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February 28, 2005

The Wisdom of Wonkette

Via Wonkette, from the "if I had a nickel every time someone said that to me..." department:

Did people at least tell you to go *fuck yourself*? That's almost like getting laid...

Ah, yes. What if?

Posted by David Richmond at 6:43 PM EST | TrackBack

AIMrony

DavidTigre201: oh gah
DavidTigre201: xanga has no RSS feed
Ian Goh: oh that's good
Ian Goh: wonderful
DavidTigre201: haha
Ian Goh: see i'm doing my best to subvert IM for ironical purposes
DavidTigre201: i see that
DavidTigre201: v. good
Ian Goh: expression is so bloody difficult on this thing that only total sarcasm can get you anywhere
DavidTigre201: hahahahaha
DavidTigre201: my friend daron figured that out years ago

See, when you comment here, good things happen. Like your IM conversations with me getting posted, such that your sparkling wit and humor need not be lost in a churning internet sea, but instead brought to the surf by my gently guiding hand. Or....something like that.

Posted by David Richmond at 9:21 AM EST | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Jenn and Madeleine, please finish your comps ASAP

Today's Crimson review of Dunster House Opera's Candide is right in essence: the show was quite good, the cast was great, and the orchestra was a merry band of crack players. But nevertheless, the review makes me want to puke. Consider the following:

"Prostitutes, pirates, and persecution may have marauded the stage" [thanks for the alliteration]
"In a production of lovely postmodern excess" [wtf does that mean?]
"Hosfield plays his part with an unnaturally wide emotional breadth" [unnaturally?]
"The comically quirky Old Lady was pleasantly played by Kathy D. Gerlach '07" [again with the alliteration? cut it out]
"The violinists, led by concertmaster Ian K. Goh '06, were pure and lovely. Similarly, the woodwinds, brass, and keyboard were simply heavenly, and the percussion section was duly percussive. Conductor and Musical Director Daniel W. Chetel '06, who waved vigorously to coax such beautiful music from both the orchestra..., etc." [worst-written orchestra review EVER]

Cheap shots, all, I'll grant you. But come on, this over-the-top writing style is typical from The Crimson. And there's another, more serious problem. Bernstein's Candide is Voltaire postmodernized? Now there could be some interesting content there, but our overmatched reviwer seems content [a pun! can I write for Crimson Arts now?] to leave Bernstein's work per se largely unexamined. If you're going to analyze something, analyze it. Don't go off half-cocked, handing out buzzwords ("postmodern," "aesthetic," etc.) like candy.

All of this contrasts with the fact that help is on the way for Plympton Street: Jenn Chang and Madeleine Baverstam, HRO violinists and people who actually know what they're doing are in process of comping The Crimson. They're planning to write for the Arts section. The music community at Harvard waits anxiously.

UPDATE: (9:45 am) Toni Marchioni noticed the (one hopes) accidental insult dealt to Lara Hirner:

"Hirner belted out piercing high notes..."

Meant, I'm sure, as a compliment, but an unmitigated insult to a singer of Lara's caliber.

ANOTHER UPDATE: (10:15 am) Jenn emails that their first articles for the Arts comp were published Thursday: here and here. Check it out.

Posted by David Richmond at 7:22 AM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 26, 2005

Self Revelation: August Redux

During the week of August 2nd, still in Aspen, I walked into my lesson with Steve Dibner and responded to his customary polite inquiry with, "I'm all right, except my girlfriend broke up with me." Then, genuine sympathy. Upon finishing the narrative, he pointed to my bassoon and said, "pour it out." I knew enough about his life story to sense that he felt a certain sense of identification with me then. But as hard as I tried, I couldn't push that feeling of being trapped inside my own skin out. I don't know if he knew. True, I found considerable solace in playing principal on Rigoletto, but that was more because, suddenly blinded by shock, it was the only thing I was any longer excited about.

