Instaweek!

The week in pictures!
























Interesting week....

Something for Thursday

Film music fans tend to really enjoy End Credit suites, because often times -- although less so now than in previous years, what with the rise of pop tunes in films even with orchestral scores -- the composer gets to write what is basically a concert overture blending the main themes of their score.

By way of examples, here are the End Credit suites from several of the Star Trek movies!

Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Jerry Goldsmith:



Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, James Horner:



Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Horner again.
(The actual suite for the rolling of the credits is identical to the
Wrath of Khan suite, but I really dig the intro, with the neat
way Horner used the original theme from the teevee series before sequeing
into his own stuff.)



Star Trek Into Darkness, Michael Giacchino:

No doing WHAT in your toilets, now?

Journalists aren't thrilled with their quarters in Sochi for the Olympics. Lots of photo of questionable stuff, but this one stopped me cold:

Can someone tell me just what the last panel there is demonstrating, by way of Things They Don't Want You Doing In Their Bathroom? I cannot figure this one out, folks. Help!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

What repeating event -- i.e., something that happens yearly, every other year, whatever -- would you most like to witness in person?

Reminder: Ask Me Anything!

Just a reminder that I'm taking queries for Ask Me Anything! for this month, so get 'em in! Leave them in comments to that post, or submit via e-mail or Twitter or Facebook or whatever.

In other news, I'm posting light for the rest of the week because I'm tired and I need to regenerate. No, wait, that's the Doctor. I need to reenergize. Yup, that's it. I did a lot of marathon editing over the weekend to get the second draft of Princesses In SPACE!!! II done, and now it is...but I'm still a bit worn out from that. I'll likely start returning to normal tomorrow, in terms of writing...I need to get back to Lighthouse Boy, which I put on the back burner a few weeks ago. Time to start that thing simmering again!

Super Thoughts

Wow, what an awful game. We haven't seen an out-and-out blowout in a number of years, have we? Remember what it felt like, back when the Super Bowl was an annual ass-kicking? This was quite the throwback -- it was even an NFC team beating up on the Denver Broncos!

Random thoughts:

:: I'm a Peyton Manning fan, so I was hoping he'd go out and have an indisputably great game, just to silence everybody. I figured that if he ended up losing, it would likely be the Denver defense that did him in. I honestly did not figure that Manning would look as bad as he did yesterday. It was painful at times, watching him play. His passes weren't accurate, they didn't have much zip, and he looked panicky. It was really pretty shocking. This is the first time that I have ever seen a Super Bowl where the very first play from scrimmage actually set the tone for the entire game. Amazing.

:: I was also rooting for the Broncos because I don't like Pete Carroll or Marshawn Lynch. But I don't dislike those guys enough to hate the entire team or anything like that, so I'm not heartbroken, here. Seattle has a heck of a team, and given their youth, who knows where they go from here? Maybe back!

:: The game's musical offerings were excellent. Renee Fleming did a wonderful national anthem, I always love seeing Queen Latifah (she is just amazing), and I even found halftime enjoyable. I'm not a Bruno Mars fan, but I don't hate him, either -- his music is pleasant in that way of not really making me want to change the radio station when he comes on.

:: Troy Aikman and the rest of the commentators were sort of annoying. I loved -- and by "loved", I mean, "hated" -- all the various commentaries about "How can the Broncos get back into this game?" They all went into lengthy explanations and such, when the answer was pretty simple: They needed to score points, and lots of 'em.

:: Oh, commercials? As usual, I paid no attention to them, except for a couple. I loved the Coke commercial with "America the Beautiful" in all those languages, and I'm saddened (but not shocked) to see the knuckle-draggers in our society attacking it because "In America you speak English!" or some such nonsense. Like I tweeted: If you were offended by that ad, you are a person I do not wish to know.

:: One last thing: The Denver loss puts their Super Bowl record at 2-5. And that means that the Buffalo Bills no longer hold a share of "Most Super Bowls lost". So yay, us!

On to the Draft!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I've heard of fore-edge paintings on books, but to my knowledge I've never seen one and certainly never owned one. What am I talking about? Watch!


(via)

:: Who needs a bicycle lock?

:: Ten terrifying highways. I would cheerfully drive any of these, except one. Guess which one! [shudder]

My personal most nerve-wracking, but also eye-popping, drive of all time is probably US 14 across northern Wyoming. I remember driving that road years ago with The Girlfriend (now The Wife), and at one point I looked up at this giant mountain to our left and noted the presence of cars on this harrowing-looking road way, way, wayyy up there. And then a minute later, I realized that was our road. That was an amazing drive, though.

:: It seems to me that whenever you see a headline that some kind of crazy shit happened someplace, more often than not, you can assume it happened in Russia. I'll say this for the Soviets: they really seemed to keep a tight lid on the crazy over there. This week's case in point: two guys get into an argument, over the merits of prose versus poetry. The discussion turned into an argument, fueled by vodka, and ended when the poet stabbed the prose-stylist to death.

