That's my name, too!

The Minnesota Opera is currently running a production of Lucia di Lammermoor, Donizetti's tale of feuding Scots with Italian names. They have been promoting it on Classical Minnesota Public Radio and elsewhere with the tagline "In all of opera, there's only one Lucia." I've found this to be fairly useless, as it tells nothing of what the story is about, and is also quite generic. You could just as well say that in all of opera there is only one Aida, one Figaro (one character in three operas), or one Nixon.

I was talking about this over the weekend with my opera-buff father, and he explained that besides being silly, the phrase is also false:

• there is a Lucia in Cavalleria Rusticana (the one-act opera featured in the climax of Godfather III that tried so hard to be the climax from Godfather I)
• Mimi, the female lead in La Boheme, explains "Mi chiamano Mimi, ma il mio name e Lucia" ("They call me Mimi, but my real name is Lucia")

So not only is there not only one Lucia in all of opera, but we only need to come up with two more to create an "Operatic Lucias" Jeopardy category.


I propose that for the rest of the week, the MN Opera and MPR revise the ad copy to "In all of opera, there are no fewer than three Lucias. This is one of them." No doubt the Ordway will be standing room only next weekend in gratitude for the accuracy.

Callback: DC Storytapes Teach Classical Music

You may recall way back in the second post on this blog, when I wrote about these old DC Comics storybook & tape sets I had as a kid, and about how they ended up introducing me to a few pieces of classical music, but there were holes in my memory as to what all the pieces were. Well, over the weekend, I found mp3s of all these sets online. Link here — scroll down a little for the DC/Fisher Price sets.

In my searches for these tapes, I came across several message and comment threads where people were asking about the pieces of music used in them. Since such a list seems not to exist, and in the spirit of niche marketing, I hereby present:

A Brief and Incomplete Guide to Classical Music in the DC Comics/Fisher Price Story Tapes

I. Superman: From Krypton to Metropolis
This was the tape I was wondering about in the original post. As it turns out, the Superman theme from this story is Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture, which I would have guessed too dark, but the way they edit it, it works.
Wagner: The Flying Dutchman, overture; opening used for main theme, other clips used for some action scenes
Dvořák: Sym. No. 9, "From the New World," IV. Allegro con fuoco; used (including, once or twice, the "Jaws" motif from the beginning of the movement) throughout in action scenes, especially the climax
R. Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks; TE's lighthearted theme quoted goofily during Superbaby's exploits

II. Wonder Woman: Cheetah on the Prowl
This story makes a lot of use out of pretty much one piece.
Liszt: Les Preludes; single most "heroic" statement of the tone poem's theme used repeatedly as WW's theme, other sections used incidentally throughout.

III. Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder: The Case of the Laughing Sphinx
A Mussorgsky two-fer! Besides the selections I list here, there is another piece used several times, including the scene where Batman invites Dick Grayson to become his sidekick, that I did not recognize.
Mussorgsky (ed. Rimsky-Korsakov): Night on Bald Mountain; main theme, other moments of Bat-action
Mussorgsky (orch. Ravel): Pictures at an Exhibition -
- Hut on Fowl's Legs; used through most of the middle in threatening situations, with an odd piano/percussion arrangement for some of the training "montage"
- Great Gate at Kiev; used triumphantly at the end

IV. The Justice League of America: The Lunar Invaders
First off, this story reuses the main themes of each of the individual heroes above for their big moments, which is pretty cool, especially when each is being introduced at the beginning. I did not recognize the theme used at the top of the recording, which reappears a few times as a sort of JLA "team motif". Also didn't quite catch Green Lantern's theme or The Atom's. Red Tornado's theme is ridiculous and seems original.
Beethoven: Moonlight Sonata, I. Adagio sostenuto; used for the scene of the astronaut Team of Ethnic Tokens working on the moon, in an unusual and surprisingly effective interpretation of the piece's title
Wagner: Lohengrin, Prélude, Act III; Flash's theme which was incidentally also used as one of the pieces Peppermint Patty skated to in the "She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown," book & tape.
J. Strauss II: On the Beautiful Blue Danube; boringly and predictably used for the approach to the JLA's space station. Maybe 2001 references weren't completely played out in 1983?

