The Fredösphere

I have faint memories of the very first stereo my parents bought, back sometime in the 1960s. It was second-hand, but we were mightily impressed by this exotic purchase, not just because it had two (count 'em: two!) speakers, but especially because of the collection of vinyl LPs that came free with it. These records boasted their "Stereo" status, sometimes upgraded to "Stereophonic", "Living Stereo" or even "Super Stereo", and defined a musical taste far, far, far removed from that of my famiy. They gave me a peephole (I believe "peep" is the best word here) into a world I knew little of.

There was the soundtrack to Goldfinger (my sister declared it to be a "dirty" movie and then foolishly pointed out the half-naked girl on the back cover, which I had not, until then, even noticed) and one of the Firestone Christmas albums (James Lileks has that topic covered, exhaustively) and a album from the Cha-Cha-Cha craze (not this one exactly, but it gives you the idea) and the Woody the Woodchuck Christmas Album (and you thought Alvin and the Chipmunks were un-knock-off-able!). But by far, the album that made a lasting impression on my was Dave Dudley: Truck Drivin' Son of a Gun.

Here's Dudley performing the song live. Note how his height, large head, and talent overwhelms the announcer. Dudley is all blue-collar simplicity in his presentation; he doesn't quite know what to do during the musical interludes and the camera mercifully cuts away from his silly bouncing around, but when it comes to the drama of the line "but not her figure!" (transliterated, "figger") his timing and control of his eyes are perfect. He works the song in an understated way, refusing to coast on the prodigious talent of his vocal instrument. The song itself seems to revel in its vulgarity, daring us to disapprove. Enjoy.



Finally, let me commend to your attention the blog Schadenfreudian Therapy, an excellent source for cover art and commentary of the popular music albums of the 1960s.

Labels: Culture, Memory Lane, VideoClip, vocal

Michael Potemra celebrates the documentary Rejoice and Shout and the song "Oh, Happy Day":

Labels: Choral, Culture

Let's have a contest, shall we? Let's vote on what is history's greatest single act of vulgarity.

My nominee is the Palace of the Soviets. This building was intended to be the tallest building in the world, and largest by volume, with a primary auditorium to seat 15,000 (a secondary auditorium would have been cramped by comparison, with room for only 6,000; one wonders what the capacity of the phone booths would have been). The design called for a statue of Lenin to stand on its top, a statue three times larger than the Statue of Liberty, with an index finger 20 feet long.

This video gets to the Palace of the Soviets at the end; in the meantime, we're treated to an amusing, yet melancholy, pipe dream of Moscow as the new Rome (they don't call it the Third Rome for nothing):



Construction work on the Palace began in the 1930s but was interrupted by World War II, and it never came even close to completion. The excavation hole was converted into an indoor public pool for a time. In the 1990s, Moscow mayor Yuriy Luzhkov oversaw the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer on that site, which had been demolished in 1931 in the most visible repudiation of the past by the Soviet government.

I think that extended index finger, pointing the way to the glorious socialist future, that puts my nominee over the top. The shear hugeness of the thing would test the good taste of even the finest architect, but the statue with the extended finger—well, what can I say? Nothing says totalitarian kitsch like a giant statue of a bloodthirsty dictator making a bold, impatient gesture with his hand.

(And what is it with giant statues that brings out the urge to make ethnically inappropriate pointing gestures?)

Russian monumentalism is not inherently doomed. The Mamayev Monument, was the tallest statue in the world at the time of its completion. The expression of horror on the statue's face is extreme, and risky for so public a work of art (especially considering this was the USSR) and its builders deserve praise for the risk they took.

Labels: Architecture, BigDumbObject, Marxists--I Hate These Guys

I'm enjoying the title song from Ghost In the Shell: Innocence, featuring traditional Min'yo singers in Western-style triadic harmony:



Note the use of Autotune or other pitch manipulation. This, my friends, is how Autotune should be used. The weird, straight tones of the singers works with the pitch-bending for a completely novel effect. Novel, and beautiful, in my opinion. In fact, the effect mirrors in a more precise way the trills of the traditional music. Ancient becomes futuristic.

