This is just a list of things I’ve managed to get published in the Hun Review, my school’s literary annual:

• 2010: The Memory of Pain
• 2009: The Walking Man
• 2008: From Arizona to Missouri
• 2007: Somewhere Beyond the Bitter End
• 2006: Takings and Leavings
• 2005: The King Lies Dying; The Burning Moment
• 2004: A Tide Between
• 2003: On Synchronicity
• 2002: Meaning Between Extremes
• 2001: Drift
• 2000: Blaze

Being a geek of a certain age, I of course went out to see Tron: Legacy as soon as it opened in the theaters. And being a geek of a certain type, and having listened to Wendy Carlos‘ ethereal soundtrack to the original Tron, I also purchased the soundtrack to this one as soon as it was available. This was my first introduction to Daft Punk, whom (I must admit) I first even heard of when their role was announced to much rejoicing. On receipt of the CD (yes, I still buy physical goods from time to time), I learned that they had worked on the orchestration with Hans Zimmer, a composer whose other cinematic work I do know and enjoy.

I say all this to make clear that I cannot evaluate the album as to its “Daft Punkness”. On my first listen through, I was underwhelmed. Wendy Carlos notwithstanding, I am not much of a fan of techno, and this album is certainly that. But having spent the cash I gave it a few good listens, and then I noticed that I was replaying the music in my head throughout the day. That’s just about the best recommendation you can give an album: it’s something you want to keep listening to. It evokes the movie (which I very much enjoyed) without being dogmatically tied to it. I’ve played these tracks for more than anything I’ve purchased in the past year or so.

That’s not to say the album is perfect. Again, bear in mind that all I know of techno is an outsider’s impression; it’s not my cup of tea. But the soundtrack encapsulates why it’s not my cup of tea. Daft Punk is very good at mood-setting and crafting almost subliminal music cues and then building them up. But this album is too much crescendo and too little climax: Too many tracks simply don’t pay off, dribbling away into subtle but ultimately disappointing whimpers. To be fair, this is a criticism applicable to most movie orchestration; after all, the music is fundamentally infrastructure on which a scene is hung. It’s not supposed to attract your attention and it isn’t telling the story itself. Especially in a visual medium such as movie-making, there tends to be an emphasis on crescendo: The scene wants to build tension which is generally then released abruptly with transition to the next scene. (Certainly the action genre, of which Tron: Legacy is an example, follows this pattern.) So the music builds for the big reveal, and then dashes to the next cue.

All of that said, it is this no-there-there quality of most tracks that I find most dissatisfying about the album. Daft Punk does a nice job with the rising action and are masters of the building overlay, where the same riff is repeated many times, but each repetition adds a new instrument or variation. By the tenth or so cycle, the output is quite complex and rich. But once the end of the scene comes, the payoff is usually just one abrupt transition to a fadeout; and that is unsatisfying, especially when encountered over and over.

Nonetheless the soundtrack worked its way into my brain and I found myself often putting it on when I needed instrumental music in the background. It turns out that this album is far more effective when heard out of the corner of your ear, rather than faced directly head-on. Once I got past the newness of the genre and made peace with the crescendo/climax issue, I was able to appreciate the subtleties. One surprise, for me, was that the bombastic big-picture stuff is not the album’s strengths. There are some quite gentle and quite beautiful pieces to be found, such as “Adagio for Tron” and “Father and Son“. They serve as nice counterpoints to the more driven mood music of the rest of the movie. They also allow the audience to come up for air and find the emotional core of the movie, which is always at risk of being lost among the neon action.

It is fair to say that the album succeeds in capturing (and creating) the mood of its progenitor film. After listening to the album for nearly a month, I went back to re-watch Tron: Legacy in the theater. My familiarity with the music definitely enhanced my experience of the film. Daft Punk does seem to have a cinematic intuition; the music evokes the action, as it should. Despite not knowing the soundtrack, it still did not drown out the film. It lies safely underneath what is happening on screen, the audio substrate but not a distraction, just as it should be. Perhaps the only place where that really fails is during the End of Line Club scenes, wherein Daft Punk appear as digital versions of themselves and their music on this album is closest to the club-thumping techno for which they’ve earned their fame. Maybe I’m just a oldster but this is the least engaging part of the movie and of the soundtrack.

