Saturday, February 12, 2005

Orchestral Etiquette

This cute NYTimes article on "Cracking the Secret Orchestral Codes" clears up a couple of questions my sister and I had after our TSO experience last week. Namely, what the heck else does the concertmaster do for his paycheque?:

"During performances, orchestra musicians have their own internal rules, too. Never turn around if someone makes a mistake. (New York Philharmonic musicians speak of one colleague who got into hot water for doing so.) Never turn a page if someone nearby has a solo. Signal praise with a slight shuffling of the feet. For a nearby string player who has a solo, a slight rubbing of the music with the edge of the bow does the trick.

'Musicians have incredible peripheral vision,' said Carl Schiebler, the personnel manager of the Philharmonic. 'They're looking at their music and watching every nuance of the conductor. Any kind of unusual motion on the stage is noticed immediately by everybody.' At the end of the concert, the orchestra takes its cue from the concertmaster about whether to rise again. Occasionally, when the orchestra feels particular warmth toward a conductor, it will show appreciation by declining to rise (again, at the concertmaster's cue)."

Friday, February 11, 2005

What a Putz

Actor Tom Sizemore has been jailed for violating his probation by failing a drug test after he was caught trying to use a prosthetic penis to fake the results.

At what point did confronting his drug problem become more mortifying than wearing a plastic penis and buying dehydrated urine off the Internet?

Overkill

U.S. playwright Arthur Miller has died after battling cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition.

Also emphysema, stroke, multiple GSWs and halitosis. Man! Which cause-of-death statistic do you chalk this up to?

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Word of the Moment: Beslippered

Beslippered, adj.

Not actually a word, according to dictionary.com, but used today in one of my fave blogs greenfairydotcom.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

So Why Do They Make Me Cry?

I have long considered myself a usability aficionado, but I'm realising more and more these days how much the layout - for good or bad - of a given site affects my enjoyment of it.

Case in point: In the past year, The Onion has made several changes to their format. A splash page ad now greets visitors; I greet it back by immediately pressing the "if you are not routed press here" link. Splash pages in general tick me off, and one that is nothing but a huge ad is particularly pissy.

Once onto the site, what used to be the "front page" of news stories now features the same old top half of stories and headlines, but the bottom half's stories have been nested; to read them all requires five or six clicks, and it feels to me less like I'm loading a new story than I'm refreshing the large ads that share the page.

Finally, the Onion's great review section, the AV Club, has been similarly changed. I used to enjoy loading the different sections (Movies, Music, etc.) and reading/skimming all the reviews. It always led to some neat discoveries or the adding of an unexpected title to my "must find" lists. With the reviews now nested like the aforementioned stories, I find myself less inclined to read all of the reviews. Psychologically, it becomes too much work to open, read, then click for the next article. I now target those I know I want to read, and leave the rest.

All of this is adding up to distaste and impatience with the site. I never thought I'd say this, but I think I'm going to stop reading the Onion pretty soon...

Mr. Nielsen, is there a support group for usability cranks?

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Child's Play

This is the second installment of "Child's Play" from 1UP.com, who pits today's gamer-kids against yesterday's classics. Part II isn't as gut-bustingly funny as the first, but it's still a great read:

Garret: That's not Mike Tyson. Are you kidding me? Mike Tyson does not have a handlebar moustache, and he's not white.

EGM: [Laughing] So those are the two things that make you think that's not Mike Tyson?

Garret: Yeah, plus this guy's wearing pants.

Monday, February 07, 2005

The Royal Paparazza

I read about this exhibit ages ago. Out of spite, since I am unable to attend and there don't appear to be any decent supporting websites, I am only blogging about it now. There's something terribly charming about the thought of this shutterbug princess, particularly since the images one sees of Victoria and her brood tend to be of the dour and formal variety. I would love to have been present when the future queen asked one of Her Majesty's sailors to pose with a cat on his head; photography at the time hadn't yet developed into the "informal snaps" stage it's at now, so she must have come across a bit batty, but she's the future queen, so you know he didn't dare question her. How cute!

"There are also pictures of seamen in the royal yacht made to pose with various pets, including a Lieutenant Watson with a Siamese cat perched on his head and a clearly exasperated rating, Ernest Davies, caught in the act of drying a small dog named Carlos on a sunny day in 1899.

The queen clearly snapped much like a modern tourist on holiday. She caught her husband fast asleep - presumably after a good lunch - in a horse-drawn carriage during a visit to Sardinia in 1905.

And on a trip to Marseille in 1899 she took a picture of a couple canoodling in their boat through the porthole of her cabin on the royal yacht."

A Love Song To War

I came across When U Find Someone, a Beach-Boys-esque Ken Stringfellow song, while browsing Amazon's free download section. I've been listening to it half-heartedly, as it sounds like a pretty saccharine love song (and I can't stand titles with "U" in them), but reading the lyrics dispells that notion pretty quickly.