I tell you this story because I came to realize last night, in a conversation with a very good friend, that I am not the type of artist who expresses himself well when he is sad. Some artists, we think, have made their sadness intelligible and beautiful to the rest of the world. Van Gogh, Schumann, Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky. Even if this is historically true (and I'm not sure it is), I myself find that while I've searched for meaning through art in my darkest emotional moments, those are not the moments at which my creativity has sprung most memorably forth. Instead, I'm at my most creative when content and happy, when I can brazenly declare to the world, "Hello, this is me!"

So yes, in my darker hours I've listened to Tchaikovsky's Fourth, or the Barber Violin Concerto, and tried to examine my own life from the artist's distance. Sometimes, I've been able to express myself through words in those moments, in prose or poetry, and in speech only once, on a starry night in Colorado, biting my lip through the tears. Sometimes these efforts reach ecstatic heights, like in an early morning trip on August 6th up to the Maroon Bells with Steve and two other bassoonists (the photo here was taken on that trip).

But -- and here I stake my aesthetic claim -- true self expression is more than exhibitionism, more than a cry of pain. True self expression builds the artist into the person he wants to become. Your music must reflect your soul, not the constraints others put upon it. And therein lies the path to the life I seek: commitment to be myself above all.

Posted by David Richmond at 8:50 PM EST | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 25, 2005

Smeagol Likes Commenters, Oh Yes

The more comments, the more my blogging addiction grows. So if this blog is on your morning rounds right after thefacebook (you know who you are, and so do my server logs), take your DR stalking to a whole new level and comment, gosh darn it. With apologies to Eddie Izzard: commenting shows that you have a strong personality. And everyone likes to have sex with strong personalities. Draw your own conclusions.

Posted by David Richmond at 7:51 PM EST | TrackBack

Dinner Conversation

The indomitable roommate Mike Catlin, on my reasons for not smashing a salt shaker on the ground:

Man, the day I care what other people think is the day I lose all respect for myself. Spike the f-ing salt shaker.

This might only be funny if you've spent enough time around Catlin to recognize, here in plain text, his patented even-keeled sardonic delivery.

Posted by David Richmond at 7:36 PM EST | TrackBack

Portland Trailblazers

The NBA trade deadline passed and my Blazers did absolutely nothing. We're 21-31, and apparently Paul Allen (the owner) has decided it's time to cut salary (but not enough to fall beneath the cap) and "rebuild". Whatever that means. Last year's trade of one of the top 25 players in the NBA (fine, top 50) now amounts to a trade for an expiring contract and an oft-injured, over-the-hill center (and to think how excited I was to get his jersey at Christmas...).

All of which raises the question, what's left to cheer for? The optimistic boilerplate answer is, "look to the future and the young guys and the draft" and so forth, but I think there's a more philosophic lesson here. Being a fan is about more than cheering for your team to win, it's also about supporting them when they're down. One need not be rabidly, unrealistically optimistic about things, but there are players and stories on the team to be happy and excited about.

And that, of course, points to one of the things that's so compelling about sports. Because living your life is also not always about how much you win or lose. Being a fan of yourself is the same as being a fan of your sports team (a relationship more often expressed in reverse). Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose; sometimes you play hard, sometimes you don't. But you always have to stay behind your own team.

Posted by David Richmond at 11:46 AM EST | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 24, 2005

From the mouths of babes....

James Lileks' daughter, as quoted by him today:

"All of my mistakes are giving me ideas."

Truth.

There's also this shockingly amusing bit:

I don't know why, but for some reason the term "German Expressionist" just looked amusingly contradictory, like "Prussian Eroticism." Of course the Germans are very good at making expressive music, sometimes overly so. But you don't think of them as an expressive people. Hence it comes out in adagios, or blitzkriegs.

Okay with you if I just leave that as is and not criticize it? Fudging is always excusable by humor in my book.

Posted by David Richmond at 11:39 AM EST | TrackBack

February 23, 2005

Typecast

Last spring the ever-industrious Jen Raymond (hey, there's even a facebook group dedicated to her, which may or may not have been started by my blog-friend Lastella), along with several former Greenough residents, formed the Harvard Storytime Players to fulfill Jen's admirable desire to bring lighthearted theater to kids in Boston hospitals. For the inaugural production, I was tapped to play a very green and only slightly scary dragon, who came around to the good side of things in the course of the script.

