Musical Terms in the Marketplace

It's another episode of a favorite on-going irregular MM feature.  You can count on it to appear when my time is short and I need a simple post requiring minimal thought.

The previous installment featured only potable music and this time we drink in two more: a pluckable tequila and a liquid Italian opera composer, who, it turns out, goes over well with babies and children.  Next are two masters of their art followed by two signs of a euphonious city.  Also watch out for a smokin' military wake-up call and a garden variety string instrument for less than $5.

Finally, this collection ends with a cheesy pun.

You can see all of Mixed Meters' pictures showing products and companies with musical names.  This post is the sixth in the series.

So who is the Young Maestro?

Musical Term Tags: musical terminology. . . product names

The Shackle Stick

Music, at its best, is a mystery for the listener. A dose of uncertainty about exactly what is happening on stage can turn an average performance into a sublime listening experience.  These days, high technology can be used to intensify this aura of musical mystique better than just about anything.

Electronic music technology abounds in the form of portable sound processing equipment (as represented by laptops, tablets and even smartphones). Composers and performers are using these digital tools to create and explore as yet unknown musical worlds.  They produce new sounds, new textures and new ways of playing together.  A listener may not be able to identify exactly how the music is created, but it is clear that the performers are doing it ... somehow.

One such group - a duet called Shackle, Anne LaBerge and Robert van Heumen - is on the cutting edge of such music voyages of discovery.   Here's their self-description.

Shackle is a band.  We make improvised music and use a computer system to structure our improvisations.

They describe their electronics as as

a cutting-edge digital cueing system which operates as a sometimes visible third member

and

a computerized communication system that proposes various compositional elements to each player, they can then choose whether or not to cooperate with the proposed material.

In other words, they're not telling us much.  What is clear is that it is some sort of "system".  The flute is played.  Sounds are modified electronically and also sampled for further modification.  We are told that there is improvisation - but it seems impossible to know what is planned and what is spontaneous.  A joystick is moved as if in some sort of game.  We watch as pedals are pushed and buttons poked.  We hear the sound change.

But we cannot predict the sounds we hear from the actions we see.  It is hard, even impossible, to find an answer when we wonder "How did they do that?"  Failing to find an answer for how the technology works opens up a possibility for a listener to seek out the mystery in the music.

Here's a short excerpt:

You can hear longer tracks of Shackle at Soundcloud or at the Shackle website.

Shackle is trying to raise a modest amount of money via Kickstarter to fund the distribution of their music.

They want to use a unique new medium - the USB stick.  The little beastie,  called The Shackle Stick, will contain video and photographs as well as an hour of music.  In an era when storing and listening to music on computer is increasingly the norm, someday sticks may well become a common format for sharing music.  But for now, it's a new idea.

Here's another video of Anne and Robert self consciously trying to stay relaxed on camera as they explain who they are, describe what their project is and ask for your support.

I signed up to support The Shackle Stick via Kickstarter. If you want to help these intrepid musical explorers go where no musician has gone before, then you too should consider supporting them.

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A quarter century ago Anne and I played in an improvisation group, the Golia LaBerge Ocker Trio.  (There are three short improvs available for listening.)

Anne has already gone where no flutist has gone before.  Here's her website.  You can listen to her mysterious talents as flute soloist.  Mixed Meters recommends her recent album Speak on which she also tells stories.

Once Anne visited L.A. and was presented to a class of music students at CalArts by Vinny Golia.  You can watch event that here.

System Tags: Shackle. . . Shackle Stick. . . Anne LaBerge. . . Robert van Heumen. . . musical improvisation. . . live electronic music

Morgenrot

Here's a little movie I ran into on the Internet. If you've ever wished someone would push a burning piano - an old upright in this case - from the top of the Empire State Building, then this video will be three and a half minutes well spent.

Lots of sepia tones. A very old feel. New York in slowest motion. I suspect that this is a work of high technology - although you might never notice the technique as you watch the piano fall.

The film is credited to Jeff Desom, the music, entitled Morgenrot, a simple waltz from the album Ferndorf, to Hauschka.

Here's another piano epic by the same duo - Bloksky - focusing more on the artist than on the instrument.

Burning Piano Tags: Hauschka. . . Jeff Desom. . . music video

Tim Minchin

Here are videos by Tim Minchin. I had never heard of him until yesterday.

