So I'm having lunch at Comet and reading The Onion, when I happen to look up at the TV, which was playing CNN. There's a crawl at the bottom saying something like PORN INDUSTRY WANTS ITS OWN BAILOUT.
You know that Philip K. Dick novel Time Out of Joint, where the main character Ragle Gumm finds objects disintegrating in front of him, replaced only by scraps of paper saying things like DESK and the like? (You know that Orson Scott Card - author of Ender's Game - and the folks who put together The Truman Show should be paying Dick's estate royalties...) This was a more high-tech version, where somehow the world of The Onion had escaped its textual confines and had virally infected the actual news.
That must be the answer. Because with more people unemployed with nothing else to do, how could the porn industry possibly be suffering?
(Next post will not mention The Onion - promise. Unless they pay me.)
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
1.08.2009
12.26.2008
year-end books-to-be-read list
I did this last year - and, astonishingly, have actually read all the books sitting in my queue from that date (I would have guessed...maybe not).
Here's what's upcoming for me on the bookshelf (in the random order they're shelved):
John Hodgman More Information Than You Require (gift)
Sean Wilentz & Greil Marcus The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad (gift)
Steven Pinker The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Robertson Davies World of Wonders
Jasper Fforde Thursday Next: First Among Sequels
I'm sure I'll find a few more as the new year rolls on...
Here's what's upcoming for me on the bookshelf (in the random order they're shelved):
John Hodgman More Information Than You Require (gift)
Sean Wilentz & Greil Marcus The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad (gift)
Steven Pinker The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Robertson Davies World of Wonders
Jasper Fforde Thursday Next: First Among Sequels
I'm sure I'll find a few more as the new year rolls on...
11.10.2008
from the ADS "Last Year's Films" files
I was amused to discover that Atonement won an Oscar for Best Original Score...because in viewing the film the other night, I thought the score was the main element that kept the film from being truly outstanding. (A few scenes somehow came across as more familiar on film than they had in the novel, and I really could have done without the enormous MESSAGE COMING IN! of Cecilia's posture in her watery death.) First of all, while scores are meant to underline a scene's emotions, this one often did so by a forceful triple set of slashes that no doubt broke the pencil's lead. A couple scenes in particular had me wishing there was a selective mute button (dialogue and diegetic sound only). And the composer's device of using the sound of a typewriter as percussion was only cute at first (if marred by being way too high in the mix) but quite clickly became cloying. We get it: writers and writing are a key part of the movie!
I guess Oscar voters must have thought that last bit very clever, and apparently approve of emotional hammering over the head. Too bad: the rest of the movie nicely compressed a novel to the smaller scope of a movie without losing its essence.
I guess Oscar voters must have thought that last bit very clever, and apparently approve of emotional hammering over the head. Too bad: the rest of the movie nicely compressed a novel to the smaller scope of a movie without losing its essence.
10.01.2008
not at all the same as "bartime pairs"
A few months back, one of the music-related e-mails in my inbox was from a songwriter I hadn't heard of named Bennett Samuel Lin. Lin is the main songwriter for a band called Bobtail Yearlings (whom I also had not heard of), but rather than promoting his band directly, in this case he was interested in feedback on a book he'd just published, called The Bobtail Method for Composing Unique Pop Melodies. (The Method is available both in book form and online as a free PDF file, at the band's website - painfully cute front page and all.) While Lin does have some formal musical training, his method doesn't seem to follow typical songwriting advice or approaches. His main idea is that chord sequences and melodies ought to be composed together, rather than either a melody being written separately (often come up with from the blue sky) and chords built around it, or a chord sequence being written, over which an impoverished, stereotypical melody is improvised.
To this end, Lin walks his readers through the way chords and melodies work and work together. His basic device he calls "the barline pair": "exactly what its name implies: two barlines, signifying a harmonic progression of three bars, with one chord per bar." And what he does with this simple, simplifying device is provide for the musician a sort of puzzle: he leaves the third bar unspecified. So we begin with a question: given these two chords and/or these two melodic lines (he walks us through the construction of both), what chord and melodic line makes musical sense in that third bar? There are, of course, numerous possibilities - but Lin begins by exploring the nature of melodies: their distribution of steps (half- or whole steps), skips (a third or fourth, sometimes), and leaps (generally a diminished fifth or greater), their "points of emphasis" deriving from their intervals, changes in register (any leap defines a change in register), and rhythmic characteristics.
