The midst of March

Well, we survived one birthday, and another one is a’coming.  Plus the kids’ grandma is here for a few weeks ... lots going on!  No time to talk; check in next week.

Game of Thrones Rewatch: the "Short" Version (Part 1)

In honor of the final season of Game of Thrones, I’ve decided to rewatch the entire series, finishing up just in time to watch the upcoming season 8 in real time.  As I went through it, I decided to make little notes to myself: at first, it was just a note of when every major (or semi-major, in some cases) character dies, and maybe some of the best quotes.  As I got deeper into it, I made more and more notes, little questions, or revelations (“oh, that’s what that meant!”), or snide comments on dramatic ironies (“yeah, sure you’ll talk about it ‘when you get back’ ...”), or just observations of my outlook or feelings on a particular happenstance.  Eventually, it involved into the pseudo-outline you see below.

When I first began, I had 72 days to watch 67 episodes.  As of this writing, I have 29 days left to watch 31 episodes, so I’ve fallen a bit behind, but definitely not enough to make me worried that I won’t be able to hit the goal.  Obviously I’m not done yet; what you’re getting today is only the first 3 seasons.  But it worked out that that’s about the right length for a blog post.  Since my commentary is picking up (and going deeper) the longer I go on, it’s likely that the next 4 seasons may turn into 2 blog posts; we’ll just have to see.

Here are the rules of my rewatch commentary:

• THERE ARE METRIC SHIT-TONS OF SPOILERS HERE.  One wouldn’t think I would have to point this out, as it’s a rewatch, but people will complain.  If you haven’t already watched all the seasons of GoT up till the last one, DON’T READ THIS.  Perhaps you can come back when you’re all caught up.  (To be crystal clear: just because the comment is in season 3 doesn’t mean that it won’t contain spoilers for season 4 ... or season 7.  Obviously there are no spoilers for season 8 yet.)
• (Speaking of “shit-tons” ...)  I curse.  Anyone who’s read any of my other blog posts will already know this, but perhaps you got here via some link or other and don’t know what you’re in for.  Although the previous bullet point should have been a giveaway.
• My opnions are just that: opinions.  I present them here in case you find them interesting, but I’m not trying to convince you to believe as I do.  I ask that you show me the same courtesy should you choose to leave a comment—that is, feel free to share your own opinions, but don’t try to tell me I’m “wrong.”
• Likewise, whatever moments I found worthy of comment are also my opinions.  If I left out one of your favorites, sorry about that.  Feel free to remind me of it in the blog post comments.
• My comments are always super-quick.  If I want to expand on a particular thing, I do it as a pseudo-footnote.  In this case, “pseudo-footnote” means “formatted almost exactly like a footnote, but way more obvious.”  These “footnotes” are designed to be less ignorable, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ignore them if you want to.  They’re just topics I wanted to explore a bit further.  Sometimes only a sentence or two more, sometimes whole paragraphs.  Read ’em or not: your call.
• There’s not a comment on every episode.  Especially in the early episodes: sometimes there’s just nothing that jumped out at me that hour.
• I am watching the “Inside the Episode” shorts after the shows, for every show.  Occasionally that will inform my commentary (but usually not).
• Once I’m done with the rewatch, I may keep some commentary on the final season.  Or I may not; no promises.

Season 1

• Episode 2: I never liked Sansa.
• Episode 6: I continue to dislike Sansa.  In fact, I may like her even less at this point.
• Aaaand there goes Viserys.  “He was no dragon.  Fire cannot kill a dragon.” —Daenerys
• Episode 7: Aaaand there goes Robert.
• “I did warn you not to trust me ...” —Littlefinger
• Episode 8: Arya kill #1.  (Many more to come.)
• Episode 9: “Surely there are ways to have me killed that are less detrimental to the war effort.” —Tyrion
• Aaaand there goes Ned.
• Episode 10: “There are no men like me.  Only me.” —Jaime

Season 2

• Episode 3: Man, I really dislike Sansa.
• Tyrion is really good at all this political maneuvering stuff.  Theon is really bad at it.
• Ah, Brienne: so young and innocent back then.
• Episode 4: Joffrey is a sick fuck.
• Episode 5: Aaaand there goes Renly.
• I wish Theon didn’t suck so bad. [1]
• “No, my lord.  Anyone can be killed.” —Arya
• Episode 6: “You’re brave.  Stupid, but brave.” —Ygritte
• Episode 7: This Ironborn schmuck that keeps egging Theon on ... I’m starting to wonder if he works for Theon’s sister.
• Ah! there it is: the very first “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”  First of many.
• “It’s better to be cruel than weak.” —Theon  (Dumber words were never spoken.)
• From the perspective of later-seasons-Jaime, it is sometimes difficult to remember what an awful shit he is.
• Episode 8: How much easier would it have been if Arya had just named Cersei as one of her 3 deaths?
• Episode 9: Sansa should’ve gone with the Hound.  Another in a long string of bad decisions.
• Episode 10: “My father is dead.  And the only parent I have left has no right to call anyone reckless.” —Robb  (Zing!)
• Aaaand there goes Maester Luwin.
• Aaaand there goes the first person to die from dragonfire in a thousand years.  But definitely not the last.
• I’m still not entirely sure why the White Walkers didn’t just kill Sam ...