He's an Australian living in Britain.  He has unkempt red hair and uses lots of eye-liner.  He writes songs which he sings while playing the piano.  He's a very talented guy.  Also very funny.  Very uninhibited when it comes to discussing sex.  Prudes and Republicans will not approve.

More importantly, his music shows a strong political sense.  If you believe in things like religion, alternative medicine or the paranormal, Tim Minchin is not going to amuse you.

Some of his songs are definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK since he often deals with sexual topics.  The first video at least makes the effort at a G rating.  It was written especially for television broadcast in the UK.  It's clean - if you ignore the double entendres.

I like self-reflexive art like this: songs about songs.  Here he performs at the Proms, with full symphonic accompaniment.  It's a song about singing the pitch F-sharp while playing in the key of F.

Tim does not mince words about controversial subjects. The Pope Song, for example, deals with priestly pedophilia - a hot button topic. He clothes this delicate subject with countless repetitions of the f-word  Reminds me of Frank Zappa in that sense.

You could compare Minchin to Victor Borge, as a comedian pianist - only with sex.  Or to Tom Lehrer, as a comedian, pianist, social commentator - only with sex added.  Minchin's use of clever wordplay can be really remarkable - I'd compare that aspect of his work to someone as good as Cole Porter - just with lots of explicit sex.

In this last video, an animation of a Minchin monologue, you might sense a resemblance to Ken Nordine.  You might get the impression that Tim is a really smart guy who does not suffer fools one little bit.  Someone who's pretty confident that his way of understanding of the world is the proper one and isn't afraid to get into your face to tell you just how wrong you are.

There's a lot more Minchin on YouTube.  What the heck - here's one more: Some People Have It Worse than Me - which contains this great existentialist line:

But the total non-existence
of colonic animation
Seems to me
the perfect metaphor
for the utter constipation
of my soul.

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This just in: Tim Minchin here in Los Angeles on April 10 at Amoeba Records in darkest Hollywood. He's got a lot of work to do before he cracks the U.S. market.

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I know it's a pale comparison to Minchin's songs, but you could listen to my own piece which overuses the word fuck: Frustration Etude No. 1.

Fuck Tags: Tim Minchin. . . songwriter

Winter 2011 from The Seasons

Why not listen to Winter 2011 while you're reading this post?  It's nearly an hour long but it's easy listening.  That's because 80% of it is silence.  Click here to listen.

Winter 2011 is the first in what I intend to be an ongoing series of pieces called The Seasons.  I would no more call it a complete piece of music than I would call salt and pepper a complete meal.  But, like salt and pepper, you can season other music with Winter 2011.  That's how I use it.

In my recent pieces I've been writing very short "musical events" surrounded by long silences.  Read about the ideas involved here and here.  There are also pieces you can listen to.

Lately, while I'm busy earning a living, I've needed to conserve my creative time.  I resolved to write one short musical event each day.  Just a few seconds of music.  It could be anything I cared to dream up.

Now suppose that I began this regimen on the previous Winter solstice and then wrote one bit every day until the Spring equinox.  All those bits together would become Winter 2011.

Well, I would have started on the winter equinox last December if I had had the initial idea just a little earlier.  Actually I started a couple weeks after the solstice.  I had some catching up to do.  Even so most of the events in Winter 2011 were composed on the day they represent.

If I continue this process for a whole year, beginning a new piece on each solstice or equinox and continuing adding one event each day throughout the season, I'd have a complete set of musical seasons: a cycle of four pieces.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: Vivaldi already wrote four seasons.   And he's making a ton of money off of them because that music gets used in lots of television commercials.  People love Vivaldi's Four Seasons.  They listen to it over and over again.

Many other composers have aped Vivaldi as well.  Click here to read about my personal favorite musical seasonal cycle.

Don't expect tone painting in my The Seasons.  You will not hear the cold winter wind in my musical winter.  There is nothing in this music to suggest snow - although you're free to imagine whatever you want as you listen.  Where I live there is no snow in the winter anyway - there are barely any seasons.  As a general rule you're free to imagine whatever you damn well please while listening to whatever music you happen to hear.

My seasons (assuming I finish them) are more calendrical than than they are representational.  They're a lot like crossing off each day on a wall calendar as it goes by.  And because they consist of only short moments of music I find that they blend with other music quite well.

