http://www.sukipot.com/ The title says it all. It's my ongoing one-woman show, with new works being put into rotation as they come up. more>> en-us susan@sukipot.com 2007-01-17T12:15:28-06:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000070.html I've been intrigued enough by the Lifehacker Web site to order the new book, which, on first flip-through, seemed full of useful ideas. This sentence on p.6, however, has distracted me: "Plain text is application- and operating system- agnostic" -- by way of explaining why it's a good idea to keep your to-do list in a plain text file. Agnostic? Plain text is doubtful? Plain text is noncommittal? Okay, maaaaaaybe it's noncommittal, but wouldn't a theological reference maybe be ecumenical -- of worldwide scope, universal -- rather than agnostic? Or maybe just throw out the religious metaphors altogether. It's not worth not reading the book, of course. It's just faintly irritating. 2007-01-17T12:15:28-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000069.html Well, Fitzgerald. According to OED, he used the phrase "reached a crescendo" in The Great Gatsby, circa 1925. And it's been madness ever since. To be fair, Fitzgerald wrote, "The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward home." So maybe he meant, "reached a passage in the music where they started to climb in volume and intensity." I doubt it. But it's possible. I was thinking about this while reading the various Alias post-morts this morning -- that irksome phrase, "reached a crescendo," showed up again, and so I went spelunking in OED like Sydney last night in Rambaldi's Styrofoam Magic Mount Subasio. (Guys. Couldn't you have afforded a better set for that scene? But I digress.) Crescendo is from the Italian (and, of course, Latin before that) crescere, to increase. You don't build to the crescendo. That doesn't make sense. It isn't the summit; it's the gradual process of heading to it. In music and in life. Growing. Waxing. Like the crescent moon. Climax, crown, culmination, height, peak, pinnacle, summit, top, zenith. High point. Jaysus, just use "payoff." All those words mean the place the climb should take you, and what people think they mean when they write, "reached a crescendo." And don't give me the, "but everybody uses it that way now so usage makes it okay." If everybody else were jumping off a mountain before they reached the top, would you do it too? It doesn't sound arty or learned or any of that. It just sounds like you want to sound arty by skewing the meaning of a specific artistic term to suit your artistic purpose. If you're F. Scott Fitzgerald, you may do that. Everybody else, just stop it. 2006-05-23T12:27:17-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000068.html Earworms come from unexpected places, and are not always taken from the most obvious candidate pool. Here's just a small sampling of audio-embedded earworm exotica that has tormented me of late: "Under the Sea" (from The Little Mermaid) "Two Outta Three Ain't Bad" And just to show that it doesn't always have to be catchy to turn into an earworm: "Let There Be Peace On Earth" 2006-05-19T11:00:20-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000067.html I'm having to write this short bio of myself for the TexShare site contributors page, and I'm having real trouble conveying what I want to convey, because it takes a lot of explaining, and I won't get into any of that here, but, it does put me in mind of this: Circa 1972, when my parents were planning what would be our migration back from Alabama to Texas, I would ask questions beginning, "If we move to Texas..." and my mother would respond, "*When* we move to Texas." And I would ask what the difference was, and she would tell me. "If" meant something might or might not happen; it wasn't a given. "When," on the other hand, meant it was definitely going to happen. If. When. Texas. The three go together like beads on a string in my head, even today. 2006-04-17T15:49:07-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000066.html Bookkeeping. B-oo-kk-ee-ping. That's just not right. Even if it is. 2006-04-06T10:46:06-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000064.html IMG_0588.JPG Originally uploaded by Sukipot. Graduate school has been eating my brain these past couple of months, so it's only fair that I created something for graduate school that someone can eat. Here's a snap of our Moleskine notebook entry for the 2005 Edible Book Festival, held this past April 1 at the Kilgarlin Center. (That yellow stuff is indeed icing. It only looks like scrambled eggs. Too much yellow dye.) 2006-04-02T19:05:49-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000063.html News reports tell us that scientists are no closer to knowing if the skull unearthed in 1801 by Joseph Rothmayer is indeed that of Wolfgang Mozart. This comes after performing comparisons between DNA material from two teeth in the skull and two thigh bones exhumed from the Mozart family grave in Salzburg. These two bones were believed to be from Mozart's maternal grandmother and his niece. The only thing the scientists seem to be able to say conclusively is that "there is no family link between these three people." What I want to know is, is this the best they could get? Leopold Mozart is buried in that grave. (So, in an twist too ironic to be made up, is Constanze Weber Mozart.) His mother, Anna Maria Mozart, was buried in Paris, in one of the three cemeteries used by Saint-Eustache Church -- but that grave was unmarked. His sister, "Nannerl," is buried in Saint Peter's in Salzburg. If they're going to go digging people up, wouldn't exhuming Leopold or Nannerl make more sense? (Especially Leopold, seeing as they have already cracked that tomb.) And just what do they mean by "between these three people?" The two thigh bones do have a link to each other (i.e., "between"), but neither have any relation to the skull? I hate when a history of sloppy usage makes it hard to tell what anybody's talking about anymore. I wonder what kind of a hootenanny they would have had for the upcoming sesquibicentennial (bisesquicentennial?) celebrations if tests had found a link. Would we really feel that much better, I wonder, if we could account for at least one Mozart body part? Would they be trying so hard if what the gravedigger had lifted was Mozart's coccyx? Now that's a bit of humor Wolfgang would appreciate. 