If I Looking For Bucket

I’m sure this has been around forever, but I just saw it the other day. It somehow captures the entire tragedy of existence through the plight of this unfortunate sea creature. Who among us, indeed, has not at one time or another been cruelly robbed of our bucket by the inescapable workings of Fate? It’s pretty much my new favorite image of all time, although I still like the Hopkin note.

good hyphen bye, or: who misses dash?

This is one of the first sentences in a recent New York Times article:

“WASHINGTON, March 20 — Al Gore... returns on Wednesday, a heartbreak loser turned Oscar boasting Nobel hopeful globe trotting multimillionaire pop culture eminence”

WHAT THE &^%$? Has the paper evolved beyond the need for any punctuation? Those last 13 words didn’t strike anyone as possibly requiring any sort of hyphenation at all?

This is an extreme example but I’ve seen other weird non-hyphenated things there lately, like “teen ager”. What gives?

Haiku Week, Day 7

Fever, sweat, mucus
Writhing in a wool cocoon
Waiting to emerge

Haiku Week, Day 6

Resonating tones
In a hollow wood chamber;
Ribcage and heartbeats.

Translato-Bot Strikes Again

I’m going to interrupt Haiku week just for a second for a brief note to share a few lines of superb machine translation I just stumbled across.

This little gem of inadvertent robot humor is from a blog of random news articles about animals, apparently translated by a malfunctioning Brazilian android or something, with the imaginative name of “Animal News”.

Monday, January 22, 2007

The bees of the assassin infest the area of Katrina-Ravaged

The residents of the flood-damaged parish of the St. Bernard, still that recovers of the Katrina hurricane, have a new preoccupation: bees of the assassin.

The article goes on to explain that “Sometimes they call the ‘bees to you of the assassin’ because their intense attacks can be fatal.” Who would have guessed that Portuguese-(or whatever)-to-English translation mechanoids were also such masters at writing kung-fu movie dialogue?

Haiku Week, Day 5

Thunder came early
Shattered the midday silence
The path was flooded

Haiku Week, Day 4

Paper hummingbird
A creased and discarded leaf
Fallen, torn, reborn

This one’s not as complicated as usual. It’s a little ode to my most complex piece of origami to date, a hummingbird from a design by Peter Engel. It’s interesting to me that something like that can be made from the photocopied scraps in the recycling bin.

Haiku Week, Day 3

Flames dancing on sand
God’s voice, madness or mirage?
Same thing in the end.

Since yesterday’s post partially involved me poking fun at avant-garde music, I thought I’d show I’m not a complete Philistine by mentioning that I really like Moses und Aron, an unfinished modern opera by Schoenberg that I recently acquired. The music is very atonal and strange, and the opera’s subject is a tough one to wrestle with, but I definitely like it.

The opera is about Moses (obviously) and how the Burning Bush, when it’s giving him his mission, suggests that his brother Aron be his mouthpiece. The opera’s Moses is a real puritan, and knows that his God can’t be portrayed in pictures or described fully in words. So the paradox of trying to convert the Hebrews to an invisible God he can’t talk about without diluting the message really messes with his mind. His brother Aron, on the other hand, has no trouble giving the people what they want, via magic tricks and fancy speeches (well, singing), and eventually he and they are worshipping the Golden Calf while Moses is away.

Moses comes down from Mount Sinai tablets in hand, furiously confronts Aron, and when Aron points out that the Ten Commandments are also nothing more than a graven image themselves, Moses smashes them in frustration and cries out “O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!”, which is more or less “O word, you word I lack!” He can’t figure out how to convey his message, and the opera cuts off there, unfinished after the end of Act II.



The compelling thing about this words-versus-ideals version of the Moses story for me is that it’s such a strange mix of old and modern concepts, and a weird jumble of ideas which I admire and things which I am a bit wary of.

I’m not sure whether Schoenberg’s Moses is more like a brave modern artist or intellectual, trying to create something new but realizing that all messages are distorted by the media they’re portrayed through – or more like a stereotypical religious fanatic, unable to accept any other ideas or thoughts except those he imagines are being beamed into his head directly by the Supreme Being. In the planned (but never composed) ending, Moses triumphs and, flanked by soldiers, scolds Aron for his wickedness, and Aron drops dead. Was Moses a brilliant, principled reformer or the type of guy who would have put a hit out on Salman Rushdie, or both?

I think the composer himself wasn’t sure, and I assume that’s why one of the reasons he stopped working on the opera and never finished it.

Anyway, as another irony for an opera which hinges on communication breakdown and ends with “O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!”, I can’t find the text for the opera anywhere online, so my understanding of it is currently fragmentary, based on random summaries I’ve read online and the few words I can understand in the recording. And I guess the final irony is that I was supposed to convey this all through the succinct medium of haiku, and I’ve ended up taking hundreds of words to explain myself. Oh well. I can only imagine how long my version of the Ten Commandments would be.

Haiku Week, Day 2

Screech of angry owls
Under old wooden rafters
Disorients me

Tonight we went to hear some very interesting musical performances at the Central Market Annexe, which is a cool old set of renovated colonial-era buildings with nice wooden rafters. No owls though. The owls are like totally a metaphor for the musicians we heard. Two of the performers were playing their laptops. Here’s the website of one of them. I’m not sure how they did it, but they were sort of looping and reverberating all sorts of recordings and sounds to make a kind of sonic collage. One guy played an electric guitar with a set of screwdrivers.

Unfortunately, while I am all for artistic experimentation, these very interesting concepts often sounded, in execution, like a thousand smoke alarms going off at once while a million kittens were being thrown into the world’s largest blender. For some reason all the acts tended toward high-pitched shrieking feedback tones that physically hurt my ears. Note to free-form jazz musicians and laptop sound pioneers: less high-pitched squealing, please. You can experiment all you want with muffled thumps or dull clicks, really. I’ll sit there for hours enthralled by muffled thumps. Make muffled thumps your main focus. Not ultra-high squeals. Anything but squeals.

However, while I was being tortured by many of the the sounds I was actually very interested in the intensity and obvious creativity the musicians brought to making noise. And who am I, I thought, to judge these guys’ experimental music? I wondered if I were up there deliberately trying not to make sounds that sounded like normal music, what I’d come up with. So I was interested, entranced, bored, confused, excited, physically pained, shamed and made contemplative all within the space of a few minutes. Not bad for a free concert, and I’m glad we were invited.

Haiku Week, Day 1

Spring’s tall grass breeds pests
Ancient crabs cling to their turf
Gorilla loin-spawn

Ok here’s the deal. I’ve recently been told in a friendly but firm way that my posts are too convoluted and long for normal human browsing. I really wasn’t trying to be difficult, I guess I just figured that everyone’s interests were exactly the same as my own and that therefore anything I wrote on topics that interest me, no matter how rambling, would be inherently riveting. Oops. So I’m going to post nothing but haikus for at least a week as penance, although I have in the past said I would avoid the form. This poem deals with the very real and very interesting possibility that some of our lice originally evolved on gorillas, and the larger idea that human evolutionary history can be traced by studying parasites and more specifically head and pubic lice, as discussed on this extremely interesting article. I will not be quoting from the interesting page, even though I find it very, very interesting. If you’re interested you’ll have to click on the link yourself. Thank you.