Storytime has taken on a life of its own in my busy-induced exile from it this fall, with a crop of excited freshmen and a director (Cailin O'Connor) who dares (occasionally) to contradict Jen's authority. With a "slightly edgy" script written primarily by the creative-as-always Shana Franklin, I decided to make my triumphant return to the Storytime stage this term. For which I was, inevitably, typecast as the scary monster once again (it happens when you're the tallest member of the cast by a good four to six inches and have the deepest voice by far), this time as an unrepentantly evil shark who tries to get the protagonist fish "hooked", for which I am given the most regrettable line: "So, do you want some candy?"

Cailin, after I delivered the line in rehearsal today, agreed that she'd call HUPD if I called her on the phone and said that in my deep scary voice to her. Shit. Andy Jorgensen's already hitting the comment button.*

* Andy earlier this fall made the decidedly unfunny comment that my hair "looked like a child molester's"; my typecast role will no doubt only encourage him in his delusion.

Posted by David Richmond at 10:25 PM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Strong Bad's rock opera

If you don't obsessively check Homestar Runner.com every Monday, well, you should. In case you missed it, this week Strong Bad revealed that he's been writing a rock opera all along. I think I just found my thesis topic....*

* Note to music department faculty who might be reading this: I'm kidding. I promise.

Posted by David Richmond at 2:17 PM EST | TrackBack

Laws of Dating

These are influenced by decadesyears of field research. This is reality in dating-land. Attempting to act contrary to reality will result in failure. Discuss.

Posted by David Richmond at 12:10 PM EST | TrackBack

Summers makes it through

I don't really have any more to say about the Summers/Faculty flap, but if you're still interested, Molly Atlas gives a very detailed account of yesterday's Faculty meeting in the Harvard Independent. I was right that he would make it through, but wrong that the Faculty meeting would prove decisive, politically speaking, as it seems instead that the Faculty has found a productive way forward:

Yet inside Lowell Lecture Hall, the appointed site of the second faculty meeting, the atmosphere was surprisingly reserved. What began as a forceful, if disorganized, movement by the faculty to combat Summers' presidency evolved by yesterday's meeting into a comparatively united effort to find a way for the university to move forward in the face of this controversy. While faculty members presented no dearth of strong opinions, there was less outcry about Summers' tenure than expected, as faculty members instead emphasized finding a way to ensure a more workable relationship with President Summers and the administration in the future.

In a similiar vein, Elizabeth Spelke (Professor of Psychology) and Mahzarin Banaji (Cabot Professor of Social Ethics) had an op-ed in yesterday's Crimson that's one of the more fair and accurate opinion pieces on this whole thing.

Posted by David Richmond at 9:28 AM EST | TrackBack

February 22, 2005

On the Other Side of the Aisle

As Hillary goes for the Democratic nomination, the other side of the blogosphere aisle is going nuts for Condoleezza Rice. Condi versus Hillary: wouldn't that be fun?

Oh, and then there's this:

Rumors persist that midway through the second Bush term VP Dick Cheney will step aside and make room for someone who can run in '08. McCain, Giuliani, Frist, Santorum, [ewwwwww -Ed.] et al, are jockeying for that position. Needless to say, we're partial to Dr. Rice. She'd not only be a great VP -- she's one of only a few Republicans who can beat Hillary and win in a landslide against any other Democrat.

Anyone still in doubt that Hillary is the Democratic Party's knight...(er, knightess? warrior princess?) in shining armor?

Posted by David Richmond at 4:54 PM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Hillary '08 Watch

I'll go on record publically predicting what I have been privately predicting since November's election: Hillary Clinton will win the 2008 presidential election. The most fascinating thing about this prediction is that my left-wing friends object, "No way she'll ever get elected, her name is a dirty word on the right; she's an effete, screaming Northeast liberal," while my right-wing friends concede the argument.

