The Re-Hör-Saal …
After Queen? Queensryche.
And then two Quiet Riot songs, the only two I can name and perhaps the only two that most know: Cum on Feel the Noize and Metal Health (Bang Your Head).
Were they perhaps a “two hit wonder”?
That finished “Q” — “R” is up, and it will be Rachael Yamagata … before I get to a long stretch of Radiohead … to which I’ve never really listened.
During the Tuesday afternoon post-reading talk Peter Glaser provider interesting (theoretical and even practical) insight into the way he thinks about literature and about the connection between poetry and programming, seeing in the latter a use of specialized language not so separate from the specialized language and rules of poetry (Lyrik). This was all fine and dandy, and there was some great stuff in this little section. Glaser made a comparison (analogy) between refrains in poetry/songs and loops in programs, which I found fitting enough (especially considering loops can be identical, but can have variations as well … it’s not just necessarily repetition). While walking to Kabul Hans found the comparison/analogy a bit problematic, but nothing more was said about it.
I can say this, though: loops are generally “rhetorical devices” in programs. Most everything a loop can do can be done without one, especially if what it does is iteration. They’re a short-cut. Other loops have more decision-making to do, more conditional choices, but this is still at the level of rhetoric and logic. Short of looking at the elegance of the implementation of a loop or piece of programming and somehow calling it “elegant” there is very little here to term “aesthetic.” But a refrain is something aesthetic.
First, it is part of a poem or song, something poetic, we assume, and thus it is part of “the poetic” and thus subject to “the aesthetic” (as the ‘logic’ of the poetic [vs. rhetorical]). To the extent a refrain repeats and emphasizes something it might be fulfilling a rhetorical purpose, a hitting-you-over-the-head tactic, a way to drive something home, keep something in mind. Perhaps rhetorical. But the fact that they can be catchy, that they can sum up the poem or help it to be recalled even if it (the refrain) does not relate logically to the rest of the content (as a summary, abstract, main thesis, whatever), that a refrain often uses more explicit poetic constructions, condensed, than the rest — these are aesthetic considerations, and that a song/poem is to be experienced. That the refrain might be written out once but referred to later just as “refrain” and then sung/read/performed, this puts it “in time” — a matter of spacial-temporal experience, something not shared with “loops” that do, indeed, have a temporal element, but one that, when a program is run, is a-temporal to us, since they run at a speed we can’t follow (if they go quickly, as iterations often do — that’s why we use computers), or not at all, if it’s part of an input-output interaction thing and they sit there waiting for a response.
Rhetorically, structurally, yes … loops and refrains, I see the similarity, but to tease things apart a bit more, the refrain is aesthetic, as is the poem/song as a whole, and generally the program is not.
Of course one could tease apart the production-aesthetics vs. reception-aesthetics aspects here, and when it comes to production, I suspect there is much more an “aesthetic experience” going on in coding than one usually admits, and furthermore that this aesthetic experience is not tied to / limited to matters of “the beautiful” or similar categories, but related also to the matter of experience, or of experiencing the process in time and space, as something purposeful but not exactly with purpose — which is to say, as a creative endeavor.
It is now Wednesday evening around 11 “something.” I rode the 6 bus back to my place with Ivana, who continued to Baldwin. We had our rehearsal from 5:30 until about 9:30 (scheduled until 10:30 if we needed to go that long), and as it was I left my apartment at 7:35 for the 7:37 #38 bus.
How long of a day was it for me and for others?
When I got on the bus a woman who lives not too far away (a house this or that direction I suspect) whom I’ve seen once or twice at the bus stop, probably a grad student, with face that is not quite symmetrical and not particularly pretty but like her body a bit squat and blocky without being fat and potentially exotic in a pasty white way if seen from the right angle, as if that whiteness went with the black she wore — this was that woman in a skirt and coat and black shoe-boots. Ivana and I left the Union, walked across the library mall, made it to the Lake & State stop, looked at the schedule, and the #6 came 30 seconds later, and as the#6 was approaching the same woman, from 7:35 in the morning, was also catching a bus to go home. She smiled a bit; no one stood behind me, so I assume it was my way, and in reference to, an acknowledgment of the fact that we both had very long days, and it’s an interesting coincidence to encounter someone on the morning and evening bus on the same day. We exchanged no words.
Meeting up with Ivana post-rehearsal almost didn’t work out because she left a few minutes before I did — we were to meet up elswhere in the Union, and she went for a smoke — because I stayed behind to chat briefly with the (to me) nameless theater employee who was helping Kris this evening with the sound. She’ll be replaced soon by Heather, who’ll help us from here on out, evidently, but this evening’s nameless employee wished to chat it seemed, after I mentioned Jason, with whom I worked on the previous two plays, and — she mentioned — he’s back in town after his 6 months in London and still working for that company (“International”!) but also doing theater stuff, and so this was the starting point for our conversation, from which she then moseyed to the renovations, to how we could use everything there, how the big old movable movie screen is gone, there are new filters for the lights, etc. And her eyes lit up here a bit, it seems. Perhaps she thought I was a fellow theater geek interested in the business end of the institution. But then I rushed off to find Ivana and went through the Union twice before I found her out front.
Rehearsal itself was long and at times strained as everyone talked but Manfred’s patience was tried. I hadn’t seen the whole thing through, or at least all the scenes, as Manfred and Johannes evidently had, and at times it seemed as if Manfred expected me to know more about the scenes in question than I did, though other times he was clearly aware that this stuff was new to me. I got my prompts down. I’ll have to transcribe them again in a legible fashion both for myself and for Di or whomever helps with the lights when I go downstairs for my cameo.
After one long rehearsal I now have most of the names of my castmates down — before I knew only the grad students. Monday evening I caught Rachel’s name (she plays Elizabeth), and Jose stood out (I also remembered him from the first meeting in 1418).
Just a reminder of my place flight next week:
Thu 26-Apr-07: Madison to Ontario
Madison to Denver, United 7917
-Depart 6:05 am Arrive 7:27 am
Denver to Ontatio, Ted 1461
-Depart 9:27 am Arrive 10:33 amSun 29-Apr-07: Ontario to Madison
Ontario to LAX, United 6104
-Depart 8:57 pm Arrive 9:40 pm
LAX to Chicago, United 126
-Depart 11:15 pm Arrive 5:10 am
Chicago to Madison, United 5804
-Depart 7:15 am Arrive 8:02 am
Tonight: Rachael Yamagata, whose work I must have gotten from Anne or someone similar. It’s nice, inoffensive, and not overly catchy, but it has that piano-as-main-instrument thing going, which is a plus. I suspect that it deserves multiple listenings to give it a chance, to tease out its subtleties, but right now it doesn’t stand out. Very nicely sung, performed, and produced though.
