New Wheels

I picked up my new used car today, a 2004 Subaru Outback Sport Wagon. Hopefully, the last car purchase I have to make for a while. This car represents a number a firsts: first automatic transmission, first station wagon, first Japanese car (first non-Ford car, for that matter). Here are some photos of my new ride.

In Case of Rapture, this Plane will be Unmanned

Today's installment of the comic strip Sylvia is quite amusing. It's a riff on the oft-debunked myth that airlines avoid staffing the cockpit of commercial flights with two born-again Christians to avoid the possibility of both of them disappearing should the rapture occur during a flight.

New Math

This is a pretty nice website. If you ever need to look up a mathematical formula or concept that you were once familiar with but have long since forgotten, this website probably has a description of it along with a pretty straightforward explanation and maybe even a nice little diagram.

You are what you drive

I don't really like or agree with this whole blue state/red state dichotomy that the media has been pushing for a while, so while I don't exactly appreciate the premise of this article, I found it somewhat interesting. A lot of it was pretty obvious, Republicans like pickup trucks, Democrats like econoboxes, etc. I think the most interesting finding was how Democratic familes are more likely to drive minivans than Republican families because women tend to have more of a voice in the car buying decision in Democratic households.

Kevin Norton's Bauhaus Quartet

Westcott Community Center - Syracuse, NY
Sunday, April 24th

This was the second time I've had the pleasue of hearing Kevin Norton play at the Westcott, though this was my first time experiencing the Bauhaus quartet. The ensemble he brought last time, Living Language, didn't impress me for some reason that I can't quite remember, but this group was outstanding. For one, they played incredibly well together. This band certainly falls into the category of free jazz, but not for the usual reasons. They definitely showed their free jazz chops on the first and last pieces of their single-set concert, but the rest of the pieces really didn't exhibit the high-energy cacaphony usually associated with free jazz. One my great disappointments of free jazz is the inability a lot of bands have overcoming the rigid separation between solo and ensemble playing. While I'm sure "Ascenion" sounded really crazy when Coltrane recorded it in the 1965, in form, it really isn't much different than a regular jazz tune. You have a "head" of sorts, then each musician takes a solo, then you come back to the head. The Bauhaus quartet really didn't pay much attention to this orthodoxy. That's not to say that there were no solos, there certainly were a number of great solos, but on most pieces, instead of sitting around while the soloist played, the rest of the band continued to contribute to the musical conversation. Solos had less of a defined beginning and ending as well. While improvisation was still at the heart of this music, it was definitely composed and structured. That may sound like planning to be spontaneous, but in music as well as in life, freedom generally needs some boundaries placed around it in order to be used to its fullest extent.

Another thing I really liked about this band was their ability to play quietly. The best tune of the show was a ballad called "Terms". On a lot of their more subdued music, the horn section of Tony Malaby and Dave Ballou played some really nice soundscape-esque lines. This was interesting because it sort of inverted the band, allowing the rhythm section of Norton and bassist John Lindberg to take over the reigns and move the music forward while the horns provided the continuity. Norton was yet another example of my rule that states the skill of a drummer is inversely proportional to the size of his or her drum kit. He had a bass, snare, single tom-tom, two cymbals, and a high-hat, but he got an incredible sound out it. I think this group would've been even more exciting if there was a dedicated drummer, which would've allowed Norton to play the vibes the whole time. His approach to the vibes was not really rooted in jazz, it was more of a contemporary classical/minimalist approach, which made for some really interesting sounds. It's a shame that the group wasn't able to explore that further.

They definitely left me and the rest of the audience wanting more. I picked up a copy of their live CD "Time-Space Modulator". It's hard for a recording to measure up to a great live performance, but as the memory of tonight's music slowly fades, I'm sure the recording will come in handy, until they make their next visit to the Westcott.

Pinpoint

I heard about this cool new travel website today. It's called pinpoint travel and it's brought to you by our good friends at AOL. It aggregates results from a number of different travel sites and shows you the information. If you want to purchase a ticket, you have to go directly to the site where pinpoint found the ticket. Pinpoint facilitates this by providing you with links that will take you to it directly. It has an extremely slick user interface and as far as I can tell, it's pure DHTML.

March Madness

You may not have known that the shot clock was born in Syracuse. This new monument in Armory Square Park celebrates the birth of the 24-second clock. It's kind of a strange thing to memorialize, but I think it's pretty cool. The monument is functional, which is a nice touch (fortunatelly, there's no buzzer). It is surprising that the original clock is sitting around up the road at LeMoyne College. You'd think that the Basketball Hall of Fame would be interested in having it.

Hotel Darfur

If you haven't seen the movie Hotel Rwanda yet, go see it. If you haven't read this USA Today editorial by its star, Don Cheadle, read it.

Dukes of Gotham

I watched the Dukes of Hazzard over the weekend. It was probably the first time I had seen the show since it went off the air. I stumbled upon a DoH marathon on CMT and was somewhat surprised that I still found the show entertaining. I couldn't help but thinking that the show, which I watched on a weekly basis as kid, was very similar to another one of my old favorites, the old Batman TV series.