That argument follows. The Republican party, having consolidated its power in the last election, is likely to overstep its mandate. The electorate will desire a shift back to the center, as is usual, and the opportunity will be ripe for a skilled Democratic politician to take it. Hillary is undoubtedly skilled, far more than her left-wing companions realize. As The Economist noted (or on Lexis with Harvard PIN) after the November 2nd election, Hillary's been moving steadily towards the center after her election as Senator from New York, being especially careful to position herself as far more hawkish than the rest of her party. This carefully crafted record will shield her from the "effete liberal" charge in 2008.

The center-right has had markedly more love for Hillary in recent weeks. Consider the centrist stance she took in a speech on abortion. Andrew Sullivan ate it up. And consider especially her remarks this weekend on Iraq:

Sen. Hillary Clinton said that much of Iraq was "functioning quite well" and that the rash of suicide attacks was a sign that the insurgency was failing...Clinton, a New York Democrat, said insurgents intent on destabilizing the country had failed to disrupt Iraq's landmark Jan. 30 elections.

This even as she acknowledges the security situation has deteriorated. Setting aside the rather Orwellian contradiction there, the right loves it. She's making a strong play for the center and she's already winning.

Posted by David Richmond at 12:45 PM EST | TrackBack

Yogi Berra

Rediscovered the quotable output of Yogi Berra after The Economist named him the wisest fool of the last 50 years:

If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.
You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.
I wish I had an answer to that, because I'm tired of answering that question.

And of course:

I didn't really say everything I said.

Posted by David Richmond at 11:19 AM EST | TrackBack

February 21, 2005

Disillusionment

"We need you," she once said of me and music, but the real power is that I need music. Of late my mind has been supplying its own soundtrack, unprompted. So yesterday in the station, above the roar of the buses and the man mumbling to himself in the corner, I heard Jacqueline du Pré playing Elgar, that tribute to the awful capability of humanity to inflict pain on itself. Eight and a half million dead by its writing in 1919, and the real catastrophes were yet to begin. Is it out of simple fascination with the macabre that I'm drawn to Elgar's disillusionment? Or is there instead, perhaps, a note of hope in the very fact of its expression? Because that which can be named can be controlled; unseen ropes cannot be untied.

Thus we are always afraid of that which we do not know, do not understand. But worse than poor understanding is false confidence, which allows us to be manipulated and controlled by those who know more. If confidence in our knowing is always imperfect, are we doomed to be either afraid or foolish? Both prevent us from being free.

Posted by David Richmond at 1:02 PM EST | TrackBack

February 18, 2005

Shoutout to Eliot Awesomeness

Part I:
For several days we had very tiny ants crawling all over the bathroom for some inexplicable reason. Being small enough not to trigger my threshold of "yuck" and not attracted to any discernible foodstuff debris that I could see, I wasn't terribly worried about it. Despite this, Francisco (superintendent) sent an exterminator the same day as we complained about it, and now the ants are gone.

Part II:
Last night, three of my favorite things were available for free in house common spaces: popcorn, apple pie, and Blue Moon beer. Plus the company of incredibly hot Eliotites.

It doesn't get any better than that. It's enough to make one forget about the 6am fire alarms....

Posted by David Richmond at 5:12 PM EST | TrackBack

Summers' Silent Support

Lending support to my previous suggestion that a relatively silent majority supports Summers in this controversy, the entirety of the Crimson op-ed page today is in support of Summers:

Interestingly, the feedback that The Crimson received -- both the op-ed submissions and letters to the editor -- overwhelmingly voiced support for both Summers and the comments he made on women and science at a recent conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In seeking to balance the opinions on the page, we contacted several professors who were some of the most vocal opponents of Summers at the Faculty meeting, and all those we contacted declined to write for this page.

Someone entrepreneurial should consider selling towels outside Lowell Lecture Hall on Tuesday so that Summers' outspoken critics can wipe the egg off their faces.

Posted by David Richmond at 10:45 AM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack

On the Merits

I turn now to the merits of the Summers controversy. I'm no expert in the field, so I'll keep it brief. It seems to me that if Summers' remarks have provoked debate, they have achieved their purpose; indeed, he said as much himself. I can't speak decisively as to the accuracy of his suggestion that biological differences are a more important factor than discrimination in the underrepresentation of women in science. If he's wrong, isn't it enough to say so and show why? His remarks are hardly polemical. And what if he's right? Targeting discrimination as the source of the problem is doomed to fail if discrimination is not the problem.

