Sat - April 5, 2008
new blog domain
OK, it's up: http://dtoub.wordpress.com. Please feel free to
change the feed subscription for my blog to http://dtoub.wordpress.com/feed.
We'll see how it goes...
Posted at 02:07 PM
moving to wordpress
Version 2.0 of iBlog has been in development
for an eternity. It's been promised for probably close to three years now. The
iBlog
Forum has been pretty stagnant, and while there have been reassurances
for at least two years now that version 2.0 is getting there, the reality is
that it isn't there, and likely won't ever be. At the very least, I'm not
holding my breath, not when someone close to the developer is urging folks to move on to WordPress, even
though iBlog 2.0 is “95+% finished.“ The sad reality is that while
it's close, almost doesn't count in software development. I wouldn't hold my
breath that iBlog 2.0 will ever see the light of day. The third release
candidate, while a clear improvement on iBlog 1.x (which is what I'm using for
this blog post), apparently is not compatible with Leopard. And even if iBlog
2.0 were to come out, that would essentially be the end of it; who knows if it
would be compatible with OS 10.6 on
up.
Now to be fair, I've gotten a few years out of iBlog 1.x, and it's managed just fine through several OS upgrades. However, iBlog is limited. While I like the idea of having a blogging app I can use regardless of whether or not I'm connected to the Web, iBlog's limitations and issues have driven me nuts for some time. Working with its XML under the hood, while usually not necessary, is something of a mystic art. I've spent countless hours futzing with XML code just to get things to the point where they are in the sidebar, and even then, it's not like I can remove the useless Technorati search widget in the lower right corner; I don't remember how I got it there in the first place, and that's part of the problem.
On the other hand, iBlog accepts javascript, so that I've been able to place scripts from OneStat and StatCounter to track who comes to this site, etc. That's always interesting. And everything syncs just fine with my iDisk. Also, the table boundaries stretch as needed, so if I place a large graphic in the sidebar, the graphic is still viewable in its entirety.
Still, iBlog is at the end of its life, and without any realistic hope of further development, it's time to thing of switching to something else. And on balance, WordPress.com (rather than the more powerful, but potentially more complex wordpress.org-based blogging system) seems to be the best of all possible worlds. I toyed with the idea of migrating my nearly 600 posts to WP, but that is a really daunting task, requiring a major investment of time to clean up issues with each post. So, rather than try to get my old posts into WP, I'm just going to leave this site up and start a new one with WP. That's the same tack that the online new music community Sequenza 21 took when it outgrew its previous system.
So the new site is essentially there, after a bit of work. WordPress has some quirks---not all my code changes stuck, so I had to keep playing with it, reloading the page to see if the changes took, etc. For the most part, I just gave up and resorted to developing my code edits using DreamWeaver, and that seemed to do the job, even with DW's inefficient HTML. I also finally realized that WordPress won't accept javascript, so there's no way to use OneStat or StatCounter to track who comes here. WordPress has built-in Web stats, but they are really meager by comparison. And I had to slim down some graphics to fit in the side column, since the template I'm using can't resize itself or be resized by me (unless I pay to have write access to the underlying CSS). On the other hand, the layout is much nicer than iBlog's templates. And I'm used to using WP from blogging for Sequenza 21, so it's not that strange.
So look here in the coming days for the link to the new blog. I have to adjust some links on my other Web pages to point to the new blog, and then I'll go live with it. The old blog (ie, the one you're reading) will be readily accessible from the new blog, so nothing will be lost. Personally, I'd be fine with making a fresh start and ditching all my previous posts from the Web (although I'm sure they'd be accessible via archive.org). But I still can't believe how much traffic I get every day from an old post about some logic board issues I had had with my iBook; guess there are still folks out there having the same trouble with their iBooks.
Here's a sneak preview:
Now to be fair, I've gotten a few years out of iBlog 1.x, and it's managed just fine through several OS upgrades. However, iBlog is limited. While I like the idea of having a blogging app I can use regardless of whether or not I'm connected to the Web, iBlog's limitations and issues have driven me nuts for some time. Working with its XML under the hood, while usually not necessary, is something of a mystic art. I've spent countless hours futzing with XML code just to get things to the point where they are in the sidebar, and even then, it's not like I can remove the useless Technorati search widget in the lower right corner; I don't remember how I got it there in the first place, and that's part of the problem.
On the other hand, iBlog accepts javascript, so that I've been able to place scripts from OneStat and StatCounter to track who comes to this site, etc. That's always interesting. And everything syncs just fine with my iDisk. Also, the table boundaries stretch as needed, so if I place a large graphic in the sidebar, the graphic is still viewable in its entirety.
Still, iBlog is at the end of its life, and without any realistic hope of further development, it's time to thing of switching to something else. And on balance, WordPress.com (rather than the more powerful, but potentially more complex wordpress.org-based blogging system) seems to be the best of all possible worlds. I toyed with the idea of migrating my nearly 600 posts to WP, but that is a really daunting task, requiring a major investment of time to clean up issues with each post. So, rather than try to get my old posts into WP, I'm just going to leave this site up and start a new one with WP. That's the same tack that the online new music community Sequenza 21 took when it outgrew its previous system.
So the new site is essentially there, after a bit of work. WordPress has some quirks---not all my code changes stuck, so I had to keep playing with it, reloading the page to see if the changes took, etc. For the most part, I just gave up and resorted to developing my code edits using DreamWeaver, and that seemed to do the job, even with DW's inefficient HTML. I also finally realized that WordPress won't accept javascript, so there's no way to use OneStat or StatCounter to track who comes here. WordPress has built-in Web stats, but they are really meager by comparison. And I had to slim down some graphics to fit in the side column, since the template I'm using can't resize itself or be resized by me (unless I pay to have write access to the underlying CSS). On the other hand, the layout is much nicer than iBlog's templates. And I'm used to using WP from blogging for Sequenza 21, so it's not that strange.
So look here in the coming days for the link to the new blog. I have to adjust some links on my other Web pages to point to the new blog, and then I'll go live with it. The old blog (ie, the one you're reading) will be readily accessible from the new blog, so nothing will be lost. Personally, I'd be fine with making a fresh start and ditching all my previous posts from the Web (although I'm sure they'd be accessible via archive.org). But I still can't believe how much traffic I get every day from an old post about some logic board issues I had had with my iBook; guess there are still folks out there having the same trouble with their iBooks.
Here's a sneak preview:
Posted at 12:59 AM
Fri - March 28, 2008
100%
To be fair, Opera got to 100% at the same time as the current WebKit build of Safari 3.1. So if Safari is now so much better, why won't the current IMAX theater schedule at the Franklin Institute load in my browser? Guess it's that issue with Java applets or something...
Posted at 11:11 AM
Sun - March 23, 2008
a quick perspective on Reverend Wright
Just to provide some grounding to the
incessant noise about Obama's relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright in
Chicago:
1. When listening to Wright's assertions that the HIV virus and widespread drug availability in lower income neighborhoods represents a government plot against Blacks, people should keep in mind that approximately 50% of Black Americans in one study believe that HIV is man-made and at least a quarter of them believe that drugs are made available in poor Black neighborhoods to oppress the population. Rather than express shock at what the Reverend said, why not ask why so many Black Americans believe the same thing? Clearly, the legacy of the Tuskegee Experiment is not lost on many Blacks, while so many Whites seem to have forgotten what our government scientists did.
2. If Wright's beliefs are so outrageous and indefensible, how about the statements by the evangelical leader Rev. John Hagee to the effect that Hurricane Katrina was god's punishment for a New Orleans gay pride parade, and that America is damned because we tolerate Muslims? I should not that the good reverend was not only embraced by John McCain but actively courted, Same with the Ohio pastor Rod Parsley, who said that ”...America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion (Islam) destroyed.“ I don't see anyone calling on McCain to reject and denounce these two influential religious figures who have endorsed him. And then there were, of course, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who said that America is damned because of our embracing the ACLU, feminists, gays and abortion. How many politicians embraced these two demagogues?
Were Rev. Wright's words provocative? Absolutely. Was his declamation and oratory fiery? Of course. Did he say some things many folks disagree with? Certainly. But he also said many things that either were indeed correct or else widely held within the Black community. Our lack of understanding of our minorities is abominable, and associating Obama with whatever prejudices and fears we project onto Rev. Wright is similarly unfortunate. I am now hoping to educate the Jewish community that Obama is the best hope we have for a rational, compassionate and progressive presidency. Sure, some in the Jewish community are skeptical of Obama. Some of this has to do with the Rev. Wright debacle. But truth be told, it goes much deeper than that. An e-mail campaign that stoked unfounded fears and concerns about Obama's stance on the Middle East took place several months ago in the Jewish community, and was immediately renounced by many Jewish leaders in a counter-campaign of e-mail. This obviously predated the Rev. Wright videos, and builds on many undercurrents that emerged from the breaking down of the traditional Black-Jewish alliance. This was the alliance that Obama poignantly recalled in a recent debate with Hillary Clinton when Tim Russert tried to make an issue out of Minister Louis Farrakhan's endorsement of Obama. An endorsement that, unlike McCain';s endorsement by John Hagee and Rod Parsley, was neither solicited nor celebrated.
So there's lots of work to do in terms of rebuilding racial alliances and getting past the nonsense that divides us. We are a diverse country. It's time we truly celebrate this diversity rather than allow the right wing pundits to focus in on it in order to split us apart.
1. When listening to Wright's assertions that the HIV virus and widespread drug availability in lower income neighborhoods represents a government plot against Blacks, people should keep in mind that approximately 50% of Black Americans in one study believe that HIV is man-made and at least a quarter of them believe that drugs are made available in poor Black neighborhoods to oppress the population. Rather than express shock at what the Reverend said, why not ask why so many Black Americans believe the same thing? Clearly, the legacy of the Tuskegee Experiment is not lost on many Blacks, while so many Whites seem to have forgotten what our government scientists did.
2. If Wright's beliefs are so outrageous and indefensible, how about the statements by the evangelical leader Rev. John Hagee to the effect that Hurricane Katrina was god's punishment for a New Orleans gay pride parade, and that America is damned because we tolerate Muslims? I should not that the good reverend was not only embraced by John McCain but actively courted, Same with the Ohio pastor Rod Parsley, who said that ”...America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion (Islam) destroyed.“ I don't see anyone calling on McCain to reject and denounce these two influential religious figures who have endorsed him. And then there were, of course, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who said that America is damned because of our embracing the ACLU, feminists, gays and abortion. How many politicians embraced these two demagogues?
Were Rev. Wright's words provocative? Absolutely. Was his declamation and oratory fiery? Of course. Did he say some things many folks disagree with? Certainly. But he also said many things that either were indeed correct or else widely held within the Black community. Our lack of understanding of our minorities is abominable, and associating Obama with whatever prejudices and fears we project onto Rev. Wright is similarly unfortunate. I am now hoping to educate the Jewish community that Obama is the best hope we have for a rational, compassionate and progressive presidency. Sure, some in the Jewish community are skeptical of Obama. Some of this has to do with the Rev. Wright debacle. But truth be told, it goes much deeper than that. An e-mail campaign that stoked unfounded fears and concerns about Obama's stance on the Middle East took place several months ago in the Jewish community, and was immediately renounced by many Jewish leaders in a counter-campaign of e-mail. This obviously predated the Rev. Wright videos, and builds on many undercurrents that emerged from the breaking down of the traditional Black-Jewish alliance. This was the alliance that Obama poignantly recalled in a recent debate with Hillary Clinton when Tim Russert tried to make an issue out of Minister Louis Farrakhan's endorsement of Obama. An endorsement that, unlike McCain';s endorsement by John Hagee and Rod Parsley, was neither solicited nor celebrated.
So there's lots of work to do in terms of rebuilding racial alliances and getting past the nonsense that divides us. We are a diverse country. It's time we truly celebrate this diversity rather than allow the right wing pundits to focus in on it in order to split us apart.
Posted at 03:01 PM
Wed - March 19, 2008
Wed - March 12, 2008
it's been three weeks...
...and still no response to my LinkedIn invite to connect with Hillary Clinton. But that's fine, since I no longer want to connect with her. I'm royally offended by many of the tactics her campaign has taken to in the past two weeks. Like her half-hearted denial about Obama's alleged Islamicism (as if being a Muslim should disqualify you from elected office in this country?). And her refusal so far to axe supporter Geraldine Ferraro, despite Ferraro's offensive statements that clearly pander to the background racism that exists. So it's imperative for Obama to fire someone who called HRC “a monster,” but what Geraldine Ferraro said is acceptable?
I won't even discuss her hinting of her desire to sway committed Obama delegates towards supporting her, contradicting the will of the folks who elected them to vote for Obama at the Democratic Convention. Or her calculated comments about Obama being her VP candidate, words that her confidant Howard Wolfson spun to suggest that Obama isn't really ready now to be President, but would be by the convention, so he would then be an acceptable VP choice.
Hillary, we're done. There was a time not too long ago when I, despite being an Obama supporter, would have supported you as the Democratic nominee should that have been the fair and proper outcome of the primaries. But you're not overtaking his lead; indeed, he is way ahead of you. And even if somehow you managed to finagle and cajole your way to being the nominee, there is now no way in hell I'd vote for you. I don't want someone who represents more of the same, who subscribes to the same deceptive nonsense that has been typical operating procedure in politics within this country. Now, that doesn't mean that I'd do as many Democrats are suggesting they will do, namely casting their votes for McCain in place of Clinton should she connive her way to the nomination. Instead, I will write in Obama's name for the general election. I can't give McCain my vote in good conscience---a few years ago, sure, but not anymore, now that he's nothing but an extension of the Bush '43 disaster.
