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Finally had some good packing snow.

OK it isn't really. And yet...I mean just LISTEN. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SLOGs9ttiE I have feelings about Stickerbrush Symphony. And David Wise is a musigician.

Something I have been seeing lately that really bugs me is the notion that if there is more of something, it is automatically better or more laudable. That a 500 page book is always more commendable and more artistic than a 150 page book, or a three hour album of 27 songs is automatically better and more engaging than a twenty-minute, five-song EP, or a three-part trilogy of four-hour movies is inherently more entertaining than a single, self-contained two-hour movie. This idea that bigger automatically means better is something that has bugged me for a long time. Don't get me wrong, big can absolutely be outstanding; look no further than The Wall for a great album that is almost an hour and a half long with 25+ songs, or 450+ page Catch-22 for an outstanding book that is also pretty long, or the Lord Of The Rings trilogy for a collection of ridiculously long movies that are also outstanding artistic pieces. However at the same time, I have never felt that something should be commended purely on its length or size, and I see that done so often, particularly on the internet. The Great Gatsby is only 180 pages. Heck, Animal Farm isn't even 150! Is anyone going to argue that those aren't classics of literature purely because of their length? 12 Angry Men, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Dr. Strangelove are all barely above the hour-and-a-half mark. Toy Story and The Lion King are both under it, though you can argue their validity in this argument since they were targeted at kids(short attention spans). Casablanca is only an hour and 42 minutes. Would anyone argue the quality of any of those movies? Dark Side Of The Moon isn'y even 45 minutes. Sgt. Pepper's, Born To Run, Ziggy Stardust, 2112, and many other hallmark rock albums, aren't even 40. Disraeli Gears, one of my favorite albums ever, doesn't even clock in at 35. Van Halen's 1984 is even shorter. Tell me any of those weren't majorly impactful on the history of rock music or that they weren't laudable artistic pieces, and I will laugh at you. Again, I'm not trying to say that big art can't be good art, because it absolutely can. What I am trying to say though is that being big does not automatically make a movie/book/album/story/etc. better. Length for the sake of length, at least in my mind, is self-defeating because it bogs down any artistic message with excessive filler and prose. And it bugs me that people don't recognize this, and use the long length of a piece of art as something that automatically makes it better. Is it long? I don't care. Does its length serve a purpose? If so cool. If not I'm not interested. Is it short? I don't care. Can it deliver its message in spite of its brevity? If so cool. If not I'm not interested. Length means nothing as far as the quality of a work, whether it's particularly long or particularly short, and I'm sick of people acting like it inherently means something in terms of quality.

It has always amazed me that the fear of being wrong for some people is greater than the desire to learn. So many of us are so afraid of having to say "You're right" that not only do we refuse to accept it when we're proven wrong, we will outright ignore and berate anyone who doesn't agree with us simply so we can avoid any possibility of being proven wrong. I love being proven wrong, because it means I'm being given a better understanding of how things actually are, and something I believed that was false is no longer something I believe. That doesn't mean I won't defend what I believe, or that I'll listen to anyone that just goes "You're wrong because dumb", but I love being proven wrong because it means that I'm learning something new. I'm not advocating accepting things that lack proof - I'm trying to emphasize the "proven" part of "proven wrong" because if someone is not providing proof for their argument I see no reason to accept their word over my own - but if someone provides you something that proves they're right and you're not, it boggles my mind that people would rather lie to themselves and continue to believe a lie than accept reality.

So that exam where I forgot my calculator? I apparently still passed it! Barely, but passed. So it's time for the cheering matoran again (I simply love them so much I mean aren't they adorable awwwww <3)

Fixed that for you.

Makuta is Dead

Kakaru as a staff member you should know better than to stretch the page like thYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I'm pretty sure Google is going to either take over or destroy the world.

John dies at the end.

gpoy

Snape kills Dumbledore.

I really love the Galaxy Squad sets. I just have a little one but if past behavior is any indication I may be getting all of the darn things by the end of this. Incidentally anyone want to trade some Bionicle for theirs? Haha.