In practice (and probably because to construct a book, you have to begin somewhere), Lin begins with chords, in that he constructs "barline pairs" for every possible sequence of two chords, which chords he's categorized in terms of their harmonic relation, from closest to furthest. Progressing through the book, the reader finds the chords, melodies, and rhythms increasing in complexity and moving away from the harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically obvious.
So how useful is all this? First, I'm probably not his ideal audience: I do have some musical training, enough that it's reasonable when I write songs to proceed more intuitively, confident that I can spot out both the over-obvious and the unduly recherché chordal or melodic sequence. Well, I'd like to think I can, anyway: point is, at first I found myself thinking that Lin's approach was maybe too formalistic, too intellectualized, and that sometimes one just needs to trust one's ears. But (and I think Lin would argue thus), where do one's ears learn what works? Much of the music we hear is, for better or worse, rather clichéd harmonically and, these days, impoverished melodically - so one's ears may well be a poor guide, prone to lead one down only the most worn, well-traveled, and predictable paths. The advantage of Lin's method for beginning musicians is that without being as arbitrary as, say, the twelve-tone school, he doesn't privilege particular chord sequences but shows readers how each one might be made to work reasonably well, in certain contexts. And I suspect that such methodological order might help such musicians get a handle on the unruly array of possibilities a keyboard or guitar presents to them.
I'm not sure about some of Lin's quirks: nearly all his examples (at least in the early part of the book) are in 6/8 time because, he says, this "is an optimal [meter] for creating an interesting melodic contour that feels neither too sparse nor too crowded [and which] ... provides greater flexibility for consolidating a fluid melodic pace when different barline pairs are assembled into a single musical work, which can then be converted to common time (four quarter notes per bar) all at once." Maybe...I'm not entirely persuaded. I was also concerned (as I said above) that the musical exercises that would result from "The Bobtail Method" would be logical but uncompelling musically (that is to say, emotionally). Some of them probably are...but then, they're intended as exercises and examples in some cases, while others are drawn from his own compositions. Fortunately, nearly twenty Bobtail Yearlings tracks are downloadable from the band's website, and they go some ways toward answering the question of how well Lin's ideas work in practice. My first impression is fairly positive: they generally begin from a folk-like texture, but their variety is broader than "folk-like" suggests, and while they are more diverse harmonically and melodically than most pop music, they're not egregiously or clumsily so. In practice, at least, Lin wears his theoretical approach lightly and gracefully. That cutesy splash page does characterize the music to an extent: if you're one of those people who requires a heavy dose of obvious angst and heaviness in your music, you'll probably be disappointed. (Me, I think being boringly dark all the time is easier than the opposite, yet somehow critically more accepted.) Also, banjo.
My only real criticisms of the book are both trivial: I wish the print version had been made available bound such that it could lie flat, to make it easier to rest on a music stand and play the examples. (Perhaps future editions, if they come to be, can be bound this way. You can always download and print the PDF version however you want, of course.) I also think it might have been helpful, when Lin demonstrates the effects of particular chord sequences, to have provided examples from well-known songs rather than just his own music. While copyright no doubt prevented him from reproducing the notes and chords of such songs, he could certainly mention them (as in the well-known mnemonic - a bit outdated but still effective - that to remember a melodic interval of a rising augmented fourth, think of the first two notes of Bernstein's "Maria" from West Side Story, say). This would allow readers to "hear" in their heads the effect of such chordal sequences even if they're away from an instrument, and it would also illustrate (in conjunction with the examples from Lin's own songs) that the same chord sequence can result in sometimes dramatically different effects, depending upon other musical components (which melody and rhythm are chosen with those chords, texture, etc.).
