Cycho Librarian

A piece from the 1970's followed by a Bach chorale in church this morning got me to thinking about "classical" music. I'm not talking about actual classical music, composed between 1750ish to 1810ish. I'm talking about what Joe Normal probably thinks of as classical music. That is, stuff you hear in church, at the symphony, or at the opera. I've been thinking about how inaccessible modern classical music is. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of modern classical music that I love. It's just that unless you've grown up on it and trained your ear to hear what's good about it, a lot of the time it's just so much noise. The problem is that it's virtually impossible to tell the good noise from the bad unless you know what you're listening for. On top of that, there's a lot of jokers out there who think they can write good classical music who frankly can't. What I can't figure out is how we got to this point. Classi...

So as we all tuned in to John Stewart, expecting to hear the requisite jokes about Election- Day-tomorrow-but-we're-not- voting-for-president-yet, instead we hear "Happy Halloween!" That's right, the Writer's Guild of America is on strike, and so we head into the barren wasteland that is reruns. That's okay with me though. I'm a big fan of Unions generally, and in this case the writers are definitely getting shafted. Writers have always been the red-headed stepchild of the motion picture industry. In reality nothing gets done without them, but for some reason studios have always treated writers as essentially unnecessary. I think that the majority of studio heads figure that worst case scenario they can yank someone off the street to slap together their latest project. This is really a very strange attitude, though, and seems to me to be a fairly recent development. Prior to the arrival of motion pictures, writers were definitely the most important pa...

This really only makes sense if you've read the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. If you haven't yet, drop everything you're doing, head straight to your local library, check out The Golden Compass , The Subtle Knife , and The Amber Spyglass , take three days off work and read them. I'm not kidding. No, really. Go. Right now. For those of you who have read it, there is a movie coming out in December in case you haven't heard. I have strong hopes for the movie. Thus far it looks like they're doing it right. However, as part of the website you get to meet your Daemon. But friends can weigh in on whether or not you've got the right one. So those of you who know me, follow the link below and weigh in: is this really my Daemon?

I didn't watch much of the Oscars last night. I only just turned them on briefly as I was going to bed. I did turn it on in time to see something of a surreal moment that Oscar provides every so often. More often than not this is usually the result of the participants having engaged in a little too much pre-show revelry, and I think that may have played something of a role this time as well. Clint Eastwood comes to the podium to present a lifetime achievement award to Ennio Morricone , the composer behind the instantly recognizable and eternally pervasive music to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly among other Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. Now normally this moment in the show is one surrounded by dignity and solemnity as the academy honors someone who has contributed huge amounts of work to the industry over their lifetime. However, dear old Clint apparently forgot his glasses and thus couldn't read the teleprompter. This led to an oddly rambling speech that clearly was ...