Book It

Jess moved in bearing largely two kinds of items: clothing and books. And while, fortunately, my apartment has ample closet space, leaving room for both her and my own (albeit now slightly more compressed) apparel, I had previously filled my own large bookshelf to near bursting, leaving certainly no room in which to store her many, many tomes.

So, to accommodate, we added a second bookshelf and some magazine baskets, commandeered a section of windowsill for library lineup. And, in the process, I also started going through all of my books, to see what I wanted to keep, and with what I might be willing to part.

And while it turned out, unfortunately, that I did want to keep most of my books, I also discovered there were a rather shockingly large number I had never finished, or, worse, even begun. Apparently, armed with an Amazon Prime account, my eyes are bigger than my literary stomach, with even my relatively voracious pace of book consumption falling steadily behind my pace of online book accumulation.

So, making a belated resolution that, in all honesty, I still won’t be able to keep: no new books until I catch back up on the old ones. Or, at least, no new books until I’m satisfied having simply judged each unread one by its cover instead.

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Tooting their Horn

This evening, headed to a special joint concert between the New York Philharmonic and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. The two played, respectively, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, and Duke Ellington’s arrangements of the same music, switching back and forth to allow the audience to compare the original classical and more newly jazzified versions of each movement.

As the concert also included Copland’s El Salon Mexico, it gave me the chance to hear featured playing from two of my favorite trumpet players in the entire world: the NY Philharmonic’s Phil Smith, and the JLCO’s Wynton Marsalis.

As ever, I headed home not sure whether to start practicing, or give up playing the trumpet completely.

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Guest Blog: Josh Lilienstein on Medeski Martin & Wood

With recorded music ever easier to find, fewer and fewer people take the time to go see their favorite groups perform live. Which is a shame, because a good live show is an experience completely unmatched by disembodied sounds floating out of living room speakers. My old friend Josh Lilienstein recently emailed along this summary of a MMW concert he attended. I’m posting it up here in the hopes that it will get a few more readers out of their chairs, and into clubs, bars and concert halls.

If you go see one popular band this week, this month, this year, or this decade, these guys should be on your radar. When was the last time you saw a concert where all three members of the group (plus the special guest) were ALL incredible musicians? When was the last time that you heard improvised music that made a crowd get up and dance? When was the last time you saw a jazz concert where each of the musicians onstage traded off leading the group, instead of trading solos?

As soon as i could find a musical reference, they were on to the next. Ellington degenerates into chaos which is rescued by funk slipping into blues, at which point the guy on the standup bass grabs his bow, hits the reverb pedal, and launches into Hendrix, soaring into a Miles Davis bebop breakdown and across the Florida keys to mid-century Cuban dance hall, shimmies out to Mariachi shores and back-to-Africa tribal chants, dropping the bass into some deep house, devolving into 80s metal, with country western rock and roll gracefully saving the day, and Indian raga bringing us back into downtown New York jazz. And that was just the first song. They played for two hours.

Medeski, the keyboardist, is a master of his craft. He actually used, often in ridiculously complex combinations, three keyboards, a moog, a sequencer, a sound board, and a record player. Often, in order to somehow account for genius, we imagine that impressive people had been born in the wrong decade; thankfully, this guy was not. Using a historically-informed musicianship and contemporary instruments, he shows up an entire generation of DJs and computer geeks.

The Bros holla’ed. The tube-top girls grinded. The fat man clapped and jumped along. The hippies twirled. The stoners passed joints with a smile. The intellectuals bobbed their heads while scratching their chins. Something for everyone!

When was the last time you saw a drummer who was subtle? Who had a real dynamic range? Who used every snap, crackle, bop, wheeze, and thump he could think of to move the music instead of making noise?

When was the last time you really wanted to hear the bass, and actually could? Have you ever seen a standup bass played like a Stratocaster? Ever head a saw (yes, a saw, placed on the bridge of the bass so it resonated) ROCK the party?

Those of you who were involved in improvisational music thirty years ago need to see the fruits of your movement. Those of you who feel alienated from popular culture need a reality check. Take your kids. Get high. You musicians out there, go get inspired.

[Catch an upcoming MM&W show near you.]

