The Fredösphere

Alex Ross believes that beings a thousand years hence will want to listen to Bach. Space.com believes beings a thousand light years hence will want the same. I agree. With both.

(Related: see more meditations on what they'll be thinking/doing in 1k years, plus detective Dirk Gently's discovery of the extra-terrestrial origin of Bach's inspiration.)

Labels: Culture, sci-fi, Spooky

This is way cool, and definitely a Fredösphere story: I'm already on record stating that Seraphic Fire is a way cool name for a professional choir. Better, two past or present members of the group (Paul Max Tipton and Sara Guttenberg) have Ann Arbor connections and have sung for me in past recording projects. Finally, I'm thrilled to see the Western Michigan University Chorale, and its director Patrick Dupre Quigley, get some big time recognition. They teamed up with Seraphic Fire to record Monteverdi's Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, and the recording went viral on iTunes. Bravo!

NPR has the story. Hat tip to ChoralNet, two different places.

Labels: Choral, local

Dontcha just luv the internet? It's impossible to get jaded about what it has to offer. Somebody did some phenomenal editing work and produced this amazing mashup of Michael Jackson's music and the Red Army's visuals. Enjoy.



Tip of the Red Starred cap to Geekosystem.

Labels: Marxists--I Hate These Guys, VideoClip

Back from vacation! We spent last week in Holland, Michigan, in a rental cottage near the beaches of Lake Michigan. I’ve blogged before on my love of Michigan’s west coast, so I won’t belabor that point. Suffice it to say we added Holland to the list of Michigan towns worthy of a return. It’s got beaches, dunes, and a quaint downtown.

We took a day trip up to Muskegon to frolick among the roller coasters of Michigan’s Adventure. In my boyhood, the great theme park to which people in my area pilgrimaged was Cedar Point, in northern Ohio. I’m very glad Michigan has its own adventure to rival the mighty Cedar Point. I much prefer the smaller, more intimate setting (an "intimate" theme park: ha!) with smaller roller coasters and, best of all, smaller crowds forming shorter queues for the rides.

I’ve been a roller coaster hater all my life, and as a kid always experienced Cedar Point visits with deep ambivalence. My misanthropic tendencies are stimulated by such places, although now in mellow middle age I’m much less offended by the sight of thousands of slovenly-attired thrill seekers passing docilely through livestock chutes. My son, Der Drübermensch, seems to be an apple falling not far from the tree. He also showed a dislike of roller coasters, and was somewhat irritable all day. Fortunately, we finally did find a water slide ride that we could all enjoy, and that gave us an upbeat ending to our day.

As we were leaving we stopped at a Dippin' Dots ice cream stand. The aural environment had been dominated all day by pop music, with a bias toward the most inane and nostalgic, but suddenly, to my great surprise, Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man blasted majestically (superfluity alert! Can FFTCM blast in any other way other than majestically? Okay, I guess it can) from the loudspeakers. A kind of retrograde ennobling of the entire day’s activities occurred in a flash. Our experiences with free fall and g-forces became heroic tests. Good for us.

Labels: Holiday, local

My all-time favorite genre of writing is Writing Advice, and David Mamet proves to be a master of the form. But then, he would.

Labels: Readers Are Leaders

More fun than Risk: cutting the US map into little pieces and reassembling it in new ways. I could link to lots of proposals, I guess, but today I'm mostly thinking of three: there's an analysis of the way populations are linked via Facebook that implies new ways to divide up the country into subregions (or soveriegn countries, if the ever-imminent crackup actually comes about) . . . and then there's the the many possible ways to knock California down to size and free various populations stifled by its politics (which are left, but to some, not left enough), with deeply nonserious names for the five new states that would result, like "Lotusland" and "Groovy", or divide California 3 ways, a suggestion that has a whole blog devoted to it . . . and how could I fail to mention the history of the proposed state of Superior, aka Ontonagon which would be constituted by lopping of the northern portions of Michigan, Wisconsin, and possibly Minnesota and clumping them into one, single, tidy, underpopulated and economically depressed state. Sounds like a winner.

Labels: local, Politics

My colleague (in the sense that we both contribute to the StarShipSofa podcast) Dr. Amy H. Sturgis is an expert on Tolkien, Lovecraft, and the historical roots of speculative fiction, and she loves to make lists of important works of dystopian fiction. (I guess there's something about the world going horribly that warms her heart.) Today, I noticed at her LiveJournal page a trailer for the movie adaptation of Never Let Me Go, the dreadfully sad, frustrating, and haunting tale by Kazuo Ishiguro. Here's the trailer:



I've discussed with Amy the meaning of some of the things hinted at in the book in the comments sections of both the link above and at her review of the book at Goodreads. The comments contain spoilerly material, so decide for yourself if you want to read them. Here I'll just say that the plot of NLMG involves children raised at a school-slash-orphanage who are destined for a special, not-very-nice destiny. They are kept strictly isolated from the rest of the world until they become adults, and their ignorance of the why and what of their existence is extreme. As the story is told first-person by a student at the school, the reader is ignorant too, and the fun of the story (what little fun there is to be had in this tragedy) is in solving the mystery from what clues are available. By the end of the story, the narrator's passivity in the face of a horrible injustice becomes maddening.

The trailer of the movie looks promising. But read the book first. Ishiguro is a prose master, and it's really cool that someone with impeccable lit credentials would write what is, fundamentally, a sci-fi novel.

Labels: Fiction, sci-fi, VideoClip