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Sumiki

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  1. Sumiki

    The Maine Event

    By Sumiki,

    After a delicious breakfast in Bangor, we headed down on Route 1A towards Acadia National Park. Route 1A gave way to Route 3 in Ellsworth, and we got to the entrance of Acadia around 1:00.
     
    Post-Visitor Center, the first few pullouts were beautiful vistas of the shore, the ocean, and distant islands, but they were marred by the trees that got in the way. We eventually kept going after getting close to a few fearless seagulls, likely fearless because they equated humanity with free food distribution.
     
    Before 2:00 we experienced our first big excursion: the Schooner Head overlook. I spotted what looked at first to be an old trail, as the pavement that once had smoothed it out fell victim to the vicious Maine frost heaves that have taken such a heavy toll on their roads.
     
    We wound our way on this trail until I spotted a cut-through to some rocks. At first, I thought it'd just be a clear shot of the gorgeous, rocky shoreline that gave Acadia its fame, but it ended up being so much more than that.
     
    There was no sign of any human activity on these rocks. Looking down on the Atlantic crashing against the granite below, we climbed around and ogled at the scenery for quite a while before eventually, sadly, having to meander our way back to the trail. In the meantime, we examined the bits of wildlife - plants, algae, and lichen - that have made the barren rocks their home, and looked out to the shore below and seascape beyond.
     
    Our next stop didn't come too much later - this time at Monument Cove. We parked and asked a bearded park ranger how to best see the Monument - which isn't actually a man-made monument, but rather an erosion that ended up creating a cracked brown monolith of stone. It was in its own area, impossibly difficult to reach due to the large but smooth stones that lay beneath it. Instead of the more traveled rocks to the left, we took the path to the right and worked our way down the rocks right up to the Atlantic itself, sitting on one end of a long rock as waves splashed up against the other, throwing spray out where it was visible in its entirety but not near enough to hit me in any way.
     
    I was sad when we had to go back, but go back we did. Soon enough we pulled off again at Otter Point, and again we clamored out on the rocks. These rocks were much different, however - layers of granite were crushed up, creating a labyrinth of large jagged stones down to the ocean. Here, we investigated a layer of incredibly jagged quartz, incredibly smooth rock (which we also saw at the first rock-carousing excursion), and incredibly still pond-puddles - some surprisingly deep. Indentions in the rocks created places for water to run into during storms - it was higher than even high tide could reach - and algae would thrive in it. White and fuzzy-looking on the bottom, it grew in green strands upwards to the top, where they'd float.
     
    One thing we didn't see while exploring Otter Point was an actual otter, but I saw something that looked quite like an otter scurrying across the road at a very fast clip. We were too far away to see if it was an otter or a beaver - in fact, I was the only one who even caught a glimpse of it - but either way, I know I've seen a new animal.
     
    The last big rock adventure of the day came at a stone beach, on a very narrow trail that hugged the edge of a sheer rock face. Once on the other side, it opened up to a much larger expanse of rock, one that was easier to climb around, as the rocks in general were much larger. My mom spotted the biggest algae-filled pond-puddle of the day, which we looked around before heading back again.
     
    We stopped at the Jordan Pond House for a quick bite to eat to tide us over until dinnertime. For a drink, I sampled a locally made blueberry soda, bottled in what looked at first glance to be a beer bottle. I loved it, but it's one of those things that you either love or you hate. It's quite possibly my new favorite drink, which is a shame since it's not sold anywhere outside of the Portland-Bar Harbor area.
     
    After an attempt to hike a trail to the Bubbles (strangely enough, they're mountains) we turned back due to the bugs that ate us like they were at the top of the food chain. We didn't get out again until we were most of the way up the road on Cadillac Mountain.
     
    (Side note: Cadillac Mountain, the highest point on the Atlantic coast, is less than 1600 feet tall, but seems much higher because it basically rises from sea level. It was named after Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who was granted rights to the land after he requested it from the governor of New France. The same absurdly-named fellow would go on to found the city of Detroit, hence the Cadillac brand of cars. I wouldn't bother mentioning this except for the fact that, despite not having a Cadillac car, we do have a sexy Cadillac engine.)
     
    The views from the road up and the summit of Cadillac Mountain are stunning. Mountains - which would be considered rolling hills were they not so close to the water, thus amplifying their height - lay beneath us, and the rocky shoreline ran in and out every which way, etching out an intricate design as it met the Atlantic. Inland, lakes dotted the landscape, and if one tried, one could make out the very road we'd traversed earlier when we were between rock-clamoring excursions.
     
    It honestly felt like we were walking around inside a postcard; everything was just that gorgeous.
     
    We took our time walking around on the summit (home of the earliest sunrise in America) and then began making our way back. We would have stayed longer, soaking in the details of the landscape and seascape, but our stomachs won out, so we rolled into Bar Harbor to see what we could find.
     
    The thing about Acadia - and, in fact, most places this time of year in this corner of the continent - is that the season hasn't exactly opened. The restaurant at the Jordan Pond House in Acadia is due to open tomorrow, on the 1st, and many other places won't open until school gets out a little later this month.
     
    Nevertheless, since the locals have to have somewhere to eat, we drove through the streets of Bar Harbor, noting all of the lobster places. We'd all been craving some Maine lobster - specifically, my dad - so we went into a place that wasn't crowded. It turns out that it'd just opened earlier in the day, so we were one of the few customers they'd had all day.
     
    I hate saying this, but lobster places are lobster places - i.e. functionally interchangeable. Our bet paid off - they brought out whole (cooked!) lobsters, which we cracked opened and sucked the morsels out of, all while looking supremely idiotic in our restaurant-supplied bibs.
     
    The lobster, along with our sides, our fries, our dinner rolls, our desserts, and our pre-meal soups, made for a very big meal - but we ate nearly all of it, having spent so much energy climbing around on the rocks earlier in the afternoon. Around 7:00 we left Bar Harbor, doubling back to Ellsworth along a highway that somehow has worse potholes going than coming.
     
    Tomorrow: we hit the road to Moncton, New Brunswick. With very little between here and the other side of New Brunswick, we'll make a day of it across what is thankfully one of Canada's smaller provinces.
  2. Sumiki

    Chowderheads

    By Sumiki,

    We got on the road a few minutes after 11:00. Our hotel breakfast - at least for my parents - consisted of sliced sausages called "pork ham." This is, of course, repetitive, so we thought that it was probably something we could chalk up to some local custom. A brief Google search tells me that it isn't. My faith in the overall intelligence level in human society took another hit.
     
