Few people read. I went to the DMV this morning to renew my driver’s license. There were at least fifty people there waiting for their summons, but the only book in sight was the one I brought with me. I expected that there would be a few Kindles and iPads in use, but nope. Everyone just sat there, doing nothing.
Author: Don
Miscellaneous links
It’s taken years, but Miku is at last coming to the Mac.
What can you say about nothing? Quite a bit, actually.
Orwell is not the only writer who comes to mind when I read the news these days.
Iwo Jima, one of the less hospitable places on earth, might not be around much longer. Also, Kyushu is an exceptionally violent place, geologically speaking.
Anthony Weiner and his ilk would do well to consider the example of John Profumo.
Dark Shadows, Guiding Light
Is there worse than the St. Louis Jesuits? Perhaps. (Keep the anti-nausea medication handy.)
Briefly noted
Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C3, is Gainax’s shameless attempt to capture the Girls und Panzer audience. It’s slightly more realistic: set in a high school that’s larger than some colleges, the girls fight with airguns rather than tanks. The first episode wasn’t bad, and the animators pointedly did not show any pantsu. I’ll probably continue watching. Update: In the second episode, one of the characters steps out of the shower wearing just a towel, and later bounces a bit; this is a Gainax show, after all. Still, it’s mild as fanservice goes. Stella etc. promises to be a pleasant entertainment featuring a bunch of (mostly) non-neurotic eccentrics, but it’s not another GuP.
By the way, if after watching Girls und Panzer you’ve got the yen to drive a tank, you can, if you’re in Georgia. (Via Borepatch.)
The Brickmuppet endured the entire first episode of Watamote and wondered where the punch line was. I only made it half-way through; this just isn’t my kind of humor.
Thomas McDonald has begun a series of posts on Tarot cards from a Catholic perspective. When I learned that il sole penetra le illusioni was a mahou shoujo series based on Tarot decks, I was curious to see how much the writers got right (very little). The show looks like it’s intended to be a dark fantasy in the vein of Madoka Magica, but between the bad botany and the middle-aged transvestite, the staff didn’t quite nail it. Still, parts of the first episode were odd enough to be intriguing, and I might watch the second episode. Or I might not.
The first episode of the current iteration of Genshiken was largely about a girl who was actually a boy. Never mind.
More screencaps from the first episode of Stella with the very long title below the fold.
Today’s quotes
I was taken particularly aback by the first five minutes of the film [Pacific Rim]. It shows very neatly and succinctly how we in the First World do have this knack for turning even the worst catastrophes, the most vicious wars, the most horrific losses of life, into forms of entertainment. Call it our penchant for commercializing everything, or a neat psychological trick for distancing ourselves emotionally and psychologically from the evils of this world, we can turn even global genocide into a game show, a video game, or a set of collectibles.
Norman is said to have his eyes on the Tory leadership; like Disraeli before him, he climbs the greasy pole with pen in hand. A product of Eton and Oxford, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he combines politics and scholarship in a manner more common in Westminster than Washington. Boris Johnson, mayor of London and a rival in the race for Downing Street, dashes off witty works of popular history with ease; the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has authored polished biographies of Pitt and Wilberforce. There is no equivalent in America; books by politicians here are almost invariably bland, ghostwritten policy tracts or memoirs. This impoverishes our politics—historical ignorance and inarticulacy preclude statesmanship. ((But is there any statemanship in England today?))
Ace:
Al Sharpton will interview Rachel Jeantel tonight.
The closed captioning guy just hanged himself. He left this note: “Avenge me.”
Bonus quote — Avatar:
You guys are thinking too small. For that kind of capital, robot catgirl maids could be a reality!
Bach times 377
Amazon.com is currently offering the complete harpsichord works of Bach, performed by Martin Galling, for 99 cents. This includes both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the partitas and French and English suites, and much else. Even if the recordings are not to your taste, you’re only risking a dollar for fifteen hours of music.
The performances, to my non-expert ears, are acceptable but not outstanding. Here’s Galling’s rendition of the Prelude and Fugue in C minor from the first book:
Compare it to Malcolm Hamilton’s
and Takahiro Sonoda’s
Galling is a plodder. I’m being unfair — he usually picks better tempos than he does in that prelude — but there is a reason why he is seldom mentioned in the same breath as Glenn Gould and Wanda Landowska. Still, Galling generally does play Bach well enough to give pleasure, and the set is a good deal. You can indeed find better recordings of Bach, but they’ll cost you much more than one dollar.