I swear this isn't a music blog. (Okay, it kind of is.) I've listened to a wide swath of different pieces of classical music, and I occasionally come across some things that are just ... well, strange. We're talking off-the-wall levels of goofy here. -----La Monte Young - Piano Piece for David Tudor #1 This piece doesn't even have a proper score, just a sheet of paper telling the performer to come out onto the stage with a bucket of water and a bale of hay for the piano to drink and eat. Performance consists of either feeding the piano or letting the piano feed itself, and that the music is over once the piano had been fed. -----Erik Satie - Vexations Satie's Vexations is a remarkably unassuming piece of sheet music - but inspection reveals a peculiar direction in the corner: if you want to play it 840 times in a row, Satie advises performers to prepare beforehand, "in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." John Cage - who will appear later in this list - was inspired by the inherent ridiculousness of Vexations and organized its first performance in New York in 1963. It lasted 18 hours and was played by a dozen pianists working in shifts. -----Karlheinz Stockhausen - Helicopter String Quartet The controversial Stockhausen composed Helicopter String Quartet to be part of one of his massive operatic projects. Each string quartet member is lifted in a different helicopter, and they coordinate their playing in tremolos, with the intended effect of making the helicopters instruments themselves. The piece is by far the most complex string quartet ever written. -----Karlheinz Stockhausen - Fresco Fresco is not composed with the audacity of Helicopter String Quartet, but nonetheless makes this list because of the scandal that marred its only performance to date. Written as background music for four orchestras situated around a hall, the instructions in Fresco irritated the classically-trained performers. Tensions between composer and performers grew wider, and some performers tried to refuse playing it, only to realize that they were contractually obligated to do so. (This didn't deter the concertmaster, who threatened to kill the head conductor.) Remaining performers did so under protest, and the performance was a complete disaster. Performers took to practicing other repertoire instead of following their score as an act of protest, pranksters and hecklers distracted the few that stuck to Stockhausen's instructions, and the performance was halted when somebody cut out the lights on them. -----Erwin Schulhoff - In Futurum A lot of people are familiar with John Cage's famous "silent piece," 4'33", but it's not here. Few are aware that, while Cage's motives were different, the idea of a completely silent piece was not his own - the first one was composed by the Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff over thirty years before Cage. In Futurum - with its ostensibly crossed hands (the clefs are switched) and irrational time signatures (3/5 and 7/10) - appears as the third movement of his piano collection Fünf Pittoresken. The rest of Schulhoff's works take influence from jazz, making In Futurum all that much more remarkable in its uniqueness. -----John Cage - Atlas Eclipticalis Cage's music ranges from the serene (Dream, In a Landscape) to silence (4'33", 0′00″, One3) to more or less off-the-wall concepts. Atlas Eclipticalis is for any number of instruments playing the music however they wish, with the sheet music consisting of star charts graphed onto music paper. Because of the undefined instruments and the lack of both tempo and dynamic instructions, performances of Atlas Eclipticalis are all remarkably different. -----John Cage - Organ²/ASLSP A fan of extremes, Cage wrote ASLSP (standing for As Slow As Possible) for piano. The piano version usually takes around an hour to perform ... but the organ edition, owing to the nature of the instrument, can sound indefinitely. It wouldn't be on this list if not for an organ that was built expressly for the purpose of performing the piece - an organ piece that will end in September of the year 2640. But, while slow, it's still - theoretically speaking - not as slow as possible. -----György Ligeti - Poéme Symphonique Ligeti's music is full of rhythmic variation and unique sonority. Equal parts rhythmic experimentation and avant-garde parody, the score calls for 100 metronomes, all of which are set to different speeds. -----Leo Ornstein - Suicide in an Airplane This piece isn't really strange in the ways that the others are, but it honestly has one of the most metal titles of any piece of music I've ever heard of. I've decided to hone my orchestration skills and I've chosen this piece because of its musical depiction of a dogfight and rumbling engines, which is equally well suited to an orchestral sonority.