Let's consider the similarities. Batman and Robin, two impossibly square crime fighters, spent an hour each week fighting against comical and utterly incompetent villains to keep the streets of Gotham City safe. Bo and Luke Duke, two straight arrows, spent an hour each week fighting against the same comically incompetent villain to defend the honor of the Duke family and all law-abiding citizen of Hazzard County. In the Batman TV series, a cliffhanger at the end of the first episode made the viewers wonder if Batman and Robin would still be alive for tomorrow's episode (at the same bat-time, on the same bat-channel). Since the Dukes were only on once a week, the cliffhanger spanned a single commercial break and generally involved the General Lee getting airborne. Automobiles played an important role in both shows, Batman had the Batmobile and Dukes had their beloved General Lee. Both shows also featured a narrator.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, both shows used quite a bit of over-acting, especially for the villain roles. Batman was way more corny and over-the-top, but I think that Boss Hogg and Rosco P. Coltrane would have pretty much felt right at home had they wandered onto the streets of Gotham City. While the roles of the Duke boys weren't played as straight as Batman and Robin, the way that they maintained a congenial relationship with Boss Hogg in light of his never-ending quest to slander them (or worse) was either a page out the Batman and Robin clean-living playbook or a testament to southern hospitality.

Lily

I really like this photo I took a few days ago. I finally got around to reading the manual for my digital camera and managed to take this macro shot of the flowers I gave Michelle for Valentine's day.

Worst Dictator Ever

In case you missed it, America's most hard-hitting news magazine published its annual list of the world's 10 worst dictators this week. You may have missed the article because it was featured in none other than Parade Magazine. You know, that little magazine that probably comes in your Sunday paper sandwiched between 15 lbs of ads. Believe it or not, this is now an annual feature. Dictators of the world, you have been put on alert. America's senior citizens and homemakers will no longer be vacationing in your countries, depriving your regimes of valuable hard currency. Take that, Equatorial Guinea.

While there are no indications that anyone on this year's top 10 list is a tireless champion of human rights and/or transparent governance, the list is kind of strange. For one, Fidel Castro didn't manage to crack the top 10 this year (he did, however, receive a dishonorable mention). China's Hu Jintao, who has been in power for just over two years, came in fourth place, which was actually an improvement over last year's third place finish, but still out in front of notable de facto presidents-for-life, like Muammar Quaddafi (6th), Robert Mugabe (9th), and Turkmenistan's inscrutable Saparmurat Niyazov (8th). I'm not saying that China should be praised for its treatment of its citizens, but for them to finish fourth behind a failed state rife with civil war, the world's most repressive Stalinist regime, and a rural Southeast Asian country ruled by a ruthless military junta seems a little ridiculous.

Maybe journalistic cross-overs like this are the wave of the future. Perhaps local news networks across the country will start airing segments about the foibles of failed state autocrats between car chases and stories about how linoleum may be hazardous to your health. Some people might see this as progress, but I am not so sure. I have a feeling that compressing complicated geopolitical situations into easy to digest top 10 lists and other eye-catching forms of journalism is going to more harm than good. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go finish the "Are you a good dictator in bed?" quiz in this month's issue of Cosmo.

An Evening with the Kronos Quartet

Michelle and I went to check out the Kronos Quartet's free concert at the Goldstein auditorium last night. I had never really listened to the quartet before, but I had heard a lot of good things about them. This, along with my general apathy towards non-improvised music, made the avant garde music snob in me somewhat skeptical. Overall, I have to say that I was impressed. The best piece by far was the world premiere of Marc Mellits' string quartet number 2. It was one of the most amazing things I've heard in a while. The only way I can describe the piece is to imagine a chamber ensemble playing the music of an iconic rock and roll band, only instead making the music sound lame, they actually make it sound even cooler than when it was originally performed by the rock and roll band. I don't know if that was a testament to the composer, the ensemble, or both. As an added bonus, the composer himself, who happens to reside in the Syracuse area when he's not in Transylvania (I'm not making this up), came up and took a bow.

Everything else on the program was interesting and nothing if not eclectic (Indian movie music, Ethiopian saxophone music, etc.) The only other piece that really caught my attention was a work called Oasis by the Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, who is apparently a frequent collaborator with the quartet. Supposedly, her music is a blend of traditional Azerbaijani music and 20th century European classical forms. With the exception of some piped in effects, Oasis sounded pretty much like straight ahead 20th century classical music. My ears were never good at picking out structural elements of music and the chamber music side of my brain is so atrophied that I don't know if this piece really was written using a twelve tone system or any of those other "wacky" compositional structures, but I was definitely getting that kind of vibe from it and found it very appealing.

As for the other pieces, I was kind of disappointed by "One Earth, One People, One Love" from Terry Riley's Sun Rings. I generally dig anything minimalist, but this piece didn't really embody the hypnotic effect that I've always associated with great minimalist music. The only other piece worth noting was a work called "Potassium" by Michael Gordon. It made use of a lot of electronics, which I had never really heard before in a string quartet. It came off very well, I thought, plus the tune had a really cool minimalist/rock kind of groove. It was a very downtown New York kind of piece.

The group ended the evening with two encores, the second of which was a take of Hendrix's famous rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock. It was probably the only rendition of the tune that has ever caused Jimi and Francis Scott Key to turn in their graves simultaneously. The quartet either wanted to give the college kids something to remember the concert by, or they wanted to make absolutely sure that there wouldn't be a third encore. They were successful on both counts.

Blue Tusk Redemption

I was about to swear off eating lunch at the Blue Tusk, due to my general disappointment with their sandwiches, but I tried their grilled vegetable Mediterannean Panini today, and it was excellent. I've had bad luck with grilled vegetable sandwiches in the past, but this sandwich had none of the problems that I'm come to associate with grilled vegetable sandwiches, such as overcooked vegetables, undercooked vegetables, or unwieldy construction.

Baba Ganoush

The baba ganoush from the Wegman's Mediterannean olive bar is delicious. It reminds me of the baba at Munjed's, also outstanding, which gives me some hope that in addition to being tasty, it is also somewhat authentic.