The Black Swan has arrived!

I started writing yet another piece of music… I’m not sure what I’ll call it, perhaps some sort of lullaby. It’s a slower piece.

The Black Swan came in the mail today from Amazon.com, I can’t wait to get started reading it… maybe I’ll have to put I Am A Strange Loop on hold yet again (a book which doesn’t seem to be so interesting after all, just about everything Hofstadter’s mentioned thus far I’ve thought about before).

I’m watching the film Lady in the Water as I type, so I must get back to it…

A banquet of sound

I finished another really short piece of music called “The Banquet”. It features one melody repeated over and over about 12 or 13 times, each time with different orchestration. It’s quite a ridiculous piece, but was a lot of fun to compose. Nothing like giving the timpani the main melody for eight bars, eh?

I’m uploading some of my music to Last.fm for some more exposure. I actually found the site through a Google search of my own name, so at least a few people on there already have my music listed somehow. Uploading takes forever though…

Headache

I’ve been tortured today with a bad headache… ouch… I realize of course it’s all in the head. So I’ve been in too much pain to do much, that’s my excuse… 🙁

I did write a few nice melodies, as if I need any more of those in my melody vault. Well, I guess you can never have too many. No sooner do I pick an egg of gold than the goose lays another, if you know what I mean.

A day of memorial

Not much to say today… the power went out for no reason, that was memorialable. Spent some time going through old video tapes and found some funny old home movies, those were memorialable.

According to film news websites, Pirates 3 failed to surpass its prequel in terms of opening weekend profits, and therefore of course failed to surpass Spider-Man 3‘s record. This is good, because Pirates 3 is a dumb movie! See my review from earlier…

Broken Swords

Woohoo, I’ve finished “Broken Swords”! That didn’t take long. Nothing like the simple ABCBA format, eh? I don’t have time to say much else today, so enjoy the music… I’ll post a link to the MP3 download eventually on my MP3’s page, but in the meantime you can hear it in this fine YouTube video:

Music in F minor

Last night I posted the score to my “Trio for Harp, Flute, and Oboe” on my MP3’s page (see Opus 21). People on YouTube have been asking to see it, it seems to be my most popular piece there.

I hope to start my Christmas piece for the “GPO Christmas 2007” album soon, but I just started a new piece this morning. I don’t think it will be a very long one, nothing like “Hour by Hour”, but instead short and sweet. I’m thinking about calling it “Broken Swords” or “The Broken Sword” … for some reason that’s just what I see when I composed the first melody. It’s in F minor, so it has that minor feel to it.

I did work on my book, The Game of Gynwig, a bit… I’m trudging through Chapter 12. Exciting, huh?

Pirates 3 review

Horrible. 2 out of 10 stars. I really hate where all the characters ended up, and the ending is ridiculous. So, overall, these Pirates of the Caribbean movies have gone downhill. The first one was the best, which I’d probably rate an 8 out of 10. The second one wasn’t as good, but at least it had the prospect of setting up storylines for this film, Pirates 3. But this third one just stunk, with sudden pointless character deaths and a stupid ending. I fear they may have been setting up the ending in a way that would allow for more Pirate movies that don’t need all the characters, in which case, shame on them.

That said, the special effects were still spectacular, and it’s a shame they had to waste such computing power on such a dumb story. The music was also great, I look forward to getting the soundtrack in the mail.

I also saw The Good Shepherd a few days ago. I’d give it a 4 out of 10 stars. It was too choppy, I got the sense Robert De Niro was striving to be a less violent version of Scorsese, but failed. Scorsese’s choppy scenes work, Robert De Niro’s choppiness is pointless. But it did have some poetic dialogue (quite literally).

At Yahoo Movies, they’ve got a trailer for The Golden Compass up, which looks pretty bad. I’m so saddened. The special effects just look bland, especially compared to the standards set up by the Pirate movies and Lord of the Rings. Granted, the film is still in post production, so perhaps they’ll improve on some things, but in my opinion the entire style of the fantasy world in the film is too bland, too clean to feel real. Too bad. (And the mouth movements of the talking bear were ridiculous… they better work on that.)

Pirates tonight…

I can’t say much tonight (again) because I’m off to see Pirates 3 tonight and I’m trying to catch up on the saga by watching Pirates 2… I’ll post a review of Pirates 3 tomorrow… maybe… if I feel like it.

Wearily I compose

I’m not going to dedicate a lot of time to this post because I’ve been up for over 24 hours and I’m feeling kind of… well… tired. However, I am working on the ending to my “Hour by Hour” piece, the longest piece of music I’ve ever written which has taken me about 3 months to compose. I’m excited to have reached the end and I’m putting the finishing touches on it now. Woohoo!

Children of Men

I ordered the new Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack and the book The Black Swan from Amazon.com today. Woohoo!

I saw the film Children of Men last night. I’d give it a 7 out of 10. In contrast to Copying Beethoven‘s horrible cinematography, this film had brilliant cinematography, with superb long single-shot takes (or at least seemingly single-shot takes). It is some of the best cinematography I have ever seen. That said, the story left me wanting a bit more. Although it had a good ending (well, a Pyrrhic victory ending at least), I still felt it was incomplete. I want to know what happens further on down the line, where are the characters five years or so down the road? How does the world get better? Overall though, good film, I liked it.

In other news, I just found out today that Lloyd Alexander died on May 17 at the age of 83. 🙁