For the heck of it, I found MIDI files of the prelude and fugue and ran them through a synthesized harpsichord on my computer:
Musical interlude
Just a few music videos that caught my ear recently.
Tim and Myles Thompson will be at Winfield this year.
Probably as painless an introduction to twelve-tone music as you’ll ever find. I’m less enthused by the philosophy, though — Josh calls it “rank nominalism.”
I experimented with some highly-simplified twelve tone techniques some years back. The results were not pretty. For the morbidly curious, “Twelve Toes” was probably the least unsuccessful.
Useful advice …
… should you ever find yourself in a South African jail, from Tom Sharpe:
“In prison they told me: ‘Make friends with the murderers,’” he told Britain’s Sunday Express. “‘Everybody else is afraid of them so if you’re with them the others leave you alone.’ That’s what I did. Good tip.”
Tom Sharpe, one of the funniest writers of the 20th century, died last month.
Born in 1928, he was the son of a British Nazi:
Years later, when Tom was a famous writer, he was invited to address a Jewish women’s group and began his talk with the memorable line, “You have probably not often been addressed by someone whose chief ambition, at age 15, was to be an SS officer.” Tom’s dad was the Ealing and Acton member of The Link (a pro-Nazi organisation) and also a member of the Nordic League. A loyal Nazi, he said he hated Jews “in the sense that I hate all corruption”. When the war began the family was on the run from the Special Branch, moving house time after time, always haunted by the fear that the minister would be consigned to the Isle of Man along with other Mosleyites. Tom’s father died in 1944, just too soon to see the film of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Belsen which utterly devastated Tom; he realised that everything he had been brought up to believe had been wrong and that Nazism was pure evil.
Free noisemakers
My old computer died last month. The hard drives are intact, so I didn’t lose any files. However, several frequently-used applications will not run on my middle-aged laptop, some because of technical incompatibilities, some because of tyrannical DRM. I spent a little time recently searching for freeware to substitute for missing soft synths, and I found a few.
• Spicy Guitar is a pretty good physically-modeled acoustic guitar. In a mix with with a pinch of reverb, it can pass for the real thing, and it’s a lot cheaper than the AAS Strum Acoustic.
Don’t pet the caterpillar
Feline stroke of the week
Matthew Walther on Dan Savage:
Savage has probably written more books than he’s read, so one cannot fully fault him for his prose’s shortcomings.
Exploding princesses, etc.
(Via Darwin Catholic.)
*****
In my ballet training, I had no enemy but myself. Especially when I would watch myself in the mirror in the studio and execute my ballet routines, I often envisioned myself as Son-Goku struggling with the enemy. When I would fail, my hair would look darker; when I would triumph over a seemingly impossible task, my hair would appear blonder than it is.
Whenever people watch me dance, I hope they see the character I’m trying to impersonate onstage. I might be the noble prince from Swan Lake or the Prodigal Son; I might be a beggar or a soldier. In reality, I am just a geek owing everything I can do to an ape alien named Son-Goku.
*****
The Man Who Was Thursday was one of my favorite books years ago. I thought it was a fantasy, but apparently it is one of the most realistic spy novels ever written.
*****
Presenting George Herriman and Krazy Kat, with appearances by archie and mehitabel.
*****
Killer trees? Poisons aside, I don’t think so. Killer bromeliads? Perhaps.
*****
What is the worst Bob Dylan song? I’m tempted to say all of them — Zimmerman, to my ears, has a modest talent for doggerel and none whatsoever for music — but some of his songs are worse than others. I’ll nominate one that’s a bit obscure nowadays (though not obscure enough), “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.”
Well, up the stairs ran Frankie Lee
With a soulful bounding leap
And foaming at the mouth
He began to make his midnight creep
For sixteen nights and days he raved
But on the seventeenth he burst
Into the arms of Judas Priest
Which is where he died of thirst
If you perceive anything in the lyrics beyond the clanging rhyme, you need to detox.
Krummhorn, ukelele and tuba
The past seven days have been rotten. It’s time for the Kuricorder Quartet. (You might remember them from Azumanga Daioh and Tsuritama.)
Update: I know what I want for Christmas.
It’s been a tedious week …
… and I could use a little silliness right now.
When I read Dusty Sage’s comments on Equestria Girls, it occurred to me that there might be another bipedal variation on the Pony theme extant. And indeed there is. Is there ever.
