Some Pics and Pans

Some awwwwwwshucks pics from the past couple of days...


And a couple of reviews from the past few, too:

This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Letvin: 40

This was a thoroughly frustrating book that fell far short of my expectations. The cover boasted praise from the likes of Oliver Sacks ("endlessly fascinating"), David Byrne and the conductor of the Boston Pops. And I can't let this go; the Boston Pops guy wrote the funniest one line review EVER. Here it is, in its glorious entirety:

"This is a fascinating subject, compellingly treated."

That is right up there with the "Potato Chips" cheer in terms of universally applicable statements that require no thought and/or reading of actual said work.
Perhaps I will pick up that technique. Doubtful. Anyways, here's the problem with the book - after whirling through a bare minimum of music theory and then touching on some of bare facts of music perception - which areas of the brain are connected to which, how the cerebellum (rhythm-setter of muscle movements) is integrally tied into rhythm perception of music, how the frequencies of music are related to one another and to the brain and how we are constantly matching heard music up against an emotional/memory based expectation framework that we have learned - he then goes off into la la land. A ton of the book was wasted on his own name-dropping tendencies (and these are, for the most part, names of which you have never heard) and personal resume recounting, including his own "fascinating" work which demonstrated that people can generally remember the pitch of songs, not just the relation between notes. Wow. He spent a large amount of time on a ridiculously oversimplified concept of complexity appreciation in music, and then left the neuro-realm entirely to wax poetic about how real music is the ability to convey emotion. He rescued the book (somewhat) with a small end-section on music-as-evolutionary phenomenon, but he pulled the same hack job that I've mentioned in a couple of other pop-academ works lately - he started talking about genes and evolution with an authority he does not have, and consequently made mistakes that while subtle, are glaring if you just read a Dawkins book. Which I had.

I am not sure whether it's just that the cog-sci work that's been done to this point is just not that interesting to me - it so far sounds like we have road-maps of where things connect and how sound is perceived, but once you have to actually talk about the impact that music has, outside of saying "it's connected to the amygdala" it seems that they are limited to falling into the same crap about "the artist's emotional content" and "it all depends upon the listener's memories and preferences." All of this falls under categories of things I already understand - I fully expected a text on neurobiology and music to include some kind of physical account for phenomena such as the universal displeasure at dissonance, but all I got was a cross cultural study that stated that there is a universal displeasure at dissonance. Yahoo. Seriously. A disappointment.

Little Children: 50

We watched this flick with Ali & Ben on Friday night - the book on which it is based is one of Ali's favorites, and the film received a few oscar nominations (best supporting actor for creepy-as-hell Jackie Earle Haley and actress for Kate Winslett) plus a lot of buzz so it seemed like it should be a good deal. But it was WAY over the top - Haley's "actor" moments were super-contrived poolside scenes that came off as a strange cross between Jaws and Caddyshack, a faux-Kane homage that involved some shattering of little China dolls and a gruesome (though admittedly not as much as it could have been) case of self-surgery on a swingset. Winslett spent five seconds in some kind of strange anthropologist observing the native Desperate Housewives
role and then went on to explode in every non-subtle way, from cheering for touchdowns to keeping pictures in poetry books to a more painful than anything interpretation of Madame Bovary at a book club meeting. (I mean, really, book club meeting as self-exposition of character? With Madame Bovary? You needed that to show that she was exercising her promiscuity as a means of self-empowerment? Really? They may as well have featured Martin Sheen reading Heart of Darkness in Apocalypse Now. Yes, THAT would have been more obvious). From the ridiculous voice-over narration to the uber-necessary lost-child screaming scene to the sprinkled, forced cases of quirk, this flick had way more than its share of gratuity. This is not to say that my heart didn't beat uncomfortably in Haley's scenes (but really, it was more the look than anything that put him over the top) or that I didn't jump into the story - I just found it to be an overblown exercise without enough substance to warrant whatever modern suburbia effect it was going for.