Book Notes

Some book-ish stuff:

:: I keep forgetting to link these reviews I wrote for GMR: The Boy Who Cried Freebird: Rock and Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling by Mitch Myers, WorldCon Guest of Honor Speeches edited by Mike Resnick and Joe Siclari, and (a recording, not a book) a double album by John Wesley Harding.

:: Good book on baseball, if you like baseball (or good books about subjects you don't particularly care about): Is This a Great Game or What?, by ESPN's Tim Kurkjian. If George Will's Men at Work made you want to open a window and turn on a fan (I did, and I liked that book), then this is the book for you. It's nothing more, and nothing less, than a 250-page love letter to baseball. What's different is the tone: it's genuine enthusiasm for the game and all its foibles, with little of the philosophical "baseball as metaphor for life" stuff that one often finds in book-length love-letters to the game. No sepia-toned descriptions of every deal Branch Rickey swung here; just one writer's reasons for loving baseball more than any other sport.

The best part is the funny anecdotes:

The funniest promotions come from baseball. The minor-league St. Paul Saints had Two Dead Fat Guys Night, which commemorated the lives of Elvis Presley and Babe Ruth, who died on the same day, August 16...But the Orioles blew a great opportunity after acquiring pitcher Daniel Boone, a direct descendant of the Daniel Boone. "I suggested instead of Cap Night, we have Coonskin Cap Night," said Doug Melvin, then the Orioles' assistant general manager. "I was told to stay out of marketing.

...

As pitcher Dennis Lamp watched teammate outfielder Luis Polonia butcher another fly ball, he decided, "If you hit Polonia a hundred fly balls, you could make a movie out of it, Catch-22."

...

Larry Andersen played all over the major and minlor leagues, including one season in reno. "Our clubhouse guy quit midway through the season, so, for an extra $10 a week, I was the clubhouse guy," he said. "I was a starting pitcher, I had time on my hands. But I'd be on the mound in the fourth inning wondering, 'Did I take the jocks out of the dryer?'"

...

When Rangers pitchers started throwing footballs before each game to strengthen their arms, I asked [Charlie] Hough if it was doing any good. "I don't know," he said, 'but we lead the league in third-down conversions."

...

I promised never to reveal the name of the player who was told in the early 1990s that Major League Baseball might be moving a team to Washington, DC. And the player said, "The league can't give Washington a team. It already has two teams, Baltimore and Seattle."

:: I'll flesh this out later on, but for right now, I'm becoming a huge fan of the work of Nick Bantock.

Unidentified Earth 9

OK, we missed an installment last week, but never fear; we're back and we're traipsing the globe of Planet Google. But first, I'm shifting the ground rules here a bit: I'm going to deactivate comments on Unidentified Earth posts, so as not to spoil things for people who don't get the answer in the first eight minutes, like that one guy who keeps shooting them down! (You know who you are!)

Anyhow, answers should be e-mailed to me, and then with each new post, I'll list the "winners". (I enclose "winners" in quotation marks because, well, all you win is the cool feeling of having identified something. I'd offer a prize of 10,000 Quatloo's for each correct guess, but times are tough and a blogger's got to look for any reason to avoid spending large amounts of Quatloo's.)

OK? OK. Now for this week's location:



Where are we? E-mail me with your answers!

America

It always saddens me that on July 4 these days, we hear that Lee Greenwood song a lot, and "God Bless America" a lot. The latter's a good song and all, and I don't really care for the former, but what actually makes me sad is that Woody Guthrie's great tune doesn't seem to get heard much at all outside of folk circles.

This land is your land, this land is my land!
From California, to the New York Island;
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters,
This land was made for you and me!

As I was walking a ribbon of highway,
I saw above me an endless skyway.
I saw below me a golden valley;
This land was made for you and me!

I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts.
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me!

The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling;
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting:
This land was made for you and me!

As I was walkin', I saw a sign there;
And that sign said: "No tress passin'".
But on the other side...it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple,
Near the relief office, I see my people.
And some are grumblin', and some are wonderin',
If this land's still made for you and me.

I wish that was our national anthem, quite frankly. But enough of that: Happy Birthday, America.

The Interview Meme! Yay!

I see that one of my favorite blog-memes is making the rounds again: the Five Question Interview, in which I answer five questions posed to me by the blogger on whose blog I saw the meme in play (in this case, Electronic Cerebrectomy), and then offer to ask any questions myself of anyone who wishes them! Hoo-ray! This game comes around about once a year or so -- I suppose that's how long it takes before it wends its way out of my little corner of Blogistan and then back again, but I'm always happy to see it return.

