyfish article that was teased atop the NY Times website for a while today. My pet fascination with jellyfish is largely about their complex life cycle, but the story of their surprisingly developed nervous system makes for good light science reading, too. The best bit is at the very end, describing the mangrove-swamp-dwelling box jellyfish that's developed a complex eye that always looks up at the water's surface. Apparently they use visual cues to stay close to the mangrove roots that are their preferred habitat.

Burgh Ball in Queens 2K11

2011-06-02T20:11:00.001-04:00

One of the office manuscript editors, Dan, is an enthusiastic Mets fan, and for the past couple of years he's been buying a big package of tickets and selling the ones he doesn't use. But he always goes to the midweek day games, so I took a day off work with him today and went down to watch the Mets and Pirates wrap up their four-game series. Now I can say I've watched Paul Maholm blow a seven-run lead. I also grabbed Dan's tickets for Memorial Day and watched that game with Stu and Stu's friend Craig.

So I've had a lot of baseball in my life this week! I may have caught both Pirates losses in their four-game visit, but the atmospherics were let's-play-two prototypical both times. Today the air was fresh, the sun was bright, and a brisk wind was blowing trash all around the field, which is to say ideal weather for Queens.

Dan's baseball fandom has an old-fashioned cast to it, keeping a scorecard going and all that, so he's a fun game companion. We usually have a two- or five-minute morning chat in the office about baseball goings-on and our respective sufferings; gametime conversation was largely that, expanded to three hours. Around when the score had crept up to 7–5 he said, "You know, I was kidding when I said how disappointed you'd be to go home after watching the Pirates blow a seven-run lead," to which I replied "Yeah, I don't doubt this stuff any more" or one of my other interchangeable laconic Pirates statements.

If I can digress briefly into the onfield action, may I note that the seventh run (the fourth in that inning) scored on a first-pitch passed ball by catcher Dusty Brown, a runner having gone from second to third base because Brown let a throw home get behind him right before that. In short: catcher Dusty Brown scored a key run all by himself from second by failing to catch two consecutive live baseballs that went to him. And let's not even get into what Jose Veras did in relief.

Neil Walker did hit a highly entertaining 430-foot home run into a right-center billboard, although he was somewhat outdone a couple innings later by Carlos Beltran absolutely destroying a ball on a sailing line drive into left.

Monday night was a fine game as well, Armed Forces Recognition Day at the park for Memorial Day weekend. So they had a crew from Afghanistan piped onto the scoreboard by satellite video, and a fighter-jet flyover, and generally a healthily honorary milieu going. And the evening was clear, with a pink-purple sunset passing through. The ballgame was a bit chippier, without many balls being hit all that authoritatively till the Mets broke things open late. But it was fun to watch Charlie Morton pitch without being "Charlie Mortoned" (as Nate coined it last year in one of our voluminous Pirates-related email exchanges). I'm happy to see Morton doing well, and really he just lost the game because of several unlucky ground balls getting into the outfield. And of course it's always fun to watch Pittsburgh sports with Stu.

Citi Field didn't impress me when I went there the first time a couple years ago, but it's growing on me a little bit. I still think it's too big to be ideal. Dan's seats are up in section 514, right behind home plate but of course up a ways. You do get an especially nice view of the outfielders tracking fly balls that way.

I saw a couple of Pirates fans in the crowd wearing actually current player jerseys (Walker, McCutchen), so you can tell that, at the moment, things are looking up for the team. Or at least somewhat less down.

136,036

2011-05-25T20:18:00.002-04:00

My car's odometer stood at that number when I parked outside Kyle's apartment yesterday night, which seems auspicious in that it's the mark at which I had put exactly 100,000 miles on the vehicle: When I bought it from a Fairfax, VA Honda dealership in, I think, the late spring of 2003 it had 36,036 miles on it.

I at least got to watch the odometer roll over this time, unlike with the transition into six-figure mileage. My feelings about the milestone are low in magnitude and mixed in nature. At the 72,072 point I felt like I was making the car actually mine -- not to the degree that paying off the car loan, hopefully the first and only of my life, did -- but my attitude towards increased mileage has long since flipped from "this vehicle is more and more mine" to "I am depreciating the most significant item I have ever paid for". Still, there remains a good feeling that the 2000 Civic is a very good car for the money, especially when the title's in someone else's name when it drives off the lot the first time. It's increasingly odd that anyone owned it previously to me, if only because it meant bailing on a then-four-year-old workhorse of a passenger vehicle with only 36K miles on it. Who does that, buy a lower-mid-size Honda without intending to use it for as long as possible? I certainly hope myself, as Steelers coach Mike Tomlin once said about a real live human being, to run it until the wheels come off, hopefully not at highway speed. It's a good car, and I should take better care of it -- just in terms of surface appearance, it is rather full of leaf litter at the moment and covered in patches by a sort of algal patina, a result of being parked outside during a rainy Portland winter that has lasted for about the past sixteen months, which gives it an aspect not unlike Swamp Thing -- but it's holding up as expected and will hopefully last for several years more.

Where did all those miles go? I don't feel a lot of nostalgia for them, and hence not a lot of urge to calculate them out, but they mainly would have been paced off in a numbing loop along the I-66 / Dulles Toll Road corridor in Northern Virginia, in direct analogy to my career. Some back-of-the-envelope crunching suggests I've approximately halved my yearly driving distance since moving to Portland, to which I say "right on"; doing away with driving to work was a major reason for moving here, after all, or I should say a major reason I moved here instead of putting the screws to Kyle to join me in the Greater-D.C. 'burbscape. I would happily drive less still, since I just haven't ever enjoyed driving as an end in itself under any circumstances whatsoever, and I'd like to think that if I relocated someplace where car ownership were actually difficult I would dispassionately sell the Civic without a sentimental thought. I probably would feel a pang, though. The car, or rather a sort of intuitive, animistic concept of the car as a fellow being, does seem to have wormed its way somewhat into my heart.

Soul Sharing

2011-05-23T21:52:00.002-04:00

I learned about Raphael Saadiq for the first time this weekend, thanks to the GF's Rhapsody listening. Saadiq's got a new album out, Stone Rollin', continuing in a straight line from his 2008 release The Way I See It by faithfully emulating classic Motown soul down to the orchestrations and studio sound. It's not like I listen to a lot of Motown, but I am way on board with this project. I think music in most genres would be well served by turning back the clock several decades. Saadiq sounds really good doing it.

I think he should have stuck with the cleanly retro album art from '08, but otherwise I give the new thing both of my thumbs up. And, um, although I'm going to feel somewhat white writing this, you can read a good interview with Saadiq from The Guardian, from 2009. The man's experience is a combination of rough childhood and charmed life.

Tête-à-têtanus

2011-05-18T13:34:00.004-04:00

Today I got a tetanus booster shot at a local Walgreen's. Which is somehow so uncannily close to feeling totally mundane and commonplace without being so that it seems to have (has) broached the usual personal life barriers that filter what of mild posts I make.

It's also the first tetanus shot I've gotten that I remember getting. Which had been popping up in my day-to-day consciousness for the past two months, since (along with a couple aspects of my upcoming summer, which seem to call for being tetanus-protected) I cut myself on a few pieces of metal recently, and mashed one of my fingers in a metal lock-holding window-gate thing (according to the internet "mashing" injuries are particularly prone to giving cause to tetanus).

My only tetanus-related memories are:

a) a neighbor (next-door neighbors, the ones in the "dislike" column because of a certain car crash that ruined (aka made awesome) my 6th grade class picture) kid stepping on a rusty nail in his backyard and needing to get a tetanus shot afterwards

b) being asked if my tetanus boosting was in order, before a Boy Scout trip at the Philmont Ranch, when I was 14, and having a parent-affirmed answer of "I don't see how it couldn't be." (Maybe I didn't talk quite that stiltedly back then, but you get the idea.)

So I wasn't eager to add "that time I got tetanus when I was, like, in my late 20s" to the list. I don't have much love for the American middle-class way of life, as it pertains to health care, or for the corporations that I mostly blame for most of the world's ills. I also don't have health insurance. But wanted me some tetanus resistance. So I went to a clinic at a national corporate pharmacy/convenience chain store, because it was the obviousest and cheapest way to get the shot that I could find, paying $63 for 10 more years of tetanus boostification (that's only $6.30/year!).

During my visit, I had a very nice conversation with a nurse practitioner about bicycle riding in Miami (and the hazards thereof) and about planning long distance cross-state bicycle trips (and the pleasures thereof). Other than having to check in to the clinic via a touchscreen computer (a helpful robot!) the experience was altogether more pleasant than either my former (corporate degree-mill) university's health center or the hospital where I used to go for general care in Boston. Which leaves me feeling all kinds of different what-the-fuckednesses. So I'm confused, but at least I'm now protected from the dread-specter of tetanus.

Atchafalaya

2011-05-16T22:17:00.009-04:00

The severely flooded Mississippi has focused some news coverage on the Old River Control Structure, the 50-year-old Army Corps of Engineers project in Louisiana that prevents the river from changing its course and draining into the Gulf of Mexico through a steeper channel, the Atchafalaya River. You can read Jeff Masters on the subject here. (Take note of the sweet, 1958-vintage USACE Sankey Diagram of a 500-year-flood flow that he posts!) The structure doesn't seem to be facing imminent failure, but the 2011 flood is a severe test of an extraordinary, inherently vulnerable engineering system. When the structure does fail, and it certainly will someday, then Baton Rouge and New Orleans will be left by the wayside.

Masters, of course, points to John McPhee's classic essay from 1987, compiled in his eminently worthwhile trilogy The Control of Nature. Basically, you should find this and read it, or if you're appallingly immune to the sensory pleasures of a physical book you can catch the Atchafalaya portion of it by scrolling through twenty-seven web pages on the New Yorker site. It's a fairly amazing projection of modern power that we've been imposing our will on the lower Mississippi for this long, contra natural preferences.

Oregon at Carnegie Hall

2011-05-15T12:25:00.009-04:00

Carnegie Hall inaugurated what it calls its Spring for Music festival this year, a smartly conceived series that brings a few less-traveled orchestras into town with unusual, high-concept programs. Thursday's offering by the Oregon Symphony, directed by the perky Austro-Uruguayan Carlos Kalmar, showed what a win-win formula it is. Playing Carnegie Hall is a big deal for the orchestra, which has existed for 115 years without performing east of the Mississippi. Kalmar described a countdown clock that's been ticking down the days all season long. Much of the audience had actually flown in from Portland for the occasion, frequently lending the scene a cheerful, booster-ish feeling, most of all in the six ovations at the end.

And the program they sharply performed was significantly more daring than what you can usually hear, a somber ticket of four twentieth-century works united under the theme "Music in a Time of War." Ralph Vaughan Williams's 1930s-vintage Fourth Symphony had pride of place after intermission, angrily resonating with the decade's rise of violence and fascism. Before that, Kalmar constructed a kind of meta-symphony, played without pause, of Charles Ives's The Unanswered Question, John Adams's late-1980s setting for baritone of Walt Whitman's The Wound-Dresser, and Benjamin Britten's 1940 Sinfonia da Requiem, the one piece actually composed during wartime. The Oregonians brought it off as a big success, sounding like an overachieving B-plus orchestra in the first half and then really nailing the Vaughan Williams.

So it was a challenging, fearless program. For any twentieth-century music junkie, this is a rare treat: big, modern works throw sparks off of each other when you hear them together, but they're generally paired with something older and safer. Britten and Vaughan Williams were particularly resonant on Thursday night: two countryman composers without much style in common, writing music a few years apart in a similar mood. Some tense, climbing melodies in the first movement of the Vaughan Williams were immediately reminiscent of material in the Britten, in a way that you wouldn't realize from knowing the pieces separately.

The Unanswered Question was distinguished by a remarkable opening pianissimo in the strings, a barely-there dynamic taking full advantage of the Carnegie acoustic that Kalmar had raved about in his opening remarks. (Allan Kozinn, in the Times, takes time to note the worse-than usual coughing in the hall, which I think began before the first chord change. It was indeed a damn shame.) It's an appropriately atmospheric lead-in to The Wound-Dresser, itself slow, quiet, and ruminative. Adams is generally a flashy composer, but he's much deferential to the Whitman text, which plainly honors its Civil War wounded without flinching from the bodily tragedies they've suffered. The result is a serious, through-composed treatment that seems to step back and let the words create their own emotional profile. Sanford Sylvan, who premiered the work two decades ago, voiced its searching, arching melodies with somber grace and humanity. (Props to him, too, for gamely sitting self-effacingly onstage during the Ives and Britten works.) The Oregonians' concertmaster, Jun Iwasaki, performed a secondary but more rhapsodic violin part richly and with visible commitment. (He's an unusually animated violinist: even in the big symphonic works, it was fun to watch him bobbing and swaying around with the unconventional rhythms.)

