islanded in a stream of stars

I hate to pull a Lynn Truss (think Eats, Shoots and Leaves) on everyone, but when will these freshmen learn that quotation marks go AFTER the comma?!

Spending excessive amounts of time, especially relatively late in the day, in a basement really puts a damper on one's mood. If I wasn't such a lousy gardener I'd stick a plant down here in the newspaper office, and fake houseplants are just depressing. Perhaps I should just get a cactus...

Who wants to help me translate Italian film score terminology by Thursday night?

I didn't think so :P For some reason I can't find either of my Ennio Morricone compilations for my end of the term Italian project this Friday, which really worries me. Sometimes I think my room is a giantic void that swallows up my soundtracks and spits them out two years later. It's a very disturbing trend.

The end of the world might be emminent as I did a week's worth of integral and differential equation homework in advance and enjoyed it quite a bit.

And *now* I have to find out that Michael Giacchino is married...I think. Actually, I can't seem to find any proof of said marriage, so perhaps there's still hope for me.


You didn't think I was being serious, did you? Every composer needs a devoted fangirl, I suppose :D

Bernard Herrmann's Taxi Driver is really growing on me; it joins the ranks of the Incredibles, Out of Africa, Dances With Wolves, and Enigma in the category of scores for which I felt lukewarm/bored upon the first listen and discovered how wonderful it was by the second or third listen some time after. It's a hard listen at first; you've got the hard brass progressions, the marching percussion and anguished chromatic dissonances in the main title that are redeemed by the lyrical saxaphone solo (Betsy's theme). It's existential anguish in a nutshell, but what a fascinating story you hear unfurl, how such beauty and harshness sympatically coexist. What's really lovely about Herrmann is how he subtly tweaks these themes in such a way that you're never quite listening to the same piece twice and hear something new each time.

On the non-slacker front, thanks to the 15 minute timer method I finally have a college essay that's 486 words long. And it was painful to get it at that length even while talking about something I love; I always expected to have more difficulty in cutting stuff down, actually. Tomorrow will be a mad editing fest and I will be pretty much done with the essay that I'm using for six out of seven unis; Stanford is the only one that requires me to come up with fresh material, and a lot of it at that.

I'm going to go to bed early tonight for once. I just can't do my French homework.

Some people figure out crossword puzzles; I attempt to analyze incidental music for clues on what will happen in the next episode of a TV series.

It's almost disturbing how happy this makes me. I tried counting all of the post-it notes I've used for my findings for one show alone (I'm not even counting movies); it's somewhere around 35 at the very least. I would probably be a lot faster if I actually knew music theory and/or real terminology, but there are some really nifty cross-references that I'd like to trace further. In other words, I actually have a semi-legitimate excuse to wath TV!

One of these days I really need to transcribe and compile my notes onto Karen, my beloved laptop, so that I can actually read what I have. I'd hate to see my Alias project end up like my Incredibles (which I'm still working on; it's been about ten months so far and I've been slacking off on that)-I'm never writing down anything in pencil ever again.

In other words, I'm in the midst of finding every bottle of vitriol I can for my Newsweek letter to the editor for dissing my composer-god, Michael Giacchino (See the snippet on the extinction of the TV title song article near the beginning. The idiots can't even tell the difference between a song and a main title theme). If only I didn't completely and utterly botch the one and only article I've ever gotten published...

Techno is not the root of all musical evil.

To be honest, I've never believed that techno was the worst thing to happen to film music; I personally am not a fan of early 30's to late 50's film music which subscribes to "the Danube School of Music," to quote from Henry Mancini. "Sappy 1000 Violins Syndrome" for sentimental moments (i.e. non-location, non-suspense and non-action) is still a big issue today. But there are limitations on to how well electronica can replicate live instrumental music. I remember reading somewhere that even with an electronic synthesizer piano which plays each note perfectly without all of the tiny little wavelengths of notes that are close in frequency to the main note, listeners still prefered the original instrument because it sounded more interesting. The same applied to string instruments, if I remember correctly. There is a unique emotional quality to these tiny fluctuations in frequency that electronica simply can't replicate. The Danube School, for better or for worse, has ingrained upon society the standard of strings and occasionally woodwinds to carry the melody lines for the more emotionally complex scenes.

My favorite modern scores, and even some of my favorite retro scores, manage to combine "traditional" instrumental writing for the majority of scoring with live instrumentals and electronica for suspense and action cues. For example, take John Barry's the Living Daylights, the last James Bond score he wrote as of this point in time *fingers crossed for Casino Royale* As the All Music Guide review for TLD remarked, this score is one of the most contemporary sounding action/adventure scores of the 80's in its sparing use of synthesizers for key action cues. The drum loops in "Ice Chase," "Necros Attacks" "Hercules Takes Off" work beautifully as the rhythmic core; the emphasis is still on the brass and strings. For the suspense cues like "the Sniper Was A Woman," "Koskov Escapes," "Airbase Jailbreak" and "Afghanistan Plan," the strings dominate with brass and percussion accompaniment; these 18-year-old cues could just as easily fit into a 21st century thriller. As much as I love Bill Conti's For Your Eyes Only, the heavy emphasis on synthesizers and disco for the cues in the first half of the film make the soundtrack a retrospective of 80's disco masked as action music. I won't even get started on David Arnold's the World is Not Enough and Die Another Day because I'll burst a few blood vessels in the process.