Anyhow, SamuraiFrog posed five questions to me, and here they are:

1. You’re a fantasy novelist. What kind of books did you read as a child and which ones stand out for you as influences?

My reading interests were often all over the map. My mother, as I've noted before, had a tendency to punish my mis-deeds by handing me a book and telling me that I'd watch no TV until I read said book. Even more deviously, though, she'd make sure that the book she gave me was the first book in some series or other. The first time this happened was Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three, the first volume in his Prydain Chronicles. I was nine years old at the time. This was my first exposure to epic fantasy with a map and everything. I've never recovered.

2. I’ve been enjoying your reviews on space opera novels. Is there another genre or subgenre you’re planning on giving a try?

I'll probably read the occasional hard-SF work, since that's the second type of SF I tend to like a lot. (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy rocked my world pretty strongly.) Military SF tends to not be my cup of tea, although some of it I like (the Vorkosigan series by Bujold, for example). I've flirted with alternate history, but for me, a little of that goes a long way. Cyberpunk also never rang my bell all that much.

As for fantasy, multi-volume "fat" fantasy isn't a major obsession of mine these days, although there are some series that have caught my eye. I'm interested in reading earlier stuff now: Robert E. Howard, Lord Dunsany, and so on.

How about non-SF genres? I have to admit that I'm tempted to read some bodice-ripping romances. I'm always on the lookout for really compelling love stories; it's the romantic in me, I suppose. (Go ahead and suggest some.) I also want to read some Larry McMurtry Westerns, and I'm sure I'll get a hankering for some horror sooner or later. (I tend to read horror in spurts. Like blood!) Espionage novels aren't much of a love of mine anymore, although I tore through a number of them back in my late-high-school years. Non-genre fiction? I'll read some every so often, if I hear of a title that sounds especially interesting.

Reading some Jane Austen is high on my "to do" list. I'm currently reading Wuthering Heights, and re-reading Jane Eyre is also high on my list. I loved it when I read it in high school, but I haven't picked it up since.

3. We both have a love of film music. I’ve been somewhat disappointed by the majority of scores I’ve heard in the 21st century; what’s your take on the modern film score?

I always have a hard time making generalized statements about the state of any art right now, because I really do believe that those who inhabit a certain time are in no way best equipped to judge their own period's art. Today you can go to any film music message board or forum and find postings like "Wow, today's stuff has no flavor of its own, and it's crap compared to Goldsmith and the giants of yesteryear", but I'd be willing to bet that if you could go back in time to when, say, The Wind and the Lion was a new score or when Rosza's King of Kings had come out, you'd find more than a few film music fans of those times saying, "Meh". (This is generally why I generally scorn the notion that professional critics should be taken as the best arbiters of quality. Read up on even the very best critics of all time, and you'll find them being flat-out wrong much of the time.)

That said, I think that film music today isn't to my taste nearly as often as it's been in the past. The rise of "corporate culture" in Hollywood has only had the same effect on movies that the corporatizing of, say, radio has had: the general spread of homogenization. Film scores tend to sound the same much of the time, and what's worse, they're intended and even required to sound the same. Films are edited with "temp tracks", in which music from other films or classical works are slapped into the film as an intended guide for the composers, but then, the composers are required to produce scores that sound very like the temp tracks, as opposed to the works they'd produce using their own instincts and their own voices.

Many fine scores also get rejected when the films test poorly at screenings, since usually at that point in production the score is just about the only thing that can be changed. The film Troy is a notable example; Gabriel Yared wrote a fine score for that film, but when the film tested poorly, the score was removed and James Horner was brought in to crank out a replacement score in a matter of weeks. James Newton Howard had to score King Kong in a similarly short period after Howard Shore's effort was turned down (a shocking development at the time, after the brilliant work Shore had done for Peter Jackson's earlier Lord of the Rings).

Mainstream film right now is not an environment where composers can be distinctive, individual, or innovative, and that's a shame. For an entire series of examples of how the director/composer relationship is supposed to work, one only need go to Japan and look at the films of Hayao Miyazaki. The idea that he'd ever tell Joe Hisaishi what kind of music to write is unthinkable, and the result is that Hisaishi's scores for those films are, in just about every case, either very high in quality or just outright masterpieces. There are some highly talented composers today, just as much the case as was ever so in film. But it does seem to me that finding good film music tends to involve digging through lots of lesser work, as though we're pushing the ratio in Sturgeon's Law to 93 or 94 percent.

