Author: AKMA

Thinking about retrospective judgment the other day piqued me to follow up my post on 1980 in music with another 25-year retrospective, this year focusing on 1983. Rather than running through all the categories and subcategories from Grammys and Oscars, I’ll exercise my authorial prerogative to award retrospective honors on an as-merited basis. That being said, Thriller (for which Pippa has recently shown some enthusiasm) represents a noteworthy accomplishment for the scope and staying power of its cultural impact. When Pippa borrowed the CD from the library, it was weeks before I could get “Billie Jean” out of my head (and now it’s back, of course). Overall, though, “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” stand out from the rest of the disk in critical retrospect; I’ll award it a “Landmark Achievement of 1983” ribbon, but not Best Album or Best Single.
 
’83 was a slack year for some of my favorites. Springsteen didn’t release any new material; he was between Nebraska and Born In the U.S.A. Bob Dylan’s Infidels album has “Jokerman,” but it’s not a knock-out. I’m a huge Elvis Costello fan, and I delight in Punch the Clock, but I wouldn’t lobby for it to win any notable honors (not even in the extended version that includes “Heathen Town”). High marks for New Order’s Power, Corruption, and Lies and XTC’s Mummer, but of all the albums I can think of for 1983, the standout rock album, top to bottom, has to be Talking Heads’ Speaking In Tongues. “Burning Down the House,” “Girlfriend Is Better,” “Pull Up the Roots” — terrific work from a band that was peaking.
 
The vast impact of Thriller obscures what I’d think a more important soul/rock crossover, that being Prince’s 1999. The title cut, “Little Red Corvette,” and “Delirious” make a tremendous opening sequence for a very strong album.
 
A few of my favorite singles came out this year, too. Big Country’s “In a Big Country” makes me turn up the stereo every time, and the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” likewise.
 
As far as movies are concerned, I’ve never seen all of Terms of Endearment (just portions in passing), but the bits I’ve seen didn’t win me over. In fact, I haven’t seen very many of the 1983 releases at all: Return of the Jedi (of course), Silkwood, WarGames, The Return of Martin Guerre (the French one). My favorite movie of the year would have to be Zelig, one of the last old/transitional Woody Allen movies.
 
In all fairness, though, I’d bet Margaret (and many others) would cast their votes for The Big Chill, which I like all right, but am not as intensely fond of as others are. It’s too easy to write off Chill as self-congratulatory yuppie Boomer narcissism — Kasdan and the actors put a great deal more into the film than the nostalgia, and the strong ensemble acting still catches some of the actors’ best work.
 
There’s some ambiguity about the release date (Amazon says 1980, IMDB says 1982/83), but before I close, I have to put in a plug for one of my favorite documentaries ever, Say Amen, Somebody. Yes, I’m especially susceptible as a raw-gospel music advocate, but the music and the historical narrative and the participants all lend their extraordinary contributions to a memorable, joyous, proud movie from outside the well-worn paths of the mainstream media.
 
What have I forgotten?

• Sarah Vowell contributed a glorious column on Martin Luther King to the Monday New York Times
• The world’s flags graded for their vexillological aesthetics. As a student of heraldry and vexillology, I appreciated the author’s critical approach, though I’m less troubled than said author by some design decisions. I don’t disapprove of including “things” on flags, so long as they’re not overly detailed or fussy. Yes, points off for using letters on a flag (though the design of the Saudi flag may appeal to me as a non-Arabic reader, I’m quite ignorant of what it says and I’d never be able to produce a Saudi flag if the occasion required one).
• PDF Hammer looks useful. Not sure how I’d use it, but I want to remember it’s there.
• Likewise the online teleprompter app.
• Ha! Wrangled a single-page book layout from Pages (version 1, which I hope may be even better if we upgrade to a more recent version).
• My processor is very happy now that I’ve exorcised the cycle-hungry JunkMatcher script from its subconscious. I hardly ever push the processor load over 60%, where the script was hogging more than 50% just by itself.
• Wrangled single-page book layout from Mellel, too. Unfortunately, both Mellel and Pages reproduce the weird Apple margin+margin problem when I export them to PDF; looks like NeoOffice wins this round (though I wish it offered stronger typographical controls).