As scathing as the Sinfonia da Reqiuem may be, it was welcome by this point to hear some loud and fast music. It's an emotionally raw work, opening with a pounding bass drum, built on a mass of bold, inchoate musical gestures that only win a melodic security in the tender third movement. The middle movement, taken at a ferocious clip by Kalmar, is a whirl of galloping string rhythms, snare drums, bugle calls, and grating orchestral outbursts: machine warfare evoked in a nightmare impression of a cavalry charge. The concluding lullaby, sung at first by three tenuously harmonized flutes above a gently consoling orchestra, suggests relief, scarring, and moral exhaustion all at the same time. Britten builds to a more affirmative climax, then lets that melt away too.

Ralph Vaughan Williams is much better known in his pastoralist mode, the romantic composer of The Lark Ascending and the Fantasy on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. But in a darker mood he's punchy and unpredictable, no more so than in the Fourth Symphony. The recurring theme is a jagged, four-note chromatic piece of scrap metal, memorably blasted out by the trombones and trumpets in seriously dissonant counterpoint to start the final movement's fugal epilogue. There's a softer, brooding slow movement and some similar episodes throughout, but the dominant feeling is bitter and unshrinking. In the final movement the orchestra builds up a galumphing head of steam replete with brass oompahs and cymbal crashes. The Oregonians charged through it impressively, all focused energy and precisely snapped full-orchestra syncopations.

By all appearances the Oregonians really outdid themselves, and I'd hear them again without hesitation. The series has gotten good local press; Carnegie's got it scheduled through 2013 so far, and I hope they decide to stick with it. It goes to show how good the apparently "regional" American orchestras can be, and in the service of an unusual concert presentation that's not about wondering how their Tchaikovsky or whatever stands up to the Big Five orchestras. So, like I said already, win-win.

F---ed up on my computer and my mind starts roaming

2011-05-09T20:50:00.001-04:00

Since this weekend I haven't had the use of my personal laptop, which is a little bit annoying. Kyle, at least, has work and personal laptops of her own, which helped me decide that my registry got corrupted in such a way as to kill Windows XP's local authentication service on startup. The upshot being that the system is reduced to a mouse pointer on a black screen, which unless you are a cat will probably not meet your home computing needs.

This all would be pretty straightforward to resolve if I had the Windows CDs that came with my laptop when I bought it several years ago. Indeed, I believed in my heart of hearts -- still I believe! -- that these were duly packed up with all of my other important stuff when I left Northern Virginia and survived the move west. My faith did waver, it's true, when I looked for them in the single place where they would be if all that had happened, where they were not.

Picking through your closets, bookshelves, miscellaneous shitpiles, and so on turns out to be a sort of internally humiliating experience. Not just because I'm dealing with a small tear in the fabric of my self-image as a reasonably organized person but because I have to question my intelligence and priorities too, and square my understanding of myself with the less flattering concept of a person who drives the user manual for his toaster 3,000 miles across the country while not keeping the computer equivalent of a spare key to your car.

The computerness of the issue rankles, too, because I am a software professional and you would think -- I would think, without much evidence over the past decade -- that I'd be more generally on top of the data backups, antivirus updates, etc. that prevent and minimize the impact of this sort of thing. In fact I'm exposed again as a person who, although engaged enough by writing code, has an attitude towards the nuts and bolts of PC hardware and maintenance that ranges from vaguely curious to crankily indifferent. And that's not good. I've often taken comfort in the cliche of the plumber who can't bring himself to fix the leaky pipes at home after hours, but this makes me feel more like a plumber who's just dug an open pit where his toilet is supposed to be.

As for the laptop itself, it should be recovered easily enough with more time than I should have had to put to it. The greater issue is the temptation just to take the somewhat creaky old Dell Inspiron out back to the apartment complex's communal yard and Old Yeller it, then go buy a shiny new MacBook, but my iTunes library and password database should lure me away from that fantasy. That and some amount of scanned and MS-Paint-doodled nonsense that's accumulated without being good enough to email to somebody or to put up on the blog. (This is a low bar to clear, as longtime readers and/or correspondents will be aware.) On the one hand, that notion should only galvanize me to put away childish halfway efforts for good and engage afresh in deeper, more committed creative work, but on the other hand, "Noooooo, my nonsense".

At any rate, I intended to bring my work laptop home tonight to tide me over, and even brought my computer bag to make this transfer more comfortable, forgetting, however, to move the key for the cable securing my laptop to my desk out of my non-computer bag and into my computer bag. Thus, probably no computers this evening for me, save for this bit of after-hours, office-bound usage. That will at least keep me relatively undistracted from combing my apartment for those XP discs. Also, I have nothing time-sensitive to write except that anyone considering a jaunt to New York on Thursday for the Oregon Symphony's Carnegie Hall premiere -- by which I basically mean Jack -- should absolutely do it, since I heard their war-themed, English/American program on Saturday night and it was exceptionally well-played, as well as one of the most astonishingly thoughtful concert line-ups I've ever heard. And, there!, but for some illustrative details I've just blogged that. So all is well in the cosmos.

Coplandic Passacagliana

2011-05-09T20:17:00.004-04:00

I was inspired by that David Orr book to finally read Aaron Copland's What to Listen For in Music, from way back in 1939. It's something along similar lines for classical music: really the classic music appreciation book, stateside at least. It's a good, clear read. Its datedness does show, for example in assuming a striving attitude on the part of the listener, bordering on an obligation. "To listen intently, to listen consciously, to listen with one's whole intelligence is the least we can do in the furtherance of an art that is one of the glories of mankind," he concludes. Less substantively but more destructively, his pronouns and hypothetical figures are claustrophobically male. So I'm not sure this would really work as a layperson's reader any more.

I'm still digesting it, but for now here's an isolated fragment that shows an important point of light. Here's Copland discussing the passacaglia form:

Speaking generally, the composer has two objectives in treating the passacaglia form. First, with each new variation the theme must be seen in a new light. In other words, interest in the oft repeated ground bass must be aroused and sustained and added to by the composer's creative imagination. Secondly, aside from the beauty of any one variation, taken alone, they must all together gather cumulative momentum, so that the form as a whole may be psychologically satisfying.

I may be forgetting something, but I think Copland's second thought here is about as concretely as he discusses dramatic intensity as a key ingredient of musical construction. (He does allude elsewhere to the "long line" of a work, a dramatic contour, that needs to be instinctively felt by the composer.) But anyway, here they are in microcosm, the two aspects in which a piece varies as it goes from measure to measure: in musical content and in dramatic intensity. Copland spends a lot of time on the former and not a lot on the latter. Which is fair enough, since the dramatic line is much, much harder to describe concretely. Plus, it's basically subjective in the ears of the listener. But I think the tricky thing is that the dramatic line is also more important to how you're going to experience a long-form piece of music.

And I think the same thing is true on the macro level, with musical variation more or less aggregating to form and dramatic variation to the "long line." It's not like you can disengage the two things, but I think the second one's the primary one. If you want a give a glib instruction for an instrumental composition, it's not "have a robust form," it's "don't get boring."

Anyway, I'm not going to dash something off and outdo Aaron Copland in an evening. Here's the passacaglia he gives as an example -- and if you know the piece, you already know it's going to be the exemplary passacaglia -- Bach's magnificent Passacaglia in C minor. (With bonus fugue!) The two high-register variations at about five and a half minutes always get me, I think because the sublimation of the bass line lends them a sense of wistful vulnerability.

In Which I am Baited by a Shostakovich Book Review

2011-05-07T13:48:00.000-04:00

I wrote most of the following yesterday in a burst of annoyance after reading Edward Rothstein's New York Times review of Wendy Lesser's fine survey of the Shostakovich string quartets, Music for Silenced Voices. I put those thoughts up in full on my sorely underused Shosto-blog, where they belong, but I'm cross-posting a couple of paragraphs here to save a click and highlight a point about authenticity that I hope is less specific to the composer and more of general (mild) interest.

(The background on the below-mentioned Testimony is that it's a deeply influential but inauthentic Shostakovich "memoir" put out by the musicologist Solomon Volkov in the late 1970s. I won't try to beat Alex Ross at laying out the case against it.)

* * * * *

I've allowed this space to get cobwebby over the past couple of months, obviously, but it's worth saying some words about Edward Rothstein's review of Wendy Lesser's Music for Silenced Voices in yesterday's New York Times, which turns out to be more of an ambiguous endorsement of Solomon Volkov's fraudulent Shostakovich memoir, Testimony.

. . .

Where Rothstein becomes irritating is in offering a squishy apology for Volkov's misrepresentation of Testimony as Shostakovich's own, writing: "In fact, if not an authentic memoir, 'Testimony' is still a work of considerable literary power, a suggestive account of the music and a convincing portrait of the man who composed it." The "convincing portrait" bit is maddeningly circular, in that the main mechanism by which the book convinced anyone in the first place was by falsely representing itself within what was then a void of non-Party line information about the composer. I agree with Rothstein that Lesser fails to dismiss Testimony as thoroughly as she wants to, but I think what she wants to say by deeming its legacy "pointless" is that its halfway accuracy is no longer needed now that there are far more authentic versions of the composer's words and private thoughts available. And after reading Elizabeth Wilson's excellent Shostakovich: A Life Remembered and Isaak Glikman's lovable collection of Shostakovich's letters to him, Story of a Friendship, Volkov's text fails to convince; the anecdotes and the general outline of disliking the Soviet state apparatus may be correct, but the bitterness of its voice is alien.

More generally, I've become less and less of a relativist about the notion of truth since my heyday in a sophomore-level literary theory class in college, and by now I'm convinced that any sentence beginning "In fact, if not an authentic memoir" has little business leading anywhere but "then it should not in fact be treated as authentic" without a really good justification. I get that words can be partially true; I get what Maxim Shostakovich told Rothstein in the early 1980s that Volkov's book, while a fake, was truer to his father than the other published words attributed to him at that time. But it's easy to overestimate that fractional truth value, and Rothstein too glibly brushes off the risk that accepting a simplified and ideologically motivated account will lead him toward a shallower understanding. The attitude smacks of the idea that "you sometimes have to lie to tell the truth" embraced one way or another by any number of students in my creative writing classes when I was in school, myself included, but this too often turns into an excuse for cutting off tricky corners of experience instead of pushing toward an understanding that fits the difficult event or feeling -- it's no coincidence that the Shostakovich that emerges from Volkov's work is considerably less nuanced and self-contradictory than the personality sussed out by Wilson or Lesser or even, through his correspondence, Shostakovich himself. That personality's motivations are harder to understand -- more to the point, that vision of the composer is harder to lionize -- but once you do that more difficult empathetic work you gain a richer, subtler, more real perspective on the emotional currents in the man's music, or the peculiar terrors and frustrations of life in a totalitarian state, or the basic nature of fear and compromise. More often, it turns out, you have to tell the truth to tell the truth.

Next Stop: the Kumite!

2011-05-06T17:08:00.003-04:00

I went to Jai Alai for the first time last night. And bet on humans! I say bet on humans, because the (para-mutual, like all betting in Florida) betting is just like that as how one might bet on horses (as opposed to betting on, like a boxing match, or on professional sports (which I've never actually done (just horses and jai alai for me!))).

They hurl this ball in this weird court that is clearly the inspiration for pretty much every weird 60s/70s sci-fi competitive sport/game ever. The game comes from the Basques! But if you were in a dome, or the future, you would be some kind of futuro-techno-basque!

After winning, like, $12, making chickenshit bets on various players, I did want to clap my hands and then kind of spread them out from where I had clapped then, and say "and that's how you bet on human sport!"

Like this guy:

Seriously, tho, if you're ever in Miami again, go see Jai Alai (Ma, Pop, who just visited, sorry for not having the time or wherewithal to take you to Jai Alai).

The venue is this cavernous arena that carries some strange charm from the sport's '70s hey-day. I can't imagine the seats being filled nowadays. There were maybe two dozen people there. And my friend Jamie, who had been there before, said that it seemed more crowded than the last time he'd been. Which is also just part of the awesomeness. There was even a big dark empty balcony area, where I'd've liked to sit, with scantily clad women on both of my arms and a mountain of coke on the table in front of us, because that's how it must have been, way back when.

I really think that if I wanted to spiral down into some really hideous and inappropriate addiction, gambling on Jai Alai would be it. And after that, I'd disappear into Southeast Asia, in order to gamble on bloodsports.

Ze Next Beethoven Vill to Colorado Go!

2011-05-05T22:31:00.015-04:00

I'm not much interested in Atlas Shrugged but I'm really interested in modern classical music from the mid-twentieth century. And reading about Ayn Rand's fake composer Richard Halley, I thought, OK, clearly this music more or less exists somewhere. Because if there's anything you can say about twentieth-century music, it's that there's a ton of it in basically every style. It's just got to be a question of finding it! And I think that's possible in good faith.