The words of the Affirmation Creep
Remember “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies“? Here it is again, this time with illuminating captions. (But where’s Voltron?)
Notes, musical and otherwise
There is an anime music tournament in the works, and the organizers seek your nominations. The following are what I came up with during breakfast this morning. There’s a lot of Susumu Hirasawa, Masumi Itou, Yuki Kajiura and Yoko Kanno. It’s not by accident.
Haibane Renmei — “Free Bird”
Paprika — “Mediational Field”
Azumanga Daioh — “Soramimi Cake”
Noir — “Salva Nos”
Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica — “Sis Puella Magica”
Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita — “Yume no Naka no Watashi no Yume”
Macross Plus — “Voices”
Paranoia Agent — “Yume no Shima Shinen Kouen”
Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto — “Kouya Ruten”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Lithium Flower”
Shin Sekai Yori — “Wareta Ringo”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Inner Universe”
Paranoia Agent — “Shiroi Oka – Maromi no Theme”
Pumpkin Scissors — “Mercury Go”
Level E — “Cold Finger Girl”
Inevitably, I forgot a favorite: “Poltergeist,” from Ghost Hound.
***
No one ever visits my photo gallery. I decided to open a Flickr account, so even more people can ignore my pictures. It seems I timed it just right — the Flickr page sure looks pretty, but I have to wait for it to load completely twice before I can do anything there. I joined a few Flickr groups and, again, I timed it just right. It seems that Wichita photographers hang out at Facebook nowadays. Although I do have a Facebook account to keep tabs on family and friends, as a policy I post virtually nothing there. That’s not going to change.
***
Satsuma-jima, not far from Kyushu, has been a bit feisty lately. I grabbed the picture above from the JMA webcam (third from the bottom of the list) this morning.
From the chariot boudoir
If you can’t find the video you want on YouTube, look elsewhere. (This is the complete recording of the song, not just the excerpt included in the eighth episode of Girls und Panzer (and censored on Crunchyroll). The missing section of the anime begins around 1:50.) ((Though the censored section is back on Youtube for now.))
So we’ve had girls with guns, girls as guns (or is that guns as girls?), girls with mecha, girls as combat aircraft, and now with girls with tanks. ((It’s actually not that new. See Those Who Hunt Elves — on second thought, don’t. It’s lousy; not even Kotono Mitsuishi could redeem it.)) It’s probably all just pandering to otaku, but perhaps there is something more sinister going on. If anime reflects reality, Japanese young men generally are either hapless dweebs or sparkly bishies and crossdressers. If you want to form an army, they’d be useless. You’d be better off drafting young women, who in Japan have talent for using the tools of war, and often magic, too. Girls und Panzer may be just the latest in a series of entertainments designed to accustom the Japanese to the idea of women as warriors.
At least one Chinese writer sees “evil intent militarism” in Girls und Panzer, though it’s difficult to follow the argument as interpreted by Giggle Translate. ((Giggle Translate insisted that the original language of the linked page was Irish.))
Spines and fuzz
A few pictures from yesterday evening’s expedition. This time I used only the 50mm lens (effectively 75mm on my camera).
Cultural notes
For those who remember Leonard Pinth-Garnell.
*****
Norman Lebrecht says that The Rite of Spring was “a glorification of primitivism that challenged the values of modern society. Its response was reciprocal violence.” My own theory is that the riot at its premiere was caused by time-traveling aesthetes happy for an opportunity to get rowdy.
*****
The Locus Science Fiction Foundation bought the rights to R.A. Lafferty‘s writing a couple years ago and is planning to reprint his complete short stories. The first volume is due out early next year, in time for the centenary of his birth. Twenty or so years ago I tried to collect every book by Lafferty in print. Although I found numerous chapbooks and small-press editions, most of his writing was out of reach. The new edition is very welcome, even though the first volume costs $66.
If you’ve never read Lafferty, there are a handful of his stories online:
I’m pleased to observe that I am not the only R.A. Lafferty obsessive around. Andrew Ferguson is reading his way though Lafferty’s stories in order and commenting on them at Continued on Next Rock. See also The Ants of God Are Queer Fish.
Readers of Lafferty are often readers of Gene Wolfe as well. I recently found a couple of weblogs devoted to Wolfe, Silk for Caldé and The Silk and Horn Heresy.
Advisory
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception III in Wichita
I’m preoccupied with cameras and keyboards these days. Posting will continue to be sporadic.