To this end, Lin walks his readers through the way chords and melodies work and work together. His basic device he calls "the barline pair": "exactly what its name implies: two barlines, signifying a harmonic progression of three bars, with one chord per bar." And what he does with this simple, simplifying device is provide for the musician a sort of puzzle: he leaves the third bar unspecified. So we begin with a question: given these two chords and/or these two melodic lines (he walks us through the construction of both), what chord and melodic line makes musical sense in that third bar? There are, of course, numerous possibilities - but Lin begins by exploring the nature of melodies: their distribution of steps (half- or whole steps), skips (a third or fourth, sometimes), and leaps (generally a diminished fifth or greater), their "points of emphasis" deriving from their intervals, changes in register (any leap defines a change in register), and rhythmic characteristics.
In practice (and probably because to construct a book, you have to begin somewhere), Lin begins with chords, in that he constructs "barline pairs" for every possible sequence of two chords, which chords he's categorized in terms of their harmonic relation, from closest to furthest. Progressing through the book, the reader finds the chords, melodies, and rhythms increasing in complexity and moving away from the harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically obvious.
So how useful is all this? First, I'm probably not his ideal audience: I do have some musical training, enough that it's reasonable when I write songs to proceed more intuitively, confident that I can spot out both the over-obvious and the unduly recherché chordal or melodic sequence. Well, I'd like to think I can, anyway: point is, at first I found myself thinking that Lin's approach was maybe too formalistic, too intellectualized, and that sometimes one just needs to trust one's ears. But (and I think Lin would argue thus), where do one's ears learn what works? Much of the music we hear is, for better or worse, rather clichéd harmonically and, these days, impoverished melodically - so one's ears may well be a poor guide, prone to lead one down only the most worn, well-traveled, and predictable paths. The advantage of Lin's method for beginning musicians is that without being as arbitrary as, say, the twelve-tone school, he doesn't privilege particular chord sequences but shows readers how each one might be made to work reasonably well, in certain contexts. And I suspect that such methodological order might help such musicians get a handle on the unruly array of possibilities a keyboard or guitar presents to them.
I'm not sure about some of Lin's quirks: nearly all his examples (at least in the early part of the book) are in 6/8 time because, he says, this "is an optimal [meter] for creating an interesting melodic contour that feels neither too sparse nor too crowded [and which] ... provides greater flexibility for consolidating a fluid melodic pace when different barline pairs are assembled into a single musical work, which can then be converted to common time (four quarter notes per bar) all at once." Maybe...I'm not entirely persuaded. I was also concerned (as I said above) that the musical exercises that would result from "The Bobtail Method" would be logical but uncompelling musically (that is to say, emotionally). Some of them probably are...but then, they're intended as exercises and examples in some cases, while others are drawn from his own compositions. Fortunately, nearly twenty Bobtail Yearlings tracks are downloadable from the band's website, and they go some ways toward answering the question of how well Lin's ideas work in practice. My first impression is fairly positive: they generally begin from a folk-like texture, but their variety is broader than "folk-like" suggests, and while they are more diverse harmonically and melodically than most pop music, they're not egregiously or clumsily so. In practice, at least, Lin wears his theoretical approach lightly and gracefully. That cutesy splash page does characterize the music to an extent: if you're one of those people who requires a heavy dose of obvious angst and heaviness in your music, you'll probably be disappointed. (Me, I think being boringly dark all the time is easier than the opposite, yet somehow critically more accepted.) Also, banjo.
My only real criticisms of the book are both trivial: I wish the print version had been made available bound such that it could lie flat, to make it easier to rest on a music stand and play the examples. (Perhaps future editions, if they come to be, can be bound this way. You can always download and print the PDF version however you want, of course.) I also think it might have been helpful, when Lin demonstrates the effects of particular chord sequences, to have provided examples from well-known songs rather than just his own music. While copyright no doubt prevented him from reproducing the notes and chords of such songs, he could certainly mention them (as in the well-known mnemonic - a bit outdated but still effective - that to remember a melodic interval of a rising augmented fourth, think of the first two notes of Bernstein's "Maria" from West Side Story, say). This would allow readers to "hear" in their heads the effect of such chordal sequences even if they're away from an instrument, and it would also illustrate (in conjunction with the examples from Lin's own songs) that the same chord sequence can result in sometimes dramatically different effects, depending upon other musical components (which melody and rhythm are chosen with those chords, texture, etc.).