Most insane is the linked article's last graf:

The killing came four months after an argument over the theories of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant ended in a man being shot in a grocery store in southern Russia.

Ummm...wow. Note to self: Never discuss, well, anything with anybody in Russia!

More next week!

Ask Me Anything!

Wow, it's February already! And that means it's time for another fun round of Ask Me Anything! Get your questions in now, folks -- either in comments on this post, or in e-mail, or on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or...wow, I'm on a lot of stuff. Anyway, Ask Me Anything!

(I do answer questions anonymously, if that is preferred.)

Symphony Saturday

Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.

There's honestly not a great deal I can say about this work that hasn't been said before and better. It's one of the towering masterworks of all of music, and likely of all human art. The Seventh is that extraordinary. In this work you encounter the type of perfection that makes you marvel the notion that it emerged from a human mind at all.

Setting aside all that, Beethoven here crafts a work that seems to contain nearly every human emotion in its pages, with the gorgeous meditation that opens the work, the profound depth of the second movement, and the last two movements that abound in dance rhythms. Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is one of those works of art to which I turn when I am feeling generally down about the human race. We have the capacity to do this, why not better?

My very favorite passage comes early in the first movement (3:30 in the first movement), and may well be the single finest transitional passage in all of classical music. The orchestra seems, just for a second or two, to be bogging down in bar after bar of dueling scales, when they all seem to get stuck on the same note, handing it back an forth between the flutes and the violins. A rhythm haltingly emerges...and then takes over as Beethoven slides into a melody of pure delight.

And amazing, he does it again, this time letting that same rhythm come boiling up and out of the orchestra's depths (start at 7:30). Beethoven is so good at building up to something, isn't he? You can always feel his energy gathering. There's no mistaking with him, none at all, that something is coming.

Here's the Seventh.


Is the Seventh Beethoven's greatest symphony? Now that's an interesting question. I discussed this once with someone on a Usenet group, and the case in the Seventh's favor is extremely compelling. Next week, we'll wrap up Beethoven with the other contender to the title of Greatest Beethoven Symphony.

Instaweek

The week in photos!

Something for Thursday

This is a rough time of year for astronauts, it seems -- the dates of the three fatal space-launch accidents are all within days of each other. I salute their sacrifice and zest for exploration.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

On a scale of 1 to "I'm moving to Barbados and I'm not even packing my stuff, I'll buy new stuff when I get there", how sick are YOU of this deep freeze? (I usually try to not be quite so location - specific with these posts, but I'm too cold to think of anything else right now.)

Farewell Pete Seeger

What a long, strange, and brilliant trip this man's life was.


Walk the stars, Pete Seeger!

Oooooh, stuff on the teevee!

We're a little more than halfway through the teevee season, so here's where things stand for me on the few shows I still watch regularly:

Person of Interest will be getting its own post. Suffice it to say that it's become my favorite currently-running show, and I think it's terribly underrated.

:: Castle continues chugging along. It's a very comfortable show now, especially since it pretty much wrapped up the storyline about Beckett's mother's murder. Castle is, more than anything else, that warmly welcome show that I look forward to every week simply because it's so comfortable. No real new ground is being broken here, but so what? I still like these characters and I like seeing what happens to them.

This season did get off to a rough start, with Beckett going to the FBI and Castle having to figure out a long-distance relationship. I did like how the marriage proposal wasn't made into a long-standing plot point; I liked how Castle says "This isn't my way of trying to get you to stay in New York; if we have to move for your job, then that's what we do". I liked the honesty with which the writers handled that, and I also liked the degree to which the writers clearly know their characters, in the way they wrapped up Beckett's FBI experiment. They know that Beckett's concept of justice – find the criminal, and put them away – doesn't really work in agencies like the FBI, where often an agent's day-to-day work doesn't yield a big-picture view of where the "justice" is. That was well done.

Less well-done were the FBI-based episodes themselves, since the writers had to figure out ways to shoehorn our old NYPD friends into the stories, because they are, after all, cast regulars under contract. This was another example of the Castle writers being somewhat constrained by the realities of their show, as a mid-level show with decent ratings. No killer budget, but also the standard "rules" that come with being on a network. There's only so far they seem able to push their storytelling, and there are times when you can really feel the Castle writers pulling their punches. The FBI episodes were a good example of that.

Still, love the show!

:: The Big Bang Theory is also becoming comfortable – maybe a little too comfortable. It still makes me laugh – the Thanksgiving episode was utterly hysterical – but short of actual character growth or some new way of shaking the dynamic, the show is often twenty minutes of "Let's make fun of nerds!" and "Ha ha, Sheldon doesn't realize that Amy's been horny for four years" and "Raj is pathetic" and "Leonard and Penny love each other but make an awful couple". I just don't know how much more shelf-life this show has. This show needs something to happen. The last big thing to occur were the additions of Bernadette and Amy to the group, and since then, it's pretty much been kind of a struggle.