What we know, largely based on this snazzy-looking recent Richard-Halley-themed website* and the ever-trustworthy Conservapedia, is that the music sounds intellectually tough and unsentimental, at least enough to deny it popular understanding; but it's melodic and inspiring and ultimately blazingly triumphant. And you ideally want the composer to be an American too.

So that points to the rich vein of "great American symphony" composers in the 1930s and 40s, which is a little bit behind Atlas times (mid-1950s) but not too badly. You've got William Schuman and Roy Harris, among others, working out broad-shouldered, self-consciously heroic works with what Virgil Thomson acidly identified as the "masterpiece" tone. It shouldn't be as derogatory a description as Thomson makes it. Good composers can deploy the tone well: Sibelius was all over it, for one.

So I'm going to suggest Samuel Barber's First Symphony, a single-movement affair he wrote in 1935 on a declamatory, sharply profiled theme that's memorably turned into the ground bass of a seriously heavy-duty passacaglia in the last few minutes. It's not really a triumphant conclusion, but it packs a wallop and ought to point the new, bold way forward as much as anything else does. William Schuman's Third Symphony (1941) is also very good, tilting further to the unsentimental/intellectual side and putting some strikingly angular themes through the contrapuntal works. Roy Harris's Third (1939) is the best of that generation of American symphonies, but it has a surprisingly bleak ending. It's a better symphony for it, but it's not Halley.

What you'd really want for the task is Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, which is where this American sound gets alloyed with a human relatability and a genuinely triumphant mood. His Third Symphony, which integrates the fanfare into its conclusion, would be perfect; except, obviously, we're held back by the "common man" part. You know Richard Halley would be all like, Go write your own fanfare, looter. So Barber it is.

I'm assuming that Ayn Rand meant to talk about symphonies, and not "concertos" per se (I gather there's some muddiness), even if Halley's big showstopper was his Fifth Concerto. If you really prefer a piano concerto you could take Bohuslav Martinů's Fifth Piano Concerto, which obviously has the right number and premiered just a year after Atlas Shrugged. It's a fine piece, and with its own rugged touch of Halleydom. Martinů was Czech, but he did spend much of the 1940s in America, and his later music frequently has something of the striding openness of symphonic Americana. Also intriguing: Martinů, somewhat like Halley, had absconded by the late 1950s to a kind of mountain-country getaway at the behest of a charismatic patron. But in his case it was Switzerland at the invitation of Paul Sacher, who wasn't fighting the world economic order but rather had married into a pharmaceuticals fortune. I'm not sure if that counts as looting.**

For a final option, and the best title match, the Italian modernist Goffredo Petrassi's Fifth Concerto for Orchestra was premiered in Boston in 1955. Now by my lights that's the kind of brusquely gestural, harmonically dense, abstractly rarefied orchestral opus that would be taken as a declaration of independence from the world's looters. But we all know Ayn Rand wouldn't have realistically thought this way. Actually, Ayn Rand apparently hated Beethoven and liked Rachmaninoff a lot, so who knows how the hell she actually did think about this stuff.

*You can get anti-Obama/pro-Shrugged bumper stickers there too! Remember, Barack Obama is completely responsible for a social welfare system that's been in place for half a century, a turn of events which has prevented America from ascending as a globally unprecedented sole superpower, probably. I don't have time to look that up right this moment.

**Sacher commissioned basically the entire neo-baroque golden age of the late 1930s to 1940s: Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Martinů's Double Concerto, Honegger's Second Symphony, Frank Martin's Petite Symphonie Concertante, and Stravinsky's Concerto for Strings in D, plus a half century's worth of music after that. So no actual knock on the man.

Looters!

2011-05-05T01:10:00.001-04:00

I had a good laugh at a fellow motorist's Objectivist bumper stickers yesterday. Not the one that asked, predictably, "Who is John Galt?", but the one that simply declared "LOOTERS". I read Atlas Shrugged two or three years ago and the main enduring pleasure of it has been the epithet "looter", which Ayn Rand's stand-ins direct with the intensity and nuance of a fire hose at any character who believes in taxation, charity, or those aspects of government not deemed essential by Rand. It's a fun word to say and, being not much of an Objectivist myself, I sometimes like to use it to fake-shout-down ideas I agree with. For instance, a conversation with the girlfriend can be pleasantly derailed like so:

Kyle: The local school district is having a fundraising dinner next month...
Nate: Looters!
Kyle: Yeah, anyway, I can get tickets from work...
Nate: LOOOOTERS!! Looters are looting my loot!

You can see how this sort of thing is charming. Yesterday's bumper sticker turned out not to be an entirely simple "LOOTER" declaration: Close up, I saw it uses the Obama campaign's O logo for o's (various Zazzle offerings show off the effect), which I suppose is meant to indicate that the President brought this whole welfare state apparatus with him from a Kenyan Islamo-commune and George W., thwarted in his stewardship of a just and productive economy, has retired to a hidden mountain community where he works a steel furnace and a potato garden. That in itself makes more sense than my first half-impression of the bumper sticker's iconography, that it was playing on the Hooters logo for some obscure reason.

Try our Miracle Wings, which would be delicious if only Hank Rearden would share his special sauce recipe!

The book itself is terrible -- South Park made this point aptly many moons ago, and the big weakness of its conceit is nicely illustrated by a Bob the Angry Flower comic I've always liked. The main thing worth adding to that is that it's probably the most emotionally volatile alleged defense of rational thought that I will ever be exposed to: Rand's wordy outrage spews all over the place, and she's incapable of representing the ideas she's attacking without putting them into the mouths of pathetic characters with weirdly deformed names like "Balph Eubank".

The weirdly deformed names like "Balph Eubank" were actually one of the aspects of the novel that I liked. I mean, they're a failure rhetorically, but (as I think I've proven) I really like goofy fake names.

The best thing Atlas Shrugged has going for it, though, is Rand's clunky passion. A little while ago the terrible-looking movie based on its first third came out (and went out, it seems, although the producers might be banking on DVD sales fueled by weeknight screenings by the nation's collegiate Objectivist Clubs) and the worst looking part of the trailer is its glossy anonymity. If there's one thing that propelled me through hundreds of pages of radio addresses and sluggish boardroom drama it's that I can truthfully say it was unlike any other book I'll ever read. If only because there's no fucking way I'm ever going to pick up The Fountainhead.

I'm actually curious whether two elements of the novel made it into the film, or are slated for its maybe-still-in-the-works sequels. Firstly, Rand's bitey and sometimes dubiously consensual sex scenes, which are a subject all their own but add a nifty S&M tinge to all the economic heavy breathing. Secondly, the composer Richard Halley, whose fictional symphonic works make up a minor but substantive part of the plot machinery. (If I remember rightly, Rand, for all of her cultural pot shots, doesn't mention pop music at all, instead complaining about the dissonance-minded, insufficiently heroic, academic type of composer, about which she sort of has a point, albeit not one that accounts for the George Crumbs of the world.) Alex Ross wrote a piece in the New Yorker in August 2009 about notable fictional composers and Halley didn't make the cut, although I think he deserves to: surely he's had more readers than most. At any rate I hope he made it into the movie, in part because I'm such an apologist for 20th-century classical music that that seems like it would be a win and in part because I'd like to hear a stab at the piano concertos that so charmed Dagny Taggart -- while reading I imagined the sound as a bloated, more fascistic version of Howard Hanson but I'm open to other interpretations.

None of this should be taken as mockery of the gentleman in his pickup truck on 99W yesterday evening, who probably did manufacture that fine vehicle himself according to his own singularly inventive design, or at the very least purchase it with gold coins minted by an honest banker and acquired as the hard but equitable price for his own inspired labor. My laughter didn't feel like it was directed at him, or at the bumper sticker; I think weird humor makes up most of what remains of my impression of the book, now that the exasperation of actually reading it has mostly evaporated.

Da Da Da Da Da Da Da Da Da

2011-05-03T18:16:00.000-04:00

If you haven't seen the viral video of the babbling one-year-old twins yet, enjoy. I know Nate and I didn't babble back and forth so much as babies, but as grown-ups we have this same conversation pretty much all the time.

See, it starts out as the odd giggle, but pretty soon you spiral into the full feedback loop.

Language acquisition is so weird. Lots to love about it.

Heeh.

Hubbub Health

2011-05-03T17:26:00.000-04:00

Hubbub Health, the "wellness challenge platform" that has been my project at work since last year, is now in its public beta release. I haven't previously mentioned much if anything of my professional existence here but I do now since Hubbub is open to the public; it helps explain why I seem to have fallen into a particularly deep hole during the past six to eight weeks of pre-release push; and, not least, I value the opinions of this blog's elite corps of readers.

Hubbub lets you play in or create a variety of wellness-related challenges -- weight-loss contents, stair-climbing competitions, and the like. The platform's mainly aimed at companies right now, but with plenty of room for employees' friends and family, or for whatever other, unaffiliated player walks in out of the Internet. It exists at an intersection of social media, gamification, and corporate wellness programs that's seeing a lot of activity in the health care industry right now, and should become more and more visible in companies' benefits offerings pretty soon.

I can't take any credit for the product's vision or design, but it does represent a bunch of my own effort. From a personal standpoint it's nothing so awe-inspiring as Pete's tremendous organizational and artistic effort on O, Miami but it's out there and it's what I've been up to. Plus a little bit of my personality has seeped into it via the chatter I've been typing into the site while using it myself (or, to use the delicious office-land cliche, "eating our own dog food"). I've had fun with it within our own development team -- it did spur me to rack up about 230 miles on foot in April for a walking challenge, although my team lost at the last minute due to a single-day, 42-mile effort by another developer far more insane than me in this regard. Please do check it out. (And if you sign up, look for "nateborr" and add me as a friend.)

And with this, being mostly free of coding to deadline as well as just walking a whole hell of a lot in my off hours, I aspire to rejoin the mildly interested living...

Or Spring Afternoon, or Whenever Really

2011-05-02T20:20:00.001-04:00

My friend Dan was on the East Coast last week, in from Ann Arbor, and I was in New York for yet another weekend; we popped into Alice Tully Hall yesterday for a piano and percussion concert. To start with a mundane observation: a 5 PM concert start time is really nice. You can still spend the prime part of the afternoon wandering around Central Park, but after the concert it's still light out and there's plenty of time to get back to New Haven. (You can generalize that description as needed.)

George Crumb's Music for a Summer Evening was the highlight. I have a very personal response to this piece and find it deeply touching; Dan has the same feeling about it. It's very much a Swarthmore piece, most literally in that Crumb (a UPenn figure) wrote it on a commission for opening the school's music building back in 1974. But there's a lot of Crumb in the air at Swarthmore, both in performance and in spirit, and a lot of my composing activity a decade ago unconsciously made its way to holding down a practice-room piano pedal and trying to come up with the same kind of ringing chords that flash through Crumb's writing. You can fake that to an extent as a composition student, but the real sounds really touch a nerve.

More broadly speaking it's a piece that's very touching in spirit, and very lucid in the sense I not very successfully tried to get at the other day. Its resonating sounds are most often suspended in a mystical, expectant mode, but a rarefied emotional light passes through them very clearly. The noises are intentionally unpredictable and unconventional, but the expressive meaning is absolutely straightforward.

Crumb has a way of sounding flatly dated and magnificently timeless at the same time, possessing an anything-goes spirit of percussion-lab experimenting that feels fixed in the 1970s but still hits its otherworldly notes. In the concluding minutes of Music for a Summer Evening, the pianos take up a simple, serene ostinato pattern, broken with some of those magnificent resounding chords and embellished with a Bartók-style chatter inspired by the nocturnal insect world. (And, of course, the pianos are amplified and have paper laid over their strings, creating a weird, rattling synthesizer-ish effect.) This builds into a naturalistic hubbub, then gradually subsides. The placid conclusion is one of the sweetest moments in modern music.

The performance came across as utterly committed. Gilbert Kalish was one of the premiering pianists back in '74; Lincoln Center fixture Wu Han joined him, along with two top-flight percussionists in Ayano Kataoka and Daniel Druckman.

The other half of the concert was the Crumb piece's antecedent, Bartók's mid-1930s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. I heard it in New Haven a year or two ago, too. What I've discovered is that I find it highly satisfying, even though little of it sticks in my mind afterwards. Large expanses of the first and second movements submerge into a thicket of dense counterpoint, and yesterday I lightly dozed off on a couple of occasions. The third movement is much dance-ier, though, and the piece has one of the great conclusions, evaporating into some wonderfully gentle quiet cadences in the pianos (blending a couple of keys, it sounds like) and then trailing off in pattering snare drum taps. So Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule ensures a pretty nice experience.

