Today I saw something I'd never noticed before: county employees with brushes and soapy water wiping roadsigns clean.
I sped by, of course, and didn't take a good look. But, zipping down the road, it struck me how odd it is that I could have spent over forty years in our civilization and never noticed people cleaning signs before.
I took notice. And I took it as a sign (so to speak) that I should get up this website: Designated Semiotician.
In my days working for a fanzinish political magazine, I sometimes listed myself as that rag's designated semiotician.
Ah, the delicious obscurity of the pun! The word sign is buried in the word designated, and a semiotician is a theorist or critic of sign-use and interpretation.
Signs are everywhere. These words you now read are signs. The field of semiotics is, like praxeology, an almost all-encompassing disipline.
I'm still a bit surprised, though: today was the first time I'd noticed public employees cleaning roadsigns. Not a breakthrough in semiotics, but a reminder that we can take signs and their use and their maintenance for granted, noticing little.
Innocence and Experience
My cousin just wrote me to tell that she had attended a concert of William Bolcom's Songs of Innocence and Experience, a long, two-and-a-half hour work. It is impossible for most concertgoers not to fidget in their seats at such an endurance test, but it was worth it, she said. Bolcom's ability to set poetry to music is almost unmatched.
I've heard only small portions of the piece, on the radio. I'm afraid it left no impression. Luckily, Slatkin and his 450 musicians are set to record the work, too. Perhaps I'll soon get a second chance to listen to the work on my stereo, and fidget all I want, in private.
Bolcom is a major talent. He is one of those composers whose taste and nerve run across the musical spectrum, from pop tunes to avant-gardish gesturing. The best place to start in his oeuvre is probably his Graceful Ghost Rags or his Open House, a song cycle on Theodore Roethke poems (look for the great old Nonesuch LP).
Bolcom was born in Seattle, where Alan Hovhaness died. I'm pleased about the recent performance. Would that Hovhaness's bigger works get such loving attention!
AlanHovhanessSociety | April 9, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Another One Bites the Dust
In the middle of a fine April night — no wind, no rain — the power goes out. I go back to sleep, thinking fix the clocks in daylight.
Usually, in such a case, I'd wonder who got drunk and drove into a pole, crashing the power lines.
Now, however, I can't help but muse for a moment whether Al-Quaida or The People's Republic of China — or, hey, Israel — has hacked an NT box and taken down the power grid.
Later I woke, however, and the sun is shining and my alarm clock flashes. All's right with the world. Except, I suppose, the dead drunk.
Designations | April 10, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Off his rocket
Ray Bradbury's romanticism about space travel endures. As reported in a recent AP article, he has once again asserted that, well,
Human exploration of the moon and Mars will move humanity beyond terrorism and war, inspiring the public in much the same way as Europeans who explored North America 500 years ago. . . .
Of course, the exploration of America did not put a halt to wars in Europe. The very idea is preposterous. Arguably, wars increased in severity and number. The opportunities of a new continent (with an easy-to-conquer population) mainly inspired Europeans to flee to the new land.
I don't see that happening any time soon with Luna or Mars. Thankfully neither have natives ripe for the kill.
The author of Rocket Summer
is off his rocket. Just because he was inspired by the idea of space travel, as a kid, doesn't mean that others will be so inspired, and thus give up war, terrorism, and wife beating. For some people, violence inspires, too.
Reading Matters | April 16, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Mysterious mounting disapproval
Disquieting news from England: Musicians in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic gave music director Gerard Schwarz a no-confidence vote earlier this week. Forty-five of the 64 contract players eligible to vote said no to extending Schwarz's five-year contract, which will end in 2006.
Schwarz, who has directed the Seattle Symphony Ochestra for twenty years, is one of the better-known advocates of mid-20th century American composers, including Alan Hovhaness, who lived in Seattle within view of the Cascades. Schwarz's first recording with the Liverpool Philharmonic was of three mountain symphonies
by Hovhaness.
