Angkor Wat
This transformation of legend into fact has been a theme of the LiDAR surveys. Angkor's huge population is described in temple inscriptions and reports written by Chinese travelers who visited the city during the 12th century reign of King Suryavarman II, who built Angkor Wat. But historical sources are often exaggerated or incomplete. Plus, it was difficult for Western researchers to believe that the Khmer Empire's great city was home to almost a million people, dwarfing European cities of the same era. Now, such facts are impossible to deny.
playing Todd
I think Todd Rundgren is one of the great pop songwriters, and it occurred to me recently that I’d like to learn to play a few of his songs on the guitar. “It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference” is one of his loveliest tunes, so I thought I would try that. I did my usual googling for tablature, and (it doesn’t always work out this way) quickly found a very accurate one.
Turns out that to make my way through this one little pop song I have to be able to play seventeen chords. And some of them are kind of peculiar — the sort that sound wrong until you play the next chord and go “Oh right.”
This tells me some things. The first thing it tells me is that the song was almost certainly written on the piano, and indeed it would be much easier to play on a piano, should one actually know how to do that. (Ahem.)
But it also tells me that as a craftsman of songwriting Todd is kind of a freak. My shoulders sagged at the thought of negotiating seventeen different chords in around three minutes, so I went through the song to see if some of them could be simplified or eliminated: sometimes a careful and thorough tablature-writer includes transitional chords that can be left out with little harm to the song’s integrity. But not in this case: every one of those chords was necessary, and changing or eliminating any of them yielded a significant loss of musical nuance and texture.
I think the writing of catchy pop songs — even really complex and musically sophisticated ones — came too easily to Todd. A couple of years after Something/Anything? he wrote a song called “Izzat Love." Give it a listen. It’s a super-super-catchy little number. But as the song goes along it keeps getting faster, not dramatically but noticeably — and then after less than two minutes you hear a sudden squeal as Todd hits the fast-forward on the tape deck. It’s unsettling, Todd’s contempt for his own facility; as though he’s telling us Do you see how easy this shit is? God, I’m sick of it. It’s time to do something else.
[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17361,17362,17363,17364,17365,17366,17367,17368,17369,17370”]
Dial M for MagnificentFrom the book “Reinventing the Wheel”
[gallery] drawingarchitecture:
Javier Cardiel
[gallery] houghtonlib:
Ituarte, Julio. Ecos de México : (Aires nacionales) : capricho de concierto para piano, 1886.Houghton Library, Harvard University
[gallery] robertogreco:
One of the highlights of my summer has been reading Luke Pearson’s Hilda books. I like the description that Alexandra Lange gives:For such a small girl, Hilda is about to get very big, and I am not at all surprised. My five-year-old daughter brought the first book home from a friend’s house, and it took reading only the first few pages, beautifully laid out, with the rich color palette of a Nordic sweater, to know that Hilda was something special. Trolberg may have a complex of bell towers (bells keep trolls at bay, we learn), but it also has a glassy downtown à la Houston. “All of these stories are riffs on folktales that are as old as time, that have taken a hard left turn through Luke’s imagination and all of these contemporary pop-cultural sensibilities,” Kurt Mueller, the executive vice-president at Silvergate Media, which will produce the Hilda series, said. (The company’s other series include “The Octonauts” and “Peter Rabbit.”) “Like the movies of Miyazaki, she feels totally of the moment, but she’s reacting to something that feels ancient and archetypal,” Mueller said. The nostalgic Northern European setting recalls Miyazaki’s romanticism, while Hilda’s communion with the conjoined natural and spirit worlds recalls San from “Princess Mononoke” or Satsuki from “My Neighbor Totoro.”My first point of comparison was Lewis Carroll’s Alice, though Pearson said that he never thought of her. But, greeted by a little girl in an unchanging outfit, who is confronted with all manner of creatures great and small, in landscapes giant and miniaturized, who else are we to think of? What’s markedly different with Hilda is the attitude with which she greets her wonderland. She does not fall down a hole but strides, prepared with sketchbook and satchel, into the wind and weather. The first words of the first book, “Hilda and the Troll,” are delivered by a radio announcer: “But tonight clouds rolling in from the east … temperatures remain mild … with the likelihood of heavy rain.” Hilda, reading a tome on trolls at the breakfast table, rushes outside her red, peak-roofed cabin to see storm clouds forming over an adjacent peak. “Mum! Mum! It’s going to rain tonight! Can I sleep in the tent?” And Mum says yes.
Illustrated maps, folktales, creatures, Iceland, Miyazaki, heroines, “landscapes giant & miniaturized”? Sign me up.Seriously, though, Moomins + My Neighbor Totoro + Alice + Princess Mononoke. I’ll add some Pippi too. ?
Then the books came, I read them, and loved them, and I shared two images. See also the additonal links at the bottom of my bookmark of Alexandra Lange’s review.