Besides, I need Obama to win. I have a bet on with a good friend in Canada that Obama will be the nominee and beat McCain. If I lose, I have to send him a Philadelphia cheesesteak and clog his coronary arteries. if I win, I have to figure out what I want from Canada as my prize (as a vegetarian, smoked meat from Montreal isn't really an option). So a vote for Obama helps me win over a friend in Canada, making every Obama vote a vote for US national pride, right?
Posted at 09:47 AM
morton feldman widget
This is so very cool. There is a dashboard widget for OS X that provides daily quotes from the writings of Morton Feldman. Having just reread the compendium of his writings, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, for the 10th time or so, this is a great way for me to get my daily fix of MF's wisdom.
It can be downloaded for free here. Thanks to Charles Allen from the Vertical Thoughts listserv for this tip.
And as you can see from one of my dashboard widgets, the cheapest price of gas in the Wyncote, PA area isn't good. And it's only getting worse.
Posted at 09:23 AM
Sat - March 8, 2008
la monte young: trio for strings (1958)
I'm listening to one of the seminal works of the 20th century, La Monte Young's Trio for Strings from 1958. This was the work that made a lot of Young's classmates and his composition teacher Seymour Shifrin think he'd gone nuts. It's a long work for sustained tones, punctuated by long silences. There was nothing in Western classical music like it before Young wrote this work, and if it wasn't the starting point for minimalism, it's pretty damn close. I've heard that Young is considering releasing a version of the Trio using just intonation. That's his right, of course, but I think it sounds just fine in its original version. Actually, the recording I know is of a version Young made in 198 for Trio Basso, as group from Germany, and is scored for viola, cello and contrabass rather than the original violin, viola and cello.
What seemed messhugah in those days is actually pretty tame by today's standards. But at the time, it provoked a lot of controversy. I've seen a page or two of the score, which appeared in the booklet for the tapes of the first recording of The Well-Tuned Piano, and it's indeed a 12-tone work. Interestingly, a lot of minimalist composers started off writing 12-tone music, and while many ended up dissing it, Young actually has always held serialism in high regard as best I can tell. I find this interesting in light of my rereading of Feldman's compliation Give My Regards to Eighth Street, in which he writes some pointed criticism of those who have systems, those who (like Boulez and Babbitt) are more concerned with how a piece is constructed than how it sounds. My favorite observation of Feldman's is that unlike artists, composers are always fixated on analyzing how pieces are made; artists could care less about what paint brush Rothko or Guston used.
Posted at 12:20 PM
Thu - March 6, 2008
webkit 3.0.4 (523.12) and acid3
I've been downloading the nightly builds of WebKit, the work-in-progress version of Safari, for quite some time now. Today, the Web Standards Project released its Acid3 test for Web browsers. Safari has generally been ahead of the curve in achieving Acid test compatibility, which indicates compliance with Web standards, and I'm glad to see that based on the test I just ran today, the version of WebKit I'm running (the 523.12 build) is 90% compliant with Acid3. That's really remarkable, when you figure that Safari 2.0.2 was the first browser to pass the Acid2 test and that came an entire six months after Acid2 was announced. And to be perfectly fair, the latest nightly builds of FireFox are also running Acid3 scores in the 80-90 range.
So what's this background noise I'm hearing about the forthcoming IE8 being Acid2 compliant? Yawn...
Posted at 12:54 PM
Fri - February 29, 2008
fun with translation
I was just looking at some recent Web stats
for site visits to my music page, and I noticed that one of the pages viewed (by
someone in Germany) was listed as ”Musik von David toub.“ So I
figured I'd go there, and sure enough, it's a Google-translated version of the
page.
Google's translation did a decent enough job, although not being a German speaker, it's kinda hard for me to be perfectly sure. So here's some of the translation I'm seeing on that page, followed by the English name of the piece:
Dieses Stück wurde absichtlich leer gelassen (this piece intentionally left blank)
Philip für Glas (for philip glass)
MF (mf---note the difference in capitalization)
Fünf Noten für hans fong (five notes for christina fong) sorry, Christina!
Bäche des Bewusstseins (I needed Google's help to figure this one out: streams of consciousness)
Zwei Sätzen (two sets)---interesting that ”sets“ gets translated into what I know is the German word for ”movements“
Lehrbuch: Musik von einsamen Landschaften im Hyperspace (Stück für IPS-2h) (8') (textbook: music of descending landscapes in hyperspace [piece for IPS]--not bad, except that Google's translation parsed the timing of the piece incorrectly, so one might think that this piece only takes eight minutes, rather than its 2h, 8 minute duration
Vergessenheiten (oblivions)---personally, I think it sounds even better in German
Which brings up an interesting point---when we give musical works interesting titles, do they play well in other languages? The two composers I first think of for having written some really interesting names for their works are Feldman (Crippled Symmetry, Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, False Relationships and the Extended Ending, Half a Minute It's All I've Time For) and Babbitt (All Set, Sheer Pluck). I mean, I'd wonder what Google's translation algorithms would do to Babbitt's The Joy of More Sextets or Four Play?
Google's translation did a decent enough job, although not being a German speaker, it's kinda hard for me to be perfectly sure. So here's some of the translation I'm seeing on that page, followed by the English name of the piece:
Dieses Stück wurde absichtlich leer gelassen (this piece intentionally left blank)
Philip für Glas (for philip glass)
MF (mf---note the difference in capitalization)
Fünf Noten für hans fong (five notes for christina fong) sorry, Christina!
Bäche des Bewusstseins (I needed Google's help to figure this one out: streams of consciousness)
Zwei Sätzen (two sets)---interesting that ”sets“ gets translated into what I know is the German word for ”movements“
Lehrbuch: Musik von einsamen Landschaften im Hyperspace (Stück für IPS-2h) (8') (textbook: music of descending landscapes in hyperspace [piece for IPS]--not bad, except that Google's translation parsed the timing of the piece incorrectly, so one might think that this piece only takes eight minutes, rather than its 2h, 8 minute duration
Vergessenheiten (oblivions)---personally, I think it sounds even better in German
Which brings up an interesting point---when we give musical works interesting titles, do they play well in other languages? The two composers I first think of for having written some really interesting names for their works are Feldman (Crippled Symmetry, Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, False Relationships and the Extended Ending, Half a Minute It's All I've Time For) and Babbitt (All Set, Sheer Pluck). I mean, I'd wonder what Google's translation algorithms would do to Babbitt's The Joy of More Sextets or Four Play?
Posted at 11:20 AM
more on ”cosmetic gynecology“
As I've expressed before, I'm not a supporter
of including cosmetic surgery services within gynecologic practice. This issue
came up on the physician forum sermo.com and I figured I'd weigh
in:
My $0.02: WTF has our specialty come to? I won't heavily criticize our colleagues who are now including a range of cosmetic procedures outside of gynecology; they're just responding to crappy reimbursement rates, tough cash flow issues, declining operative volumes, etc. From a business perspective, it makes sense. From a medical perspective, it sucks.
What I've heard from friends is that it's considered easy and lucrative--after all, we're surgeons too, right? No one is going to harp more on the fact that we're surgeons than me. However, if we're going to suddenly pull this ”we're surgeons“ stuff, then why don't we instead take back breast surgery rather than get into a new area? Many of us used to do breast surgery---I was trained to do mastectomies, axillary node dissections, tylectomies, etc. Why don't we generally do them nowadays as gynecologists (aside from the difficulty with getting privileges for these procedures)? Because we acknowledge that general surgeons who do these every day will do them better. Conversely, I've seen general surgeons do hysterectomies, and sure, they're surgeons and they are technically competent to do them. But I wouldn't suggest that they can do them as well as we do, nor manage the complications.
It's not just the technique, but also the judgment. Doing a suction curettage at 10 weeks is not that difficult, but I don't think anyone should be doing them unless they do them in a reasonable volume and after appropriate training, because we gynecologists need to know how to prevent complications, how to manage them when they occur (and complications can always occur, of course, with any procedure) and have the sound judgment to know how, when, and why to do these procedures in the first place.
Cosmetic surgery can kill people. It can maim and disfigure people. Just as I think surgeons should respect the procedures we do as gynecologists, we should respect the things they do, and only do them when we really have the training and judgment to proceed. No weekend course on ”cosmetic gynecology“ (whatever the f that is) is going to provide skills and judgment comparable to someone who is boarded in cosmetic surgery and plastic/reconstructive surgery. As it is, the folks who are boarded in cosmetic surgery are rightfully pissed at those cosmetic surgeons who are doing this without board certification or a decent background in plastic and reconstructive surgery. Why are we adding to this nonsense?
As an example in terms of judgment, you're mentioning the possibility of doing ”gspot injections“ (sic). This is inappropriate and has no place in modern practice, cosmetic surgery, gynecology or otherwise.
To my point exactly. We have no business doing this crap. I sympathize with those who do, and understand their motivation in terms of a cash business. But we're surgeons and professionals, NOT car dealers trying to make a fast buck. Or are we?
My $0.02: WTF has our specialty come to? I won't heavily criticize our colleagues who are now including a range of cosmetic procedures outside of gynecology; they're just responding to crappy reimbursement rates, tough cash flow issues, declining operative volumes, etc. From a business perspective, it makes sense. From a medical perspective, it sucks.
What I've heard from friends is that it's considered easy and lucrative--after all, we're surgeons too, right? No one is going to harp more on the fact that we're surgeons than me. However, if we're going to suddenly pull this ”we're surgeons“ stuff, then why don't we instead take back breast surgery rather than get into a new area? Many of us used to do breast surgery---I was trained to do mastectomies, axillary node dissections, tylectomies, etc. Why don't we generally do them nowadays as gynecologists (aside from the difficulty with getting privileges for these procedures)? Because we acknowledge that general surgeons who do these every day will do them better. Conversely, I've seen general surgeons do hysterectomies, and sure, they're surgeons and they are technically competent to do them. But I wouldn't suggest that they can do them as well as we do, nor manage the complications.
It's not just the technique, but also the judgment. Doing a suction curettage at 10 weeks is not that difficult, but I don't think anyone should be doing them unless they do them in a reasonable volume and after appropriate training, because we gynecologists need to know how to prevent complications, how to manage them when they occur (and complications can always occur, of course, with any procedure) and have the sound judgment to know how, when, and why to do these procedures in the first place.
Cosmetic surgery can kill people. It can maim and disfigure people. Just as I think surgeons should respect the procedures we do as gynecologists, we should respect the things they do, and only do them when we really have the training and judgment to proceed. No weekend course on ”cosmetic gynecology“ (whatever the f that is) is going to provide skills and judgment comparable to someone who is boarded in cosmetic surgery and plastic/reconstructive surgery. As it is, the folks who are boarded in cosmetic surgery are rightfully pissed at those cosmetic surgeons who are doing this without board certification or a decent background in plastic and reconstructive surgery. Why are we adding to this nonsense?
As an example in terms of judgment, you're mentioning the possibility of doing ”gspot injections“ (sic). This is inappropriate and has no place in modern practice, cosmetic surgery, gynecology or otherwise.
To my point exactly. We have no business doing this crap. I sympathize with those who do, and understand their motivation in terms of a cash business. But we're surgeons and professionals, NOT car dealers trying to make a fast buck. Or are we?
Posted at 10:09 AM
Thu - February 28, 2008
thoughts on north korea
While I applaud the NY Philharmonic's recent
trip to N. Korea (I mean, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea), as I've
learned more about N. Korea, I'm horrified. I've always known it to be a
totalitarian state with Kim Jong Il as an autocratic dictator in the Stalin
mode, but the more I read about N. Korea, I'm convinced Kim makes Stalin almost
seem like a lightweight.
N. Korea controls the opinions of its population in ways that even Orwell didn't consider in his novel 1984. Sure, there's the complete control of the press and media. But informers are placed everywhere, and anyone who is considered a potential subversive is removed. From day one, children are taught that their own lives are worthless compared to the state and the lives of Dear Leader. This is manifested by acts such as N. Koreans using their own bodies to try to stop fire from destroying trees upon which the words of Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il (father and son) are written. Even if N. Korea were liberated tomorrow, I'm not sure most of the population would understand that this is a good thing.
Then there are the concentration camps, such as Camp 22 and many others, in which approximately 200,000 political prisoners and their families are held, tortured and often executed. If someone is a subversive, the entire family is punished, which is a powerful incentive for others to keep in line. Anyone with physical deformities or special needs is relocated to special towns where they are isolated and often brutalized. Only the elite can live in the capital Pyongyang, and even then, there are electrical outages at night and very few cars. Indeed, if one looks through the streets of Pyongyang on Google Earth, there are hardly any cars to be seen. But one can certainly see the Ryogyong Hotel, or rather what exists of it. This was built at an estimated cost of $750,000,000 but ran out of funding in the 90's and sits dormant with a crane on top of it. In fact, it's actually crumbling as the cement used in its construction is of poor quality. Official N. Korean publications photoshop the hotel out of any views of Pyongyang, and no one in N. Korea will really talk about it, since it represents an abject failure. Nearly one billion dollars wasted in a country where approximately 2 million people have literally starved to death over the years.
