solar-powered glasses

me: are we still young?

him: yeah




me: where's our optimism?

him: we're not that young

The park at noon on Wednesday

The bells of the Lutheran church rang a hymn
by Martin Luther at noon on Wednesday
when I ran through the park on concrete paths
laid by union workers; for example, one
blew leaves from the patio of the over-
priced park eatery. We both saw each other
but neither smiled; no one smiles in this park
because most are strangers running around
on concrete paths laid by union workers
who definitely aren’t smiling because they
are on the clock in the heat, trying to fathom
the amount of leisure it takes to go for a run
on a Wednesday in July.

Lost Dogs Found

Dog Reunited with Owners 10 Months After Hurricane Ike.

Quote: “Kathy Bauer late Thursday whistled for the pet. She says Daizy came running and ‘lifted her paw for a handshake.’”

This is important: Dog Reunited with Family After Catastrophe. It’s a story of loss brought on by an accident or nature and the reunion of a bond that apparently couldn’t be blown away. Even though a dog isn’t human, we have anthropomorphized these animals to the point where we are positive they will return to us and not some other loving family of a closer proximity. It's why this story keeps making the news.

I’m sure the people who post Lost Dog flyers around my neighborhood eat this shit UP. Yes! Your dog will not rest until it finds you again. No! Your dog does not just love you for your food and warm blanket, and no your dog won’t settle for another loving home with the same food and warm blanket, because you are singular with your dog and it’s singular with you.

These stories are important today, “especially with this economy.”

Dog Lost for Six Months Reunited with Family.

Missing Dog Reunited with Family.

Missing Dog Reunited with Family after Ohio Turnpike Crash.

Dog Reunited with Family after Fire Destroys Farmhouse.

I’m reminded of a poem by Pablo Neruda:

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died. I buried him in the garden next to a rusted old machine. Some day I'll join him right there, but now he's gone with his shaggy coat, his bad manners and his cold nose, and I, the materialist, who never believed in any promised heaven in the sky for any human being, I believe in a heaven I'll never enter. Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship. Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth, of having lost a companion who was never servile. His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine withholding its authority, was the friendship of a star, aloof, with no more intimacy than was called for, with no exaggerations: he never climbed all over my clothes filling me full of his hair or his mange, he never rubbed up against my knee like other dogs obsessed with sex. No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he'd keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing. Ai, how many times have I envied his tail as we walked together on the shores of the sea in the lonely winter of Isla Negra where the wintering birds filled the sky and my hairy dog was jumping about full of the voltage of the sea's movement: my wandering dog, sniffing away with his golden tail held high, face to face with the ocean's spray. Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit. There are no good-byes for my dog who has died, and we don't now and never did lie to each other. So now he's gone and I buried him, and that's all there is to it.

This is the clarinet duck

I must have read in a book on soundtrack theory that chromaticism in movie music is often used to accompany an unstable brain. To be honest, many books I’ve looked at on soundtrack theory were so dry and focused too much on specific examples, I ended up skimming them. Books like Listening to Movies: The Film Lover’s Guide to Film Music and Changing Music: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film had a few good points to make, in my opinion, but most of the text became too much like a catalog for which movies used which music, and that specific director’s habits, etc. I guess I should have known from the academic-ness of the titles (it's not a title unless it has a colon) that they would be dry. Back to the point: Chromaticism = Instability. I watched Sybil (Sallie Field plays a young woman with multiple personalities formed to cope with her abusive childhood) for the first time yesterday, and was not surprised in terms of the soundtrack. As the audience is introduced to her first psychotic episode during the first fifteen minutes of the film, she is running up flights of stairs trying to escape a neighbor’s piano playing. The piece is Chopin’ Etude op.25 no.11, known as the “Winter Wind” etude, and it involves complex descending chromatics on the part of the right hand while the left hand plays a minor melody:



Sybil runs up four or five flights, the camera above her focused on her head simulating a feeling of a whirlwind, until she enters her apartment and closes the door. The viewer is left outside the door but hears her talking to herself, changing her voice and way of speaking. The music was not the catalyst for her episode, but instead, foreshadowing for the audience. However, chromaticism is not always used to initiate a feeling of instability. Alfred Hitchcock used one composer for most of his films, Bernard Hermann, and while chromatics were involved in much of the thematic structure, chromaticism did not take the front seat. For example, Vertigo’s theme consists of dissonant arpeggios going up and down, up and down, creating a sense of – you guessed it – vertigo.



