It never rains…

This week has been awful. But at the end of it, I dropped my chemistry class, so maybe the rest of the semester will be less awful. Ironically, although I’ve been busy, I seem to have made it through a suprising amount of media works. There’s nothing that I particularly want to promote, or have the energy to write a full review of, so I’ll just give quick reviews here.

Jeff Lemire – The Complete Essex County

Essex County is a stark story expressed in stark style with stark technique. Interestingly, if I had to pick a single phrase to describe it, it would be “a Canadian 100 Years of Solitude comic book.” I don’t want to discuss the story for fear of spoiling it, but the graphic novel spends a lot of time showing what extended periods of lonlieness and solitude do to people emotionally and relating that to the geography and culture of rural Canada.

All of this is rendered in Lemire’s rough, monochromatic ink style, which perfectly illustrates the empty isolation in which most of his characters live. One powerful sequence shows the seasonal transitions on the farm, and we see that nothing changes, whether it is snow as far as the eye can see, corn rows as far as the eye can see, bare furrows…

Another aspect of the comic that I found interesting was the way in which it resembled Southern Gothic literature. This is not a perfect parallel; there is no Canadian analogue to the Civil War and race relations are much different there, yet as in Faulkner the rural isolation, long history, and buried secrets made me feel like I was missing something in every panel I read. I felt like because I am not from Essex County, I couldn’t really understand what was going on. Fortunately Lemire is humane and exposes those relationships (in a very exciting way, no less).

I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but the story gives plenty to think about and some of the artwork is worth it on its own.

Ned Rorem – The Paris Diary

Ned Rorem was a young, beautiful, gay, American composer who ran around in Parisian expatriate and artistic circles in the mid-1950’s. In short, he was the person that I wish I could be at the time that I wish I could have been. I was surprised to find that he does not talk a whole lot about his work, but there are some personal insights into other composers of the time that I can’t imagine one could find anywhere else, and Rorem’s youthful, neurotic narration is entertaining and provoking in its own right.  I did find the untranslated use of French somewhat annoying (thanks, Babelfish!) and at times I felt like I was intruding into Rorem’s beautiful-people problems (“It’s much harder to maintain one’s reputation for being pretty than for being a talented composer”), but I’m just bitching so that this review doesn’t read as me drooling all over myself.

Arturo Perez-Reverte – The Club Dumas

As I was reading this, I was struck by how similar this book is to Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club. Both involve clues embedded in the works of historical writers. Both involve brushes with the occult. But Dante is superior in every way to Dumas. It should be mentioned that Dumas was published a full decade before Pearl’s book, but in this case originality does not trump execution. Skip Dumas, read Dante.

Neal Stephenson – Quicksilver

This is my latest stop on my quest to read all of Stephenson’s works. Honestly, the book is just too long for me to feel comfortable reccomending it to anybody. It’s not that I don’t think it’s good (I do!), but at 900 pages (and don’t forget that it’s the first installment of a trilogy), I don’t want to be responsible for wasting anybody’s time. If you’ve liked anything by him before, you’ll probably like this.

The Big Sleep

It was weird watching this; I’ve seen so many neo-noir and parodies of the Bogart drawl, casual sexism and L.A. cool epitomized in this movie that I felt like I had seen it before. It seems to have scared me off of The Maltese Falcon, however. As one of the few people of my generation that has read quite a few of the classic pulp mystery novels, I can tell you that Bogart fits as Phillip Marlowe, but is completely wrong for Sam Spade.

The Exorcist

Meh. I was high and it wasn’t as scary.

Gotta Run…

…but I’ll leave you with this link to a large scale optical illusion that was constructed in a Swiss town in the alps.

Musical Moment of the Day

The main chord progression from Radiohead’s “Everything in it’s Right Place”…

…is the same as the string riff in Marlena Shaw’s “California Soul.”