You could listen to Vivaldi's Four Seasons and my The Seasons at the same time.  In fact, that's what I want you to do.  That's what I would do.  The musical combinations they produce might be fascinating.  How will you know until you try it?

Longtime Mixed Meters readers might remember that I'm someone who listens to multiple radio stations at once.  Adding Winter 2011 to a mix of several radio stations can produce some fascinating interactions.  It's something I really like.  You have to be open to the shear happenstance of it all.

I know that not everyone can alter their thinking to accept this idea as music.  But I offer it to you in a positive sense of creating something new, a musical landscape only you can access.  Depending on what other music you choose to combine Winter 2011 with  you will have a unique new musical experience.  It's not at all like hearing that same old Vivaldi yet again.  It'll be a slightly different Vivaldi ... yet again.

If you're not willing to try listening to Winter 2011 simultaneously with other music, I suppose you could listen to it by itself.  But I warn you ... it'll be pretty boring that way.  So is listening to Vivaldi the two hundreth time.

Last Tuesday, on the Spring Equinox, I started my second season, Spring 2012.  If all goes as planned it will be finished in June.  It will focus on somewhat different musical materials than Winter 2011.  Eventually I hope to begin Summer 2012 on the Summer Solstice.  And so on.  At least that's the plan.

And you probably already figured out that I'm not calling my cycle "The Four Seasons" because I might well write multiple winters, springs or whatevers.  If you stay tuned long enough maybe you'll find out how Winter 2012 differs from Winter 2011.  I wonder about that myself.

Click here to hear Winter 2011 by David Ocker - © 2012 David Ocker - 3470 seconds



Seasonal Tags: Winter 2011. . . David Ocker. . . The Seasons

Arthur Jarvinen Birthday Concert

There was a time when Venice, home of canals, was an independent city.  Then in 1925 it was swallowed up by the voracious mega-metropolis Los Angeles.  Today the old Venice city hall is the home of the Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center.

Beyond Baroque hosts the very adventuresome new music concerts called Beyond Music.  This series is "curated" (to use a trendient word) by composer Daniel Rothman.   Daniel deserves much credit for his programming.  It is cutting edge and it is a showcase for local artists - at the same time.

Daniel deserves even more credit, in my opinion, for making complete videos of some presentations available online on the Beyond Music YouTube page.  These include both works on the Beyond Music Art Jarvinen birthday concert, Conspiracy of Crows (for three oboes) and 100 Cadences (for string quartet).

You could go back and read the two Mixed Meters posts I wrote before that concert.  One was entitled Beyond Baroque, Arthur Jarvinen and Me - about performances Art and I had given of each other's music there over the years.  The other, Preparing to Hear a Concert of Art Jarvinen's Music, briefly discussed the music and history of each piece.

But now, thanks to the combined miracles of consumer video, YouTube and the Internet, you can watch and listen to the performances of Arthur's music right in the comfort of your own ... well,  these days I guess you can listen almost anywhere.

Arthur Jarvinen: A Conspiracy of Crows - Kathleen Pisaro, oboes - January 27, 2012, Beyond Music

Arthur Jarvinen: 100 CADENCES with four melodies, a chorale, and a coda ("with bells on!") - The Formalist Quartet (Andrew Tholl, Andrew Mcintosh, Mark Menzies, Ashley Walters) - January 27, 2012, Beyond Music

The Jarvinen Birthday concert was reviewed by our own newspaper of record, the L.A. Times.  Critic Josef Woodard concluded:

One couldn’t escape the feeling that this meditative lament of a work was looping back to reflect on its very creator, except that his inventive spirit was alive and well in this intimate room. As if to accentuate that notion, after the applause, someone in the back bellowed out “Happy birthday, Art.”

The "intimate room" - it's small, painted completely black, even the windows - continues to host music and poetry events.  There's two Beyond Music concerts next weekend (March 23 and 24) performances by the youthfully intense "modern music collective" wild Up.

To prepare you for that event, you might watch this beyond-hyper performance video from a previous Beyond Music wild Up concert.   It's just one of the gems posted on Beyond Music's YouTube page.  I hope there'll be more to come.