That said, I think he's probably wrong. He's an economist, not a scientist, not a psychologist. And his analysis of variability is over-simplistic. But this is not so much the point any longer. The furor is not over what he said as much as that he said anything at all. University presidents should keep their mouths shut, and they should not provoke controversy. They shouldn't be thinking about problems like women in science beyond the usual tropes. But I think it is unreservedly good for higher education that Larry Summers does, even if he's occasionally, even often, completely and unabashedly wrong.

Posted by David Richmond at 9:48 AM EST | TrackBack

Summers wrap-up

So, Larry Summers released a transcript of his remarks on gender and science. And Zoe Vanderwolk has a copy of an email sent to university officers that she terms an "apology," although I seriously doubt it will silence his harshest critics. She further (accurately, says me) observes:

When I first arrived here Neil Rudenstein was still President, and I sang at Summers' inauguration as President in the fall of my freshman year. Rudenstein was the classic university president - just raise the money and stay well clear of anything else that's going on. Whether or not Summers has overstepped his bounds as President is another question entirely, but it's one that should be addressed head on and not in this shameful underhanded way. I don't usually find myself in agreement with Harvey Mansfield, but in this we agree - Summers is being set up, and it makes me feel very, very uncomfortable. If the case against him was so strong, it should stand on its own merits without any of this backstabbing.

The transcript, meanwhile, is not nearly as explosive as I had thought it would be, although it's easily taken out of context:

As recently as Tuesday, when several professors renewed their calls for a release of the transcript, Summers said, "I have believed to date that it is not best to try to parse in detail a statement that was a set of informal remarks that were not even written out before they were delivered and were not intended to be quoted." (from The Crimson)

And so the selective quoting and Faculty sound-biting has already begun. But his critics on the faculty, in their eagerness to tear him down, are blind to a Faculty majority that, I predict, will stand with Summers. His supporters are silent because his critics' rhetoric leaves any member of the academic community with a stark choice: agree with us or be lumped, to appropriate a biting turn of phrase from Richard Taruskin (with Harvard PIN, or see New Republic 3/21/94 "The Golden Age of Kitsch"). But put it to an anonymous vote, and I think Summers will weather the storm -- and emerge stronger for it.

Posted by David Richmond at 9:30 AM EST | TrackBack

February 17, 2005

On The Transient Lives of Twenty-Somethings

This heartfelt and starkly honest piece in FM by Jonathan Bardin really resonated with me (perhaps partly because my own decision in April 2002 was between This Fine Institution and Oberlin) and is definitely worth a read, even if the rest of FM (and The Crimson proper) aren't.

Posted by David Richmond at 4:33 PM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Closer

A week ago I saw Closer (spoiler warning: I'm assuming you've seen it), and now, appropriately distant, I feel objective enough to comment. The immediate critical consensus between my roommate and I was that 1) it's a deeply disturbing movie and 2) Natalie Portman is hot. Which she is, but I also think (he disagrees) that her Alice/Jane is the most compelling character of the four.

Each is a caricature of humanity in that each has certain sympathetic qualities which are joined by their opposites. Larry (Clive Owen), for instance, is driven by animalistic lust, but nevertheless has a certain boyish innocence about him, emotionally speaking. This latter emotional innocence is belied, however, by a masterful ability to emotionally manipulate other people. Anna (Julia Roberts), meanwhile, is introduced as a self-confident career woman/divorcée, but finds herself bouncing between Larry and Dan out of indecision and insecurity. She seems to thrive on feeling horrible about herself. In the end, Larry figures her out, and manipulates her back into marriage -- but not love -- with him, which only seems to show that those who fail to maintain concrete self identity are in danger of having it imposed from outside by the stronger willed. Or more manipulative. Dan (Jude Law), finally, is the most "romantic" of all the characters, but in his selfish quest for literary perfection in his own heart he hurts the other three more than anyone else.