Season 3

• Episode 1: Holy shit! it’s Qyburn!!  I had no recollection of him showing up this early.
• Tywin continues to demonstrate that he richly deserves his ultimate fate.
• Nobody listens to Davos.  Sigh.
• Episode 2: Margaery appears to be the only person on the planet capable of controlling Joffrey.
• Episode 3: Aaaand there goes Jaime’s hand.
• Episode 4: There is but one person in the seven kingdoms who can give Joffrey a run for his money in the sick fuck department.  Poor Theon.  Still a jerk, but nobody deserves Ramsay.
• Aaaand there goes Lord Commander Mormont.  (And Craster, too, but that’s no great loss.)
• Only the second person on the planet to die from dragonfire, but undoubtedly the most deserving. [2]
• Episode 5: Aaaand there goes Beric.  No, wait ... never mind.
• Aaaand there goes Jon’s virginity.
• And this is the place where Jaime changes from mostly-bad-guy to sorta-kinda-hero. [3]
• Episode 6: Melisandre to Arya: “We’ll meet again.”  Looking forward to that shit! [4]
• Aaaand there goes Ros.
• Episode 7: “I’m stupid.  A stupid little girl with stupid dreams who never learns.” —Sansa  (Hey: she said it, not me.)
• Man, people in this show make a lot of promises they’re not going to be able to keep ...
• Episode 8: “If you ever call me sister again I’ll have you strangled in your sleep.” —Cersei [5]
• I can’t decide whether Tyrion really is that drunk, or if he’s just faking it. [6]
• Aaaand there goes the first White Walker to die from dragonglass in a thousand years.  But definitely not the last.
• Episode 9: Eek ... another wedding.  This never ends well ... [7]
• Aaaand there goes Robb.  And his wife.   And their unborn child.  And his wolf.
• And Catelyn.
• Episode 10: Tywin sending Joffrey to bed in the middle of the day is one of my favorite moments.
• Sam gives Meera some dragonglass arrowheads.  I hadn’t remembered that.
• “It’s not easy being drunk all the time.  Everyone would do it if it were easy.” —Tyrion
• Arya kill #2.

[1] Our culture has what I’ve always considered a curious custom: we do not speak ill of the dead.  No matter how shitty a person is in life, once they’re dead, we’re supposed to pretend they were a saint.  I’ve never really bought into it.  An asshole is an asshole, alive or dead.

There’s a parallel situation with Sansa and Theon.  Terrible things happen to them—truly horrible, awful things.  Do I feel sympathy for them?  Of course I do!  I’m not a monster.

But that doesn’t change the fact that they make some truly idiotic choices.  And that’s compounded by the fact that neither of them is particularly an idiot.  At least if they were stupid, you could understand it.  But they both have opportunities to make the right choices ... good choices.  And they both flub it.  Over and over.  I easily remembered Sansa’s first worst choice: it’s right in episode #2, where she chooses Joffrey over her family.  Raised to value honor over everything else, to value family over everyone else, she rejects both for a fantasy of a golden prince.  We can argue that she’s only a little girl at the time, but both Arya and Bran are younger, and they consistently make better choices than Sansa.  And, to make it worse, even after Cersei demonstrates to Sansa what terrible people she wants to marry into in a very painful way (remember: Sansa is the first to lose her wolf), Sansa continues to wail on about how much she loves Joffrey.  Puh-lease.

I didn’t even remember the corresponding scene for Theon until this rewatch, but it comes in S2E3.  Theon was so looking forward to this grand homecoming and it goes so badly.  And, sure, his father is a crushing asshole, and his sister is an even bigger dick than he is, and he brings a lot of it on himself with his bad decisions.  But he knows what the right course of action is.  He actually writes a letter to Robb (this is the part I’d forgotten), and he’s ready to ... I don’t know, exactly—send it? run away and deliver it himself?  But either way he’s going to warn Robb about his crazy father’s plans.  He’s all set to go ... and then he burns the letter.  Epically bad choice.  And, again, not the last one.

So, while I do sympathize with Sansa, and with Theon, that doesn’t mean I have to like them.  They do stupid things, despite not being stupid, they choose dishonorable paths, despite being raised by what is essentially the only honorable family on the continent, and they choose to go along instead of running away over and over even though it always works out badly for them.  I will never claim that they deserve the awfulness that is visited upon them.  But I’m also not going to pretend they’re anything other than terrible people.


[2] I’m still not sure how I feel about this scene.  Daenerys is a serious bad-ass, and there’s a lot of “fuck yeah!” going on here.  But, at the same time, Dany is always an honourable person, and this transaction feels like cheating.  I can’t find any statement she made that was an actual lie, but it certainly is breaking the spirit of the agreement to pay for an army with something that will murder the seller.  She’s getting something for nothing here.  And, yes, I know: she’s freeing an entire city full of slaves, and the guy had no right to be selling people in the first place.  But it still feels wrong, somehow.

On the other hand, I was looking forward to this scene the entire season.  One of my all-time favorites.  Fuck yeah!


