I'm a Monkey! Boo!

And I'm scary because I eat cheese, not bananas. Cheese!!!

New Review - Danny Elfman's "The Kingdom"

I must confess that with this review and the last one, I've reviewed back to back two of my favorite film scorers working today. And, unfortunately, in both cases they did not live up to expectations. Danny Elfman's new score for The Kingdom is perhaps the deepest cut of all because I was looking forward to his return to adult action-adventure movies after a few years of scoring children's films. But alas, he has descended into noodling. Interesting noodling, but noodling nonetheless. You can read all about it here.

Hey! Did you know this keyboard makes letters appear on the Computer Screen?

3 8 * - / E R , , D X B T FFY5JM N6HH

/[NJ

SAM

DADA

Okay, so that was all Sam. Now instead of asking to look at Blue Buses on the computer, which is still exciting, Sam has started begging to push letters on Mama's keyboard. Of course, this all started because I gave Sam an old keyboard to play with to keep him away from mine, and he immediately started declaring, "Look, Mama. There's a B." Then we started playing "find the letter" with Sam's keyboard, and now you can see how it's evolving. Now we open Word Documents, put on the caps lock and have fun exploring keys.

The Importance of Good Diction

When I was a choir director back in Champaign, I often told my choir members that they needed to over-enunciate their words to ensure the congregation understood the message we were attempting to impart. My favorite example of the strange mistakes in understanding caused by bad diction was always to sing them the opening line of "Lead On O King Eternal" and mumble enough so it came out "Lead On O Kinky Turtle."

Obviously someone in Britain thinks the same way I do and has posted this absolutely brilliant video that should be required viewing for all choir members:

Even watching the congregation's lips you would swear that they really were singing about Richard Gere. Anyone out there know what hymn they are actually singing?

A Happy Video for Your Friday

It has choo-choo trains! What could be better!

Harry Partch and the Sorcerers's Tone

I've long been aware of the distinct similarities of my studies of Harry Partch and my love of the Harry Potter novels. Many times I've stumbled and used one name for the other, most humorously in my graduate class one day. Well, I've learned I'm not alone - enter Uncyclopedia, the content-free wiki that deflates the pretensions of Wikipedia to authoritative knowledge with blistering acuity. Their entry on Harry Partch is a masterpiece of a mash-up between these two cultural icons. My only problem with it? No one has edited it with a name and synopsis of the final book. Harry Partch and the Deathly Harmonic Canons? Harry Partch and the Death of Hallowed Music? Add your own ideas in the comments, and I'll post the best along with a synopsis to the Uncyclopedia.

Hope You're Enjoying New Jersey

Yesterday morning I received one of those calls you hope you never receive. Chase came calling to let me know that my Visa had been used Monday evening in New Jersey. I suppose New Jersey is a bit out of my normal spending habits as is $800 at CVS and $600 at a convenience store. Thankfully, they caught the strange charges, called, and canceled the card before any more damages could be done. I have no idea how this person/these people got a hold of my card since Joy and I both still have our physical cards or a hold of my number since I'm careful to shred all documents related to it. Besides, that card is a backup and almost never used.

So, to the person who stole my card number and took it (of all places) to New Jersey: hope you enjoy what $800 can buy you at CVS. And hope they catch you soon.

I'd Hate to be Thirsty Nine

This morning at breakfast, I was putting Sam in his booster seat, trying to secure his squirming bottom, when he grabbed his juice and declared:

"Sam is thirsty too!"

I nodded, and agreed that he was, seeing that he had already downed half his glass that morning. Then he continued:

"and Dada is thirsty five!"

New Review - Alexandre Desplat's "Lust, Caution"

While waiting a few hours for my plane in Detroit, I managed to finish my latest review and get it posted. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (Sie Ji) is already generating controversy for its explicit sex scenes and its designation as originating in Taiwan, China, a sticky political situation to be sure. In my book, the more interesting controversy is how similar Alexandre Desplat's score for the movie sounds to his excellent The Painted Veil from last year. A bit less caution and a bit more daring on Desplat's part would have made this a more satisfying score.

Spring Dreams at the New Music Festival

This afternoon, I'm giving my presentation on exoticism and modern music. I thought you might be interested in my thoughts, at least as they relate to Chen Yi, a composer on our faculty back home and the guest composer at the festival this year.