Only Alice/Jane seems completely innocent of judgement, in my opinion; at least at first blush, she's the recipient of pain but not the source. Even at the end, I perceive her rejection of Dan more as justice for Dan's transgressions than unprovoked hurt. Yet even as we are set up to believe in the purity of her love for Dan at the beginning, her duplicitous identities raise the question: what, in her life, is actually real? Jane by night in England, Jane by day in America; Alice by day in England, perhaps Alice by night in America. Is one capable of feeling real love under those circumstances?

For this reason, I find her character compelling. The movie doesn't offer an answer to the question of Alice/Jane's love being real or not, perhaps inviting the audience to answer it for themselves. The other characters have judgement passed upon them by the script itself, which is, I think, a weakness.

So much for Closer's (limited) dramatic content. The rest of it seems to be driven forward by our lingering discomfort with the character's ability to maintain their opposites without somehow magically being driven from existence by their contradictions. Closer, that is, seems to be about shocking the audience with how "bad" the characters are, asking us to see them and identify with them as sympathetic people -- only to have our sympathy turned on its head in the next scene. This is why the movie is so deeply disturbing and gut-wrenching. But to the extent that it succeeds in doing so, the movie then fails: once we allow ourselves to identify with the characters, or with parts of the characters, Closer has little else to offer.

Portman's performance is the only one worth mentioning as stellar, although Clive Owen is adequate and even good at times. He's certainly given the best one-liners ("Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist covered with blood!" and "Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die."). I've never been a big Jude Law fan; this is one of his better performances, but that's not saying much. And Julia Roberts is at her most stilted.

Posted by David Richmond at 3:06 PM EST | TrackBack

Tough Crowd

After minor criticism of Felipe's, the pro-Felipe's thugs came over to Eliot L-12 and broke my leg (virtually), so I retract my previous statements about the Holy Shrine. Felipe's is the source of all that is good and right in the world and I was gravely mistaken to suggest otherwise.

Um, yeah.

Posted by David Richmond at 1:04 AM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 16, 2005

Too Close For Comfort

For the second term in a row, I have a personal connection to my core TF. Very strange.

Posted by David Richmond at 10:22 PM EST | TrackBack

I, For One, Welcome Our New Robot Overlords

The thought of armies of robot soldiers disturbs me not so much for the reasons proposed by the Times -- namely that "bloodless war" (for the American side, that is) leads to a lower decision threshold for going to war -- but rather for the disconcerting thought of said robot armies being turned on our own citizens. I've always been a little bit of a "black helicopters are coming now, I can hear them!" conspiracy theorist at heart (the legacy of my once-radical libertarianism), but it seems to me that this is actually a legitimate concern. As the human part of the Army shrinks and field decisions are concentrated more and more in the hands of an ever-smaller command structure, the ability to politically ambush that command structure for tyrannical ends increases. Right now, the ability of the US Army to be used for political ends is checked not only by civilian control (the president) and not only by (one hopes) the sense among generals that this would be a very bad thing to do, but also by the sense of the individual soldier that this would be a bad thing to do. Robots don't have this sense, and that worries me.

Posted by David Richmond at 1:42 PM EST | TrackBack

Women, Careers, and Larry Summers

Just returned from a spirited lunch discussion provoked by Larry Summers' continuing crisis, during which I proposed that if indeed "innate differences" between men and women account for the relative lack of women in the sciences or in the academy, this would simply point to a need for the academy to adapt to these "feminine differences". Eliot res-tutor Karen Teoh agreed, observing that the pressures of the academic environment -- indeed the modern pressures of career in general -- are hostile towards women simply by the fact that the period of their lives (mid-30s) when women are most likely to want children coincides with a time of peak career-building activity.

Indeed, Carly Fiorina, recently forced out as CEO of HP but still the most recognizable female executive in the US, has a "wife" to take care of the domestic half of her marriage partnership: her husband retired seven years ago, apparently deciding that for Carly to fulfill her career potential, the traditional roles would have to be reversed. But is this progress? If the best we can do after recognizing and deconstructing the traditional power roles in heterosexual partnerships is to occasionally get the male and female to switch roles -- but keep the categories essentially intact -- it seems like we've failed in some deep and fundamental sense.