[3] To be clear, I realize that Jaime was never completely evil (certainly not in the way that Joffrey is, or Ramsay), and I also realize that he never really becomes noble (the way that Jon and Dany do).  But Jaime is the closest to what I would refer to as a “heel turn”.  Technically (as that link will tell you), a heel turn is only when someone goes from being a good guy to being a bad guy.  But I’m happy enough to use it for the opposite situation as well.  Some ongoing stories (be they novels or TV shows) radically overuse the heel turn; my favorite example is Heroes, where, if you watch for enough seasons (hint: don’t do that), pretty much every single character undergoes at least one heel turn, and several characters (the most obvious one being Sylar, although Claire’s father Noah is nearly as bad) flip-flop back and forth so much it makes your head spin trying to keep up.  GoT has surprisingly few heel turns for a show that eschews black and white this hard (and, for more pointless meandering on that topic, see my post on shades of gray in fantasy.)  You could try to argue Tyrion, but he was never that bad a guy: his worst sins were decadence and a touch of laziness.  You could try to argue Varys, but he was never a bad guy either: you just couldn’t tell which side he was on.  Maybe the Hound?  Well, he may undergo some sort of redemptive arc before the story’s done, but I doubt we’ll ever think of him as an actual good guy.

No, I think Jaime is actually the only character who starts out as unquestionably bad (e.g. pushing Bran out the window, right in S1E1), and then then ends up, I would argue, unquestionably good.  First, he performs his little deception to keep Brienne from being raped, then he takes a bit more active role by going back to save her life after he was already free, then he sends her off to track down Sansa and Arya to try to fulfill his oath to poor, dead Catelyn, then his kindness to Tyrion in the dungeons, then the whole trip to Dorn to rescue Myrcella, and I honestly think that, at the end, he will be the only thing keeping Cersei from destroying the whole world, much the same way he kept the Mad King from destroying all of King’s Landing (the story of which was the impetus for my comment, which led to this long digression).  I hate to make predictions about a show which works so very very hard to be unpredictable, but let’s just say that, if Jaime dies while killing Cersei to keep her from carrying out some devastating scheme, I’ll be busy patting myself on the back.

So I think Jaime’s arc is a proper heel turn, and I think it may well be the only one in the whole story.  Which I’m fine with, and I’m mostly on board with it.  It is really hard to forget that image of him pushing Bran (and the whole smirk, and the little quip—“The things we do for love!”—certainly don’t help any), and I definitely don’t claim we should forgive him for that.  But I do think we have to recognize that not only is there a core of goodness in him, even in the beginning, when it’s buried pretty deep, but also that he’s actively changing over the course of the story.  I think that’s very different from a character like Tyrion, or even Arya, where what’s changing is not so much their fundamental natures, but rather our understanding of them.


[4] I’d completely forgotten this line.  One of several times during the rewatch that I was surprised by something I hadn’t remembered.  Which is, of course, really the whole point of the exercise.


[5] The way that Cersei looks at Margaery when Margaery takes her arm is utterly brilliant.  The amount of scorn that Lena Headey can invest in a single look is astonishing: it’s more than you would think humanly possible.  While Cersei is one of my least favorite characters, I postively adore Headey.  If you want to see her in something where you’ll hate her character a bit less, I recommend The Sarah Connor Chronicles.


[6] This is on his wedding night, to Sansa.  He does seem very drunk.  But he also makes some very canny decisions while supposedly falling over pissed.


[7] Were I dispensing advice, I would suggest 2 rules for common-sense survival in Westeros:

1. If anyone tries to promise you they’ll tell you more about a topic when they see you again, tie them down and do not let them leave until they spill it.
2. Under no circumstances attend any weddings.

Part 2 ⇒

First birthday of the year

Sliding into the March birthday season, it’s the Smaller Animal’s birthday weekend, so it works out nicely that I don’t have to do a long post this week.  You know, I was just looking at what we did last year for the corresponding weekend, and this weekend was mostly the same: Subway and Panda Express, make The Mother cook “Burden spaghetti” (we call it that because it comes from my side of the family, although, since it actually derives from my mother’s family, it should more properly be called “Baird spaghetti,” and the tale of that recipe is probably worthy of its own blog post one day), attend a showing of a CGI movie.  Last year we couldn’t find a place to watch the chosen flick (Early Man, which we saw later when it came out on DVD/streaming, and it was quite excellent); this year we went with the Lego Movie 2, which was easier to find and just as entertaining.  Also, at home we watched Ralph Breaks the Internet, which is yet another CGI movie, and it was also quite fun.  Also, birthday donuts again (pretty much everyone gets that for their birthday), and still more videogames.

The new thing—well, it’s still technically a videogame, so perhaps not entirely new—this year was Nintendo Labo, which is this bizarre concoction of cardboard and string kits that you build, and then play videogames with, most of involves which a lot of moving around.  It’s half craft kit, half videogame, and half exercise machine.  It’s really quite amazing on a lot of levels.  First of all, my kid is, right this very second, jumping around in what is essentially a VR rig made out of carbboard, that he assembled himself without any real tools, and is now using to control a giant robot on the screen that he makes punch and stomp things by, well, punching and stomping.  So that’s pretty impressive right off the bat.  It was also amazing how much time he was willing to put into following the laborious instructions, which are themselves amazing, because instead of being scores of printed pages with indecipherable diagrams and badly translated text, they’re friggin’ movies.  And not just movies, because they use the gaming console, so you can back up, or zoom in, or change the camera angle.  Shit, man: if Ikea ever figures out how to do instrucitons like this, comedians will run out of material.