:: We seem to have finally abandoned Bones, which became embarrassingly bad last year and started off this year even worse. They finally resolved the Palant storyline (that guy makes my top five of Worst Teevee Recurring Villains Ever), got Bones and Booth married, and then...who cares. This show was once good, but it's awful now.

:: I honestly don't know what The Mentalist is doing, and I wonder if it's just playing out the string at this point. The Red John storyline limped to a pretty boring conclusion two seasons after it really should have ended (inasmuch as it can even be called a "storyline", as few of its twists and turns through the years ever made any sense), but not before trying to muddy the water with some kind of secret society in the law enforcement ranks and then shifting half the cast to the FBI and moving the show from California to Texas. So now the main attraction seems to be watching a new set of law enforcement people try to figure out how to deal with Patrick Jane's various quirks, which isn't exactly a recipe for the show's long-term future. Frankly, I'll be really surprised if The Mentalist is still around come next fall.

:: Once Upon a Time had a surprisingly good first half this season. In previous years this show has been so inconsistent as to make me crazy. Sometimes the show is amazing, but other times the writers make me want to throw bricks at puppies. This year, with most of the cast sent to Neverland to battle the evil (!) Peter Pan, things were actually a lot more interesting. They did keep that storyline going on just a tad too long, and they still indulge their habit of too many scenes where the villains do nothing but twirl their figurative mustaches whilst saying evil things, and Red Riding Hood was nowhere to be found (nooooo!), but I really did enjoy this season's first half. Most impressively, they actually made Captain Hook into an interesting character! Last year, he was just annoying.

I continue to crush mightily on Lana Parilla and Robert Carlyle. Love those two.

:: I tried to like Hannibal, and I even gave it more than my usual five or six episodes to grab my interest. By the eleventh episode, though, I had to admit that it just wasn't getting there for me. Mads Mikkelson is amazing as Hannibal Lecter, playing him with a kind of "European weirdness" that contrasts with Sir Anthony Hopkins's legendary portrayal. Mikkelson captures the fact that Lecter is, for all his depraved villainy, actually a decent person capable of some degree of caring, albeit on his own very limited and somewhat villainous terms. Mikkelson gives a Lecter who is vulnerable, horrible, calculating, sickening, and friendly.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is pretty bland. Hugh Dancy's moods range from "mild brooding" to "maximum brooding"; Laurence Fishburne (an actor to whom I have never warmed very much) basically plays Jack Crawford the same way he tends to play everybody else. The rest of the cast makes absolutely no impression on me, and the show even manages to waste Gillian Anderson in a dreary turn as Hannibal Lecter's psychiatrist.

At first I liked the show's production design, which is often cinematic and spectacular, but as the series went on, I tired of this angle, and I started wondering why, in the show's universe, the news media hasn't taken notice of the incredible rash of deeply theatrical murders taking place in the Baltimore area. It started to feel as if the writers were trying to figure out a more spectacular way for the Serial Killer Of The Week to make his/her work known, so we have the killer who slices his victims' flesh to make it look like they have wings and then poses them as if they are praying angels; then we have the killer who impales his musician victim on a cello; and then there's the killer who builds an enormous totem pole out of corpses he's buried on some beach someplace. This is ultimately what made me turn against the show: its events simply became less and less believable, and the characters weren't interesting or well-portrayed enough (Hannibal himself excluded) to keep me interested in what was increasingly a bit of non-magical dark fantasy. I wanted to like this show, but it's a miss.

:: That's about all for network teevee! Aside from Big Bang Theory, there aren't any comedies we watch regularly – How I Met Your Mother never really won me over (its lead character is insanely boring), and my love of Kat Dennings isn't enough to sustain my interest in 2 Broke Girls. Also, no new show has come along that makes me stand up and say, "Ooooh, we gotta watch that!" So our non-network teevee watching consists of things like Sherlock, The Daily Show, Pawn Stars, and a recent plow-through of Arrested Development in its entirety. (That, also, will get a post of its own.) We're on the lookout for other stuff to watch, so let us know what's good! (Elementary and Sleepy Hollow are no-go. We tried both, although I may give the latter another shot on my own. I'm a bit gunshy, though, as I have not had very good experiences with stuff from the minds of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.)

That's about it. I'm looking forward to the Neil DeGrasse Tyson revisit of Cosmos, and as always, there are a bunch of shows from yesteryear I need to either continue watching or start watching (Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, X-Files, Millennium). And you never know, I may hear enough interesting things about some new show to jump in at some point.