Overall, it's clear that whoever put the music together for these things knew their stuff, especially along the Liszt-Wagner-Strauss 19th Century German axis. I'm a little surprised that the first time I heard the Flying Dutchman Overture later in life, I didn't experience the Sudden Instant Recall Effect (SIRE, coined by the Muppet nuts over at ToughPigs.com) that I did with Les Preludes in college. In any case, I'm glad to have solved the Superman music mystery with which I kicked this blog, and to have celebrated it with yet another obscure post with an incredibly narrow target audience. Cheers!

Shames (Three Different Ones)

Here are three links to make you more disappointed in your fellow man.

First, with a hat tip to John Cole at Balloon Juice, is a Christmas decoration for the "there's a war on Christmas!" crowd.

Cole puts it well:

In all seriousness, I guess you can’t expect people who reject evolution, who think the world was created 6,000 years ago, and who think Adam and Eve roamed the world with dinosaurs to know anything about basic American history, can you?

Next, via Andrew Sullivan, we have a head-slappingly inane piece of exercise equipment.



Words fail. Buildings tumble. The ground opens wide. I'm hopeful that the looming depression will kill this thing dead, for the sake of the species and for civilization.

Finally, found originally on Joe. My. God., The New Yorker spends some time with Prince and discovers that along with his conversion to Jehovah's Witness, he's not so cool with the gays:

He pointed to a Bible. “But there’s the problem of interpretation, and you’ve got some churches, some people, basically doing things and saying it comes from here, but it doesn’t. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum you’ve got blue, you’ve got the Democrats, and they’re, like, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ Gay marriage, whatever. But neither of them is right.” When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion—Prince tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

Prince's spokesbots have claimed that he was misquoted or taken out of context. But Coates points out that the New Yorker fact-checkers are famously stringent. Also, the quote is remarkably specific, and seems to include its context. Super-disappointing. Way more than when I found out Beck is a lifelong Scientologist. Disappointing that the guy responsible for some of the most perfect pop music in the last 30 years, much of it highly popular in dance clubs, which figure in some way, as I understand it, into gay culture (I mean, I guess), is a total phobe. I'm reminded of when my music history prof. in college (himself of Russian Jewish heritage) got to Richard Wagner: he implored a separation of the music and the man. Just because Wagner was in some ways a horrible person doesn't make the Siegfried Idyll not beautiful or the Prelude to the third act of Lohengrin not stirring. With that in mind, I present some of the great work of an idiot with backwards views on homosexuality:

Watch more Purple Rain videos on AOL Video

Life changes & found items

So, the big news is that I'm changing jobs. I'm leaving the firm where I started my career four years ago, and had the opportunity to take self-portraits of myself wearing aviators on the roofs of half-finished Target stores. I'll be starting in mid-May at a large architecture/engineering firm in downtown St. Paul, who shall go unnamed because I don't know what their feelings are about being associated with an individual's blog and I don't want to get pre-fired. I'm excited for the downtown environment, expensive parking notwithstanding, and the hustle & bustle of an urban firm with a large variety of projects going on. I'll have to listen to lots of SimCity music on my iPod while I engineer.

As a result of the change, I'm looking down the barrel of two moves: job and house, more or less simultaneously. I finish at Job #1 on May 7th, we close on our house May 9th, and I start at Job #2 May 14th. I'm a frothing madman, you see.

I started cleaning out my desk yesterday, and came across a stack of slips of paper, most of them Get Fuzzy Page-a-Day pages, with notes scrawled on them. Old to-do lists, many of them, but also some Fred-cultural artifacts scrawled on lunch breaks and end-of-the-day flights of fancy. I present to you here two that I found of interest.