In the movie, a "ghost" refers to a person's consciousness, which can be transferred between bodies and computers. (I hope that's a fair description.) An odd choice in the visual design puts the human figures in pastels, upon a background of saturated colors. I think it means: we're all ghosts.

The soundtrack composer is Kenji Kawai. According to the movie's Wikipedia page:

The characteristic minyoh singers chorus, heard in the Chants of the first movie, and in the Ballade of Puppets in this one, was expanded to include 75 performers, which proved challenging to record. The session lasted for 14 straight hours.

As a bonus, here's a min'yo band (a min'yo com'bo???) singing their traditional music:

Labels: Composer, movie, Spooky, VideoClip

My good friend, the speculative fiction author Matthew Sanborn Smith, recently heaped some fawning attention on my song "Earth Girl" and featured it on his micro-podcast called Beware the Hairy Mango. Sample Matt and his psycho machine gun humor in Episode 67: Frog Magnet.

I also urge you to read his story recently published in Nature, called Steve Sepp, Tasty! Tasty! which begins with:

We didn't eat Steve on a Tuesday, which I think was one of the things that made him special

. . .which is quintessential MSS. Bon appetit!

Labels: Earth Girl, LovableOddballs, Podcast

First, I should stipulate that I subscribe to the 99% Invisible podcast, and enjoy it a lot.

A recent episode looked at phone app called RJDJ that produces "reactive music". It's part of a movement toward augmented reality: based on your location, the sounds in your environment it hears, and even the speed at which you are moving, it chooses sounds and music loops and composes them into a soundtrack to accompany your life. They call it augmented reality; I call it processed silence.

Now, there's no way I'm going to fall into the curmudgeon's trap of declaring some experiment as non-art, according to some constantly patched up definition of art. I'm not going to pull a Roger Ebert here. So, let me stipulate that I think this is a cool idea, and—yes—I'm very happy to live in a world where we have freedom to experiment, try things, blah blah blah. The truth is, I've encountered many attempts to create computer-generated music, and they always fall flat for me.

The atmospheric, minimalistic music that is inevitably produced by these experiments (with pentatonic scales as a frequent crutch) are profoundly shallow in exactly those attributes that I most listen for in music. I want progress: I want chord progressions, I want a romantic arc, a beginning, a middle, and end; I want music written by some man with a plan, some guy (or gal, naturally) who's going places and knows how to get there. My creed: Music Is A Destination, not some post-processed, algorithm-generated, multi-layered airbrushed / autotuned / de-essed Journey.

Whew!

Finally, let me stipulate that Roman Mars (producer of 99 % Invisible) has one of the coolest names in podcasting.

Labels: Composition, Culture, Podcast

My first impulse was to start this post with the phrase, "my lifelong love affair with Tintin", but I think I'll rephrase that to avoid any confusion.

As a lifelong fan of the bande dessinée called Tintin (there—much better), and as the designated reviewer of graphic novels for the SF podcast StarShipSofa, I was thrilled to hear rumors of serious Spielbergian consideration the Belgian strip as the basis of cinematic treatment. As more news confirmed these rumors, I got only happier.

By the whiskers of Kurvi-Tasch! Today, a French co-worker of mine has alerted me to the release of a Tintin trailer on Youtube:



Interesting. . .but we only get a glimpse of the CG Tintin at the very end, and what we see is not promising. No wonder Tintin is so shy; were I that ugly, I'd be shy too. [Insert insulting retort here.]

Perhaps he'll get a makeover before the final version of the movie gets made. Unlike human actors, CG characters can (presumably) undergo major cosmetic surgery during production. I remain guardedly hopeful. It is Spielberg, after all: he'll give it his trademark patina of plasticized perfection, won't he?

UPDATE: CB Droege at TGDaily.com speculates on the contrast between Tintin's cartoonish face and the near-photorealism of the rest of the movie—that it may be deliberate. An odd choice, I think, but perhaps it is an homage to Tintin author Hergé's drawing philosophy, called ligne claire.

Labels: Comix, GraphicNovel, movie, VideoClip