But then, I think we have to be careful. Were previous "golden ages" of film music as golden as all that? Are we forgetting the misses, and assuming that what was truly great was representative of film music as a whole during those times? Or, even worse, are we inflating scores that are OK but otherwise fall into that giant realm of musical works which don't make "the Canon" but don't quite deserve total obscurity, either? You see this kind of thing all the time on lots of film music forums: composers who are completely forgotten today, except by the most encyclopedically-knowledged of film music fans, who wrote decent enough scores for the kinds of films you used to see aired at two in the morning on AMC or on the "Two-buck DVD rack" at the supermarket, lauded as "unjustly forgotten masters". You also see composers' entire bodies of work elevated to unfairly high stature. (Let's face it, the man scored more than two hundred films and TV productions. Not everything Jerry Goldsmith produced is a classic.)

So who's good right now? James Newton Howard seems to be the current favorite of the "Goldsmith was God" crowd. For my money, Howard Shore's the best working today, but for some reason, I think he gets overlooked a lot. Gabriel Yared is superb. Michael Giacchino is a musical chameleon, and a first-rate one, at that. Thomas Newman's voice is unmistakable. Jan A.P. Kaczmarek is something of a newcomer to filmscoring outside of his native Poland, but what little of his work I've heard is wonderful. David Arnold's work tends to be viewed in lesser light, but I like him. Alan Silvestri is in no way a great composer, but he's a very fine one, very professional, whose music always does exactly what it's supposed to do (and he's got a tremendous melodic gift). I'm not a big fan of Danny Elfman, but he's got his moments. And there's the "bad boy" of film music, Eliot Goldenthal. Finally, you know what? Hans Zimmer's music doesn't always suck. He's written some good stuff, as have Klaus Badelt and Harry Gregson Williams.

And hey, I'm not about to write off the current film music era as long as John Williams is alive.

4. When did your interest in classical music begin, and what was the piece that really pulled you in the first time?

It's very hard to say when it began, because it was always around to some degree in our home, as far back as I can remember. My sister is six years older than I, and she started piano lessons early enough that I don't remember her not playing the piano (although I do have one very vague memory of riding the freight elevator at the piano dealership, a memory which may well be totally wrong). So there was classical music, as well as other genres, as early as I can recall.

I started my own musical adventures in fifth grade, when I was talked into joining the band. I played French horn that first year, but switched a year later to the trumpet. Even so, I didn't really feel the "bite" of the music for another couple of years. I recall that the first orchestral score I studied was Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor. That work was, and continues to be, for me a revelation. And I've written before of how I came to Berlioz, which was a year or so after I came to Mozart.

In short, it was gradual. There's no guaranteed way to make kids love classical music, but the best way is almost certainly to make sure they're surrounded by it from early on.

5. Finally: how, exactly, is Jaquandor pronounced? I’ve been saying it as though the Q made a K sound and ignoring the U.

To get a definitive answer on this, you'd probably have to ask Doug Moench, the writer who scripted the comic book from which I snagged the name. The comic is Six From Sirius, a space opera (big surprise!) espionage tale that came out as a Marvel Limited Series in the mid-1980s. That said, I pronounce it "juh-KWAN-dor".

OK, that ends that. If anyone would like five questions from me, just drop into comments here and indicate as much. I'll craft some devious questions and e-mail them your way.

I guess Matt can turn off that countdown clock now

OK, so Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip ended last week. Did I like the show? I did enough to watch every episode; I may have even liked it enough to buy it on DVD if I see it cheap (like the fact that at Target you can get Firefly for under twenty bucks right now). But it was never as good as it could have been, and it never came anywhere near the heights that Aaron Sorkin can reach when he's really on his game. A Few Good Men? The American President? The first two-and-a-half seasons of The West Wing? All were far better than this show. Random thoughts abound:

:: Lance Mannion mocks it, but I consider it a cosmic injustice that I'll never again hear Ed Asner growl the word "Macao" again. I loved the way he said "Macao". In fact, I'd like to have Ed Asner record the word "Macao" for the outgoing message on my answering machine. And I loved Asner's pep-talk for Jack Rudolph, Action Executive during the Macao deal: "I took the ball ninety-nine yards, now take it the last one. Get us the touchdown. Take it to the damn house!" I just get all giggly when I say that line in my head. "Take it to the damn house!" I'll be getting some mileage out of that over the next few months, let me tell you.

:: I'll also miss the Studio 60 set. I loved the little world-within-a-world they created there, and I was always a bit disappointed when the show left it.

