Despite my starting late in the day and some of the most impossible looking instructions I’ve ever seen, this week’s Listener crossword, “Confused” by Tea Leaves, turned out to be easier than it looks. After seven or eight clues solved, I started figuring out what was going on and finished before midnight. Very nice puzzle with several sweet surprises along the way.
Not So “Confused” After All
25 February 2012Astronomical Coolness of the Evening
23 February 2012To the west, an unusually bright Jupiter, a normally bright Venus, and the waning moon are in a very straight line and very evenly spaced. It’s a striking sight.
The Manga Flute stuff
21 February 2012The website for the upcoming West Edge Opera premiere of The Manga Flute is here.
There’s a nice bit about the show in Janos Gereben’s “Music News” column in San Francisco Classical Voice for 7 February 2012.
I was interviewed yesterday by Ken Bullock at SFCV for a longer feature that will appear later this week or early next week.
I’ve started a new section on my website for stuff relating to The Manga Flute. So far I’m posted the cast list and my notes for the program.
Passing Thought
28 January 2012When most people are in the position that their world views and their comfortable habits would be inconveniently changed by the revelation that a rhinoceros has infiltrated their town, then a rhinoceros can walk down Main Street in nothing more than a fake mustache and a funny hat and no one will notice it.
The problem is not that the rhinoceroses have become dangerously skillful at disguise.
Really Unfortunate Acronym of the Day
25 January 2012
Moan of the Day
6 December 2011Oh man, I cannot wait until we evolve into a species capable of focusing together on an important issue for five minutes without being distracted by squirrels and shiny things.
Weekend Update
7 November 2011Finally finished the first full draft of Act I of The Manga Flute over the weekend. Much last-minute trimming. When I’d assembled all the individual scenes and got them formatted and then read through the whole thing, three of the dialogue scenes seemed too long. This isn’t uncommon; I’ve found it’s better not to bother trying very hard to trim a scene to its best length until I’ve got enough of the story written to get a sense of what the overall pacing and rhythm is like, as what happens in every scene can change how the pacing feels in all the following scenes.
Even so, I was startled at how really overlong the early scene between Tamino and Papageno (after Papageno’s entrance song and before Tamino’s portrait song) was. I managed to trim it by a full third, and it may need a little more. There’s a lot of ground to cover in that scene, though. It would be lovely if I could knock on Mr. Mozart’s grave and ask him for some music for a light, comic, back-and-forth duet for Tamino and Papageno that I could use to highlight the differences between them and that I could place right in the middle of that scene to break up the stretch of spoken dialogue. But I can’t. So I need to keep the scene as brisk and short as I can make it without losing its fun.
The title of the piece is now back to The Manga Flute. I had meant that as a working title, not a serious suggestion about what to call the finished production. It seems kind of silly and self-referential to me. But I have been told by several people that the title is getting a lot of positive reactions and stirring up a lot of interest, so I’ve been persuaded to let it be the final title. Part of collaborating with others is always picking the right battles to lose, and it’s a wonderful thing to have a title that makes people think, hey, that sounds like the sort of thing that I want to see, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this was the right battle to concede without much of a fight. The title that I had decided on was Tamino’s Magic Flute, because — to my ear, anyway — it sounds like what the title could have been if the story really had started out as a manga or anime. But if The Manga Flute makes more people think that this sounds like a fun show that’ll be good to bring the whole family to, then it’s a better title. I hope so, anyway.
Two Things I Am Hating About iOS5
20 October 2011First, they somehow screwed up the shuffle function. I have an iTunes smart playlist on my laptop that gives me a list of randomly selected “albums” (for classical music, I group each work as an “album” and make the individual movements “songs”). I shuffle by albums, and this way I get random works but the movements within each work stay together and in the right order. Since updating to iOS5, however, when I sync to my iPhone, this list gets shuffled again — by song, dammit. The playlist is still fine on my laptop, but on my iPhone the list begins with the fourth movement of Verklärte Nacht, the second variation from the Enigma Variations, the first movement of Dvořák’s Sixth Symphony, the sixth movement from J. S. Bach’s Overture No. 1 in C, the second movement from Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, and so on. This is not how I want a shuffled list to work! And I cannot figure out how to get my iPhone to go back to just duplicating the playlist on my laptop like it used to. Maybe there’s a setting somewhere I need to set, but I’ve looked around and can’t find one.
Second, the iPhone, or at least the music part of it, now seems to ignore all characters other than letters and numbers in alphabetizing lists. For something like 20 years, I have used a bullet (option-8 on the Mac keyboard) at the start of the name to pull my most important or frequently accessed files to the top of a list, so I don’t have to be scrolling for them all the time. This no longer works — the item with the bullet is alphabetized as though the bullet were not there. Arrgh! I’ve tried several other symbols and they all work like that now. Again, things are fine on my laptop, but screwed up in the Music app on my iPhone. Why did they change this? It’s going to take a mess of trouble to find something else that works (I may have to resort to “aa” if this is now true of all symbols, and “aa” is kind of ugly compared to •) and then change the titles of hundreds of playlists.
But I Only Get These Books to Look at the Diagrams
19 September 2011I’m editing a list of variables and their definitions in a book on structural engineering. fpj is defined as “stress in prestressing tendon due to jacking force”.
Later in the chapter, we learn that the tendon may be stressed by means of a jack or by tightening a nut. A gauge is then used to measure the resulting load.
Manga Artist Wanted
19 September 2011Berkeley West Edge Opera is planning a production of a new musical fantasy based on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, currently with the working title of Tamino’s Magic Flute. We are looking for an artist who is skilled in the visual style of manga and/or anime to work with us.
More information is here (PDF file, 200K). Please feel free to pass it along to any manga artists you may know!
Later: We’ve found our artist and she’s at work now on drawings that will be projected during the show. Some will be scenic backgrounds and others will actually help tell the story. I don’t think I want to say more than that for now.