"Modern society is like a great network of complex latitudes and attitudes – and despite their differences, all cultures, environments and conditions have something valuable to contribute to the whole. They keep changing all the time and interact with each other, so that each experience that we come across can become the source and exciting medium for our creation. In this sense, a composition reflects a composer’s cultural and psychological makeup." – Chen Yi in interview with John de Clef Piñeiro

Chen Yi was born into a musical family. Her mother and sister played piano and her father played violin. During dinner, the family would listen to classical recordings, and they attended weekly symphonic concerts, ballets from France, England, and the Soviet Union, and the ethnic song and dance shows from the Congo, Japan, and elsewhere that traveled through her hometown of Guangzhou. Hers was an eclectic musical upbringing that, much like Partch’s, crossed the line between East and West, between so-called high and low culture.

When the Cultural Revolution overtook China in the 1960s, Chen tried hard to continue her music studies, practicing violin at home with a heavy metal mute and piano with a blanket between the hammers and the steel frame. But in 1968, she was sent (along with her violin) to the countryside in order to be “re-educated” and perform forced labor. During this time she found her personal voice, later remarking that "In the countryside, I also found my own language when I realized that my mother tongue really is the same as what the farmers speak! I also found that when I translated it into music, it’s not the same as what I was practicing everyday! For this reason, I believe that I really need to study more deeply and extensively, and find a way to express myself in a way of real fusion of Eastern and Western musics in my music. The result should be a natural hybrid, and not an artificial or superficial combination....I think that my music is a kind of fusion and merger, a marriage of the consonant and dissonant, the tonal and atonal. It really sounds to me like speaking in Chinese, in a Chinese color, but it’s written in a Western music idiom."

Although she does quote from Chinese musical materials, she is more interested in reflecting an entire culture, not just a part of it. For this reason, when she approaches a vocal work, she delves into the depths of Chinese literature, finding words that can help her translate Chinese culture into musical form.

In order to understand the method of Chen Yi’s, shall we call it neo-exoticism, I want to briefly look at her a cappella work for chorus that will be performed here at the festival, Spring Dreams. The text was written by the T’ang poet Meng Hao-ran, and although Chen is writing for the traditionally Western ensemble of SATB chorus, she keeps the text in its original language, providing a pronunciation guide for the singers. This simple choice has profound consequences on the work’s overall form. The piece is built upon layers of ostinati, as is typical of much of her work. The altos and tenors enter with short nonsense syllables of strong consonants and vowels that are performed as breathy unpitched speech. By the time the basses enter whistling in imitation of bird calls a minute into the work, the audience feels surrounded by birds and insects calling to each other on an early spring morning. The text finally enters last in the sopranos, floating above the cacophony with a melody that in its contour and sound mimics, but does not quote, the sound of Jingju, Beijing Opera. Sonically marking the texted line by putting it in the upper voices and setting it to a recognizable melody allows Western audiences to distinguish that line as carrying the text; otherwise the nonsense syllables could be construed as bits of the Chinese language. Futhermore, by using a Jingju-like melody, Chen highlights the practice in that tradition of crafting new words to match pre-existing melodies in contour and linguistic tone, a connection that would have been lost had the poem been translated.

The total affect of the work’s first half is achieved through heterophony, a dominant organizational principle of Chinese music, especially the music of the regional operatic styles. In the work’s second half, the music becomes much more Western and chordal, as though upon awakening, the poem’s speaker realizes that he has been in a Chinese dream and is back in the Western tradition. The voices begin moving in homophony, building clear chords while the nonsense syllables are relegated to one tenor voice. However, traces of East Asia remain in the construction of those chords which undermine triadic tonality in their quartal and quintal formations. Chen operates in a Western mold while refusing to capitulate to its most basic and foundational practice, the creation of the triad.



Throughout this work and others, Chen Yi operates like a conceptually exotic composer firmly writing in a Western style influenced by an East Asian one, but the outcome is quite different because of Chen’s unique background as an Asian composer trained in China and the West who now presents back to the West its own music fundamentally altered. Yo Everett terms this type of exoticism synthesis, where it is difficult to see where one culture fades into another and you wonder if the struggle to find the individual strands enriches or diminishes the whole.