    Before noon, we found ourselves in New London, home of the US Coast Guard Academy. It's a lot different in look and feel to other service academies - its layout and architecture are much more like a small college than the austere gothic structures one associates with service academy. We were warned by the security guard that some of the cadets were about to begin a 21-gun salute for Memorial Day. With that in the back of our heads, we drove around. Mom, in the backseat, rolled down her window for a picture, when
     
    *BLAM*
     
    the first three shots of the salute, fired simultaneously, thundered out across the grounds and rebounded six seconds later off of the other side of the Thames River (in keeping with the London theme). My dad knew what to expect with regards to decibel level, but my mom and I got seriously spooked by that first volley.
     
    We picked up a Christmas tree ornament for my mom's collection and then rolled out, our eyes on a restaurant in Narragansett, Rhode Island, called Crazy Burger. We made good time getting out of Connecticut and into Rhode Island.
     
    Rhode Island is, of course, the smallest of the fifty states. It still took about fifty minutes to get from the border to Narragansett, where one of the Atlantic's many inlets takes over. We found Crazy Burger, and getting in was, as they say, crazy.
     
    To say that Crazy Burger is a hole in the wall is to complement its size. The building was what appeared to be a converted house, with four booths arranged in a square in its center, a bar-like area on one side, three more booths on the other side, and four more tables squeezed in wherever they could fit. Even that wasn't enough, even more seating was available on the patio, which we did not see.
     
    It took thirty minutes for us to get in, and then about that long from getting in to actually eating. In the meantime, my mom and I went down the street a little ways to look at a local art gallery, ranging from thought-provoking paintings of native Alaskans and bear trapped in a vacuum-sealed bag to surrealist photography to splashes and splotches reminiscent of Jackson Pollock.
     
    In the end, Crazy Burger delivered, and, as it turns out, their burgers all had some kind of twist to them. My parents got burgers that came in a wrap, with some interesting side dishes such as "Bangkok slaw." My burger was a blue cheese burger ... but the blue cheese (and caramelized onions) were inside the meat. The bun was a homemade English muffin, and even more gorgonzola came alongside.
     
    They were definitely interesting. They were delicious, but I'm not sure they were quite worth the wait. In my list of Top Burgers, I'd rate it the fourth-best.
     
    It was filling - at the time. It didn't quite stick to our ribs, as we found out about an hour later.
     
    We crossed over onto Conanicut Island, then off of it onto Rhode Island - the actual island for which the state was named. We turned south to Newport, famous for its many mansions.
     
    The traffic was horrendous getting through downtown, and everyone seemed to be parading a dog around as a status symbol. I got a sinking feeling that most of these dogs, if they were not named "Fifi," were named something pretty close to it.
     
    One guy was on a bike, towing a little trailer with one of these stupid-looking dogs in it. If that's all you need to know about the ritzy nature of the place ... too bad, because I'm going to keep talking about it.
     
    We finally got out of the traffic jam - a jam that extended through six consecutive stoplights - and out into more of the countryside. We located the mansions - some still private, some bought by the local preservation society and open to any member of the public willing to pay through the nose to ogle at their gaudy interiors.
     
    After driving around on roads with a surprising number of pot holes, especially considering the money inherent in the region. Most of the mansions were obscured by carefully manicured hedges and only visible through fanciful wrought-iron gates, and then only for a second or so. The only mansion we got a real good look at was The Breakers - a summer cottage originally built by a member of the Vanderbilt family for his growing number of extended relatives. (His father, the original Cornelius Vanderbilt, built the Biltmore Estate outside of Asheville, NC.)
     
    It was like the Biltmore crossed with the White House, with an impressive and detailed exterior. We circumnavigated the mansion and then went into the gift shop on the lowest floor.
     
    The gift shop was quite thorough and extended over about five rooms of the basement. I'm pretty sure that we could have snuck into the rest of the house without anyone caring - in the same manner of how we got into the stadium in Scranton - but we didn't particularly want to.
     
    We got back on the road, skirted Newport, and traveled up until we took a bridge off Rhode Island (the island) and then exited Rhode Island (the state), entering Massachusetts a little after 5:00.
     
    (Side note: throughout the day, on major thoroughfares, have - with the exception of Newport - had incredible luck with our timing. As traffic gets backed up for tens of miles going the opposite direction, we make good time heading into the places coming out of the Memorial Day rush. If we'd left earlier, we'd still be stuck in Connecticut.)
     
    A half-hour later we entered Cape Cod - at least, according to the sign; we'd not yet crossed over the Cape Cod Canal. As we did so, we saw the most incredible traffic buildup of the day - thousands of cars headed west on Route 6 out of Cape Cod. Around us, on the eastbound side, there was one other car in our sight for the longest time.
     
    We got to Hyannis and checked in a little after 6:00, and got some restaurant advice from the front desk. They recommended two places downtown almost right across from each other. We parked in a nearby lot and chose the one that looked more interesting.
     
    There was no disappointment in the quality of the food. I got lobster ravioli, served in one of those bowls that looks like it doesn't have much food in it until you get about a third of the way through the meal, when you realize just how much food there is in the bowl. My mom got a seafood sampler, and my dad got some pan-roasted scallops. We all sampled some of each other's food, and we came to the conclusion than mine was definitely the best. My mom got some of the place's award-winning clam chowder. We all tried it, and we all loved it. It was the first time I've ever had clam chowder (or even clam, for that matter), so I guess it was a good place to start.
     
    Our waitress was very pleasant and even posed for a picture with that perennial trip mascot, the one and only Yoder the Duck. It was a sight to behold ... especially for the confused patrons sitting around us. We also learned that the insane build-up of traffic isn't just a Memorial Day thing - it's like that on every weekend.
     
    We got some ice cream comes and walked out around the dock area before getting in the car and heading back to the hotel. But getting back, the car made noises between scratching and squeaking with every turn. These sounds got progressively worse en route to the hotel.
     
    With the drive between Hyannis and Boston only about an hour, Dad will have a chance to get the car looked at in Hyannis next morning and still get to Boston on schedule.
  3. Sumiki
    We got on the road at 10:30 bound for Harrisburg. We wanted to avoid going through the gnarly traffic of New York City - we consider that a trip unto itself, to be done at an undetermined later date - so we decided to go up all the way to Scranton before cutting through upstate New York to Connecticut.
     
    At 11:30, we entered the parking lot for the Harrisburg Senators, the Washington Nationals' double-A affiliate. The Senators' stadium is located on an island in the Susquehanna River, accessible from both sides by bridges. We drove on one of these bridges onto the island, then walked from the parking lot up to the stadium. This would have been an easy proposition if there weren't throngs of people traversing a footbridge to downtown Harrisburg, where an arts festival was being held.
     
    We got into the team store, got a hat and a pennant for the esteemed Collection, learned valuable information on the mayflies that torment summer night games at the ballpark, and nearly walked over the footbridge to get a bite to eat. At nearly noon, the throngs of arts-lovers were peaking, and we knew it'd be nearly impossible to get anything to eat.
     