Being versed in the released album also let me notice the musical cues that aren’t to be found on the CD. Clearly there are always artistic choices to be made and decisions to face. I did discover the haunting “Father and Son” interlude, cut from the album but happily available online via the Apple iTunes store. I wonder if the decision was artistic or commercial — perhaps they wanted to tap multiple revenue stream? In any case the omission lessens the official soundtrack. Likewise, there are apparently tracks available on an import CD but not in the States. I’m a big Tron fan but I’m not spending another $40 to get five tracks.

Daft Punk have said that Wendy Carlos was a major influence on their own style, and that comes through. No one would mistake this soundtrack for hers, but then, no one would mistake Tron: Legacy for Tron, so that’s OK. Much like the visuals of the movie, the soundtrack has been updated and evolved. I do wish that, perhaps, they had included just one or two more direct homages (all we get is a brief rendition of the iconic Tron motif by Kevin Flynn) but that is really more nitpicking than anything else.

Final verdict? This album was definitely worth the time to listen and the money to buy. It’s already worked its way into my rotation of instrumental/soundtrack playlists and I expect I’ll be replaying it for a long time.Православни икони

Last night, Annie and I attended a show by Marc Cohn with Suzanna Vega at the Town Hall NYC.

Playlist

• Ghost Train
• Perfect Love
• The Calling (Charlie Christian’s Tune)
• Dance Back From the Grave
• 29 Ways
• Listening to Levon
• My Sanctuary
• Walking in Memphis
• Into the Mystic
• Only Living Boy in New York

We stayed for most of Suzanne Vega’s act.  I don’t really know Ms. Vega’s work so I didn’t capture an accurate playlist and I can’t really comment on her performance.  I was reminded that for me (and I’ll apologize to any Vega fans out there), I like her songs on occasion but couldn’t really listen to a whole album of them.

Marc Cohn’s portion of the show was everything I’d hoped for, though.  (It was a little short for him, but that’s the result of the double-billing.)  I was a bit taken aback by the realization that this month marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Marc Cohn, his debut.  He’s probably getting a little tired of reciting the story about Muriel at the Hollywood.    His band was excellent, including as always the amazing Shane Fontayne on guitar.  I found the playlist interesting, as there were some rarer bits (“My Santuary”, for example) and some missing favorites (such as my personal one, “Dig Down Deep”).  He played surprisingly few from what he jokingly calls his “Greatest Hits album, released first”.

He did two from Listening Booth: 1970.  While I like the album well enough, I am less excited to hear other people’s songs than Cohn’s.  But he put a really nice spin on “Into the Mystic”.

It’s been too long since I’d been to a Marc Cohn show — this past summer, it seemed like he would play a city only after I’d left it — and it was a nice refresher.

• American Scripture by Pauline Maier
• Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks
• Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowel

So, last Saturday (Sep 11), a paper in Maine ran a story about the local celebrations at the end of Ramadan the day before.  It was a pretty innocuous piece, a typical fluff article about local culture.

Then the Internet happened.

The paper got deluged with calls and comments and Facebook screeds and angry words.  Some people, it seems, were offended that the paper would devote front-page real estate to a Muslim celebration on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.  Blindsided and, one imagines, just a bit scared, the paper issued a remarkably abject — one might even say servile — apology.

I find the whole affair disheartening.  And even though I neither subscribe to the Press-Herald nor, indeed, had ever heard of it, I wrote to the Publisher to express my own reaction.  Here it is:

Dear Mr. Conor–
I have read with interest your story on the ending of Ramadan and your subsequent apology (http://www.pressherald.com/note-of-apology.html).  I will admit to finding out about the incident only through Internet reporting and I can’t lay any particular claim on your attention or respect.  But the apology was disheartening.  Your paper’s response to frankly overheated criticism helps support a very mistaken view that 9/11 was about Islam versus the West.  Only one group benefits from that view, which is al Qaeda.  On 2001 September 11, the US was not attacked by Islam.  We were attacked by a band of street thugs, of small men with small minds who exploited a weakness in our vigilance.  It was not an epic clash of civilizations; it was a drive-by shooting.  We should not dignify those thugs by allowing them to shock and certainly we should not buy into their ridiculous claims.  Islam did not triumph over the West on 9/11.  Rather, 19 unworthy men got unbelievably lucky.