:: I enjoyed the last story arc, although it went on way too long what with yet more boring crap about Matt-and-Harriet, the worst couple in television history. And I do not buy for one second that they're "back together", whatever the hell that means. I don't know how good or bad an actress Sarah Paulson is, but I do know that she and Matthew Perry had as little chemistry as any two people I've ever seen on teevee.

:: Matthew Perry finally gets his chance to strut his acting stuff after Friends, gets the lead on a Sorkin show, and then has to play the guy who basically stays in his office looking conflicted the whole time. Perry got screwed.

:: There must be an interesting "inside baseball" story about this show's cancellation. Few shows that get yanked from the schedule at mid-season get a chance to end on a full-stop the way Studio 60 did; the show's last-aired episode was also a decent final episode. Did NBC go to Sorkin and tell him something along the lines of, "Look, you're highly unlikely to last the year, to say nothing of coming back next year, so if you've got any storyline stuff in the pipeline that you won't be able to live with yourself unless you get to write the endings, you'd better start thinking about that now."

:: Sorkin's biggest flaws on this show were twofold. The first? His hubris: the entire show's run reeked of his apparent "I am Writer, and verily I shall save thee from Bad TeeVee!" attitude. It's amazing, really; the entirety of Studio 60 basically turned out to be a giant Mary Sue story. If I write a Mary Sue story and submit it somewhere, it'll get rejected. Aaron Sorkin got big money to actually make his Mary Sue story into a show. Wow.

:: And what's with Sorkin's constant beef that TeeVee sucks across the board? Sure, if all you ever watch is stuff like Are You Smarter Than Your Kids or that sitcom with Jim Belushi, but really, isn't there some just plain great stuff on TeeVee nowadays? Sorkin's preaching against TeeVee on Studio 60 often seemed not unlike if a present-day clergyman were to devote sermon after sermon to denouncing Copernican theory.

:: Sorkin's other problem? His laziness. He's the James Horner of screenwriting. He has plenty of good ideas, but he has all these other ideas that he keeps using, over and over and over again. The glaring examples from the final episode? Well, the episode was titled "What Kind of Day Has It Been". That was also the title of the final episode of The West Wing's first season. On that episode of the earlier show, a major subplot is that an American Air Force pilot crashes in Iraq and has to be rescued before the Iraqis get him. On Studio 60's episode of the same name, a major subplot is an American military officer getting captured in Afghanistan (he's the brother of Tom Jarrett, one of the regulars). On TWW, there's a scene where a black military officer comes into the Oval Office and tells the President that he'll receive an update on the pilot's rescue by phone soon. On Studio 60, there's a scene where a black military officer receives an update on the military officer's fate by phone. On TWW, said black officer hands the President the phone and says, "I have the pilot on the phone. We got him out a few minutes ago." On Studio 60, said black officer hands Tom the phone and says, "I have your brother on the phone. We got him out a few minutes ago." Seriously, how lazy is that?! Especially to do the same thing again in the same episode, when he very carefully constructs Jordan McDeere's death only to say, "Yay, she's fine!"

Of course, this may not be laziness, so much as some pretty extravagant narcissism on Sorkin's part. It could be that he's really thinking, "This was such a great idea the first time, that I'm gonna do it again! And again! And again!" This is why Sorkin's stuff starts to sound the same, the more you watch it. It's not that he writes the same type of stuff every time (rapid-fire dialogue that goes by way faster than anyone would normally talk, "walk-and-talk" scenes, flashbacks galore), but that a lot of the time he actually writes the same stuff over again. So ultimately that's my disappointment with Studio 60: rather than come up with something new, Sorkin just wallowed in himself. And dammit, he can do better.

So, bon voyage, Studio 60. As Rossini said of Wagner: you had great moments, but awful quarters of an hour.

Hideous Arse Candles!

John Scalzi received some low-grade snark today, and decides to grade it for effort and effect. Sadly, the snark doesn't come out so well, only meriting a C-, but it does yield what is sure to enter the lexicon of all good Blogistanic insults: "Hideous Arse Candles". Now, that's just classic!

I hope Scalzi doesn't object, but I couldn't resist the urge to look through some of the photos that he's posted to the Whatever over the years and, well, adjust them according to his newfound status as High Priest of Hideous Arse Candlehood.







Yup. You can tell I am in "holiday mode"!

UPDATE: Ha! I thought that would get a link! Welcome aboard, Whateverites. Feel free to hang out a while. Put your feet up. Check out the archives. And don't worry about breaking anything; most of my shit's been broken already. It's not yours until you break it, after all.

