Five things I now know...

...after re-watching and web-stalking "The Sound of Music"

(1) Edelweiss is not a traditional Austrian song, or even popular there. The song was written for the musical. This is crushing news, as if learning that "America the Beautiful" was really done as a 1870's French rock song.

(2) The musical is loosely based on the real Von Trapp Family Singers. There was a real Maria von Trapp?! Yes, there was. And she wrote a whole damn book about it -- plus had two movies done about her story previous to this film. This website gives the real backstory of the von Trapps.

(3) Who can forget the stunning blue eyes of Charmian Carr as Liesl? I'd read somewhere that her eyes really are that blue but re-watching the movie, that hue seems unearthly.

Charmian pretty much stepped away from films after the Sound of Music -- she too has written a book about her experiences. She became a close friend and interior designer to Michael Jackson -- designing for him a "mannequin room." Yeah, don't ask.

(4) "During the Cold War, in the event of a nuclear strike on the United Kingdom, the BBC planned to broadcast The Sound of Music on radio as part of an emergency timetable of programmes designed to 'reassure' the public in the aftermath of the attack."

I wonder what the United States has/had planned, "It's A Wonderful Life?" Or that other American classic, "The Day the Earth Caught Fire?"

(5) The entire musical has about five songs played on loop. I thought I just happened to remember all the classics because they were the classics; overlooking the other songs from the film. But no, I remember those five songs because they were driven into my head from repeated exposure. Not that I minded this, but I didn't realize how many times "Do-Re-Mi" or "My Favorite Things" was played throughout the movie. No wonder the thing ran three hours.

Apparently, a cinema in Hong Kong had thought the movie was too long and cut out all the musical numbers. Just "The Sound" was enough for the Chinese.

It's a gift, to be able to watch these seminal films with fresh eyes -- not a gift I was given however. Not many people I know have never seen Star Wars, The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz, etc. as a kid. I like sharing these movies with them to see their responses. Is the experience still magical? Or merely good?

Cover Art

"Today, the art of the magazine cover has been vanquished by celebrity worship and bad taste. Designers are simply fulfilling the dictates of their industry, not unlike the paint person on an auto assembly line.

Innovation, creative expression, or even cleverness has been mostly abandoned. Artistic considerations are limited to how much retouching the celebrity headshot requires in Photoshop and how many headlines can be crammed in before the cover looks too 'busy.'

The result: A world in which it's difficult to tell the difference between Playboy and Harper's Bazaar without cracking them open."
-The Decline of Western Magazine Design-

Oh, The Places You'll Go

I've been trying to organize and start up a book swap for months. I decided to harness the power of craigslist to gather my fellow book readers. I put up an ad for the South Bay area and got enough responses to know that this was a good idea. However, I needed to kick things up a notch and so joined meetup.com for the express purpose of organizing a book swap focused on my area (Fremont, CA).

Worked like a charm. Organizing the meetup was easy, getting people interested was easy, and we were on our way. But wait. The first meeting, scheduled for December, fell through due to holiday scheduling. Then the backup date, in January, didn't work out because I went to Los Angeles.

I had one meetup member quit the "group." It hurt like losing a teammate in Survivor. Despite never having met these people (or even knowing what they looked like), I had become quite attached to the usernames that populated my group. When I lost that member I thought my leadership skills were being questioned and that I would soon be sent into the Gauntlet. Okay, not that dramatic, but close.

I finally got an honest to goodness meetup planned and committed to and last Saturday, it happened. And it was magical, just like the anti-prom! But more on that later.

First, why a book swap and not a book club? Book clubs are a long and messy affair. It takes a long time to find the optimum group of people. In San Diego, I had a great book club, but it took two years or more to distill to the proper taste. A book swap is designed for easy in, easy out. People show up, swap stories, swap suggestions, swap books. Done. Finito.

It's more personable than a library and you get to talk to nice, interesting people. Plus, who doesn't like to see what people would select with a "first round draft pick?" Does he go for "DaVinci Code" or the lesser known but highly recommended "High Fidelity?" See what I mean? It's fun, literary style.

The February book swap was a smashing success and despite not enough participants to actually conduct an organized swap, it was two hours worth of good conversation and exciting people. I loved it. So, more next month and we'll see if we can't get this book swap not only off the ground but perhaps transformed into a book club!

Movie Machine

"What Goldman was saying was a version of something that has long been argued about art: that there is no way of getting beyond one's own impressions to arrive at some larger, objective truth. There are no rules to art, only the infinite variety of subjective experience. 'Beauty is no quality in things themselves,' the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. 'It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.' Hume might as well have said that nobody knows anything.

But Hume had a Scottish counterpart, Lord Kames, and Lord Kames was equally convinced that traits like beauty, sublimity, and grandeur were indeed reducible to a rational system of rules and precepts. He devised principles of congruity, propriety, and perspicuity: an elevated subject, for instance, must be expressed in elevated language; sound and signification should be in concordance; a woman was most attractive when in distress; depicted misfortunes must never occur by chance.

He genuinely thought that the superiority of Virgil's hexameters to Horace's could be demonstrated with Euclidean precision, and for every Hume, it seems, there has always been a Kames -- someone arguing that if nobody knows anything it is only because nobody's looking hard enough."
-Malcolm Gladwell, The Formula-

The Bloggies

The nominations for the 2007 Bloggies, the Academy Awards of the blogosphere, have been unveiled! This is the seventh year the Bloggies will be handing out cash prizes (sometimes up to $25 or more) and bestowing recognition upon the worthy. This is a great place to find blogs that have already been reader-tested and fan-approved. Go there to vote for the coveted "Weblog of the Year" and make your voice heard.

Only you can prevent forest fires!

Welcome

To the new and improved jonyang.org. We've got a lot of exciting things coming up right around the corner, won't you stick around?

For now, you know everyone loves the Oregon Trail right?