I Just Spent About $800.00 on a... Telephone

I must be out of my mind (OK, a "duh" moment for those who frequent this blog).



Got up this morning, sat down with my morning coffee, logged onto Apple.com, and ordered an iPhone. The plan was - since I'm sure an upgraded model will appear sooner than you can sneeze - to order the $100.00 less expensive 4GB model, but when the moment of truth arrived, I found it impossible not to click on the 8GB model. It was also part of the plan not to load up on accessories, but I simply had to have a car charger... right? Availability - according to the site - was "2-4 Weeks" so no hurry on the shipping. Why then did I pay an extra $11.00 for 2-3 day shipping? I already have Cingular/AT&T, but there was no information about how to merge the iPhone into my existing plan, or how to set it up with my existing cellular phone number. I didn't care, for some reason, even though I've been sweating this for months. I just pressed the one-click checkout button and ordered it. I did all of this with a big, broad grin on my face. Not the usual expression on my countenance when I part with eight Franklins. Why? (That's a rhetorical question, as all of the aforementioned have been, since I don't think there are any logical answers).

*****

Interestingly - or not - what made me switch from PC's to Macs all those many years ago now was Apple's old Newton PDA. I had a part-time job at a music store in Denton when I was a doctoral candidate at UNT, and the store owner had gotten a Newton 110 in some sort of promo deal. He had no clue what it was or how to use it, so I picked it up for a song. I became instantly addicted to the thing. I took all of my notes in class on it, I balanced my checkbook on it, and in no time I had to get a PowerBook to sync it up to: It's been all Macs all the time for me ever since.

Also interestingly - or not - when Apple dropped the Newton, I never got another PDA. The Palm and Blackberry devices didn't interest me at all: I didn't want something I could TYPE on, I wanted sometning I could WRITE on, like the Newton (And, the Newton 120-130 handwriting recognition software was awesome). Sure, I won't be able to write on the iPhone, but the interface looks amazing nonetheless. Since I'm not exactly a chatty guy - my mom will tell you I'm no "Great Communicator - It wasn't until 2003 that I got my first real cellular phone (I had a government issued one for a while before that, though).

So, why am I so jazzed about the iPhone?

Well, I'm an iPod addict, and it is an iPod (A widescreen video iPod, at that); I do need a cellular phone and it is... um... an iPhone; I have gotten pretty attached to eMail and it will sync with my Mac Mail account; and surfing on the web - even if the space is a little cramped - is something I always hoped my old Newton would be able to do. But that can't be all, can it? It isn't. The iPhone is simply the sexiest little techno-bauble in history, and I lust for techno-bling.

*****

Now all I have to do is wait... and figure out who to call first.

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What Makes a "Musical Masterpiece"?

In the comments to a post entitled Sir Mad Max over at Sequenza21 an interesting sup-plot developed (OK, I thought it was interesting) concerning the definition of what is - and is not - a musical masterpiece. So, I looked it up. The dictionary in Mac OS X gave me this:

masterpiece |ˈmastərˌpēs| noun

a work of outstanding artistry, skill, or workmanship : a great literary masterpiece | the car was a masterpiece of space-age technology.
• an artist's or craftsman's best piece of work : the painting is arguably Picasso's masterpiece.

• historical

a piece of work by a craftsman accepted as qualification for membership of a guild as an acknowledged master.

Further, the thesaurus provided:

masterpiece | noun

Vivaldi's masterpiece pièce de résistance, chef-d'œuvre, masterwork, magnum opus, finest/best work, tour de force.

I find the concept fascinating on many levels, but the term masterpiece is often applied strictly to transcendent works of sublimity, which seems too restrictive to me. Sure, we can probably all agree that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is a masterpiece, but so is the Eroica (In B's estimation his finest) and, of course, all of the late string quartets. I would go further and say that everything Beethoven wrote after his Opus 18 string quartets qualifies as a masterpiece.

Where to begin with JS Bach? Of course we could agree that A Musical Offering and Die Kunst der Fuge are musical masterpieces, but what of the Lute Suites, Cello Suites, and the Violin Sonatas and Partitas? Those are masterpieces too as far as I'm concerned because - despite the brevity of some of the individual tunes - the collections as a whole display supreme mastery of those varied idioms.

I prefer the term be used as something beyond a journeyman effort:

journeyman |ˈjərnēmən| noun ( pl. -men)

a trained worker who is employed by someone else.