Passages

Last time I revised my blogroll, I removed Rittenhouse Review because its creator, James Capozzola, hadn't posted in more than two months, as is my general approach to such things. Still, I kept him bookmarked in an "Inactive Blogs" folder, in hopes he'd return. He was one of the first big liberal blogs out there, way back in 2002; for a while he was the only major liberal blog to link mine; he was the writer of a particularly fine essay, "Al Gore and the Alpha Girls"; he was a proud denizen of Philadelphia; and he was a doting cohabitant of a bulldog named Mildred.

Sadly, James Capozzola has died. I seem to recall that he wasn't generally in the best health -- but that explains why his blog fell silent for the last time.

Somebody better be taking care of Mildred.

Meme-licious!

OK, it seems that while I was taking a break, I got tagged by SamuraiFrog with a quiz-thing. So here goes:

INSTRUCTIONS: Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot, like so.

1. Confessions of a Sophisticated Writer
2. The Urban Recluse
3. No Smoking in the Skull Cave
4. Electronic Cerebrectomy
5. Byzantium's Shores: The Occasional Meditations of yada yada yada.

(Not sure why we're doing this. It sounds vaguely chain-letterish.)

Next, select five people to tag.

You know, I rarely tag people on these kinds of things, but I suppose I will, just this once:

1. Jen (14221)
2. Erin
3. Jason Bennion
4. Jayme Lynn Blaschke
5. Tosy and Cosh

And now for the questions!

What were you doing ten years ago?

Settling into married life.

What were you doing one year ago?

Well, what's odd about activities like this is that I can actually go back in the archives and look! So...[clicks and reads]...well, I wrote some posts a year ago today. Nothing terribly earth-shaking, so I'm assuming it was a day at home. Since it was a Sunday, I was probably doing laundry.

Five snacks you enjoy.

1. Summer fruit: nectarines, peaches (O my beloved white peaches!), strawberries.
2. Ice cream.
3. Nacho chips, dipped in salsa-cheese sauce. (By the way, Buffalonians, if you ever have leftover Mighty Tacos in your fridge, before you nuke 'em for reheating, slather them with salsa-cheese sauce. Ohhhhh, the nachoey-cheesy goodness!)
4. Pretzels, dipped in fine mustards. (I like the fat Dutch ones best, but I generally love pretzels across the board.)
5. Nuts of all kinds.

Five songs to which you know all the lyrics.

1. "Hotel California" (long song, but not that impressive to know the lyrics, as the song opens with a minute of instrumental and closes with three more minutes of guitar stuff)
2. "American Pie" (Decoding this song is probably an exercise in futility. There's no way the whole thing makes sense.)
3. "Some Enchanted Evening"
4. "On the Street Where You Live"
5. "I Dreamed a Dream" (Look, ma, showtunes!)

Five things you would do if you were a billionaire.

OK, I changed this one, because it was originally what you'd do if you were a millionaire, but you can't even retire on a million bucks anymore. But a billion? Whoa, nellie! I'll also assume that I don't earn my way up to billionaire, but that I somehow get the whole lump sum at once.

1. Ten million dollars each to all of Buffalo's leading cultural institutions.
2. I'd spend however much money it takes to place subscriptions to each of the top five science fiction and fantasy magazines in the public library systems of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country.
3. I'd build something in downtown Buffalo. Maybe apartments or something. The more people living downtown, the better.
4. Cerebral palsy research would get a huge windfall.
5. Heck, I don't know...it's hard to spend a billion dollars. A scholarship fund that pays full tuition to the University at Buffalo for anyone who wears overalls for every day of their college career? Pay for SF's WorldCon to take place in Buffalo? Set up an organization that advertises Buffalo's attractions in places other than Buffalo? Who knows?

Five bad habits.

1. Swearing like a sailor.
2. Thinking, "I'll do some writing just as soon as I get ___ done", with ___ being some menial task or whatever that doesn't need done all that urgently.
3. Putting off car maintenance.
4. Assuming the worst-case scenario at every juncture. (Although truth to tell, this habit has actually proven fairly useful in recent years.)
5. Forgetting what books I own when I go to the bookstore.

Five things you like doing.

1. Answering blog-quizzes.
2. Eating red meat.
3. Voting for Democrats.
4. Consuming pie.
5. Waxing poetic about the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Five things you would never wear again.

Hmmmmm....