A few years ago, in the DMZ that separates N. and S. Korea, some US troops decided to cut down a tree that was blocking their view of a N. Korean outpost. Some N. Korean troops assembled and, as there are no weapons allowed in the DMZ, they took the soldier's axes and used them to kill two US military personnel. This was referred to as the Axe Murder Incident. I'm amazed we avoided war over this.
And that's just it. We went to war, unprovoked, against Iraq to liberate the Iraqis from the actions of Saddam Hussein. Now, Hussein was a brutal murderous dictator. But so is Kim Jong Il. The brutality and cruelty of the N. Korean government against its people is unparalleled in modern times except by the actions of Nazi Germany. I even think it might top the atrocities committed under Stalin. Yet we went to war against Iraq, which has no nuclear arsenal. Go figure. I'm not suggesting we attack N. Korea, and think our invasion of Iraq was the most brazen, idiotic think our country has done in some time (and trust me, there are plenty of runners up). But how could someone justify invading Iraq for human rights abuses (which was the excuse when the WMD thing was proven to be a delusion), when things are as bad if not worse in N. Korea?
So I'm glad the NY Philharmonic played in Pyongyang. It would be wonderful if some mutual understanding comes out of it. But the reality is that N. Koreans live under an oppressive dictatorship that controls their minds through terror and indoctrination. I don't see much hope that that will change anytime soon. Nor am I hearing consistent outrage from the world powers at the ongoing executions and concentration camp atrocities taking place in N. Korea on a daily basis. A shame. These people deserve better from the world community, a community that does little or nothing about human rights abuses in Darfur and other parts of Africa, Myanmar and too many other nations.
N. Korea controls the opinions of its population in ways that even Orwell didn't consider in his novel 1984. Sure, there's the complete control of the press and media. But informers are placed everywhere, and anyone who is considered a potential subversive is removed. From day one, children are taught that their own lives are worthless compared to the state and the lives of Dear Leader. This is manifested by acts such as N. Koreans using their own bodies to try to stop fire from destroying trees upon which the words of Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il (father and son) are written. Even if N. Korea were liberated tomorrow, I'm not sure most of the population would understand that this is a good thing.
Then there are the concentration camps, such as Camp 22 and many others, in which approximately 200,000 political prisoners and their families are held, tortured and often executed. If someone is a subversive, the entire family is punished, which is a powerful incentive for others to keep in line. Anyone with physical deformities or special needs is relocated to special towns where they are isolated and often brutalized. Only the elite can live in the capital Pyongyang, and even then, there are electrical outages at night and very few cars. Indeed, if one looks through the streets of Pyongyang on Google Earth, there are hardly any cars to be seen. But one can certainly see the Ryogyong Hotel, or rather what exists of it. This was built at an estimated cost of $750,000,000 but ran out of funding in the 90's and sits dormant with a crane on top of it. In fact, it's actually crumbling as the cement used in its construction is of poor quality. Official N. Korean publications photoshop the hotel out of any views of Pyongyang, and no one in N. Korea will really talk about it, since it represents an abject failure. Nearly one billion dollars wasted in a country where approximately 2 million people have literally starved to death over the years.
A few years ago, in the DMZ that separates N. and S. Korea, some US troops decided to cut down a tree that was blocking their view of a N. Korean outpost. Some N. Korean troops assembled and, as there are no weapons allowed in the DMZ, they took the soldier's axes and used them to kill two US military personnel. This was referred to as the Axe Murder Incident. I'm amazed we avoided war over this.
And that's just it. We went to war, unprovoked, against Iraq to liberate the Iraqis from the actions of Saddam Hussein. Now, Hussein was a brutal murderous dictator. But so is Kim Jong Il. The brutality and cruelty of the N. Korean government against its people is unparalleled in modern times except by the actions of Nazi Germany. I even think it might top the atrocities committed under Stalin. Yet we went to war against Iraq, which has no nuclear arsenal. Go figure. I'm not suggesting we attack N. Korea, and think our invasion of Iraq was the most brazen, idiotic think our country has done in some time (and trust me, there are plenty of runners up). But how could someone justify invading Iraq for human rights abuses (which was the excuse when the WMD thing was proven to be a delusion), when things are as bad if not worse in N. Korea?
So I'm glad the NY Philharmonic played in Pyongyang. It would be wonderful if some mutual understanding comes out of it. But the reality is that N. Koreans live under an oppressive dictatorship that controls their minds through terror and indoctrination. I don't see much hope that that will change anytime soon. Nor am I hearing consistent outrage from the world powers at the ongoing executions and concentration camp atrocities taking place in N. Korea on a daily basis. A shame. These people deserve better from the world community, a community that does little or nothing about human rights abuses in Darfur and other parts of Africa, Myanmar and too many other nations.
Posted at 10:32 AM
Tue - February 26, 2008
Fri - February 22, 2008
random thoughts for a snow day
Working from home today in Wyncote due to the
snow. Nice that we finally have some snow---it's been more like living around
the equator for the past two
months.
* I find the universal horror about the NYT article on McCain and the lobbyist interesting. A lot of people are blaming the messenger, calling it a smear campaign, etc. Well, where was the mass outrage when Fox News repeatedly made innuendoes about Obama being a Muslim (as if that would be a crime)? And where were these people when those Swift Boat folks were smearing another war hero, John Kerry? The sad thing is that this is coming from the Times, which these people perceive as left-wing and hate it about as much as the ACLU. Why couldn't this have been published first in the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post? Even better, the Washington Times.
* I'm about to crack 300 connections on LinkedIn. Amazing, since one year ago I had maybe four connections. Barack, you could be #300 (yes, he is on LinkedIn)
* Hillary's closing remark yesterday was eloquent, and truthfully bested Barack's standard remarks about his experience that really didn't answer the question
* Been listening a lot to Copland's Piano Fantasy lately. I still prefer the earlier Piano Variations, but the Piano Fantasy is starting to grow on me. I still think it rambles at times, and I wish he had done more with the 1-2 ideas that really blow me away, but it's definitely a great piece. The greatest piano work of the 20th century? I don't think so. To me, the best examples would be Ives' Concord Sonata, Feldman's Triadic Memories and Piano (For Bunita Marcus and Palais de Mari are also great pieces), Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus, Ligeti's Etudes, Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano as a whole, Schoenberg's op. 23 Klavierstucke, Webern's Variations, Stockhausen's Klavierstucke IX (I like IX better than XI, so there), Shostakovich's Sonata #1, Shapey's Fromm Variations, Charlemagne Palestine's Strumming Music, La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano and perhaps Wolpe's Form and Form IV: Broken Sequences. I'm trying to get into the piano music of Gunnar Berg a bit more. I like it, but haven't made total contact yet.
OK, I've procrastinated enough---time to shovel the snow. Maybe I'll finally see a Yeti.
* I find the universal horror about the NYT article on McCain and the lobbyist interesting. A lot of people are blaming the messenger, calling it a smear campaign, etc. Well, where was the mass outrage when Fox News repeatedly made innuendoes about Obama being a Muslim (as if that would be a crime)? And where were these people when those Swift Boat folks were smearing another war hero, John Kerry? The sad thing is that this is coming from the Times, which these people perceive as left-wing and hate it about as much as the ACLU. Why couldn't this have been published first in the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post? Even better, the Washington Times.
* I'm about to crack 300 connections on LinkedIn. Amazing, since one year ago I had maybe four connections. Barack, you could be #300 (yes, he is on LinkedIn)
* Hillary's closing remark yesterday was eloquent, and truthfully bested Barack's standard remarks about his experience that really didn't answer the question
* Been listening a lot to Copland's Piano Fantasy lately. I still prefer the earlier Piano Variations, but the Piano Fantasy is starting to grow on me. I still think it rambles at times, and I wish he had done more with the 1-2 ideas that really blow me away, but it's definitely a great piece. The greatest piano work of the 20th century? I don't think so. To me, the best examples would be Ives' Concord Sonata, Feldman's Triadic Memories and Piano (For Bunita Marcus and Palais de Mari are also great pieces), Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus, Ligeti's Etudes, Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano as a whole, Schoenberg's op. 23 Klavierstucke, Webern's Variations, Stockhausen's Klavierstucke IX (I like IX better than XI, so there), Shostakovich's Sonata #1, Shapey's Fromm Variations, Charlemagne Palestine's Strumming Music, La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano and perhaps Wolpe's Form and Form IV: Broken Sequences. I'm trying to get into the piano music of Gunnar Berg a bit more. I like it, but haven't made total contact yet.
OK, I've procrastinated enough---time to shovel the snow. Maybe I'll finally see a Yeti.
Posted at 09:25 AM
Thu - February 21, 2008
perspectives on new music
I have access to old copies of the music
journal Perspectives on New
Music, and first became familiar with it
in the 80's when I purchased a paperback collection of selected articles
(”Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky“). I still have that
book, and it manages to creep me out every time I read through it. There are
articles by Milton Babbitt, Claudio Spies and others expounding upon and
diagramming all sorts of intricate serial structures and combinatorialities in
the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, all to demonstrate how wonderful it all
is. Now, I adore a lot of late Stravinsky (the serial stuff, like
Movements,
Variations for
Orchestra,
Abraham and
Isaac, etc) and certainly am fond of
Schoenberg's
oeuvre.
However, I like these works because they succeed as music, expressing something
of interest to me and just, well, sounding enjoyable to my ears. Same with late
Copland; while there are those people who despise his “conversion”
to serialism as exemplified by works like
Connnotations
or
Inscape,
I have come to like these works, but because I like listening to them, not
because they are well constructed from a theoretical perspective. By the same
token, the scores of Babbitt and Carter are very cool to look at, but do little
or nothing for me as a listener. As I write this, I'm forcing myself to listen
to Babbitt's Arie da
Capo, and it might as well be muzak for
all I care, since it's totally forgettable and just plain boring.
So back to Perspectives on New Music. What strikes me, having looked through the tables of contents for everything from the early 60's to the last issue a few years ago, is how much this publication summarizes everything I despised about academic music growing up. I noticed an article in there somewhere trying to prove that even early Schoenberg had serial structures. I guess if you work hard enough, you can analyze any piece of music to justify a particular position, kind of like how statistics can be misused. There are tons of articles either by Milton Babbitt or about his muisic, yet hardly anything about Feldman (even after his death in 1987, there was no tribute to Feldman while tributes to lesser-known composers abound in back issues of PONM). There are, to be sure, a few token articles on what I would consider to be “new music,” including a smattering of articles by or about Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier, Conlon Nancarrow and even a very authoritative article on La Monte Young penned by Kyle Gann. But that's it; even Berio doesn't make out that well, with only an article or two on his music. Yet there's tons of stuff relating to Arthur Berger, Kenneth Gaburo, Charles Wuorinen, and others in the uptown crowd. Glass, Palestine, Riley, Meredith Monk, Leach, Chatham, Branca, Curran, Garland, Johnson, Annea Lockwood, Spiegel, Duckworth...where are they?
When people dispute that there really was an academic, uptown bias that pervaded the music world in the last half of the 20th century, I would simply refer these folks to PONM. There are pages upon pages of mental gyrations that seek to justify total serialism to the exclusion of all else. It was even sort of a polemic. I have nothing against anyone going through a score and analyzing it. All of us do it; it can even be fun, sort of like finding buried treasure or seeing the hidden picture in one of those computer-generated 3D images that were popular a few years ago. Webern wrote some amazing canons, probably the best of any since Bach, and there is certainly great beauty not just in how the music sounds, but how it was constructed. But all the great composers like Webern and Stravinsky were more concerned, at the end of the day, with how their music sounded. Serialism was just a tool to get there. The problem I have with most of the articles in PONM, aside from its large-scale exclusion of what really constituted “new music” at that time, is that it fosters the notion that if one doesn't rigidly construct a piece of music, it's not as worthy of being heard. Sure, there is a certain genius in how Carter generates his rhythms, or how Babbitt puts together his pitch structures, dynamics, and other elements. And it's cool to analyze it. But the amounts of analysis make all this stuff seem like a mathematical exercise. Math is beautiful, to be sure, but it's math, not music.
I don't construct my pieces, preferring to write music through improvisation. I will, from time to time, write palindromic measures, and even use some serial forms in terms of trichords, where four trichords form a series of 12 tones. But other than a canon or two here and there, that's about it. I used to do that sort of thing all the time; there are several types of 12-tone canons in ineffabilities and in four landscapes for six instruments:
And I'm sure the folks who wrote all those articles about pitch class and rhythmic serialization would really love to take a crack at my later stuff like for philip glass or even ushabti, both of which occasionally use some serial structures. But really, I'm over this stuff. There's nothing worth analyzing in anything I've written since ineffabilities back in 1981. And even ineffabilities deviates from the row all over the place. After writing it, I was so drained by the entire 12-tone approach that I didn't think I would ever write anything again. I was basically tired of intricately manipulating rows to sound like what I wanted to write, and I finally just gave myself permission to write whatever I wanted without any formal constraints like serialism, tonality or basic musical structures (like sonata form, etc). That I felt I needed permission to do this is really sad, but that was the musical world I was living in at the time. There were plenty of people who were writing some amazing things that would never make it to the pages of Perspectives on New Music, all of whom didn't care about the sorts of formalities I described. But a lot of this was underground, and was certainly not being taught in most academic centers. Certainly not where I was attending college at the time.
