While we were visiting folks in L.A. this weekend the Delta region was hammered with a severe rainstorm - 1.93" in Sacramento in about two hours for example. More than that, the temperature has dropped at least 20°F in the last 24 hours such that tonight's overnight low is expected to be 52. That's three degrees above the 40s! In mid-September in Stockton. Our apartment was a chilly 60° at noon when we got back into town and it only got into the mid-70s all day. Burr...

Anyway, our visit to L.A. was to meet up with the extended ITC crowd and to see off Cecilia as she embarks on her new job in Sydney, Australia (where it will soon be summer -- talk about an Endless Summer!). An enjoyable time was had by all at Uncle Chen's Dim Sum restaurant in Encino and there were lots of babies and small children to keep things lively. Some of us then spent a few hours at Balboa Lake, located in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. Peddle boats were rented and ice cream was eaten and an enjoyable Saturday afternoon in L.A. was had. Saturday evening Pete, R3, and Cecilia had good Mexican food and saw a Chinese movie called Hero. Really great film was amazing colors. It's been compared to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon but I enjoyed Hero much more. The night was closed by a drink with Sara, her boyfriend, and her roommate. And thus was Cecilia's last night in L.A. had.

Sunday morning, after breakfast at Dinah's in West L.A. (where the menu was too difficult for all of to figure out easily -- even with something like 10 academic degrees between us!), we said farewell to Cecilia and went to Amoeba Records in Hollywood. Because that's what one does on occasions such as this, or whenever one is in L.A. Lunch with Liz the Bridesmaid at Jerry's Famous Deli followed, wherein we happened to share the restaurant with KISS lead singer Paul Stanley and renowned comedian Jerry Seinfeld (just down from Stockton, ironically, where he opened the newly renovated Bob Hope Theatre). Quite an L.A. moment as well.

And then we got on the road north, observed quite a few rainbows and rainbow-like manifestations as we drove through the San Joaquin Valley, and came across the final clouds of the day's rainstorm. I wish I had packed a sweater! 

So I've joined the Stockton Chorale, the community choir here in town. As much to get out of the house and away from this blasted computer as to do some musicking, the choir seemed like a good choice on both accounts and it has been so far. The "audition" was last Monday (requiring only about three minutes once it was clear that I could match pitch and sight-read basic things) and rehearsals have begun for a small concert with the Stockton Symphony in mid-October. I've been placed in the bass section, which is new for me since I sang tenor in the various choirs at UC Riverside back in the early and mid-90s, and have always thought of myself as a tenor. Age, I suppose, has had a different opinion. Bass is fun though. At the moment we're working on Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, Op. 80 and a couple of other short twentieth-century works. The Beethoven is a lively and simple piece (with a melody startlingly reminiscent of the one he used in the Ninth Symphony), but the German text is throwing many people: it's basically a stream of strange and random syllables at this point. Overall the choir is pretty good, especially when it comes to sight reading and I'm glad we're not reduced to waiting around while the accompanist plunks out each part one-by-one. The average age is around 65, with many participants having been a member for most of the Chorale's 5-plus decades. I don't mind though, and hope to meet some interesting people regardless of our age difference. 

09/20/2004: Well, I went ahead and reinstalled the operating system at the end of last week, downgrading to 10.3.4. Amazingly it didn't help. Right now I'm working with severely curtailed number of fonts and I'm slowly adding the others back, taking a very patient wait-and-see approach. Whether a single corrupted font has been causing the problem I can't tell. Font Doctor X doesn't report anything too unusual, but there is clearly something going on between the system and font menus, perhaps dealing with the menu manager part of the system (about which I know nothing). In any event, I've been able to function with the bare minimum of web fonts and a few select fonts for other specialized applications, but it's frustrating not to be able to add and use fonts in a more willy-nilly fashion.

Again, more news when it happens.

09/16/2004: I've been battling a deadly font problem for the last few days. Microsoft Word and other apps that don't use the Panther font palette to select fonts have stopped listing all installed fonts in their various font menus. I've been able to add/reinstall fonts one at a time and tediously check whether the new font is recognized, but at some point the communication breaks down and I'm suddenly reverted to the initial stage of random subsets of fonts being available. I think it has something to do with Carbon applications but I don't know how font information is conveyed to those apps by the system, if that's even the cause of the problem (I'm not 100% positive which apps are Carbon and which are Cocoa, but I do know that if the font palette is available to an application it does not have the problem). At the moment I'm desperately trying to avoid reinstalling the operating system because that's, well, just so... Windows. However, I may not have a choice...

More news as it happens.
 

Finally, after some months of nagging reminders to the press I received the two reader's reports commissioned on my proposal. I wanted these because they're generally a pretty good source of critique. The readers only had the broad proposal, the chapter summaries, and one chapter to work with, but getting feedback from people outside the UCLA orbit was something I looked forward to reading. My editor told me back in March or April that one report was extremely enthusiastic while the other was decidedly less so, and I was very interested to read that one.

When they arrived (via FedEx no less) I was surprised at how thin the envelope was. I had assumed the press would send me whatever the readers had sent them: marked up versions of the chapter and related materials along with the summary report. Instead, all I got were the reports. This made the unenthusiastic report somewhat less helpful to me because the reader's comments on the chapter are simply listed in the report in the order in which they appear. So I only saw things like "1. Interesting." or "2. Hmm. Not sure if I agree with this." without any context to see what was objected to.