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The Results

The First Annual Cyan Pictures Oscar Pool has come and gone, and, in the process, I’ve actually learned a number of things:

1. The crowd is smart.

Together, we correctly predicted 17 of the 24 Oscars.

2. Smarter than even our best entrant.

Still, congratulations to Jennifer Kearns, who, with 16 right answers (and missing only Crash for Best Picture in the eight ‘big’ categories) won the pool.

Also, ‘congratulations’ to Seanna Davidson, who, with 5 right answers (but still somehow getting Crash for Best Picture) was at the very bottom of the barrel. While, arguably, that means Seanna should be sending me movies, we’re sending her a prize pack as well; clearly, she’s in need of some good movie watching.

Jennifer and Seanna, shoot me an email to claim your prizes.

3. And way smarter than the average entrant.

Although, together, we got 17, on average, each of you only predicted 10.7 Oscars correctly.

4. Smarter than me.

Misled by my crush on Amy Adams in Junebug, I was in the (reasonably large) crowd of folks who would have tied for second with 15 predictions.

5. But not smarter than my mom.

While this last one pains me to no end, had she entered (rather than simply mocking me from afar), my own mother, with 19 predictions (including Best Picture), bested me, our winner Jennifer, and our collective wisdom.

As she emailed to say, “so when you want advice on moviesÖ”

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Wisdom of the Crowd

As promised, here’s your collective wisdom on who’s going home with statues tomorrow night.

In cases where the runner-up was within 5% of the number of votes, I’ve included both to account for margin of error. That happened on only two categories: Best Actor, where people were nearly perfectly split between Hoffman and Ledger, and Best Live Action Short, where people were clearly pulling decisions out of their asses.

Interestingly, the most unanimously decided category was Best Documentary Short, and I’m fairly certain no more of you have seen those shorts than the live action ones. Still, stick ‘Rwanda’ in the title (as in God Sleeps in Rwanda, which garnered 78% of your votes) and it’s got to be an Oscar contender.

Check back on Monday to see how we did together, and to determine which wise voter led the pack.
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Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain (71%)

Best Director: Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain (70%)

Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote (52%), Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain (48%)

Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line (63%)

Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney for Syriana (44%)

Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz for The Constant Gardener (51%)

Best Original Screenplay: Crash – Paul Haggis (41%)

Best Adapted Screenplay: Brokeback Mountain – Larry McMurtry (45%)

Cinematography: Brokeback Mountain (56%)

Editing: Crash (48%)

Art Direction: Memoirs of a Geisha (37%)

Costume Design: Memoirs of a Geisha (59%)

Original Score: Brokeback Mountain (41%)

Original Song: “Travelin’ Thru” – Transamerica – Dolly Parton (40%)

Best Makeup: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (66%)

Best Sound: King Kong (49%)

Best Sound Editing: King Kong (71%)

Best Visual Effects: King Kong (69%)

Best Animated Feature Film: Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (67%)

Best Foreign Language Film: Paradise Now (Palestine) (48%)

Best Documentary Feature: Murderball (42%)

Best Documentary Short: God Sleeps in Rwanda (78%)

Best Live Action Short: Our Time Is Up (32%), Cashback (30%), Six Shooter (27%)

Best Animated Short: Moon and the Son (33%)

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On Bygone Days

My senior year in high school, AP US History fell during the same period as jazz band. And, Louis and Miles being nearer and dearer to my heart than any dead president, I opted for jazz.

While I’ve never regretted that choice, I’ve often regretted the deep hole in my knowledge that resulted. What was, for example Truman’s legacy? Or Harding’s? I have absolutely no idea.

Over the years, in fits of self-improvement, I’ve therefore picked up a slew of US history texts. I’ve tried to slog through Loewen and Zinn. I’ve even resorted to Davis’ much maligned Don’t Know Much About History. Because, as I’ve said, I don’t.

But, despite my best intentions, I’d never make it more than fifty pages through any of these tomes. I’d sit down to read and my eyelids would droop before I could even crack the volume open to the right page.

So, it was with some trepidation that I picked up Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, which retells the story of the 1893 World’s Fair by intertwining the perspectives of Daniel Burnham, the fair’s lead architect, and Henry Holmes, a serial killer who used the fair to lure in his victims.