    So we kept northbound, looking for a good stopping point on I-81. The thing about that stretch of I-81 (as is true for most stretches of that road I've been on), is that there really isn't much on it if you're not in a major city. The stretch between towns and exits is vast.
     
    We got off at one of the few stopping points, a town with the rather unfortunate name of Frackville. We entertained the employees at the local Subway and filled up with gas.
     
    A little after 2:30 we located the stadium of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, the Triple-A affiliate of the New York Yankees and known as the Yankees themselves until last offseason. Their stadium certainly isn't major-league size, but it is a quality park. We entered the team store, got our requisite gear for the Collection, and then walked into the park.
     
    If they noticed, they didn't care. It was the sixth inning, and the Rochester Red Wings were beating the RailRiders. We gave ourselves a quick stadium tour, saw the control booth where they were broadcasting the game on a local network affiliate, and encountered their mascot - something akin to a mutated hedgehog. It surprised my mom with a hug.
     
    We contemplated getting something else to eat, but with the subs still in our stomachs and the portions generous, we headed out of the park, having caught a few innings without having to pay the price of admission.
     
    Leaving the park at 3:00, we headed out of Scranton and headed for New York on I-84. We went through some tedious sections of road work and evaded some nasty pot holes. (A few fault-line-style potholes were entirely unavoidable, but it didn't screw up our alignment.)
     
    I-84 curved along the New Jersey state line before traveling into New York. The "I ♥ NY" logo was emblazoned on a hill as we entered the Empire State.
     
    We pulled off at a "text stop" - a feature peculiar to New York and something that has left me with even less hope for humanity as a whole. Every few miles, they've built a turnoff - basically a rest stop without any buildings - so people can stop trying to text and drive - instead, they can text at the text stop.
     
    I guess this is good for keeping the folks stupid enough to text and drive off of the roads, but it wouldn't do any good if the texters are looking down at their phones and miss the sign that says "text stop."
     
    The views from atop one of these stops, especially when the road is already on a mountaintop - is stunning. I took over behind the wheel at this point, and the traffic increased around me with every mile as we traveled to Connecticut.
     
    A little after 5:00 we got to the Connecticut welcome center. This is the first time on this trip that I've been to a state that I've never been to on any previous trip. We talked with the friendly fellow who gave us all kinds of maps, as well as one sage piece of wisdom about traveling in Connecticut: don't go on Interstate 95.
     
    Guess what road we'd later find ourselves on?
     
    He advised an alternate route from Danbury to New Haven which involved state highways. We were perfectly fine with that, and went on picturesque, winding, river-paralleling Route 34. We started to get quite punchy as we wound our way to New Haven, culminating in my mispronunciation of Fort Sumter as "Bacteria Bulge."
     
    They've not let me forget it since.
     
    On Route 34, there are a series of small towns, filled with Cape Cod-style domiciles. Some were incorporated before the Revolution, like the town of Derby - incorporated in 1675.
     
    (Side note: the fine for littering in Connecticut is $219. They make this fact well-known on their signs, which is kind of hilarious, because it's not $200, or $250, or even $300. It's $219. I can only imagine how this came to be set as the maximum fine for littering.)
     
    A little after 6:00, we got to the outskirts of the Yale campus. We needed something to eat and wanted to see a little bit of the campus, so we drove around quasi-aimlessly until we found it.
     
    It's a masterpiece of gothic architecture encased in one-way roads and dotted with enough modernity to keep you rooted in 2014 and not 1814. The detail and beauty everywhere we went was astounding.
     
    We found a parking spot near an ornately spired steeple and began to walk around. After asking around, we wormed our way over to where we thought the School of Music would be, but ended up finding one of the coolest bits of architecture on campus: the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. If we had been here on anything but a Sunday, on any weekend but Memorial Day weekend, I could have gone in and seen the manuscript to Leo Ornstein's Piano Concerto.
     
    This Library was part of the greater Student Commons area. It stood on a plain of gray textured stone, and looked as if it was being held aloft by four pyramid-shaped structures on each corner. Much of the face was of the same monolithic stone, engineered into a geometric pattern. The entrance was on the bottom, underneath an imposing overhang of stone.
     
    On the other side was the Student Commons, an ornate L-shaped building with the names of World War I battles etched on one side. Below was some temporary set-up, presumably for Memorial Day.
     
    The in the "elbow" of the L stood a flag pole forged in New York in 1908, and between that and the Library was a hole in the ground - a rectangular hole which looked down on a courtyard area for the subterranean offices.
     
    Since it was one of the only open buildings on campus, we walked into the Student Commons building. Most of the doors were locked - you could really only use it for its bathrooms and as a cut-through to the other side - but the interior was intricate and ornate. If it were a new construction, I'd consider it an ostentatious display of gaud.
     
    Inside were the names of Yale alumni that gave their lives for the United States in war. Their names were carved in marble on the concentric walls of the interior. Other jaw-dropping details included the relief work, a tile mosaic on the ceiling, and old-fashioned stalls in the bathrooms.
     
    We went back to the car to get some hand sanitizer, then headed in the opposite direction for food. We didn't go far before my dad spotted a place to eat - Claire's Corner Copia. Now, this was a vegetarian restaurant, which I saw upon arrival, but somehow this fact escaped my dad as he went through the motions of ordering. We both got the special - southwestern egg rolls - while my mom sprang for some nachos. I began thinking about the fact that we were going to eat vegetarian Mexican in Connecticut when the waitress came over and told us that there was only one batch of southwestern egg rolls left.
     
    With no immediate back-up, I mentioned the mac and cheese that I'd seen in the display case. My dad looked the waitress in the eye and asked if it came with bacon, loud enough to shock some of the more sensitive patrons.
     
    I was somewhat mortified internally, but I laughed my head off when it happened. The waitress thought he might be referring to soy bacon, which made it even funnier.
     
    The nachos were rather plain, and accounts from my dad with regards to the state of his egg salad sandwich were good (although he ate the individual layers of the sandwich off of the bread with a fork and knife, leaving bread and what appeared to be arugula detritus on the plate by meals' end.)
     
    But those southwestern egg rolls were something else. Spicy beans and corn inside what appeared to be some kind of rye wrap, served on an abundance of greenery with some sort of sauce over the whole thing ... it was a glorious experience. The portions of it - and the other things I saw, brought to our table and to others - were massive. I couldn't finish mine, a third of the nachos were left, and the lump of hardtack they tried passing off as bread saw little action until we felt like we had to do something with it at the end.
     
    We did not book a room in advance since we didn't know where we'd end up - Danbury, New Haven, or even New London - so we looked into it when we got to the car. The only property available anywhere close to our route required a wee bit of backtracking.
     