The effect of the spatial arrangement of the notes plays a big role in the listener’s “feelings,” but even if the notes didn’t fully accomplish this, those spiraling images placed over the woman’s eyes complete the job.

I guess these two instances of spatiality can be easily tied together. Chromatic piano for climbing up stairs (ascending and descending "steps" in the music mirroring physical step-climbing), vertiginous arpeggios and spiral images initiating dizzying heights. Yes, and Queen has "word painting" in their song "Bohemian Rhapsody" that includes the sound of a xylophone when they sing, "Sent a shiver down my spine," and Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and Saint-Saen's "Carnival of the Animals" imitating animals and Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," this is the clarinet-duck, this is the french horn-wolf, blah blah.

This is an old idea that has been appropriated for the screen during the last 100 years after a long history of appropriating music with the stage via opera, plays, circus acts, etc. I suppose tricks like these always seem lame during the age of (though I thought the Sybil scene seemed pretty cool but I'm partial to piano); even Debussy writes:

Wagner has set us a number of precedents in how to fashion music for the theater. One day we shall see how useless they all are. For his own benefit he invented the "leitmotiv guide" to aid those who cannot read a score. It's perfect: it enables the listener to get through all the more quickly...But what is more serious, he has accustomed us to making the music servile, in being responsible for the development of the characters. I feel I should try to explain this, for it seems to me to be the main trouble with dramatic music these days. Music has a rhythm whose secret force shapes the development. The rhythm of a soul, however, is quite different---more instinctive, more general, and controlled by many events. From the incompatibility of these two rhythms a perpetual conflict arises, for the two do not move at the same speed. Either the music stifles itself by chasing after a character, or the character has to sit on a note to allow the music to catch up with him. Nonetheless, there are miraculous moments where the two are in harmony, and Wagner has the honor of being responsible for some of these. But they are for the most part due to chance, and more often than not awkward and deceptive. All in all, the application of symphonic form to dramatic action succeeds in killing dramatic music rather than saving it, as was proclaimed when Wagner was crowned king of opera.

Well, everyone's a critic.

Fresh Air

The new issue of Born Magazine is out.

My favorites from this issue are Zoology and I Can No Longer Think.

(Plug.)

A Nice Science Lesson

It’s always a little satisfying to have one’s suspicions about the corporate world proved correct, though that amount of satisfaction is met with a similar amount of dismay. It’s always a little dismaying to have one’s suspicions about the corporate world proved correct. These paragraphs have gotten me fired.

Apparently, one does not need names named. Corporate paranoia gives way to general recognition. Is that metaphor me (do I hold congress with vampires?)

C’est la vie. Haven’t had any of this since I left:

…and I’ve found a new company for which to work:

In an unexpected way, I now join scores of my unemployed brothers and sisters, though mine is not due to a drop in production, but a soured system of ethics.

But bad leads to good, as the popular press often purports. I know my volcanic event will lead to beautiful sunsets, even if the ash is in Russia and the sunset is in Kentucky (?), I will not question the connection as long as the view is pleasing and it gives way to a nice lesson about science, or life.

Reflecting Excitement Reflecting Excitement

Watch this video.

In a second, I'll get to the teen texting part, but first, I have to say that without the existence of the internet and her Myspace presence (which led me to this video), my adoration of Amanda Palmer would not exist. But since the internet and Myspace do exist, I have adoration for Amanda Palmer, because her constant creative energy, captured on audio and video, is inspiring to me.

The idea that teenage girls are so excited about Panic! at the Disco, they can't stop texting during the show, is a little upsetting. It is almost beautifully upsetting. Upsetting in a very vivid way. Someone, somewhere, is mourning the loss of their vision which they have exchanged for the screen.

But is this a new manifestation of teenage* emotion, like AP suggests, being excited and showing it through reflection to others? Or is it another manifestation of a core desire of teenagers, which is not necessarily to enjoy a thing for the sake of the thing, but to "enjoy" a thing as a method of reaching another teen? In this instance, maybe the cell phone is like an old-school fire alarm that would spray paint the hand that pulled it. All those blue-handed teenagers out there, betraying their true desire at the Panic! show: not to enjoy the music, but to relate to friends via the music.

I like that. We blue-handed people exhibit our vulnerability by text messaging in public, acknowledging that we desire something that hasn't materialized next to us, willingly distracting ourselves with gadgets that tunnel through the physical barrier.

In this way, texting both unites and divides us with our fellow teenagers.

*In this context, "teenage" is to be politely used instead of "human"