That Shining Music

Halloween is one of those crazy pseudo-holidays where young people like to have parties featuring live bands.

In the fleeting days of my young adulthood, I myself was a rock bassist for several bands (meaning that since Halloween only happens once a year, I often found myself overbooked...it was not uncommon to play 4 shows in a single weekend).

Recently, a young garage-band in my neighborhood discovered composer Bela Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (the 3rd Movement of which was made famous by Stanley Kubrick in the 1980 horror classic "The Shining").

I know that the piece is great as forboding horror music, but when I realized that almost nobody in the U.S. even knew Bartok's name, I was suddenly compelled to write a brief homage to this often overlooked musical genius that at least identified him as 'the guy who wrote the music for "The Shining"', because had it not been for Hitler's mad quest to make Hungary a vassal outpost of the Third Reich, Bartok might have been remembered more widely as one of the great Hungarian composers of the 20th Century.

Obviously, I only know what other people have written about the man, but at the very minimum, his story is one of the more compelling bits of modern history worth knowing.

NOTE: The TITLE theme to The Shining is the original work of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind. This fairly brief keyboard piece was only a segment of the piece the band I mentioned was trying to learn. I in no way meant to discredit Carlos and Elkind...I only meant to elevate Bartok's contribution to The Shining (which IS the music that permeates the majority of the film). And while I'm giving credit where credit is due, The Shining is IMHO author Stephen King's scariest book. Kubrick's film adaptation is great, but there's really no comparison between a novel and a film.

The 3 Faces of Evening

I've been trying to avoid this topic purely because it seems so obvious as to be largely uninteresting--but due to recent events in my personal life I think the time has come to throw a little light on this pervasive phenomenon: personality ("nick") spoofing has become the new heroin of the 21st Century.

Obviously, it's only interesting to people who've sought to make their presence more than just a babbling digital super-ego.

"Mattergy" is a nickname my ex-Girlfriend gave to me for reasons that she alone understands completely, and I wear the nick because it is easily associated with my personality...even by people who've just met me.

The word was also used infrequently in the past to honor Einstein's equation of Special Relativity ([E=MC^2] or matter/energy equivalence). But these days, it seems every New Age nutcase in cyberspace is trying to adopt the term to validate their own irrational metaphysical BS.

Conversely, this particular "Mattergy" knows that without the limits of the macroscopic universe (that is, the world our eyes, ears and hands tell us is real) we'd all go very quickly insane.

I know this idea meets with a lot of resistance from people who'd like to imagine the possibility of alternate realities that cater to their own personal desires (and I am in no way suggesting that such non-physical realities can't/don't exist), but the truth is that our very physical brains DO have limitations.

For the puposes of this post, I'll only focus on the problems multiple cyber-egos make for REAL people these days: my supposition is that the multiplying of personae without restraint has serious destabilizing consequences that have yet to be addressed by sociologists, economists and mental-health professionals.

As with most subjects I write about, I resist specifically defining the profound impact of this coming cyber-insanity...but I feel a great destabilization of the TOTAL human experience coming.

The easiest way to understand the problem is to consider this conundrum: it is now possible to have feelings about people who may or may not really exist. And I think this phenomenon is in itself one of the most ominous portents confronting the human species at this moment in its existence.

NKUR, Revisited

OMG, I'm not sure which is more alarming: always being one step BEHIND the news, or always being one step AHEAD.

It's gotten to the point where I just want to call up the idiots of the world and tell them to stop proving me correct all the time!

There are so many decent people in the world who understand that a nuclear weapon in the hands of a narcissist dictator like Kim Jong Il is just begging for war!

Again, my heart goes out to the Korean people. No matter what Kim Jong Il says, the good people of the United States are friends, not enemies.

The Sheedy Effect

I don't ordinarily focus attention on my personal tastes, but as I look back on my life, I realize that I have had secret crushes on women who look like Ally Sheedy (including Ally herself) since the early 1980s.

Now whether this is purely coincidence, or due to the fact that she seems to have inspired a vast cross-section of women who are approximately my age, I don't know.

But there's more than just a look about Ally...it's her whole persona. I seem to remember quite a few young women maturing into the "new" feminine roles of the 1980s principally along paths that Ally herself tread.

Not being a woman myself, I can't really begin to comment on her specific contributions to the Social tranformation of American culture in the late 20th-Century...but I have a "strong feeling" that history will ultimately recall that Ally Sheedy was as instrumental in transforming the Social Landscape of late 20th-Century America as anyone.

EDIT: 10/7/06
Before comments start "pouring in" (lol), I should mention that director John Badham ("WarGames", "Short Circuit") probably tried as hard as anyone to keep Sheedy's career on a respectable trajectory, but was himself a victim of the very social transformations that were examined in his films. But Badham and Sheedy BOTH left their footprints in the muck of the 1980s, at least in the USA.

EDIT: 10/9/06
So you don't mistake me for a star-struck stalker, there's a deeper reason I chose Ally Sheedy as my topic. In "WarGames", computer-junkie David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) is trying to research computer-genius Steven Falken's published work to figure out a secret password into the WOPR computer (at NORAD, unknown to him) to play games online (a novel idea in 1983, when the movie came out).

Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), being more interested in Falken (John Wood) than his computer, reads that Falken's wife and son died in a tragic car accident while Falken was working on the WOPR. Sheedy's heartfelt response is momentary, but totally believable for the purpose of moving the film along (David instantly realizes that the password is "Joshua", the name of Falken's son.)

I remember this moment even years after seeing the film, and that fact alone ranks Ally Sheedy as a model actress in MY mind.

The World is Melting

You will remember this post about drops in oil prices signalling events of global significance. Although the headlines about U.S. Congressman Foley, and the terrible murders in Amish Pennsylvania are both disheartening and detestable, I sense from this week's sudden plunge in oil pries that the REAL NEWS is yet to come.