Clarence Barlow:  Septima de Facto - wild Up - November 19, 2011, Beyond Music

Beyond Tags: Beyond Baroque. . . Beyond Music. . . Formalist Quartet. . . Kathy Pisaro. . . wild Up. . . new music concerts. . . Daniel Rothman

Floating Rocks

Los Angeles has been witnessing the movements of a large rock.  A boulder which is supposed to weigh 340 tons.  I wonder how they weighed it, not that it matters.

At a reported cost of $10,000,000 (I calculate that's roughly $1 per ounce, considerably more than first class postage) the boulder just finished a very slow, very public journey through urban Los Angeles, picking up not moss but publicity as it moved towards the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Public relations-wise the museum must figure the ten mil is money well spent.  We are told this is one of the largest objects ever moved.  A feat of engineering to be sure.  Lots of good pictures of the moving rock here.

Once at its destination, the boulder will be suspended in mid-air.

No, not really.  It will be installed above a trench through which people can walk.  The rock will only seem to be float.  Giving it the appearance of floating is, I guess, what makes this project art.  It will be called Levitated Mass and it is the concept of artist Michael Heizer.

Here's some real art in which a large rock actually does float high in the air.  It's the painting by Rene Magritte entitled The Castle in the Pyrenees.  (click it for an enlargement)

I saw this painting in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.  I was there in 1987 with my Aunt Marion and Uncle Ben.  In spite of rules against doing just that, they photographed me standing next to it.   I would love to post that picture here but, alas, I can't find it.  It is lost in the decades of my accumulated crap.  Maybe the snapshot will turn up someday.

Here is another floating rock in the Middle East.  It seems that some people in that part of the world believe that large boulders can float in midair.  It's probably a Photoshop trick, don't you know.  Still, the mother and child speaking in this video seem pretty much convinced.

The best example of gravity defying stonework, however, comes from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - the original 1980 BBC radio version.

This happens in the fourth episode of the "secondary" phase of programs.  Arthur Dent and his companions Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android land their probability-propelled spaceship in a mysterious white cave with smooth walls.  The cave turns out to be the Nutramatic cup.

Arthur falls from the cave and finds out about its origin from a bird-person on whose back he very improbably falls.  Here's the passage:

Arthur: "It looks like … like … just like a plastic cup hanging in the sky.  It's about a mile long."
Bird: "Looks like plastic.  Carved from solid marble there."
Arthur: "But the weight of it.  What's supporting it?  What keeps it there?"
Bird: "Art."
Arthur: "Art?"
Bird: "It's only part of the main statue.  Fifteen miles high. It's directly behind us but I'll circle round in a moment."
Arthur: "Fifteen miles high?"
Bird: "Very impressive from up here with the morning sun gleaming on it."
Arthur: "But what is it.  What's worth a statue 15 miles high?"
Bird: "It was of great symbolic importance to our ancestors.  It's called Arthur Dent Throwing the Nutramatic Cup."
Arthur: "Sorry, what did you say?"
Bird: "There.  What do you think of it?"

Not enough space or time in this post to explain the entire origin story of the statue of Arthur throwing the cup.  It's quality Douglas Adams.  There's the "Shoe Event Horizon", the Lintilla clones and the Dolmansaxlil Galactic Shoe Corporation publicity film.  Great stuff.

Meanwhile, back here in Los Angeles we will soon have our own floating rock, Levitated Mass.  As mentioned, the rock will be held up by a contraption of concrete and steel. Here's a video showing the trench in its early stages:

The Los Angeles rock will, clearly, not be held up by "art" as Magritte's castle or the Nutramatic cup are. Nor will it float because of any sort of religious faith. It will appear to float by virtue of some sort of optical illusion.  Shortly Los Angeles will discover just how good that illusion is.

It is fair to wonder what the illusion will mean.  I assume that like most art this piece is supposed to have some sort of meaning.  The word monumental is used quite a lot.  Levitated Mass is a monument, I guess.  Monuments are supposed to memorialize things.  And Levitated Mass does.  Here's a quote from a LACMA press release:

It is dedicated to the memory of Nancy Daly, former chair of LACMA’s board of trustees and an influential advocate for children and the arts in Los Angeles.

Nancy died in 2010 and Levitated Mass was conceived of in 1968.  So Nancy Daly is not an intrinsic part of the artistic experience.  She's someone important to the funding.  That's arts reality.