1. Oxford cloth. If I have to, I will, but I generally can't stand Oxford cloth.
2. Neckties. Again, I will if I have to, but I must admit my belief that the necktie is just about the dumbest damn thing ever invented, in terms of men's clothing. (Now, the bow-ties with tuxes are fine. Those are classy. But just generic ties, because that's what guys wear? Ick.)
3. Argyle. In any form.
4. Cowboy boots. Nothing against them; just not my cup of tea.
5. Tank-tops. Maybe just around my own home, if we ever own a house, and I'm mowing the lawn. But not in public. No way.

OK, I guess that's it.

Things I don't want to hear again

I could do without hearing the following statements, ever again:

:: "It's all part of God's plan." (Gee, when I was in management, I was always told that planning had to flexible. Joe Schmoe the manager at Pizza Hut has to be flexible, but God must execute every single detail in his plan, with no deviation? That make sense?! And why are we just cogs in some omnipotent being's plan, anyway?)

:: "That which does not kill us, makes us stronger." (Well, that horseback-riding accident didn't kill Christopher Reeve, but I don't think it exactly made him stronger.)

:: "God helps those who help themselves." (Generally, I don't like homilies about God wherein God is made to be a bit of a jerk.)

:: "God never gives us more than we can handle." (Well, actually, he does. In fact, we have a word in our language for "that moment when God gives us more than we can handle". That word is death.)

:: "We don't negotiate contracts during the season." (Way to go, Sabres!)

OK, I'm done.

Sentential Links #104

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

I wasn't online nearly as much this week as other weeks, for various reasons, but some weird stuff did transpire.

:: First, Jonathan Strahan links this review of his new anthology, The New Space Opera (which you'd better believe I'm buying). The second paragraph of this review ends with this odd assertion:

Space ships, etc., only show up in one very small subgenre of SF: the space opera.

Now, I'm not sure what the "etc." refers to here -- earlier in the article the reviewer mentions "spaceship and bug-eyed monsters" as appearing in SF as a genre, but I'm not sure that's what the "etc." means here. But even if so, this is a terribly odd characterization of space opera. 2001: A Space Odyssey isn't space opera, and yet it contains one of the iconic spaceships in all of SF (the Discovery). Michael Flynn's wonderful Falling Stars (that's not the title of the series, actually, but if you've read it, you know the one I mean) series has lots of spaceships, but it's not space opera, either. Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow has both spaceships and strange aliens, but it's most definitely not a space opera.

:: This isn't for the faint of heart. It's a museum in Russia that's devoted to some very dark stuff. Via Warren Ellis, whom I imagine is starting to feel like one of the victims of the items on display in that museum, given that he apparently can't smoke in pubs anymore. Seems to me he could just compensate by simply drinking more, but having never smoked, I'm not sure how that works.

Yeah. Best. And don't you forget it!

According to Alan, I won something the other night: Buffalo Spree Magazine's survey of Best Blogs, or something of that nature. I think it was one of those surveys city publications do to see what their readership thinks are the "best" of whatever in that city, whether it's restaurants, arts venues, sports teams, or websites devoted to sporadically-updated thoughts of persons of varying degrees of geekitude.

In truth, I wasn't even aware in any real sense of being in the running. It's kind of like a recurring funny fantasy I have, in which we're at the Oscars, and they're announcing Best Actor: after reading the five nominees, the envelope is opened and the name therein turns out to be some completely-unexpected sixth actor. Camera then cuts to that actor, who's in his kitchen, eating a sandwich, and we freeze-frame his reaction as a piece of pastrami hangs from his mouth and a dab of mayo oozes down his chin. "The nominees are Sean Connery, Denzel Washington, Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and Ralph Fiennes -- but the Oscar goes to Bob McGaskill! Congratulations, Bob!" And Bob says, "Gwhaaa?"

Anyway, apparently this blog won. I'm frankly amazed, because I'm in no way one of the cadre of "citizen journalists" who constitute the larger portion of the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan; my Buffalo-blogging tends to consist of the occasional thing about the Sabres (not terribly often because I don't know much about hockey), the more frequent stuff about the Bills (especially during the season), and once-in-a-while takes on urbanism. I don't do reportage here, and the vast majority of the content I produce could as easily come from Peoria. That I, a guy who's content to blog about the obscure SF books I read and movies and food and women who look good in workwear and whatever other obscure topics leap to mind, should come in first in such a survey is somewhat amazing. This blog isn't any kind of organized set of thoughts; it's rather my own personal mix-tape for the world.

So, thanks to those who voted. The full roster of winners can be found here. I should really start paying attention to stuff like this, I suppose. I could delude myself into thinking that they could do a big profile thingie on me, like they did for Jennifer a while back, but -- well, I suspect that a big picture of me in that magazine wouldn't be the best thing in the world. I still cringe when I see the way I looked in the Buffalo News for my short-story thing.