Kataoka started the concert with a fifteen-minute Iannis Xenakis survey of several drums and a set of woodblocks called Rebonds, from 1988, a piece that marries a compositional severity with good old-fashioned percussive ass-kicking. Dan and I were sitting in the second row from the stage, from which vantage point Kataoka was largely hidden behind the drums. Her sticks would fly around the edge of the visual obstruction, and you'd get a fair amount of her arms and occasionally a partial look at her head. I would add that Rebonds is a pleasantly loud composition.

Remote Poetry Festivity, Bookwise Anyway

2011-04-27T21:57:00.002-04:00

In an effort to sympathetically align myself with O, Miami, I figured I'd read a new book on contemporary poetry by a critic named David Orr, Beautiful and Pointless, which got a good review in Slate. It's a short book, just a couple of Metro North rides long. I like reading accessible nonfiction when I feel like I'm more or less exactly the target audience -- in this case, pretty knowledgeable and interested in art in general, but not much about poetry in particular. And I feel I have a pre-existing stake in the topic, since it analogizes very closely to modern classical music.

It's an admirably straightforward book, and I'd recommend it, but I think Orr misses a big piece of the puzzle.

He very directly states his agenda -- not writing a how-to-read kind of book, but filling in the context about "what modern poets think about, how those poets talk about what they're thinking about, and most important, how an individual poetry reader relates to the art he usually likes, always loves, and is frequently annoyed by." He supplies that context crisply, in chapters covering the extent to which poetry is inherently personal (less than assumed); the importance of form (not supremely so); and the professional and academic world of poetry, how it affects both what poets do and which poets are taken as significant.

It's informational and relatable, and Orr takes time to deflate the kinds of stereotypical claims about poetry that are either romantically fuzzy or academically obscure. He doesn't quote all that much poetry, and a generous handful of those excerpts are there to show off an unfavorable aspect. I came out wanting to read Elizabeth Bishop and Kay Ryan, but not with a big list of threads to follow. It's not that kind of a book.

What I think is missing is a basic account of why reading poetry is pleasurable in the first place. Knowing the context helps you enjoy more things, I think. But talking about art has got to start with the emotional reaction you get from it, and Orr skirts this point a few times. That emotional effect is always tied into your aesthetic reaction: for some reason, you construct an arrangement of words and juxtaposed ideas, and it's emotionally transfixing. Except that in modern art, where the overt emotional content is frequently muted (if it's not scorched into something disturbing), it's a much more subtle effect and therefore really hard to enjoy at first.

I don't know how you teach that, but I think you have to look at the problem squarely. I guess you want to find lucid modern poetry, where you can attend to the imagery floating through it and the surprising scene changes, and also enjoy the brush strokes of the words. (The Amanda Lamarche poem Pete just read for How Pedestrian seems to fit that bill, even if it's inexplicably downcast. So does the first poem that Orr remembers liking, Philip Larkin's "Water.") As opposed to needing to crack something completely cryptic. That's the level I suspect you need to zero in on. I don't think there's much help in being aware of the world poets that live in.

Again, I think there's a big parallel in how people talk about modern classical music, and there's a real void where you'd talk more subjectively (or, hey, poetically!) about how the expressive thread of a piece moves and skips around. That's not really the nuts and bolts of harmonic practice or form, but that's what you need, as a listener, to pick up on if you're going to be pulled in emotionally. So I wonder if there's a similar fruitful yet underexplored conversational area in modern poetry. I've wandered off my turf here, so maybe there's good writing about this someplace? I'd like to know about it. And I'd still like to know more about modern poetry, too, at least the lucid kind.

Sunglasses & Architecture

2011-04-26T10:42:00.003-04:00

I'm on a poetry blog in Canada today!

Katherine, the founder, producer, curator, etc. of How Pedestrian (the afore-linked Canadian blog) had the dubious honor of getting to live with me in my quasi-squat (I should name it--the home--"it"--easier than quasqua--) for the first ten days of April, since we had brought her down here to contribute her massive poetry skills to O, Miami. And then, she needed a place to live, and it--the house I live in--has all kinds of bedrooms. I just had to do some basic up-sprucings, like borrowing a mattress from a friend, purchasing sheets for said mattress, pillows, replacing the broken toilet seat, buying a couple garbage cans (for the kitchen and bathroom) buying a hot plate (which didn't get there till halfway through her stay, alas); you know, generally scrambling to get it--the place--to a level that's livable for humans not quite as self-negligent as myself.

She was a super patient guest, and really understanding, and happy to be in Miami (she's from Toronto). So, thankfully, it worked out.

I eventually had three visiting poets/artists living in its three bedrooms (I drove around town in my rental SUV borrowing mattresses from two other friends (one of them was actually a former futon of my own that I sold over the summer for a six-pack of Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA (how I've grown...)). I slept on the floor (on a yoga mat on a Thermarest lightweight camping mattress (the one that's been bloodstained with my noseblood since Temagami in, what was that, 1996?)) in the main room. Like a guard dog ("actually, all was not well, what was I doing there at one o'clock in the morning?"). Kind of awesome (since I'd been sleeping on said mat/tress combo in the main room since January anyways, it wasn't really a change for me).

It was really great living in a house with several other awesome creative humans. I miss having roommates.

Now I'm back to being in it--quasqua--by myself. And still sleeping on the mat/tress in the main room. I slept on one of the borrowed mattresses for a few days, but had to return it (and one of the others as well). There's still the DFH mattress in one of the bedrooms, but in that same bedroom there was also a drip bucket that was in place to collect the water from the hole in the ceiling (leak in the roof), and some pesky mosquito decided to lay eggs in it while I wasn't paying attention, so that wing of the house is overrun with bloodstrawmouth bugs right now. Which I'm unwilling to go in and actively kill (I killed one, but it just felt so futile, given how many insects were clouding me for the few minutes that I attempted to lay on the DFH mattress (which, incidentally, is the futon that I brought all the way to Miami from Boston (with a layover in Pittsburgh), which makes it also half-Zac's, who also probably would have appreciated that I sold it for a six pack of beer)), so I'm guessing that if I leave the room alone for a few more days, the mosquitos, with nothing to drink, bloodwise, will fail to live much longer. But, by then, I'll have to return the futon.

Boy, have I got work to do today that this is helping me avoid! hOmestretch, Miami!

Gulf Stream Number 5

2011-04-18T14:11:00.002-04:00

The latest Gulf Stream Online (No. 5) is up and running, as of the 15th. Check it out.

My style sheets are going strong, with (mostly) minimal degradation!

In related news, a couple of poems from the last issue that I was editor of (No. 3) were selected for Sun Dress Press's Best of the Net 2010.

Bazaam!

This Week in Sports Thwacking

2011-04-16T10:39:00.002-04:00

Even if you don't play golf or watch golf, PGA Tour golfer Kevin Na's widely YouTubed odyssey in the rough last Thursday makes for good TV. I'm not sure what I like more, his Will-Arnett-style "Oh, come on" after stroke 11 or the round of polite golf-clapping he gets when he's finally back on the fairway after stroke 12. We can all relate.

I Also Have a Used Car to Sell You

2011-04-12T16:39:00.003-04:00

With Brothers Like These

2011-04-11T18:20:00.002-04:00

Fucking amazing.

NOX

2011-04-11T14:18:00.005-04:00

So, driving Anne Carson and Robert Currie to and from their hotel and their performances, and getting to hang out and talk with them was massively awesome, since what they do in art, poetry, and life is hugely inspiring to me in a multitude of ways. But their actual performance of the actual piece (NOX, based on Carson's most recent book), with choreography by Rashaun Mitchell, dancing by him and Silas Riener, and music by Ben Miller was pretty damn amazing.

We're one-third of the way through O, Miami. I'm running out of superlatives.

Gremlins from the Kremlin

2011-04-06T13:11:00.004-04:00

Have I mentioned yet how exhausting it is to be co-running a month-long poetry festival? I'm not sure why, but this is the cartoon I just watched, to take a break from my day of trying to add some much-needed documentary content to omiami.org.

It--watching the WB cartoon--had something to do with this:

which I never, ever, get tired of watching.

In other news, I got to witness the tail end of rehearsal for this event last night, which was awesome. And got to meet Anne Carson, one of my real intellectual heroes, and tell her how much I appreciate her having written Economy of the Unlost--undoubtedly the obscurest of her books (which she acknowledged, making me all the happier)--and talk to her a bit about it and Paul Celan. So that's cool.

And It Taught Us All an Important Lesson about Holes

2011-04-05T19:59:00.001-04:00

Slate's indispensable "Explainer" feature tackles the question this week of why people generally don't get sucked out of holes blown in airplane fuselages. (Topical, in terms of holes but happily not people getting sucked out of them. I should note optimistically that neither Maddie nor myself are irrationally fearful of people being suddenly sucked out of aircraft.) The really worthwhile read, though, is a Sydney Morning Herald story linked by Explainer, flight attendant Nigel Ogden's account of his rather unbelievable 1990 experience of holding on to a pilot half-blown out of the cockpit after the improperly installed windscreen blew out. Wild stuff. Keep that perspective next time you have a bad day at work!

My Pants

2011-04-04T15:00:00.003-04:00

So I know I blog about my pants with odd frequency, but now my pants-wearing has been covered in a major metropolitan newspaper as well. So, boo-fucking-yah!

"A legion of trumpeters and percussionists introduced Cunningham, 32, and co-founder Pete Borrebach, 28, who wore a more muted outfit of maroon pants and a buttoned-up shirt."

It should also be noted that this day of maroon pants-wearing broke a streak of 5 straight months of wearing the same pair of pants every single day, which I think was a new record, even against my own pantially-austere track record.

Dept. of Facetious Thereminiana

2011-04-02T10:14:00.004-04:00

A day late for April Fool's Day: among all the Internet-facilitated fake tech product announcements stands out the Moog Polyphonic Theremin:

The world is a better place for each addition of a deadpan, three-minute-long theremin joke. And I say that even as more of an Ondes Martenot guy.

The blonde, Austrian-accented Dorit Chrysler is not a made-up person, incidentally, she's an actual thereminist.

It Begins!

2011-04-01T16:31:00.002-04:00

Pine Mouth

2011-03-30T19:09:00.003-04:00

Before this week I'd at least heard of "pine mouth," the mysterious and ultimately harmless effect wherein eating pine nuts can temporarily screw up your sense of taste. Apparently it started to get noticed around 2008, and no one's sure what causes it. But some weekend pesto pasta has given me pine mouth, I'm ready to say with some certainly. Seems to be the easiest explanation for (1) bad taste in mouth; (2) no other symptoms; (3) just ate pine nuts. This is supposed to go away within a few days or a couple of weeks.

Descriptions of pine mouth are all over the Internet now, and they tend to play up how horrible it is. I don't find my experience that horrible. There's a lingering bad aftertaste to everything, bitter and a bit puckering, and my sense of sweet is way depressed. But the bland savory foods I tend to rely on aren't affected that much. Sugar-free wintergreen-flavored gum helps. It's after you eat that I have to ameliorate it, a lingering, somewhat distracting sense.

Maddie didn't get it, from the same batch of nuts -- it's really that unpredictable an effect -- although I need to check in on the friends we had over for pesto pasta dinner. People theorize that Chinese pine nuts are to blame, but I'm sure I didn't help things by using pine nuts that had been sitting around for a while. They seemed otherwise edible, but you're apparently not supposed to do that.

Weird, huh?

A Couple of Jackasses

2011-03-30T10:33:00.003-04:00

I was scanning youtube for a video clip of Bob Odenkirk shouting "a couple of jackasses" but I couldn't find it, so here's this video instead:

And then this link to an article from the Miami Herald about O, Miami:

and another one.

Put It in H!

2011-03-27T22:22:00.005-04:00

So I have a hard time describing Bach's B Minor Mass. The Bach Collegium Japan has been touring the U.S. with it this month, under their dapper and extraordinarily distinguished-looking conductor Masaaki Suzuki, and they stopped in New Haven Saturday night. I went with Maddie and with my friends Kate and Alex, following dinner at my apartment. Maddie & I cooked vegan dinner — pesto pasta with sauteed veggies, butternut squash soup, bread from the machine — and Kate & Alex brought me a second birthday cake.

The Collegium's tour has obviously come at a poignant time, just post-tsunami, and the sacred music institute here turned the performance into a Red Cross fundraiser. The B Minor Mass is formal and affirmative enough to seem to stand aside from earthly tragedy. It's a humane and fairly all-embracing work, and in a memorial context it maybe stands as a signpost for shared humanity.

Woolsey Hall's famously muddy acoustics don't particularly suit a baroque vocal mass, but up in the second balcony the sound was pleasing enough. You couldn't hear much of the choral counterpoint, which melted into a luminous mush. That's a big loss in Bach, but it doesn't interrupt the emotional and dramatic swell. And the lightly scored passages sounded fine. (They performed, incidentally, with a chorus of about 20 people, plus the 5 vocal soloists, and an orchestra of something like 10 strings, 10 of those wonderful period brass & woodwinds that are like heirloom tomatoes, an enthusiastic timpanist with two drums, plus chamber organ and harpsichord.)