Legend of Zelda Games
chronologically, and indicating (X) if I have ever completed them:

• The Legend of Zelda X
  
• Adventure of Link X
  
• Link to the Past X
  
• Link's Awakening X
  
• Ocarina of Time
• Majora's Mask
• Oracle of Ages
• Oracle of Seasons
• Wind Waker X
  
• Four Swords Adventures X
  
• Minish Cap X
  
• Twilight Princess (X, more recent than list)
  
• Phantom Hourglass

Hey, that was fun! Here's another:

Awesome Rolling Stones songs
(* indicates songs I was newly, especially fond of as of early 2005)

• Moonlight Mile
• Happy
• Let It Loose *
• Paint It Black
• She's a Rainbow
• You Can't Always Get What You Want
• 19th Nervous Breakdown
• Can't You Hear Me Knocking *
• Monkey Man
• Wild Horses
• Bitch *
• Beast of Burden
• Ruby Tuesday
• Rocks Off *
• Sympathy for the Devil
• Ventilator Blues
• Angie
• I Don't Know Why *
• Loving Cup
• Tumbling Dice
• Gimme Shelter

Wow! This is the sort of hard-hitting excitement you've come to expect from my blog, no doubt. Glad to serve.

Hey, reminder, Neutrino happens tonight. Please do come. I certainly didn't expect April to be the month where it actually snowed while we were filming but then, sometimes our expectations are dashed and covered with a half an inch of snow.

Weeklypedia #3: Already at the bottom of the barrel?

Last week's answers are up. Here's this week's quiz, which feels more sophomore-slumpy than last week's did.

1. The remake of this film featured James LeGros in a small role as a used car salesman who didn't want any trouble from his first customer of the day.

2. He is the NYC cop who broke the code of silence surrounding police corruption in the early 1970s (last name only is acceptable).

3. This hazardous metal is commonly obtained from the ore cinnabar, and is one of only two elements that is liquid at standard temperature and pressure.

4. Regina is its capital.

5. This 2002 album by the rock band Wilco would have been known as "Yoke How Fox" if they were British instead of American.

6. It's a slang term for a padded backrest on a motorcycle.

7. She's the owner of the company that adapted Zora Neale Hurston's novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" into a film in 2005.

8. The title of Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung, which premiered in Bayreuth, Germany in 1876, is a translation of this Norse term meaning "the Fate of the Gods."

Until next week, or until I finally blog something other than hastily-constructed trivia.

Taste the rainbow

My next blogging subject was suggested by an article on Salon.com, entitled "The Letter E is Purple." Without even reading the lede, I knew exactly what the article would be: a first-person narrative nonfiction piece about synesthesia. I knew this because I have had similar statements bouncing in my mind since an early age, except to me, the letter E is orange.

Synethesia, as the previous links will tell you, is a state in which the mind connects the input from one sense with the felt experience of another. Being able to taste colors, see music, or indeed, associate colors with numbers and letters.

Ever since I was little, I've associated a certain color or colors with each number and letter. The image above more or less represents my color associations with the ten individual Arabic digits. Not all of the color associations are strong, and some are hard for me to pin down if I think about them. 1 and 0 are hard, especially. 3 is sometimes yellow, sometimes orange. But for my whole life, I've had a starter set of colors that I associate with numerals and with letters. Like each color has a Platonic form sitting in a locked room somewhere, a perfect Sesame Street Muppet version of itself that all other examples of the symbol is copied from.

I think that when I was a kid, I understood these colors to be universal, but after a couple arguments ("Don't be stupid! E is brown!"), I realized that my colors were not other peoples' colors. And over time, I think I realized that a) the colors were subjective and b) not everybody had the colors, so I let it drop. That has always been the extent of my synesthetic experience: each letter and numeral has a color. Sometimes words or longer numbers have colors, being combinations or sequences of others. Sometimes a color overwhelms. The letter F is green, as are the words Fred or Frederick. B and Beukema are red. Incidentally, my favorite color is blue. On an early date with my wife, I explained my experience of synesthesia to her, and mentioned that her initials went well together (MSR = blue, grey and brown, although the letters are black, blue and reddish brown respectively -- I never claimed this made any sense to me).

