David Denby in the New Yorker on the new Steven Spielberg film The Adventures of Tintin:
The plot is standard boy’s-book adventure stuff. Tintin (Jamie Bell), the young reporter with an orange-brown quiff and an insatiable curiosity, pursues a buried treasure, journeying to the far corners by ship, plane, and motorcycle.
The hair-style noun quiff caught my eye, and pronunciation /tɪntɪn/ (rather than /tæntæn/) in ads for the movie caught my ear.
(Silliness for the season.)
From Chris Ambidge, this offering from the Ship of Fools site:
Oh, Maria, keep my data safe.
The product description:
Maria Memory Stick
She looks like any other dashboard Madonna. But the Virgin Mary, as ever, is on the move. She now plugs into your computer and keeps a motherly eye on your files, the red LED of her heart beating as your data is transferred. No one has yet reported seeing the Maria Memory Stick (only 69 Euros) actually weeping, but it can only be a matter of time. To find out more, visit Gadgets for God on shipoffools.com.
Following on my posting on the “Amazing Grace” text with the tune New Britain, a few ornamental notes (Amazing Grace notes, to use a phrasal overlap portmanteau): on antipathy towards the hymn; on the pentatonic scale; and on outrageous play on the text title.
As Christmas rolls upon us and I’m resurrecting memories of food in the Boston area in 1962-65 (here and here), I’ve come up with musical memories of the period, starting with the Christmas music of Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica (“Noah Greenberg thump”, as a friend referred to it), notably “Nova, Nova, Ave Fit Ex Eva” (‘Ave is made from Eva’: Ave ‘hail’, as in Ave, Maria, is an anagram of Eva ‘Eve’) and the equally rousing “Riu, Riu, Chiu”. And then on to Handel’s oratorio Acis and Galatea and a difference with a friend as to who introduced who to it. And then, non-musically, to a similar difference between Haj Ross and me as to who invented the playful technical term scanting out.
Two recent items in the New York Times: “Everyone Speaks Text Message” by Tina Rosenberg in the 12/11 Magazine; “Athhilezar? Watch Your Fantasy World Language” by Amy Chozick in the 12/12 paper.
Three items from Benoit Denizet-Lewis’s 11/27 NYT Magazine piece “Can the Bulldog Be Saved?”, about the plight of the modern bulldog, bred for cuteness but with resulting dire consequences for the dog’s physical well-being.
A Shannon Wheeler penguin cartoon:
(Hat tip to Michael Palmer.) If you’re not a penguin, “they all look alike”. The cartoon’s conceit is that this is true even if you’re a penguin.
Comments on my “Amazing Grace” posting brought up the inclination of people to refer to songs (including hymns) by the name of the text (usually the beginning of the first line), disregarding the tune. For many song traditions, the text and tune are indissolubly linked, so there’s no problem. But for hymns, the two often have separate lives (and the tunes have names of their own), so this practice is misleading. “Amazing Grace” is the name of the text, “New Britain” the name of the tune now strongly associated with that text, but the words have been set to other tunes (for instance, Jewett, illustrated in my previous posting).
Now, in the Christmas spirit, to the carol known as “Joy to the World”.
From Elizabeth Traugott yesterday, a report on a Santa Clara Chorale Christmas concert, which had two songs that originated in shapenote music, “The Hills Are Bare at Bethlehem” and “Amazing Grace”. But her companion said that “Amazing Grace” came from an African spiritual, and sent on an e-mail message with a video of gospel singer Wintley Phipps at Carnegie Hall, talking about the history of the song, which he said was a white spiritual (with words by John Newton) based on the “slave scale” — the black keys on the piano (that is, the pentatonic scale). Phipps said that the melody “sounds very much like a West African sorrow chant”, and maintained that Newton “set his words to a slave melody”.
The image of the black keys for black people is striking — a nice piece of poetry, but can’t be accurate, since the creators of Negro spirituals didn’t use pianos. The whole story has a kind of poetic truth, but it’s most unlikely as an account of the history of the tune. (more…)
Continuing food reminiscences from the early 60s in the Boston area, some recollections of the restaurant Peking on Mystic in Medford MA from those days (that would be the Mystic River, since made famous by Dennis Lehane’s novel and Clint Eastwood’s movie). A bunch of summer interns at the MITRE Corporation (in Bedford MA) hung out together outside of work. I was one, and Jacqueline Wei Mintz (then a linguistics student at Yale) was another. In (I think) 1964, Jackie arranged a dinner at Peking on Mystic — an adventure in eating — for the interns and their guests; the deal was that she would order all the food (in Chinese) and explain it to us. It was wonderful, and Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and I went back to the restaurant, on our own, many times thereafter. We also learned to cook some of our favorite Szechwan / Sichuan dishes, including the wonderfully named Ants Climb Tree (a.k.a. Ant Climbs Tree, Ants Climbing a Tree, Ants on a Tree) and Lion Head (a.k.a. Lion’s Head).