    In the context of how far we'd traveled, backtracking really wasn't a deal-breaker - it was only about three miles, as the crow flies, from the Yale campus - but getting to the hotel meant that we had to face those three miles on Interstate 95.
     
    It was bad, but it could have been much worse, and I was thankful that we didn't try 95 when we needed to get from Danbury to New Haven. We entered West Haven and then exited, nabbing a room at a hotel that, despite being Memorial Day weekend, doesn't have an insane number of visitors. I guess that's because no one has ever said "hey guys, we're going to spend our Memorial Day in West Haven, Connecticut!"
     
    Tomorrow: New London, CT, Narragansett and Newport in RI, and Hyannis, MA.
  4. Sumiki
    After a protracted breakfast, we began the day at 11:30 and headed away from Winchester on Route 7. We rolled through rolling countryside and a half hour later found ourselves in West Virginia, on one of its little nubs. Our destination: Harpers Ferry, made famous by John Brown's 1859 abolitionist raid on its US Armory. After Brown's raid, Harpers Ferry continued to be an important stronghold during the Civil War, sitting at the confluence of two states at the war's beginning and three by war's end.
     
    Sitting on the tip of West Virginia and separated from heights in both Maryland and Virginia by rivers, Harpers Ferry is now a historic town, with cobblestone streets, a mix of carefully preserved and even more carefully reconstructed buildings, and a fascinating terrain. Its strategic location has made its history complex - before the Brown raid, the location was selected by George Washington himself to be the location for the US Armory - essentially the Fort Knox of weaponry for the United States government.
     
    The rivers there were so important as a jumping-off point that Lewis and Clark stopped there en route to the West. One of their favorite boats - a collapsable boat - was eventually ditched because it couldn't handle the waters they found themselves in, but a replica proudly stands near the Potomac.
     
    Harpers Ferry continued to serve as the armory through the Civil War, which made it a common location for raids and battles as the supplies changed hands. After Virginia seceded, General "Stonewall" Jackson secured the supplies by placing cannon on the heights that surround it, and sent the supplies further south to be used by the Confederacy.
     
    All in all, Harpers Ferry changed hands eight times during the course of the war. Later in the war, General Jubal Early did battle at Harpers Ferry, but in doing so, lost too many men to continue on. The usually aggressive Early did not know that there were not enough men to stand between his army and Washington, D.C. ... a route that, if taken, could have prolonged the war.
     
    Harpers Ferry, with its heights and twists and turns, is a small but geographically interesting town. The iron moorings that once latched a pontoon bridge across the Potomac River are still in place, embedded in stone structures on the river's shore. Grimes Davis, a southerner who sided with the Union and the commander of the Union cavalry, once used the pontoon bridge to escape back into Maryland.
     
    I had to navigate some wary geese, their droppings, and what appeared to be a mud-quicksand mix, but I found my way from the heights where the railroad used to go down along the stone infrastructure, which held the curved iron bars solidly at its base. Successful, and about to turn back, a train blasted its horn twice as it chugged across the Potomac on a railroad bridge of slightly newer construction.
     
    Another quirk of Harpers Ferry was the John Brown building, probably the least important building in the town until his raid. Originally on the heights, quite near the pontoon bridge moorings, it was of enough historical significance that the whole thing was moved and displayed at the Chicago World's Fair. When it returned, the residents were rather disinterested in the building and now stands about 50 yards from its original location, which now has only an obelisk to mark its original foundation site. (It could not be moved back to its original location due to the proximity of the railroad ... which has since been re-routed over the river.)
     
    It was there that John Brown was wounded in an exceptionally peculiar way. When the troops had surrounded the shed he'd barricaded himself into, he busted out - probably resigning himself to death. The soldier that he first encountered thrust his sword into Brown's gut ... only to have it hit his belt buckle and bend upwards, as the sword was made of a soft material. Thus, the soldier did what any soldier would do in that situation: bang John Brown over the head with the thing.
     
    We explored all of Harpers Ferry that we felt like, then headed back to the car. Our next stop was along a famous route, one that connected Harpers Ferry to the bloodiest single day of the Civil War: Antietam.
     
    But getting to Antietam isn't as straightforward as one might imagine. After getting to Maryland, roads hook around and follow the Potomac on the Maryland side. They were quaint, historic, and vertigo-inducing. Going from the Potomac - roughly sea level - up through mountainous terrain to Antietam was an absolute chore. The road bent this way and that, going up and down on blind curves, hitting you with blind entrances, and wavy hills that would make you feel weightless and twice your weight in the span of about five seconds.
     
    The roller-coaster road was seventeen miles, and played an important role in the battle of Antietam.
     
    We finally made it to Antietam - although I'm not sure my inner ear has caught up yet - and poked around the visitor's center, watching a film about the battle as narrated by the golden tonsils of James Earl Jones. Most of it - well, all of it - was already in my dad's head. He'd be an excellent park ranger, as he's read up enough on Civil War history to go toe-to-toe with any ranger. (In fact, he knows more about the Civil War than most of them know about it - or even the backs of their own hands. Fortunately, the historically ignorant on the payroll are generally stuck in the tiny admissions booths at the entrance to the various parks.)
     
    We then began the driving tour around Antietam, crossing over and paralleling Confederate and Union lines. The Confederacy had invaded Maryland in the interest of bringing the war to Union soil in order to destroy what was left of the Union troops' morale, legitimize the Confederacy in the eyes of European powers, and bring the war to an end. After a skirmish or two, the armies collided around Antietam Creek, near the town of Sharpsburg. The carnage in about a two-mile area outnumbered the total casualties of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican-American War combined.
     
    And it all happened in one day.
     
    Dunkers Church, behind the Confederate lines, was damaged by the hail of bullet fire, which contributed to its collapse in a wind storm just a few decades later. (It has since been rebuilt, though it is no longer used.) General J.B. Hood led his notoriously rowdy Texans to save the day at Dunkers Church when the Confederates were being pushed back by the Union. (Hood would lose functionality in one of his arms at Gettysburg in 1863, and would lose one of his legs entirely at Chickamauga later in the same year.)
     
    Three of the bloodiest areas were the Cornfield, Rohrbach Bridge, and the Sunken Road. Rohrbach Bridge which has since been renamed to Burnside Bridge after Union General Ambrose Burnside, whose impressive and precariously manicured facial coiffure let to the coining of the term "sideburns." (More on Burnside in a moment.)
     
    The Cornfield is not a large area, but it was an absolute bloodbath. The date of the battle - September 17, 1862 - meant that the cornstalks, though dead, were still high and thick. When the armies clashed, confusion rippled through the lines. All you could hear was the din of cannon fire, and all you could see were the guys to your right and left and the flag of the regiment somewhere in front of you. Shooting blind, control of the Cornfield went back and forth as casualties piled up. One of the survivors - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. - went on to become a Supreme Court Justice.
     