How sad that music came to this, where formalities and rigid structures essentially put a lot of people into straightjackets where they had to write music that reflected this sort of analytical process. There's a review of Irving Fine's Symphony in one of the issues of Perspectives that notes its use of the 12-tone system, but also remarks on its deviations. But the ultimate comment by the reviewer was as follows:
“It is not in the ”path-breaking“ category of contemporary works. But it has every right, I feel, to find a place in that much needed repertoire of modern music–among those works, developed within a vital and active tradition, that reveal a markedly personal idiom.”
Glad they cut Fine's symphony some slack. I think it's one of the better orchestral pieces by an American composer in the last 50 years, even if it isn't “path-breaking.” Sheesh...isn't the music all that matters, rather than how it's composed? Is a novel that uses some intricate forms, like Ulysses, necessarily superior to something that doesn't, but is a good read nonetheless?
This is why reading stuff like Perspectives on New Music gives me the willies. I'd like to think we've moved on past this sort of cold, calculating approach to new music.
So back to Perspectives on New Music. What strikes me, having looked through the tables of contents for everything from the early 60's to the last issue a few years ago, is how much this publication summarizes everything I despised about academic music growing up. I noticed an article in there somewhere trying to prove that even early Schoenberg had serial structures. I guess if you work hard enough, you can analyze any piece of music to justify a particular position, kind of like how statistics can be misused. There are tons of articles either by Milton Babbitt or about his muisic, yet hardly anything about Feldman (even after his death in 1987, there was no tribute to Feldman while tributes to lesser-known composers abound in back issues of PONM). There are, to be sure, a few token articles on what I would consider to be “new music,” including a smattering of articles by or about Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier, Conlon Nancarrow and even a very authoritative article on La Monte Young penned by Kyle Gann. But that's it; even Berio doesn't make out that well, with only an article or two on his music. Yet there's tons of stuff relating to Arthur Berger, Kenneth Gaburo, Charles Wuorinen, and others in the uptown crowd. Glass, Palestine, Riley, Meredith Monk, Leach, Chatham, Branca, Curran, Garland, Johnson, Annea Lockwood, Spiegel, Duckworth...where are they?
When people dispute that there really was an academic, uptown bias that pervaded the music world in the last half of the 20th century, I would simply refer these folks to PONM. There are pages upon pages of mental gyrations that seek to justify total serialism to the exclusion of all else. It was even sort of a polemic. I have nothing against anyone going through a score and analyzing it. All of us do it; it can even be fun, sort of like finding buried treasure or seeing the hidden picture in one of those computer-generated 3D images that were popular a few years ago. Webern wrote some amazing canons, probably the best of any since Bach, and there is certainly great beauty not just in how the music sounds, but how it was constructed. But all the great composers like Webern and Stravinsky were more concerned, at the end of the day, with how their music sounded. Serialism was just a tool to get there. The problem I have with most of the articles in PONM, aside from its large-scale exclusion of what really constituted “new music” at that time, is that it fosters the notion that if one doesn't rigidly construct a piece of music, it's not as worthy of being heard. Sure, there is a certain genius in how Carter generates his rhythms, or how Babbitt puts together his pitch structures, dynamics, and other elements. And it's cool to analyze it. But the amounts of analysis make all this stuff seem like a mathematical exercise. Math is beautiful, to be sure, but it's math, not music.
I don't construct my pieces, preferring to write music through improvisation. I will, from time to time, write palindromic measures, and even use some serial forms in terms of trichords, where four trichords form a series of 12 tones. But other than a canon or two here and there, that's about it. I used to do that sort of thing all the time; there are several types of 12-tone canons in ineffabilities and in four landscapes for six instruments:
And I'm sure the folks who wrote all those articles about pitch class and rhythmic serialization would really love to take a crack at my later stuff like for philip glass or even ushabti, both of which occasionally use some serial structures. But really, I'm over this stuff. There's nothing worth analyzing in anything I've written since ineffabilities back in 1981. And even ineffabilities deviates from the row all over the place. After writing it, I was so drained by the entire 12-tone approach that I didn't think I would ever write anything again. I was basically tired of intricately manipulating rows to sound like what I wanted to write, and I finally just gave myself permission to write whatever I wanted without any formal constraints like serialism, tonality or basic musical structures (like sonata form, etc). That I felt I needed permission to do this is really sad, but that was the musical world I was living in at the time. There were plenty of people who were writing some amazing things that would never make it to the pages of Perspectives on New Music, all of whom didn't care about the sorts of formalities I described. But a lot of this was underground, and was certainly not being taught in most academic centers. Certainly not where I was attending college at the time.
How sad that music came to this, where formalities and rigid structures essentially put a lot of people into straightjackets where they had to write music that reflected this sort of analytical process. There's a review of Irving Fine's Symphony in one of the issues of Perspectives that notes its use of the 12-tone system, but also remarks on its deviations. But the ultimate comment by the reviewer was as follows:
“It is not in the ”path-breaking“ category of contemporary works. But it has every right, I feel, to find a place in that much needed repertoire of modern music–among those works, developed within a vital and active tradition, that reveal a markedly personal idiom.”
Glad they cut Fine's symphony some slack. I think it's one of the better orchestral pieces by an American composer in the last 50 years, even if it isn't “path-breaking.” Sheesh...isn't the music all that matters, rather than how it's composed? Is a novel that uses some intricate forms, like Ulysses, necessarily superior to something that doesn't, but is a good read nonetheless?
This is why reading stuff like Perspectives on New Music gives me the willies. I'd like to think we've moved on past this sort of cold, calculating approach to new music.
Posted at 10:19 AM
Sat - February 16, 2008
Ives' Universe Symphony
Growing up with the visionary music of
Charles Ives, I'd heard much about his unfinished Universe Symphony, and that
was about it. For years it was considered not just unfinished, but existing as a
fragmentary mess, with sketches that were incomplete, on scraps of music paper,
etc. The composer Larry Austin made a realization of the sketches, but these
were never really accepted as Ives but rather as Austin channelling Ives. The
situation changed a bit when Johnny Reinhard, who is a very active microtonal
devotee, took up the study of the fragments of the Universe Symphony and
eventually found that the situation wasn't quite as bleak as the word on the
street would have it. He started to grasp the obscure notes Ives had made
indicating how various fragments should be put together, although the challenge
probably rivaled figuring out how thousands of small DNA fragments should be put
back together as accomplished with the Human Genome
Project.
So I downloaded the Reinhard version from Amazon (no DRM, unlike iTunes...I like that) and have been listening to it for several days, including right now. While the entire endeavor has become somewhat politicized, despite an endorsement from the Ives Society, I personally like the work. No, it's not much, if anything, like the Fourth Symphony or any of Ives' other works. It's also fragmented; one thing I don't like about the recording is that there is absolutely no space at the end of each section. At least on the mp3 version, there are just no gaps between tracks. But the music is great anyway. I really like the long movement that is essentially just unpitched percussion for 20 minutes followed by about 10 minutes of music with the addition of non-percussion instruments. This predated Varese's Ionization and Cage's Construction in Metal by years. But at the same time, it is very much unlike Ives, at least the Ives that we knew through his other works.
What is particularly interesting about the Universe Symphony, apart from the idea of having different orchestras playing on separate mountaintops, is that Universe was meant to be worked on by one or more composers besides Ives. In other words, Ives had no qualms whatsoever about someone coming along, taking his music, and running with it. In effect, Ives anticipated the Creative Commons music by almost a century.
So is it Ives? Mostly Ives? Halfway there? Who cares? I find it really enjoyable to listen to and, just as with the Deryck Cooke version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony, I'm glad someone took the time to finalize music that otherwise would never have been heard.
So I downloaded the Reinhard version from Amazon (no DRM, unlike iTunes...I like that) and have been listening to it for several days, including right now. While the entire endeavor has become somewhat politicized, despite an endorsement from the Ives Society, I personally like the work. No, it's not much, if anything, like the Fourth Symphony or any of Ives' other works. It's also fragmented; one thing I don't like about the recording is that there is absolutely no space at the end of each section. At least on the mp3 version, there are just no gaps between tracks. But the music is great anyway. I really like the long movement that is essentially just unpitched percussion for 20 minutes followed by about 10 minutes of music with the addition of non-percussion instruments. This predated Varese's Ionization and Cage's Construction in Metal by years. But at the same time, it is very much unlike Ives, at least the Ives that we knew through his other works.
What is particularly interesting about the Universe Symphony, apart from the idea of having different orchestras playing on separate mountaintops, is that Universe was meant to be worked on by one or more composers besides Ives. In other words, Ives had no qualms whatsoever about someone coming along, taking his music, and running with it. In effect, Ives anticipated the Creative Commons music by almost a century.
So is it Ives? Mostly Ives? Halfway there? Who cares? I find it really enjoyable to listen to and, just as with the Deryck Cooke version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony, I'm glad someone took the time to finalize music that otherwise would never have been heard.
Posted at 02:10 PM
playing with a macbook air at the stockton street apple store
I managed to get out for a few moments
yesterday while at a meeting in San Francisco and went for a return visit to the
Apple Store on Stockton Ave, my third visit there in four years. As usual, it
was busy, and at the front of the store were, you guessed it, several MacBook
Air models. What was interesting is that people weren't so much trying out all
the usual things one does with a computer, like checking out how fast
applications launch, etc. Rather, people tended to examine the MBA with the lid
closed, picking it up and turning it over to grasp its thin dimensions.
I certainly did the same, and yes it is definitely thin. The display is excellent, as is the keyboard. For all the dismay about the slower hard disk speed and older Intel CPU, I found it to be pretty fast, although a few minutes' of messing around is certainly not going to give an accurate picture as far as performance. I figured I'd try the new trackpad gestures that are like those on the iPhone, including the ability to move forward and backward in browsers with the trackpad. Surprisingly, this was not enabled on the machine I was using, so I went into System Preferences and tried to enable this. Maybe it was the particular MBA I was using, but the trackpad preference window was illegible, since the previous System Prefs window continued to merge with it. I quit and relaunched System Preferences, and same thing. Another attempt didn't even load the trackpad preferences; rather, it just said Loading... and after a minute of that, I bailed. Granted, it's clearly a software glitch, most likely on that particular unit, and I didn't get to try another one i the short time I was in the store. But I felt like I was back at Circuit City years ago playing with a demo Mac that was neglected and buggy. Maybe it's something with 10.5 (Leopard). But I was really surprised that a relatively new demo model in one of the main Apple Stores out there didn't have one of its salient features enabled, and couldn't be enabled due to a software glitch anyway.
Am I nitpicking this? Sure. But I've always been struck by how choreographed everything is in an Apple Store. The lighting, the design, which computer models are placed where...everything is arranged for maximum effect, as it should be. But very importantly, all the computers I've ever used at an Apple Store worked flawlessly. System glitches just never happened to me before in that setting. Maybe there's a first time for everything.
Anyway, back to the MBA. It's a lovely machine, although I have to say that apart from the extra weight and perhaps a more scrunched keyboard, my 12“ iBook G4 that I'm typing this on at 39,000 feet is a pleasure to use on a long flight. Plus it plays DVDs, which would require a USB-based Superdrive for an additional $99 on the MBA. Then again, my iBook was just over half the price of the base MBA, so if you have money to spare on a new MBA, what's another $99 for a Superdrive?
And as I think about it more, my initial negative reactions to the MBA perhaps were a bit too harsh. The point of having a MBA isn't to replace one's desktop machine or even one's laptop workhorse. It's for schlepping around so that you have all the basic stuff you need and no more. It's a minimalist computer, and what it does retain is very good. I suspect the price will come down in a few months, and that would likely spur more sales of the MBA. Right now, I think many people are gawking at it but haven't gotten to the point where they understand the logic of a more minimalist laptop.
I certainly did the same, and yes it is definitely thin. The display is excellent, as is the keyboard. For all the dismay about the slower hard disk speed and older Intel CPU, I found it to be pretty fast, although a few minutes' of messing around is certainly not going to give an accurate picture as far as performance. I figured I'd try the new trackpad gestures that are like those on the iPhone, including the ability to move forward and backward in browsers with the trackpad. Surprisingly, this was not enabled on the machine I was using, so I went into System Preferences and tried to enable this. Maybe it was the particular MBA I was using, but the trackpad preference window was illegible, since the previous System Prefs window continued to merge with it. I quit and relaunched System Preferences, and same thing. Another attempt didn't even load the trackpad preferences; rather, it just said Loading... and after a minute of that, I bailed. Granted, it's clearly a software glitch, most likely on that particular unit, and I didn't get to try another one i the short time I was in the store. But I felt like I was back at Circuit City years ago playing with a demo Mac that was neglected and buggy. Maybe it's something with 10.5 (Leopard). But I was really surprised that a relatively new demo model in one of the main Apple Stores out there didn't have one of its salient features enabled, and couldn't be enabled due to a software glitch anyway.
Am I nitpicking this? Sure. But I've always been struck by how choreographed everything is in an Apple Store. The lighting, the design, which computer models are placed where...everything is arranged for maximum effect, as it should be. But very importantly, all the computers I've ever used at an Apple Store worked flawlessly. System glitches just never happened to me before in that setting. Maybe there's a first time for everything.