How, then, are we to hear this new type of exoticism? I believe we need a new formulation or at least a new addition to our discussions of exoticism. In challenging Edward Said’s original construction of Orientalism, Michael Richardson writes: “The problem here is that if reciprocity between subject and object is impossible, then, by the same token, the object cannot challenge the subject by developing alternative models.” This notion of reciprocity is key in understanding the currents of exoticism that are evident in our examples. Although questions of power invariably must come into the discussion, we cannot forget that once Western musical culture has been imposed, it can be taken and twisted back upon itself to create new spaces for dialogue. Think, for example, of a composer like Chen Yi. She has lived in the United States for over twenty years and is fully conversant in America’s cultural perspectives. Can we truly consider her an East Asian composer any more? If not, what do we consider her? In response, I can do no better than offer you her own words: “I think music could become a bridge between peoples from different cultural traditions. I hope that it can be inspiring and helpful to improve the level of understanding between peoples from different parts of the world. The answer to which culture she represents is “yes.” Chen Yi and other East Asian composers currently working in the Western world offer us a new answer to our old exoticism questions, one based in the music itself: through the act of creating and sharing in the listening experience, we begin to create our identities anew, outside of the lens of oppressive exoticism. Social science literature is full of theories of identity development and the ways in which healing between races and cultures can begin when we reconstruct our personal and professional identities in authentic ways that do not participate in the dialogue of oppression. Through the act of offering this music, Chen Yi speaks through her own unique identity and asks us to look anew at ourselves and our relationship with others; the act of listening to her music cannot help but begin the process.

Even Goths Need Security

This morning, I arose early to travel to Bowling Green, Ohio, where I've been invited to give a paper on Orientalism in new music as part of the Bowling Green State University New Music and Art Festival. I'll have more stories to share later about my experiences at the festival, but I wanted to grace you with a marvelous encounter I had this morning on my flight to Detroit. I was sitting next to a young woman who was quite Goth, with the died black hair (with a carefully placed strand of pink), dark clothes, and multiple piercings in her nose, lips, and tongue. She was cordial and quiet, a good seatmate for a 2 hour plane ride, but what struck me was her iPod. When the flight attendants announced that portable electronics were now permitted, we both whipped out our iPods (hers was black of course) and began to scroll for tunes. Once hers was playing, she turned it over and I noticed a large sticker with a bullseye on it. Curious, I looked closer and saw that she had not only bought her iPod at Target, but had also purchased the extended warranty on it.

Goths need long-term security too.

Worst Songs Ever Inspire Thoughts About Music's Power

Recently, Blender.com (which loves nothing more than making lists and ranking songs) decided to tackle the 50 worst songs of all time. Their scientific methodology for arriving at said songs? Evidently they got a bunch of writers in a room together and vamped on what songs annoy them the most today and which they are most ashamed of having liked before. How else do you explain that almost every song on the list is a former number one? And how else do you explain Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" being one number away from Color Me Badd's (the extra "D" is because they're extra bad) “I Wanna Sex You Up”?

The list has provided many minutes of rumination around our house, mostly revolving around the inclusion of Bobby McFerrin at number seven (!) with "Don't Worry Be Happy." We love Bobby McFerrin around our house, and are baffled at how anyone could not love a video that stars Robin Williams and Bill Irwin and was the first a capella pop song to chart at number one? Still, the real reason we love Bobby McFerrin is because of a solo concert we attended a few years ago at which he did this:



Audience participation and imparting a love of music in this manner is an amazing gift. He creates community out of a huge group of people, and I challenge you to watch this or, better yet, attend a concert and not get chills at moments like this one. He truly demonstrates the power of music.

Filling the Wall - Built in Bookshelves

Back in August, I mentioned that I was building built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace in our living room. We had some bookshelves that I had thrown together in grad school and they fit in the area we had available and looked fine there, but being Granades, we needed more space for our books. Here's what we originally had:
So in early August, I measured and schemed and came up with a plan for five shelves for books and sundry other artifacts that reached to the ceiling anchored by larger cabinets underneath. I took the old bookshelves downstairs and put in temporary cabinets that are now next to my side of our bed, because Joy was hosting a baby shower and needed something to fill the space. It looks a little strange without any shelves there (but you can see the normal state of our living room with toys strewn everywhere) and we lived that way for about a month.

When the cabinets and shelves were done, I pulled up the carpet, took off the baseboards, and put the cabinets in place, carefully replacing the baseboards on the cabinet's front and relaying a bit of carpet. I then built the bookshelves right into the wall and painted the entire thing. We lived with open shelves most of September until two weeks ago, with the help of a good friend with great tools, I got the doors finished. Just yesterday Joy picked out hardware for the cabinets and we can finally declare the entire project done. I don't think Joy was expecting how long the project would take, but she's pleased with the results:

The Rest is Noise

Just a quick link for you to enjoy. Every day in my job I fight against the prejudice of musicians against music from the past century. While Jackson Pollack's and Robert Rauschenberg's paintings sell for millions and contemporary literature is consumed every day, contemporary music seems to languish because people just don't know about it. I'm always amazed to watch how any non-musician students are immediately excited by modern music more than that of the classical period.