Phillip Glass has also done some interesting work with electronica which of what I've heard I've liked tremendously, but his focus is more on expanding the limits of melody and thematic development rather than on tone color.

But with Arnold and other action film composers, the orchestra has been virtually tossed out, often at the behest of producers seeking a quick profit, for the cheaper electronic instruments. What happens is that it becomes nearly impossible and not worthwhile to distinguish the music from one action film to another. An experimentalist musical trend has become the new cost-effective standard, reducing aural art into a pre-programmed set of rhythms and melodies jumbled into different orders to present the illusion of originality. Thankfully there are composers like Michael Giacchino, David Holmes, and John Powell who rework occasional techno elements for a contemporary feel into seamless transitions with live instrumentals carrying the main melodies.

Semi-related links:

Cool Unused Composer's Choice Scoring for the Bond movies

OK, I'm advertising the above site because it's been my friend's pet project for the past few months. Essentially the edited scenes include the composer's intended cues that appear on the remastered soundtracks of the film instead of the in-film versions, but the research into the musical selection choices is pretty good.

Extremely cool remixes of From Russia With Love and On Her Majesty's Secret Service with great fan trailers

Some of the remixed techno elements sound a little obviously worked in, but the overall effect is rather pleasing and pretty professional sounding for a fan remix.

Yeah, I've gotten a lot of work done today...

I am starting to see why people claim that I am obsessive compulsive, except I'm not. Right.

There's a lot of Harry Potter madness over at the Harvard Coop; there must have been at least 150 people crowded into the bookstore at 11 tonight. Danielle, Sophia, Sophia's roommates, and Filippe (Sophia's roommate's boyfriend or unofficial 3rd roommate) and I waited outside just to see what people were doing. We noticed that quite a few people had arrived in costume (the best one was of Professor Trelwaney whose name I am sure I have misspelled) and many more arrived with painted lightning bolt "scars." The line was ridiculously long, so I'll probably get the book tomorrow or later this week as I still have other required reading to do.

Ellie got me a Phillip Glass compilation from the NY Metropolitain Museum of Art, Up Close, and I've got to say that the more I listen to it the more I believe Glass to be an absolute genius. There are composers who experiment for the sake of trying to attract attention, and there are composers who experiment in order to redefine the elements of musical composition while paying homage to the work of past masters. Glass is of the latter category, but he's the sort of composer whom people immediately worship or hate. Personally I'm intrigued by his redefinition of Impressionism as minimalism in exploring the development of harmonic fragments. To oversimplify somewhat, minimalism is just Impressionism taken to the extreme.

I never cease to be amazed by how pretentious I can sound despite the fact that I have no idea what I'm talking about.

And as a random note: I thought that this article was pretty cool about Israel monitoring the health of models (thanks to horosha for the link):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1528862,00.html#article_continue

My cousin Jason got married this Friday! Congrats to him and his new wife, Jenny; may you have the happiest of times together. And happy 77th birthday to my paternal grandmother as of yesterday!

I left Thursday afternoon to go up to NYC for the wedding and got back at around 8:30 to my dorm this evening. There were tons of relatives from both sides of the couple's family plus a lot of co-workers and whatnot. The ceremony was held at this psuedo-Victorian manor on Long Island where the festivities ended up being held inside as it was pouring ropes that afternoon. The bride cried a lot, and the maid of honor gave the sappiest speech I have heard in years. The flower girls didn't show up until the ceremony ended (their father got hopelessly lost in the rain), the best man dropped the rings down the aisle, and the groom kept bumping his head against the floral arrangement hung on the top of the wedding arch, but I still think it's the most entertaining wedding I've ever attended. Then again, I've only been to two others before, and the first one was when I was three so I remember nothing. I was amazed by how many of my stiff-faced relatives flung themselves about on the dance floor with the aid of a few drinks. My cousin even took off his bride's garter blindfolded in the middle of the dance floor; luckily my grandmother's eyesight isn't so great anymore. And then the best man, who caught the garter afterwards, had to put it on the girl who caught the bride's bouquet with his eyes closed. Nobody ended up starving-there must have been enough for two entire small African nations to consume within a week. I'll confess that I'm not particularly fond of the bride from what I've heard about her, but if she and my cousin are happy together and will continue to be happy together, then who am I to judge?

I met a lot of people who knew me and my father when we were younger; two of them actually showed my old Christmas card photos to everyone else at my grandmother's birthday dinner yesterday. I nearly crawled underneath the table but thankfully I was slightly photogenic then. My female cousins are all much prettier than me; what happened to our gene pool to give me the short end of the stick here? To be very shallow/defensive, the married ones have unattractive (which doesn't mean ugly) husbands, although they seem to be nice if dull human beings. We have tons and tons of photos that I'll post up later if anyone remembers to send them to me.

