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3/15/2010 8:06:50 PM
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topic:
Trumpets and popular music
Marian
Posts 2500
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There's a lovely Twilight Zone episode about a discouraged trumpet player who meets a superlative trumpet player (who turns out to be the Angel Gabriel) and who finds the encouragement he needs to keep going.
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3/15/2010 8:00:25 PM
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topic:
Trumpets and popular music
gdozois
Posts 3689
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Charles Schultz suggested once that every baby born ought to be issued a banjo.
The only SF/fantasy entertainment involving trumpets I can think of is the dreadful Jack Benny movie THE HORN BLOWS AT MIDNIGHT, which involves the Archangel Gabriel's lost trumpet, the one that's supposed to usher in the Apocalypse when blown. I think there may have been a story in UNKNOWN with a similar plot, but can't remember the author.
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3/15/2010 7:47:15 PM
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topic:
What's this worth?
Lukas Jackson
Posts 839
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Marian wrote:
Agree with pc. Lukas, you should look up the divorce statistics of the guys who married a docile, non-english speaking Asian bride, brought her home and then got clobbered by reality.
Weell the problem is probably "brought her home." It's always safe to keep them barefoot and pregnant in a Third World hellhole; i.e., grateful for your dispensations.
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3/15/2010 7:39:23 PM
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topic:
George R.R. Martin Discussion
Marian
Posts 2500
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I don't think we've ever discussed him. Also, if I wanted to read something by him (not the multi volume epic Game of Thrones!!!) is there any recommended story. He's going to be GOH at LepreCon in Phoenix in May and I'm debating going.
In case anyone is wondering, I asked why LepreCon in Phoenix. It was originally held over St. Patrick's Day weekend and the name began as a nickname that stuck. But alas, spring training ate up all the hotel rooms so it was moved to May. It was also supposed to be an art show but segeued into a regular Con.
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3/15/2010 7:22:41 PM
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topic:
What's this worth?
Marian
Posts 2500
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Agree with pc. Lukas, you should look up the divorce statistics of the guys who married a docile, non-english speaking Asian bride, brought her home and then got clobbered by reality.
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3/15/2010 7:15:02 PM
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topic:
Trumpets and popular music
Marian
Posts 2500
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Any sf involving trumpets. I can only think of one, Still Small Voice, an Analog story. Had a wonderful endline "You can't ignore a still, small voice if it's playing a trumpet." And yes, rebels in the story really did play trumpets; it wasn't just a metaphor.
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3/15/2010 7:04:02 PM
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topic:
Trumpets and popular music
Matt Hughes
Posts 303
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gdozois wrote:
I actually took accordion lessons back in the early '60s, believe it or not; I was terrible at it.
Was it a Far Side cartoon that I remember, with the tag line: Welcome to Hell, here's your accordion."
I do remember Ted Mack's amateur hour always seemed to have some kid playing "Lady of Spain."
Matt Hughes
http://www.archonate.com
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3/15/2010 6:53:05 PM
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topic:
Trumpets and popular music
John Thiel
Posts 1739
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In the late 50s I was a kid taking accordian lessons; my brother was taking them also, in a music studio formerly occupied by Freddie Einsford Hill. When we got through with those, we got more the instruments of our choice, I a saxophone and my brother a trumpet. We immediately worked out a piece of music. When the music teacher heard it, he had it copyrighted and made the rights out to himself. It ended up with Dave Brubeck playing it, after Red Norvo had had a shot at it. The music teacher publicized the work on his radio show, "Uncle Moo Moo Presents" and it was taken up later by Daddy-O Dayley. I'm just now starting to do the tune on my keyboard, walking down memory lane. I find the tune takes me all the way back down there.
Shorty Rogers also played a flugelhorn; I know that because I picked up his lp "Martians Come Back" while I was taking those accordion lessons and it said on the liner notes that was what he played.
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3/15/2010 4:40:58 PM
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topic:
Trumpets and popular music
Captain Mitty
Posts 340
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John Thiel wrote:
Last trumpet I heard was Chuck Mangione. Curiously enough, there is a scientific reason for this lack, making this a scientific topic...
