Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Some people assume the composer's job is to mirror or augment the action taking place onscreen. I prefer to think that my job is to bring out something that's not onscreen.... There's a period in film scoring that people often refer to as the Golden Age -- back in the '30s and '40s, when Erich Korngold, Max Steiner and Franz Waxman were doing film music. They're beautiful scores, but they're often telling you what's happening onscreen -- not just while it's happening, but often before it happens. And I really dislike that. I hate having someone tell me what's going to happen so that I don't have the option of experiencing it personally. I think a lot of film scores are added just to comfort the audience and make sure they're not confused at any moment. I object to that; I think that state of confusion is a precious state and it should be respected." -- Carter Burwell, as quoted in an interview in Vue Weekly, published 2004-12-23

An empty semi is a curious sort of drum. Instead of striking the top or side with hands or sticks, one plays it from beneath by lifting it up and slamming it against the ground, using a bump in the road to do so.

A striking feature of the eighteen wheeled drum is its usefulness for generating sond effects. While it is probably a bit unwieldy for a Foley artist to use, a truck of the proper dimensions can sound exactly like a small cannon (such as the kind fired at some college football games after a touchdown by the home team).

So unless there is a handgun that literally sounds like a cannon, I was jolted rather painfully awake after far too little sleep earlier this morning by a truck exceeding the speed limit going north on Fulton Ave. hitting the dip in the intersection at Lombard and bouncing twice. (I heard three shots in quick succession, too quickly to reload a cannon, so if it was actual cannon, it had to have been three of them. Three people both boneheaded enough to fire a cannon in broad daylight in the middle of SoWeBo and able to obtain cannon in the first place, all choosing to roll their guns down the sidewalk in a group artillery outing, strikes me as sufficiently unlikely to say that ol' Willie of O. would have concluded pretty quickly that a commonplace lorry traveling unusually fast is a more likely explanation.)

I haven't heard shouting, nor sirens, so I'm blaming an anonymous truck-driver for how much my back hurts from being jolted awake like that and how crappily underslept I feel.

I did warn y'all I might be extra cranky for a few days, right?