the litvenenko connection

well, my mother and sister are currently flying over the middle of the united states, on their way to london to visit me. yesterday i was talking to my mom, trying to find out the details of the flight and the hotel they booked, and she gave me the name of the hotel they were staying at. as it turns out, the hotel is called "millennium hotel" which is located in london's posh mayfair area. the hotel is a lovely hotel, i have to admit. however, i had this strange feeling as i glanced through the hotel's website. suddenly i saw it...the hotel has a sushi bar. i turned to carl and said, "wasn't that the hotel where litvenenko was poisoned?" he said, "i don't know. check google." i searched the news articles and found that i was right. my family is staying at the hotel where not just one person was poisoned, but at least 10 people were poisoned. how lovely. i guess i should warn her against drinking the water. i told carl they should ask for a discount since it's a health risk being there!!

so...as for six degrees of separation go....

attali

“Fetishized as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society: deritualize a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialize its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalize its consumption, then see to it that it is stockpiled until it loses meaning.”
--- Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music

so true...

atonality/post-tonality destroy the bourgeois?

i was just thinking...if schoenberg was tried to destroy the "decaying tonal music" of the bourgeois...did he succeed? i have a feeling that if i look at the events schedule for any philharmonic i will find the answer. in a sad way i think all he did was force people to cling that that "decaying" form of music even tighter than they had in the past.

no one ever really talks about whether schoenberg succeeded in destroying the music of the bourgeois, they just say that was his goal. i don't know why. it would be interesting if someone did some compelling musicological research into the effect of schoenberg's music on "bourgeois" music. maybe someone has and i just don't know about it?



...i always thought that wagner was an ugly antisemite but now i think he was just jealous. according to my opera studies professor, wagner borrowed quite a lot, in regard to musical elements, from halevy and when he was a poor and starving young composer he used to arrange halevy's operas for voice and piano. of course, i imagine, at the time it was quite fashionable to hate jews.

just a few days before carl arrives in london. i can hardly work on my fieldwork proposal, all i can think about is the moment when carl walks into the waiting area of heathrow airport with his shaggy amish beard and square glasses. woohoo.

honestly dishonest

(my apologies, this isn't music related at all)

well, my sister had to do an assignment for u.s. history where she had to come up with an political party with its own platform, name, and motto. i tried to make her take a extremist platform...for example, i suggested that on the issue of abortion we should just "kill the babies" but unfortunately, that was just "too sad," according to my sister. however, she did use my motto when i told her that platforms didn't matter since politicians never do what they say anyhow. so as a result she came up with the "Honestly Dishonest Party" and the motto (which i suggested although after that i suggested the motto "the revolution is dead, long live the revolution!) "we're all lies, at least we're honest." however, perhaps the best part of her assignment is the last bit of it where she had to write a "messsage from our founder" which you can see posted below:

Our party was founded on the idea that not everything said is kept, which in the end leads the people into believing that their government lied to them. To stop any further thought of being cheated by the United States, we offer our nations people the right to believe that everything we have said here is an honest lie. In the end if it turns out that we actually do keep to our word, instead of feeling cheated, the people will be happy in knowing that the lying party they voted for can actually tell the truth. We would also like to acknowledge some famous words from an equally dishonest man. If you can trust in it that is.

“You can always trust an honest man to be dishonest. Honestly, it’s the honest ones you have to look after.”

That would have been our motto, but it turned out to be too long, but in all honesty our new one is better. And that is the honest truth.

yes...she has in fact quoted a fictional pirate named jack sparrow...i'm so proud of that brat!

chopin and mulled wine

i tasted mulled wine for the first time, this evening. it wasn't spectacular.

i checked out a few books of piano music. a collection of six sonatinas for piano and a compilation of chopin piano pieces, which according to the editor are the easiest of all of his works. they're easy enough for me to play through very slowly at least. despite the fact that i am not a pro at the piano i still had a great time in the practice room playing chopin. i haven't really had a chance to just play alone. it's such a nice experience. i really miss playing music. hopefully i will be getting some decent reeds from carl this week so i can start playing oboe again. i'm really glad that there is still something inside me that has a strong desire to play music. in class a professor warned against losing focus of the music in our essays. we mustn't lose focus of music as part of our life, either.

i find this funny. i always had a hard time calling myself a musician because i felt so unlike my friends who were obsessed with their horns. but i should just face the facts, i am a musician. i love to play music and perform. i really can't live without being able to express myself musically. at least i've discovered something new about myself.

i have a proposal due on wedsnesday for "techniques of ethnomusicology". i'm planning on doing my fieldwork project on the buskers in the underground. i want to take a look at how performing somewhere outside of the conventions of Western music affects the making of music in a Western society that promotes the capitalist music venue (i.e. the concert hall, opera house, etc.) over something as equalizing as busking. to be exact, i want to focus on reception of the music that is being performed. music in the underground is a bit different from in the subways of New York where performers are allowed to play on platforms. people can't really stop to listen to the music since the buskers generally perform in the tunnels that connect the platform to the escalators and to other platforms. as a matter of fact, i think it would be really dangerous if people actually did stop to listen. so i want to see how that affects musicking.

another interesting aspect of this is that the underground has tried to regulate busking by setting up spots in certain areas of the tunnel for music performance. buskers have to apply for a license and go through an audition that is organized by carling, the beer company. which sort of destroys an element of spontaneity, doesn't it? also, it makes it less equalizing since buskers must audition and are then given a time slot. i'll have to focus on this as well in my ethnography.

i miss twoj's and mr. t's. i miss new york, too. i' m having a hard time finding the new art music scene. ha ha. i mean, at least i could listen to john zorn in new york at a club. i can't find the equivalent in london. does anyone know where i can go?