Anyway, back to the MBA. It's a lovely machine, although I have to say that apart from the extra weight and perhaps a more scrunched keyboard, my 12“ iBook G4 that I'm typing this on at 39,000 feet is a pleasure to use on a long flight. Plus it plays DVDs, which would require a USB-based Superdrive for an additional $99 on the MBA. Then again, my iBook was just over half the price of the base MBA, so if you have money to spare on a new MBA, what's another $99 for a Superdrive?
And as I think about it more, my initial negative reactions to the MBA perhaps were a bit too harsh. The point of having a MBA isn't to replace one's desktop machine or even one's laptop workhorse. It's for schlepping around so that you have all the basic stuff you need and no more. It's a minimalist computer, and what it does retain is very good. I suspect the price will come down in a few months, and that would likely spur more sales of the MBA. Right now, I think many people are gawking at it but haven't gotten to the point where they understand the logic of a more minimalist laptop.
Posted at 01:54 PM
score of ushabti now available
I had a long flight today to San Francisco
and am flying back tomorrow morning. On the flight, I finally had an opportunity
to look over the finished score of ushabti and as best I can tell, it's ready to
go. I'll probably find something to fix on the flight back tomorrow, but I just
uploaded it to the server, so feel free
to take a look.
Posted at 01:12 AM
Fri - February 15, 2008
steve layton's realization of darfur pogrommen
My piece from a few months ago, darfur pogrommen, is written for open instrumentation. That means it could ostensibly be performed by any number and type of instruments (although at least 1-2 sustaining instruments would be optimal for notes that are held). I did a less-than-ideal version for strings in Finale, which is flawed by some erratic playback in the beginning that probably won't get fixed until I eventually get a better CPU. I then did a version for strings, winds, vibes and keyboards using Reason 4.0, and that's the better of the two for sure.
Well now there's version #3, and it's really great. Not surprising, since it comes from the MIDI talents of Steve Layton, who also did a wicked good version of my 80's piano work textbook. In both cases, Steve had to deal with a slightly less than optimal MIDI file, and also liked the music to lend his own stamp. In the case of darfur pogrommen, he liked the ending so much he repeated a few notes after I had finished the piece! And I''m perfectly fine with someone making a piece of mine his or her own, just as Ives could have cared less who did what with his Universe Symphony and other works. So long as people acknowledge that I'm the starting point, I take it as a form of flattery.
The liner notes for Steve's release is here. Steve's version is available on iTunes, as well as through Steve's own Niwo label, and soon through eMusic (which will be a first for me). I say, collect all three versions and listen to them end-to-end for about 2.5 hours of continuous postminimalism.
Guess it's time to update the sidebar and my MySpace page with a link to Steve's album.
Posted at 08:48 PM
Mon - February 11, 2008
ideas for next piece
I'm probably taking a bit of a hiatus from
writing new music, since I don't have any major musical ideas at hand, and I
also really want to finally finish inputting some older works of mine into
Finale. I'm almost halfway done with my first postminimalist piece from 1981,
which was a long piano piece. Until I get it all digitized, I don't even know
how long it would take in performance, since I've never played it through start
to finish. I suspect it's on the order of 2 hours, but it remains a mystery. I
also have an old set of songs I wrote around the age of 17 to poems by Joyce.
You can hear the first and only performance here. It is from an old cassette tape that's
seen better days, was not professionally recorded, and the pianist is pretty
horrendous (it was me but then, I've never every claimed to be a decent pianist,
since I'm not). Some other old works I'd like to get into Finale format: a piece
for violin and piano (12-tone; what do you want, I was a kid!) and a
postminimalist work for chamber ensemble called
canonical
ensembles.
Funny stories about both of these: I dedicated the violin and piano work to the scientist George Beadle, with whom I was doing a research project on the origin of corn (and just so there's no misunderstanding, modern corn is indeed related closely to teosinte [zea mexicanus], regardless of what those misguided folks at Harvard thought at the time). Beadle showed it to a neighbor of his (he lived just across the street from the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, which is one of the best science museums on the planet) who was a professional violinist with an orchestra. It apparently provoked a bit of a reaction. Beadle was, of course, a midwestern gentleman from Nebraska; apart from those sadly mistaken Harvard folks, he never said anything negative about anyone or anything. So I suspect my score, which admittedly is excruciatingly difficult to perform from a violinist's perspective, went over even worse than Beadle was going to relate back to me, being a gentleman and all that. So it's sat for almost 30 years in a box and I'd love for it to at least be seen if not heard. The other work is a pun; there are no canons whatsoever in the entire piece. Not a one. The term “canonical ensemble” is a statistical mechanics term from a physical chemistry class I took in college. At the molecular level, things are determined more by probability than anything else, but it isn't an indeterminate piece, although that would have been a nice idea I suppose.
I have some old works that I doubt I'll ever get around to digitizing. And that's probably all for the best. I have the only completed work for orchestra I ever wrote, which is pretty long and has some great parts. But it would be a bear to dump into notation software and even worse to try to use to generate an audio file that's worth anything. Maybe when/if I retire...
So while I want to get 1-2 of these things digitized already, having planned to do so at least two years ago, I also want to do some new things. I've been interested for some time in setting some Palestinian poetry to music, more as a political statement and as a means to try to build bridges than anything else, but have yet to find texts that I would want to set. So I started thinking: what about setting some blog posts from around the Web? Not that I care about or need precedent, but there is ample precedent for taking everyday texts and using them in music (Partch's Barstow, the third movement of Berio's Sinfonia, some of the 70's music of Rzewski, etc). So perhaps that's what I'll end up doing; hopefully it will be the first new music composition using blogs as texts. Just a thought...
Funny stories about both of these: I dedicated the violin and piano work to the scientist George Beadle, with whom I was doing a research project on the origin of corn (and just so there's no misunderstanding, modern corn is indeed related closely to teosinte [zea mexicanus], regardless of what those misguided folks at Harvard thought at the time). Beadle showed it to a neighbor of his (he lived just across the street from the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, which is one of the best science museums on the planet) who was a professional violinist with an orchestra. It apparently provoked a bit of a reaction. Beadle was, of course, a midwestern gentleman from Nebraska; apart from those sadly mistaken Harvard folks, he never said anything negative about anyone or anything. So I suspect my score, which admittedly is excruciatingly difficult to perform from a violinist's perspective, went over even worse than Beadle was going to relate back to me, being a gentleman and all that. So it's sat for almost 30 years in a box and I'd love for it to at least be seen if not heard. The other work is a pun; there are no canons whatsoever in the entire piece. Not a one. The term “canonical ensemble” is a statistical mechanics term from a physical chemistry class I took in college. At the molecular level, things are determined more by probability than anything else, but it isn't an indeterminate piece, although that would have been a nice idea I suppose.
I have some old works that I doubt I'll ever get around to digitizing. And that's probably all for the best. I have the only completed work for orchestra I ever wrote, which is pretty long and has some great parts. But it would be a bear to dump into notation software and even worse to try to use to generate an audio file that's worth anything. Maybe when/if I retire...
So while I want to get 1-2 of these things digitized already, having planned to do so at least two years ago, I also want to do some new things. I've been interested for some time in setting some Palestinian poetry to music, more as a political statement and as a means to try to build bridges than anything else, but have yet to find texts that I would want to set. So I started thinking: what about setting some blog posts from around the Web? Not that I care about or need precedent, but there is ample precedent for taking everyday texts and using them in music (Partch's Barstow, the third movement of Berio's Sinfonia, some of the 70's music of Rzewski, etc). So perhaps that's what I'll end up doing; hopefully it will be the first new music composition using blogs as texts. Just a thought...
Posted at 01:07 PM
Thu - January 31, 2008
a morton feldman day
My playlist yesterday, beginning with the drive into work:
Crippled Symmetry
For Philip Guston
For John Cage
That took up the day; Crippled Symmetry is around 80 minutes, For Philip Guston is 4 hours and For John Cage is a good hour and a half.
As if that wasn't wonderful enough, I'm now 42 minutes into disc one of String Quartet II. I can get through all 6+ hours of it and then some in the course of a work day.
Feldman's music, particularly his works since 1978 or thereabouts, are among the greatest works of the last century. They're still terribly underperformed in the US, but at least they do get heard. Kyle Gann recently wrote a detailed essay about Feldman that is dead on, and says much of what I've thought for some time. I also came across a partial transcript of a talk Feldman gave in Toronto that is absolutely hysterical (his Jewish mother joke alone is worth the lengthy read). To say that Feldman's music has had as significant an impact on my own work as did that of the early minimalists is no understatement.
Posted at 08:48 AM
Mon - January 28, 2008
ushabti (2007-2008) for violin and piano
OK, it's up on the site here. I have to double-check the score in detail to make sure it looks ok, so that's not on the site as of yet, but hopefully soon. The audio file, created using Garritan Personal Orchestra (GPO; the version that came with Finale 2008) sounds pretty good. There's one short section towards the end in which the violinist plays col legno (with the wood part of the bow) alternating with a single pizzicato Db that sounds like it's all pizzicato only because GPO doesn't have a col legno sample, at least in the version I have. Also, the last 20 seconds or so has some unwanted accents (it's really just a steady stream of 16ths) that I couldn't get rid of no matter what I did with Finale, so that got sent off to the developers as a possible bug or issues. But other than that, it was fine for posting.
So what's with the name, anyway? An ushabti is a small figure that was left with dead Egyptians when they were buried in the hopes that it would come to life and do the deceased's work in the fields of of Osiris. It has nothing to do with the music, but as I explain, I thought it sounded cool, which is how I choose all the titles for my music. Like textbook: music of descending landscapes in hyperspace (piece for IPS). Pretty cool, no? 8-)
The piece started out as an improvisation I did in 2007, but I didn't do anything with the piece until recently since I was working on darfur pogrommen, and in the interim, my synthesizer died as was amply documented in this blog. The actual improvisation is here. The final result is considerably expanded, of course, but I find it interesting to look back at my original sketches and see how far things have come, what changed, what didn't, etc. I was initially thinking of the piece as one for solo piano, and might still arranged it for piano at some point.
So what's next? I'm not entirely sure. I have to finish dumping some old scores into digital format (just the stuff worth keeping, of course, including my first postminimalist piece from 25 years ago or thereabouts). I'd also like to set some poetry to music, but I have some controversial ideas for that I need to think through first.
Posted at 12:01 PM
Sat - January 26, 2008
it's done
Just finished a new
piece.
I need to listen to it in its entirety a
bit to see if anything needs to be tweaked, but I think it's there. It's for
violin and piano and clocks in a few seconds shy of 40 minutes. Once I'm
convinced it's there, I'll post it.
Posted at 05:50 PM
Tue - January 22, 2008
where CME is heading
For probably 2-3 years, I've been saying that
within the next decade, commercial support of CME was going to die off and like
nurses, lawyers and other professionals, physicians will have to pay their own
way for CME, which will also become much more oriented towards performance
improvement, making a difference in clinical
care.
All but two people to whom I've said this, besides Debbie, have left thinking I'm from Mars.
Well, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation agrees with me.
So there. QED.
All but two people to whom I've said this, besides Debbie, have left thinking I'm from Mars.
Well, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation agrees with me.
So there. QED.
Posted at 08:59 AM
on listening to babbitt
Nothing personal, but ever since I was a kid
who listened to a ton of new music, the works of Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter
and a few others summed up the worst in contemporary music for me. These guys
were taken as the epitome of “new music,” the leading composers of
the 60's and 70's if not later. And they ruined it for the rest of us for
decades. This “creepy music,” as Philip Glass would term it, served
as the paradigm for modern music: thorny, theoretical, very hard to play,
lacking a beat, no obvious melodies, etc. Nasty, nasty
stuff.
Now, I've studied Carter's scores in detail. In the late 70's he was considered the great American composer, the true heir to Aaron Copland, who was essentially MIA at that point and soon to pass away. Carter's scores are a marvel to look at, particularly works like his Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras, the Piano Concerto, and the Third String Quartet. Without question he had interesting ideas about rhythm, and it always amazed me that his music could be played at all, given that something like Cowell's beautiful Quartet Romantic waited so long for its premiere, and when I attended it the performers had to listen to click tracks since the rhythms were so hypercomplex. But Cowell's work is enticing, Carter's music never grabbed me at all. I'd listen to it over and over again, hoping to find something in it to keep me engaged, since he was clearly so celebrated and all that. But nothing. Maybe a few measures of his Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord. But that's it. Carter's certainly a nice guy, and it's great that he's still actively composing as he reaches his 100th birthday. But nothing works for me...sorry, Elliott. I even remember a student of his whom I knew, who shall remain nameless, who blew me off as soon as he heard me say that I wasn't a fan of Carter's music. That's all it took, and perhaps that's evidence to support my feeling that there was a cult of Carter at the time that broached no discord.
Which brings me to Milton Babbitt. Again, I'm sure he's a nice person, even if he is known to be conservative in his political views. But his works never sounded anything to me other than a bunch of notes rather than music. I've been giving it another shot recently, listening to a ton of his piano music that spans his career, along with some chamber works and his brief song Philomel that everyone under the sun seems to think is the greatest thing since tofu. Well, none of this music works for me. I can sort of get into his Three Compositions for Piano that represents the first total serial piece, preceding a far better work by Messiaen (Mode de Valeurs et d'intensities). But that's about it. Babbitt, unlike Carter, is a devoted serialist. That's fine, since I have nothing against 12-tone music or serialism in general, and indeed wrote a number of 12-tone works, some of which I still am very fond of (such as Ineffabiities). I love nearly everything Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Dallapiccola, and a few other early serialists wrote. I gave up writing 12-tone music around 1981 because I just reached a dead end with it; I had done everything I wanted to do with it, and my musical inclinations were heading much more in a postminimalist direction. And I certainly appreciated the academic rigor of serialism, being a geek and all that. But after awhile, when I want to geek out, I'll turn to something in the sciences. Music isn't something I like to partake of in an academic sense. It's much more important than making it an academic exercise.