I am sure others have pointed out that many Americans who are Muslims died in those attacks, and others as first responders trying to save lives in the aftermath.  I am sure that others have pointed out that papers routinely runs stories on Christmas pageants and Easter parades without “balancing” them with stories about forced conversions and pogroms.  As a nation, I would like to believe, we are wise enough to distinguish between a faith and the twisted shadow of a faith misappropriated by evil men.

Your first article did a service by reminding your readers that Islam is practiced — peacefully! — in the United States just as Christianity and Judaism and all faiths are.  Your abject apology undermined that and gave comfort only to the foes of the US.  No matter how much a bunch of yahoos hiding in caves want it to be different, there need be no clash of civilizations, and we don’t need to abandon our time-honored jurisprudence, our noble tolerance, or our basic civility.

We are smarter than that.  We are stronger than that.  We are better than that.

And I just wish your paper had been, too.

Disappointed,
-=-Bernard HP Gilroy

Just to put it in one place, here’s what I’ve read and what I hope to read this summer.

Already Read

• Neverwhere by Niel Gaiman
• The Engineer Trilogy by K. J. Parker
  • Devices and Desires
  • Evil for Evil
  • The Escapement
• To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski (2010 0708)
• Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (2010 0715)
• Ghosts of Manhattan (2010 0720)
• Metatropolis edited by John Scalzi (2010 0722)
• Stardust by Neil Gaiman (2010 0724)
• The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction by Max Page (2010 0726)
• Tron by Brian Daley (2010 0731)
• 1453 by Roger Crowley
• The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin
• Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
• The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy by Sally Jenkins & John Stauffer
• The Affinity Bridge by George Mann

On the agenda

• The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner
• The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree

From a post by Steve Benen over at Political Animal:

In human history, it’s never been easier to get — and stay — well informed. Folks just have to take some responsibility. If they don’t, the result can be a dysfunctional democracy.

It’s impolitic to say this but not all pastimes and passions are equal. And the next time you bemoan the state of the economy or your due taxes or your summons to jury duty or the latest idiocy out of Washington — just pause for a moment and think about how much time you spend reading gossip columns, or devouring “reality” TV, or watching one overgrown overdosed tribe of jocks beat up on a different overgrown overdosed tribe of jocks. Is it really true that you don’t have the time to keep informed?  Or is it that you just don’t want to invest that time?

And if it’s the latter, do you really deserve the vote you’re accorded by virtue of your citizenship in an advanced democracy?

Inception
a Christopher Nolan Film
Arbitrary 5-Point rating: 5 out of 5

Inception is a weird, ambitious, action-packed sci fi thriller-cum-heist flick.  It is, in its own way, as ambitious as The Matrix and suffers from the comparison only in that it didn’t come first.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Tom Dom Cobb, a thief of a singular kind: He can enter the dreams of others and “extract” information they’re trying to keep secret.  On the run for (at first) unspecified horrible crimes, he parlays his skill into a lucrative, if high-risk, lifestyle.  But in the end all he really wants to do is get to go home again and pick up the shards of his former life, including two small children.

More detail, and spoilers, to follow, but in short, this is a fantastic film that’s better than it has any right to be.  The pacing is superb, the acting is above-average, and the setting and technology are remarkably well fleshed out.  Although everyone draws comparisons to The Matrix, the real spiritual ancestor of this film is The Thirteenth Floor (which, ironically, came out at the same time as — and got lost in the glare of the hoopla of — The Matrix).

Spoilers ho!
====
Any movie that involves dream technology is going to mess with the audience’s perceptions, and this is no exception.  By the end of the film, we’ve delved three levels “deep” : a dream within a dream, itself within a dream. And the film ends by (of course) going one further and asking, Is this the real world?  Or is Tom Cobb just locked within another nested level?  Has he returned to reality?  Was he ever there to begin with?  By transparent design, the question is left open.  Within the movie, we are told that every dream adventurer must fashion his or her own “totem”, an object he/she can use to assess whether the current setting is real or someone’s dream.  Arthur uses a loaded die, whose balance only he knows.  Adriadne makes a chess piece (a bishop). Cobb uses a peculiar top.  (It belonged to his deceased wife Mallorie, and would keep spinning forever in a dream world but flop over in a real one.)  You can’t share your totem because then someone else could simulate it in one of their dreams and you’d be lost.

