Shostakovich - Symphony No. 14

Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, conductor Alexander Lazarev

This is bleak, dark music. The majority of movements sound despairing and hopeless... my favorite of which was the opening theme from "De Profundis," repeated in "The Death of a Poet." It is this genius statement which James Horner apparently ripped off to write the string quartet for the closing credits of Aliens - one of my favorite movie soundtracks, so no surprise that I like the original... well, not better, but similarly. (That was graceful.)

Backing up, this work is a collection of poems set for two voices and symphony, modeled after Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death. He meant it "as a protest against death, and, by extension, against tyranny and persecution in any form" (not Shostakovich himself, but the liner note author Eric Roseberry). The texts are from poets writing during times of war and revolt, with a large variety of depressing subjects including - yes - war casualties, suicide, solitary confinement in prison, and a dying poet, but also several with different subject matter, including a medieval witch, tavern, and a letter cursing the Sultan of Constantinople. Some of these latter are the exceptions to the dark and bleak music - especially, queerly, the final "Conclusion," whose text by Rainer Maria Rilke is:

Death is immense.
We belong to him
of the laughing mouth.
When we think we are in the midst of life
he dares to weep
in our midst.

The accompaniment for this poem is rhythmic and sparse hits from strings and percussion, which, if you didn't guess, is slightly incongruous.

Other favorite moments of mine included some 12-tone rows on the celeste in "Loreley," and dissonant, suffering string passages in "The Death of a Poet."

Dark dark dark. A good palate-cleanser after pop music.

Wall-E

Only somewhat surprisingly, one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. Pixar has hit the right balance of many elements, including humor, cynicism, adventure, love story, post-apocalypse, utopia/dystopia, satire, and any number of other themes you might care to add. I enjoyed it because of the grand sci-fi epic-type story arch - the ruined Earth / survival in space / Great Return to Earth just has a great romantic shape.

The facial and vocal expressions of the robots were well done - this was probably the key to making the entire movie work. The Pixar animators must have learned so much by now about the symbolic representation of emotions that they are probably in a position to inform modern psychology a bit. By this point they should be able to animate a happy pencil, a disgruntled banana, a nervous tractor, or any other wholly weird combination of emotion and typically-inanimate object.

The cautionary-tale aspect is timely yet hopeful: we may ruin our planet and render it uninhabitable for centuries, but perhaps not forever. Actually, the reality may be more like: we may render the planet uninhabitable for ourselves - yet other life on Earth will be fine and continue long after we perish. Alright, so that wouldn't have been as upbeat and Disney an ending.... It could have been the plant was one of a new species that had adapted to the toxic, perhaps radioactive atmosphere, and when humans returned they found that only these new superplants, along with cockroaches, were the only things which could live on Earth.... Happy happy.

Satirical aspects were interesting as well. I can imagine a young child in the theater: Mommy, why does everyone look like Uncle Tod? Similarly, the BnF (was that it?) mega-corporation was a different take on Resident Evil's Umbrella Corporation, or Alien's Weyland-Yutani or The Company or so on and so forth.... You know, a few years back, the number one target of megacompany / mass-produced / anti-mom-and-pop angst was probably Wal-Mart. This was perhaps when the storyline for this film was being written... by any chance was Wall-E meant to be Wal-Mart's robot?? And how will we feel when Best Buy and Price Club and Wal-Mart carry this DVD later on in the year, and most likely promote it to sickening excess, maybe around the holiday season? For that matter, would this movie rub a fat audience member the wrong way? Does it make people feel guilty, or at least self-conscious, about being stationary for two hours while gorging on popcorn and high-fructose corn syrup? Hmmm....

All in all, what a well-done film... a unique cross-genre story that would be a good companion movie to I Am Legend, Final Fantasy, the Short Circuit series, etc.

...Yes, too bad they couldn't have inserted a favorite recurring image/theme of mine: life on Earth has adapted, and has taken our ruined cities, littered with husks of skyscrapers, and covered them all in green and buried all memories of us away (imagery from many stories of mine - one here)... and our descendent survivors lament the folly of their ancestors in making the Earth pass us by... But no film can be perfect.

On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson (1978), Ch. 1: Dilemma

This illuminating volume is the third is a loose trilogy by naturalist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson. The first work was a study of the social nature of ants; the second, a proposition to establish sociobiology as a field of study (and detailing the sociology of many animal species); and finally, this volume looks at human nature in the sociobiological perspective.

In short, this perspective views all living creatures as products of evolution, and hence of all of their past environments. Every trait they embody is either something with a distinct evolutionary function or is an outgrowth of something that once had such a function.

Here I present [dum-dum-dum] summaries, re-formulations, and responses to this work, starting oddly enough with Chapter 1: Dilemma.

Wilson begins by observing that if humans evolved through natural selection, then we have two great spiritual dilemmas: 

1. We have no purpose beyond the imperatives created by our genetic history. There is no goal outside of our biological nature.

Expanding on this, he writes "It could be that in the next hundred years humankind will thread the needles of technology and politics, solve the energy and material crises, avert nuclear war, and control reproduction. The world can at least hope for a stable ecosystem and a well-nourished population. But what then? Educated people everywhere like to believe that beyond material needs lie fulfillment and the realization of individual potential. But what is fulfillment, and to what ends may potential be realized?"

One of the ramifications of this is that, if this were widely known, certain societies which organize themselves around transcendental goals (such as propagation of a master race, religious reasons, etc.) would dissolve.

On a related note, Wilson notes the inescapable nature of our biology: "The reflective person knows that his life is in some incomprehensible manner guided through a biological ontogeny, a more or less fixed order of life stages. He senses that with all the drive, wit, love, pride, anger, hope and anxiety that characterize the species he will in the end be sure only of helping to perpetuate the same cycle."

2. Innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct. [...] Which of the censors and motivators should be obeyed and which ones might better be curtailed or sublimated?"

In other words, how should we apply our capacity for judgment to guiding our behavior?

On another note, Wilson makes the interesting point that fields of study concerned with a adjacent levels of organization often influence each other in fundamental ways - usually with the lower (more detailed / smaller focus) discipline reformulating the higher. For example quantum physics informed nuclear physics which informed chemistry, molecular biology, cytology, physiology, medicine, and so on up the chain. An expert scientist must know about his field as well as each adjacent field. In the same way he predicts that evolutionary biology is now in a position to influence the social sciences.

(to be continued...)