In general, the unenthusiastic reader wasn't against the project, just not enthused by it. It's a very short report as well. The reader makes it clear at the beginning of the report that It might not be the best reader to report on my particular project. The biggest complaint (though it really wasn't a complaint in the sense of whining, though maybe it was whining now that I think about it) was "that in too much music scholarship the music gets left out" and that my project generally fit along those lines. I wasn't quite sure how to mentally respond though, since the chapter I sent to the press was one of the most musically technical chapters in the book. Then again, the reader seems to have been either a music theorist or a conservative musicologist, and both types get very defensive if glorious charts, graphs, and analytical descriptions aren't given the lionshare of concern.

The enthusiastic report was certainly enthusiastic (three single-spaced pages of prose instead of the short sentences of the other report). The reader seems also not to have been a musicologist because the reader wrote that they'd welcome the book for students but would suggest the students skip over the sections of technical discussion. The reader identifies itself to be a musician and a literary/rhetorical scholar so I'm really curious to know the reader's identity. Interestingly, the reader also noted that Damage Incorporated is essentially a reworked version of my dissertation and that I had changed the title. While it's certainly possible the reader Googled my name and "Metallica" and came across the dissertation title, it still struck me as a little Twilight Zone-ish. Most of the report's comments focus on the tone of the writing, remarking that it gets a bit longwinded at times, which is true of all my writing (including this blog). Still, the report's enthusiasm is a nice pick-me-up. 

And so Cecilia is the latest to finish the dissertation. DDr. Sun (in the German style of addressing someone with more than one doctoral degree) defended this past Thursday and I drove down to L.A. with the idea to surprise her as she emerged from the office. Of course, the timing wasn't perfect. I showed up at 2:20, which I assumed would be twenty minutes into her defense, but her committee was delayed and she was standing in the department waiting around, and thus the surprise was blown. Oh well. She was instrumental in organizing the gathering of folks who celebrated my emergence after my defense and since so many people have now moved out of L.A. I thought it would sad if she emerged to an empty hallway. Gore-Don was there as well but he had childcare duties to attend to and so couldn't join Cecilia, me, and her committee for dinner in Westwood. Following dinner, the two of us and Bob went for a celebratory spree at Amoeba Records. 

The first weekend in September was a music weekend, the first I've had in a while. On Thursday the 2nd I drove into San Francisco to see Lux Nova play (Patrick's band). They were playing at a tiny loft/art gallery/performance space in the Mission District with a couple of hardcore/noise bands. As I've mentioned before, Lux Nova doesn't play hardcore music but their participation in those kinds of shows is always good. In this case, the two bands that went on before them were actually interesting and did some inventive things with the hardcore/noise form. Lux Nova was awesome as usual, but only played four songs. However, each song is over 10 minutes long so it's their own damn fault. hehe The drive from Stockton to S.F. and back wasn't too bad and I was glad to get out and see some music and hang out with Patrick.

The very next day I again drove out to San Francisco, this time to see a band called Nightwish. They're a Finnish metal band that plays what's called "symphonic power metal." This essentially means non-scary metal with lots of lush symphonic elements thrown in. The lead singer is a classically trained soprano and the combination of music and female voice frequently has a lot in common with musical theatre (not surprisingly Nightwish recorded a version of "The Phantom of the Opera" a few years ago). I'm no musical theatre fan at all, but for some reason Nightwish's style of metal is quite pleasing. The allure of traditional approaches to melody, the use of vaguely tonal harmonic progressions, and the particular emphasis on virtuosity is all something of a guilty pleasure I suppose. I also only owned two of the band's albums at the time of the concert, so it was exciting to see a "new" band again. I bought their first album Oceanborn (1998) only in August and then decided I should get their newest album Once (2004) in order to recognize the songs if they were played at the concert. I certainly did recognize the four or five songs they played from Once, but surprisingly (and disappointingly) the band didn't play a thing from Oceanborn.

Two other things about the concert struck me: Nightwish is amazingly family-friendly for a metal band. Perhaps it's the musical theatre element, the lack of scary transgression, or the presence of a powerful and confident female lead singer, but I saw two families there. The young girls (aged 10 or 11) all had over-large Nightwish T-shirts and the dads were all sweaty from being up front (the room was a furnace as well). The other thing: both Nightwish and the opening act, Lullacry (also from Finland, also with a female lead singer, but more hard rock than theatrical power metal, and not nearly as interesting as Nightwish), did cover songs in their set. Lullacry's cover was a really odd choice: "L.O.V.E. Machine" by the 80s shock metal band W.A.S.P. It's not that a Finnish band could never have heard of W.A.S.P., but I wouldn't expect any band to care enough to cover W.A.S.P. in 2004. On the other hands, the 80s are back in so many ways. Fun performance though. Nightwish did Megadeth's "Symphony of Destruction," perhaps that band's most commercially visible song. Interestingly, only the men in Nightwish performed the song while the singer left the stage for a breather. It was an okay performance, but I would have recommended they play one of the instrumental tunes from their own albums. After all, this was their first U.S. tour as headliners.

Fin 

No, the blog isn't going political, but I couldn't resist sharing with you all this charming image accompanying the AP's report on Cheney and Miller's speeches at the Republican convention this evening. The AP's title is even better: "Cheney, Miller Unleash Rage Against Kerry." Perhaps not "better" for Cheney given the picture, of course, and you can bet there'll be virtual hell to pay tomorrow once conspiracy theorists of the Liberal Media™ see it. RAAAAAAGE!!!!! Still, this is generally how I imagine the man, when he's not smirking at all of us lowly average citizens. He's always seemed to me to be saying "all this hoohah about 'freedom' and 'democracy' and 'noble leadership' and whatnot are really just a nice fiction for you all. It doesn't matter whether I'm Veep or not -- I have been, I am, and I will always be part of the inner circle of extra-governmental power in the world and you. simply. don't. matter." Charming, indeed.