The Blind Side: Blind spots all around

On November 20th, Warner Brothers will release The Blind Side, a biopic based on Michael Lewis’ book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, about the high school years of Baltimore Raven’s offensive tackle Michael Oher. An excerpt of the book was published in the New York Times Magazine in 2006 as “The Ballad of Big Mike.” There are several things that make me uncomfortable about both the journalistic account and the movie project. Oher, his foster family, the professional football establishment, and the journalistic coverage of the situation bring up many complicated issues of class, race and attitudes toward the developmentally delayed. To be clear, I have not read the book; I regard it as a separate entity and will critique it as such.

Most of the race-based controversy surrounding this film that I have encountered online deals with the motivations of Leigh Ann and Sean Tuohy, the white couple who foster parented Oher through his high school years. I think this is a distraction from the real issues. Detractors point to the couples involvement with the Ole Miss football team, and charge them with adopting Oher for the purpose of grooming him to play college ball. Sean Tuohy (before the arrival of Oher) had a track record of financially supporting black students at Briarcrest Christian School (BCS), and from all accounts has been proactively racially progressive. Furthermore, Tuohy was not the person that brought Oher to BCS (although his influence with the school kept him there) and there is no indication that he would have abandoned Oher had he not proven to be successful at football. One could point to the enormous difference in Oher’s quality of life before and after the Tuohy’s involvement as motivation to stay in the program, but he is a presumably adult professional football player now; if he can’t decide independently now, then when? (I’ll write a little more later about this later). On the other hand, I do think that boosterism played a part in the Tuohy’s motivation, however I don’t find it wrong, simply a complicating factor. The Tuohys were trying to help Oher reach his full potential, and that meant both providing the home and cognitive foundation that Oher never got in his childhood and get his grades high enough to participate in high school and college football. It’s obvious that if their goal was to focus on academics their plan would have been different, but today Oher is independent, wealthy, successful, and shows no outward signs of his absent childhood. I think actions matter more than hidden motivations and that Oher’s journey has been a success.

On the other hand, I do think there are some racial problems with this story, and they all come from the telling of it. I don’t want to unfairly malign Michael Lewis; I understand that you have to alter your narrative arc to cut down a book into a 3,000 word Sunday magazine article and some subtlety gets lost. Still, the language used to describe the teenaged Oher is astounding to me: “an awesome physical specimen,” “not any ordinary giant.” When Lewis talks about offensive linemen in general, the comparison to animals is even more explicit, calling them “rare beasts.” There is no question that a description of an athlete will include physical form and condition, or that defensive linemen are not all black. Still, the comparisons between Oher and animals (or at least something not human), the constant reference through the story to his size, and, worst of all, the complete silence of Oher and his point of view on the situation paint a picture of Oher the other.

That absence of what I consider an essential point of view, Oher’s, is what makes me most uncomfortable about the magazine article. In the article, everything happens TO Oher. His journey is described as Oher being handed off from one interested parent-substitute to another. We never get his perspective on his high school years. We never get the sense that he is in any way independent of the Tuohy’s plans for him. It creates a false and demeaning distance between Oher and his own story; it puts the focus completely on the Tuohys while pretending that Oher is the subject. Even the title casts Oher as a mythical archetype rather than a real person with agency.  Lewis must have interviewed Oher for the book. To not include him in the article strikes me as callous and disrespectful to his subject.

This distance is found in media about mental illness and developmental disabilities from Radio to Rain Man. Too often, the “abnormal” person acts as a foil for the character development that happens to the “normal” people. This is independent of the acting or the depictions of the symptoms and behaviors involved. The reason why Shine (to name a film that handles mental illness well) works isn’t Geoffery Rush or (the underappreciated) Noah Taylor, it is that the film treats David as an independent person, even in sequences where he abruptly enters other character’s lives. Oher is an independent adult, and for his voice to be absent in a story about the most personal details of his life is shameful.

The movie trailer, on the other hand, just made me nauseous. To start with, the movie makes the common “based on a true story” mistake of confusing the end intangible result with the journey to get there. I’m sure Oher and the Tuohys are happy with how far he has come, but there were huge emotional sacrifices, sometimes ugly sacrifices,  involved in getting there, and no movie can portray those accurately while remaining “feel good.”