So it’s been a pretty decent weekend, and I think the kid has had fun.  And in 3 more weeks we get to do it all again, only with a more tyrannical master: our fairy princess will be turning 7.  Joy.

Classical Plasma I

"The Night Aquarium Is Closed"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

I’ve always said there’s only 2 kinds of music I don’t like at all: country and opera.  All other types, I like at least a little bit.  Take classical music, for instance.  There isn’t a lot of classical music I like, but there’s a few pieces.  And, a few months ago, I got a wild hair to make a mix based around classical music.  Of course, the big problem is that I don’t really like enough classical music to make an interesting mix out of it, and also classical music pieces can sometimes be hugely long, which I rarely allow on my mixes.¹  So I thought, let’s expand the parameters.  What about cinematic music?  Mostly I favor soundtracks with actual songs on them,² but the more common, neoclassical-style form of soundtrack has its place too.  Often I pick up such things to use as bridges for other mixes; Four Rooms, for instance, with its instrumental tracks composed nearly entirely of tunes by Combustible Edison, is great for this, although perhaps not properly neoclassical.  We’ve seen snippets from Beetlejuice and The Da Vinci Code³ and Coraline⁴ and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,⁵, and we’ll see more from those movies and many others.  But there are also some pieces from soundtracks that are larger, more stand-alone, and don’t lend themselves to quick instrumental breaks on otherwise-vocal mixes.  And what about gaming music?  Both videogame soundtracks, and what I often consider to be music composed exclusively for listening in the background while playing roleplaying games?  Those are often in this ballpark as well, and, again: some of them can squeeze into some of my other mixes here and there, but many of them are left looking for a home.

So here we are, with something a bit beyond classical gas and into a whole new state of matter.  I think I’ve managed to represent most of my classical and neoclassical interests here, and the mood is fairly wide-ranging.  Most importantly, I think a really good classical piece tells a story: Peter and the Wolf does that, as does The Nutcracker Suite and The Carnival of the Animals.  That story is mostly in the mind of the listener, but I think we can all agree it’s still there.  I wanted this mix to tell a story in the traditions of those classical pieces, and I feel pretty good about what I ended up with.  (Interestingly, I used individual tunes of two of those three longer pieces, plus some from another, similar work.  Whether I was successful in recontextualizing them or not, I’ll leave it to you to decide.)  So I’m going to do something I don’t normally do for these mixes and actually tackle the exact order of the tracks.  Perhaps it’ll help to clarify the journey I’m trying to send you on.

First, a few notes about the works I’m drawing from.  There’s the Nutcracker Suite, of course, which many people think of as Christmas music, but I have to say I don’t.  Each tune within the suite is its own little world, as far as I’m concerned, and I really like some of them, and don’t care for others.  There’s also the Mother Goose Suite⁶ by Ravel.  My eldest heard this on the radio at a fairly young age and declared it was the only classical music they’d ever actually liked, so of course I tracked it down.  Eventually I started to like it too.  The Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns has only a few pieces I like, including the amazing “Aquarium,” but Saint-Saëns is also the author of Danse Macabre, which you’ve heard in countless cartoons and Jim Beam commercials.  Erik Satie’s piece I first heard in its Gary Numan form in LittleBigPlanet;⁷ most of the rest of the “properly classical” tracks I gleaned from yet another in the Lifescapes series: Classical Meditation.⁸

In the soundtrack department, there are a few names one can’t really skip over in a mix such as this: John Williams is the major figure that looms over modern cinematic music, of course, but Hans Zimmer is a pretty big name as well, and Danny Elfman, while perhaps not as traditional as the others, is just as ubiquitous when it comes to soundtracks.  Perhaps lesser-known, but no less talented, is Christopher Young, who is known primarily for his work on horror film soundtracks such as Hellraiser and (the one I draw from here) Drag Me to Hell.  For videogames, I’m looking at Jesper Kyd (Assassin’s Creed) and Koji Kondo (Legend of Zelda).  For gaming music, I have my old standbys Midnight Syndicate and Nox Arcana, plus yet another track off the CD that I got with an Eberron book.⁹

For this particular tracklist, I’m going to follow the classical music tradition of listing the composer as the artist rather than the performer.  In most cases, the performer is not critical; any reasonably competent performance of the piece should suffice.  Pick your favorite, if you have one, or listen to a few and pick the one that strikes your fancy.  For the soundtracks, of course (both movie and videogame), there is generally just the one version, so you’re covered there.  The big exception would be the Kondo piece; I recommend the Legend of Zelda 30th anniversary CD, which gives orchestral interpretations of many of the classical Zelda tunes.¹⁰  But there are 3 exceptions to the pick-your-own-version guideline, which I’ve indicated in the tracklist using “performed by” tags.