Compositionally, the Mass is, you know, regarded as one of the towering achievements of European art, and I'm intimidated away from trying so say anything really cogent about it. In fact, I haven't really even listened to it much in recorded form, since I feel like doing it justice would require more attention than I tend to give my casual listening.

I can say that it's a much more expressively rich work than I was somehow expecting, certainly thanks in large part to the Collegium's expressive performance. (I don't have anything like the Baroque chops to describe their interpretation, but it felt true, while being frankly expressive. I think what you want for this piece isn't far off from what you want in a good Mozart Requiem, or for that matter the Frank Martin Mass for Double Choir.) Suzuki is a fun conductor to watch, too, efficient in his gestures but urgent when the music becomes more urgent.

None of the following represents a particularly nuanced commentary, but here goes. Bach's opening Kyrie Eleison is a somber choral fugue that extends luxuriously beyond the length of time you think it will last. There are exultant movements where the trumpets and timpani come in to underline a thumping kind of "happy Baroque" sound familiar from Sunday-morning NPR. My favorite of these is the "Et resurrexit" following a moody, plaintively chromatic "Crucifixus": Hey, Jesus is risen! This is great! The bass soloist's scene was stolen, to my ears, by the guy playing a two-looped baroque horn, adroitly lipping his way around his quietly dangerous decorative garlands. One of the most surprisingly moving passages sets the perfunctory-sounding Credo text "I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins." The line "Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum" both pleases me in its major-key joyfulness and reminds part of my brain what it's like trying to play E-flat clarinet in a staggeringly difficult Messiaen wind-orchestra piece. The "Sanctus" is just magnificently stately. I forget which quiet movement the countertenor sang so exquisitely, but he netted an extra-large ovation at the end for it.

I really should read about the work, and listen to it closely, and try to get to know it. I think hearing it in concert needs to happen first. Maybe I'm accepting a kind of mythology about the piece, but it feels like it expresses a platonic excellence or exquisiteness.

As much as people talk about Bach's mastery of counterpoint and musical argument, it's his great control of emotional ebb and flow that makes him who he is. (Compare Monteverdi or Palestrina, earlier masters of less immediately moving contrapuntal musical languages.) And you can "get" that without following the fugal patterns. And that too helps embrace a wide world of listeners.

Sloth Catching Is Not Without Its Risks

2011-03-18T13:45:00.000-04:00

For a cheerful midday, pre-weekend news interlude, turn to this charming fieldwork description by animal sleep scientist Bryson Voirin. He doesn't get too far into the actual sleep science in this writeup (although he hints at its inexplicable nature), but the sloth-wrangling details are delightful. The sentence I borrowed for this post title is easily the best sentence I've read all week.

I don't have much of value to say about the troubling balance of what's in the news, other than that the Libya situation seems extremely difficult to grasp even by foreign-events standards, and that I never envisioned a nuclear meltdown crisis as stretching over days or weeks like this. I guess I've always assumed that nuclear accidents would be a matter of being caught off guard, rather than being unable to assert control over a gradually deteriorating situation. Humbling and kind of terrifying at the same time.

Anyway. Hey, 1300th blog post!

Poem on the Internet

2011-03-15T12:02:00.001-04:00

Here. Enjoy.

It's a Small (small) Thing

2011-03-14T15:23:00.002-04:00

It's mostly, like, functional, and not really rhetorical at all, but I'm still proud that I managed to sneak a set of parentheses-inside-parentheses into a somewhat official-looking (and actually, like, you know, official) blurb at the place where you can buy tickets for one of O, Miami's many wonderful poetry events (I'm actually quite proud of the programming on this one ("~~Competitive~~ Political violence! That's why you're here!")).

Number of Poet Laureates Co-Interviewed by Pete: 1

2011-03-11T10:42:00.002-05:00

Read it here.

Can't You See How Happy We Would Stochastically Be

2011-03-11T02:32:00.005-05:00

Teas for Two

I. (Irving Caesar)

Picture me upon your knee

Just tea for two

And two for tea

Just me for you

And you for me alone

II.

Picture me for tea for two

And two for two

And you for tea

Just me upon your knee

Just me alone

III.

Picture me for two for tea for two

And you

And your knee

Just tea for your knee

Just me for your knee

Just me alone

IV.

Picture me for two

And you

And two for me alone

Picture me upon you

And your knee

Just me upon your knee

Just tea

Just tea for tea for you for me upon you

And your knee

Just tea

Just me for tea

Just me upon you for me for me for two

And you

And your knee

Just me for tea for me alone

VI.

Picture me alone

Epilog

The first stanza there, as noted, comes from Irving Caesar's "Tea for Two" lyrics, albeit from the later, solo female rendering rather than the original No, No, Nanette duet. The other stanzas are similarly accepted by the epilog, and were culled from several dozen random walks through the graph, powered by a slapdash Ruby script and the fierce urgency of "I should be doing something else right now". Relatedly: Ella Fitzgerald, finite state machines.

Lions (A Space Dream)

2011-03-10T02:49:00.003-05:00

I doubt I'm as much of a stress zombie as Pete these days, but I am busy enough at work that our project there -- which is more or less at that point where it's just rolling waves of go/no-go deadlines, after which I guess either our product goes live or everybody gets fired -- is consuming most of my capacity for nontrivial brain work. Blogging, both here and on the now very slow-running Shostakovich-blog front, suffers; I'm spending some self discipline (i.e. precious brain sugar) on keeping myself fed more or less correctly and walking around a lot, in part because it's a pleasant and mind-quieting way to commute and in part because the work project is a health-'n'-wellness-related effort that, for testing purposes, involves strapping on a pedometer and walking around a lot. Sure, there's a night here and there where Kyle and I just split a liter of red wine and watch a few episodes of 30 Rock in a row, but such is the glue that holds our relationship together; highly necessary. Also there was that extremely enjoyable trip to New York and the Met Opera, where the second act of Nixon in China may have been the best unit of theatrical entertainment I've ever seen on a stage.

At any rate, one other thing I'm finding a bunch of time for is reading, since it decompresses me and (at the level I've been reading at) keeps me engaged without being overly strenuous. Currently I'm near the end of Wendy Lesser's so-far-very-fine critical survey of Shostakovich's string quartets, Music for Silenced Voices; a couple of Sundays ago, being earlier in it and having already spent enough thought on Shostakovich that day for the book to work as a change of pace, Kyle offered to find something lighter for me on her bookshelf and came up with C.J. Cherryh's sci-fi novel, The Pride of Chanur, which fit the bill perfectly and is its own kind of enjoyable read. (It maintains the women-authors pattern, too, although as Kyle pointed out the "C.J." and the superfluous "h" at the end of the surname artfully mask that fact, "Carolyn Cherry" having been deemed unworkable as a science-fiction author name in the 1970s.)

One of the book's real pleasures is its bitchin', early-'80s vintage cover painting:

The cover art is by Michael Whelan (color prints available, as of 1982!) and it may be totally appropriate to judge the book by that. Less superficially, though, the novel strikes a good balance between its lean and fast-enough-moving plot and the details of its speculative world, viewed -- as in all of the sci-fi and fantasy material I've ever liked -- indirectly and incompletely as called for by the story, rather than disgorged in huge exposition dumps.

The story focuses on the chaos-inducing appearance of a single human within a loose trading compact among several other spacefaring alien races, but the most engaging stuff is all in Cherryh's setup of the book's universe. (That's also what's stuck with Kyle; another of the pleasures of reading the book is comparing my own reaction to her impression of it from reading it when she was a teenager.) Her most detailed concept is that of the hani, the central alien race of the book -- the human himself is a side character verging on a MacGuffin -- and one based loosely on the social structure of lions, with the related females of each group doing the productive work while the males challenge each other for the limited positions as heads of a house, or else bide their time on the fringe of society. Some of this serves as a socially critical gender bend -- here it's the powerful but violently competitive males who are considered "useless, too high strung" for useful service -- but much of it just imagines an alternative sociology, in which a gender is marginalized based on perceived volatility rather than perceived weakness and sex differences divide into something other than familiar ideas of masculinity and femininity. Combined with some nice secondary details -- theirs is a relatively medieval society, accelerated into space through contact with another alien species and less unified than most of the other races -- it makes a good piece of social-science fiction.

To me, though, a grabbier element of the book is that some of the alien species are mutually intelligible and some are barely relatable at all. Cherryh's execution of this idea seems slightly preposterous -- she breaks the aliens into groups of oxygen breathers and methane breathers that are socially as well as metabolically similar to each other, an evolutionary notion that I find, unjustifiably, much harder to accept than the existence of clearly mammalian space lions piloting interstellar freighters -- but I like her hints of the more-alien intelligences, one whose thoughts run in parallel chains in a "multipartite brain", and another whose actions and communications remain inexplicable except for a recognizable concept of reciprocation and exchange. It's the high-level idea of it that I like, in part because I like thinking about Language and The Brain in any case, and in part because I've been listening to a bunch of Radiolab episodes on my iPod while doing all my walking, including a show from last summer about how language develops, or not, in the human brain and how it can be lost... It has me musing about what intelligence without language, or without conscious symbolic thought, would look like, and wondering how much science fiction there is out there that adequately works over that notion. (Wondering in that sense where I just type it out loud onto the blog, rather than perform a series of focused Google searches.) Stanislaw Lem's Solaris is the best novel I know of for mapping out the gulf between two forms of intelligence in contact, but Lem's a pessimist about the prospect of any understandable exchange at all, while I'm more interested in, and optimistic about, what could possibly be had in common, based on a largely Wikipedia-based, quasi understanding of convergent evolution and information theory. But it's gotten late since I started this post and my own matrix of distributed, parallel thoughts is threatening to fly apart completely, so I'll bring this rather digressive thing to a close.

A Good Chance to Take Bets on Precisely What Kind of an Ass I Am Going to Make out of Myself

2011-03-08T17:53:00.007-05:00

None of you-all are in Miami, I don't think. But if you were, I'd invite you to come to a public lecture I'm giving on Monday, on "A Speculative Geometry of Lyricism." The Facebook event page for it features the following drawing, which I think just about sums it up, so there's no need, really, for you to attend anyway:

SPECULATE!!!

You Can't Spell Information Without O, Miami (well almost...)

2011-03-04T17:51:00.002-05:00

This is something of a "soft" unfurling of a bunch of O, Miami information--we're not "officially" announcing the availability of all this stuff until Monday--but, seeing as I've turned myself into a poetry stress zombie getting all this stuff arranged and onto the website, I thought I'd share it here first.

Now available for your perusal and awe: O, Miami's Events, Poets, Projects, Partners, Sponsors, and Calls for Work.

And please check back at that site frequently, as we'll be making updates more or less continuously up until and through the festival.

I am astounded by how much we've put together for this inaugural festival, I hope that you are too.

Only Nixon Could Go to China

2011-03-03T22:13:00.000-05:00

I've had a hard time coming up with anything to write about Nixon in China at the Met a couple of weekends ago. It's such a rich and intellectually unusual opera that trying to explain it would be a sprawling task. Experientially, though, it's just an electrifying delight.

The way Adams's vocal lines invest Nixon & crew with so much personality by teasing out a densely poetic, unpredictable libretto is a minor miracle. Sparks fly at seemingly unlikely bursts of words: Nixon's exclamatory "News! News! News! News!" first and foremost; Chairman Mao repeatedly spitting out "Founders come first, then profiteers" like a crazy old man to a baffled Nixon and Kissinger; Pat Nixon's dreamy "I think what is to be will be in spite of us" skipping effortlessly over a couple of simple chords. The libretto (by Alice Goodman) makes fairly fascinating reading on its own, often with a strikingly different tone.

Musically there's just nothing like it, with magnificent expanses of vintage mid-1980s Adams bopping and careening along to primary-color splashes of brass and saxophone in the pit. It's in large part a synthesis of Philip Glass and the midcentury Igor Stravinsky, but it's unmistakably Adams's musical personality. There are liberal splashes of prewar dance-band music, including a melancholy semi-slow number in Act III scored for piano and an anachronistic haze of shimmery synthesizer-keyboard around it. Elsewhere any number of the simple harmonic moves have a light shading of oldies-rock chorus in them. It can be a lot more touching than you'd expect it to be. The first half of Act II is magnificent, too, with Pat Nixon touchingly and lyrically drawn as a starry-eyed American abroad being shown around on a photo-op tour. (Janis Kelly was the soprano in the role, and she was one of the show's highlights.)

The opening ten minutes are pretty much iconic for the Adams lover: The chorus of Chinese workers' "The People Are the Heroes Now" sets up the landing of Air Force One -- a cutout of the plane is lowered onto the back of the stage, in a good-natured bit of puckish abstraction, while one of Adams's great orchestral passages churns away -- and soon enough you've got Nixon's aria about the news.