The politics involved with the changes made to the story are even more disgusting. The film would have it that Leigh Ann “rescued” Oher out of the random kindness of her heart (even worse, using the “the unprejudiced naivite of a child breaks down adult’s racial attitudes” trope) and, worse, completely ignores the role that his football potential played in her, and other’s, decisions. The fact is that everyone  (except perhaps, ironically, Big Tony, the “inner city character” that sheltered Oher at the beginning of his time at BCS) had one eye on Oher and one eye on the field. I don’t think this makes the Tuohys bad people, but it does not make them saints.

The most cringe inducing line was the “If you insult my son, you insult me” sequence. Leaving aside that twee sentiment, it misrepresents the challenges of homelessness that Oher faced. Nobody was going to mess with him. Protecting himself is easy. Finding shelter, heat and clothes is much more difficult.

Finally, the movie looks like it will repeat all of the mistakes found in the movies I mentioned earlier. The puppy dog expression on Quinton Aaron’s face and the trailer’s focus on Sandra Bullock reinforce the shallow depiction of Oher as a project, a problem for a bored housewife to fix.

Organ Case File #1: St. Andrew’s Church

I started taking organ lessons at the beginning of the semester. The organ, partially because of its liturgical use and partially because of its fundemental complexity, exists in its own hermetically sealed sphere; there is a tremendous amount to learn about every aspect of the instrument. One of the most useful things an organ student is to try and gain experience and perspective by visiting, playing and experimenting with many different instruments. Although these updates will not be regular, I hope to post about the different organs I visit in my own language to the extent of the education I have now.

One of the most fun afternoons of my spring break was the brief time I had to visit the Rosales Op. 10 organ at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Ojai, California. Manuel Rosales is a Los Angeles based organ builder who builds in a tonally postmodern style heavily influenced by French and Mexican organs. His magnum opus is the organ at the Walt Disney Concert Hall (Op. 24), however he first gained national attention with the organ at Trinity Cathedral in Portland, Oregon (the Trinity organ was build right after the instrument at St. Andrew’s).

The organ at St. Andrews is much more modest than those organs (15 stops and two manuals), however it has the same craftsmanship, sweet tone, and strong point of view that have come to characterize Rosales organs. There were some physical features that I noticed immediately. The pedalboard is flat, without the curved array ususal for American organs. The stops on the console are physically large (perhaps taking influence from Mexican organs). Because of the small size of the organ, the expression pedal controls small hinged doors on the case, not the usual louvres. This, and the facade prestant, gives the organ an incredible dynamic range; the chimney flute with the doors closed is nearly inaudible. Sara Edwards, resident organist, pointed out to me the decoration on the case; it incorporates local motifs like the oak leaves and acorns of the California live oaks that grow in abundance in Ojai, and the crossed fishes of St. Andrew.

I’m still new at this, so I don’t have much of a palate to distinguish between different tonal palletes, however the organ did seem very sweet and mellow. As befits an organ of this size, the different stops seemed to be quite versatile. Almost all of them seemed like they could hold their own as a solo stop; I was particularly taken with the delicate 8′ chimney flute. Although I found the mechanics sluggish (it is a tracker [completely mechanical] organ), the 8′ trumpet sounded quite nice. I am generally suspicious of reed stops, but this one balanced boldness with richness. One thing that I found interesting when I first began to learn about organ building traditions is that, outside of a few basic stops, there is no standardized naming convention for organ pipes, they depend on the imagination and poetry of the builder. The stops at St. Andrews are named with traditional French labels, however the presense of the Dulciana in the choir division show Rosales’ Mexican influence (his Disney organ in particular has this in abundance with stops labeled Llamarada, Clarín armonico and Pajaritos*).

It was a real pleasure to play. I had heard the organ before, but didn’t know anything about them. It was interesting to find that there was such a treasure in my backyard.

*Pajaritos (little birds) is a stop that controls four birdolas, a kind of trick organ stop. Basically, before you play, you fill a small chamber with water, and the keys on the manuals control air burbling through it (almost like those plastic whistles you fill with water). One of my favorite things is all these trick stops on organs. They are most present on theater organs (like classic Wurlitzers) but they are also present in concert or liturgical organs. The St. Andrew’s organ has a Cymbal Star: basically air pressure spins a tine around which strikes a series of fixed cymbals.