First, “Aquarium,” from The Carnival of the Animals, is an interesting and tricky piece.  Saint-Saëns wrote it specifically for the glass harmonica, which is an instrument that almost no orchestra will actually have on hand (nor anyone to play it even if they did).  Because of this, there are various strategies to getting around this, including using a glockenspiel, a celesta, or just chimes (or even, in the supreme cop-out, trying to play it on the piano).  Some strategies work better than others, but since we’re talking about entirely different instruments (as opposed to just different performances, different instrumentalists, etc), there are pretty huge differences in one version of “Aquarium” vs another.  First of all, if there exists any good quality recording of this piece played orchestrally with the glass harmonica, I haven’t found it.¹¹  The one I indicate, by the ever-popular Nash Ensemble, is in my opinion the best substitute.¹²  Secondly, there are a million different versions of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (yet another tune you’ll be familiar with from cartoons and commercials).  In this case, you really want the amazing version by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, from the soundtrack for The Social Network.  Trust me.  Finally, “Once Upon a December” is actually a vocal piece, from the not-quite-Disney movie Anastasia.¹³  But this version is an instrumental one by piano virtuoso Emile Pandolfi.  I don’t actually like the version from the movie.  But this version is sublime.

Since there are no words on the entire mix, there’s no lyrics to draw a title from.  So I’ve taken a different approach on this one: I took a few words from each of three different track titles and glued them together.  It provides an evocative, yet non-specific, volume title.

Classical Plasma I
[ The Night Aquarium Is Closed ]

“Tableau I: Spinning Wheel Dance and Scene” by Maurice Ravel, off Mother Goose (ballet) [Classical Piece]
“Meeting Aragog” by John Williams, off Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets [Soundtrack]
“Into the Night” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg (performed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) [Single]
“Drag Me to Hell” by Christopher Young, off Drag Me to Hell [Soundtrack]
“Danse macabre, op. 40” by Camille Saint-Saëns, off Carnaval des animaux / Danse macabre etc.
“Sharn: City of Towers” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“Act II. Le Cafe (The Arabian Dance)” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, off The Nutcracker Suite [Classical Piece]
“Spirit of Damascus” by Jesper Kyd, off Assassin's Creed [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Dream Within a Dream” by Hans Zimmer, off Inception [Soundtrack]
“Tableau III: Conversations of Beauty and the Beast” by Maurice Ravel, off Mother Goose (ballet) [Classical Piece]
“Nocturne #19” by Frédéric Chopin, off Lifescapes: Classical Meditation [Compilation]
“The Carnival of the Animals - zoological fantasy: The Aquarium” by Camille Saint-Saëns (performed by Nash Ensemble) [Single]
“Gymnopedie #1” by Erik Satie, off Lifescapes: Classical Meditation [Compilation]
“Prelude in C-Minor” by Johann Sebastian Bach, off Lifescapes: Classical Meditation [Compilation]
“Act II. Le Tea (The Chinese Dance)” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, off The Nutcracker Suite [Classical Piece]
“Gerudo Valley” by Koji Kondo [Single]
“Fate” by Danny Elfman, off Wanted [Soundtrack]
“City of Sails” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“Once Upon a December” by David Newman & Stephen Flaherty (performed by Emile Pandolfi) [Single]
“The Park Is Closed” by John Williams & Michael Giacchino [Single]

Total:  21 tracks,  75:02

So we begin with “tableaux I” of Moother Goose: “Spinning Wheel Dance and Scene.” The main thing that I love about this is that it just bursts into being, and then slows down a bit to settle into a groove which is somehow both magical and slightly menacing.  Something amazing is coming, but it might not be the good kind of amazing.  As this track slowly fades away, we get to “Meeting Aragog,” from the second Harry Potter movie.  If you know the movie, you know that this signals the arrival of the amazing thing, and it is definitely not the good kind.  Which carries us perfecty into Nox Arcana’s “Into the Night,” which I’ve always felt was a sort of background menacing—it’s like looking out into the darkness and knowing that something scary is probably out there, but you have no idea what it is.  The final bell chime fading away from that tune is replaced by the electronic hum of Nine Inch Nails’ founder Trent Reznor’s take on the classic Halloween piece “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” This particular version starts out with a pretty slow tempo, but gradually builds up to a sort of frantic frenzy, which crescendoes to several false stops, and then bleeds perfectly into the demonic “Drag Me to Hell,” which is pretty much right what it says on the tin.  From there, it makes perfect sense to gently slide into “Danse Macabre,” which, after all, means “Dance of the Dead.”

The strange thing about “Danse Macabre,” though, it that it’s not actually creepy in the same way that “Drag Me to Hell” is.  Despite the fact that “Danse Macabre” is specifically supposed to represent Death fiddling skeletons from their graves on Halloween, there’s a gentleness, and even a playfulness to it, that starts to come up out of the darkness that the opening tracks plunged us quickly into.  It ends with a very quiet violin part, and then the opening strings of “Sharn: City of Towers” come up, and it really feels like dawn breaking on the impossibly tall spires of a fantasy city.  Which is not unlike what Tchaikovsky wants us to feel with his “Arabian Dance,” harkening back, as it does somehow, to stories like Aladdin and Sinbad.  Which is, of course, the perfect intro to “Spirit of Damascus,” which (coming from the Assassin’s Creed version of the Middle East) seems to marry the quiet nomadic spirit of Arabia to the fantasy feel of Sharn.  All this majestic building culminates in the somewhat dramatic “Dream Within a Dream” (from Inception).