The whole opera, well, it's hard to take in all in one gulp. They more or less assume that you know the outline of the trip, the basic profiles of the players, and (not essentially but very helpfully) a working knowledge of The Red Detachment of Women, which is extensively parodied to fantastic effect in Act II (climaxing when a Cultural-Revolution-symbolizing riot breaks out around a coloratura soprano majestically belting out "I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung.") Shortly before then, about at the halfway point of the opera, the thus-far literal storytelling unravels into things much more surreal and indefinite, and the entire third act is more or less a plot-free meditation on old age and the limits of human endeavor, themes that don't really exist in the first two acts. So you need to work to "get" it, or more precisely to apprehend the thematic contours of it and embrace its unexplained business along with the rest.

Adams conducted the orchestra, and Sellars's staging is the opera's original 1987 creation, and James Maddelena sang the Nixon role he created back then too. So it felt like a valedictory production, and one that will be the standard until such time as another generation picks it up. And the opera has a good a shot at staying power as anything else in the newer repertoire.

Right after the smog of early February's Super Bowl obsession cleared, it hit home how much I'd been looking forward to the performance -- Nate & I got these tickets back in August -- and that anticipation's paid off into a satisfaction that feels like it'll last a while. These are the highlights of art appreciation, the events you remember something about for years.

So, yeah, good times all around. Had a great weekend with Nate & Kyle around to hang out with Maddie & myself, too.

(Picture shamelessly ripped off from here.)

Series of Related Events Considered Newsworthy

2011-02-27T20:50:00.001-05:00

I'm not knocking the article, which I haven't read and which could be incredibly perceptive for all I know, but the New Haven Register caught my eye on the newsstand today with the magnificently generic headline SOCIETAL CHANGES DIVIDING NATION: SOME TOLERATE TRENDS OTHERS SEE AS HARMFUL. That would seem to sum up the general state of affairs, all right.

Cheese & Hockey Friday

2011-02-26T17:04:00.000-05:00

Friday night plan in New Haven: out for after-work dinner with friends at Cheese Restaurant (obviously actually open for a while now), followed by a 7 pm hockey game at the university's estimable Saarinen rink. Dinner had me stuffed, yet surprisingly without lethargy or overeating-remorse. I can't remember the last time I was so blissed out on just being full. That feeling came courtesy of a high-end grilled cheese sandwich (on thick slices of homemade rye) with a little salad, some cheddared kale (oh yes, "cheddar" gets to be a verb), and fries we split among ourselves, plus a smooth and creamy Belgian amber ale.

The hockey game set the popular university home team against the squad from central New York's Colgate University. The Colgate crew played the scrappy underdogs and gutted out a 1–1 tie despite seeming less sharp the whole game. The tie feels a little anticlimactic, frankly. Someone from the home team missed an easy goal with about 1:30 left in regulation (the goalie a couple feet forward of where he should have been, but the shot flicked wide of the net to his side, from maybe four feet away)\. I have a hard time rooting against a scrappy underdog, though, so my affiliation had quietly reversed field by the middle of the first period.

It's the hockey atmospherics I enjoy more than anything, as ever: the excellent rink, the university-booster crowd, the pep band playing bits of top 40 and '80s pop. The tickets were free to employees last night, and you've got to take the perks they give you.

How I Could Just Kill A Man

2011-02-25T18:25:00.006-05:00

I think O, Miami has hit the point where I'll essentially be working on it all the time now until it's over (it's over April 30). Which means there's some potential for overload blowback, whereby I do things like this, which is blog something that generally wouldn't surface on my usual scale of bloggability, but since I'm avoiding doing some other crucial piece of work, or, like, letting my brain rest a minute while it processes some piece of festival work.

So now you get to know that, despite the semi-populist modulations of O, Miami, I'm still as highbrow as ever, as evidenced by my being currently in a long-term project of reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake with my friend Parker. We're doing some work to document our encounter with the book, and that's including some writing and some doodling. And I'm quite happy with our first doodle, which happened as a counterpoint to our first (written) dialogue. So here it is:

If you have to ask what it means, then you can't afford it.

Particularly, I'm pretty thrilled with the two little diagrams I made:

Shout-out to Kaja Silverman!

Here Comes Everyone!

To-day's Ration of Oatmeal Blogging

2011-02-24T22:04:00.004-05:00

The current most-emailed article on the NY Times website is ~~a description of mounting civil war in Libya~~ a Mark Bittman post unloading on how awful McDonald's oatmeal is, which is fun reading. McDonald's actually has taken one of the healthiest, easiest-to-prepare foods in existence and make it bad for you.

Interesting bloggo-processing of the post comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who highlights Bittman's making-oatmeal-is-simple argument:

Others will argue that the McDonald's version is more "convenient." [This is Bittman's quote here, not Coates'.] This is nonsense; in the time it takes to go into a McDonald's, stand in line, order, wait, pay and leave, you could make oatmeal for four while taking your vitamins, brushing your teeth and half-unloading the dishwasher. (If you're too busy to eat it before you leave the house, you could throw it in a container and microwave it at work. If you prefer so-called instant, flavored oatmeal, see this link, which will describe how to make your own).

If you don't want to bother with the stove at all, you could put some rolled oats (instant not necessary) in a glass or bowl, along with a teeny pinch of salt, sugar or maple syrup or honey, maybe some dried fruit. Add milk and let stand for a minute (or 10). Eat. Eat while you're walking around getting dressed. And then talk to me about convenience.

Coates finds a deeper "conscious"/"unconscious" behavioral question in whether you go to McDonald's or go DIY. Ezra Klein isolates a bit more exactly the key point of effort as opposed to time as being crucial to convenience. "Easy isn't the same as effortless" is a good point. It's an activity versus passivity thing.

It reminds me of the willpower thing again, how it takes actual resources for the brain to exercise the planning and control to carry out tasks. Presumably even small ones, like making oatmeal. Not that people shouldn't make the effort, but it's not really accurate to equate a short active task with a short passive one. Now how you might get people (not to mention, first, yourself) spending more of their day doing active tasks instead of giving in to accessible passive options, that's a question.

Anyway. Food for thought, and vice versa. I should specify (for full disclosure?) that I make my own oatmeal, although I may switch to bulgur wheat for a while, since I just bought some for an unrelated Mark Bittman recipe and there's an alarming quantity of it that I didn't use.

Completely unrelated but interesting: physicist Geoffrey West as quoted in the December 19, 2010, New York Times Weekend Magazine.

West illustrates the problem by translating human life into watts. “A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he says. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”

That Festival I'm Co-Founding

2011-02-18T13:12:00.002-05:00

is getting realer and realer. Here's an image of our ad that's now running on the digital display wall at the brand new Frank Gehry-designed New World Center, where our month-long festival culminates!

And, this may not survive the weekend, but this is awesome.

Your Brain: It May Be Outsmarting You Again

2011-02-17T21:55:00.001-05:00

This NY Times column about willpower and brain chemistry is a couple of years old, but it's new to me. (See, discovering this kind of stuff can be the perk of an otherwise exasperating manuscript.) The takeaway is that willpower (which is to say, planning and self-control) is a scarce mental resource that can be tapped out from unrelated tasks that require it. On the plus side, exercising willpower gives you a bigger reserve of it in the future. Also, it's easier to exert willpower if your blood sugar is at a good level.

It's probably safe to assume that, being a popular report on brain chemistry, things are simplified and smoothed around the edges. But I'm struck by how unintuitive the broad answers here are. And this stuff matters to all of our lives in an immediate way!

Speaking of brain chemistry, this short YouTube video on the placebo effect isn't too information-dense, but it entertainingly conveys its theme (and it's narrated in an Australian accent, which, admit it, is fun). Read a fresh report about a kind of reverse placebo effect from the BBC here.

Ah, brains. Can't understand 'em.

Happy Valentine's Day, Mr. Lincoln

2011-02-14T22:44:00.000-05:00

Valentine's Day was really Saturday night for Maddie and me, for scheduling purposes, which seems fine for a holiday that's even more arbitrarily placed than usual. If that gives Valentine's Day date night top billing over Abraham Lincoln's birthday, so be it. No offense to Abe.

We had dinner at a nearby restaurant we've been to before and enjoyed. The main draw for me is the spicy pear vodka martini they serve, because my sweet tooth is something like 15 percent pear-specific. The drink was therefore excellent. I've started to realize that I almost never remember restaurant meals that I eat, so I'll briefly memorialize this one. (It took me three minutes to call it back to mind, and it's only two days later.) I had a couple of lamb back ribs, over some kind of non-rice cooked grain and what I want to say was broccoli rabe. I could be wrong about the details, but it was tasty. I forget what Maddie ate. We both started with a magnificently creamy butternut squash soup, with a few delicate yet robustly seasoned croutons floating therein. Our waiter, a likable guy named Mohamed who kept crossing himself on the way back to the kitchen, forgot about us once and confused us with two different tables. I think he might have been new.

Afterward we adjourned through the slicing night wind to a comfortable, very classy bar near the Kaufmann Astoria studios, where we stayed chatting until the wee hours, by which I mean 10:15. Ah, to be young!

Saturday morning I'd snuck out to the florist a few blocks down Broadway from Maddie's apartment, under the pretense of running to Rite Aid down the block to get more coffee. (I promise this wasn't last-minute, I just didn't want to schedule a delivery when we were going to be in and out all day.) The florist is a 1-800-FLOWERS store. They were great, and efficient, but it strikes me as odd to go to a physical location named after a phone number. (If I opened a franchise, I'd name it after their website, florist.1800flowers.com.) The tulips were lovely, and it looks like Maddie's flight schedule will allow them to not fall into immediate neglect, which is the risk run by flowers cared for by flight attendants. The important thing about flowers, anyway, is that I was not run over in a crosswalk on my way to get coffee, which is what Maddie had started to suspect when I disappeared for 35 minutes. Incidentally, Rite Aid house blend: still satisfactory.

Next weekend is when Nate and Kyle come out and we all go see Nixon in China at the Met Opera, so that'll be pretty great.

Aguilerian Anthemry

2011-02-08T22:18:00.000-05:00

I would like to mention briefly that my first and only reaction to Christina Aguilera flubbing a line of the national anthem before the Super Bowl is to blame the national anthem itself, which is a terrible song. Really, did whatever she sang have significantly less meaning than "o'er the ramparts we watched"? Frankly, that she sounded good singing the tune puts her ahead of the pack. It's a terrible tune, and it's a terrible song.

I'd be in favor of scrapping the national anthem and replacing it with almost any other song that's not "God Bless America." Personally, and this is thinking outside the box a little, I think a great anthem would just be someone shouting "America!" and then a whipcrack and then the theme to Bonanza.

RIP Brian Jacques

2011-02-08T18:16:00.003-05:00

We seem to mostly reserve our Rest in Peace posts for composers born in the 20th century, but I think Brian Jacques deserves a shout out, upon his death. So, rest in peace, Brian Jacques. I think this one is more particular to me than to the twins or Mike, but I read, quite rabidly, the first six or seven of the books in Jacques's Redwall series, a probably more-muddled-than-I-realized-at-the-time account of heroic mice fighting evil weasels (and snakes and shit!) in a medieval castles-and-monasteries setting (I eventually graduated to Narcissus and Goldmund (right after wasting several years of my reading life in the Dungeons-and-Dragons novelized spin-off waste-web of the Dragonlance books (and then quitting fantasy novels forever (right after reading a bunch of Orson Scott Card's non-Ender's Game American pioneer-era fantasy novels--I think I made it through the first four of these (and being excited to go to Northland Library when that fourth book in the series came out in 1995))))).

Unlike Ender's Game, which I re-read back in October, when my hosts in Helsinki (who happened to have a copy of the book (in English, not Finnish)) went to bed early before my flight pretty early the next morning and I had a night to kill, and I figured re-reading Ender's Game was as good a way as any to do that (some of the ideas still hold up, but the writing is quite shit, and there's way less to the book than I thought there was back when I was 12 (surprise, surprise)), there's very little chance that I decide to re-read the Redwall books. Mostly because, come on, there's no way they're gonna hold up, seriously... and I'm simply not that nostalgic for them. Books 4 through 7 (by publication date (I'm looking at the Wikipedia list of books)), I think I read as they came out. I recognize the title of The Bellmaker, so that's probably the last one I read, right before making the leap over to those damn Dragonlance books and, like, Dune.

But Brian Jacques kept right on writing. I like the title of one of the newer ones, Loamhedge. But, on behalf of the fragile emotions of my 8-12 year old self, so sucked into those worlds, thanks for the books, Mr. Jacques.