    Now, as promised, more on Burnside. The only thing that could outshine Burnside's sideburns was his incompetency as a commander. At Rohrbach Bridge, he was tasked with taking the other side. With a wide river and a steep hill on the other side, his men were forced to cross the river on the one bridge available. This may have worked if his men had charged and overwhelmed the thin Confederate line, but he sent his men off in smaller groups, which were handled by the Confederates. After enough waves, the Confederates were eventually worn down, but not before Burnside had wasted an unnecessary amount of manpower.
     
    (This, however, does explain the tactic that Burnside used in December of that year at Fredericksburg, when he sent wave after wave of his men at the high ground held by the Confederates at Marye's Heights.)
     
    A third bloody part of Antietam was the Sunken Road, visible to this day. The Confederates, under the command of North Carolinian D.H. Hill, post-war Davidson College professor, and his subordinate John Gordon, who got shot five times at the Sunken Road and only survived because his hat kept him upright just enough to keep him from choking on his own blood. He got hit four more times through the rest of the war and manage to see the end of the war alive and without having lost a limb or an eye.
     
    Backed up against the river and with no place to go, Robert E. Lee had to think about the possibility of his invasion strategy backfiring and ending the war then and there, before Gettysburg occurs. But A.P. Hill's famous Light Division, so named because they could out-march anyone else, marched the seventeen miles of hilly terrain between Harpers Ferry and Antietam - on the same road we traveled on - in one day. Like a moment in a Hollywood script, his reinforcements held off the Union.
     
    But the Union still had a chance to annihilate Lee's Army of Northern Virginia ... if they'd simply attacked on the very next day. But the Union, under the command of notoriously cautious, extremely egomaniacal, inexplicably popular, and newly reinstated General George McClellan, didn't push onwards, allowing Lee to slink back into Virginia, preparing a second invasion that would end up on the fields of Gettysburg less than a year later.
     
    After that tour, we went back through Sharpsburg - which had a parade going through it when we passed through earlier - and looked for something to eat. The only place we saw looked like a bar, so we kept pressing on to Hagerstown, home of the Hagerstown Suns, a single-A minor league team affiliated with the Washington Nationals. They were playing the Asheville Tourists at 7:00. We entered the park at around 6:00, got free hats in their Memorial Day giveaway, purchased a medium-sized pennant for the ever-expanding Basement Collection, and got some food. I got a Cheddar Jalapeño hot dog (not as spicy as you might think) while my parents ate burgers.
     
    We got some seats underneath some cover. It sprinkled a little bit and the wind brought a few drops to our legs, but these passed. Before the game could begin, the National Anthem was sung ... by two little girls.
     
    They had heart, and they had the lyrics down (which can't be said of most adults who sing it), but they were both badly off key and in different keys - the closest they got to singing in unison was a wavering quarter-tone dissonance. Still, their attempt was valiant, and they were applauded greatly.
     
    Since my parents had entered the park with hats, and they had given all of us hats upon entrance, a hatpile was a must. We piled five caps on my dad's head.
     
    (hatpiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiile)
     
    The Hagerstown faithful got into their hometown team, cheering the Suns on with all manners of whooping and hollering. One large black fellow had a proclivity to shrilly whistle the notes that precede the "charge!" cheer, much to the annoyance of a great many people in our section, including myself.
     
    The Suns, from a better farm system than Asheville, scored early and then poured it on from there. Two triples with two outs helped them to a six-run lead. We split chicken tenders and fries and split before it got too dark, as we needed some light to get our way out of Hagerstown.
     
    This early exit was necessary, as we had to navigate one-way roads in the less savory parts of Hagerstown in order to get to I-81, which got us to Pennsylvania a little after 8:30. Before 9:00 we arrived in Chambersburg and settled into our room.
     
    Tomorrow: we're still planning the route. We're debating when to to Valley Forge - now, or on our way back. The route still isn't settled and likely will not be until the morning, but we're trying to figure out the fastest route to Connecticut and Rhode Island without having to navigate traffic-choked places like New York City.
  8. Sumiki

    The Road So Far

    By Sumiki,

    This was perhaps the most uneventful day one of any trip. We didn't know if we'd even get on the road today, as we had to wait for a package to show up through FedEx before we could leave. FedEx said that the package would arrive at 8:00 PM, so we spent the morning and early afternoon leisurely packing, thinking that we'd have to delay our plans by one day.
     
    The FedEx guy showed up a little after 3:00. We sprung into action, immediately panicking. My mom was in the shower, so my dad and I did everything that we could and got the packing finalized.
     
    We left a little after 5:00, traversing scenery up through North Carolina and crossing into Virginia. After merging onto I-81 in Roanoke, we kept making good time en route to Winchester.
     
    A little before 8:00, a truck with a kayak in its bed flew past us going about a zillion miles a second. My dad looked at it and said, "look, that's a Himalayan."
     
    There you have it, folks - a truck carrying a kayak is, apparently, a Himalayan. We tried not to think about the fact that our lives were in his hands as we careened down the Interstate.
     
    At 9:00, we pulled off the road and nibbled at a Jimmy John's. While this didn't fully alleviate our appetites, we felt re-energized enough to get gas and get back on the road.
     
    An hour later, we pulled into the hotel in Winchester. Still hungry, we saw an interesting restaurant nearby. We inquired about its quality when we checked in, and after getting positive feedback, we decided to have Dinner #2 over there.
     
    I can't speak for my mom's half-salad or my dad's fried fish concoction, but I got a blue cheese burger and it was merely mediocre. But I was only looking for sustenance, and sustenance is what I received. Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, perhaps it was a lack of taste buds in the mouths of the folks who staff the front desk ...
     
    Tomorrow: the battlefields of Harper's Ferry and Antietam before traveling towards Harrisburg.
  9. Sumiki
    Well folks, it's that time of year again - Sumiki's annual whirlwind tour around North America, and the third year in succession in our evil plot to turn a continent into a backyard.
     
    After over 16,600 miles in over 60 days in the first two Great American Road Trips, not to mention the sanely paced road trips of my younger and more vulnerable years, I have been in 42 states and exactly half of Canada's wonderful provinces. Looking at a map and checking off the places I've been in leaves a conspicuous gap: the northeast. I've not been any further northeast than upstate New York, which I last visited in 2011 en route to Toronto.
     
    It was therefore a given that a trip to New England and the Canadian Maritimes must be taken. In fact, that destination had been talked of long before the "out west trip" that ended up spawning the first two expeditions. But I'd never given it that much thought until recently - I mean, after all, those states don't have too much land area to cover. A trip there would not be on the imposingly grand, nigh-impossible, and totally outlandish scale of its immediate predecessors.
     