One of my favorite writers on contemporary music is Alex Ross (no, not that Alex Ross), the music reviewer for the New Yorker. He has a new book out this month (and if you're shopping for Christmas presents for me, here's a big hint) that beautifully places music of the past century in its historical, cultural, political context. He talked a bit about the phobia towards music from the past 100 years this afternoon on All Things Considered and you should really give it a listen.

Thoughts on Diversity - You Can't Teach What You Don't Know

This year I'm participating in a workshop series offered by my campus aimed at helping us infuse diversity into our classrooms. The idea is to help us develop an ideological as well as practical framework for moving beyond simply tacking on diversity to our classes to having it threaded throughout. I'm reminded of the old Grout/Palisca A History of Western Music where they wanted to add diversity and so stuck an extra chapter at the end on American music. The underlying meaning was if you had time to get there, great, but you needed to get through the important stuff first.

I've been wrestling with how to do this successfully in my own survey of Western music and how to deal with issues of power structures in music for some time so the workshops have been interesting to me. We had reading assignments for tomorrow, including the book You Can't Teach What You Don't Know, and we had to write a reaction essay. I thought others might find it interesting and perhaps thought provoking as well, so I offer my response to the text:

Perhaps it is because I have a 2-year-old at home who is obsessed with trains, constantly crashing them, taking them apart, and putting them back together, or perhaps it is just the beauty of the phrase, but Gary Howard’s description of the mental state that occurs in White teachers when we begin to confront the legacy of our privilege as a “train wreck in the mind” has resonated throughout me for several days. Elsewhere in his book We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know he describes the experience of Whites recognizing White privilege as fish realizing they are swimming in water, and while a beautiful metaphor, it does not hold the same power for me. I believe my attraction to the phrase exists because it more accurately describes my current state as a teacher and human – I recognize and have long recognized that I am swimming in the wide ocean of White privilege, but I haven’t allowed the train of my life to come off the tracks enough to being to be a solution to the problem. I haven’t allowed my knowledge to crash through into experience.

We live in an age where White men and women are beginning to push back against the sea of change that has engulfed our nation over the past forty years. Many of us as White educators have felt so put upon by the emphasis on multicultural education, have felt so blamed for the sins of our fathers, that we have begun reacting negatively against implementation of this type of equality. This reaction is most notably present in the linguistically interesting phrase “reverse discrimination,” where we take up the blame game and point the finger back at other races, claiming that they are now discriminating against us. To justify this stance, I have heard my colleagues say, and have said myself, that I am a colorbind teacher, treating all my students equally, so why can’t everyone else. My personal mantra has been that race is a social construct and we are moving past it. But as Gary Howard so eloquently points out, such stances are merely symptoms of our engrained privilege:

Many privileges have come to Whites simply because we are members of the dominant group: the privilege of having our voices heard, of not having to explain or defend our legitimate citizenship or identity, of seeing our images projected in a positive light, of remaining insulated from other people’s realities, of being represented in positions of power, and of being able to tell our own stories. These privileges are usually not earned and often not consciously acknowledged. That our privileged dominance often threatens the physical and cultural well-being of other groups is a reality that Whites, for the most part, have chosen to ignore. The fact that we can choose to ignore such realities is perhaps our most insidious privilege. (Howard, 66)

I appreciated Howard’s approach because he was able to short-circuit knee-jerk reactions to the laying of blame and move on towards a goal of healing. My train has stayed firmly on the track of White privilege even while I decried its effects because I felt blamed. I’ve been stuck in what he labels the “Disintegration stage,” where I’ve been attempting to create the illusion that racism is a construct that can be overcome without direct action by ignoring it. But both race and racism are reality for most people in our country and need to be addressed. We need to see people for who they are, and by claiming that we are colorblind, we are in effect saying we cannot see them. The way forward, at least according to Howard, is the personal creation of an authentic White identity that acknowledges the reality of personal, cultural, and institutional racism and seeks to learn from all groups of people while developing deep personal relationships and interactions with people “across the boundaries of difference.” This notion was a great source of healing and a breakthrough in my thinking. I’m not sure at this point if I fully agree with all his stages of the development of White identity, but I do recognize the potential power in the outcome. It was encouraging and inspiring to believe that teaching actually can make a dent in the hegemonic culture we currently sustain, to see ways to make my teaching effective for all races, genders, and orientations that walk into my classroom, and to know that I can begin breaking down dominance by giving voice to all students and learning from them as much as they learn from me. Forming a way of teaching, and indeed any personal relationship, that is authentic, culturally responsive, and culturally competent is a high goal, but Howard’s great gift in his book is to demonstrate a way to approach it with grace and humility.

Does anything beat a Thomas the Train (tm) birthday?

