The Fredösphere

Yesterday around supper time my good friend Thad phoned me, sounding exhausted and desperate. It seemed he and his family were stuck in the family van somewhere south of the Maryland/Pennsylvania border in a huge parking lot commonly referred to as Interstate 70.  He had been essentially motionless for an hour and wanted any information I could find on the internet about the extent of the traffic jam he was in.

This I was happy to do, happy, that is, until I found that neither Triple-A nor the official government websites of Pennsylvania or Maryland had any current traffic information. They had websites that described themselves as traffic information sites--but which were empty. They also contained links to other, equally worthless, non-governmental traffic-monitoring websites.  In those cases, the links came with amusing warnings that the government could not be responsible blah blah blah and that the user was at risk blah blah blah and that you might go blind blah blah blah. Sheesh, so stupid, so. . .so. . .nineties.

Then suddenly a little light went off in my mind, and I went over to Google maps and turned on the Traffic option. Immediately the highways were color-coded with the information I needed. I called Thad back and told him to expect traffic to clear up right around the state line. He said he had just done that and he confirmed the accuracy of Google's information. Apparently Google has taken over this function on the internet completely, and I am among the last to find out.

In any event, Thad took a moment on the phone to tell me his whole family was enjoying listening to They're Made Out of Meat, my new science-fiction jazz chamber opera I told you about a while back. He said his youngest daughter, who is the Maharincess' best friend, is the biggest fan of them all. (Oooh, good, I can market this thing to children, the most gullible demographic there is!) They all love the part that says, "They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

Thad told me, "it's not only entertaining, it's also philosophically interesting," and immediately I sensed I was witnessing the birthing of a blurb.  With Thad's permission, here it is:

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT. Text by Terry Bisson, Music by the Fredösphere
"Not only entertaining, it's also philosophically interesting."  -Fred's friend Thad

No, not quite right.  Let's try this:

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT. Text by Terry Bisson, Music by the Fredösphere
"Not only entertaining, it's also philosophically interesting."  -Dr. Thaddeus Polk, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan, and Co-Editor of Cognitive Modeling

Muuuuuch better.  They're Made Out of Meat, the opera, is on sale at iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, eMusic, and Amazon, where you can get it for a lousy 89 cents.  C'mon, people: get your clicky finger busy and buy the dang thang!

Labels: They're Made Out Of Meat

All evidence indicates (Untitled) is not currently showing in any theater in the Ann Arbor area. (Perhaps the Michigan Theater, our local art house, will get to it eventually.) That's sad because the film promises to be the best thing since my beloved Art School Confidential, a film the review of which I would link to had I ever bothered to write such a thing. (I'm shocked to discover its absence from the Fredösphere.)

(Untitled) must be great; it has inspired so much brilliant writing about it. First there's this from Eve Tushnet:

I get that art can go beyond beauty; I just want it to go beyond beauty into sublimity. [Emphasis Eve's.]

. . .and also this:

[W]hy some media and not others? Why are painting and "orchestral" or non-pop music so incredibly conflicted and self-doubting, so willing to accept narratives about the death or dearth of meaning... while novelists continue to churn out adultery stories, and movies continue to do more or less everything, and even comics seem to be recovering from a late-'90s period in which they were swallowed up into the maelstrom of their own navel? Seriously... if the Weakerthans are doing something new-enough; if The Wire did something new enough; where does anyone get off saying that painters, sculptors, and non-pop musicians have exhausted the possibilities of meaning?

Can we all agree now that the expression "tempest in a teapot" has been made obsolete by Eve's genius, and that "maelstrom in a navel" is its replacement?

Then there's Roger Ebert:

It's easy to take cheap shots at conceptual art. (Untitled) doesn't do that. It takes expensive shots.

Then he goes on to admire the remarkable quality of the art made up for the movie (mostly visual and musical), describing it as plausible. Eve agrees, saying the movie avoids the lazy perspective of someone who says "my kindergartener could do that." Oooh, these are good signs. If nothing else, I'm sure my local library will get the DVD eventually, so I'm sure to see it. I can't wait.