    I was wrong. There's a lot of stuff to see, and a surprising amount of mileage to cover. It's not going to be in the 8,000-mile range, but it'll likely be well over 5,000 when it's all said and done. By trip's end, I will have been in every one of the 48 contiguous states and at least nine Canadian provinces. (Newfoundland is very iffy at this point due to time considerations, but I'm holding out hope.)
     
    We also just might find ourselves in France.
     
    I, for one, am not swimming across the frigid waters of the north Atlantic, if that's the mental image you got. Off the coast of Newfoundland lie some 100% French islands, a colonial holdover in archipelago form. They use the Euro and European electrical outlets, and French culture and food abound. They're in the Greenland Time Zone, and they even have a guillotine. The chances of doing this are profoundly slim, but ... there's still a chance.
     
    So, as it was last year and will be again, when I say "American," I really mean "North American."
     
    Of course, a Great American Road Trip isn't a Great American Road Trip unless I meet some BZPers. In 2012 I attended the first public day of Bricks Cascade in Portland and in 2013 I met Paleo and Takuma Nuva in the Twin Cities, so I'm anticipating another BZP meet-up this time around. If you live in that neck of the woods, shoot me a PM and we'll talk!
     
    So buckle up, BZPower. It's shaping up to be the strangest trip so far.
     
    P.S.: I set up a Tumblr to supplement this blog. In addition to reaching a larger audience (as well as the sizable BZP-Tumblr overlap), expect pictures and assorting musings there as well. There's not much there as of this entry, but rest assured that there will be.
  12. Sumiki
    My grandmother has been in and out of the ER for the past few weeks. She only lives about an hour away so at least one of us has been visiting and spending nights to help her recover from a series of problems exacerbated by incompetent physician’s assistants. She’s getting better, but slowly.
     
    The high school baseball season is ending soon. We had a fun awards night featuring a video where I spoke in the voice of Morgan Freeman featuring little kids going after a foul ball. We finished 20-3, and the conference tournament is this Saturday if there’s no rain. On a semi-related note, I was tricked into getting my hair gelled into a mohawk and sprayed blue.
     
    As if this wasn’t enough, I was given quite a startle at about 1:00 on Wednesday morning when I saw a bat flying around my head. I stormed out of the room and slammed the door shut. Wide awake from the commotion, my parents headed upstairs as we tried to find out how to coerce the bat out of my room so I could, y’know, sleep.
     
    My dad and I donned full fencing gear, gloves, and a toboggan underneath our helmets, and spent the next hour and a half trying to find the dang thing. We turned the room upside down as my mom was at the computer in the other room yelling instructions to us. We finally trapped the bat in a clear box at 2:30 in the morning. We still have no idea how it got into the house, as exploration of the attic later on revealed nothing.
     
    As if this wasn’t bad enough, today has featured a busted air conditioner (as soon as the 90-degree weather started up), a leaking pipe on the outside, and a seemingly overnight growth of algae in the pool - or at least the water that has accumulated on top of the cover.
     
    Ugh.
  13. Sumiki
    Specifically, with regards to the gender imbalance in modern media:
     
    I'd like to see a story where, during the writing process, the characters are completely fleshed out and developed. Genders would be assigned at random at the end by computer generation, so as to avoid any unwanted author-based prejudices.
     
    Obviously this example refers to a book, but the same process could go for anything.
     
    (I was going to say more, but I think this pretty much speaks for itself.)
  14. Sumiki

    On Representation

    By Sumiki,

    BZPower is the only place on the Internet where I feel as if I can truly state what I feel without fear of someone seeing half a sentence and assuming something terrible about what I'm trying to communicate. I take a middle-of-the-road approach and try to see the good in people, and I feel as if BZPower is the only site that won't blow up in my face when it comes to moderate viewpoints.
     
    - - - - -
     
    Well, the latest firestorm of drama hit BZP earlier - this time on representation in media. It's a change of pace from what these flare-ups are normally about, but that doesn't mean that it's not an important and hot-button issue.
     
    My three major points are bolded.
     
    There is no excuse for not having female characters in modern media.

    None whatsoever.
     
    First, though, let's look at what representation really is.
     
    Representation is, for the most part, determined from capitalistic tendencies. Once the media gets in its collective head that the men are the people they should be focusing their energies and spending their money on, the vicious cycle begins. This goes for race as well - I was watching an episode of the brilliant late '90s sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun the other day and the main characters - aliens in the show's narrative - said that they'd chosen to be white because that was the color of everyone on TV. While a throwaway gag in the context of the episode (one which poignantly highlighted the inherent absurdity of racism), it stuck with me.
     
    Women make up half of all the people on Earth, so it's much easier to explain a male-dominated media as an offshoot of a patriarchal society. But if we defocus the issue from one of representation of women and into representation as a whole, things get quite a bit dicier.
     
    People of all races, genders, and orientations exist. I mean, there are over seven billion of us now, so even the most minor of minority groups have significant numbers. One would think that what would follow would be representation for every group equal to their number.
     
    Unless you've been living under a rock, however, it's clear that it hasn't happened.
     
    So ... why?
     
    Some point to internalized prejudices. While this could account for some media behavior, I harbor serious reservations that it accounts for all media - and all media are affected by this. What, then, is the most logical explanation?
     
    Like I said - by following the money.
     
    If you're a member of a group, you're going to want to get a cut of the majority. In America and much of the West, this means white people. If you're the biggest ethnic group, people who want to market stuff to the mainstream will probably market it towards you, because that's where the money lies.
     
    If you're a member of a minority group, I think it's only fair to have media representation for you. The culture that led to the situation we're in has to change.
     
    When minorities appear, they are often in token form. I shouldn't have to explain why this perpetuates stereotypes, but if we look at this from the broad view that I keep trying to get at, then we see that the smaller the minority, the less of a chance that a character from that minority will appear in media. Why? Again, money. If you're a studio executive and you want to make a movie sell, would you include characters that the perceived "majority" would relate to?
     
    Most of them answer "yes," because it's the easy way out. Only now are we started to see the inklings of a fundamental change. The more bits of media that have minorities that are successful, the more that the people who are in charge of the media will see the fundamental error of their ways.
     
    Here's another thing to keep in mind here: Representation does not always mean positive representation.

    Let's take The Big Bang Theory. Among its quartet of protagonists, a trio represent some sort of minority: asexuals, Indians, and Jews. All of which are, at some point, played for laughs - or for whatever the writers think is funny. (It's not funny.)
     
    When the most prominent asexual character in modern media is Sheldon Cooper, you know something's gone off the rails somewhere along the line. While gay characters are on the rise, a lot of them are accompanied by harmful stereotypes. Don't even get me started on bisexual erasure and the dearth of pansexual characters.