So while the music of Ralph Shapey, which is certainly born of an academic wannabe setting, is generally compelling for the most part, that's as academic as I'm willing to have my musical listening experiences go. In other words, it's Shapey and nothing further. No Babbitt. No Carter. A small amount of Boulez can be ok (I like his piano sonatas, but the jury's still out of Le Marteau Sans Maitre, his most widely accepted piece). Even Luigi Nono can work for me. But not Babbitt. I'm giving up with my experiment and won't force myself to listen to his music over and over again in the hopes of finding something that takes me in. It's not about his writings, like the one unfortunately titled by a publisher “Who Cares if You Listen?,”or the academic papers I've read that maintain that combinatoriality and other aspects of 12-tone music are superior to all else. But it is about the music, which is all that matters.
If you like Babbitt's music, then good for you. I can respect that. Please respect my lack of interest in his music. I'm not criticizing something I'm not familiar with. I've tried to like his works. I've really tried.
Now, I've studied Carter's scores in detail. In the late 70's he was considered the great American composer, the true heir to Aaron Copland, who was essentially MIA at that point and soon to pass away. Carter's scores are a marvel to look at, particularly works like his Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras, the Piano Concerto, and the Third String Quartet. Without question he had interesting ideas about rhythm, and it always amazed me that his music could be played at all, given that something like Cowell's beautiful Quartet Romantic waited so long for its premiere, and when I attended it the performers had to listen to click tracks since the rhythms were so hypercomplex. But Cowell's work is enticing, Carter's music never grabbed me at all. I'd listen to it over and over again, hoping to find something in it to keep me engaged, since he was clearly so celebrated and all that. But nothing. Maybe a few measures of his Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord. But that's it. Carter's certainly a nice guy, and it's great that he's still actively composing as he reaches his 100th birthday. But nothing works for me...sorry, Elliott. I even remember a student of his whom I knew, who shall remain nameless, who blew me off as soon as he heard me say that I wasn't a fan of Carter's music. That's all it took, and perhaps that's evidence to support my feeling that there was a cult of Carter at the time that broached no discord.
Which brings me to Milton Babbitt. Again, I'm sure he's a nice person, even if he is known to be conservative in his political views. But his works never sounded anything to me other than a bunch of notes rather than music. I've been giving it another shot recently, listening to a ton of his piano music that spans his career, along with some chamber works and his brief song Philomel that everyone under the sun seems to think is the greatest thing since tofu. Well, none of this music works for me. I can sort of get into his Three Compositions for Piano that represents the first total serial piece, preceding a far better work by Messiaen (Mode de Valeurs et d'intensities). But that's about it. Babbitt, unlike Carter, is a devoted serialist. That's fine, since I have nothing against 12-tone music or serialism in general, and indeed wrote a number of 12-tone works, some of which I still am very fond of (such as Ineffabiities). I love nearly everything Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Dallapiccola, and a few other early serialists wrote. I gave up writing 12-tone music around 1981 because I just reached a dead end with it; I had done everything I wanted to do with it, and my musical inclinations were heading much more in a postminimalist direction. And I certainly appreciated the academic rigor of serialism, being a geek and all that. But after awhile, when I want to geek out, I'll turn to something in the sciences. Music isn't something I like to partake of in an academic sense. It's much more important than making it an academic exercise.
So while the music of Ralph Shapey, which is certainly born of an academic wannabe setting, is generally compelling for the most part, that's as academic as I'm willing to have my musical listening experiences go. In other words, it's Shapey and nothing further. No Babbitt. No Carter. A small amount of Boulez can be ok (I like his piano sonatas, but the jury's still out of Le Marteau Sans Maitre, his most widely accepted piece). Even Luigi Nono can work for me. But not Babbitt. I'm giving up with my experiment and won't force myself to listen to his music over and over again in the hopes of finding something that takes me in. It's not about his writings, like the one unfortunately titled by a publisher “Who Cares if You Listen?,”or the academic papers I've read that maintain that combinatoriality and other aspects of 12-tone music are superior to all else. But it is about the music, which is all that matters.
If you like Babbitt's music, then good for you. I can respect that. Please respect my lack of interest in his music. I'm not criticizing something I'm not familiar with. I've tried to like his works. I've really tried.
Posted at 08:55 AM
Sat - January 19, 2008
more on netnewswire
I'm really liking NNW after a little over a
week of use. The sync with newsgator.com works perfectly, which means that I can
read my RSS feeds anywhere and not have to see the same ones again when my
newsreader downloads them. Even better---there's a version of NNW for my
BlackBerry. While it doesn't work as smoothly as NNW on my laptop, it works well
enough for me to read my feeds wherever I am with my BlackBerry. My only gripe
with the mobile version is that the unread list doesn't update itself
automatically, although the individual threads automatically get marked as read
when I read them.
Minor things on my wish list for NNW:
* Being able to flag and item or mark it unread by simply clicking on the flag or read status in the thread window (which can be done when using the Vienna RSS reader)
* For some reason, when I post to this blog and then refresh my subscriptions, I don't see my post in NNW. It comes much later, presumably at least 30 minutes later (the earliest NNW will automatically refresh itself) for some reason
Neither of these are major issues, just nice to have for a future release. So NNW has replaced Vienna as my default newsreader for now. I still keep Vienna handy only to get the URL of something I just posted, since it won't show up in NNW for awhile.
Minor things on my wish list for NNW:
* Being able to flag and item or mark it unread by simply clicking on the flag or read status in the thread window (which can be done when using the Vienna RSS reader)
* For some reason, when I post to this blog and then refresh my subscriptions, I don't see my post in NNW. It comes much later, presumably at least 30 minutes later (the earliest NNW will automatically refresh itself) for some reason
Neither of these are major issues, just nice to have for a future release. So NNW has replaced Vienna as my default newsreader for now. I still keep Vienna handy only to get the URL of something I just posted, since it won't show up in NNW for awhile.
Posted at 05:23 PM
Wed - January 16, 2008
another cube...
I saw the detailed rumor the day before the Macworld keynote about the MacBook Air (MBA---pun intended, perhaps?). The rumor site even got the name correct, and aside from some hinge details, pretty much nailed it except for a few points (like being able to connect to a DVD wirelessly through other computers). Without question it's a gorgeous machine. And if one inhabited a world where high-speed wireless networks were ubiquitous and free, and where one almost never needed to connect to a wired network or use a DVD or CD, then this would be perfect. However...
* While I suspect this is targeted at business users who need something really lightweight, it would have very little application in the companies I've worked in. Wireless networks are still shunned by many companies due to perceived security issues. All too often, I've needed to be able to access a CD or DVD. And then there's the whole backup and file sharing issue. Sometimes it's just more practical to burn a CD or DVD than share it via a network. And in terms of backups, I do like to have things on DVD as well as on a hard drive.
* While it was expected that the hard drive size would be constrained by the size, there's no way I could go with an 80 GB drive I've almost maxed out my 80 GB iBook drive as it is. And the hard drive is not user-upgradable. If they can put a 160 GB drive in an iPod, why not a laptop?
* Battery is not user-replaceable. That's a bummer.
* Ethernet is an extra cost via an adapter, same with a Superdrive. That adds over $100 to the cost.
* Is anyone really going to shell out $1000 extra for a MacBook Air with a smaller drive, albeit one using Flash memory? Really?
* While the CPU is undoubtedly faster than the 1.33 GHz G4 PPC chip I'm using to type this, it's slower than other MacBooks and MacBook Pros out there
* How do you troubleshoot this thing if you need to startup from a DVD or CD on the road? Sure, you can buy the Superdrive and bring it with you, but not everyone will. Why not bundle the Ethernet adapter and Superdrive with the machine in the first place? And without FireWire, how can one use FW Target Mode to transfer data from an old machine to this one? I'd hate to do this wirelessly---if the old machine has 802.11g like my iBook, that's going to be the bottleneck. Sure, I transfer a 10 MB Quicken file to and from our Mac Mini all the time. But that's 10 MB, not 70 GB of data.
Like the original iMac, Apple is making a statement, I think, that optical drives will go the way of the floppy drive. And perhaps they will, eventually. But with the iMac, Apple still included an optical drive, so there was some way to get data in from a disc of some kind. Wireless networking, and fast networking specifically, isn't that widely available. So I think they're a bit too ahead of the curve on this one.
On the other hand, if someone is fine with storing much of their media collection offline and has an 802.11n network available most of the time, then this is probably just fine. But I'd want to have the Superdrive with me until DVDs and CDs go the way of the floppy. It will definitely happen eventually. But not for a while longer, I suspect.
So the MBA reminds me a bit of the G4 Cube. Also a beautiful machine, and smaller than anything else like it at the time. But it was priced too high, and had some design quirks and limitations that kept many people from buying it, and it died a premature death. I hope this is not true of the MBA, but just the lack of a user-replaceable battery and upgradable RAM might be enough to keep many folks away.
Posted at 09:16 AM
Sat - January 12, 2008
visual recital workshop
The pianist and fellow technology aficionado Hugh Sung Is one of the nicest persons I know of, and his blog is always worth reading. I noted from a recent blog post of his that he was going to be be giving a virtual recital workshop today in my neck of the woods up in Willow Grove, PA. So of course I took Isaac with me and went to the workshop at Jacobs Music, sponsored by the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Pennsylvania Music Teacher's Association. That's me next to Hugh---he's holding his Fujitsu tablet PC while I'm wearing my finest Che Guevara shirt I brought back from Rome a few months ago.
It's always a pleasure to see Hugh, and he demonstrated his visual recital technology for a very large and welcoming audience. What Hugh does is provide visuals to the music he plays, using a tablet PC controlled by foot pedals (one to turn pages on his tablet, the other to fire off each visual effect). His command of a variety of presentation and video software is incredible, and he made it very non-threateninig for the audience of music teachers and some of their students. To be able to take new technology and make it less scary for a general audience is a great gift, and this is coupled with Hugh's incredible willingness to use the visuals to make music more accessible to audiences.
I know there's a faction within the new music community that believes what we do is haughty and shouldn't be “dumbed down” for the masses (BTW, I hate that term “dumb down,” incidentally---making music more understandable isn't “dumbing” it down). I don't agree with that faction---what we do is something that should be enJoyed by audiences and composers alike. I have no desire for people to sit glued to their chairs and pay rapt attention to my music like a drone out of the old Metropolis silent movie by Fritz Lang. If people need visual cues to better relate to my music, then great. If they want to get up and dance to it, that's wonderful (I've yet to see this happen, but I'm not averse to it). Hugh recognizes that classical music will be consigned to an even smaller niche unless we make it less mysterious. I often hear people lament “I'd love to listen to classical music, but I don't know anything about music.” This is a huge tragedy; you don't have to know anything about classical music to listen to it. Why is classical music so different in this regard from rock, hip-hop and other genres? Why can't people listen to classical music, particularly new music, regardless of whether or not they have had relevant training? What's wrong with classical music that we've reached the point where it is perceived as elitist and something only the educated can and should listen to?
I would love it if people from all walks of society listened to new music. Some people within the new music community needs to get off their high horse and do more to address the issue of accessibility. That doesn't mean “dumb down” the music or meld it with the latest Radiohead video. But it does mean communicating with audiences in such a way that classical music, and new music in particular, is less mysterious and, frankly, less scary. Hugh's definitely onto something important here, and it's to his credit that he not only recognized this need, but is doing something about it.
Posted at 05:14 PM
Fri - January 11, 2008
d-i-v-o-r-c-e
No, not me and Debbie. Rather, I'm referring
to me and the open-source Vienna RSS newsreader. I've left Vienna for
NetNewsWire. I've blogged about the wonders of Vienna before, and
indeed it's a great newsreader. I'd used NetNewsWire Lite before, but there were
more features in Vienna than in the lite version of NNW, and the full version of NNW cost money that I didn't
have. So Vienna it was, and it was a great run. Vienna is regularly updated, has
smart folders and tabbed Web pages, and runs off of WebKit.
But this past week NNW (the full version) became freely available. It's much faster than Vienna---there was a very long pause every time I'd switch to another feed in Vienna, particularly one with a lot of entries (like The Daily Kos). And if a blog post had an embedded video and I then switched to another blog post in Vienna, the previous one with the video would continue to display. NNW also syncs via NewsGator, and has similar style sheets to Vienna.
So I reluctantly switched after a fling last night in a hotel room in Seattle. Yes, I had an affair with another newsreader in a nice hotel room, and well, you know how those things go. But in this case, it wasn't a one-night stand. The speed difference with NNW was compelling, and as much as I've loved Vienna for all this time, my need for speed trumped everything. The sync ability was the icing on the cake. Now, Vienna does do a better job with searching within articles, plus it keeps old posts until you decide to delete it (NNW archives things, but I haven't played with that feature yet...give me time). But overall, it just felt like the right time to make a switch.
