Elephant Talk

It is July 4, which is not only the birthday of the United States of America, it is also the one-year anniversary of this here blog. Let’s see, in that time there have been…

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Looking at blog stats feels wrong, but I do it anyway. I had a huge peak in January, when I was posting a lot about my Europe trip. I guess naming all those places got the search bots buzzing. Now it’s like a ghost town, probably because I don’t post very much. When life is most interesting, there’s less documentation of it: fewer photos snapped, less writing, less blogging. Interesting.

I’m celebrating America’s birthday tonight by playing my final gig with my band. The guitarist and keyboardist are moving on to other parts of the world. I’ve played with a lot of musicians in my life and been in a lot of bands, but this is probably the most talented collection of folks I’ve ever had the privilege of playing with. So it’s sad, but we’ll have fun.

It’s the end of an era. I feel a kind of fall hibernation coming on. But I’ve learned that nothing happens according to plan in Korea, so we’ll see how things go.

OK, I’m going to dip into the geek pool — familiar waters for me, I should add — and give my opinion on the Star Trek versus Battlestar Galactica debate. Sam J. Miller wrote a very good analysis comparing the two shows, highlighting the optimism of the former and the bleakness of the latter, also pointing out how they reflect their respective cultural zeitgeists. As he writes:

“These days, Battlestar Galactica’s warning that technology and progress will bring us to the brink of total annihilation is far more resonant than Star Trek’s hope that technology and progress will solve all of our problems.”

I was never that into the original Star Trek series, but I am a huge fan of The Next Generation. That show was quintessential science fiction, with some brilliantly inventive stories. We got some real mind-benders that dealt with the nature of reality, death, time travel, dreams, free will, and other aspects of human nature. But we also got some intriguing cultural and political parallels of the time — gay rights, abuses of power, the individual versus the collective, war treaties, colonialism, terrorism, etc. Each episode seemed to be a sort of life lesson and a means toward inspiring our better nature. American culture was more positive then, not to mention more innocent.

Ronald D. Moore was one of the principle creative forces on the latter (better) half of the show’s seven-year run. He is also the lead creative force behind his more recent project, Battlestar Galactica. This show displays humanity in a different way. As Miller points out, unlike in TNG, humanity in the BSG future is still very, very flawed. The “heroes” of the show rig elections, assassinate enemies, make bad decisions, destroy themselves, and behave like depressed drunkards. Why shouldn’t they? Most of their species has been eradicated and hope is fading. They’re confused and afraid.

This is the fear that underlies modern society. The fear of today isn’t simply that the Soviets or the Americans will hit the red button at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons; it’s the feeling that this time, perhaps we deserve our own annihilation (again, paraphrasing Miller, but also reiterating my own opinion, which I expressed here a couple months back). It is our own mistakes, our own lack of foresight, our misunderstanding of our enemies, and an inability to change that gives us this feeling that we are unworthy of continuing. This is an oft-echoed theme of BSG, and it’s the reason the show works so well. It’s also the reason that the constructed world of BSG is far more compelling and complex than TNG.

But does that make it a better show? This is where I’m going to disagree with Miller, Moore, and perhaps every media critic out there who adores Battlestar Galactica.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you look at it bleakly, all the recent protests signal — at least in part — a new wave of anti-Americanism, and the Marmot’s Hole has been posting about this reality. At the same time, there’s a certain charm to the whole thing. This article made me laugh about a half dozen times. I could see a lot of the “good Korea” in it, because I see smaller versions of this in daily life all the time.

I particularly liked this middle section:

Besides the lack of violence, what is surprising - even to South Koreans - is that there is no organizer for the already weeks-long demonstration. People took to the streets and formed ad hoc protest groups, usually around 6pm or 7pm each day. This has been bewildering to South Korean civil society, labor unions and opposition politicians - the usual players in such public protests. Tuesday’s rally was the first officially organized protest and had the biggest turnout - police estimate 105,000 demonstrators, while the organizers said the number was closer to 500,000.

Still, one might think it was some kind of mass picnic, until you spot the riot police standing stiff, waiting for a crackdown order. Some people are holding impromptu concerts complete with guitars and violins, singing and dancing. In some cases, entire families have arrived to literally “camp out” in the middle of traffic. Of course they brought tents with them.

Other “protesters” have brought hot coffee to serve anyone who needs it. And high school students have given out roses to riot police, a move that definitely brings down the tension level. Some are distributing water bottles to the aggressive “frontliners” who usually shout more and work up a justified thirst. There are even volunteer medics walking around, shouting “Does anybody need help?”

Young couples use the protest for a romantic outing. They march with hands held tight, and the other hand holding a candle. Local TV footage has shown a man celebrating his girlfriend’s birthday with a protest-candle cake. Other “demonstrators” have brought an outdoor movie projector and are showing the US documentary Sicko.

With the party atmosphere in full swing, the street vendors are enjoying a heyday of extra money and unusual business hours. It’s 2am, and here they are selling kimbob (Korean sushi) or bundaegi (roasted silkworm larvae) right in the middle of roads that have been declared “no-traffic zones” by protesters who’re occupying them.

This is South Korea’s street protests 2.0. Or, perhaps, South Korea’s “postmodern” demonstrations. With some Koreans mistrustful of mainstream media reports on the demonstration, they’ve taken matters into their own hands by broadcasting and reporting themselves. Using high-speed wireless Internet, some “embedded” citizens are using their own laptops and camcorders to broadcast real-time events. There are “citizen reporters” conducting interviews and taking pictures and posting them on their personal blogs and Internet forums. In fact, these news hounds have been so effective that some established newspapers have begun quoting them.