Everyone I Know is Dead

I just deleted the “Homies” section from my blogroll. About the time I started this blog (coincidence? maybe) a bunch of my friends from high school started blogs of their own; at the peak there were about 6 or 7 of us. Now all but one of them haven’t been updated in months. I definitely understand lapses in blogging, but it kind of makes me satisfied to know that I was there before all the other MFers and I’ll be the last one here too.

THE VIDEO: I was trying to come up with a pithy title for this post, and the first result for “Everyone I Know is Dead” is this video. God bless them, it’s adorable. Terrible, but adorable. The garage band tradition lives on.

Tuesday’s Top Tune – L’Horloge de Flore

Jean Françaix was a French (approprately enough) neoclassical composer that lived through almost the entire 20th Century. L’Horloge de Flore is a suite for oboe and chamber orchestra, almost an oboe concerto in a different form. A floral clock is either a lansdscaping feature with a subterranean mechanics below a flower bed in the shape of a clock, or (as Françaix was inspired by) a bed in the shape of a clock that tells time based on the different times of the day that a flower blooms. Each movement of the suite takes its inspiration from one of these flowers.

I heard this on the radio as I was driving to the airport on Sunday. It pushes my musical buttons in all the right way; I really like the neoclassical technique of preserving the form and structure of traditional music while incorporating what were forbidden or alienating harmonies. I think it’s perfectly lovely, especially this first movement:

I. Galant du Jour (Poisonberry)

Mad Men and Heroes

While I was on break last week, I had dinner with one of my former teachers and her husband, a graphics designer. They asked me what TV shows I keep up with, and I mentioned Mad Men. I had recommended it  to them before and I thought it would be a natural fit for an art teacher and a graphics designer.

To my surprise, they said that they couldn’t get into the show. I thought perhaps that they gave up after a couple episodes, but they said no, they watched the whole first season. I asked what they found elusive about the show, and they agreed that there was no likable character, no hero. At the end of the season, they couldn’t get behind any of the characters, or care about what happened to them.

At some level, I think our difference of opinion comes down to differences in taste. I would agree that there is no “hero,” but I think that is because almost every character is the protagonist of the scenes they are in. Clearly Don is the focus of the show, and by screen time alone must be considered our protagonist, but at no time  do Peggy, Joan, Betty, Pete, or even comedic characters like Roger or Ken lose independence to create a dramatic situation for Don to play against.

The more I thought about it, the more interesting I found the observation that there are no likable characters (whether that’s true or not). I’m pretty heavily invested in the series at this point, and at first I was surprised, because with very, very few exceptions (currently Dr. Rapist and Ugly Betty), I like every character. And that’s even more suprising. Don’s a bad philanderer (not that the activity is categorically wrong, but Don tends to have more destructive affairs than most), Roger is disgustingly sexist, everybody’s racist, most homophobic. Yet even with all of these very un-21st century attitudes, nobody is set apart as so bad that they’re a villain, or even an anti-hero.

I think that this is the thing that makes people so uncomfortable with race and, to a lesser extent, sexism and this show. We don’t get the psychological comfort of having a perfect Peter Fonda or Gregory Peck figure to stand in for us. We don’t even have a character that is so fundementally good that we can excuse their bad behavior. We just have people. People who are sometimes villains, sometimes heroes, and sometimes bad at both.

This is where my teacher and I diverge in opinion. Because of this impartiality, she can’t get into the show. I can’t get enough.

‘Meh’st Week Ever – Fall Break Edition

I have grown attached to this weekly tradition, so I think I will continue to do it. Apologies to anybody that has seen all these before.

1. Visual Illusions from Scientific American

There’s a cool slideshow on the Scientific American website that shows some of the fruit of new research into how we process images. I’m sure most people have seen the standard optical illusions, but these all pertain to the way that we analyze faces. I can tell from my stats page that most people don’t actually click on the links, but I promise you that this is a fun way to spend 2.5-4 minutes of your time.