2006-01-09T09:42:07-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000062.html The other day in Starbucks I was looking at the Herbie Hancock "Possibilities" display, and wondered who that old git was in the grainy photo with Herbie. He looked like some British actor I should recognize, with his exceedingly fair hair and somewhat receding hairline and Roman nose and wool coat with scarf that looked well-worn but dashing at the same time. Then I realized: it was Sting. He doesn't look bad at all. He just looks like some gracefully aging, slightly mad milkman's son, like a Northumbrian poet named Gordon who happens to be over 50 -- which really shouldn't be all that surprising. He was, as he told us, born in the 50s. Still, it was. 2005-12-29T22:37:45-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000060.html Today is all about homework -- writing for this project, writing for that project, studying for Monday's exam -- and generally spending most of my day with at least half my brain in school at all times. (I say, "Hm?" and "What?" a lot.) I hear football downstairs, and the dog barking as people disappear up the stairs without her, and up here, in the next room, my sister is singing along tunelessly with "Hard Candy Christmas" as it plays on the radio, and Tears for Fears do not, quite, drown any of that out. Not that this is a bad thing. Just an observation. I did discover recordings of not one, but two favorite works that I liked enough to buy from the iTunes Store, which is a very pleasing find. A person develops opinions about work that gets recorded more than once, or by more than one artist, and it becomes difficult to accept otherwise perfectly fine recordings that take certain movements too fast or too slow, for example. So you learn which conductors and which orchestras you like, whose interpretations please or offend you (it's highly personal, this business of interpretation; one maestro's allegro is another's andante is another's too bloody fast/slow, and so on). So sometimes it's a gamble, with varying rates of payoff. This is how a person ends up with three or four recordings of the same piece. It's the "dream cast" theory of music collection. Sometimes that's fun, but sometimes, you just want the perfect (or the really really close-to-perfect) recording in one go. Getting back to the actual pieces, I purchased a lovely version of Beethoven 7 with Christian Thielemann and the Philharmonia Orchestra, and Mozart 40 (clarinet version!) with Barry Wordsworth and Capella Istropolitana. I was especially pleased with the sound of the woodwinds on the Mozart; if it had been a taste, they would have been tart -- not so much that anything was spoiled, but just enough to make the texture more interesting. Searches in classical at the iTunes store are still frustrating, when "vienna philharmonic" turns up even more hits for "odessa philharmonic," "stuttgart philharmonic" and "london philharmonic," and displays them first. Or when "Frederica von Stade" is actually "Frederica von Stade, Gabriel Faure" and a host of others, but only Flicka's name shows up, and you have to mouse over the result and wait for the pop-up to know what's really behind it. Don't even ask why "bassoon" returns Anne-Sophie Mutter with Herbert von Karajan and Berlin doing the Mozart violin concerti 3 & 5 as its first result. I can't tell you. Yes, I do like this recording of Beethoven 7. Very much. I may have to get Thielemann's Beethoven 5 from the same album. But first, I'll need to make sure it does not "correct" Beethoven's scoring in the first movement. We have views on these things, yes we do. It's too bad you can't buy recordings on approval. "I'm sorry; the first movement was great, but the adagio was far too brisk for my tastes." "I was looking for something with a more robust string section." 2005-11-25T16:14:12-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000059.html I never thought this would be a yardstick by which I would measure writing, but... I've recently finished Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs. Maybe I'll read some more of his stuff, or maybe not. But, I have learned something... when David Sedaris writes about shit coiled in a commode, I read with one eye open, but I still read. When Augusten Burroughs writes about shit coiled in a commode, I just flip past it. Even when David Sedaris writes about shit, it's still worth reading, no matter how horrible the topic. 