The press release also informs us:

Taken whole, Levitated Mass speaks to the expanse of art history—from ancient traditions of creating artworks from monolithic stones, to modern forms of abstract geometries and cutting-edge feats of engineering.

Ah! So maybe Levitated Mass is a modern day Stonehenge or  Chichen Itza - but one without any astronomical relationship.  That's because you can't see many stars from the Wilshire district.

Maybe it's an abstract geometric work - one which will inspire onlookers to consider its aesthetic form and artistic composition.  Probably not.  It's mostly just a found object - a random, if very large, rock that the artist convinced certain powerful people would look good from underneath.

If nothing else, Levitated Mass will cause us to wonder what we might have done with an extra $10,000,000.

Mostly it will become a conundrum for passers-by who will ask "What's that rock doing there?"  Maybe rock climbers will use it for practice.  It will also be a great target for taggers.

Maybe someday, hundred of years from now, when the steel and concrete under the rock have crumbled, and the people of LA have forgotten the spectacle of moving it through the streets and no one even remembers that LACMA ever existed, and if it hasn't sunk into the tar pits, someone will rediscover the art of stone sculpture and carve faces in the rock.

Those faces could be recognizable ones from late 20th and early 21st century Los Angeles:  faces most likely to survive in popular culture for generation after generation.  I suggest Mickey Mouse, Michael Jackson, Kim Kardashian and O.J. Simpson.

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Here's Eagle Rock, an inspiring natural fixture quite near to Pasadena.  The rock doesn't float in the air - but it reminds us of animals who do.  It would cost much more than $10 mil to move.

The picture came from here.

Rolling Rock Tags: Levitated Mass. . . Michael Heizer. . . LACMA. . . Rene Magritte. . . Douglas Adams. . . big money art. . . Los Angeles monuments

Banksy Speaks

Banksy is the name of an anonymous artist.  At this moment this little essay about advertising, attributed to him and probably from his book Wall and Piece, gets 4500 hits on Google.  I found it here first.

His point of view will not make capitalists happy - and I think that is a good thing.

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

- Banksy

These images come from Banksy's website.  (I'd like to have this one on my office wall, especially if turning the handle actually produced some sort of liquid.)

Here's another Banksy quote:

We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.

Banksy, Wall and Piece  

And another:

I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time. 

Banksy

Lots more quotes here and here.
Banksy appeared tangentially in Mixed Meters once before, here.

Can't resist.  One more quote:

One Original Thought is worth 1000 Meaningless Quotes.― Banksy

Banksy Tags: Banksy. . . copyright. . . advertising

Music that Moves

Here are three videos. Each in it's own way pushes the art of music notation to the breaking point. Fun stuff.

First, a piano piece even Lang Lang could't play - unless he became a computer:

Ever heard of Ferninand Ries? Neither have I. But, judging by this, his music can be a real thrill ride:

Finally: a new form of computer-aided tablature. All you have to do in order to perform this drum solo yourself is to follow the moving lines with your own sticks. But be quick about it.

Read about this video.

Dots and Lines Tags: Music Notation. . . computer music notation

Drink Musical Wines

Like to drink while you listen to music?  Maybe a little libation helps you enjoy your favorite pieces even more?  Here are pictures of six wines and one vodka with music-related names: diva, toccata, cantora ("singer" in Spanish), dynamic, mambo, symphony and Chopin.

I bet these drinks help increase both your buzz and your musical appreciation.

Or not.

Posting pictures of products and businesses and whatever with music-related names is an occasional Mixed Meters tradition.  See all similar posts by clicking this link.

Wine Tags: wine. . . musical terms. . . product names

Moby, Duck

Behold the rubber duck. Plastic.  Bright yellow. Wide-eyed.  Buoyant.  Innocent.  Squeezable.  Sensuous with its bright tumescent lips.  A modern icon of the rituals of childhood bathing.

The very first picture I ever posted on my Tumblr blog, Mixed Messages, was of three little rubber duckies, each one riding in an empty cat food tin floating over our kitchen counter. That was on May 8, 2007. Amazingly, nearly 5 years later, these duckies in their protective cans still grace our kitchen, survivors of countless cleanings and purges.  Why haven't we tossed them into the garbage?  I wonder what mysterious rubber duckie enchantment has enabled them to survive so long.

