I think it’s well worth it to check out George Orwell’s diaries. Apparently, he kept regular and complete diaries of the years between 1939-1942 and the George Orwell Foundation has them up in the form of daily blog posts. It’s really amazing how well they work as blog posts, full of nuggets of history, surprising whimsy, and as you will read, chicken eggs.
Category: Journal
'Meh'st Week Ever – Feb. 22, 2009
This week has been blissfully busy, so as life often goes, I spent far less time on the internet this week than usual. Some of these items will be from my secret stash of meh-fu.
1. Dimetri Martin’s 224 word palindrome.
2. Kitty, the transsexual Sicilian mobster.
This is Kitty. What you may not know is that Kitty was once Ugo Gabriele. Or that Kitty was a mafia ‘capo’ or godfather who masterminded a drug dealing and prostitution racket in Naples for the Scissionisti clan of the Camorra.
3. Audio illusions:
Listen to this with stereo headphones.
4. Michel Gondry’s favorite music videos.
All of these are worth checking out, but two of my favorites are:
*now that I write this, I can’t remember if those two are on the list, but it doesn’t really matter, both are super good.
5. Zadie Smith
For those of us who have not overdosed on Barack Obama, here‘s a really interesting article from Zadie Smith on Barack Obama’s voice.
For Obama, having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not solely a burden—it is also a gift. And the gift is of an interesting kind, not well served by that dull publishing-house title Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance with its suggestion of a simple linear inheritance, of paternal dreams and aspirations passed down to a son, and fulfilled. Dreams from My Father would have been a fine title for John McCain’s book Faith of My Fathers, which concerns exactly this kind of linear masculine inheritance, in his case from soldier to soldier. For Obama’s book, though, it’s wrong, lopsided. He corrects its misperception early on, in the first chapter, while discussing the failure of his parents’ relationship, characterized by their only son as the end of a dream. “Even as that spell was broken,” he writes, “and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.”
To occupy a dream, to exist in a dreamed space (conjured by both father and mother), is surely a quite different thing from simply inheriting a dream. It’s more interesting. What did Pauline Kael call Cary Grant? ” The Man from Dream City.” When Bristolian Archibald Leach became suave Cary Grant, the transformation happened in his voice, which he subjected to a strange, indefinable manipulation, resulting in that heavenly sui generis accent, neither west country nor posh, American nor English. It came from nowhere, he came from nowhere. Grant seemed the product of a collective dream, dreamed up by moviegoers in hard times, as it sometimes feels voters have dreamed up Obama in hard times. Both men have a strange reflective quality, typical of the self-created man—we see in them whatever we want to see. ” Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” said Cary Grant. ” Even I want to be Cary Grant.” It’s not hard to imagine Obama having that same thought, backstage at Grant Park, hearing his own name chanted by the hopeful multitude. Everyone wants to be Barack Obama. Even I want to be Barack Obama.
Chanticleer
On Friday night, I had the opportunity to listen to Chanticleer, the all male chorus based in San Fransisco. I was completely blown away by their technique, and the way that they were able to add so much beauty to their music. Also, I was constantly surprised by their technique. They label their singers soprano, alto, tenor and bass, and believe me, when they say “soprano” they mean soprano! For the first couple of numbers, I was trying to pick out who was singing in the countertenor range (the falsetto range that overlaps with high female voices) and I finally realized that at any time, almost all of them could sing in that range. On the other end of the spectrum, the low notes from the lone bass, Eric Alatorre, were so low that at one point they started rattling the acoustic panels behind the stage.
The program was a mixture of American music. There were some of the standard pieces that one might think would be a part of an all-American concert; some Stephen Foster, George Gershwin pieces, but augmented with some other genres that are not as often performed, such as Native American music and sacred songs from the California missions.
It was such an amazing concert that it becomes really hard to pick highlights. There was a set of songs by Samuel Barber with text by the Irish poet James Stephens that was truly lovely. In fact, it contained one of the most lovely moments of the concert, where, at the end of the song “Anthony O’Daly,” a song with a lot of dissonance and long ostinatos, the chorus broke into a massive lovely final chord, seemingly using all of the voices to fill every acoustical and harmonic space. As it was a part of a set, the audience could not applaud, and I could see several people physically restraining themselves from clapping. It was as if the room was debating whether to break concert decorum to recognize the moment.
Another highlight were two rather experimental pieces. The first was Brent Michael Davids’ “Night Chant,” a piece using both European harmony and Mohican chant. The piece was very interesting, and it seemed to straddle the line between tonal and melodic and too abstract for me to appreciate. The end came together nicely into something that I could understand, but I really need to listen to it again to know how I feel. The second was “Sleep My Child” by Eric Whitacre, a choral adaptation of an aria from his experimental techno/ambient opera Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings. I was tremendously excited by this piece; it seemed to sound like the music that I hope to compose myself. It blended some of the harmonic experiments that have been done in popular music with traditional harmony in a way that was neither cheap nor pretentious. It was my second favorite piece of the night.
My favorite, however, was Chanticleer’s rendition of Gershwin’s “Summertime” from the opera Porgy and Bess, featuring the lovely countertenor of Cortez Mitchell. At first, I was hit with a “There’s no way he can pull off an aria for an operatic soprano,” but I cannot express how beautiful that song was. I spent all of Saturday hunting for a recording, but none exists, and among existing recordings by women, few can match how beautiful that rendition was.
There were a couple of moments that I was meh about. Nothing was bad, however there were two sacred songs by Spanish priests from California that I really was not in the mood for. I am in my fifth week of an intensive course on Renaissance counterpoint. I have heard enough counterpoint to last me my entire life. So the eight part counterpoint of those mission songs kind of put my teeth on edge.
Also, they did one of my favoite songs ever, Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More.” But they performed it in a straight-ahead barbershopy style that I thought was a little bit disappointing considering the more complex alternate chordings that have now become the standard.
All told, one of my favorite concerts.
Lost Recap – "316"
Ok, this week has been really good for me. And it has been that rarest of Wednesday evenings; I am caught up on work and prepared for tomorrows class on Tuesday. Consequently, I can do this writeup.
Continue reading “Lost Recap – "316"”
'Meh'st Week Ever – February 15th, 2009
Sorry for the infrequent posting. I kind of fell off the wagon this last week in many respects, but at least this came with the benefit of completely killing my blog traffic! Thanks to anyone who keeps reading after the great post desert of ’09. Anyway, here’s what I found on the internet.
1. High School.
For politicians:
and celebrities:
2. The single most emo and simultaneously proto-yuppie website evar!
From their description:
This is a blog developed by two friends who thought they had it all. Yet, when alone, with the lights turned off, when everything was quiet- both felt a void.
These two friends wondered: “Is this it?” Both saw a world of conflict, of deteriorating personal relationships, and of youth lost in the rat race, in jobs they hated, sticking it out to buy ever fancier possessions.
Neither is an expert, but drawing from personal experience and research, both writers share their insight, and blog about the conflict and turmoil that they see as they go about their everyday lives; this in an attempt to create greater self-awareness and hopefully a little bit more joy in the world.
To conclude, a statement from the founders Harvard England & Taz Barron:
“We should all be so lucky as to recapture the joy and happiness we had as children, to once again find our smiles…“
Speaks for itself:
Today, I was volunteering at a nursing home and I was calling bingo numbers. And one woman stood up and started making noises, I asusmed she had won and I started clapping. She then fell on the floor and died of a heart attack. I essentially applauded her death. FML
hammer & jack 