But I'd like this divorce to be amicable. I harbor no ill will towards Vienna---it's a great open-source RSS and Atom newsreader, and I stand by all the praise I've ever showered upon it. But NewNewsWire, now that it's free, is just a bit more adorable. It performed magnificently last night in my hotel room...What can I say. Now that I'm 47, I guess male menopause is setting in and I'm getting fickle about RSS newsreaders. I guess I like my liquor hard and my RSS browsing fast. And boy is NetNewsWire fast. It gives great thread.
Of course, like all geeks who have affairs, if an even better newsreader as compared to NNW comes along...oh well...
But this past week NNW (the full version) became freely available. It's much faster than Vienna---there was a very long pause every time I'd switch to another feed in Vienna, particularly one with a lot of entries (like The Daily Kos). And if a blog post had an embedded video and I then switched to another blog post in Vienna, the previous one with the video would continue to display. NNW also syncs via NewsGator, and has similar style sheets to Vienna.
So I reluctantly switched after a fling last night in a hotel room in Seattle. Yes, I had an affair with another newsreader in a nice hotel room, and well, you know how those things go. But in this case, it wasn't a one-night stand. The speed difference with NNW was compelling, and as much as I've loved Vienna for all this time, my need for speed trumped everything. The sync ability was the icing on the cake. Now, Vienna does do a better job with searching within articles, plus it keeps old posts until you decide to delete it (NNW archives things, but I haven't played with that feature yet...give me time). But overall, it just felt like the right time to make a switch.
But I'd like this divorce to be amicable. I harbor no ill will towards Vienna---it's a great open-source RSS and Atom newsreader, and I stand by all the praise I've ever showered upon it. But NewNewsWire, now that it's free, is just a bit more adorable. It performed magnificently last night in my hotel room...What can I say. Now that I'm 47, I guess male menopause is setting in and I'm getting fickle about RSS newsreaders. I guess I like my liquor hard and my RSS browsing fast. And boy is NetNewsWire fast. It gives great thread.
Of course, like all geeks who have affairs, if an even better newsreader as compared to NNW comes along...oh well...
Posted at 07:43 PM
Mon - January 7, 2008
pensees
Just some random thoughts, without relation
to anything in particular or to Pascal's book. And besides, his
“proof” of god's existence, which is better known as “Pascal's
wager,“ is something I always thought was pretty lame, although many of
the Pensees
are pretty profound, like the one that
goes ”He lives on the other side of the water,“ which is really all
about how inane war is. Here
goes:
* I'm now only rarely seeing crashes in Safari 3 ever since I disabled the input manager-based add-on Safari Stand. It's a shame I had to disable it, since it is really cool to have little thumbnails of every Web page I've tabbed running along the left side of my browser window, but the crashes just got to be too much. I'm actually running nightly builds of WebKit so I can stay on the bleeding edge.
* Good for Obama
* Glad TDS and Colbert are going to be back tonight, even sans writers. Life has really sucked without them these past weeks.
* People really need to see the South African movie Tsotsi. While disturbing to the max, it has to have been one of the best movies I've seen in 2007. Plus there's a great soundtrack with Kwaito music by Zola and a few others.
* There's a lot of great, free new music to be had online, including some real treasures. Like this. And this. And even this. I'm also very much taken by Phill NIblock's flute music and this golden oldie.
* Indispensable digital audio tools: iTunes, Max (now that it doesn't crash on me all the time), Flaac, Audacity, WIreTap Pro, JoinTogether, Cog. Really awesome but too expensive: WireTap Studio. WTS has a great feature, namely the ability to hear the audio track while scrolling, which is really nice when you're editing digital audio (since you can easily find where to splice). But 70 bucks is too rich for my blood when I can do my editing with free tools like Audacity and the (now end-of-lifed) WireTap Pro. Still, I'm going to miss the audible editing cues when the trial runs out. Sign...
* Who knew Mentos and Diet Coke would provide a great demonstration of the physics of nucleation? And yes we tried this at home yesterday (I might have to post the footage when I have a moment).
* I'm now only rarely seeing crashes in Safari 3 ever since I disabled the input manager-based add-on Safari Stand. It's a shame I had to disable it, since it is really cool to have little thumbnails of every Web page I've tabbed running along the left side of my browser window, but the crashes just got to be too much. I'm actually running nightly builds of WebKit so I can stay on the bleeding edge.
* Good for Obama
* Glad TDS and Colbert are going to be back tonight, even sans writers. Life has really sucked without them these past weeks.
* People really need to see the South African movie Tsotsi. While disturbing to the max, it has to have been one of the best movies I've seen in 2007. Plus there's a great soundtrack with Kwaito music by Zola and a few others.
* There's a lot of great, free new music to be had online, including some real treasures. Like this. And this. And even this. I'm also very much taken by Phill NIblock's flute music and this golden oldie.
* Indispensable digital audio tools: iTunes, Max (now that it doesn't crash on me all the time), Flaac, Audacity, WIreTap Pro, JoinTogether, Cog. Really awesome but too expensive: WireTap Studio. WTS has a great feature, namely the ability to hear the audio track while scrolling, which is really nice when you're editing digital audio (since you can easily find where to splice). But 70 bucks is too rich for my blood when I can do my editing with free tools like Audacity and the (now end-of-lifed) WireTap Pro. Still, I'm going to miss the audible editing cues when the trial runs out. Sign...
* Who knew Mentos and Diet Coke would provide a great demonstration of the physics of nucleation? And yes we tried this at home yesterday (I might have to post the footage when I have a moment).
Posted at 08:34 PM
101111
As of a little over an hour and a half ago, I
aged another year. While I realize turning 47 isn't that big a deal (I mean,
isn't 50 the new old?), over the past year I've noticed some things. Like how
much harder it is for me to read my blackberry at night while driving home from
work at extreme speeds down Rt. 1 ( = presbyopia). Like how many times I forget
some arcane fact I used to know like the back of my hand, such as when to do a
partial differential equation rather than a linear differential equation ( =
premature senility). I could go on, but you get my
point.
If I look at things like how my iBook displays hard drive capacity, I'm seeing a bar that's at least 50% of capacity. So I'm determined to get a lot more music written before my personal hard drive (aka life expectancy) is maxed out. And see some cool places like Northern Pakistan and Nepal (ok, right now's probably not the best time to trek around the Karakoram, but I'm sure in a few years Musharraf will be gone and thanks to the Bush doctrine there will be democracy and peace in Pakistan...at least my sarcasm hasn't taken a hit from my advanced age). And get Arielle and Isaac off to their respective colleges so Debbie and I can retire to Berkeley (yes, Richard, you talked me out of the Portland, Oregon thing, although Portland sounds like a really neat place to live).
So turning 101111 maybe isn't that bad at all. If I don't lose more hair, that is.
Or not. But at least I'll have fun while trying to look like I actually know something.
BTW, happy 1000000 (or 100 in octal) to composer, photographer and programmer Richard Friedman, as of yesterday. He's really 11001 in spirit.
If I look at things like how my iBook displays hard drive capacity, I'm seeing a bar that's at least 50% of capacity. So I'm determined to get a lot more music written before my personal hard drive (aka life expectancy) is maxed out. And see some cool places like Northern Pakistan and Nepal (ok, right now's probably not the best time to trek around the Karakoram, but I'm sure in a few years Musharraf will be gone and thanks to the Bush doctrine there will be democracy and peace in Pakistan...at least my sarcasm hasn't taken a hit from my advanced age). And get Arielle and Isaac off to their respective colleges so Debbie and I can retire to Berkeley (yes, Richard, you talked me out of the Portland, Oregon thing, although Portland sounds like a really neat place to live).
So turning 101111 maybe isn't that bad at all. If I don't lose more hair, that is.
Or not. But at least I'll have fun while trying to look like I actually know something.
BTW, happy 1000000 (or 100 in octal) to composer, photographer and programmer Richard Friedman, as of yesterday. He's really 11001 in spirit.
Posted at 07:51 PM
joining together tracks in iTunes
If you're like me, you probably have some
classical music tracks on your machine that are meant to be played without
pause. While the later version of iTunes and the iPod can provide gapless
playback on the fly, my 4th-generation iPod doesn't support this feature.
Fortunately, there's a great free AppleScript called Join Together that can combine tracks in iTunes
via
QuickTime.
I was skeptical at first, since other scripts and programs I tried didn't seem to work very well. This one does, however. I used it to combine all 51 sections (“models”) of a recent recording of Stockhausen's Stimmung and it worked perfectly. Same with the different sections of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. I have to say that both of these works are less pleasant to listen to when gaps intrude during the transition from one continuous section to another, so Join Together makes a huge difference. IT has a great interface and can embed a whole bunch of ID tags that will end up in the final file. You can also make the file bookmarkable (the output of all of this is a AAC file). There are many more features that I can't even begin to discuss here, but are all clearly documented in the Read Me file. In all, I can't say enough about this free tool. Definitely one of the best applications/scripts I added to my Applications directory this year.
I was skeptical at first, since other scripts and programs I tried didn't seem to work very well. This one does, however. I used it to combine all 51 sections (“models”) of a recent recording of Stockhausen's Stimmung and it worked perfectly. Same with the different sections of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. I have to say that both of these works are less pleasant to listen to when gaps intrude during the transition from one continuous section to another, so Join Together makes a huge difference. IT has a great interface and can embed a whole bunch of ID tags that will end up in the final file. You can also make the file bookmarkable (the output of all of this is a AAC file). There are many more features that I can't even begin to discuss here, but are all clearly documented in the Read Me file. In all, I can't say enough about this free tool. Definitely one of the best applications/scripts I added to my Applications directory this year.
Posted at 07:00 AM
Tue - January 1, 2008
2006 stats
All in all, it was a pretty good year in terms of traffic to this site. The number of unique visitors was slightly down compared with 2006 (19,340 down from 20,510 the year previous), but I suspect I also haven't blogged as heavily during 2007 because of work demands, etc.
Bandwidth, however, was up. Way up:
Some of this, I'm sure, represents bogus traffic (robots, etc.), but I'd like to think it also represents an increase in music downloads from the music page. Either way, it's significantly up from where it started four years ago. What still amazes me is how many countries are represented in the Web logs: 116 in all. The most popular page, after the main blog page, remains my old post about my current (and then new) iBook that was suffering from a black screen of death (which ultimately was due to a bad logic board). The fact that I get several hits on this page every week, nearly 2000 in all of 2007, still amazes me, and makes me wonder if there are a lot of people who continue to have iBooks plagued with this issue.
Hoping 2008 is even busier in terms of traffic. And hoping that there are way fewer hits on that iBook glitch page.
Posted at 12:54 AM
Mon - December 31, 2007
another work in progress
As promised last week, preview here. It's about 27 minutes and I'm not done
with it, but this file provides a pretty good idea of where the piece is going.
Parts of it are really quiet, so if you don't hear much going on, crank up the
volume a bit.
Posted at 06:21 PM
Sun - December 30, 2007
vox novus
Thanks to LinkedIn, I
managed to come across and link to the profile of Robert Voisey, who runs an
online new music collective called Vox Novus. I noticed that several folks I know
of are members and have links to their works on the Vox Novus site, so I figured
I'd join the party. My page has some links to my music, and I'll be
interested in seeing how Vox Novus progresses over time. The more sites that
actively mention, promote and provide access to new music, the
better.
Posted at 11:19 PM
Fri - December 28, 2007
yet another realization of darfur pogrommen, this time by steve layton
Steve Layton, who did such an awesome
alternative realization of my 80's piece textbook: music of descending landscapes in hyperspace
(piece for IPS), took a fancy to darfur pogrommen and did his own realization with electronic organs and vibes. It
sounds great, and Steve also took one or two minor liberties in the last few
minutes to extend the piece, so I guess he liked it
8-)
I also uploaded a very slightly revised version of the realization I did in Reason 4.0 that fixes a few incorrectly tied beats in the bass line during the first few minutes (not sure how that happened, since the MIDI output seems fine), and that version is here. There are now three realizations of this piece for open instrumentation, and if you're really taken with it, could listen to these versions end-to-end in just around 2 1/2 hours.
I also uploaded a very slightly revised version of the realization I did in Reason 4.0 that fixes a few incorrectly tied beats in the bass line during the first few minutes (not sure how that happened, since the MIDI output seems fine), and that version is here. There are now three realizations of this piece for open instrumentation, and if you're really taken with it, could listen to these versions end-to-end in just around 2 1/2 hours.
Posted at 07:57 AM
Wed - December 26, 2007
ending the year with new music
Classical
Discoveries, a music program on Princeton University's WPRB-FM, will be
featuring 24 hours of new music beginning Thursday, December 27th at 6 PM EST
and ending on Friday at 6 PM. Sometime around 3 PM on Friday, Marvin has let me
know that he will be airing the recording of my string quartet piece mf as performed
by the Rangzen Quartet. It's a very nice performance, and I'm glad it's getting
more air time (it's also been played on Richard
Friedman's awesome new music program Music from Other
Minds on KALW-FM in San Francisco). The broadcast will be streamed,
so anyone outside of the range of the station can
listen.
Ending the year with new music is always a great idea. On that note, I'm well into a new work for violin and piano. While it is not finished and what I've written still has some rough edges, I might post a preview later this week.