The Platonic ideal, I should think, is that both people in the partnership pursue and are fulfilled by their careers equally. That, at least, is what I have understood as the implicit promise; certainly, having exclusively dated only women who have ambitious (to say the least) career aspirations, it is what I have understood as the implicit expectation. It's deeply troubling to consider that this expectation might be inevitably frustrated.

For my part, it's crossed my mind on more than one occasion that a career as a musician could line up rather nicely with a wife who had a more traditional 9-5 job, except for the part where we never get to see each other because she's either at work or I'm playing nights. But I guess the real truth here is that marriage is hard, and so you just have to Make It Work, one way or another.

Posted by David Richmond at 1:04 PM EST | TrackBack

February 15, 2005

Controversy! II

But to the extent that anyone who cares about Harvard reads this blog, that "anyone" is likely to be a Harvard undergraduate. So now I turn to a controversy that matters much, much more to your average student, unless he or she is so unfortunate as to live in Canada the Quad: Felipe's or Noch's? Those with no taste might allege that Tommy's pizza is superior to Noch's, but those people are wrong. Felipe's vs. Noch's is a more interesting question, returning to a basic and difficult question of first principles, i.e., burrito or pizza? Having favored Felipe's all year in the only way that counts (with my wallet), and having dined at Noch's this evening, my conclusion is: Noch's on taste, Felipe's on substance and filling-ness. Not even close in either category.

Posted by David Richmond at 11:45 PM EST | TrackBack

Controversy!

So since the national media is already all over the Larry Summers "crisis" story, I'll stake out my position, which is: if Summers gets fired after all of this, I'll be sad and dismayed. As Steven Pinker said, "shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse?" I don't think the fact that some comment makes you "physically ill" should be enough to get a university president fired, as long as those remarks are presented frankly and in good faith. And these were.

But I'd guess that saying so lumps me in with those upholding the patriarchal tyranny of reason, so I'd probably be wise to keep my mouth shut.

Posted by David Richmond at 11:27 PM EST | TrackBack

Nostalgia

Shared high school nostalgia with Daron on AIM late last night led to extensive quarter-life crisis type monologuing by me. The themes were familiar -- the necessity to choose, the danger of fear:

If the world seems ever more petty, and if emotion is eschewed in favor of irony, it is only because we lack the confidence to say what we feel even while knowing that it has been better said before. We are afraid of the trite in ourselves. But there is no such thing as "genuine" kitsch; the difference between kitsch and beauty lies in the sincerity of the artist. I am rarely insightful and hardly ever right, but at least I am unafraid. It would be a mistake to suppose that I know what I want. But I am willing to make a choice.

The irony, of course, is that I still am afraid to a greater extent than I would care to admit. Progress on this thing we call life, I suppose, comes from confronting fear on the one hand, and becoming more aware of things that could be feared on the other. Four years ago, still in high school, I thought I had everything figured out. That blind certainty is precisely what I was nostalgic for. Appropriately enough as I sit listening to a lecture about Socrates, I now know I know less -- and that in itself is a sort of progress. Because blind certainty is, in the end, still blind.

Posted by David Richmond at 11:08 AM EST | TrackBack

February 14, 2005

Valentine's Day

Lastella makes the inevitable, slightly cynical, but nevertheless attractive point that Valentine's Day is a) just like any other day, in an abstract sense, and b) just as bad for couples as it is for singles. Myself, I don't have much to say about Valentine's Day in general, mostly out of fear of the women in my life who invariably seem to attach great importance to it. A clever ex-girlfriend once called it "Single's Awareness Day" in protest, a sentiment with which I am inclined to agree; Valentine's Day also being my roommate's birthday, today will be an example of male bonding instead of budding romance. Which is just as well, since I still maintain that I will know I'm in a mature and serious relationship when I can give that special someone a Shit Bitch You is Fine Bear and have it be taken in the intended spirit. I know, I know, I'm all talk, and when the time comes, I'll probably chicken out and send flowers or something. Especially since my female friends always look at me like I'm the Boston Strangler when I bring it up. Meanwhile, I think the bear is unbelievably hilarious. Go figure.