• a worker or sports player who is reliable but not outstanding : [as adj. ] a solid journeyman professional.

I posted the definition of masterpiece in the comments to the Sequenza21 thread and posited that any mature composer (Assuming the presence of innate and intuitive musical talent) has written at least one musical masterpiece.

Now, obviously again, there will always be some subjectivity intruding on these kinds of evaluations, but I believe that if one applies all of the objectivity that one can muster, reasonable conclusions may be reached. For example, I really can't stand the big, bombastic symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler - they are great for relieving my bouts with insomnia - but I can nonetheless recognize that they are musical masterpieces. Sibelius? Now him I "like" but at the same time, I can see where many might judge Mahler the better composer. Point is, "like" has nothing to do with it. Point is, the display of mastery does.

So, I am a proponent of thinking of musical masterpieces more in line with the display of mastery which would qualify one for membership in a guild, but perhaps slightly more than that. Certainly less than the "once in a lifetime" definition that many bandy about, as in "the Sistine Chapel ceiling was Michelangelo's masterpiece" (A dubious claim, in my opinion, as his output was so vast and filled with masterpieces).

To put my money where my pixelating is, what would I judge to be a masterpiece that I have written? Well, the first one I have no doubt about would be my Fugue in F Minor for string quartet (I wrote that about thirteen years ago), but I could see where some might consider that a journeyman effort since its style is so derivative of Bach's late work. What I have no doubt about, however, is that the Axial Fugue in E Minor for solo classic guitar that I wrote last year and finished up a couple of weeks ago is definitely a musical masterpiece. Furthermore, I'm convinced that it is the best fugue ever written for the solo guitar (Not that there is a lot of competition in that genera, and please note that I am excluding transcriptions of Bach's lute works). To put a finer point on that, I'd say that the Axial Fugue will remain in a virtually unassailable position for some time to come.

You can judge for yourself, of course, as the score and MP3 are available for download from my .Mac Download Page. The string quartet fugue is there as well, if you scroll down far enough.

This post is too long already, so I won't offer a defense of my position on that fugue unless someone would like me to, but the point is not to brag about the thing, it's to note that I find some of the works of others to be masterful enough to qualify as musical masterpieces as well. Yes, even some composers who I can't stand and with whom I agree on just about nothing.

Like I said, "like" has nothing to do with it.



Now that is a masterpiece.

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Random Cool Science and Space Stuff

Some cool pix I've collected recently:



A new scientific field is emerging: Paleo-astronomy. I find the term somewhat ironic because any and all astronomy is in essence "paleo" because the distances are so vast that the light we see is often so ancient as to have been emmitted before the human species even appeared, but what they mean is, the study of how our galaxy evolved, and what it might have looked like in the distant past.

The artist's impression above shows a view of our Milky Way galaxy and some recently discovered star streams that are associated with it. These star streams are the remnants of ancient collisions between our galaxy and others, so there have been at least three, and probably more. Eventually, these paleo-astronomers hope to piece together a chronology of these collisions and will presumably give us a graphic vision of how the Milky Way evolved.

That will be cool, but not quite as cool as this.



A European company is planning to build a space plane just to take tourists up. It will use conventional turbofan jet engines to take off and land, but a rocket engine to boost it up to sub-orbital altitudes, giving passengers about three minutes or so of weightlessness. and a view of outer space.

Sign me up. I'd borrow money if I had to for that experience.

But this is my favorite, just because I enjoy thinking about this sort of thing.



A group of scientists has proposed a new solution for the problem of black holes, which are predicted by general relativity (Einstein) but deemed impossible by quantum mechanics. According to general relativity, a black hole is a singularity of infinite density and inescapable gravity: Even light can't escape once passing the event horizon (Point of no return). Eienstein himself doubted the possibility of black holes, recognizing the fact that general relativity was incomplete. He never finished work on a Grand Unified Theory, and that has escaped all physicists since as well.

Hawking proposed "Hawking Radiation" as a solution for how black holes starved of new material would eventually evaporate away, presumably exploding violently once the gravity became too weak to sustain infinite density. The new theory says an event horizon never forms because radiated material keeps the "black star" (The new name) from ever actually becomming a singularity.

Personally, I have always thought there must be a further resistive force beyond a collapsed nutron star that simply prevents a singularity. The whole concept of infinite density strikes me as something the universe would not allow. With a further resistive force beyond the collapse of a neutron star, there could be an event horizon AND a surface. In fact, the two could be the same. But hey, I'm a musician, right?