Someone in our household — I will not name names — has fallen under the spell of the theme music They Might Be Giants recorded for Dunkin Donuts ads, “Things I Like to Do” (this year’s 30-second version, not the 2006 60-second version). I offered to track it down online, but have been able to come up only with the Flash animation on the commercial site I linked to above.
 
I discovered that many other people appreciate the jingle too (and many detest it), but I found no one, legitimate or il-, who makes the jingle available for download.
 
I’m sure there’s a sophistication at work that I fail to grasp, but if I were advertising a donut chain and our jingle had a fan base of even meager scope, I’d be thrilled to give (or, if I could get away with it, “sell”) them mp3s of our advertising theme.

Choire Sicha posted a guest column on Jason Kottke’s blog concerning his shifting evaluation of PJ Harvey’s most recent recording, White Chalk; “Back in September, Pitchfork gave White Chalk a 6.8, and I would have given it a worse score even as recently as December,” but now he regards it as her best.
 
If one needed empirical data to enrich this exercise, looking back at the yearly awards should provide more than enough. The short timeline for these awards, and the manipulative tactics that media corporations deploy to attract profit-making recognition becloud the deliberative judgment that ought to inform critical judgment. I wrote a burdensome-lyu-long essay on the year 1980 in music, comparing what was good with what got Grammys; I have another semi-post in a draft somewhere, looking at 1979, but it’s a lot of effort, and I’m not sure what it clarifies.
 
[What might be fun would be to open the comments (thank you, WordPress, for providing robust comment spam filtering!) for discussion of a particular year’s cultural production. I’d be inclined to highlight 1983 at first, since that was 25 years ago. We could give retrospective Grammys, Oscars, and other prizes with the benefit of having twenty-five years of criticism separating us from the hype.]
 
But to get back to at least one of the subjects at hand, I recently cued up my copy of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and marvelled at it just as much as I used to back in olden times. That’s one extremely strong album. Wow, was that a great album! Much as I’ve dismissed the “record album” as an artificial construct for which contemporary artistic nostalgia is misplaced, Ziggy just plain works — even if “It Ain’t Easy” was a late addition, and “Suffragette City” belongs before (rather than after) “Ziggy Stardust.” If we get to a retrospective awards ceremony for 1972, it’ll take some strong lobbying to displace Ziggy from my ballot.

Michael White’s column in yesterday’s New York Times touches on a heap of issues about which I care a lot. What counts as the true version of a Beethoven sonata? On what basis do we form such judgments? What do we make of divergent rival accounts of “the real Beethoven”? When Barry Cooper suggests that “[w]hen a text is corrupted, it places a barrier between the composer and listener that shouldn’t be there. You’re not hearing a Beethoven sonata but a Beethoven sonata adapted by someone else,” he piques my “What Is An Author?” interest.
 
“[T]he difference between an error and a correction or improvement is not always clear, so you can end up with five or more variants of the same text with no conclusive proof of which one represents finality.” Exactly — maybe the question of which is final or original frames the problem poorly.
 
My favorite part of the article comes on the second (digital) page: “ ‘Everyone,’ [Cooper] said, ‘knows what a double bar is’ — the two perpendicular lines that conclude a section of the score — ‘but there’s no literature on double bars, nothing to tell you what they signify to the player.’ ” First of all, I don’t know what a double bar is (at least not in the way Cooper does). Second, I cherish the juxtaposition of Cooper’s asseveration that everybody knows with the Times’s explanation of the sign, which implies that they think some of their readers would not know.

It was impossible to imagine that she would not return. I noticed a few days ago, in my newsreader, but it’s time to point out right on the blog that Halley’s blogging again.

Permit me to begin with an ex cathedra pronouncement: Word processing applications tend to be abominable tools for designing pages. They demonstrate a strong commitment to certain generic assumptions about text manipulation that derive from typewriting constraints. As a result, casual users (even expert users, most of the time) prepare documents whose line length extends beyond what readers ordinarily find comfortable, with more lines per page than is ideal, and so on. Word-processor pages shout that they were indeed produced with a word processor, whereas readers cope better with ordinary book-sized pages and type.
 