Steeler Bowl '11

2011-02-06T22:44:00.000-05:00

Well, what can you do? I feel OK. That was a worthy, entertaining Super Bowl, and the Steelers' mistakes were honestly forced by the Packers. Turned out to be a great matchup. And good for the Packers: I've felt this entire two weeks that if I'd been neutral about the Steelers, I would have been pulling for the Packers, like most of the rest of America.

If your season's going to end in a loss, it may as well be on the final drive of the Super Bowl. I thought the team was going to go about 8–8 this year, so I can't complain about that. And I got to host a Super Bowl party again! You don't get to do that every year. Just, you know, every two years.

But You Don't Have to Take My Word for It . . .

2011-02-06T08:28:00.000-05:00

In reply to Nate's mention of reading books written by women:

Absent any effort, I read very few books by women last year. I would have thought there would have been a couple more, but nope. So I don't have a ton of useful recommendations. I imagine you're already familiar with Alice Munro from studying storywriting, but I picked up her collection Friend of My Youth, which is from 1990, about a year ago, and it's excellent. Her characters have a solid presence, and she writes with the effortless realism that I prefer in short stories. Now and then she'll adopt an indirect narrative frame that really makes the writing pop -- the title story "Friend of My Youth" and "Meneseteung" especially, and her later "The Love of a Good Woman" (which, in three parts and with shifting narrative viewpoints, is evolved past what you normally would call a short story).

Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs is a late nineteenth-century portrait of a coastal village in Maine, related as a string of anecdotes by a visiting narrator. There's a refreshing absence of plot structure, with Jewett bringing the characters and scene-setting to the foreground. It's a modestly scaled, humane, and pleasurable read, and I felt a little disappointed when it ended, like I wanted it to go on.

I don't really remember when I acquired a copy of Cynthia Ozick's 1987 The Messiah of Stockholm (I think it must have been at The Strand right before I read it, although I may have had it kicking around a while), but it's short and sharply drawn and packs an intellectual punch. (Pete, I think you might like this, actually.) It's about a Jewish-Swedish literary critic who's obsessed with the work of a Polish writer who was (or wasn't) his father, encountering a manuscript of his lost magnum opus. It's rather overabsorbed into the literary world (and Ozick has her characters constantly name-dropping Eastern European writers), but there are some sharp teeth on the reality-vs.-fantasy theme, and the characters are quietly outrageous in a nicely calibrated way.

But, for what it's worth, I'd recommend all three of these.

Soul Sharing Redux

2011-02-04T11:03:00.002-05:00

I just finished reading Willa Cather's novel My Ántonia. I've been a fan of her writing since Jack pseudo-randomly gave me a copy of her Death Comes for the Archbishop for our birthday several years ago and since then I've been slowly reading my way through her better known novels, maybe one about every two years. One of my ill-defined, never formalized resolutions for the new year was to spend three or six months or something reading only books by women -- I spent a lot of the end of last year reading popular nonfiction by men, and wanted to wash out some of the accumulated male-male authorial voice from my inner ear; plus I've been feeding like a baleen whale on NFL coverage for the Steelers' entire postseason run, which does not encourage mental gender balance -- and I figured one of the early ones should be more Cather. My Ántonia is a lovely book, more romantic in tone than the later books of hers that I've read (it was written in 1918, one of her earlier works), about unrequited early love, the strong-spirited women of the early Nebraska prairie settlements, and the bonds of shared experience and memory that bind people after decades of separation. Near the end, the story's narrator, Jim Burden, expresses his feelings for the titular friend of his childhood in terms that remind me of Douglas Hofstadter's concept of soul sharing:

Do you know, Ántonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister -- anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.

I don't have much to add to that sense of ideas connecting, other than that it happens from time to time (I observed it with Michelangelo and Shostakovich; Pete, earlier, had seen it in the work of Jacques Roubaud) and to reinforce that in its basic outline it's an old concept. It still seems a philosophically (and some-day-cognitive-scientifically) viable concept to me, too, some years removed from reading I Am a Strange Loop. I increasingly suspect that Hofstadter believes self identity is too deeply coherent within the mind, too pure an emergence from whatever loopy mechanism produces conscious experience, but the ultimate result, that our minds can be others to some of the extent that they can be ourselves, still rings true.

Teevee Notes

2011-02-02T20:42:00.000-05:00

When the Steelers made it into the Super Bowl, I decided I'd do the honorable thing and get a cable box again and host a Super Bowl party in my apartment, just as things should be, and just like two years ago. So for the time being, and I mean a very limited time being, I have TV again! I am celebrating by not watching any TV. The guy installed the cable box Sunday afternoon, and you know what was on? Professional golf and Bio-Dome.

I had to do some ironing, so I watched part of the Pro Bowl. You know the Pro Bowl is as awful as everyone says? For me, I enjoyed it a little on the level of "Hey teams who didn't get to the Super Bowl -- now your best players have to put on ridiculous-looking uniforms and run around."

What's on at the same time as the Pro Bowl? America's Funniest Home Videos. I would have thought YouTube would have killed that off by now, but, no, twenty years onward America is still in a place where it needs to identify and broadcast its funniest home videos. This reflects badly on all of us.

For a fresher perspective on television, Maddie and I spent part of our Tuesday by gingerly navigating the slushy Astoria sidewalks in the direction of the American Museum of the Moving Image, located next to the famed Kaufmann Astoria Studios. I'd somehow never made it over, and it's an interesting place to see -- kind of middlebrow, but definitely providing unexpected discoveries and putting things in a different light, which is what museums are supposed to do. Among their exhibitions:

--A couple of early hand-cranked, single-viewer flipbook machines (I forget what these are called) showing Charlie Chaplin gags or that famous short bit about shooting a rocket to the moon.
--Computer stations set up to let you make your own stop-motion animation shorts.
--A sound studio where, cheesily but entertainingly, you dub your own voice into a selection of movie scenes.
--Footage of a recent Mets game, simply enough shown with all 15 camera shots and footage of the TV crew, with one guy exhaustingly directing and cuing the shots. For all the hours I've watched baseball on TV, I've never once thought about how the broadcast is stitched together. Now I feel a little bad about taking that guy for granted.
--TV and movie costume and makeup paraphernalia, most of which didn't stick in my mind except for one of Bill Cosby's Dr. Huxtable sweaters, which is kind of awesome.
--A collection of TV sets ranging from 1950s radio-style cabinets to some notable 1970s models. These are so iconic it's immediately striking that you haven't seen them in a museum before. My favorite mind-blowing item: a huge $2300 set from 1975 (that's $2300 in 1975 dollars) combining a 19-inch screen with a built-in BetaMax recorder.
--Arcade game cabinets! Frustratingly, most of these were unplayable. More mindblowingly: an Atari 2600 and an 8-bit Nintendo. Yes, someone decided that your childhood now goes in a museum. But I feel a little vindicated that, eveen if Maddie can totally kick my ass at Wii boxing, I absolutely own her in Tank Battle.
--Upstairs, some interactive video art that didn't really match execution to concept.

Architecturally, the lower lobby area has a futuristic, curving, bright white layout that brought to mind the Wonkavision scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In short, I approve of all of this, much more than I approve of actual television.

It's French for "The Bohème"

2011-02-02T19:46:00.000-05:00

Maddie's Christmas gift to me was a pair of tickets for Puccini's La Bohème at the Met Opera on Monday night, so I went down Monday night (taking Tuesday off work) for a kind of midweek weekend addendum. It was a lovely evening, naturally, as dressing up and hearing some well-rendered Puccini in a lavishly traditional staging is a thoroughly nice experience. By "dressed up," I mean Maddie dressed up, and I put on a tie and the one pair of slacks she tolerates me wearing in public. And it's nice being on an opera date, rather than geeking out on Britten or Janáček or Prokofiev or Ligeti alone.

I find the idea of describing La Bohème like the idea of describing crème brûlée -- musically and dramatically it just seems to exist in the world as a smooth, well-formed luxury thing, and I can't identify any meaningful reference points to characterize it, which would be beside the point anyway. La Bohème's story is a pretty straight-up reduction of lovers-interrupted-by-death, not really embedded in a theme so much as a colorful time-and-place substrate.

Speaking of which, I hesitate to make this observation, because I think opera as an art form gets an upper-crust rap it doesn't deserve, but experiencing a story of tragic, ostensible starving-artist types in a finely polished Met Opera milieu creates a little bit of a disconnect.

After the show we had fruity cocktails in a hotel bar 35 stories above Columbus Circle and the usual intoxicating nighttime skyline, then we took a cab back to Astoria. So, yeah, luxury all around. It's satisfying now and then!

Elkphrasis Update

2011-02-01T15:32:00.003-05:00

Clearly, being on the internet every day with, like, access to digital image-making is either a good thing or a bad thing for of mild content. But the Elkphrasis, it's getting there (see previous Elkphrasis post for comparison). Two more months to finish it up...

As of 2/1/2011

Late December / Early January in Creativity

2011-01-31T11:23:00.006-05:00

The Super Bowl is coming up this weekend, and the Steelers are playing in it, so that's exciting. I've gotten my Lamar Woodley jersey and Terrible Towel out of storage just in time. Of course, I'm more distracted by the impending labor negotiations that will be going on presumably right after the big game ends (I like Kyle's reading of Nate's interpretation of the big game). Since, it seems inevitable to me that the masses of fans will want the players to shut up and play, since they make so much money already, whilst ignoring the sheer oodles of money that the owners make (and also the kind of let's call it "tax-payer" money they bilk out of municipalities to build their greed-temples (okay, well, Dallas's stadium, that's a greed temple, I guess I like Heinz Field okay (only been there once...)).

Meanwhile, I finally took the time to plug my new digital camera into my computer, so that means more creative retrospectives! Of Mild Interest is now the refrigerator door about which I will cry if my art and crafts are not clung with magnets there-upon!

Two paintings from my friend Dan's apartment, and a drawing from my friend Parker's apartment:

Everyone's gotta have a blue period, right?

"A line, a sky, nothing..."

Marker on kitchen table.

In context.

RIP Milton Babbitt

2011-01-30T14:41:00.006-05:00

Milton Babbitt died yesterday, further reducing the already dwindling number of old guard modernist composers on the planet.

I'm probably leaving a couple American composers out if I refer to Elliot Carter as the "last man standing" at this point (with Kurtag and Boulez, young scamps, chilling on the other side of the pond), and it's probably not quite respectful (especially if I go on to note that Carter is also the best of the Academic Modernists, so it makes sense that he's immortal). But Babbitt's music was only ever a curiosity to me; having given him at least mild due course at the turntables in my music schools' libraries.

The main thing I wonder about (drum roll... counterfactual coming...) is what Babbitt would have done, compositionally, had that synthesizer not dropped into his lap at Princeton once upon a time. Comparing his music to Boulez's for instance, we see that Boulez was extremely interested in pushing human virtuosity to its limits (Jack and I heard him talk about this a bit, a couple years, ago, when he was conducting a student group playing his "Masterless Hammer")--in line with Ligeti as well--and the kind of expression that becomes available at the limits of capability (and how capability evolves, and how this evolution alone can be the engine for newness/novelty that modernism needs). But for Babbitt, at least so far as the narrative goes, the synthesizer "freed" him from human performance capability. And I think that's an alienation that he never recovered from--there's still his one virtuosity, as a music-composing intellect and synth-manager, but that lacks the necessary spectacle (compare him here to, say, Richard Feynman, who was a super-genius, but is more famous, respected, etc. in his field (SCIENCE!), since he happened to also have a strong sense of showmanship).

Invective ≠ spectacle.

Death is an empty set.

∅

Last Late Summer/Early Autumn in Creativity

2011-01-27T12:44:00.002-05:00

New scanner at the office = image of the poem that I left in place of my presence at the University of Wynwood/O, Miami office, back in August-October:

Prole Bowl!

2011-01-26T00:43:00.002-05:00

It has gone unmentioned on this humble blog, I think because I, like Jack, have been avoiding pumping all of my Steelers-related hopes and fears into it, but: Pittsburgh's going to the Super Bowl. Everybody do the Super Broker Shuffle! This provides excellent television-watching opportunities, as well as a chance to emotionally invest in dramatic events completely outside one's control.

One thing that's gotten plenty of mention already is that Super Bowl XLV's bill -- the Pittsburgh Steelers vs. the Green Bay Packers -- matches two of the NFL's oldest and most storied franchises. But I would also like to highlight, per my earlier breakdown of team name categories, that the game will feature both of the league's clubs that are named after industrial workers. Gritty, blue-collar football indeed! Will the Steelers play with the strength and resilience of the metal whose name they bear? Or will the Packers butcher them and load their carcasses into refrigerated box cars, to be shipped to larger population centers? Or, as Kyle just suggested to me, will the proletarians of each squad rise up together against the bourgeois decadence of the owners?

I expect that the latter impulse will be channeled instead into the negotiations for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement later this year; the onfield action will be rabotnik against rabotnik. Perhaps one day soon the Jacksonville Jaguars or whoever will be relocated to the L.A. market and renamed the Beverly Hills Fat Cats, providing a more natural rivalry. But the present matchup still offers a pretty good theme.