One gets the horrible feeling that the Liverpool musicians were voting their no as much against Schwarz's repertory choices — and Hovhaness — as against his abilities as a conductor.
AlanHovhanessSociety | April 17, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
O for a muse of fire
Were I to read and watch Shakespeare plays more often, my company would become unbearable to most people. I'd hang our lack of ceremony and poetry, and ape the rhetoric and eloquence I hear in, say, Henry V.
I just watched Branagh's filmed performance, and am again impressed by his direction. But more by Shakespeare's words.
It is not easy, at first, to follow every turn of speech. But it gets easier as you go along. By the end of the play, one wishes that all small talk were transformed, just a bit, by Shakespeare's fiery muse. One yearns to hear some wit in everyday discourse, and some eloquence in the words of our leaders.
Alas, almost no one I speak to speaks well, and our leaders — well, our leaders are led by a man incapable of eloquence, a man whose hems and haws are the closest he will ever come to poetry, in place of e.e. cummings's strange puncuations. But don't blame cummings for bush. As the latter makes the world shake, and spears are thrown at his command, we might hope he could speak with some eloquence. Not to convince the masses better of his cause, but simply to reflect its seriousness.
Yes, yes; I know: his speech has improved. But the former cheerleader could have done something better than treat his term in office as an elocutionist's practice time. And, going off to war, he might have tried more noble rhetoric than the lies he chose.
But Henry V is not the best counter to Bush. Other ideas than one can find in this paean to warmongering need rediscovery in Washington, DC. But they won't be found, not as long as the con artists of neo-imperialism (the neocons) are in charge. Pity our poverty of mind and culture. Pity the poverty that is American leadership.
Designations | April 18, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Small victory
A state trooper stopped me a few weeks ago. The trooper not only gave me a ticket for speeding, he also lectured me in high moral dudgeon, giving dubious account of the nature of traffic laws. No other police officer I've dealt with has been as disrespectful.
So, this morning, I appeared before the county judge, in mitigation
to reduce the $91 ticket. I didn't deny I had exceeded the speed limit while passing a bus. I simply said that I had used the passing lane in such a way as to be courteous and safe, ensuring that the bus driver would not have to put on the brakes (had I passed him slowly at the speed limit).
After hearing my story, the judge asked the prosecuting attorney what cost he thought the ticket should be brought down to. The attorney said that, in view of the circumstances, $65 seemed appropriate. I was only a bit pleased; at this reduction, it may have been worth my time and trouble to drive into town, but I thought I deserved more taken off.
Then the judge proceeded to ask a number of questions — questions that the prosecutor treated as rhetorical. Why, the judge wanted to know, were the troopers citing drivers for speeding in the passing lanes? After a few more such questions, questions that showed he took the same view of speed limits that I did, he looked at me and said the charges were dismissed. "You may go now." I thanked him and left.
It's nice to live in a county with a reasonable judge.
Designations | April 21, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Airing the draft
Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, wants Americans to talk about reviving the military draft. Why? Well, it's obvious that the current war has become what they now call "a generational war," and he's thinking a whole generation should be dedicated to it. He wants to make sure all Americans "bear some responsibility" and "pay some price" in defending "the nation's interests."
He's circumspect. He just wants a debate. Well, I think we should give him one.
Here are a few ideas worth discussing:
- A draft isn't freedom. It's a kind of slavery. It's forcing some people to kill and die for their country. As such, it's a sign that things have gone very wrong.
- If things have spiralled out of control, the people who should bear the responsibility for it are not average Americans — who are basically innocent — but (just maybe) the politicians who got us into it.
- Are Americans now fighting for their own freedom, or the freedom of people who'd rather not have us give it to them? The ingrates.
- We had better be sure it is in our nation's interest that we carry on a generational war. If it isn't, the price of the war will be much higher than
some price.
Think grave cost. And to nearly all of us. (Of course, some people benefit from the sacrifices of others. Some always do. And others just like to watch sacrifices; it makes them feel all squishy inside.)
