socal(l)ed

Moving.

Soon, I’ll be moving most of my blogging efforts over to my composition website as part of an attempt to unify my “online identity.” There’s nothing wrong with holding multiple media outlets, but it makes me feel scattered.

Plus, I’ll be moving away from SoCal in a few months, so the title of this blog won’t make sense anymore.

Penelope

I’ve been listening to Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Penelope, the recorded version on New Amsterdam Records.

My relationship with the music is as follows:

While listening through the piece for the first time, I was disappointed. “This is just pop music,” I thought.

I continued by thinking about the high level of craftsmanship behind the scenes in the piece. And how beautifully melancholy it is. And maybe the pop music thing is some kind of facade, it just draws in audiences, to an unsuspectingly fulfilling musical experience. So I decided that if I couldn’t like Penelope, surely someone I know might.

Then I decided that it just sounds like music for teenagers.

Then I read the text (should have done this earlier, to be sure), and thought, “wow, that’s lovely text. And so sad.”

Then I thought, “I really wish the title of the piece on the album cover wasn’t set in Trajan. What were they thinking?”

Then I realized that, because the story uses material from the Odyssey, the designer probably had some sort of justification for using a typeface designed to emulate Roman inscription text. Greek and Roman are pretty close, right?

And now I am re-listening to sections of the piece, continuing to be a little disappointed, continuing to be disappointed that I am disappointed, continuing to figure out the person (other than myself) who might enjoy this. Continuing to think that if I could recommend the piece to someone else, it will somehow reconcile my disappointment.

It’s not a bad piece of music. The string work is consistently… bland. But pretty. Like overdone choral music. The vocal work (sung by Shara Worden) is gorgeous. Rich and satisfying. The sound design is also nice at times, but I dislike the duplicated track whispering thing. It should be in everyone’s interest to sound as little like Evanescence as possible.

So, you know, check it out. Maybe you’ll like it, and I won’t have to feel guilty anymore.

Prompted

Note:

The phrase “zoom in on,” containing those three words, in that order, does not belong in a college-level essay prompt. Does not belong in any prompt.

No, I will not “zoom in on.” I don’t think I can “zoom in on.”

Dirty Words

A hilarious (and, be warned, rather inappropriate, with many mature topics addressed) evaluation of the state of “dirty” language by Lili Loofbourow for The Awl:

Instead, try this: write down your personal dirty-word arsenal (every one you’ve ever heard, not even restricting yourself to ones you personally use), and compare it with the list of country line dance steps here. I promise that list 2 will be longer, and that for every word you wrote down, you’ll find a word on that list—a ‘botafogo’ or a ‘swivet’ or a ‘sugarfoot’ that packs more energy, more possibility and more pleasure than the overworked monosyllables we use for sex (and insults! As if they weren’t tired enough).

The article addresses an issue that has less to do with the discovery of countless euphemisms for our various taboos (we have plenty of those, mostly not creative and not interesting), and more to do with a certain flattening of language. Sure, language evolves as we introduce jargon into daily practice, but a great many synonyms have died in the name of communicative ease. Not to mention fear of the “pedantic” label.

I’m all for clarity and simplicity, but wouldn’t it be fun if, the next time you almost get hit by a bicycle on the sidewalk (the sidewalk which certainly ought be reserved for us slow-moving pedestrians who only want to make their way to class while listening to some sort of auditory entertainment and generally tuning out from their surroundings, expecting that only other slow-moving pedestrians will be encountered and easily avoided upon last-minute awareness of potential collision) you could mutter a string of words under your breath that are emotionally charged yet longer than four letters each?

“famous” is not equal to “good”

And when we use those words like synonyms, we undermine their meaning. That’s frustrating.

authenticity

Do you listen to real music?

How do you know it’s real?

If music is real, is it good?

It’s a value judgement that I hear used with some frequency, and I assume it’s often in the back of the mind when we decide which music to consume.

But I don’t think we have a clue what we mean when we say it.

Not “authentic” in the sense that a period ensemble attempts to recreate the environment in which some music was originally played, down to performance nuances; “authentic” in the sense that somehow the music can be so powerful that we want to describe it as tangible and of the world we live in rather than the abstract one that holds pleasant and unpleasant combinations of sound.

Why would we want to do that?

Waiting in Vain

This is first time I have seen such an error message and become slightly happier.

via Aaron Cohen (subbing at kottke.org)

Tusk

Lost Angeles:

Finally, as was suggested to me by a forum member on The Peristyle, we need to abandon our singing of “UCLA SUCKS” during Tusk for just this season. This year, we’re singing “NCAA SUCKS” and getting that heard on every telecast. We’re going to make the news. I want you to film yourselves singing it, I’ll put it on the blog. I want it to catch fire.

Make it happen. I can’t think of another four-letter abbreviation ending in A that more deserves to be placed before “sucks” in a somewhat lame (but nevertheless catchy due to its insistent repetitions) song that is forever attached to the sporting/pageantry reputation of a certain Southern California educational institution.

diving in

In order for someone to love new music, they must first love music.

The inverse is also true.

Oliver Strand:

The iced method isn’t complicated. Basically, you prepare brewed coffee as you normally would, only you use half hot water, half ice you put in the bottom of the vessel. The hot, fresh coffee drips directly onto ice so that it’s cool and ready to drink right away.

This is my preferred iced coffee method. If you click through, check out the cool photo with the ice in the bottom of a Chemex. Replace that paper with a Coava Kone and it would look exactly like my set-up. Delicious.

I must admit:

I sort of enjoy one of the most hated parts of the new OS X Lion, Launchpad.

For those who don’t know, Launchpad basically brings up an iOS-style “Home Screen” that arranges all of your applications on a large grid. When I use the 4-finger-pinch gesture on my trackpad, I see this:

I think it’s useful because I now can replace my obnoxious previous method of browsing for a less-often-used application (creating an “Applications” stack in the dock) with an easy-to-perform gesture. Also, I don’t use very many applications. I do understand that people could get frustrated with Launchpad if they have a ton of apps installed. But it works for me.