Month: March 2003

Weekend with friends

We saw Shel, Vik and Kris off a few hours ago. We spent today at Stevens Pass. The snow was granular to icy, but still plenty ski-able, if you don’t mind the occasional slip. Lisa and I chickened out: no snowboards for us. Instead we spent the day on blue runs until we accidentally strayed onto a black diamond that wasn’t clearly posted. After that it was back to the bunny slopes to hang out with our friends (and continue to be thankful we were still alive).

Incipit lamentationem

Early spring is also Lent. For years I celebrated Lent, and especially Holy Week, with the Suspicious Cheese Lords. We would provide music for a Tenebrae service at a church—including, over the years, the Church of the Epiphany, St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and the Franciscan Monastery—generally the Tallis Lamentations. We would also host a Tenebrae service at the Georgetown University chapel.

What great music. Over the years, we debuted members’ original compositions, sang Allegri’s Miserere, Byrd’s “Ave Verum Corpus,” Pärt’s “De profundis” (my directorial debut), and dozens of other works, including my introduction to Gregorian chant.

This year, with Mæstro di Capella under their belts, the group is branching into radio gigs, including a live performance on XM radio a week ago and a coming episode of Millennium of Music. Should be good listening. I wish I could be there to sing.

Turning to spring

It was sunny and pleasantly cool as I drove in this morning after a couple days of hard rain. I had the sunroof open. The ornamental cherry trees in the parking lot outside my building are in full bloom. It must be approaching springtime.

Naturally, we’re going skiing this weekend. This time we’ll stay local, but we’re going with Shel, her fiancé Vik, and her sister Kris. They’ve threatened to take us snowboarding. Should be fun.

Gibson on the ending of Neuromancer

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone explain the end of Gibson’s seminal novel Neuromancer. Gibson answers a discussion group question on his blog today to provide that explanation:

And his voice the cry of a bird
Unknown,
3Jane answering in song, three
notes, high and pure.
A true name….

As to what the word is, well, I never considered it to be a word, really, though 3Jane, teasingly, calls it one. It is in fact three “notes”, something akin to birdcall. The key to the cipher, that is, is revealed as being purely tonal, musical, rather than linguistic. Case’s “cry”, a species of primal scream, the voicing of the emotionality he’s been walled off from throughout the narrative (and his life), torn finally from the core of his being, is what actually forces 3Jane to give up the key. Call and response, of some kind. Hearing him, she can’t help herself. When she taunts him (“Take your word, thief.”) she’s in fact daring him, and assuming he can’t — just as she was, a moment before, daring Molly to kill her.

So Neuromancer as therapy narrative. A new category of theses is born.

Finding parts for a 17-year-old computer

I seem to have obsessions with mechanical things in their late teens. My second car was a 1977 MGB that I drove from 1991 until 1996, when it turned 19 (and caught fire, but that’s another story). Now I’m working on this surplus old Mac.

It’s not a Fat Mac, as I originally reported (and was told by the donor), but it was free, and came with some goodies. An extra keyboard, in the original box. An external floppy drive. And a replacement motherboard, internal floppy, and back chassis. (The back chassis is the part that was signed by the original Mac development team; to look at it for the first time is kind of awe inspiring.)

It did not come with the tool needed to open it, which is a specialty long handled Torx 15 wrench only available from Sears these days. It also didn’t come with a replacement PRAM battery, which was originally an Eveready 523 but which can apparently be replaced by the Exell A123 4.5 volt battery.

Next steps: figure out how to get to the yoke on the CRT to fix the bad solder joint.

Supporting weblog research

Wil Wheaton points to a survey of bloggers being conducted as part of a thesis investigation at Georgetown University. It appears to be a fairly well thought out survey with a good variety of demographic and behavioral questions about blogging.

Though I have a few criticisms of the survey (the caps on the choices numbers of daily and weekly visitors are really low, and the sample she’ll get will be nowhere near random), I still think that research on blogs is worthwhile and encourage you to visit the survey.

License to sample?

Creative Commons discusses adding a potential new commons license that explicitly grants sampling rights. Interesting idea, and they quote Don Joyce of Negativland: “[A sampling option would] stop legally suppressing it and start culturally encouraging it — because it’s here to stay.”

While I respect Mr. Joyce’s work, I’d like to hear from other musicians on this one. I can’t help but think that putting a license that grants blanket rights to sample might be opening the door for free riders. An artist like Negativland sampling something is one thing: someone pulling a P. Diddy and creating a new song that practically clones the original is something else, and I’d want to be sure that I was protected against that by default.

Besides, if someone creates a new hit song whose hook, chorus, or other major melodic element is wholly derivative of my performance, I’d want recompense in the form of royalties. The draft broadly proposed at Creative Commons doesn’t appear to allow for that option.