    Hypothetically, every movie and book and TV show could change tomorrow to one where women outnumber men, but yet the women are always portrayed with harmful stereotypes. Let's imagine the same with sexual and ethnic minorities. You'd have more representation, but if it's with even more sexism, racism, and homophobia, how is that better? Mathematically speaking, it's actually worse.
     
    Let's not support mere representation. Let's support good, positive representation. Let's prove to the media that they don't have to follow where they think the money is, but rather, where the moral thing to do lies.
     
    I welcome discussion on these issues, but I am not afraid to defend myself if I see something I wrote taken out of context.
  16. Sumiki
    Alright, so I'm going to have to finish up being sick, play baseball thrice a week until May, prepare for the end-of-season awards day/roast for the team (I'm in charge of making dumb videos for the roast portion), and finish up my course work for this semester.
     
    I was going to compete in a piano competition in Charlotte but that fell through - even though I passed the regional with flying colors, the state tournament conflicts with a home game for us against the toughest team we're due to face. This sucks, because even though I didn't care about the competition (Béla Bartók said "competitions are for horses, not artists," and I agree), if I'm going to put off learning tough repertoire that I want to learn in order to play stuff I don't care for and have now overplayed, I was hoping to get some mileage out of them before I went into "I'd-rather-give-myself-a-papercut-with-the-sheet-music-than-play-it-again" territory.
     
    Oh, and I'm composing a set of 23 short piano pieces for a legally blind prodigy, as well as a longer piece to be played by myself for my honor society's graduation ceremony, which, last I heard, they were trying to move to a Friday specifically so they could accommodate my playing because people really liked what I threw together last time apparently. This piece might end up being for four hands, which I really hope works out. Because of reasons. (she's cute)
     
    By now, you all should know what happens when May rolls around, so I'll try not to spoil anything there.
     
    The things that could have been put off have been, I'm sorry to say. I'll try to get around to writing more for Rise of the Rookies (which is still a thing that I haven't forgotten about) as well as do THAT ONE THING which none of you know about except for Pablo. At the moment I'm swamped, but I'm still kicking.
  17. Sumiki

    On Attaining Goals

    By Sumiki,

    I have been a member of BZPower for nearly seven and a half years. Every time speculation on new spinnies arises, I am there on the front lines campaigning for to become an official spinny.
     
    Today, my fellow members, I am proud to say that I have succeeded in this illustrious endeavor.
     
    I came to this web site with a mission, and now that mission is complete.
     
    Spin on, my friends.
     
    Spin on.
  21. Sumiki

    Happenings

    By Sumiki,

    The past week or so has been absolutely mad. I won't try to list all the crazy things that have transpired so I'll just kind of condense it:
     
    Our washing machine began to go bad and broke, so we got a new one, only for the delivery to be delayed because of store-side incompetency, ice, etc. Our mailbox decided to bite the dust around the same time, although getting a new one was relatively simple.
     
    The high school baseball season was slated to start last week, but our first game was sleeted out with two out in the top of the first inning. Bad conditions also forced the cancellation of a doubleheader that Saturday, which meant that our first game was last Tuesday. (We won decisively, despite the lack of practice.)
     
    The weather has been absolutely brutal. Multiple rounds of ice left many trees weakened, including a massive Bradford Pear tree in our front yard. It was over two stories tall and was the first thing that many visitors pointed out. Key word here being "was" - three massive pieces broke off, leaving the last quarter standing. If that had collapsed, we wouldn't have a front porch. As it was, much of Tuesday was spent attempting to clear out what we could with a rather limited tool supply, so we could use the driveway.
     
    If the downed trees were specific to our own yard, we wouldn't have had a problem getting some folks to come out and knock down the last part before it collapsed onto the house. As it was, though damage was significant in our area, we didn't lose power while the ice was knocking out lines left and right. In our city, we were in the 20% of people with power when the ice hit.
     
    Then last night, a cold front blows through at about 60 miles an hour. The straight-line winds were knocking over more trees than the ice, and the rain was so thick I couldn't even see outside. As strange as it was, it lasted no more than about a minute, as it was a thin band and whipped right on through.
     
    My dad and I went out and beat each other senseless at a local fencing club, then returned to find the house without any power - even though the neighborhood through the woods behind us had light. We also got into the precarious position of having had to jury-rig one of the emergency releases on the garage door during a previous inexplicable power outage, and so had to re-jury-rig it just so we could get the car in
     
    This morning, although the power was on, we realized that the folks who had put the washer in the day before had somehow, gotten the hoses reversed; "cold" was hooked up to the hot water line and vice versa. My dad got behind the appliances with a set of tools, but despite his best efforts, water went everywhere. Fortunately our veritable towel collection was able to mop up the mess. This was later fixed after calling the store, and the tree people came out to saw up what remained of the Bradford Pear.
     
    Long story short: if I've talked with you or promised you assistance in something over the past few weeks, then I apologize for my sudden inactivity. I've was swamped, and then swamp, quite literally, froze over.
  22. Sumiki

    Three Hours of Sleep

    By Sumiki,

    SUMIKI'S PAST 24 HOURS: A DRAMATIC LOG
     
    Midnight: Reading in bed. Allergies begin. Reading ceases.
     
    1:00 AM: Allergies still continue.
     
    2:00 AM: Finally asleep.
     
    3:30 AM: Wake up to a huge flash of lightning and massive crash of thunder. Walls shake and windows are vigorously rattling.
     
    3:45 AM: Unable to return to sleep. Get up to close blinds and check the weather online. Mom comes up, awakened as well by the bomb-like sound of the storm.
     
    4:00 AM: Back in bed, but unable to sleep. Lightning still bright, but thunder farther off.
     
    4:15 AM: Startled out of grogginess by dad urging me to get to the basement after hearing a cadre of sirens wailing outside. TV in basement turned on, no local channels had storm warnings.
     
    5:00 AM: Dad convinced of false alarm. Returned to bed.
     
    8:00 AM: Alarm goes off.
  23. Sumiki

    Valentine's Gifts

    By Sumiki,

    SOMEONE SPECIAL IN YOUR LIFE?
     
    YOU CAN GET THEM:
    TREE CARCASSES TATTOOED WITH MASS-PRODUCED ROMANTIC MESSAGES
    A SERIES OF CAREFULLY ARRANGED PLANT REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS
    CAREFULLY ARRANGED BITS OF FLAVORED DOG POISON, PREFERABLY ONE WITH A MAP
    A ROCK

  24. Sumiki

    Impaled By Snow

    By Sumiki,

    The snow here has been strange. The first layer - a good five inches - was a dry snow of the kind I'd never seen before. Around 8:00 on Wednesday the snow turned to sleet, which ceased at around 2:00 Thursday morning. This sleet froze over the soft snow and provided the base for the second layer of snow, which lasted until around 4:00 on Thursday afternoon. Strangely enough, this snow was the wet, thick, packable kind of the kind that I'm used to.
     
