Detail!

If you ever saw my (um) cluttered house, you might doubt this next statement, but: I try to be a detail-oriented fella.

In fact, because of the confluence of three of my interests, it’s conceivable that I could be classified as a Major League Detail Guy. (If only I really did live up to the standards of such a title all the time; but that’s another lament for another time.)

 

First Life Interest: I used to be a journalism guy, officially. Now I’m just an observer of the profession; but the training never really leaves you. As I pursued an undergraduate degree in journalistic studies, the emphasis was on accurate reportage, getting the facts straight, avoiding the misquoting of sources, double- and triple-checking multiple sources so as to report actual confirmed facts. Who what where when how, with a big side order of why.

Out in the big bad real world of journalistic endeavor, my first and only job was as an editorial assistant for a microwave-engineering technical journal. My life there was dominated by two activities:

[1] Making red marks on papers, indicating MISTAKES! in spelling, grammar, syntax and such; and making sure that magazine pages being readied for publication followed our established stylistic guidelines. There should be THIS much space between headline and body copy; the line dividing text columns should be THIS thick; THIS item should be in boldface but THIS item should not.

And [2] opening the mail, reading the press releases that our advertiser companies sent us (and sent us, and sent us), and boiling them down into little publishable blurbs for the magazine’s “New Products” section. Each blurb needed to include all the important details of whatever product it was, shouldn’t include the extraneous ones, and hopefully interested readers enough that they would consider making a purchase or two. In this role, I was less a journalist and more of a marketing surrogate; but that, often as not, is life at a trade magazine. The rules were the same: get it right, down to the last little tiny detail. Because the tiniest mistake, paradoxically, almost always seems to get noticed immediately, and makes the whole magazine look bad.

Speaking of the question of “is anyone really going to notice a small error?”…

 

Second Life Interest: I’m a musician. Never mind the music-teacher aspect of it, which requires me to stay organized with regard to grading, materials, budgets and the like. That part is definitely more of a challenge for me. But I’m thinking of my life as a rehearsing and performing musician.

In baseball, if you get a base hit three times out of every ten trips to the plate, you have very nearly punched your ticket to the Hall of Fame. On a math test, three out of ten will not do it for you.

On a math test, for that matter, if you answer nine questions out of ten correctly, our current system of grading has you in the A range. (Barely, but it does.) But in a concert, if I play nine notes out of every ten correctly … if I screw up just one rhythm out of every ten … if I interpret 90 percent of the articulations correctly … it’s obviously not perfect. In the music world, it’s definitely not an A-minus performance. And at least with regard to the pitches and rhythms, if not the more expression-oriented details of music, audience members will notice the ten percent that ain’t right somehow (even if they don’t know why it ain’t).

In, say, a choir with twenty members, if two of the singers are singing a wrong note, wrong rhythm, wrong word … or if they’re not in the same place in the music as everyone else … it’s noticeable. If the chorus is 250 strong and ninety percent of them are nailing it … that’s still twenty-five people who are out to lunch, even if only for a moment.

So, paying attention to details – ALL the details! – in that world is vitally important if you want to convince people that you’re a decent musician and this is a quality performance.

 

Third Life Interest: I’m a sci-fi nerd and I always have been.

Sit me down with a snack and a TV tuned to Star Trek reruns and I’m good for the afternoon. Park me in front of any Star Wars film (except bits of Episode I, and most of Episode II) and I won’t bother you for a good long while. More to the point, I can tell you in rather exacting detail why I can’t watch parts of Episode I (almost any scene featuring Jar Jar Binks or the young Jake Lloyd, who might by now be a fine actor but wasn’t in 1999) and why Episode II is borderline unwatchable (too many details to include here; you’ll have to take my word).

From my days as a seventh-grade student who suddenly realized he was surrounded by several other people who were willing to breathe the words “Battlestar Galactica” in public, to my early college days having lunch with members of the science-fiction club who were without doubt the precursors to the “Big Bang Theory” cast … I’ve been associated with folks who are borderline obsessive about details. Dr. McCoy is a Lieutenant Commander so his uniform sleeves have one solid and one broken braid around them not two solid! Vipers don’t launch from the Battlestar’s outboard landing bays! And Doctor Who’s scarf as worn by Tom Baker was never shorter than 12 feet. Everybody knows THAT. (Come to think of it, his name isn’t “Doctor Who”, either.)

Taking it one step further, and allowing two of these Life Interests to collide: I can also speak in mind-numbing detail about certain science-fiction film scores. I had a moment of blog-posting on this subject once, and that should probably suffice. (To wit: there are no less than seven distinct leitmotifs in the Star Wars score, associated with characters, groups or concepts – in Episode IV alone. And that’s probably more than you cared to know.)

