on being gwyneth

Yesterday was one of those brief moments that makes it worth it.

For the past several weeks we’ve been overhauling the apartment: throwing stuff out, getting things into and out of storage, moving components and shelving, cleaning everywhere, and most importantly, rebuilding the studio area… and this time, according to Alison’s direct needs rather than my idiosyncratic feng shui.

We finally got it to a point where she can sit comfortably, access her tools with a minimum of technological interference, and practice at will. It’s not a great solution by any means – not yet a room of her own where she can compose, think, and even just not be around me all the time – but it functions for now and we’re committed to not being static.

I was sitting at my desk – at a right angle to hers and facing outward, so we have full access to the whole arc of equipment and screens – deep in some engineering task or other, when I realized that the music I was listening to was her. I turned around and saw that she was practicing guitar to a recording of Toto’s “Girl Goodbye,” a very intricate and precise piece of power rock.

It was astonishing. She was so in the groove, so completely with the feel of the thing. I was watching a professional musician at work, not just an amateur guitarist flexing her chops.

These moments are yet few and short. She has a lot of work to do, to rebuild her stamina and focus. But when she’s on, she’s amazing, and I want nothing more than to get her that room so I can hear that sound.

“This is all Joker’s fault. What a tool that guy was. Now I have to spend all day computing pi because he plugged in the Overlord.”

(best in-game quote ever, from Mass Effect 2. yeah, you had to be there.)

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i’ve bought a lap steel guitar.

i’ve never been comfortable with conventional guitar technique, but have always been fascinated by this instrument and i think i can better manage its physical quirks. i’m listening to lots of dobro and hawaiian music (the latter is especially good for work) and am beginning to pick up a bit on the idiosyncratic culture… much of which involves the unbelievably wide variety of tunings. dealing with the tunings, and how they affect chording, is going to have the side effect of finally forcing me to “get” music theory, which i’ve avoided pretty thoroughly until now.

i even have a possible line on a nice pedal steel. as if i didn’t already have enough oddball things to keep busy with.

i saw The Hellstrom Chronicle only once, the year it was released. at 11 years old it impressed a heavy dread on me, and i never quite got over the ambiguity of its presentation. the sequences that really stuck with me were the ant onslaughts, and of those the scene that i have always recalled most vividly was one of its many excerpts from other films – in this case that of a central american man caught and swarmed while trying to escape, finally toppling to his hideous death.

it was many years later that i watched The Naked Jungle, a film that struck me at the time as being a bit disjointed. starring Charlton Heston – of whom i am a fan, as some know – the first half told the story of a plantation owner hacking out a living in south america who receives – and has to accomodate his attitudes and lifestyle for – a mail-order bride. about halfway through, this fairly typical romantic drama takes a permanent and heavy-handed turn for the weird, when the plantation turns out to be directly in the path of a massive phalanx of army ants, tearing through the jungle on their periodic march of ruin.

it’s in that second half that the remembered scene occurs, and it wasn’t until just a few weeks ago that i finally learned why the film had the odd paste-together quality i’d observed: it is itself based on what is apparently considered a classic short story, Leiningen versus the Ants, which has nothing whatever to do with the title character’s romantic life, but is in fact entirely about the confrontation of the hard-minded individualist with brute nature.

this discovery came about because i’ve been listening to audio books recently, prompted by a suggestion from a friend of mine. at first i heard renditions of stories by HP Lovecraft, which then led me to seek other radio plays of the weird and fantastic, research into the sources of which revealed the original adventure story.

and so listening to the play leads me to read the story which served as the inspiration for the film which itself was excerpted in another film which creeped me the hell out when i was a child. and the path of the ants takes a nearly forty-year cycle through my life, touching on all the media in which i have always immersed myself.

i wonder if they’ll make a video game?

by way of explanation:
barney is our Nerd Hero. yes, he got the scut work on Mission Impossible, while most of the rest of the cast did the high-visibility glam superspy stuff. but he also did all the cool shit. his was the expertise on which all those insane plots relied, and we watch the show in gleeful anticipation of each episode’s Barney Delivery – now in a magician’s trunk, next in a filing cabinet – which sets up the show’s absurdist clockworks geared toward the mindfuck: the shifting of their target’s reality by misdirection and transposition. and yes, all the characters were cartoons, but skilled Barney – not charismatic Phelps or alluring Cinnamon or suave Paris – is the one alison and i cheer.

by grabthar’s hammer, you’d think the damned suits would learn.

blade runner is, among my crowd at least, probably the most famous victim of Executive Meddling… the voice-over and fake ending being screwups so universally loathed that any sane person would have reason to expect a certain degree of circumspection on future projects of similar scope and genre.

oh, but no. according to tvtropes (quickly becoming a house-favorite website), one of the things that always bugged me about the matrix turns out not to have been a wachowski fumble at all, but yet another instance of the stupid beancounters apparently believing that the real audience for the work would be just as stupid as them:

In The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers had wanted to have the machines use the humans plugged into the Matrix as a gigantic neural network computer. However, executives thought that the audience wouldn’t understand this, so they changed it to using the humans to generate electricity, even though this violates the laws of thermodynamics and creates several plot holes.

in (post)modern times, one may not be yet be “hardcore”, but perhaps be taken as “getting serious about this,” when one purchases and enjoys their opera in mono, because of the quality of a particular performance.

in my cd tray today: the 1953 furtwängler Don Giovanni.

what i’m discovering is that the music really is everything… despite this recording’s technical flaws (or idiosyncracies, depending on your tastes in live recording), i find myself completely immersed in the nearly perfect performance and balance. and i’m not really that big of a mozart fan.

Die Hard totally nuked the fridge with the “riding the jumpjet” sequence.

Fantasy is popular because, since heroes and villains don’t exist, it’s absolutely necessary to our survival as a species to invent them.

- k.j. parker