A writing update

A bit less than halfway through the book, I've cut over 10K words.... #editing #AmWriting, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I'm a little less than halfway through applying my red-ink markings to the PRINCESSES IN SPACE II manuscript, and as of last night's bedtime, I had struck over 10,000 words from the book. That's pretty sweet. I'm hoping to eliminate over 20K by book's end, and I may well get there, because -- I hate to admit this, but 'tis true -- the first draft has a lot of flab.

Sadly, I'm unlikely to make my goal of having the draft ready for beta-readers by the Super Bowl, but you never know.

As for other writing, I've shelved everything so I can get through this phase on Princesses II. This isn't really a bad thing, as I took a wrong turn at some point on Lighthouse Boy and need to backtrack yet again. I think I have the right direction in mind, though, so we'll see what happens when I get back to that one.

The next priority, in terms of the Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) series is to start working toward the book's self-publication, which I still hope to get done toward the end of this year. More updates will follow! 'Tis going to be a hell of a year, friends!

Sentential Links

Linkage time!

:: You know what would be cool? Placemats that had losing presidential candidates. (Yeah, because I wanna think about Michael Dukakis when I eat!)

:: For all its archness, for all its knowingness, for all its dark and sardonic and sarcastic humor, Sherlock can be an awfully sentimental show, because one of it’s themes is the beautifully diverse and often perverse ways love takes hold of us. (I cannot comment on Lance's post because I've seen the next two episodes and he has not....)

:: This is one of those stories that I hope are not true but I know that SOMEHOW those Russian numnuts found a way to contaminate a cruise ship with plague rats as some kind of Cold War experiment. (Yeah, we're all friggin' doomed.)

:: I have what I imagine is an annoying habit. Someone says something, and it often leads me to a song. Those references to music in my blogs are not an affectation, or looked up to be hip, it’s just THERE in my head. (Not unlike my ability to relate everything to a movie or teevee show or book quote!)

:: Every day, I will do something that scares me, at least a little, expanding my comfort zone one Fearless Act at a time. Some of these will be small and simple things that anyone can do. Others will be much more difficult. Big or small, I plan to share as many of them as possible with you. (Brand new blog, go check it out! I made contact with Brinna via Instagram and Twitter, along with a whole ton of other writers.)

:: At times like this, it's really hard to see the progress I've made or even tried to make. (SamuraiFrog continues to blog unflinchingly about his battles with anxiety. I'm in his corner.)

:: At this time last year I was out of my mind. And the worst part was that I didn’t know it. It was just another day in the life as far as I was concerned. (I'm also in Sheila's corner. I aspire to her model of uncompromising and personal writing.)

More next week!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Someone decided that the signage in the London Underground needed a bit of added weirdness.

:: If you like bad puns about fish, this Twitter exchange is for you.

:: Scared of heights? Don't watch this.

More next week!

Symphony Saturday

Beethoven's first two symphonies were fine works, well in line with the standards of the Classical era.

And then came the Third, the Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, subtitled the "Eroica".

This was one of those epochal works that pretty much signaled an entirely new way of doing business, a new way of looking at things, an upping of the ante that seemingly came out of nowhere. Here was a symphony more than twice as long as usual, whose first movement alone is as long as many "standard" symphonies. Here was a work that plumbed emotional depths rarely touched by any composer; here was music composed on an epic scale. The premiere of the Eroica has always been one of those events in music history I would like to attend, if anyone were to ever a musical time machine.

Beethoven was quite the idealist and humanist, and the famous story about the dedication of the Eroica is one of the great musical legends. He originally dedicated the symphony to none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, but then, upon learning that Napoleon had declared himself Emperor, an enraged Beethoven is said to have torn away the title page and renamed the work. This story is quite possibly apocryphal, or an enlargement of whatever did, in fact, happen. There is an autograph copy of the score with the original dedication to Napoleon scratched out, however.

The Eroica's epic scale is evident right from the very start, when Beethoven eschews all introductory material in favor of two huge E-flat major chords before immediately stating the melody (which also introduces a hint of chromaticism that was also unusual for the time period). That movement covers an enormous amount of ground, and is immediately followed by a slow movement that is not gentle or lyrical, but is rather a funeral march that is equally epic and vast in scope. The final two movements -- the scherzo and the theme-and-variations finale -- are also uncompromising and original.

Beethoven's Third has never been my favorite of his works, but its power and majesty cannot be denied. It's an amazing work that changed everything. Many musical historians date the beginning of Romanticism in music to this work, and it's hard to disagree with that assessment.

The performance video, by the way, is occasionally marred by a fault in the recording. Don't let this bother you. The performance is wonderful.

Instaweek

The week in pictures!

National Pie Day!

Today is National Pie Day, huzzah!

Sadly, this is also the day that the Captain and Tennille announced that they are divorcing, which I find quite a bummer. But I can tie that into National Pie Day, too:


Happy National Pie Day, folks!