This Week in Shameless Self-Promotion

2011-01-25T12:08:00.001-05:00

Pete: poetry organizer.

You'll Never Beat the Irish

2011-01-25T10:42:00.002-05:00

In an interesting development, a poetry gang in Ireland, having heard about the awesome power of the Poem Depot of the Miami Poetry Collective (co-founded, with maybe ten other brilliant Miamian poets, by yours truly), through the awesome power of public radio, has taken up the site-specific poetry sales banner on the other side of the atlantipond. Further, they also, in their language there-about, propose a "a one day census of the state of the nation in poetry," which, of course, we're also already doing in Miami.

Typically, one would anticipate American writers to be influenced by the Irish, but we've reversed the flow!

Now let's all sing our songs, sing our songs...

Vegetariana

2011-01-20T11:15:00.002-05:00

I've said plenty of times, that I've never successfully convinced anyone to become a vegetarian (nor have I ever really tried). Folks mostly have to decide for themselves to cultivate some awareness of what they consume (whether that means going meatless, drinking Fair Trade (or better, Direct Trade) coffee, riding a bicycle to get around, etc.). But this is an article with a healthy angle for people-that-want-to-eat-animals. It's the usual good points that eating local, responsibly-raised animals is really way better than eating the usual industrially produced paingarbage that most meat is.

To me, the main lesson is: it's grotesque to try and save so much money on what you eat. Humans have to eat pretty much every day, so it should be where you spend a lot of your earnings, and you might as well eat what not only is better for you, the animals, and the planet, but also tastes better.

Mostly Avoiding Steelers Commentary

2011-01-19T19:19:00.000-05:00

. . . but you should read this article in the Wall Street Journal about a guy meeting Steelers fans in Beijing in the middle of the night to watch the January '06 AFC championship game. (via Behind the Steel Curtain)

I'm going to be watching the January '10 one at home home, like Pittsburgh home, since Maddie has a Pittsburgh flight and I'm going out for the weekend with her. Fortunately the girl's down with mandatory football viewing.

Next Week in Creativity

2011-01-19T15:07:00.004-05:00

I've got a poetry-reading series re-launching in Miami next week (after an initial event all the way back in July). The flier for which I am somewhat proud of, so I thought I would share it:
And now that I have a camera, maybe there will even be some photographic documentation of the event itself. I don't think anyone that reads this blog lives in Miami, but if you happen to be here next Wednesday, come on by...

"Ice" to See You

2011-01-18T18:49:00.002-05:00

I like being a pedestrian commuter, but there are always a few days a year where it's massively inconvenient. Usually those days are in the rain-and-wind genre, where the only thing to do is to dress like you're Nate going to the opera. Today was a day in a different genre, freezing-rain-plus-sidewalk-slush, which created ice sheets in the morning and huge melted puddles on every street corner in the evening.

Survivable, but it gave the ol' Johnston and Murphys a workout. Actually I only got those in December. Hooray commuter shoes. (Even if shoe shopping at the Queens Center Mall during Christmas season is an activity that I'd not care to repeat.) I like to think of the left and right shoes being individually named "Johnston" and "Murphy," along the lines of an Irishman naming his fists.

I'd be more happily ensconced at home for the evening if there wasn't this thing in the news about how being sedentary is irreparably bad for you. You had to tell us this in the middle of January? Really? On the plus side, we'll be rid of Joe Lieberman before too too long.

I'm listening to my copy of the finally-released Steven Mackey/Dreamhouse recording, which sounds gorgeous and, predictably, way better than reality as far as sonic clarity goes.

(Get on up) Like a Bread Machine

2011-01-14T10:58:00.000-05:00

Pursuant to Jack's thing below, I'll note that he generally outdid himself on the tags for his gifts under the tree this Christmas. The one attached to the book about ants that he got me is reproduced here. As you can see Jack's work in the genre continues to exhibit both novelty and a keen understanding of exactly what his various siblings are going to find funny. (Nate: "Awesome, it's an 8-bit Nintendo Santa." Mike: "I thought that was a Lego Santa." Dad: "If Nate thinks it's an 8-bit Nintendo Santa, it's definitely an 8-bit Nintendo Santa.")

My 2011 feels like it's off to a slow-rolling start, though a good one. Thanks to the steady build-up of yoga classes and daily stair climbs at work, I can say with confidence for the first time since December that I no longer feel like someone who ate pie for breakfast every day between Christmas and New Year's. Also like Jack, I'm enjoying the production of a bread machine at home, in fact the very same model; this was a thoughtful gift from my parents and so far it's providing an excellent vector for whole wheat bread flour, letting me carbo-load for a marathon I will never run. I'm also putting a ton of miles on Janelle Monáe's rangy, genre-straddling album The ArchAndroid, a present from Pete, who's been keeping me in sci-fi concept albums ever since Deltron 3030. The Steelers' playoff run is all up in my head these days, too, though that's mostly letting out into long-running email threads with Jack.

Contrary to 2010, 2011 really doesn't feel like a milestone; it has this second-order interest in that it's this advanced-seeming year that's otherwise uninteresting. So far it just feels like the future. I just want to yell at the people around me -- who, granted, are mostly software developers and are more put out as a body that there aren't transporters and such yet -- "It's the future! Your phone is a tricorder! You are carrying around a computer screen like a book! You're in the future!"

(Further riffing on the James Brown reference of this post's title, a while ago an office-themed magnetic poetry kit was put onto the fridge in my workplace's break room, and one of the things I spelled out of the available words was "get on up like a fax machine". Due to extremely slow magnetic poetry turnaround it's still there on the freezer door. And -- although this blog is testament enough to the fact that I find a great many things I do unjustifiably funny -- this is maybe the only thing recently that I've just thought those around me have not found suitably hilarious. It's clever, people! Like Brian Wilson -- the Beach Boy, not the spooky-eyed Giants relief pitcher -- I guess I just wasn't made for these times.)

Workin' in a Winter Wonderland

2011-01-12T17:10:00.000-05:00

It snowed overnight, and when I padded into work around 9:10 -- mostly having picked my way through the snowy streets, since the sidewalks were maybe a quarter shoveled -- I was one of two people in the office, me and the managing editor. I think there were about 5 people at the office in total. I feel so hardcore! Yeah, not depending on a car.

I heard there were 18 inches accumulated, but that seems high. Close to a foot looks about right.

The workplace bonus here is that it's easier to review page proofs when it's really quiet. At home, well, I've got a bottle of wine and the bread machine's on, so I'm pretty much set.

While I'm bragging about myself: I really nailed Time Log's visual style! See, if you told me 20 years ago that someone would one day write that about me on the Internet, I would have been all like, "What? . . . on the what?"

Nongrapefruit Department

2011-01-06T19:28:00.000-05:00

I very much enjoyed this interview with John McPhee in the Paris Review. More than a few striking observations about writing.

I haven't read any of McPhee's geology books yet, which he talks about at some length there; onto the Metro North reading list they go.

Deceptiforehead

2011-01-06T19:00:00.006-05:00

It's been kind of quiet here recently, so I thought I'd add something. I realized today that when I mash my forehead wrinkles together it sort of looks like the Decepticon logo.

You Fat Cats Didn't Eat All Your Plankton

2010-12-22T11:41:00.001-05:00

It's my blog now. Over two weeks of Pete-only postings!

I celebrate with some awesome smarty-pants pro-bicycle propaganda.

Happy Cold Solstice!

2010-12-21T13:35:00.006-05:00

Auspicious tidings on this totally-non-arbitrary-day-of-recognizing-cyclic-and-or-orbital-motions-of-our-pertinent-planetary-bodies! And that we share ways of noticing our recognitions! As the totally-eclipsed moon was washed red with an atmospheric glow not unlike that of a just-ignited Yule log, I hope we all stayed as awake as necessary for what was surely one of the most special events on a Cold Solstice since 1638 (and until 2094).

I was recalling last night, as I laid on the beach and stared up at that much-more-spherical-seeming-when-it-isn't-doing-its-mirror-thing heavenly body, that I spent a fair amount of the last lunar eclipse also just sort of checking it out. I actually wrote a poem about the last one (with a title that went something like "On Viewing the Last Total Lunar Eclipse Until 2010" (which probably seemed further away at the time), that was mostly about apophasis, which was at the forefront of my thinking in those days (part of the broader & on-going negativism of my poetics/worldview)). That poem got whittled down and eventually just called "Apophasis," but then got whittled down to where it's just a couple chunks of moon-imagery that are waiting for other poems to show up in (one chunk did, not so long ago, tho I can't quite recall it at this moment).

In the usual kind of nerdy misappraisal of other peoples' behaviors, when I stepped outside last night to start watching the eclipse, at about 1:45am, I was expecting the streets, the park, the beach to be crowded with other people also out to stare at the moon (I seem to recall moon-viewing in a decent crowd at Franklin Elementary for some eclipse of yore, so maybe that established a false precedent for the popularity of lunar eclipses (especially on the solstice, come on!)). But it wasn't all that crowded. I've been living on the Beach for a couple days now, so it's odd to see people still out at their bars and clubs at 2am and not stopping whatever they're doing to go stare at the sky for a while.

I headed to the beach for viewing, wondering, as usual, about why I already knew I was going to end up blogging about this, and whether or not this compulsion to share is problematic or not, or even a compulsion, etc. And also, like, watching the moon slowly lose its light.

Mostly: when it's totally eclipsed, the moon is a rock in the sky.
And: when a totally eclipsed moon is blocked by a passing cloud, the rock in the sky is gone.

A Thing to Read Some Months from Now

2010-12-21T11:55:00.003-05:00

Douglas Hofstadter has a new book coming out in March. Exciting! I probably haven't been this excited about a book coming out since the last time Hofstadter had a book coming out (a book we blogged about pretty well, way back then).

Chromiamium-6

2010-12-20T09:21:00.003-05:00

Here's a list that makes Miami seem less crappy to live in then, say, Pittsburgh.

It's, of course, not surprising that Pittsburgh would be pretty high up on the cancer-chemicals-in-your-water list (and I would guess that it varies pretty significantly depending on where exactly the water was sourced from). Generally speaking, I would guess that Pittsburgh is pretty high up on most gonna-poison-you lists. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but I'm pretty sure the ol' hometown at least used to be host to the largest number of Superfund sites in the country.

(And just because it wasn't detected at all in Indianapolis, doesn't mean anyone needs to move there.)

Editor Emeritus

2010-12-15T13:59:00.003-05:00

Gulf Stream isn't my literary magazine anymore (that is, I'm not it's Editor anymore), but its newest issue is online. So congrats to David, the current Editor! A new web designer, James, has taken over, so this will probably be the last issue that reflects the work that I did in making Gulf Stream an online journal in the first place. And in an even more important note, I'm extremely proud of how large Gulf Stream's staff has grown (if you go back to Issue #2, and then check #3 and then #4, you'll see that it's gotten larger every semester), which really says a lot for the work that we've done in the last three years to make Gulf Stream an important part of FIU's MFA program again. Enjoy!

Last Month in Creativity

2010-12-13T15:39:00.003-05:00

Here's the video the Knight Foundation made of our Patti Smith intro:

Random Act of Culture & Patti Smith from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Enjoy.

Idiopa(g)ean

2010-12-06T20:16:00.005-05:00

These are three photos of our collaborative book project that Carol took and posted on Facebook, so I think they're safe to share here as well. It is called Idiopa(g)ean: a brok(op)en page-song. The books present a fractured poetic text with many possible ways of being read, intended to be interpreted aloud into a complete whole be each reader or group of readers that encounter it. Carol's guiding image for the design of the books was of a flock of ibis strolling through a South Floridian lawn, joined by an exotic scarlet ibis. I decided, two-thirds of the way through making it, that my poem, to me, was about love conquering capitalism, or vice versa.

One of the best and least anticipated aspects of the work
was the sound the pages made
when they were whipped up by the wind.

That's a (tired, oblivious) me sunning in the background.

"Aureate" is my fourth or fifth favorite "a" word.

This Week in (Sports-Bumping) Creativity

2010-12-06T00:14:00.003-05:00

Carol Todaro and I had a collaborative poetry-based installation on display at CasaLin during Art Basel Miami (for the second year in a row (this is what part of last year's looked like, if you've forgotten)) from Thursday through Sunday. It's a long poem written by me printed across eight books designed and hand-made by Carol (hand-printed (transferred) by both of us). Here's a blog that has a couple pictures of it, amongst the other pieces in the show with us.

Once I get some more pictures of it, I'll post them or share them somehow. But for now, that was the week that was.

(Also, Thursday night, went to see the Merce Cunningham Legacy Tour, which if it rolls through your town you should really go see (maybe I'll write about that more too).)