Last night, Aaron Brown on CNN gave a nice little sermon emphasizing one of Hagel's points, on how the next draft shouldn't be like the last one. No one should be allowed off. If you can't fight, do something else for the cause. If you're rich, or in college, so what?
It's all very egalitarian. I applaud Brown for going on the soapbox like this not because I support the draft, but because such a demand for a new draft
— a super-draft — makes it that much more unlikely.
Designations | April 22, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Pink noise blending to white noise
Most civilized people probably don't wake up to rain as do I. Rain in the city, in the suburbs, falls chiefly upon roofs, decks, asphalt. But rain where I live patters onto leaves and grass.
The sound, I assure you, is much more soothing. It is almost lovely. It's hard to hate rain when it falls upon green leaf.
Designations | April 23, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
*nomen
The ancient Romans had three names, like most Americans do today. But we don't call their three names first
and second
and third
; we call them
- praenomen,
- nomen,
- cognomen.
The praenomen is a personal name, like my first, which begins with a T.
The nomen is the family name, indicating the gens.
That would be most people's last name in America. Mine too. In Roman civilization, however, this was often placed in the middle. The cognomen is a nickname, the name people usually use to indicate the person. Cicero
was Marcus Tullis Cicero's cognomen, for example. My name Wirkman
might be thought of as a cognomen.
The dotted suffixes to my cognomen (wirkman.com, wirkman.net, wirkman.biz, etc.) might be called domen, for top-level domain suffixes
!
Designations | April 24, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Men and Mountains
Yesterday was, for me, Armenian Appreciation Day. I watched Atom Egoyan's complex meta-epic Ararat. And in the mail I got an Alan Hovhaness CD and two Hovhaness scores. The CD is called Mysterious Mountains, and features two of the Armenian-American composer's most famous orchestral works plus two fairly obscure works — each in their titles referencing mountains (though not Ararat). The scores were of the Saint Vartan Symphony and the piano suite Visionary Landscapes.
The latter I placed on the piano stand at first opportunity. Wondrous music, and surprisingly easy to play. I'll be able to get each of the first four movements under my fingers pretty quickly. The fifth, however, demands inside the piano
work, and I play an upright, so . . . it'll have to wait.
The nicest surprise was the harmonic character of Visionary Landscapes. The first movement is an exercise in a pulsing ostinato on A, in my favorite mode of my favorite scale, the acoustic scale: A, b-flat, c, d, e, f-sharp, g, a. And the melody works off of a tetrad, not a triad: a, b-flat, d, and e. More complex chords appear on the third page, chords that feature triadic as well as quartal harmony. It's simple music, really, and doesn't change key. The other movements are as brief, but harmonically a bit more complex. All are evocative, and the title of the suite could hardly be more apt.
Rhythmically, only the last movement looks
normal on the page, for only it has barlines, alternating, every few bars, between 5/4 and 4/4. The others are measureless, and pulse in a way reminiscent of Indian music.
Ararat, the Egoyan movie, is perhaps too complex for its own good. Still, it's worth seeing, and reminds us of something history has almost forgotten: the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, a mass of massacres over acres of ancestral lands, a genocide.
More important, as far as art is concerned, is that it spreads out a fairly unfamiliar emotional landscape, and shows us a few scenes of Armenian Turkey,, surrounding the great mountain, with a wondrously desolate geography, er, landscape.
The film's music was fine, but I would've preferred a Hovhaness score. Studying Visionary Landscapes and the Saint Vartan Symphony, the virtues of simplicity is something I can recommend to Mr. Egoyan.
Designations | April 27, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
The past few weeks have seen an increase of email virus attacks. Of course, since I use a Mac, these attacks mean little to me other than clutter. They are mostly harmless.
Unfortunately, my ISP keeps sending to my ISP-provided email account notices about various emails with viruses. These notices detail how my ISP has heroically quarantined
these emails, and about where I can go to look at these emails safely.