2. Every time you turn on the heat in Sweden, God kills a bunny.

Apparently the feral rabbit population in Sweden is so out of control that private contractors cull the rabbits then turn them into biofuel for home and commercial heating. The idea is so bizarre, not to mention squeamishly gross, that I would believe that it’s a hoax, but the reporting comes from Die Spiegel, an outfit with some credibility.

Thousands of stray rabbits in Sweden are being shot, frozen and then burned for heat. Stockholm even hires rabbit hunters for the task, like Tommy Tuvuynger, a modern day Elmer Fudd.

“We are shooting rabbits in Stockholm center, they are a very big problem,” he said. “Once culled, the rabbits are frozen and when we have enough; a contractor comes and takes them away.”

3. Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking auto-tuned.

I actually heard about this on NPR before I saw the video. I figure if it’s broken into the mainstream, everybody has seen it, but in case you haven’t, here it is:

I think it’s a brilliant example of an art form (or at least an artistic technique) maturing. This is something beyond the novelty of auto-tune applied to an unusual source. I also find it affecting that Stephen Hawking, someone who only speaks through a computer today, has his real voice altered.

4. Organelle Hangeliers

Organelle, a Vancouver design firm, assembles these found-object chandeliers. I am delighted by them. I do wonder if they look as good in real life as they do in these fancy, controlled photographs, but I think they managed to make something genuinely beautiful out of an unexpected material.

(Via Core 77)

5. Talking Piano

It’s basically a physical vocoder. It’s awesome.

6. The American Symphony from Mr. Holland’s Opus

I saw that Mr. Holland’s Opus was available on Netflix, and attempted to watch it. I had forgotten what a sappy, cliché ridden piece of shit it is. It really frustrates me when I watch movies about music education, because they are always so saccharine and terrible. I’m trying to thing about movies that accurately portray the student-teacher relationship, and I’m coming up with precious few examples. Perhaps Shine when Helfgott is studying at the Royal College of Music.

Anyway, the absolute worst part of the movie is the gimmicky, trite ’symphony’ that Mr. Holland’s students perform for him as he retires. It’s a more painful damnation of him than any funding decision ever could be.

In an example of Youtube commenting genius, user tzebra writes:

An amazing tribute to a unique nation, which for such a young age has accomplished, created, invented, freed, and inspired more than any other in history.

which is like the funniest thing I have ever read. Listen, I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but really. Pretension + absurd hyperbole = LOLZ.

I, Ombudsman

When I decided to maintain a personal weblog, I envisioned a space where I could post about things that I like, a place where I could publish thoughts that I would have to stand behind. Basically, what I wanted was a place to hone my writing skills and perhaps find an audience for my thoughts about things that I am interested in.

I have always been wary of the intersection between life and the internet, so I didn’t (and don’t) want this to be a personal journal, but it’s probably true that the majority of the people who regularly read this blog (and there are very few) probably know me in the meatspace. The fact is, whenever I pass on links or videos or things of that nature, there are a hundred other blogs doing the same thing better.

So, I’m looking for direction. I’ll be continuing to blog, but if you want to leave a comment, or send me an e-mail at meilar@gmail.com about what you’d like to see, I would appreciate the input.

I’ve made a few changes here. I’ve got a new header. Considering how recently I’ve started to play the organ, a picture of the pedalboard as the header is perhaps presumptuous, but I got tired of the canned header.

I got rid of all traces of the disastrous and annoying ‘LOLspeak Mondays’ (hopefully the last time I wholesale delete anything, but I was just embarrased by the whole thing) and I think I’m going to begin posting listening notes from the Minimalism class I’m taking this semester. It’s all good music, and some of it is lost in the arcana of those who study it.

It goes without saying (or maybe it doesn’t) that I am super busy with schoolwork at all times, but I also plan on resuming a more regular posting schedule. I will also take this opportunity to plug my RSS reader, Newsfire (OSX only, sorry). It’s clean, functional and makes it easy to group feeds.

Matthew Eilar