2005-11-20T21:53:09-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000057.html I was expecting it sometime next week. It came, yesterday, in the mail. Shipped from Atlanta, and not saying "Sony/EMI" anywhere on the packaging. So I opened the manila mailer lined in bubble wrap wondering what half.com thing I had bought and forgot about, and looked inside. And there it was. The first Kate Bush album in 12 years, Aerial. In my hands at last. I've been, ahem, previewing the tracks over the last couple of days, and been very pleased with what I have heard, but it wasn't real, it didn't count, until I had the Actual Album in my hands, and now I do. I have had a couple of proper listens now, CD booklet in hand (the first Kate Bush release with a booklet designed entirely, and initially, for CD booklet format). Yes, I admit it -- I was nervous. What if I didn't like it? What if I thought it wasn't any good? What would I say about it then? I didn't like the idea of coming up with well-chosen ways to express any potential disappointment. This is Kate Bush we're talking about. To say I love Kate Bush would be something of an understatement. Whether it's my prerogative or not, I had a lot of investment in whether or not this album would be something I liked -- no, more like, something I thought was just as good or better than all the ones that had gone before, all the ones I love so much, that I have multiple copies of, that I'd save in a fire. So being able to say, truthfully and without reservation, that I think it's great, is wonderful. (I may even move on to "brilliant," but, no sense in going there right away. Although I'm pretty sure I will be at some point.) It's early days yet for me to give a laundry list of which songs I like best, or to say, "Download this," because I'm not ready to be deconstructing Aerial. I will say that the first disc holds songs that are somewhat more self-contained than the pieces on the second disc, and that, while it probably won't ever be released as a single, "Bertie" is sure to delight. And that it's possible only Kate Bush could integrate pi into a song so it didn't sound like the lost years of Schoolhouse Rock (yes, pi, as in, you will hear numbers). The second disc is much harder to isolate things on, but portions of it do remind me, very sharply, that Kate Bush has said her favorite composers include Satie and Debussy. If you have ever wondered if jazz and flamenco belong in the same piece of music, you will learn that the answer is yes. And the mystery of that strange horizon of sound that makes up the cover artwork will be revealed. If Kate Bush had gone into a time capsule, had been frozen in amber or carbonite ("We love you!" "I know.") or had otherwise somehow just been wakened from a Big Sleep, then this album would basically pick up from where we left off, 12 years ago. And that would have been all right, I suppose. But that's not what Aerial does. Aerial contains pieces of everything Kate Bush has picked up along the way these 30 or so years, but it's far from a retrospective or a self-referential pastiche. It goes somewhere new, perhaps not entirely unexpected, but full of revelations all the same. Aerial is both a culmination and a trajectory -- a trajectory on which I'm definitely still wanting to go along for the ride, for as long as Kate is still willing to take us. 2005-11-05T18:22:14-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000053.html Notes on fashion: If I am never again assaulted by the sight of the naked toes, navels, or love handles of another total stranger, it will be too soon. Jumbling the Times: If I hadn't done the crossword today, I'd never know that Presbyterians jumbled are Best of Prayers. Or Britney Spears. Omit needless words. The Elements of Style has been set as a song cycle. I think next someone should make an opera out of The Deluxe Transitive Vampire. It would be very Berg-like, like Wozzeck. Or maybe like Boris Gudunov. I don't know what the Associated Press Manual set to music would sound like. What is undistinguished and yet utterly pervasive? Hmm. 2005-10-19T19:04:22-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000052.html "King of the Mountain" video at katebush.com! (I just love saying that. katebushdotcom.) You can watch the video in QuickTime for free at Kate's official site. Here's a description of the video from the Homeground news site: Kate's new video opens with an atmospheric black and white impression of Charles Kane's empty mansion full of priceless junk, whilst newspaper headlines about Elvis swirl by. Kate is glimpsed until she is seen singing and swaying to the music. A ghostly Elvis suit dances with Kate before taking wing with the Canada Geese to Shangri-La where an elderly Elvis hides in the snowy mountains with Kane's famous sled Rosebud. That's about right. Kane's mansion, black and white, snow, geese, an Elvis suit, and a sled. And Kate, of course. She looks fabulous, as little as we see her. And while it's a little weird not to have Kate dancing, acting or miming throughout, it's still pretty cool. Two reviews of the as-yet unreleased album here: Times Online Guardian Online I like how they like it, but they don't agree on everything they like. And an interesting brief Guardian article here about recording the choir for "Hello Earth" on Hounds of Love, and how pop musicians are far more demanding in the studio than classical artists: 2005-10-19T12:10:11-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000051.html From Amazon's entry on Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life: Selected Letters, translated by Robert Spaethling. Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): most obedient children, your most obedient son, goode friends, iooooo [100,000] times, iooo [1,000] times, dearest little wife, most beloved little wife, next post day, loon [1,000] times, boo [600] gulden , sorella mia, addio farewell, most beloved father, next mail coach, our dear sister, three piano concertos, kiss your hands, kiss mama, prima vista, dearest father, finta giardiniera, thousand gulden, court orchestra, court organist, dearest sister. 2005-10-04T14:46:27-06:00 http://www.sukipot.com/archives/000050.html It's been in the news for over a week, and it's still just too pure and perfect to be quite true... Kate Bush will be releasing Aerial, her first album in 12 years, this November. I'm so excited, it's as if I can't get any calmer. Can it really be real until I've got it in my hands? Can it truly be true until I've heard it? It comes out on a Tuesday. I'll need to be sure to take the day. 2005-09-12T11:27:47-06:00