Which in turn leads us to a quieter turn in the mix, starting off with the middle act of the Mother Goose Suite, “Conversations of Beauty and the Beast.” It does indeed have a conversational tone, and it flows nicely into one of Chopin’s “Nocturne"s.  This is a quieter, contemplative piece which allows the listener to reflect on perhaps a quiet nighttime vista.  And that in turn bleeds very prettily into “Aquarium,” with its waterlike trills and glissandoes, and then directly to “Gymnopedie,” both of which have a natural feel, like quietly watching animals roam about, unaware of being observed.  The turn to Bach’s “Prelude in C-Minor” is a bit of a step down, as the key implies, but it’s still a piece that’s more reflective than sad.

The next “movement” of the mix kicks off with another portion of the Nutcracker Suite: in this case, “The Chinese Dance.” It’s the perfect bridge, as it retains a ghost of the contemplative nature of the previous set, but also sets up for the much more active “Gerudo Valley,” which has a bit of a feel of traveling along an exotic landscape.  This leads inevitably to “Fate,” which feels like a brief moment of preparation before setting off on the journey that is “City of Sails.” As the name implies, this is also a traveling song, but more like a slow ocean journey than the rapid transit of “Gerudo Valley.”

Finally, we come to the closing of this musical story, which kicks off with the gentle, mildly romantic piano of “Once Upon a December.” This is a waltz-like piece that feels a lot like a slow dance, perhaps the last one before “The Park Is Closed.” This latter marriage of John William’s original Jurassic Park score with Michael Giacchino’s updated musings provides the perfect closer for the mix.

Next time, we’ll dig a little deeper into the meaning of “operatic.”

__________

1 As always, there are some exceptions.

2 Two of my favorites in this regard are Pretty in Pink and Lost Boys.

3 Both on Phantasma Chorale I.

4 Also on Phantasma Chorale, but also once on Shadowfall Equinox IV.

5 On Paradoxically Sized World II.

6 There are two versions of this: an orchestral piece and a ballet.  The ballet includes extra interludes as well as new bookend movements, so it’s more complete.

7 Also the inspiration for the Paradoxically Sized World mixes.

8 Although of course you could feel free to substitute your favorite versions of those tracks; I know the Lifescapes CDs are a pain in the ass to find.

9 For a fuller discussion of this CD, see Phantasma Chorale I.

10 The link in the tracklist is actually to a YouTube copy of that exact version.

11 Please enlighten me in the comments section if you know of one.

12 I’m pretty sure their choice of substitute is glockenspiel, but I haven’t been able to pin it down for certain.

13 To be clear, it wasn’t really even remotely a Disney movie at the time, although it used the classic Disney animated movie style, and many people misremember it as a Disney film.  In a weird twist of fate, it now belongs to Disney, after their merger with Fox, so it ended up being a Disney movie after all.

What? I have a blog??

Nothing exciting to say this week.  Nor unexciting neither, I suppose.  Tune in next week.

Snailing on the Railing

About 5 years ago now, I took a picture of snail climbing one of the handrails at my then-office.  One does not expect to find such a thing on the way in to work, so I remarked on it, took the picture, and thought to myself: “snailing on the railing ... heheh.”

A few weeks later I took this lame piece of doggerel and turned it into a whole lame poem.  Now, understand: I believe that I’m a pretty good writer.  But that doesn’t make me a good poet ... in point of fact, I’m a mediocre poet, and even then my college poetry professor might call that bragging.  But every once in a great while I’m struck by ... something ... and I write a smaller piece, nearly always something with a definite rhyme scheme but playing fast and loose with the meter.  None of them have ever been any good, really, although I’m quite fond of the very first one of these I wrote, although my poetry professor called it “trite,” or “overblown,” or possibly both of those, or something else equally soul-crushing—my poetry professor was a bit of a dick, really, and made more than one person in the class cry, but he taught me quite a lot about what poetry really ought to be, and what it has to say, and what it needs to convey to people other than its author (i.e. to its audience).  He would often say something along the lines of “if you’re pouring out your emotions on the page, and it makes you feel better, that’s lovely, but that’s a diary, not a poem.”  He told us right at the beginning not to bring that stuff in, but people often don’t listen, so, you know: tears.  But he pushed us, and some of us actually were good poets, and I learned a hell of a lot in that class, and one of the main things I learned is that I am not a particularly good poet.

But I’m okay with that.  I don’t write poetry very often anyway.  I don’t read poetry very often either (probably those two things are connected).  The poems I like are typically not free verse: they have boundaries, even if they push them.  I like “The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll, and I like “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe.  Perhaps most relevantly to the effort below, I like “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by E. E. Cummings.  But perhaps before we start deconstructing my piece, we should take a look at what it looks like when it’s all constructed.  Below is the picture, and the poem.

there’s a snailing
on the railing
and I cannot help but think
it’s a failing
of the trailing
having once been on the brink

what one decides
as he resides
here—it makes me wonder more
what he’s tailing
unassailing
what he even came here for

was he unhappy?
home life crappy?
thought he’d see the great wide world?
was he ailing?
and now prevailing
with his destiny unfurled?

does he regret it
find it fetid
the universe beyond his sill
p’raps he’s wailing
even flailing
wishes to be back there still

then again heightened
completely unfrightened
maybe all along his goal
this peak he’s scaling
grit unfailing
to match the soaring of his soul

I wish to draw it full
even if implausible
to slake my yearning fancy
to add more detailing
than only mere surveilling
or traipsing off feeling antsy

because otherwise
(if I may summarize)
this image is just too plain
and it’s merely a snailing
here on the railing
and that would seem a shame

This is not much changed from what I originally wrote, those 5 years ago.  I fixed a few clumsy word choices and cleaned up the meter slightly ... which is not to say that many of the word choices are not still clumsy, or that the meter is now untortured.  But it’s better than my initial off-the-cuff effort (just take my word for it).