The totems raise a couple of questions.  For example, while it might tell you you’re in someone else’s dream, could it tell you if you were lost in your own?  Cobb warns Adriadne that one must never use whole memories in building a dream world, because you might lose grasp of the distinction and never find your way out.  But you can, of course, perfectly dream your own totem — so it must be useless in distinguishing your dreams from reality.

Adriadne’s totem never comes into play, oddly enough, considering the screen time spent on explaining its purpose and on her fashioning it.  But the top is crucial.  At several places, after Cobb begins to get drawn more and more obsessively into the dreams they are making, he uses it to reassure himself that he’s still got a handle on reality.  There’s something almost heartbreaking about this process, because by the very rules of the game, he must check his sanity alone.  You can never share the thing that keeps you anchored.

But the most important — if most glaringly telegraphed — use of the top comes at the end of the film, after Cobb has rescued the sponsor of the last job and so gotten his life back. He sets the top to spinning, but is distracted by the arrivial of his children.  For the first time he (and we) can see their faces, and he moves off to their embrace.  Behind him the top keeps spinning.  Just before the camera cuts, it starts to wobble, but we never see it fall.  So… is Cobb in the real world?  Or has he fled into yet another dream, one he fashioned himself, so that he can have the life he’s been missing?  (This is even set up by a projection of Mallorie, that asks him whether his actual life — chased by shadowy agents of an unseen conspiracy — is true or just another psychological immune reaction.)

To me, the far more interesting point is:  The top was Mallorie‘s totem.  That fact is mentioned repeatedly, in important scenes.  But you can’t share totems … so why does Cobb think it’s valid for him at all?  Every one of his reality checks is suspect, not just the final one.  We might be far more than one level “down” at the end.  There are hints, I think, that the nesting is infinite.

It’s been a while since a movie had me thinking this hard after the credits rolled.  I heartily recommend it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo

I think the major point — that a unquestioning devotion to “positive thinking” is both dangerous and immoral — is a good one. We definitely allow suffering because we think everyone has a shot, so if they’re suffering, it must be their fault. It’s pretty easy to see how comforting this is, to people on top.

There are poor people who are poor because they are lazy or bad.  There are rich people who are rich because they have worked hard and applied intelligence.  What we don’t like to recognize, however, is that there are also poor people who are poor despite living right and working hard, and there are rich people who are rich despite being lazy or stupid.

Luck plays a huge role in our lives.  The part of our lives that result from forces outside our control — luck, history, social mores, etc. — probably dwarfs the fragment of our lives we can directly influence.  And that terrifies people.  It means that maybe, just maybe, their success isn’t really deserved.  Maybe the fact that they have a giant house and three cars and five iPhones doesn’t mean that they’re better people than someone who struggles to find food every day.  And if that’s the case, then maybe they should help out those who are struggling.

But no one wants to hear that, so they prefer to imbibe The Secret and believe that they are the root cause of all they have.

We are a sad, little species.

I’ve received my new laptop and am working on getting it outfitted and up to speed.  (This process, by the way, is distressingly like moving to a new home and is equally as frustrating and potentially as traumatizing.)  After logging in for the first time, the system helpfully suggests that you create a system backup.  This is a wise and useful thing to do, so that you can restore to original conditions, and I was impressed that Microsoft offered it.

Except…

It takes fiendishly long to generate the system image — after about two hours of waiting, I gave up last night and went to bed.  During the night, the other “helpful” feature of Windows 7 kicked in, which was automatic downloading and installation of updates.  As anyone who works with Microsoft knows, you can’t even think about an update without Windows needing to reboot, which it did … automatically.  This interrupted the system backup, of course; and since the system has changed, the backup can’t even just pick up from where it left off.

Net result?  I must begin the backup again and wait another two hours for it to run.   I will have had my laptop for over a day without being able to run a single program on it.  What is the overwhelming temptation, of course?  To skip the backup “for now” and just dive in.  So these two choices for Microsoft have the combined effect of discouraging proper computer hygiene — and for many users, probably taint the whole idea of backups in general.

Way to go, Microsoft!

(By the way, I have of course also now turned off the automatic install option, as it’s insane to let anyone just drop stuff into your operating system without at least some chance at review.  Once again I am reminded of a mantra I’ve had since at least Windows 95:  Whatever default behavior Microsoft settles on, it’s the wrong one.  We could call their philosophy “default-to-fail”.)