net neutrality

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

"freedom isn't free, it costs folks like you and me...freedom costs a buck o five!"

colbert and stewart, part 2

(part 2 of 2)

which leads me back to something else i read in the interview. stewart, in a way, laments the fact that we are a two party system and a majority of people will vote based on the party line rather than on what is really best for the nation. i think that is true. everyone tells you, "don't vote green party, it's like throwing your vote away." that is deceiving. i used to believe that but now i don't. i don't think it is throwing a vote away to vote for a candidate of another party. if more people realised that they were not throwing their vote away, i think third parties would have a greater opportunity to make their voice heard.

i think we are too obsessed with having our voices count. maybe if we just stopped caring about voting for "the lesser of the two evils because we really don't have a choice" then maybe we would find ourselves with more options. of course, it's difficult to make 200 million people think this way.

since i arrived in the UK, i've found myself constantly having to defend myself because i am an american (or as my friend from chili says, "not american. you are from the united states." so decided to call myself, "united statesean"). i often find myself having to tell people that yes, america has a history (someone once had the nerve to claim that we had no history). yes, we did rape the native americans, but i didn't do it personally. and yes, our president's administration is taking the lead role in destroying the world.

however.

while i have to say, yes and yes and yes. i also comeback by saying, "and what about your country? blair is no better. he is worse. he chooses to wait on hand and foot and do whatever the US administration says." i find it difficult when people feel they have to tell me that my country is very bad and doing very wrong things when their country isn't innocent of doing wrong, either. however, at least their country doesn't deny global warming.

interestingly enough, i found myself in a reverse role recently. i was talking to an acquaintance about the bush administration. it was the first time, in a long time, that i had allowed myself to be part of a heated political discussion. this guy, who was the same age me, was defending the president for going into iraq and toppling the hussein regime. i said, "yes but what about the 600,000 some-odd civilians that were reported dead as a result of the occupation?" anyhow, i won't go into detail about the argument but he couldn't see how appointing tony snow as the press secretary was wrong. he also thought that the people in the middle east just wanted to blow things up. all i could say was that i was sorry that he felt the way he did about my government and i also mentioned that my "forefathers" wrote that if we didn't like our government, we could overthrow it (unlike in england where they celebrate guy fawkes day, where they burn an effigy of the man who tried to overthrow parliament) and start a new one.

it is funny, but it seems like i do a lot more talking about the US administration outside of the country than when i was in the country. i feel like i walk around with a sign that says, "tell me why my country is wrong. i am dumb and ignorant and need to be enlightened."

returning to colbert and stewart, though, i sometimes find myself so surprised at how influential they have become. i used to watch the daily show back when kilborn was the host. in those days i always confused, colbert, roco, and carrell. of course, i was just a middle school kid then and i would only catch the next day reruns when i was home sick from school. when stewart took over the show, i was upset. i thought kilborn was really funny and i didn't think that stewart was funny at all. i remember the advertisements during this "transitional period" and for some reason he was in a helicopter...

needless to say, after a while he really grew on me. although, i was always a casual viewer, watching a rerun here or there. i suppose like everyone else, there was a point when i realised that the news wasn't really news at all. it was all a game and i was being played by the media machine. so i gave up on television news. then i rediscovered the daily show and soon after the colbert report was born, and i realised that fake news was really the only reliable news source on television because they didn't care and they don't care still.

i guess that goes back to what i was saying about caring about voting and making your voice heard. maybe we think we have a lot to lose but we really don't. if at this point we feel like our vote doesn't matter, then what does it matter if it seems like we are just "throwing away" our votes? we're already doing it by voting for someone we don't really care for.

so the moral of the story is...stop caring. have a nice day.

colbert and stewart

you may have noticed that i like to post youtube clips of the colbert report and the daily show, and so you may not be surprised that i am able to write a post related to the two men.

i just read the main feature in rolling stones magazine about the two men. it must have been close to 5,000 words, including the interview at the end. the slant of the article is that the two men have really become some of the most trusted names in television news even though they are only "fake news" correspondents and pundits.

in the article, stewart talks about what the current generation is doing for the younger one. he says, "I don't worry about this generation of young people. They seem to be far more sophisticated and interesting than I remember myself being at that age. I'm more worrying about my generation. We're digging such a hole for these cats, they will have to be exceptional just to get out of it."

at least he thinks we're "interesting and sophisticated." i think we're all just apathetic. sometimes i think that all young generations are living in the shadow of the generations of the sixities and seventies. maybe those young generations of the eighties didn't have much to worry about, nor of the nineties. the gulf war was quick and was in and out of the collective conscious in no time. however, those of living in today's generation, it seems that we have this large shadow. we are too apathetic to be like those of the past.

perhaps that sounds ridiculous and self-indulgent. to think that we are unique because of the current social/political/economical climate may be incorrect. but i wonder how far from true that really is?

they say to us, "well if you want to make difference go out and vote. run for office. become the next president!" i scoff at such remarks. "yeah, i'd rather not be assassinated," is one of my favorite responses.

in passing, i read somewhere a remark about the recent mid-term elections. specifically related to california. someone made a comment, maybe it was advertising an event, but essentially it poked fun at the fact that voting in california's mid-term election was pointless and was not a way to make your "voice heard," on a national level. perhaps because california is always going to lean democratic. perhaps it is because we all know that arnold is the terminator and bush is the decider and we are the hollywood sodomites (to quote colbert) who are always going to vote one way, despite the orange county conservatives attempts to disenfranchise their "minorities" voice. in a funny way, you can always count on our vote or not count on it, depending on which party you belong to.

(part 1 of 2)