There isn't a trumpet made that can sound like Chuck Mangione's. That's because his is a flugelhorn instead of a trumpet; it has a longer pipe and a darker sound.
I saw them making trombones (actually just a tenor sackbutt) on "How It's Made". It looked like they remember how to make them pretty well and its not much of a leap to cornets, trumpets, flugelhorns, euphoniums, (euphonia?) and tubas.
Now if you really want a rare horn, get an ophicleide. I only know that workd because there was a story (IIRC in IASFM!) that featured one, but I don't remember anything else.
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3/15/2010 4:25:36 PM
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topic:
New Books and Stories, 2010
dolphintornsea
Posts 391
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This was announced a while back, but I missed it and it looks right up my alley. It's an anthology called Is There Anybody Out There?, edited by Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern.
The TOC is (from sfsignal):
1."Introduction: Here Comes Everyone" by Paul McAuley
2."Residue" by Michael Arsenault
3."The Taste of Night" by Pat Cadigan
4."Galaxy of Mirrors" by Paul Di Filippo
5."Where Two or Three" by Sheila Finch
6."Timmy, Come Home" by Matthew Hughes
7."The Word He Was Looking for Was Hello" by Alex Irvine
8."Permanent Fatal Errors" by Jay Lake
9."Graffiti in the Library of Babel" by David Langford
10."Good News from Antares" by Yves Meynard
11."The Vampires of Paradox" by James Morrow
12."Report From the Field" b Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn
13."The Dark Man" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
14."Rare Earth" by Felicity Shoulders & Leslie What
15."One Big Monkey" by Ray Vukcevich
16."A Waterfall of Lights" by Ian Watson
Steven, thanks for the list. I'll look out for those!
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3/15/2010 4:10:16 PM
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topic:
Heliograph
gdozois
Posts 3689
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Heliographs were used to send news of the invading Martians in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. Can't remember too many other examples.
The closely related semaphore towers, which actually did exist and formed relay networks in England and France, actually get more play in SF than heliographs. Semaphore tower networks play a major part in both Keith Roberts's PAVANE and Jack Vance's THE BLUE WORLD.
And, of course, there's the chain of signal fires in THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Such things were actually used in Scotland, something Tolkien certainly would have known about, and you can still see the ruins of signal-fire structures on top of some of the hills, in line with other hills.
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3/15/2010 3:52:58 PM
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topic:
Trumpets and popular music
gdozois
Posts 3689
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I actually took accordion lessons back in the early '60s, believe it or not; I was terrible at it.
Early rock, like Buddy Holly, brought guitars in, and then folk music really opened the floodgates--everyone wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and that continued, and even accelerated, throughout the Counter-Culture days of the mid and late '60s, when strumming a guitar while wearing a soulful expression (and perhaps having some good dope back at your pad) was one of the surest ways for a guy to get laid.
Hey, I've actually stayed at the Royal York a couple of times, although it was probably long after your Uncle Den stopped playing there!
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3/15/2010 3:51:09 PM
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topic:
Fembots
pc
Posts 1767
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So . . . is this story for real?
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3/15/2010 3:47:59 PM
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topic:
What's this worth?
pc
Posts 1767
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Docile??? Oooooo Lukas, clearly you have never met . . .
Wasn't the "not be able to say no" premise a part of that Dollhouse TV show? Not with fembots, but with biological women getting re-programmed.
Either way, not very nice. 
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3/15/2010 3:43:15 PM
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topic:
Adademy Awards Tonight
gdozois
Posts 3689
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I agree that it would have been a travesty if AVATAR had won, but giving it to THE HURT LOCKER doesn't accomplish their mission of pulling in new audiences drawn from those who usually don't watch the Oscars either. They can either have critical respectability or big ratings; I'm not sure it's possible to have both at the same time. In my opinion, they should keep their standards up and just accept the fact that the Oscars just isn't going to pull the kind of audiences that the MTV Awards and the People's Choice Awards do, and stop pandering to the generation zero crowd by doing things like the ill-advised expansion of Best Picture to feature ten nominees.