 

The question is, as always – how much attention to detail is too much?

Maybe the place where this is all allowed to fall apart, at least in my world, is the floors of my house, which tend to be filled with piles of papers, books and other fallout from a busy life. But, as my father used to say, at least they’re organized heaps…

Pruning the Ol’ Bookmarks Folder

Just got freshly appalled at the number of webpages I’ve bookmarked without ever returning to them again.  So, in the spirit of “I’m on school vacation, I have time, and my house is a wreck, must clean, must clean”… I’m starting with my hard drive.  (That’s helpful.)

During that process, unfortunately, in the spirit of “I’m a hopeless pack rat”, I’ve re-discovered webpages I’ve bookmarked without ever returning to them again… that I might return to.  And which might explain a lot about me, actually…

So, in no particular order…

Besides her regular duties on “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!”, and besides the fact that she and her family were members of the church I grew up in … I don’t know a thing about her.

This music dictionary even pronounces terms for you!

Reportedly, the gentleman who played Data on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” is a pretty odd duck; but on Twitter he’s comedy gold.

The first thing to do when you go to this website is find out how to quickly stop the MIDI file of a hymn (and never the one you were searching for) that automatically plays upon your arrival to every single webpage inside it. After which, it’s a great resource.

With luck, this will stop being topical someday. Until then, it’s just fun and occasionally pretty creative. (Even more fun than William Shatner reading Ms. Palin’s Twitter posts in the manner of a poetry slam.)

They’re putting out another album this month. At last.

I wish something like this had existed when I was a college bando. Then again, maybe I don’t.

Looking for good clean jokes? “A Prairie Home Companion” to the rescue. Looking for slightly off-color jokes? Same rescue organization.

My desperate attempt to stay literarily engaged. Even if I don’t always appreciate non-rhyming poetry.

When I was about 12, I thought this was the sweetest funny television show I’d ever seen. I still put it right up there. Thanks to the BBC via PBS (whom else?).

Just an episode guide, but please do enjoy the audio that plays constantly.

My favorite cable-news law professor consultant guy.

The ultimate in nerd, but it does try to explain the unexplainable. No, not George Lucas’ dialogue; just the techno-toys in his movies.

This explains a great deal about my sense of humor, I think.

In a desperate attempt to stay literarily engaged, part 2.

When an outfit like the American Shakespeare Center creates a funny Shakespeare graphic, it’s actually funny.

Going back to the “when I was 12 and thought it was cool” department. Although, for the record, some of this stuff even I found dorky at the time.

Flanders and Swann. British. Lyrics. Spectacular.

Let’s see, what things do I like? Behind-the-scenes documentaries? Check. Music? Check. Sci-fi? Check. The only thing this TV composer’s blog is missing is something about baseball and band.  (Oh wait!  He talks about contrabass clarinets.  Check.)

It’s John Cleese. No more need be said.

Sounds, To Go With Flickering Images

Taking note of the recent passing of John Barry, composer of the orchestral scores for the early James Bond movies – as well as many others, notably The Lion in Winter (an Oscar winner), Midnight Cowboy (a Grammy winner), King Kong (1976), Disney’s The Black Hole, Body Heat, The Cotton Club (1984), Jagged Edge, Out of Africa, and Dances With Wolves (an Oscar winner) … I got thinking about my favorite film score moments.

Admittedly I am an unrepentant John Williams fan, and I tend to collect more science fiction movie score CDs than anything else; so this is by no means a list of what I believe to be the Finest Movie Score Moments Ever.  But here are some themes and movie music moments that got my attention and have held it. Not necessarily the biggest loudest ones, but ones that I think are really effective …

In alphabetical order of composers:

Elmer Bernstein: The theme from The Great Escape, mostly because of its use by “The Simpsons” for the sequence where baby Maggie engineers a daring escape from the mean nasty day care center.

Bruce Broughton: The theme from Silverado, and not just because it was the field show opener for my senior college marching season. I just like it a bunch. It’s a glorious ripoff of every important cowboy movie sound there is.

Tan Dun: “Farewell” from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Danny Elfman: The main title sequence from Beetlejuice, incorporating “The Banana Boat Song (Day-o!)”.

Jerry Goldsmith: The final sequence from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Talk about a score that propped up a movie. The acting was miserable, the special effects problems were legendary; but the music does its job, and then some. (You could say that about Goldsmith’s work in Star Trek V, as well.)