Looking back on it somewhat critically, it seems to have some things in common with Cummings.  The lack of capitalization is the most obvious—Cummings somewhat famously played fast-and-loose with case (and punctuation), to the point where there’s still a good deal of controversy over whether his name should be rendered as “e e cummings” or not (Wikipedia says not).  There are of course varying opinions on why he did this, but I personally have always felt he wanted to challenge our preconceived notions of grammar; to make us think about why we use this or that convention, and what they really add (or don’t add) to our conversation.  I wish I could claim to be as thought-provoking, but the truth is that I find poetry really difficult to punctuate.  I nearly always know exactly what to do in prose, but the very compactness of poetry is part of why I suck at it so much.  When given a lot of words to play with, I find it easy to write, and easy to revise: the freedom to replace 5 words with 2—or with 10—gives me a lot of options, and I can play with those options and figure out the best choice.  But the nature of poetry (especially poetry with meter and/or rhyme) means that many options are automatically lost, because they just won’t fit, and you need to agonize over every word.  In fact, my poetry professor used to say exactly that: in prose, some words can ride along for free.  In poetry, every word, no matter how seemingly insignificant, has to pull its weight.  And the same goes for punctuation, but it becomes worse: not only does every punctuation mark have to have a definitive purpose, but it messes with the flow.  In prose, punctuation directs the flow.  As a prose writer, I use punctuation to tell the reader when to breathe, when to anticipate, when to pause in thought.  But poetry has line breaks, and that is its own flow.  Punctuation, it seems to me, is often fighting with the line breaks to direct the flow, and it usually loses.  Sometimes, like the work above, I just throw up my hands and toss the majority of it out altogether.  So, while I wish I were being provocative like Cummings, the truth is more like I’m just being lazy.

Well, mostly.  I’m sort of telling you to let yourself be guided by the line breaks: the lack of punctuation and capitalization is just a way to say, hang on to the flow of the individual lines, because there’s nothing else to hang on to.

The message of the piece is pretty obvious, because my poetry is not good enough to be subtle.  It’s just a brief musing on the human desire to assign meaning to things, even when they probably don’t mean much of anything.  But, more than anything, I’m just having some fun with language.  This is way more inventive with rhyme than I’m prone to; rhyming (or perhaps I should say attempting to rhyme) “implausible” with “draw it full” is way more ballsy than I normally am with poetry.  But, hey: you gotta take chances in life in order to find out what works and what doesn’t.  In this case, it probably doesn’t, but I’m glad I made the attempt in any case.

So I’m being a bit self-deprecative, obviously, but I guess I must be a little bit proud of it, or I wouldn’t have resurrected it after 5 years, and subjected it to public scrutiny here on the blog.  Or maybe I just ran out of time and didn’t have anything else to give you this week.  Either way, I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

A Netflix Matryoshka

Another short week this week, so I don’t have much for you.  If you want a quick TV recommendation, though, how about Russian Doll, which is new on Netflix?  It’s 8 episodes, but they’re a half-hour or less, so it’s pretty quick to blast through the whole story.  I’ve seen it described as Groundhog Day meets Happy Death Day, which is a bit weird, because Happy Death Day is already Groundhog Day meets Happy Death Day.  But it’s a fairly appropos description anyway.  Another review I read of it said that it managed to be fairly original while still acknowledging all its influences (or something along those lines), and that’s not entirely inaccurate either.  Bottom line, Natasha Lyonne is awesome, her characters are always an amazing blend of completely familiar and completely insane, and this show does not fail to deliver on any of that.  It’s got excellent music, an excellent, twisty plot, it’s both funny and touching (often simultaneously), and you should totally watch it.

At least that’s my take.  Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Joe Hill: A Worthy Legacy

Well, I’ve talked about television for 2 of the past 3 weeks.  Let’s talk about literature for a bit.

For a while now, all the books I’ve consumed have been audiobooks.  I have a long drive to work, and it helps me keep up with all the reading I want to do.  So pretty much any newer author that I’ve been interested in checking out have been via audiobook.  One such author is Joe Hill.

Hill is actually Joseph Hillstrom King, middle child of the pinnacle of my pentagram of literary idols, Stephen King.  Although he is not the only one of the three to write novels, he is the only one to really carry forward his father’s style and traditions, and he writes large, sprawling, character-driven pieces with supernatural cores that seem to all take place in a shared universe.  While I’ll admit that I initially checked out Hill’s novels simply on the basis of his parentage, I was soon hooked on his talent.  He’s similar enough to his father that, if you’re a fan (as I am), you’ll almost certainly enjoy his writing, but not so similar that you feel like the work is a retread.  I just finished Strange Weather, which means I’ve read most of his work thus far, and I thought I’d share a bit of my perspective on them, both as novels and as audiobooks.