Labels: Artsy Fartsy, movie

An alarm went off in my head when I read the following story by my two kids. The Maharincess (now 8) started it off, then gave her brother (Der Drübermensch, 10) permission to add something of his own. Here's the first few sentences of the story. Figuring out where the girl leaves off and the boy picks up is left as an exercise for the reader:

Once there was a princess in a castle. Her name was Lexi. She was 15. Her favorite toy was Pollys. Lexi's best friend was Snowy, her cat. she wished she had a friend, a real friend. She was never happy aways sad.

One day Lexi fond a friend, her name was Nancy she was so nice Lexi asked if Nancy could have a sleepover at there castle. Her mother said "yes."

When Nancy came in she gasped and said "you live in a castle!"

"Yes." said Lexi. "I'm a princess."

They had a great tea party with apple tea. In bed they told secrets. The next morning Nancy had to leave.

Lexi played with her cat and Pollys for the rest of the day.

The next day Nancy and Lexi saw this really cute boy. His name was Jacob. Then Lexi ran home to rite a letter to him. It said, "dear Jacob, I just fell in love with you. I'm a princess. I will ride my bike on Saturday you will to. Love Lexi."

So, on Saturday, Jacob told Lexi a secret. He was a member of Team Dogatron, and was on a special mission. He needed to find the Lost Sapphire that was under the ocean before the evil Team Catomatic found it. He asked her to come with her. Then Snowy started talking, which was a surprise since Snowy had never talked before. He said that he used to be a member of Team Catomatic, but when he heard that they were evil, he secretly quit, and Team Catomatic had been looking for him.

The alarm in my head was the feeling I had seen this somewhere before. In a moment, I remembered: it was a materpiece called The Writing Assignment, ostensibly the work of two students in a college writing class, working tag-team style, so that the woman writes the odd-numbered paragraphs and the man writes the even-numbered ones. It begins like this:

At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question.

Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.

. . .and after that, it only gets better and better. Go thither and read it now!

Labels: Creativity, Fiction, fun

Forrest Covington has returned to the blogosphere. Rejoice.

Labels: Composer

This latest in a long line of denunciations of Le Corbusier, written by my favorite atheistic pessimist, Theodore Dalrymple, is a little too heavy on assertion, I agree. If you already have an opinion of Le Corbu's buildings, words like "monstrous" and "ugly" won't change it. I did find one fresh insight, however, and it's the kind that seems obvious in retrospect—which is to say, it's the best kind:

When one recalls Le Corbusier's remark about reinforced concrete—"my reliable, friendly concrete"—one wonders if he might have been suffering from a degree of Asperger's syndrome: that he knew that people talked, walked, slept, and ate, but had no idea that anything went on in their heads, or what it might be, and consequently treated them as if they were mere things. Also, people with Asperger's syndrome often have an obsession with some ordinary object or substance: reinforced concrete, say.

Of course. The narrow focus, the weirdly selective intelligence, and above all, the yawning ignorance of his fellow human beings. Asperger's. No question.

Labels: Architecture

This brief post is not about weird religions per se, although that is certainly a principal theme here at the Fredösphere. It's about a story found on Slashdot about an Australian senator denouncing Scientologists. Great fun and all, for those of a particular psychological type. (I belong to said type, and I blame my unhealthy interest in other people's kooky beliefs on the R6 Implant.)

No, I link to this story because the name of the Senator in question is Nick Xenophon. Xenophon! Isn't that just perfect? He sounds like he's a space alien who first visited this planet 75 million years ago. Xenophon! I still can't get over it.

Labels: LovableOddballs, Religion

Via Philip Copeland at ChoralNet, I present Rajaton, a fab six from Norway:



The group's English-version website says "Rajaton" is Finnish for "boundless" but I think it must be American for "wonderfully precise vocal ensemble singing." Here's there tune "Butterfly," with velvety-soft pop vocals:

Labels: Choral, VideoClip

Mahler's 6th Symphony caught my attention a while back when Alex Ross mentioned the big box constructed especially for the Redwood Symphony, to be used in the symphony's final movement.  Something in Alex's description moved me, especially when he wrote "to produce the famous hammer blows in Mahler's Sixth, the orchestra deployed a large wooden box that matched Mahler's original specifications."

Oooh, that got the latent speculative fiction author in me thinking.  The resulting story is still gestating and will continue to do so for a while, as fiction writing is my third-ranked hobby (after composing and bread baking) but I may finish the thing eventually.  Meanwhile I am loathe to give away all the details, but I'll mention that the story will feature a black hole, a skeleton orchestra sawing away on their violins with femurs--or something--and will definitively explain why Mahler was never comfortable with that last thud at the end of the fourth movement.