Black holes don't irritate me as much as the concept of dark matter though. The idea that there is a whole lot of stuff in the universe that is invisible and doesn't interact with normal matter except gravitationally strikes me as a Deus ex Machina solution for physicists who can't get a proper handle on the weak force. I ain't a buyin' it.



Ballentyne's sketchbook pages look suspiciously like my imagination.

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Bill and Hillary Soprano

This is just too good NOT to post.



It's not quite as good as the 1984 political parody for Obama, but almost.

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To Kill an iBook

I hate computers. Seriously. Absolutely detest them. Why are they not like TV sets? You turn them on, and they are on. Why do we have to wait for them to get ready for us to use them? There is no excuse as far as I'm concerned. They should behave like the appliances that they are and they sould be ready instantly whenever we want. They should also never f#¢* up.

I use Macs because they suck marginally less than PC's do. They still suck, but they suck a little less. I've destroyed several PC's over the years... OK, quite a few, actually... but tonight I had to euthanize my first Mac. Actually, I terminated it with extreme prejudice.

I have absolutely zero tolerance for s#!+ that doesn't work.

Today's drama started with my upgrading my old G3 500 iBook (The very first "iceBook" model - I was the first kid on the block with a white iBook) to OS X 10.4 tiger. I had upgraded my even older tiBook G4 400MHz and my Mac Mini G4 1.25GHz with no problem, and so this was totally unexpected. I started the proceedure this afternoon while I was practicing, and then I forgot about it. When I came back to the computer there was an error message telling me to do the installation over again.

Did I mention there were tons of files on this iBook that were not backed up on any of my other Macs? Well, now I have.

So, I reinstalled the OS. It f#¢*@& up again. So I tried a custom install.

When it finally came up, all of my files were lost and it was like a brand new computer.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!



So I rebooted, to the Apple version of "the blue screen of death"... nothing... nada...

Well, it just so happens that I inherited an unabridged set of tools from my step-dad, and among those tools was the perfect weapon with which to vent my spleen: A real, honest-to-God, carpenter's hammer.

Ten whacks - no more, no less (More than ten would have been gratuitous) - problem "solved."



And, here it is in the dumpster on the way to the landfill... where it belongs.



Yeah, sure; I could have saved it, but why? Things that f#¢* up deserve to die.

Besides, those ten whacks felt very good.

One of these days, someone with exactly half of a brain is going to invent a computer that is as reliable as the Zenith TV I had for twenty years, and then both Microsoft and Apple will be out of bee's wax. Good riddance/Can't happen soon enough.

Can't anybody here play this game? Isn't it obvious that the current computer paradigm needs to be flushed down the toilet with our daily craps?



At least I didn't hit my thumb with the hammer.

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Paul Potts sings Nessun Dorma: Yeah, I cried too.

Here's an average Joe, living an annonamous life, who knows he's been blessed with a singularly great talent. So what does he do? He throws caution to the wind, summons up all of his courage, and proceeds to hit a home run that would make Babe Ruth's jaw hit the floor.

I hate opera, but I absolutely love this humble, plain guy and the awesome talent that God gave him.

Break out the Kleenex:



No cheesecake for this post.

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Back at Work

Don't think I did a blog entry about what I have been calling "The Plumbing Disaster" for several months now, which is strange because it completely shattered a great routine I had developed. Anyway, the twenty-five year old plumbing in my townhouse was nickel and diming us to death, so the property manager and owner decided to just replace it... all of it.

It was supposed to be a one day job last January, but there were a couple of things left undone. Oh, I forgot to mention that I had to move everything out from under all of the sinks, out of the laundry room, and out of all of the closets into my studio, didn't I? Doing this turned it instantly into a "junk room." This sucked in a major way.

So, of course, the work was done on a Friday, and it snowed on the Monday they were supposed to finish up. Days turned into weeks, and then they showed up unannounced on an afternoon I had a gig, and I didn't let them in. Weeks turned into months, and I finally got a call from the manager of the plumbing company. I was hot, but we worked out a time and got the guys to finish up... last month.

By this time, I had moved all of my stuff into the livingroom and had settled into a new routine. Well, I finally reached the "had it up to here" point last week, and so I cleaned out the "junk room" and returned it back to it's rightfull place as my Sanctum Sanctorum.

Here's just a peek:



The livingroom looks much better now as well, but I have to re-do my recording setup there.



That's OK, I got it.

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