For thy reading pleasure

Earlier today, Chapter Two of The Promised King, Book II: The Finest Deed went live. Enjoy. Or not. But if you don't, you're a terrorist heathen who hates America.

A few notes from Hiatus-land

I had originally figured on returning to regular blogging today, but I've decided that I don't much feel like it yet, so I'm not. However, I want to note a couple of things:

:: Last week's Unidentified Earth was guessed correctly as Southfork Ranch, near Dallas, Texas. I'm not putting up an installment this week, but they'll start again when I start again.

:: For Better or For Worse has completely lost it. Seriously, it's just a joke now, between Michael moving into the family home with his former grade school sweetheart (now his wife), and Lizzie clearly gearing up to get back together with her grade school sweetheart, and April providing the local special needs kid with her Dead Poets Society moment, complete with standing on the desk. This strip is now officially embarrassing.

:: When the hell is the Season Three set of Once and Again going to come out?!

:: Earlier today this blog reached 300,000 hits, according to SiteMeter. Thanks to that small number of regular readers of mine, and thanks also to the much larger number of people who come here by searching for photos of beautiful women. (Not so much the people who come here looking for "overalls porn", "overalls spanking", or any of the other such search terms that show up in the referrals. I sympathize and all, but this ain't the place for that.)

That's it. Back when I feel like it.

Until its rhythm you have found

I'm not feeling too much like blogging at the moment, so I'm going to take a few days off. Could be the heat; it's pretty hot in Buffalo right now. Could be something else.

For now, I'll leave you with a song that's been haunting me for several weeks now. It's "Scythe Song", by Scots great Dougie Maclean. It can be heard here here, the song starts up at about the 1:40 mark. (Don't worry about the sound at the outset; it clears up before the music starts and for YouTube sound, it's fine. And don't worry about watching the video. It's just an unchanging title card.)

The song is a meditation on the kind of learning that takes place when you undertake a craft that may look simple, but whose mastery eludes everyone but those who work at it alongside a giving teacher. The idea, I think, is that learning is as much a function of someone teaching us as finding the secrets on our own.

The lyrics:

O I still remember when
I first watched him work the blade.
'Twas down in the Buckney den
my questions tumbled and he said:
"O this is not a thing to learn inside a day!
Stand closely by me and I’ll try to show the way.

You’ve got to hold it right,
feel the distance to the ground.
Move with a touch so light,
until its rhythm you have found.
Then you’ll know what I know.

O wild are the ways we run
when at last untethered out we fly!
Straight into the burning sun;
need no direction, no, not I!
But it is not a thing to learn inside a day....
Stand closely by me and I’ll try to show the way.

You’ve got to hold it right,
feel the distance to the ground.
Move with a touch so light,
until its rhythm you have found.
Then you’ll know what I know.

And so, little dancing girl,
you want to learn to play a tune?
One that your heart can fill
to help you shine under the moon?
Well it is not a thing to learn inside a day!
Stand closely by me and I’ll try to show the way.

You’ve got to hold it right,
feel the distance to the sound....
Move with a touch so light,
until its rhythm you have found.
Then you’ll know what I know.

Then you'll know...what I know.

I'll be back soon...but right now, I need to move with a touch so light.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Not a great week for weirdness, unfortunately -- I didn't see anything that really grabbed me as weird. But for sheer amusement, there's always AC Douglas's spittle-flecking of his monitor in response to the AFI's Top 100 films list. He can cry "O tempora! O mores!" from the rooftops as much as he likes, of course, but reading his brief roster of films he thinks get too much recognition, as well as those which don't get enough, pretty much make clear that he considers "detestable pop culture" to basically boil down to "that set of things he doesn't like".

Buy. Buy. Buy.

Hey, wanna buy some books? I've just listed a few on eBay, with more to come in the next few weeks. There's a link in the sidebar. Do it for the trees.

Hector Rules!

Earlier this week Lynn e-mailed me a notice about a comment left on this post over at Serenade in Green, about who the Greatest Composer of All Time might be. The comment (by this blogger) is lengthy and refers to several composers, but the part about Berlioz is quite the shot across my particular bow:

To back up my orchestral music is easy to impress with, consider the example of Hector Berlioz, a name that would never be praised if it wasn't for his orchestral innovations. Berlioz's music was almost completely vacuous, and had only smatterings of moments of quality. In fact, Berlioz is one of the only well known composers I'd list below Mozart, and we've had the Mozart conversation before [flashes the secret handshake].