8.17.2008
most...boring...cover...evar
A few weeks back, I picked up a free paperback copy of a P.D. James mystery via the UWM English Department's informal book exchange. I didn't really pay much attention to the cover of the book (despite my belief that "don't judge a book by its cover" is a ridiculous aphorism, at least taken literally), but it's a good thing I wasn't relying upon the designers' marketing skills to sell me a copy, because this has to be the lamest, most generic cover design I've ever seen:
The typography for the author and title are generic but serviceable...but there's something about the placement of the promotional quote and "also-by" tag that irritates...maybe because all the text is centered? And I don't like the "Queen of Crime" tag in the red band - I don't like the spread-out letter spacing, nor the needless quotation marks, nor the fact that the asterisk indicating the source of the quote is crammed up against the closing quotation mark, defying the spacing of the rest of the text in that red band.
The perspective of the space is just bizarre - either that, or someone hired a German Expressionist carpenter to do the fenestration for the room. We have a generic-looking woman in a minimally-defined room, with what look to be some papers or envelopes and a glass on the edge of the frame. Outside the open window, a man in dark clothing is walking. This only barely even suggests the notion of "mystery" - it would perhaps be more effective if the man were looking toward the woman, but no - he's apparently caught in the midst of merely passing by her window, and given that the trimming of the foliage in the background implies that there's a path of sorts he's walking on, he can't even be accused of sneaking or lurking. The woman can't be placed in any clear relation to the papers: are they on a desk? Is she seated, looking off to the side of them? Or is she standing, in the foreground, looking just to our right? And that perspective plays havoc with scale, as well: the room appears to be sunken in relation to the path outside the window, unless the woman is seated and we're intended to be a dwarf standing nearby.
The quality of the drawing is pretty weak as well: I think they were going for a sort of stylized, clean-lined pulp-fiction look, but instead everyone looks carved from wood, particularly our black-clad, hatted gentleman - who, now that I look more closely, might be just a cardboard cutout, like those promotional statues of Jar-Jar Binks used to sell Star Wars novelizations that were usefully non- flame-retardant (not that I'd actually know that and the statute of limitations has expired anyway).
The typography for the author and title are generic but serviceable...but there's something about the placement of the promotional quote and "also-by" tag that irritates...maybe because all the text is centered? And I don't like the "Queen of Crime" tag in the red band - I don't like the spread-out letter spacing, nor the needless quotation marks, nor the fact that the asterisk indicating the source of the quote is crammed up against the closing quotation mark, defying the spacing of the rest of the text in that red band.
The perspective of the space is just bizarre - either that, or someone hired a German Expressionist carpenter to do the fenestration for the room. We have a generic-looking woman in a minimally-defined room, with what look to be some papers or envelopes and a glass on the edge of the frame. Outside the open window, a man in dark clothing is walking. This only barely even suggests the notion of "mystery" - it would perhaps be more effective if the man were looking toward the woman, but no - he's apparently caught in the midst of merely passing by her window, and given that the trimming of the foliage in the background implies that there's a path of sorts he's walking on, he can't even be accused of sneaking or lurking. The woman can't be placed in any clear relation to the papers: are they on a desk? Is she seated, looking off to the side of them? Or is she standing, in the foreground, looking just to our right? And that perspective plays havoc with scale, as well: the room appears to be sunken in relation to the path outside the window, unless the woman is seated and we're intended to be a dwarf standing nearby.
The quality of the drawing is pretty weak as well: I think they were going for a sort of stylized, clean-lined pulp-fiction look, but instead everyone looks carved from wood, particularly our black-clad, hatted gentleman - who, now that I look more closely, might be just a cardboard cutout, like those promotional statues of Jar-Jar Binks used to sell Star Wars novelizations that were usefully non- flame-retardant (not that I'd actually know that and the statute of limitations has expired anyway).
7.28.2008
show me the monkey!
A curious phenomenon - which inspired a book a few years back - is the number of well-known women - Jane Goodall, Birute Galdikas, Laura Bush, and Dian Fossey, to name four - famous for living with and studying various primates.
7.15.2008
which demon incapacitates fact-checkers?