There are few things in life as full of joy as a 2-year-old's birthday party. We had all of Sam's grandparents and his Aunt Heather here for the weekend and had a great time. On Friday, we went to Kindermusik in the morning and to Fritz's Train Restaurant for dinner. At the restaurant, a model train that runs around the ceiling brings your food to the table, and Sam could barely sit still and eat for watching all the trains run. The next morning, we went to Carolyn's Country Cousin's Pumpkin Patch. They have a train you can ride (are you sensing a pattern here?) and animals you can pet and feed and tractors you can ride and slides you can, um, slide. All in all, a perfect playground for Sam and he did not stop running the entire time we were there. After his nap, we opened presents and had chocolate cake, the first time Sam had ever had chocolate. He was so excited Saturday night that we could barely get him into bed.

Below you see Sam enjoying his new Thomas the Train Lego set. Click on the picture for more fun pictures from this weekend.

Ninja Musicians

I promise to post about Sam's birthday soon and get pictures of the weekend and our new shelves up as well, but for right now, here's your quick mood lifter of the day:

Jamie Foxx, Oscar-winning actor and classically-trained pianist, has recently begun learning to play the violin and cello for his next film, The Soloist, where he plays Nathaniel Ayers, a young musician who developed schizophrenia in his second year at Juilliard and ended up homeless on the streets of L.A. In an interview with The Daily Record (reported by none other than Siobhan Synnot) he described his cello teacher in this way: "The guy who shows up to show me how to play the cello is nothing like what I expected. I thought it would be a stiff guy. But my guy is like a Ninja cellist."

Oh, the mind boggles at what his next movie project could be...

New Review - Kevin Riepl's "Gears of War"

After the light and fluffy No Reservations I posted last week, I must have felt the need for some dark apocalypse brought on by giant mutant insects on a far away planet. That's right, I've posted my first official review of a video game score for Epic's Gears of War. With all the hype over Halo 3 in the past few weeks, it seemed the right time to delve into this newly emerging genre that has already produced composers like Michael Giacchino of Ratatouille fame. So, enjoy!

106 Books: The Kansas City Granade Edition

Yesterday, Misty posted a blog entry about the 106 books most marked as unread by LibraryThing users. She listed it on her site with the books she's read in bold, the ones she's started and not finished in italics, and all others in normal typeface.

"Interesting list," I thought as I read it, and then promptly moved on.

"I should do it too!" thought Joy as she read it, and then promptly made her own list. Bowing to peer pressure, I made my list too. Here are the results:

Joy's List:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and peace
Vanity fair
The time traveler’s wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The kite runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great expectations
American gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & demons
The inferno
The satanic verses
Sense and sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels
Les misérables
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas
The confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger abbey
The catcher in the rye
On the road
The hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s rainbow
The Hobbit
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

And Andrew's List:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and peace
Vanity fair
The time traveler’s wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The kite runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great expectations
American gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & demons
The inferno
The satanic verses
Sense and sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels
Les misérables
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas
The confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger abbey
The catcher in the rye
On the road
The hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s rainbow
The Hobbit
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I'd post Sam's list, but it is noticeably void of bold, unless you count Veggie Tales versions of The Grapes of Wrath

How Much Would You Pay for Beethoven's Hair?

I recently discovered the LifeGem. As a culture, we've tried to cheat death in so many different ways, that it makes sense that something like this would come along. For a mere $3,500, you can order a .2 carat diamond made out of a bit of your loved one (and for $20,000 you can get a full carat to show you truly cared for your loved one). "How does this happen?" you might ask. LifeGem takes a lock of hair you provide and, using a carbon capture and purification process, turn that hair into a diamond. That's right, a diamond made out of bits of people (soylent diamonds, anyone?). Instead of putting Aunt Maude on the mantel, you can wear her around your neck.

As if that isn't strange enough, to publicize their business, LifeGem recently auctioned a diamond made from Beethoven's hair on Ebay. Originally they wanted to auction it for $1,000,000, but I suppose since it was one of three in the world, fans could only muster $202,700 for it.

This cult of Beethoven that began in the Romantic period shows no sign of abating. How is it that a short, grumpy, deaf man who lived in Vienna 200 years ago is still held up as the pinnacle of our artistic heritage? I'm not denying that Beethoven was a brilliant composer, but it fascinates me how every composer since has felt bound to either confirm or deny Beethoven's influence on their work. He is regularly heralded as the greatest composer of great composers by people who quite possibly have never heard any of his music completely as he wrote it. Entire websites are devoted to locks of his hair. And now some lucky winner is going to get to have Beethoven around his or her finger. It is truly an intriguing phenomenon.

Does our obsession with the cult of celebrity have no end?