While I was up in New York, I also visited two universities. As chance may be, I always end up liking the places that I expect to detest and don't really like the places that I thought I'd want to attend. The only exception to this finding is that college where cutemew will be attending in the fall. Hmmm.

Apparently my semi-existent accent is "transatlantic," the accent that was super popular for women appearing in spy films and TV shows in the 60's so that they sounded exotic while still being understandable. Personally I think like I sound like a pretentious anglophile who can't drown out the American tones in her voice, but whatever.

If I'm not making any sense and am rambling on excessively, I'd like to blame ingesting a lot of caffeine on a relatively empty stomach as the culprit. My nightly boba drinking may be the cause of my semi-insomnia/late night hyperactivity.

( And now for some long-awaited musical commentary that probably will bore and confuse just about everyone )

I officially have my cue to hide underneath the computer desk.

I thought that I sent an e-mail with a study break suggestion to my floor proctor (the Harvard equivalent of a RA, or resident assistant who is the organizer/authority figure on the floor). The e-mail addresses here usually are in the form of first initial, last name (John Smith would be jsmith). Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case with my proctor, who shares an almost identical login name with another student. So I just suggested a group Pink Panther film festival to some guy in the middle of Tennessee, who also appears to be a Peter Sellers fan. (I thought you would appreciate that, clarequilty :D )

I also met a tremendously interesting Indian guy from my behaviorism seminar whose claim to fame is "passing out on Hadrian's Wall, and then waking up laughing about midget Scotsmen battering their way through it" and "being kicked off every continent except for Australia [and Antarctica]." Sophia, Maulik (this very interesting Indian guy) and I plan on taking a trip sometime to Wonderland, which is apparently the last stop on the Boston subway blue line, just to discover what there is out there.

Besides those two, I met several new girls from my floor at one in the morning in the floor bathroom. Apparently the bathroom is only totally abandoned at 2:30 in the morning; one is inevitably drawn into a conversation with several others just happening to have the same "It won't be crowded at 1 AM!" scheme. We had a really strange conversation about Marxism, the Cold War, and how the International Baccalaureate (IB) exams tend to favor the political left. Unfortunately, two of the people I was conversing with were absolutely convinced that the Berlin Wall appeared while LBJ was president, and I gave up trying to correct them. One of these two is now trying to get me to join her ballroom dancing class, despite the fact that I look like a drunken turkey when trying to dance.

It then struck me that most people my age probably don't have discussions like this at one in the morning during the summer. Most of the people I have befriended so far, though, are terribly nice geniuses intending to go into science or pre-med. They all manage to intimidate me with their intellect and make me feel welcome at the same times. Needless to say, I don't think I will be bored this summer at all, and perhaps I won't lose too many neurons from staying up late waiting an empty hot shower.

I might very well go broke at the Coop (the big campus bookstore in Harvard Square) as there are just so many interesting things that I want to read instead of my summer reading. (Un)Luckily for me, the Coop is just across the street from my dorm. I have been trying to resist the urge to start reading too many of my new Nabokov novels since I should get more of my reading for this week done ahead of time. Strangely enough, my behaviorism and behavior modification textbook is one of the funniest textbooks I have ever read.

Unfortunately I didn't have my behaviorism class today after all because the original professor has medical issues and won't be able to teach the course any longer. The replacement professor can't come until Wednesday, so I ended up wandering around the science center with Sophia and attempted to figure out what the freefloating representation of the organic molecule hanging by the staircase is. There are two carbon molecules bonded to each other, with one also being bonded to a nitrogen atom and the other bonded to a hydrogen. Sophia and I have been attempting to figure out what this molecule is and why the letters "the origins of life" are right next to it on the wall; I'm guessing it's either C2NO or CNOC. Perhaps it's part of a nucleotide or it's an amino acid?

Perhaps if Sophia and I stayed in the Organic Chem lecture long enough, we would have found out, but we quickly realized that Sophia's physics lecture was in the adjacent hall. This week students are allowed to "shop" in different classes to see whether or not they would like to transfer out of their current classes into a new one and also to sample the other classes, so I joined Sophia's class for the morning. Frighteningly enough, the lecture covered material that I learned as a high school freshman, and there was one undergrad who seriously didn't know the law of sines. Just about everyone in the class is in pre-med as the course fulfills the physics requirement for pre-med students, but don't they still have to do math? As smug as this sounds, even someone who is as mathematically clueless as I am knows how to derive the law of sines and add and subtract basic vectors.

Besides these nerdy endeavors, I'm aslo trying to avoid this weirdo around campus who pressured my roommate and I to watch Legally Blonde with him the first night we arrived. We snuck out of the theater a few minutes later, but it's a little hard when he sits just two rows in front of me at the dean's welcome and kept turning his head back the entire time, possibly staring at me.

I better go back to my dorm now to stamp letters (I've finally figured out how to get money into the finicky stamp machine! Yay!) so I'll be back later. Be seeing you!