I’ve been trying for years to wrestle my word processing applications and page-layout apps into a functional relationship with the pages I want to produce. In each case there’s some residual glitch, a feature of a book page that the word application won’t produce (multiple independent headers, for instance, such that one can deploy page numbers and running heads on the same page), or a feature of text that the page app resists (I have InDesign 2.0, which refuses footnotes). Apple’s print engine does something wonky with PDFs that doubles the margin size, so that you can’t mount an end run around the word processor’s shortcomings by print-command trickery. And the whole process is fraught with complexity; I can readily sympathize with everyone who doesn’t bother trying to out-manipulate the constraints of the medium.
 
Of course, that won’t stop me. Of me it is written in the Book of Life, “He devoted hours and hours of his life to making better-designed pages for his students (and other readers).” I’ve wangled a prototype out of NeoOffice (the current version of which is so much better than its earlier iterations that I’m amazed); I’ll keep trying to make it work in Pages and Mellel. There’s not much point in pounding away at InDesign since I only have version 2.0, which doesn’t support footnotes (and I can’t afford the more up-to-date versions). If anyone’s interested, I can post the NeoOffice sample — and I’ll keep working on the others.

No, its not surprising or new, but until the conventions of education begin to respond to the global digital environment change that’s rapidly overtaking them, posts such as Brian Lamb’s reflections on a talk by Richard Baraniuk merit links, applause, showers of flower petals, and sundry other modes of encouragement.
 
My best wishes to Lamb and his efforts to “scrape ten decent open online courses together” in the near term. And more power to anyone who brings that kind of commitment to theological education.

In my ongoing quest to resolve the problem of my runaway osascript, I thought I’d look into Apple’s support site — maybe someone else has run into the same problem. This morning, after all, I came to the computer I had put to sleep last night, and found it awake, warm, and running at 50% processor load. Something, presumably, had triggered the script during the night (glad it was sitting open rather than closed).
 
So at the Apple Support site, I entered “osascript” in the search window, and the search returned results for the word “osa.” Tried it again — maybe some helpful widget was jumping in and searching for “osa” as a shortcut — same result. Apple Supprt evidently won’t search for the string “script.” Tried “Applescript,” to check — same result. I infer that this is a sort of defense against malicious searches that might try to execute scripts that would hack into their server system. [OK, solved that: I was typing into the main search window, not a “Support”-specific search window. My bad. Still, the Support search yields very few results, most oriented toward working with Apple Remote Desktop.]
 
At last! I found my way to the support forum that deals with AppleScript, posted my query, and an hour or so later was rewarded with a response that suggested a Terminal command [ps -axwj] that would identify the source of the script that was plaguing me. I tried it, and sure enough, it gave a much fuler account of the parent processes and the source of the offending script. In my case, JunkMatcher had developed a hyperbolic interest in combing my mail for possible junk, and I quickly disabled the script in the “Rules” portion of Mail.app, and threw out the scripts from my user library. EVerything has been calm since then; I think we have a winner.

Looks as though Apple’s stock has been wandering downward for the first several days after MacWorld. We have no money to invest — you know, having hardly any at all — but if I were an invester I’d start gobbling up Apple stock right about now. The MacBook Air looks like a winner to me, once the quibblers get over the trade-offs. Even if it doesn’t make an instant tidal wave, it will change the category of ultra-portable notebooks. The upgrade to the iPhone and iPod Touch will strengthen those lines. Leopard is mature and Apple is building on its capacities (with Time Capsule, for instance). AppleTV looks like a real product now.
 
I have to think that between now and mid-2008, Apple will reward investors. Of course, if you invest on the advice of a theologian who stepped out of computer graphics in 1983 because he doubted there was a future in it, that’s your own bad judgment.

I just noticed Google’s “Custom Search” feature. I’ll have to look further into this, but it certainly appears to resemble the kind of seeded-search engine I described in my paper of 2004. If it does indeed work that way — or reasonably close to that, or if it can be hacked to work that way — I suspect it’s much bigger news than the attention it’s been getting.