James Horner: The sequence from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock wherein Kirk, Scott etc. steal the soon-to-be-decommissioned Enterprise. The first genuine fun in the Trek movie series.

James Newton Howard: “Harvey Two-Face”, some of the rare non-action music from The Dark Knight. The story on this Batman movie is that Hans Zimmer wrote all the action sequences in that slam-bang, part-music-part-sound-design way of his, and James Newton Howard wrote the “emotional” music content. And I got that straight from the liner notes, where Zimmer admits as much.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold: The Sea Hawk. He is of course owed an enormous debt of gratitude by John Williams and just about every film composer there is. And not bad visuals for 1939.

 

Bear McCreary: these three clips are from his standout work on the TV re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica. THIS is science fiction music? Yes.

[] “Gaeta’s Lament”, a song that one character sings while recovering from, of all things, having his foot amputated. This particular character leads a particularly un-charmed life.

[] “Battlestar Sonatica”, music based on Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, but which is played during many scenes inside a Cylon base star. I’m not sure whether McCreary considered it underscore or source music. In the 1979 Galactica, it would have been all growly villain music, but here? Cylons apparently are really weird.

[] “Heeding the Call” is the underscore for the sequence where five of the main characters realize that not only have they all been hearing this weirdo version of “All Along the Watchtower” in their heads, but that the song is dragging them together so they can jointly discover they’re all Cylons, as it turns out.

 

Randy Newman: “Blue Shadows on the Trail”, from The Three Amigos.

Arvo Part: “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten”, which was not written for Fahrenheit 9/11, but was used as underscore for the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster footage early in that film.

John Powell: “The Huddle”, the opening sequence from Happy Feet. Pretty serious stuff for what would become a wonderfully goofy animated movie about singing and dancing penguins.

Joby Talbot: “Destruction of Earth”, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Amidst one of the more ridiculously grand pullbacks in cinema history, this is an appropriately huge, and for its length goofy, musical buildup to … the rather anticlimactic demolition of the planet Earth, to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.

Jay Ungar: “Ashokan Farewell”, from Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary.

Hans Zimmer: from Backdraft, “Show Me Your Firetruck” – as much as it’s a terrific theme for heroic firefighters, I also get a kick out of this one because of its use by the original Japanese Iron Chef TV cooking show.

Also Hans Zimmer: from A League of Their Own, “The Final Game” – the big finish, living at the intersection of symphonic score, big-band swing (the story took place during World War II, after all), and Warner Brothers cartoon scores.

 

My apologies, but: the John Williams pantheon…

[] The final sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Only Williams could get away with that quote of “When You Wish Upon a Star”.

[] Overture from The Cowboys.

[] “Adventures on Earth”, from E.T. The Extraterrestrial. Admission: I still have never seen the movie. But I own the soundtrack album.

[] The Map Room At Dawn, the sequence where Indiana Jones discovers the true location of the Ark of the Covenant, from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Everything you ever wanted in a semi-religious-semi-archaeological-Middle-Eastern-relic cue.

[] “Leaving Ingrid”, from Seven Years in Tibet. Another film I never saw…

[] The “Order 66” Jedi Purge sequence from Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Most composers would write angry, terrified, chaotic music. Williams goes for bleak despair, and hits for extra bases. Watch especially from 2:09 on in this clip.

[] From Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope: not the usual, expected cues, but instead the great work as the Death Star wipes out Princess Leia’s home planet.

[] “The Asteroid Field” from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. What is required when spaceships are trying to survive flying through an asteroid field? Virtuosic playing from the London Symphony Orchestra, that’s what.

[] From Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, a curious cue called “Alliance Assembly”, during which the plans for the big attack on Death Star II are laid out. Watch how precisely Williams’ music shifts to reflect even the slightest facial expression adjustments, in spite of some of the tough music edits to extend a short cue into a long scene.

[] And from Superman, although I have always loved the “Planet Krypton” fanfare from early in the film, the brass blaring in the end of the “Destruction of Krypton” sequence is just glorious.

 

And, because this thought process started with John Barry:

George S. Clinton: The “Shag-adelic” Austin Powers Score Medley, from the first Austin Powers movie.  That’s its official title.

Michael Giacchino: “Lava in the Afternoon”, a sly little item from The Incredibles.

David Arnold: from the 2006 Casino Royale remake, “Dinner Jackets” – the scene in which James Bond gets his first inkling that the debonair look may just suit him: 0:45 on this track.

And finally … at last … needing no explanation:

[] John Barry: “Bond Back in Action”, from Goldfinger.

[] John Barry: “Bond Meets Solitaire”, from Live and Let Die.