    Perfect sledding conditions.
     
    A few runs down our driveway hill packed the top layer down even further and created an exceptionally smooth surface. The only problem was that the layer below - the soft, powdery snow - was still there.
     
    One of my sledding runs was cut short by riding up onto a small hill, with the intention of coasting off of it to gain speed for a longer run. The only problem was that the sled - which was coming apart on its first few uses - decided to catch somewhere on the ice, catapulting itself through the layer of nearly impenetrable ice and through to the soft powder below.
     
    What this meant for me, riding with my chest on the sled, was that the ice that the sled was now under was heading straight for my chest, and I blacked out for a few seconds after it knocked out every particle of air in my lungs. When I came to, my dad was beside me, laughing uncontrollably. I staggered to all fours and looked at the sled.
     
    Huge chunks of ice - ice crushed by my sternum and ribcage - had buried the upper half of the sled (which is as tall as I am) completely. The surrounding surface was cratered, as the reverberations of my inertia had dispersed, imploding the general area.
     
    I grabbed the sled and proceeded back to the top of the hill, ready to do it all again.
  25. Sumiki
    After my opinions on Mozart and much of the Classical era, I got to thinking about modern classical music, which in this sense means any music written after 1900. I have ... mixed feelings, shall we say.
     
    Time for another music history lesson.
     
    By the turn of the century, late Romanticism was beginning to die out. Gustav Mahler was writing symphonies of epic proportions, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy were defining a musical style dubbed "Impressionism" - though Debussy hated the term - and Alexander Scriabin was writing increasingly mystical music based on his own egomaniacal philosophy. These folks, and figures like them, were continuously evolving the musical language that had existed more or less continuously from about 1600, when the Baroque era started. Romanticism was fracturing, and there were sub-groups of composers who sought their own styles, and composers who simply struck out on their own path.
     
    As time went by, harmony was extended, and by 1900 the usage of chromatic harmony - a technique whereby harmonies are derived from both pitches within the scale of the music you're working in and from without - was everywhere. In many composer's eyes, these kinds of rich, expanded tonal structures would go on indefinitely, with composers adding to the additions that had been accrued over the years.
     
    Other composers thought that there simply was no place to go, that traditional tonality had reached its breaking point, and new rules had to be developed. Scriabin, who started out writing very Chopinesque music, evolved his own brand of harmony derived from fourths, altered dominant chords, and a few stunning examples of bitonality in some of his late preludes. Igor Stravinsky embraced rhythmic drive (and bitonality as well) in The Rite of Spring, which was so groundbreaking that the first performance was marred by a riot in the Parisian audience.
     
    Most lasting was the music of the so-called Second Viennese School, headed up by Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg's first few opuses show the influence of Mahler and is filled with intense chromaticism - so intense that even those early works - far and away his most accessible pieces - were met with incomprehension at their first performances. Undaunted, Schoenberg veered into extreme atonality, writing pieces such as Pierrot Lunaire. Pierrot made waves not just with its atonality, but for its unique ensemble (known henceforth as the Pierrot Ensemble) and with its half-speaking, half-singing writing for voice.
     
    But Schoenberg, for all of his cacophonous music, realized that this kind of free dissonance and atonality - something that composers such as Charles Ives and Leo Ornstein had experimented with - needed some sort of structure to hold it together, just as tonality had held music together before him. To make a long, diagram-necessitating story short, he came up with something called the 12-tone technique, whereby every note was sounded equally through the use of tone rows, which were essentially randomized chromatic scales.
     
    Schoenberg's two major pupils, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, took Schoenberg's techniques and personalized them. Webern idolized Schoenberg and often moved just so he could be near him, and took the 12-tone technique and honed it to a disjointed science. Webern was known for writing exceptionally short pieces, and his piano music is characterized by its brevity, sparseness, and unholy dissonance. He died at the end of World War II after a trigger-happy American soldier saw his cigar and mistook him for an enemy soldier ... but strange composer deaths are a story for another time.
     
    Despite the fact that his music was aesthetically terrible, Webern became one of the most important modern composers, for the avant-garde for most of the rest of the century followed his lead to some extent. The 12-tone technique was applied to other areas of music - instruments, dynamics, note lengths - to derive an incredibly strict kind of "total serialism," where the composer writes a few rows and the music more or less writes itself.
     
    Alban Berg, on the other hand, experimented with making Schoenberg's ideas accessible. He wrote a masterpiece of a Violin Concerto and an opera, Wozzeck, which half-succeeded in this endeavor. He's considered the easiest atonal composer to listen to. His middle-ground approach makes him an oddball figure on both sides of the fence.
     
    But back to Webern, whose techniques had a significant impact. Pierre Boulez took Webern's usage of serial composition to every extreme imaginable, writing music where every imaginable aspect is controlled by rows - pitch, velocity, register, etc. While Boulez has always composed this kind of music, even he realized that total serialization leaves no room for creativity.
     
    The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis took off in a different direction. A mathematician and an architect, Xenakis was one of the first composers who took to "Musique Concrete" techniques - sound collages of recorded tape. Aside from his solo percussion pieces, his music is frankly ridiculous, as he wrote music based on mathematical formulas. Similar approaches were taken by Karlheinz Stockhausen, a controversial and influential figure in the sphere of electronic music, and who once wrote a string quartet where every instrument is lifted on a separate helicopter.
     
    (Don't ask.)
     
    I give all these examples to illustrate one point: since Schoenberg, many composers have taken refuge in music that is of theoretical interest, but not traditional musical interest. Say what you want about Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, and Xenakis, but their music is aesthetically unpleasing. They thought that there was nothing of strict musical interest left to say, and so they found their own paths.
     
    These paths are now showing themselves to be dead ends. The same strict adherence to predefined sets of rules makes much "modern" music as boring and as aesthetically similar to music of the Classical era.
     
    But it's not like all 20th-century composers took to serialism. Alfred Schnittke and György Ligeti were remarkably innovative and wrote significant pieces without adhering to the strict serialism that had gripped much of the classical music cognoscenti. Schnittke likened his departure as getting off an overcrowded train, and Ligeti mercilessly parodied his fellow composers in his Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes.
     
    Other composers, such as Henryk Górecki, Lowell Liebermann, Einojuhani Rautavaara, and John Corigliano have abandoned serialism in favor of a return to late Romanticism, a kind of musical reboot. They all have written music of musical and theoretical interest. Even Krzysztof Penderecki, a noted avant-garde composer who gained fame through his manic pieces for string orchestra (Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and Polymorphia among them), abandoned that style, saying that we "must go back to Mahler and start over."
     
    Suffice it to say that I very much agree with Penderecki.
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