I’ve mostly listened to them in order of publication, which means I started with Heart-Shaped Box, which is where I first realized that here was a talent to rival my 5 literary idols.¹  HSB is about the washed-up ex-singer of a heavy metal band, and it was where I started to appreciate the depth of Hill’s worlds, as so many things that at first seemed casually tossed out just for background all came together at the end, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle falling into place at the last minute.  The audiobook is read by Stephen Lang, the gravelly-voiced actor who you may think of as the “bad guy” from Avatar, but I will probably always see him as the wheelchair-bound Waldo from Into the Badlands, or maybe as the terrifying blind man who is the “victim” in Don’t Breathe.  It’s a perfect voice for this whiskey-soaked tale.

Next up was Horns, which was read by Fred Berman (a voice actor mainly known for a bunch of videogames I’ve never played).  It was also later turned into a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe, which I also highly recommend.  It lacks some of the depth of the novel, of course, but it’s not a bad adaption, and Radcliffe does a pretty damn good job playing Iggy Perrish, a character who spoke to me even more than those in Heart-Shaped Box.  Even better, Horns has one of those insane plots that sounds like it’s going to be completely ridiculous when you first hear it, but then becomes amazing as you start to delve into it.  I could easily see how Hill got his start in comics, because this is a comic book story if there ever was one, although still with the layers and layers of character development that you expect from a novel of this nature.  Plus it has some interesting things to say about human nature and the nature of secrets.

And then we come to NOS4A2.  See, Heart-Shaped Box was very good, and Horns was super-fun, but this book, beautifully rendered by Kate Mulgrew,² is finally the classic you knew had to be coming.  It’s sprawling, and bounces around in time and folds back in on itself, and deals with childhood and memory and the nature of evil.  The characters are amazing and so real you swear you’ve met them before.  The action is gripping and sucks you in completely—describing it as “edge of your seat” or a “thrillride” would be cliché ... but not entirely inaccurate.  It’s too rich and detailed to make a good movie out of, but perhaps the upcoming AMC series—starring a nearly-unrecognizable Zachary Quinto—will do it justice.

As I mentioned above, I just finished Strange Weather, which I suppose is Hill’s version of Different Seasons.³  As with his father’s work, this one is a set of 4 novellas loosely tied together thematically via weather, especially clouds.⁴  In the audibook version, each is read by a separate narrator, and they really have very little to do with each other, so let’s treat them as 4 separate books.

Snapshot is very good, and quite interesting; it’s read by Wil Wheaton, who I’ve gushed over before in the context of audiobook reader.  This was an excellent choice, and the novella is well worth it.

Loaded, on the other hand, is one of those dreary affairs where you know perfectly well what the author was going for, and why things had to happen as they did, but that doesn’t make you enjoy it any more.  The reader is once again Stephen Lang, and once again it’s an inspired choice, but it doesn’t really save the story in my opinion.  This is also the only one of Hill’s works, at least of the ones I’m familiar with, that has zero supernatural elements at all in it,⁵ so perhaps I’m biased.

Aloft is a bit of a weird one for me: while the characters felt very real to me, and the backstory was detailed and extensive, the plot itself felt a little light ... not much “there” there, if you catch my drift.  This alone of the novellas felt like it really should have been part of a larger work.  The reader is Dennis Boutsikaris, who you probably know from many things: ER, or *batteries not included, or, more recently, a recurring role on Better Call Saul.  He was fine, although I didn’t find him as perfect a choice as nearly all the other readers.

Finally, Rain is the clear winner.  Audiobook-wise, there’s another amazing performance from Kate Mulgrew, the characters are all insane and yet familiar, such as you might expect to find on a show like Twin Peaks or Northern Exposure, and the story is interesting, somehow inevitable and yet surprising at the same time, and the relevance to our current political situation is spot-on.  Highly recommended.

In fact, they’re all recommended, to one degree or another.  I also have The Fireman, the only other novel, already in my audiobook collection and ready to go.⁶  Which only leaves us with Locke & Key, his series of graphic novels,⁷ and 20th Century Ghosts, a collection of short stories, and I think that’s almost his entire output thus far.  But I have to say, I’m mightily impressed with Joe Hill at this point in his career, and I’m sure that’s only going to improve over time.  I’m not quite sure I’m ready to expand my pentagram of literary idols to a hexagram, but, who knows?  Maybe someday I will.  Maybe even someday soon.

__________

1 If you don’t recall, they are: Stephen King, Peter Straub, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, and Neil Gaiman (in order of my discovery of them).
2 Whom you may think of as either Captain Janeway from Voyager or Red from Orange Is the New Black: your choice.
3 Or perhaps Four Past Midnight, although I think stylistically/thematically Different Seasons is a closer analogue.
4 Although it’s closer to clouds of smoke in Loaded.
5 If we take “supernatural” to mean “beyond what we currently accept as reality.”  If you think science fiction is entirely separate from “supernatural,” then there’s a few that fall into that bucket.
6 Another Kate Mulgrew reading.  Apparently Hill really digs her.  Which I totally understand.
7 Also soon to be a series, this one on Netflix.