Years later, again in Doug Diamond's music history class (see also my second post), we talked about the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, and I first learned the word synesthesia. Seems old Alex had a particularly strong case, and saw colors associated with musical tones. His composition was necessarily affected by his colors, and in order to convey his experience with his audience, he devised a color organ that would project the colors he saw for each note. The wikipedia article on Scriabin describes arguments he had with Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov about his associations. Apparently the latter had a low-grade synesthesia himself. Of course his colors didn't match Scriabin's -- I think everybody who has this has a different set of associations, formed by certain chemical connections randomly happening at some time in one's youth. Maybe I had a children's book that showed the numbers as I show them above. Or maybe "green" and "4" just landed in the same place in the primordial soup between my ears.

I've spoken personally to two other people who have had strong synesthetic experiences. One is my friend Adam from college, who, if I recall, had much stronger associations than mine, including musical ones. And I once had a conversation with a synesthete who described how she would see the colors associated with words and letters projected over a page as she read it. That's very different from and more extensive than my simple, back-of-the-brain experiences.

A Japanese video game designer named Tetsuya Mizuguchi created a game for the Sega Dreamcast and Playstation 2 called "Rez" that sought, in part, to simulate synesthesia for the player. The game is full of simple, stylized, colorfol visuals and pulsing, evocative techno music, resulting in a simulation of a rave as much as anything else. But it's a fun and easily recommendable game. Check out some video from it.

So, handful of readers, do you have synesthetic associations? Have you told anyone about them? Have you talked to others who have them? Please, do tell.

DC Storytapes Teach Classical Music

When I was a kid, I had a number of book-and-tape sets, featuring short storybooks and cassettes that read the story for you. In addition to the typical Star Wars, Disney and Peanuts sets, I also had three sets made by Fisher-Price featuring DC Comics characters. These were a cut above the average storytape set: each featured a snazzy hardback book with a little plastic envelope on the back for the tape and all-original art by major DC artists like Jim Aparo and Joe Orlando, and a nicely-written (to my spotty memory) version of each superhero's mythology.

I had three. There was the Batman one, entitled "Batman and Robin the Teen Wonder in the Case of the Laughing Sphinx," which featured the Dynamic Duo against the Joker, Penguin, Riddler and Catwoman, and also told Robin's origin. There was a Superman one called "From Krypton to Metropolis," which included Superman's origin, his time as Superboy and the version of Lex Luthor's origin in which he lost his hair during an experiment in Smallville and turned against Superboy/man in the process. The Wonder Woman one was called "Cheetah on the Prowl," and had her origin and a story where she saves her boyfriend's army base from supervillainess the Cheetah. There was also a Justice League of America one I didn't have.

The reason I bring this up is that each of them used a single piece of classical music as the background theme music. The Batman music I know real well: it was Modest Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," famous pop-culturally for its segment in the original Fantasia, which worked really well. The stuttering opening notes of the piece still say Batman to me. Wonder Woman used a heroic fanfare bit from Franz Liszt's "Les Preludes," (the motif in question is declared triumphantly at 6:49 in the video) which was also the theme to the old (1930s & 40s) Buck Rogers serials. I hadn't known what piece it was for about a decade and a half, until my college music history prof played a bit of it in class, and it hit me like a ton of bricks in a moment of AHA. I don't remember what the Superman music was, but have long wondered what bit of music has been bouncing around my subconscious, secretly associated with the Man of Steel. Doug Diamond's Music 262 course at Grinnell solved the Wonder Woman problem. If I stumble upon the Superman book or especially the tape at a thrift or collectible store some day, I might just have to pony up a buck or two to find out.

(Hat tip for the images to some person on Fortunecity.)