The thud whereof I speak is one of three (later revised to two) thuds Mahler specified in his score.  He did not, however, specify the means, asking only that the sound be loud but dull, and non-metallic, "like the stroke of an ax."  They were meant to be three blows that fate delivers on the heroic protagonist of the symphony.  Alma Mahler famously described these blows as prophetically depicting Gustav's own coming disasters:  the death of his daughter; his forced resignation from the Vienna opera; and the diagnosis of his (eventually fatal) heart condition.  (Keep in mind that, for whatever reason, almost anything Alma has said about Gustav and his music is generally treated as dubious.  And one critic has pointed out her oversight in mentioning another hammer blow of fate: her own infidelity.) Various orchestras have devised ingenious devices--usually big wooden boxes or giant bass drums--of varying thuddiness in an attempt to carry out the composer's wishes.  Mahler himself was doomed to frustration with his thudders, never finding a satisfying instrument.

For more information on Mahler's 6th and its tripartite thuddiness, do listen to Benjamin Zander's superb analysis of the four movements, and his decision to restore the 3rd thud in the recording he made with the Boston Phil.  (The mp3s are available at the link; I'm told the files of the symphony itself are low-res, but those of the discussion disc are crystal clear, and feature the most awesome, phattest thuds imaginable.)  Meanwhile, Ionarts has a good comparison of the various recordings of No. 6.  I've enjoyed Iván Fischer's Budapest recording, even though he chooses Mahler's second (and final, apparently) thoughts on both the thud numbering (only two) and the ordering of the middle movements (Andante, then Scherzo).  I lean heavily toward Mahler's original concept, although I'm hardly ready to call myself an expert on the work.  (I can say I also bought Lenny Bernstein's reading as a bargain from Amazon, but the recording seems veiled; perhaps a failing of the original engineers, or a mistake in conversion to a compressed file format.)

Finally, let me leave you with a quote from David Hurwitz, writing in The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner's Manual: "There has been more nonsense written about this symphony [no. 6] than any other work by Mahler."  As I sketch the outline of my story, to be titled Mahler's Box, I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to this opportunity to contribute yet more nonsense to the pile.

Labels: Composer, Fiction, Spooky

Oooh, boy, it is such a relief to enter the post-Obamamania era and live in a time of sane expectations. That's not the only reason to watch V, the new SF series on ABC TV, but for some of us, it will be enough.

Not that the show indulges in fanaticism of the opposite kind. It's current event scorecard shows equal digs at both Bushism and Obamamania. What makes this show special is its unambiguous digs at topics previously held sacrosanct by Hollywood. Namely, the Visitors (that's "V" for short; the suave aliens who hide their lizard hides underneath beautiful human skin and who lust after our resource-rich planet) seduce us earthlings with promises of universal health care.

It's a shocking moment when you hear those words, universal health care. It's also a failure of taste—I would prefer a more creative, less partisan examination of the totalitarian temptation—but, wow. I didn't think they had it in them. It's actually okay now for a big-four network TV script to prick the Obama balloon. What a relief. What timing.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Is V worth watching?

I would say it is, although the pilot's story line was terribly rushed. Why did they want to propel us past the opening moments of First Contact (so rich in drama) and move us to conventional TV crime/spy drama plotting? This seems such a 80s way to approach a TV series. Modern audiences (many of whom will watch at their own pace via DVR or DVD) can tolerate long plot arcs that span many episodes. Some of us actually do more than tolerate long plot arcs; we prefer them.

V's plot pacing bodes ill for the series, and its status as a remake left little room for surprises for me or anyone who has paid even a little attention to the history of the SF genre. Nevertheless, the performances are uniformly strong and the lizards look great in their satiny gray power suits. In particular, I liked the icy calm and unapproachable perfection of Morena Baccarin, who is very convincing as the perfect alien headmistress. (That wasn't true in Serenity where she was supposed to be the most attractive woman in the room but was outshown by the Ivory girl appeal of Jewel Staite and the exotic spookiness of Summer Glau.) After recently watching, and being turned off by, Mad Men, I find V's lack of edgy cynicism as a relief. I'll be watch more V and I urge you to do likewise.

Labels: sci-fi, TeeVee