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3/15/2010 3:40:57 PM
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topic:
Trumpets and popular music
Matt Hughes
Posts 303
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My uncle, Dennis Rafferty, now completely unremembered, was considered the hottest, up-and-coming jazz trumpeter in Liverpool in the late forties. When the big bands came to town, they would ask him to sit in and when he blew a solo, the people would stop dancing (it was all dance music then) and crowd around the stage to listen.
The trumpet was the instrument in those days. There were virtuoso stars on other instruments, Teagarten on trombone, Shaw on clarinet, Rich on drums, but the trumpet was the soul of the jazz age, and trumpet players were the kings. Uncle Den married a former Miss Canada, which was pretty good for a working musician in those days. He was second trumpet (soloist, in other words), in the house band of the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, which was one of the best ensembles in Canada.
And then along came rock and the electric guitar and it was all over. Den could have done all right, even so, but he fell into a bottle and never found his way out.
My own sense is that electric guitar has gone about as far as it can go. Recent rock and pop seems to have dropped the guitar as a solo instrument and gone back to using it just for rhythm. Time for another instrument to step up and take the lead.
Matt Hughes
http://www.archonate.com
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3/15/2010 3:37:44 PM
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topic:
What's this worth?
Lukas Jackson
Posts 839
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In an age of fembots, normal women wouldn't be able to compete. It would be kinda like how white guys are scooping up all of the docile, non-English speaking Asian ladies. Regular women would probably be killed off, or kept only if still necessary for procreation.
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3/15/2010 3:27:07 PM
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topic:
What's this worth?
John Thiel
Posts 1739
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The point and purpose of the story is to get people thinking about the sciences and the trends involved and visualizing them as actually being a part of life as we live it--so I'm not much concerned with the details involved, and for that reason, this is what I need in writing the story.
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3/15/2010 3:23:41 PM
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topic:
What's this worth?
John Thiel
Posts 1739
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Dare not accepted, though I've seen many writers who've taken it up. It does give me an idea for the story, though--I've not been thinking what the male line would be like, perhaps the "Daredevil" would be one of the male models, showing how amoral the manufacturing concepts were. I wouldn't put more than two sentences of description in for any phase of the manufacturing, publicizing, and retailing operation, which necessitates having the whole thing thought out in advance so the significant details would be a breeze. Similarly if I have a court case, as Phil, if that is him, suggests, it would say "leftist" and "puritan" rather than asking the reader to gradually comprehend that that was what they were through interpretation of the action. The story would carouse with the scientific establishment and other establishments involved, requiring accurate indicativeness in describing the establishments. I don't mind suggestions in this area as I am slow on sociological reference points. (By the way, as far as being a bad writer is concerned, notice that if the sentence immediately preceding the parenthesis is not understandable, at least it swings.) I see there's a new fembots topic started by Thomas; I'll see if it's got something I can use.
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3/15/2010 2:56:22 PM
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topic:
Trumpets and popular music
John Thiel
Posts 1739
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Last trumpet I heard was Chuck Mangione. Curiously enough, there is a scientific reason for this lack, making this a scientific topic. This reason is that the balls have gone out of trumpet making and trumpets recently made do not have good resonance or tonal versatility. An old-style trumpet would be like a Strad to a violinist, and as rare, if not rarer. The thing is, it seems like the scientific principles involved in trumpet manufacture have been lost, perhaps in the big business confusions and overthrows. The manufacturers are like post-holocaust people trying to reproduce things of the past based on what people can remember of them. Not that I think there was a holocaust in music, it's just that the step-by-step trumpet manufacturing instructions on paper got ignored and lost. I'm reasoning that from a trumpet I bought that I could have resold to Stone Soup if I could have found them, but it had no other value. It was like the trumpet Louis Armstrong made when he was working at an iron foundry, he didn't have all the principles right and he had to slam it against his heel every so often to get the valves back to their regular adjustment.
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