Now that would be a show

Tony reminds me that last night was the induction of the first New Wave class into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Meaning the Clash, the Police, and Elvis Costello. Damn. Oh, yeah, and AC/DC.

Anyway, Elvis Costello and me you know about. Except, like anything else, there’s always more to the story. I had never heard of Elvis Costello until “Veronica.” Sad, I know. But I absorbed Spike through my pores, even “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror.” Then Mighty Like a Rose came along and I slowly got disenchanted. Then The Juliet Letters and I fell back in love. Then Brutal Youth and… well, you get the picture.

The Police? Entirely different story. Synchronicity was one of the first rock albums I ever heard, thanks to a babysitter and my parents’ old turntable. That, and the fact that if you left your house and rode in the car of someone who listened to rock instead of classical, you couldn’t escape “Every Breath You Take,” “King of Pain,” or “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” I learned the lyrics, I learned to sing like Sting. I went on to dig into the Police’s back catalog with Rob, learning about the oddities and the brilliance on Outlandos D’Amore and Zenyatta Mondatta. It was a musical formative event that wouldn’t be equalled until I discovered Nirvana, then Parliament, taking me away from the arch writing of Sting into anarchy and funk.

But I never really left. How could I? Singing like Sting was the first public (non-choral) singing I did. Scenario: talent show at the summer Governor’s School for Science, after my junior year of high school. Sting’s “Sister Moon” from …Nothing Like the Sun. I pull together a guitarist and saxophonist for a jazz trio, but they can’t make it to the rehearsal. An empty auditorium except for the counselor in charge of the talent show…and two attractive girls, talking to each other, who hadn’t been giving me the time of day, and whom I had written off totally. So I put the tape on quietly, grab the mic, and start singing. Nervous because I don’t know how to sing with a mic, until I look up during the second verse and see two attractive mouths hanging open staring at me listening.

After that it was all downhill. The violin had already gone; the piano went soon after. If I could have that effect with an instrument I had with me all the time, why bother with anything else?

Thanks, Sting, for immeasurably improving my social life.

And thanks, Rob, for enriching my back catalog.

Now playing

Currently playing song: “In A World Gone Mad…” by Beastie Boys on www.BeastieBoys.com. Yeah, you read that right. Free Beasties download. New antiwar song. A few choice rhymes:

Mirrors, smoke screens, and lies
It’s not the politicians but their actions I despise…

As you build more bombs, as you get more gold
As your midlife crisis war unfolds
All you wanna do is take control
Put the Axis of Evil bullshit on hold

Citizens rule number 2080
Politicians are shady…

Well I’ll be sleepin’ on the speeches till I start to snore
Cause I won’t carry coal for an oil war…

Now don’t get us wrong cause we love America
But that’s no reason to get hysterica
They’re layin’ on the syrup thick
We ain’t waffles we ain’t havin’ it

Improv

Lisa doesn’t come back from Boulder until about 9 tonight, so I was taking dinner solo. So I improvised. Sauteed onions in butter and olive oil; added broccoli florets, lima beans, and a pinch of salt. Added a splash more olive oil and two cups of arborio. Started stirring in the obligatory chicken broth a half cup at a time. About ten minutes in, added cubed chicken thigh meat, and at the same time started browning larger thigh chunks in a separate pan. Five minutes later: about 3/4 cup white Bordeaux. More broth. Lemon zest. Then, off the heat, stir in a touch more butter and grated Parmigiano Reggiano, and top with the browned chicken breasts.

What is it about cooking that makes me feel so competent? I guess it’s the eating.

Lundy update: Hail to the Chief

The Cavalier Daily reports that Daisy Lundy’s opponent in the race for University of Virginia Student Council President has withdrawn, conceding the election to her. The Daily Progress notes that the FBI investigation into the attack on Lundy continues. So no closure in this ugly chapter of the University’s history, nor is there likely to be for some time until all people of all races feel that the University and its community is a safe and fair place for them.

Joe Gross on Godspeed

If ever there was someone who should be paid to write about music, it’s Joe Gross. Thank God the Austin American-Statesman had the good sense to employ him. This week he writes about everyone’s favorite leftist band that no one knows, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and finds them “calcified” but still full of promise:

…At the center of all this despair there remains unexploded faith, however overwrought and pretentious. As the sleeve puts it, “hope still, a little resistance always maybe stubborn tiny lights vs. clustering darkness foreverok?” Their ambitions are vast, their music even more so and, to paraphrase Bruce Cockburn, Godspeed seem determined to drone into the darkness till it bleeds daylight.

—Of course, all this reminds me of two things:

  • I need to write about some more music.
  • I need to go listen to “Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven” again.