Twenty years ago last month, somewhere in the vast Pacific ocean, a huge ship piled high with containers (containers are the business end of a semi-trailer truck which, divorced of chassis and cab, hitch rides on trains and boats and can be filled with anything; the essential tool for providing Americans with cheap foreign merchandise) endured a powerful storm.  Containers fell overboard disgorging their innards into the water.

And so it happened that out of one such fallen container spilled 7200 boxes of plastic Chinese-made children's bath toys destined for sale to parents of American children in need of bathtime amusement.  Each box contained a red beaver, a green frog, a blue turtle and, yes, a yellow duck.  These critters proceded to follow a new destiny as they floated away on the ocean currents.  The toys had found a bathtub rather larger than anyone might have imagined.

Eventually some of them washed up on beaches where they were found by humans.  Certain of these humans become obsessed with tracking the toy's voyages.  One such human (Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer) is shown in this picture with a full set of the escaped toys on his arm.

A different human chose to detail his obsession in a book called Moby-Duck.  The subtitle reveals much:

The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

To me this sounded like it might be an interesting read.  I had heard stories of these drifting bath toys from my resident marine biologist, Leslie, who mentions them in her talks on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - an area of the North Pacific not far from the toy spill where, thanks to ocean currents, vast amounts of human trash reside permanently.  Leslie has even travelled to the area on NOAA expeditions.

Herman Melville published Moby-Dick just about a century before I was born.  It is a story of obsession and revenge.  Poor Captain Ahab obsessively sets sail on the dangerous oceans seeking revenge on the white whale, Moby Dick, which had stolen his leg, eventually allowing the colorless beast to get the rest of him as well ... and not a moment too soon.

I first encountered excerpts from Moby-Dick in my hated high school English class.  I immediately, and accurately, predicted that I would never have the interest or patience to read the whole book.  I suppose this was an early example of my lifelong dislike of interminable nineteenth century art.

The author of Moby-Duck, it turns out, was not an avid beachcomber, a professional oceanographer nor a life-long environmentalist.   He was, instead, a high school English teacher who chose to cast himself in the role of Ahab and to play his part against not a white whale but a horde of plastic ducks, frogs, turtles and beavers.  Turns out that the author himself is the real subject of his book.

Instead of setting forth on a whaling vessel the author of Moby-Duck seeks his quarry by voyaging on

• a coastal ferry in Alaska on his way to beachcomb for toys, 
• a research catamaran documenting plastic contamination off Hawaii, 
• a refurbished yacht on a mission to clean garbage from remote beaches, 
• a container ship braving Pacific storms as it brings us more crap from China, 
• a research vessel studying ocean currents off Greenland, 
• and finally, because the poor floating toys just might have found their way through the Arctic into the north Atlantic (but probably didn't), on a Canadian icebreaker as it traverses the Northwest Passage.

Along the way the author picks up trash.  He attends a toy convention.  He visits the very factory where the toys were made.  He discusses ocean currents, our wasteful society, photographs of bald eagles, types of plastic, maritime law, childhood.  He tells stories of his family, his health and his students.  And he writes about other books besides Moby-Dick - books which I certainly will never have the interest or patience to read.

Along the way he meets many colorful characters, whom he describes colorfully.  He carefully details his many largely adventureless adventures.  He wanders off topic.  He tries valiantly to tie everything together.  He weaves a seemingly endless tapestry of verbal flotsam and jetsam.  Or, possibly, he creates a huge garbage patch of beautiful literary tapestries floating on endless waves of words.  So many words, in fact, that the author's most meandering asides are banished to footnotes at the back of the book where they are set in smaller type presumably to shorten the book by a few pages without leaving anything out.  There are no pictures save for the cover - which shows a familiar rubber duckie, not one of those lost-at-sea ducks which the book was ostensibly about.

All in all, I came to think of Moby-Duck as the worlds longest magazine article, bright and cheery, plotless, nearly pointless, perfect for coffee shop or doctors' office reading.   I could pick it up briefly and then put aside for days or weeks during which time I found myself wondering why I didn't put it back on the shelf and read something else.

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Confused about why the title, Moby-Duck, has a hyphen in it?  That's because Melville's book, Moby-Dick, has a hyphen.  Confused about why Moby-Dick, the title, is hyphenated but, Moby Dick, the name of the whale, is not?  Read this.

Moby Tags: Moby-Dick. . . Moby-Duck. . . bath toys