I hate to criticize the medium that gives me voice to do so, but WordPress has implemented a new “feature” that is just dumb. Without letting me know, they’ve added a “Possibly Related Links” section at the bottom of each entry. This means, if you post about a certain topic, WordPress will, I guess, scan its database to check blogs they host discussing similar topics. Then it embeds the links into my page.

Reasons this is dumb:

1. It doesn’t work. I posted about a Korean wedding and the links generated had nothing to do with that topic. What’s worse, the links were stupid and seemed to be written by a cadre of caffeinated teenagers.

2. It’s opt-out. I hate opt-out. If you want me to use your feature, give me the option ahead of time. If you can’t do that, at least tell me you’ve added it. I just happened to notice when I was posting a comment on my own site, something I don’t do very often.

3. It’s unnecessary and self-serving. There are ways to search WordPress blogs. But I would guess that WP feels that isn’t good enough, so to generate more traffic for itself it decided to be a little more proactive.

The good news: You can turn it off, which I did.

I’ve watched this four times now, and I laugh every time.

I agree 100% Mr. Lynch.

Oh, heavenly kimchi…

Bjork came to play Seoul Saturday. I want to say she kicked ass, but those words are meaningless, even though there was much ass being kicked. So I have to try some other words. She was chilling, enrapturing, transcendent, violent, otherworldly, mad as a fucking loon. It was as if she put her hands on the microphone and sent a shockwave of electricity through the whole arena.

This was the second time I’d seen her. The first time was the Vespertine tour stop in Oakland. My girlfriend at the time used her contacts to score us 10th row seats. That show was pretty mindblowing as well, but it was also tainted by me and her being in the process of a breakup, and we had a brief but highly public fight in the lobby right before the show went on. Anyway, the mood in that performance was ethereal, sensual, and restrained. If memory serves, I believe she had a choir and Matmos (two guys with Macintoshes), and that was it.

The show in Seoul was the opposite. It was all out highly charged energy, even during the slower parts. When the lights came down, out walked a dozen or so brass players in strange, anti-elfin uniforms, with tiny flags perched atop their heads. The rest of the band came out — including a keyboard player, two programmers, and a drummer — and then Bjork herself. I can’t for the life of me figure out what she was wearing, some golden explosion of unearthly fabric. The stage was similarly cosmic. Well, not quite cosmic, but if Tolkien did post-apocalyptic rather than pre-civilization, it might look something like this. It all had a slightly militant quality to it, with brightly colored flags and tapestries depicting icons of unknown culture (no doubt in reference to “Declare Independence”).

During the first song, the lighting was bad, and it seemed the front-of-house mixer was trying to properly place her voice in the room. But when she kicked into “Hunter,” the second song, everything clicked. And then, when she belted out “how Scandinavian of me,” my head almost exploded. She sounded inhuman. No voice in the known world should be able to produce such sound. Some sort of strange vibration hit me and a shudder spread from my spine throughout my whole body. Right in that moment I thought, okay, this isn’t Vespertine. This will be a different experience altogether.

The whole show continued like this, with wave after wave of euphoria. Her band sounded great – except her drummer, but I’m not in the mood to criticize. I really like what she’s doing with brass arrangements, both in the live show and in the new album Volta. Some of my friends weren’t into the computer stuff, but I loved it. She’s a brilliant sound designer, with an equal appreciation for texture and outright noise. But what we all kept talking about after the show was her voice. She sounds great on recordings, but it’s almost as if recording technology is incapable of handling a force that it’s never had to deal with before. Something else entirely was happening here; it was as if she were released from a cage. She was Brahma and Shiva all at once, roaming around simultaneously creating and destroying with that voice of hers. Absolutely incredible.

So yes, the show was… indescribable. But I’m not done describing, because the whole Seoul weekend was interesting. I’ll post a follow-up soon.

Here’s something only an audio geek can appreciate, but it’s not often that a film sound team becomes the focus of a Hollywood scandal.

There seems to be some controversy about whether Heath Ledger finished his ADR for Dark Knight before he died.  ADR is dialogue replacement, wherein an actor re-records his lines in sync with the film. Most of the dialogue you hear in a film is actually reconstructed in a recording studio.

This quote made me giggle: “EW placed a call to Oscar-winning sound designer and sound editor Richard King, who’s handling the Dark Knight audio work, but he declined to comment.” The sound guy getting calls from an entertainment mag. And having to decline comment. That’s funny.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens if the dialogue is not up to par. They’ll have to either do some artful cleaning of the production tracks or get someone else to do his lines, then blend Ledger’s tracks with the other actor’s. It brings up a lot of interesting questions, especially if Ledger gets nominated for some awards. How much of a performance is in the delivery of the lines? Does it matter if what we’re hearing isn’t him, but some sort of collage of him and someone else?

Sound can now accomplish incredible acts of wizardry. In this age of technology, you can lift a syllable or a breath and re-purpose it elsewhere. Maybe they’ll just reconstruct whole words for him. So is it still him?

It’ll be interesting to see… and hear… what happens.

I got 150 hits on my site yesterday. I’m not deserving of such traffic, not by a long shot. So I did some research and it seems people were coming here for news about the fourth planet from the sun. (I’ll avoid naming it so as to not further confuse the misguided Google bots.)

This is news I don’t have. But the whole thing got me intrigued, so I did my own search. Seems as though a photo was released recently that appeared to show a human form on the planet.

Turns out it’s just a rock. It is a pretty cool photo though.

I’ve only been in Prague two days, but based entirely on cell phone rings, I’m concerned. Yesterday I heard the theme to Halloween and just now, the theme to Psycho.