I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE ATTACCA QUARTET-Tiny Desk Concert #580 (November 18, 2016).

The Attacca Quartet are a fascinating group. The group consists of Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga (violins), Nathan Schram (viola) and Andrew Yee (cello).  And they play a huge variety of music (and really get into what they are playing).

The first two pieces are modern and a little wild, so I assumed that that was the kind of music they played.  But then they told us about a Haydn quartet that they loved as well.   The blurb says:

They revere the old school, having recently completed a performance cycle of all 68 string quartets by Joseph Haydn, the man who invented the genre. They also hunger for the new, exploring the music of three living composers each year in a project called Recently Added.

The composer of the first two pieces is John Adams, who I know a little because of the Kronos Quartet.  But I like the blurb’s comment:

One contemporary composer the group continues to champion is John Adams. The head-banging pulsations of “Toot Nipple” (titled after a character in an Annie Proulx story) contrast with the slippery and funky episodes in “Alligator Escalator.” Adams has said he imagined such a creature waddling up and down the floors of Macy’s department store. The two movements belong to John’s Book of Alleged Dances from 1994.

I love the beginning of “Toot Nipple” as the cello is sawing away furiously and then passing off that fast sawing to the viola.  The piece is only a minute and 13 seconds long.  The second piece plays with quiet squeaky sounds as the strings progress up and down the fretboard almost randomly.  When things settle down I enjoy watching how aggressively the cellist plays the heavy notes before returning to some smooth notes high up the fretboard.  The violins also show some really fast fingerwork near the end.  This piece is all of 4 and a half minutes long.

Haydn seems really traditional when compared to Adams, there’s still some intensity on his piece:

Next to Adams, Haydn sounds positively genteel, but you needn’t look far to find the composer’s own feisty side. Sunny skies suddenly turn threatening at the turn of a phrase — a trend in Haydn’s time known as Sturm und Drang, or “Storm and Stress” — when moods can swing wildly with impunity.

Of all of the 68 string quartets, this is their favorite part to play.  It is pretty with a lot of really fast fingerwork as well.  I’m most surprised by the note it ends on–it doesn’t go down a note as you might expect.

The concert ends with “Smoke Rings.”

Measured by the cello’s tick-tock pizzicato, the mood of Michael Ippolito’s Smoke Rings is languid, even a little trippy. Inspired by a 14th-century French song about a smoking society, the composer employs long, slow strokes and light bow pressure for a hazy texture. The music heats up dramatically midway through, only to drift back into the smoke.

While the blurb talks about the cello, I was more taken with the pizzicato violin that ends the piece.  But after listening as second time I see that the pizzicato passes around to different musicians, beginning with the cello and the moving from one violin to the next.  But it’s not all pizzicato, there is a an aggressive middle section with notes the gradually ascend and grow more rapid.  It’s when this section ends that the pizzicato violin comes in to bring us home.

[READ: May 6, 2016] Hilo: Book 1

Judd Winick is a cartoonist whom I have liked for a really long time.  He has done a bunch of really funny cartoons and a very serious graphic novel called Pedro and Me.

Winick (and Pedro) and Winick’s wife Pam were all on The Real World San Francsico.  I don’t believe that that has anything to do with Winick’s success as a cartoonist (how could it, really?), but it is fun to remember him from the show.

Anyhow, this story is outstanding.  Winick has an amazing sense of comic timing and pacing.  He uses repetitive jokes to excellent result here.  On top of that, the story is compelling, funny and bittersweet.  It’s a great start to what I hope is a long series.

The book opens with Chapter 1 called AAAAAAAH!  And below the title we see a boy running and shouting AAAH!  His name is D.J.  Next panel is a boy also yelling AAAAAH!  his name is Hilo.  They are being chased by a very large robot thing.  I love that the only dialogue in that chapter is a version of the word AAAAHHH!

Chapter 2 brings us back to the beginning.  D.J introduces himself and says he is not good at anything. Then he shows us his family–each of whom is good at some thing  The only thing DJ is good at is being his neighbor Gina’s friend.  But then she moves to the city and DJ has nothing.

Jumping forward three years, DJ is on the roof of his clubhouse when there is an explosion from space.  He says “Holy mackerel,” and when runs to the crater, he sees a boy in it.  The boy speaks gibberish, and when he climbs out of the hole, DJ shrieks AAAH!  The boy (who is Hilo) shouts Aaah! and from then on he uses that as a greeting.  [There’s a funny joke on this page where DJ tells him they are in Berke County (which is presumably a reference to Berke Breathed, the created of Bloom County].

Hilo is wearing silver underpants and is enthusiastic about everything. Everything is outstanding!  Except that Hilo can’t really remember anything.  He doesn’t know where, why or who about himself. (And then he burps very loudly after drinking a ton of milk).

Things slowly start to come into focus when Hilo says he absorbed DJ’s vocabulary when they touched hands. So when he burps again, and DJ says Repeat Business, Hilo shouts YEAH repeat business! And then Hilo passes out.

In this state he has a dream and he learns a bit about his origin including awareness of a bad guy named Razorwark.

The next day Hilo wants to go to school with DJ.  DJ says no way, but Hilo has other plans and soon he is enrolled.  But that’s not the only weird thing in school that day.  Because it also turns out that Gina has come back from New York–her dad got a job in Berke County.

DJ is psyched to have Gina back but she has changed.  She thinks of Berke County as pretty boring.  DJ admits that Berke county never changes and that he never changes.  But as they are pausing uncomfortably, another thing crashes out of the sky and leaves a giant crater.   Rising out of the crater is a giant robot creature.

Gina sees the whole thing (changing her opinion of the boring nature of Berke County).

Hilo is able to fight back against this creature, (he has cool powers…and a big secret).  But when things get bad, DJ us wiling to risk his life to save his friend.  And Gina reveals that she still thinks DJ is cool.

Crisis averted temporarily, they have diner at DJ’s house–a very very funny scene.

But soon the crisis returns, along with much of Hilo’s memory.

There’s no Razorwark but there is an epic battle.

And the end of the book has an outstanding (and gross) way of continuing the story. Not only by how Hilo communicates but also because it means the next book promises to be really exciting.  Incidentally Book 2 came out in September and Book 3 came out this past Feb, so I have to track them down.