Posted by David Richmond at 12:26 PM EST | TrackBack

Making Music on the Margin

Along similiar lines to the post below: I'm taking a junior tutorial on the historical reception of music and, as a result, have come across quite a bit of contemporary writing on aesthetics, which I read as a guilty pleasure. (As a sidenote, this sort of thing is precisely why I was incensed when my junior tutorial professor asked if I was sure that I wanted to take such a light load, i.e. the ordinary load of four classes. I've got an instrument to learn and artistic questions stacked four miles high; I think four classes is enough, thanks. I prefer the reaction of my freshman year theory professor: "That's great, David! You can go on listening binges!" Now that's what I'm talking about.)

So I came across this essay called "The Irrelevance of Serious Music" published in a book of essays by pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen (Critical Entertainments) and at the end he makes the following observation:

The musical canon is not decided by majority opinion but by enthusiasm and passion. A work that ten people love passionately is more important than one that ten thousand do not mind hearing.

Rosen makes an aesthetic judgement there, and an accurate one, I think, but even more provocative is the following comment from Peter Gelb, then-president of Sony Classical and now General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera (as quoted by Rosen):

"As a major record label," Gelb insists, "we have an obligation to make recordings that are relevant." What does relevant mean? Gelb explains. "To me relevance means that people actually listen to our recordings. It is neither commercially rewarding nor artistically relevant for us to make recordings that sell only a few thousand copies."

Rosen, firmly in opposition to Gelb, asserts that a few thousand copies can indeed be commercially relevant. This should be clear from my previous discussion of chunky spaghetti sauce. It's not that nobody wants to listen to contemporary music -- or classical music, or my music, or whatever -- it's that we haven't figured out yet how to get that music to the people who passionately want to hear it. Or at least, we haven't figured out how to do it efficiently enough to make it commercially viable.

Posted by David Richmond at 10:13 AM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Ketchup

From the everything you ever wanted to know about ______, but were afraid to ask dept. comes this New Yorker article (hat tip: Matthew Yglesias). Besides the revelation that Heinz ketchup is objectively perfect, there's also a discussion of the 1989 Spaghetti Sauce Revolution:

When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people's preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket. Over the next decade, that new category proved to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Prego.

Which is encouraging to me, because if one can make "hundreds of millions of dollars" on the Long Tail (see also) of Spaghetti sauce, maybe there's a place in this world for a working classical musician after all.

Posted by David Richmond at 9:32 AM EST | TrackBack

February 13, 2005

"That guy"

It's like a Harvard section! This reminds me of the proverbial "that guy" in section who's always talking too much and goes to great lengths to try to prove he's smarter than you. He (or she) usually fails. Otherwise, I guess, they'd be "smart guy," not "that guy."

Posted by David Richmond at 9:16 PM EST | TrackBack

About Me

I, David Richmond, am a music concentrator at Harvard in the class of 2006. A bassoonist and occasional pianist, past haunts besides Cambridge, Massachusetts have included:

Further knowledge of my past will vary depending on whether you've known me since birth, since stumbling upon this newly renovated corner of the world, or since sometime in between. Longtime watchers of this domain will remember a hacked-together version of this same site, poorly written in Perl, very slow, and usually inactive. Said site still exists in the darkened back rooms of this server; old posts may be resurrected as the mood strikes me. I may even get around (eventually) to archiving the whole damn thing.

I got around to doing something once again with this domain primarily because AIM's 1024 character limit on profile space just wasn't cutting it anymore (although it's sometimes a useful constraint). I also occasionally have the desire to write about things not directly related to a course I'm taking. Who knew?

I am joined at Harvard by my twin sister Emily. My younger sister, Leslie, is a flutist at Rice University's Shepard School of Music in Houston, Texas. I have no pets, and I like dark chocolate and cheddar cheese (the only kind worthy of the name). You can reach me at drich@symphonicman.com. My public key is here. If you don't know what that means, and you're curious, here's my primer on PGP encryption.

Last updated: 30 August 2005

Posted by David Richmond at 8:45 PM EST | Comments (4) | TrackBack

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my life: building a symphony, one note at a time

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