I'm actually more irritated by the idea that Mozart is so low in esteem as to only allow one or two composers to be placed beneath him, but this is just another of those "To each his own" sorts of things.

But as for Berlioz, this opinion is hardly uncommon, I must admit. I'm a long-confirmed Berlioz obsessive (look for my series of posts, linked in the sidebar, in honor of his bicentenary), but I've also seen first-hand how many people who love classical music just don't get Berlioz, for whatever reason. I have a friend with whom I occasionally share music; I send him stuff and he sends me stuff in return (actually, he sends me a lot more stuff than I send him because he's twenty years older than me and it's thus a major challenge finding stuff that he hasn't heard already). Some years ago I sent him some Berlioz -- Romeo et Juliet, if I recall correctly -- and his response was a very polite "Meh". And this I've heard from many others. But I've also heard from people who, like me, utterly adore Berlioz. (To this day it irritates me that at the Impressions de France film at Epcot Center's World Showcase, the film -- a series of stunning images of France set to French classical music -- includes not a single note of Berlioz.)

It's generally been my experience that Berlioz gets two responses: "Meh", and "Oh my God, I've just had an orgasm." (Rachmaninov is in a similar boat, although he gets more of a range of reactions.) This is not new, either. Here is Harold Schonberg, writing in his grand old book The Lives of the Great Composers:

Perhaps Berlioz will always remain the object of veneration by a strong and articulate minority. He could not speak to Everyman. But there is not one piece of his that lacks its incandescent moments. And then Berlioz is seen plain, his eagle beak defiantly thrust at the heavens, glorifying in a kind of tonal magnificence and an ideal of self-expression that make the concept of Romanticism very clear.

And, more recently, David Dubal expresses the same sentiment in his Essential Canon of Classical Music:

Still, it took most of the twentieth century to place Berlioz's art in perspective. He has always irked many people. He refuses to fit into a convenient niche. His works as a whole are not graceful; they do not have the kind of melodies that stick in the mind. His harmonies can sound primitive, and his content empty. But for those who are temperamentally attuned to him, he is shattering. He has a subtlety of construction that goes beyond technique, and his orchestrations have proved to be models for generations to come.

...

Whenever I hear any of Berlioz's music, I think of the poet Heine's statement: "He is an immense nightingale, a lark as great as an eagle...the music causes me to dream of fabulous empires filled with fabulous sins."

And there you have it.

(Oh, and the Greatest Composer of All Time? The best historical case can probably be made for Johann Sebastian Bach, but even then, I still believe that the sentence "Bach was the greatest composer" can never be a true statement in the same sense that "Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar System" can.)

He must have forgotten to have his readers Google it for him.

Matthew Yglesias has yet another in a long series of utterances by Jonah Goldberg that fail to live up to facts about the world. I know, it's not a news flash when Goldberg turns out to have his head squarely planted right around the location of his own colon, but sometimes it's downright amusing.

Oh heck, while I'm at it, Kevin Drum's got Glenn Reynolds being a damn moron too. Not a news flash either, since Reynolds is also a complete idiot. "If things go badly in Iraq"? By what possible intellectual gymnastics can people like Reynolds continue to convince themselves that things are going well in Iraq?

UPDATE: Well, let's make it a Trifecta, shall we? Sadly, No has a nice quote from one of the indistinguishable idiots of Powerline:

E.J. Dionne argues that the “center” in American politics is moving towards the left. I think he’s correct, though we may be one major terrorist attack and/or recession on a Democratic president’s watch away from having to revisit that view.

Hmmmm. Sounds to me like the Right actually wants the US to get attacked, as long as a Democrat is in office when it happens! Isn't that what that means? If what Glenn Reynolds says in his quote is fair game, why isn't this a fair reading of Powerline?

Making it up as he goes....

OK, this is all over the place, but I'm probably not a geek in good standing if I don't post it too, so: Indy's back.



I've generally been ambivalent about a fourth Indiana Jones movie, but if they can make another good one, then I'm fine with it. I loved all three of the originals, although I don't like Last Crusade as much as I did initially and I've found that Temple of Doom is actually better than I thought it was when it first came out. Raiders is, of course, a classic -- and by pure chance, I listened to its score last week and was struck anew by how good John Williams was between 1975 (Jaws) and 1985, when he was just cranking out one amazing score after another with almost no let-downs.

I'm also kind of curious to see what happens when Indy IV comes out. If it's good, we'll hear about how Spielberg and Harrison Ford still got it, but if it's a clunker, I'd bet real money that the villain is somehow George Lucas.