As one reviewer commented, Larson seems a historan with a novelist’s soul. Several other reviewers called the book ‘engossing’; I couldn’t agree more, having, in less than three days, devoured three hundred and forty-some pages – more, perhaps, than I’ve read of all my prior history reading attempts combined.

So, if you like history books, I highly recommend The Devil in the White City. And if you don’t, I recommend it even more.

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Audible

At the same time that I picked up the now-carried-everywhere Shuffle, I also picked up Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

Or, more accurately, I downloaded it, as an audio book from the iTunes store. It was my first audio book purchase, and buying it felt like I was cheating. Like I had eschewed a classic novel for its Reader’s Digest summary. Technically, my download of Freakonomics was unabridged. But without its crinkling pages in hand, without its black words racing past my saccadic glances, it still felt, well, less than the actual book.

Worse, it still felt less than actually reading. As if, by taking in the Steves’ work through my ears rather than my eyeballs, I was missing the most important part, was divorcing myself from the long, grand history of letters, was undermining my aspirations to the snotty literati crowd.

It turns out, however, that there’s historical precedent for such aural affairs: until the twelfth century, nearly all reading was done alound. Saint Augustine, for example was shocked to discover that when Ambrose, bishop of Milan, read, “his eyes followed the pages and his heart pondered the meaning, though his voice and tongue were still.” Even reading privately involved quietly speaking the words aloud, leading Ivan Illich to describe the monasteries of his time as ‘communities of mumblers’.

Indeed, at that time, reading was an inherently social activity, not the solitary one that it’s since become. As David Levy describes in his excellent Scrolling Forward: “for many centuries… if you read aloud, you were likely to be reading to others. And those listening were themselves considered to reading – not because they were looking at the text, but because they were hearing it.”

Or, in the words of Ivan Illich again, “all those who, with the reader, are immersed in this hearing milieu are equals before the sound.”

Equals before the sound! I like that. And, it turns out, I like audio books as well. I can read them walking down the street or jostling through subway cars, can play them by stereo while mopping the kitchen floor, and can stuff them, in bits and pieces, into the small gaps throughout my day.

This past weekend, I picked up Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything – which, unabridged, belies its name with a seventeen hour playing time. After that, I have an Audible.com wishlist slowing filling up with any number of auditized volumes I’d love to listen through. I’m immersing myself into Illich’s hearing milieu, and I’m going in deep.

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Soothes the Savage Beast, Redux

Two weekends back, as celebration for closing out Long Tail’s first round of financing, I bought myself an iPod Shuffle.

Ostensibly, I bought it to take to the gym, because professional bodybuilders (a significant part of Mid City Gym’s clientelle) apparently have musical taste on par with their fashion sense (way to keep Zubaz pants alive, guys!), and because my trusty 60-gig model weighs enough that I unintentionally occasionally pants myself when moving quickly while carrying it in my gym shorts pocket.

I assumed I’d still use the 60-gig outside of the gym, as I’ve by now filled it to near capacity with a full month of tunes. But, it turns out, even really, really long subway rides (read: going to Brooklyn) are shorter than a month. And during most of them, I put the 60-gig on shuffle anyway, chunking through unexpected swaths of my collection.

So, since I shuffle most of the time anyway, and since I tend to head out for just a few hours at a time, I decided to try taking the Shuffle with me around town, instead of its big brother.

My conclusion: the Shuffle is, well, small. Small enough to be virtually weightless, to leave no strange bulge when pocketed rather than messenger-bagged. And, most importantly, small enough to encourage me to carry it literally all the time, rather than just on certain bag-carrying long-tripping occasions.

So now, full-time, I wander the streets earphones-in. I can barely hear the sounds of the city around me, and I miss them far less than I’d have ever thought.

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captain obvious

With my Airport Express intermittently on the fritz, I’ve fallen off of streaming music from iTunes, and back to an older technology involving music on plastic saucer-shaped objects I vaguely recall being named ‘compact discs’. And, the crazy thing is, the music on those discs sounds much, much better than the same stuff compressed to 192kbps MP3s. Who knew?

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