(Be warned, though, the Flash interface is awful.)

Sunday, February 06, 2005

Dreaming of Sushi

Yet another idea I wish I'd had first: Sushi Pillows. (Foolishly, there is no "Bento Box" volume purchase!)

Wrath of the Gods

A very modern-sounding excerpt from Pliny the Younger's letter to Tacitus in which he recounts the destruction of Pompeii. The reactions of the people described compare very closely with the modern day reactions the world heard after the destruction wrought by the tsunami or the terror of September 11th. Human nature and instinct obviously hasn't changed markedly in 2000 years:

I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. Let us leave the road while we can still see,' I said, 'or we shall be knocked down and trampled underfoot in the dark by the crowd behind.' We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room. You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children of their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore...

...I could boast that not a groan or cry of fear escaped me in these perils, had I not derived some poor consolation in my mortal lot from the belief that the whole world was dying with me and I with it.

Glorious Gershwin

Last night I attended my first every Toronto Symphony Orchestra performance. Now, I'm not normally one to leave the house, but the double-bonus of a 50% off promotion valid for the night of Gershwin was worth the effort. I've been subscribing to the Canadian Opera Company for the past few years, and always found the TSO's prices a bit too high in comparison, but WOW; that performance made me rethink the concept of "value"!

The opening selection was a piece by Milhaud, wonderfully introduced by the wonderful conductor, Jeffery "Wonderful" Kahane. As you may have guessed, the conductor's wonderfulness (wonderfulicity?) added a lot to the proceedings. He was rumpled, animated and witty (all wonderfully so), and for some reason reminded me of Bugs Bunny (it was likely just me harkening back to the old Looney Tunes "Leopold!" episode, though the bald guy with the gun who kept chasing him offstage twigged my subconscious too...) I was disappointed to learn he was only a guest conductor; Full-time status would have guaranteed a season ticket purchase from me. (Instead, I'm scoping real estate in Santa Rosa.)

Anyway, back to Milhaud - Jeffrey ("W") Kahane mentioned in his intro that he should be recognised as the first true fusion of old classical and new jazz techniques; Gershwin has usurped the honour, but he also usurped a lot of Milhaud's sound. Midway through the piece, the "Gershwinisms" (heavy on the oboe, bombast and verve) were so plentiful that only the occasional atonal passages threw me into doubt about which composer I was hearing.

The Milhaud piece was followed by Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, which was conducted and played wonderfully (how else can he do it?) by Jeffrey Kahane. It's obviously a technically demanding piece for pianists, yet his hands flew so quickly and lightly over the keys that my sister and I, reluctant former piano students, were astonished. At one point, Kerry leaned over to me and whispered, "You've either got it or you don't, and we obviously didn't have it." I think she took heart, though, knowing, even amongst the professionals, very, very few have that. Gershwin music makes me smile all on its own, and when accompanied by such a, won... (ahem) FANTASTICALLY joyous performance, I was grinning like an idiot through most of the night.

I say "most of the night", unfortunately, as the middle section of the bill contained two flute pieces, one solo. I would explain my disappointment by saying that I hate the flute, but in truth, it's more that I hate flautists. And, Emmanuel Pahud, the smarmy jerk they'd brought in to solo on both of the pieces did not do anything to change my attitude. At the end of the first piece, a solo for flute, he held the instrument so long to his lips after the final note that many thought there must be a second movement about to begin. When it became clear that this was not to be, people began coughing and rustling; still he didn't move. He must have been standing there for about 45 seconds after the piece ended - I have never witnessed arrogance like that on stage before, and I hope never to again; I refused to applaud him - the last thing this guy needs is more confidence.

I had another reason to want smarmy-pants rushed off the stage of course; the final piece was An American In Paris, which is the reason I'd considered the tickets in the first place. Suffice to say, (I'm sorry for this, but I'm going to have to use the W word again, albeit in context) 's wonderful. What a blast. Even my sis, who had never really heard much Gershwin before, was humming along with me as we left.

The experience has me thinking about dropping my opera subscription (maybe just scaling back to the big-name operas I know I want to see) in favour of a couple of TSO tix per season. I enjoy opera, but compared with the symphony, the audience seems a lot less polite - lots of talkers, whisperers, and other noisemakers. I wonder(ful?) how much of that is due to the light levels? The COC turns the house lights off during performance, but the TSO had a fair amount of low-level light maintained throughout the show. Oh well, this will be the perfect week to compare and contrast; I've got La Bohème next Saturday!

**UPDATE** Wow, here's a BIG push in the direction of the TSO: Some fantastic benefits for subscribers above and beyond what the COC offers. C'mon, COC, I'm awaiting your counter-offer!