So please listen to WPRB during its new music marathon. Any station that programs new music is to be welcomed, since this stuff needs to be heard and enjoyed more often.
Ending the year with new music is always a great idea. On that note, I'm well into a new work for violin and piano. While it is not finished and what I've written still has some rough edges, I might post a preview later this week.
So please listen to WPRB during its new music marathon. Any station that programs new music is to be welcomed, since this stuff needs to be heard and enjoyed more often.
Posted at 09:39 AM
Sun - December 23, 2007
witness in palestine
Just after arriving back home from an
overnight trip to an indoor water park in the Poconos (it's our third time
there---very surreal being in a water park with all this snow outside and below
freezing temperatures), a friend of mine came over and gave me a copy of a DVD by Anna Baltzer entitled
Life in Occupied
Palestine. Anna is an American member of
the tribe who has been documenting abuses against the Palestinians under
occupation.
I'm looking forward to watching it, and am reminded of a recent thread I was involved in on sermo.com, a physician-only forum, in which several physicians were discussing the recent issue involving a British teacher in Sudan who was arrested and sentenced to public flogging for allowing her students to name a stuffed animal “Muhammed.” I had no objections whatsoever to anyone on the forum taking offense at the treatment of this teacher (who fortunately was finally pardoned by the Sudanese government and urgently flown back to the UK for good), so long as it was on the basis of freedom of speech and the inherent intolerance shown by religion in general. But several physicians, and one in particular, went on a rant about how Islam is largely a religion of violence, that Muslims preach hatred and tolerate terrorism, etc. I weighed in over and over again that Islam is hardly unique in terms of being misinterpreted in a way that permits violence, nor is it the only Western religion that has committed acts of intolerance. I brought up the Inquisition, the Crusades, the actions of several Popes who forced Jews to live in ghettoes, etc. But that largely fell on deaf ears. These people believe that a large majority of Muslims are out to convert the West to Islam, destroy whole cities, bring gloom and doom, etc. It's amazing any of them can get out of bed in the morning, since the paranoia and fear must be overwhelming.
That this is what several physicians believe really concerns me, since I had hoped that it was just the mindless Ann Coulter types out there who held such fundamentally ignorant and intolerant beliefs. But I'm apparently mistaken. I was accused of being a liberal apologist for Islam, and by suggesting we try to at least understand what is motivating terrorism, I was accused of excusing it. That's nonsense. As physicians, we try to understand what are the root causes of medical errors, and I've never heard of any physician involved in such efforts as being an apologist for medical misadventures. So I'm not at all sure I understand how trying to understand why some fundamentalist Muslims are so angry at the US that they would blow themselves up is condoning their acts of violence.
The reality is, no one is trying to commit terrorism against Iceland as far as I know. And to my knowledge, Iceland is also a Western democracy. So the perception that terrorists are doing all their stuff because they hate our democracy just isn't ringing true. They're doing their violent acts because they hate our policies. And it just happens that they are willing to pervert their religion to justify their acts. Christianity certainly has done this, and the same is true of Judaism. Acts of violence are incompatible with most religious teaching and should be condemned. But let's not single out Islam, as much as I am appalled by many of the recent acts of violence and intolerance (such as the recent sentencing of a rape victim in Saudi Arabia, who also ended up being pardoned after an appropriate world outcry). I'd rather suggest that religion is generally associated with violence and intolerance, regardless of the religion. I could probably even dig up some badness on the part of some fundamentalist Taoists, although I've never heard the term “fundamentalism” and “Taoism” in the same sentence. And while I'm at it, could some right-wing folks give up their use of the term “Islamofascism?” Fundamentalism is bad, period, but equating Islamic fundamentalists with fascism shows an ignorance of both Islam and fascism. The terrorists are some pretty bad people, but fascists? Really? As Paul Krugman wrote in the NYT, “Islamofascism” is a figment of the neoconservative mind.
I'm looking forward to watching it, and am reminded of a recent thread I was involved in on sermo.com, a physician-only forum, in which several physicians were discussing the recent issue involving a British teacher in Sudan who was arrested and sentenced to public flogging for allowing her students to name a stuffed animal “Muhammed.” I had no objections whatsoever to anyone on the forum taking offense at the treatment of this teacher (who fortunately was finally pardoned by the Sudanese government and urgently flown back to the UK for good), so long as it was on the basis of freedom of speech and the inherent intolerance shown by religion in general. But several physicians, and one in particular, went on a rant about how Islam is largely a religion of violence, that Muslims preach hatred and tolerate terrorism, etc. I weighed in over and over again that Islam is hardly unique in terms of being misinterpreted in a way that permits violence, nor is it the only Western religion that has committed acts of intolerance. I brought up the Inquisition, the Crusades, the actions of several Popes who forced Jews to live in ghettoes, etc. But that largely fell on deaf ears. These people believe that a large majority of Muslims are out to convert the West to Islam, destroy whole cities, bring gloom and doom, etc. It's amazing any of them can get out of bed in the morning, since the paranoia and fear must be overwhelming.
That this is what several physicians believe really concerns me, since I had hoped that it was just the mindless Ann Coulter types out there who held such fundamentally ignorant and intolerant beliefs. But I'm apparently mistaken. I was accused of being a liberal apologist for Islam, and by suggesting we try to at least understand what is motivating terrorism, I was accused of excusing it. That's nonsense. As physicians, we try to understand what are the root causes of medical errors, and I've never heard of any physician involved in such efforts as being an apologist for medical misadventures. So I'm not at all sure I understand how trying to understand why some fundamentalist Muslims are so angry at the US that they would blow themselves up is condoning their acts of violence.
The reality is, no one is trying to commit terrorism against Iceland as far as I know. And to my knowledge, Iceland is also a Western democracy. So the perception that terrorists are doing all their stuff because they hate our democracy just isn't ringing true. They're doing their violent acts because they hate our policies. And it just happens that they are willing to pervert their religion to justify their acts. Christianity certainly has done this, and the same is true of Judaism. Acts of violence are incompatible with most religious teaching and should be condemned. But let's not single out Islam, as much as I am appalled by many of the recent acts of violence and intolerance (such as the recent sentencing of a rape victim in Saudi Arabia, who also ended up being pardoned after an appropriate world outcry). I'd rather suggest that religion is generally associated with violence and intolerance, regardless of the religion. I could probably even dig up some badness on the part of some fundamentalist Taoists, although I've never heard the term “fundamentalism” and “Taoism” in the same sentence. And while I'm at it, could some right-wing folks give up their use of the term “Islamofascism?” Fundamentalism is bad, period, but equating Islamic fundamentalists with fascism shows an ignorance of both Islam and fascism. The terrorists are some pretty bad people, but fascists? Really? As Paul Krugman wrote in the NYT, “Islamofascism” is a figment of the neoconservative mind.
Posted at 04:20 PM
miscellanea
1. Fake Steve Jobs is in trouble. Just as Apple closed down Think Secret, they're apparently
going after Fake Steve's blog claiming that on three occasions he published
"trade secrets." Like predicting that there would be only one button on the
iPhone. Stuff like that. Big whoop. At first, I thought this was a joke by FSJ himself, but now it really does
appear to be real. I'm disappointed, but not surprised, by Apple. Fake Steve's
blog, which has been on overdrive lately, makes me laugh at least several times
a day. Nothing else, other than The Daily Show, manages to do that for me, and
TDS is still in hiatus due to the writer's strike. Not that anyone from Apple
will read this, but my message to the real Steve Jobs would be: stop being a
frigtard already. Leave Fake Steve alone and peace out already.
2. As I've said multiple times before, iBlog is probably toast. A new version has been in the works for something like two years now, and it seems to have been derailed due to some major issues with Leopard. I'm writing this in iBlog 1, and while it works fine, I've long wanted a new and improved version that would deal with several limitations inherent in the current application. Development has been on again, off again for months, and while it now might be "on again," I'm not holding my breath. I've seen this sort of thing with open-source applications (such as Camino) that had very limited development support, but this is a commercial product, not OSS. It's a bummer, and I'll continue using iBlog 1 for now. But eventually, I'll probably have to bite the bullet and go to WordPress or something like it. I've looked at the possibility of exporting my 539 blog entries to WP, but it ain't pretty...
3. Been listening to a lot of Stockhausen's music lately, not surprisingly, given his recent death. I'm saddened by any composer's death, and am glad to see all the outpourings of positive comments, even bordering on canonization on the Web. Indeed, there are many people whose musical outlooks were transformed by Stockhausen's experiments. However, with no disrespect intended, I'm going to confess that I never much had the same transformational experience with his music, albeit with a few exceptions. I like Stimmung, although it's a bit similar to music by Meredith Monk and a few other downtown composers (I have two different recordings, including the latest one by Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices). I used to really like to follow the score of Kontra-punkte when I was young, and would love to hear it again, except that it is almost nowhere to be found except through Stockhausen's site and perhaps a few other sources, and is prohibitively expensive (Stockhausen's page charges $18 just to place an order). No question that Stockhausen was a very important composer. But I'd be less than honest if I didn't say that I'm in agreement with those who raised questions about his work being taken too seriously. I've listened to Gesang der Jünglinge multiple times, and while it's interesting, I don't agree with those who have expressed the opinion that it is the greatest work of electronic music ever. It doesn't do anything for me in the way that, say, Pauline Oliveros's I of IV or Reich's It's Gonna Rain do. Or any of a number of other pieces. Same with Stockhausen's other works like Mantra or Hymnen, although there are parts of Mantra that are very compelling. Klavierstücke IX is a takeoff of La Monte Young's X for Henry Flynt, for example. It's a nice piece, but I don't find it as original. So while Stockhausen is an important composer, my opinion of Stockhausen's music is closer to that of Feldman's. I'm sure there are going to be some out there (among the five people who actually read this blog) who will accuse me of new music heresy. But I think the point of writing a blog is to be honest, even if the opinions expressed aren't going to fly with many others. And I do listen to Stockhausen's music, so he fares better in my iTunes collection than, say, Carter or Babbitt.
4. Just finished Israel's Secret Wars by Ian Black and the Israeli revisionist historian Benny Morris. It's out of date by now, but still is fascinating reading. What amazes me is how all these governments really do repeat their past mistakes. The section on the 1982 Lebanon incursion reads just like the 2006 Lebanese War---same mistakes, same problems, etc.
5. Staying home for the holidays, and hopefully will have some time to get more work done on a new work for violin and piano. I'm trying to dump the sequencer file from Reason 4 into notation
2. As I've said multiple times before, iBlog is probably toast. A new version has been in the works for something like two years now, and it seems to have been derailed due to some major issues with Leopard. I'm writing this in iBlog 1, and while it works fine, I've long wanted a new and improved version that would deal with several limitations inherent in the current application. Development has been on again, off again for months, and while it now might be "on again," I'm not holding my breath. I've seen this sort of thing with open-source applications (such as Camino) that had very limited development support, but this is a commercial product, not OSS. It's a bummer, and I'll continue using iBlog 1 for now. But eventually, I'll probably have to bite the bullet and go to WordPress or something like it. I've looked at the possibility of exporting my 539 blog entries to WP, but it ain't pretty...
3. Been listening to a lot of Stockhausen's music lately, not surprisingly, given his recent death. I'm saddened by any composer's death, and am glad to see all the outpourings of positive comments, even bordering on canonization on the Web. Indeed, there are many people whose musical outlooks were transformed by Stockhausen's experiments. However, with no disrespect intended, I'm going to confess that I never much had the same transformational experience with his music, albeit with a few exceptions. I like Stimmung, although it's a bit similar to music by Meredith Monk and a few other downtown composers (I have two different recordings, including the latest one by Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices). I used to really like to follow the score of Kontra-punkte when I was young, and would love to hear it again, except that it is almost nowhere to be found except through Stockhausen's site and perhaps a few other sources, and is prohibitively expensive (Stockhausen's page charges $18 just to place an order). No question that Stockhausen was a very important composer. But I'd be less than honest if I didn't say that I'm in agreement with those who raised questions about his work being taken too seriously. I've listened to Gesang der Jünglinge multiple times, and while it's interesting, I don't agree with those who have expressed the opinion that it is the greatest work of electronic music ever. It doesn't do anything for me in the way that, say, Pauline Oliveros's I of IV or Reich's It's Gonna Rain do. Or any of a number of other pieces. Same with Stockhausen's other works like Mantra or Hymnen, although there are parts of Mantra that are very compelling. Klavierstücke IX is a takeoff of La Monte Young's X for Henry Flynt, for example. It's a nice piece, but I don't find it as original. So while Stockhausen is an important composer, my opinion of Stockhausen's music is closer to that of Feldman's. I'm sure there are going to be some out there (among the five people who actually read this blog) who will accuse me of new music heresy. But I think the point of writing a blog is to be honest, even if the opinions expressed aren't going to fly with many others. And I do listen to Stockhausen's music, so he fares better in my iTunes collection than, say, Carter or Babbitt.
4. Just finished Israel's Secret Wars by Ian Black and the Israeli revisionist historian Benny Morris. It's out of date by now, but still is fascinating reading. What amazes me is how all these governments really do repeat their past mistakes. The section on the 1982 Lebanon incursion reads just like the 2006 Lebanese War---same mistakes, same problems, etc.
5. Staying home for the holidays, and hopefully will have some time to get more work done on a new work for violin and piano. I'm trying to dump the sequencer file from Reason 4 into notation