I picked up a used copy of an amusing little book called The Psychology of Joss Whedon, which looks at psychological themes as played out in Whedon's TV series and the film Serenity. Nothing earth-shattering - not that I expected it - but you'd think a book clearly catering to rampant geeks would recognize the need for scrupulous fact-checking...a need the publisher amusingly falls short on twice within a single page.
In an article called "Existentialism Meets Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (the book occasionally seems to confuse philosophical questions with psychological ones...), authors C. Albert Bardi and Sherry Hamby rather trivially misidentify whose song Giles sings at the open mic club (it's "Behind Blue Eyes" by the Who, of course - they think it's a song by Eric Clapton) and then, rather amusingly, confuse the mad Renfield in Bram Stoker's Dracula with the former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist: "Every Dracula needs a Rehnquist..." they write.
Actually, I think a sitcom featuring Dracula and Justice Rehnquist would be kind of a blast: both were, after all, rather fashion-conscious, what with the Gilbert & Sullivan -inspired stripes Rehnquist infamously sewed to his judicial robes.
In an article called "Existentialism Meets Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (the book occasionally seems to confuse philosophical questions with psychological ones...), authors C. Albert Bardi and Sherry Hamby rather trivially misidentify whose song Giles sings at the open mic club (it's "Behind Blue Eyes" by the Who, of course - they think it's a song by Eric Clapton) and then, rather amusingly, confuse the mad Renfield in Bram Stoker's Dracula with the former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist: "Every Dracula needs a Rehnquist..." they write.
Actually, I think a sitcom featuring Dracula and Justice Rehnquist would be kind of a blast: both were, after all, rather fashion-conscious, what with the Gilbert & Sullivan -inspired stripes Rehnquist infamously sewed to his judicial robes.
4.14.2008
inevitably...
It's finally come to pass: David Thomas, guru of long-standing Cleveland-based "avant-garage" rock band Pere Ubu, is playing the namesake of his band in an adaptation of Alfred Jarry's landmark absurdist play Ubu Roi. Brilliant photo at the link.
12.30.2007
the no-time-for shelf
I'm pathetic at finishing books. Not that I abandon them - I'm fairly compulsive about finishing books once I've started them - more that I don't have time to read them. (Perhaps I type too much...) So I thought I'd make a little list of the books in my to-be-read pile - and for amusement, maybe look back at this a year from now to see how many I've actually managed to read. They're in the order they're sitting there...which is basically order of acquisition.
Robertson Davies Fifth Business (informal workplace book exchange)
P.D. James An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (English dept. free book area)
Anne McCaffrey The Ship Who Sang (English dept. free book area)
Daniel Handler Adverbs (purchased new)
Colson Whitehead Apex Hides the Hurt (purchased new)
China Miéville Iron Council (purchased new)
Susanna Clarke The Ladies of Grace Adieu (purchased new)
Douglas Hofstadter I Am a Strange Loop (purchased new)
A.M. Homes This Book Will Save Your Life (informal workplace book exchange)
Sherry Turkle Evocative Objects (English dept. free book area)
LD Beghtol 69 Love Songs - 33 1/3 (purchased new)
Franklin Bruno Armed Forces - 33 1/3 (purchased new)
Ben Sisario Doolittle - 33 1/3 (purchased new)
Don DeLillo Falling Man (gift)
Philip K. Dick Voices from the Street (gift)
Robertson Davies Fifth Business (informal workplace book exchange)
P.D. James An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (English dept. free book area)
Anne McCaffrey The Ship Who Sang (English dept. free book area)
Daniel Handler Adverbs (purchased new)
Colson Whitehead Apex Hides the Hurt (purchased new)
China Miéville Iron Council (purchased new)
Susanna Clarke The Ladies of Grace Adieu (purchased new)
Douglas Hofstadter I Am a Strange Loop (purchased new)
A.M. Homes This Book Will Save Your Life (informal workplace book exchange)
Sherry Turkle Evocative Objects (English dept. free book area)
LD Beghtol 69 Love Songs - 33 1/3 (purchased new)
Franklin Bruno Armed Forces - 33 1/3 (purchased new)
Ben Sisario Doolittle - 33 1/3 (purchased new)
Don DeLillo Falling Man (gift)
Philip K. Dick Voices from the Street (gift)
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