Messiaen = Prog ov the GodZoR
Ligeti = lame after he found fame (eg by the 80s)
Penderecki = mark-down Lutoslawski = Radiohead for strings
Ligeti and Penderecki hold a special place in my heart, prolly ’cos I’m an uncouth sod who don’t know music good — proper music, I mean, and I feel dead ignorant and embarrassed if I’m ever in a room with people talking up the category: 20th Century Composers Who Rate. Buuut … Ligeti, yeah, some of his stuff pinged me right, and same with Penderecki. I don’t have the education to appreciate, say, Messiaen, I mean, a lot of composers (or any other ‘canon’, theatre, art, opera, etc) don’t really open themselves up until you know a heap about what they’re saying, their context, the decades or centuries-long conversations (arguments) different composers and genres have with each other, so my first response to music is very emotional. Penderecki hit that. The strings in Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima or the whistling in St Luke Passion (I’m naming obvious ones here ’cos like I said, going deep in Western Classical music has never been easy for me), these, the sound, the emotion, I want to be buried in that. (Radiohead though, gotta say, fuck that basic noise.)
My fourth site to lurch livewards for the month, and the one longest coming. Thomas and I started working on this in late-2011, got mostly finished, took a long pause while he added quite a few projects in-between doing also quite a few projects, and we came back to it about a month ago and decided that we could wait forever or just arrive now.
In the last three days, I’ve done what is becoming a regular approach to the last bit before a site ceases to lurk and becomes public, which is to go through everything and make all the code coherent, add in anything new that has become standard, remove old stuff, and then completely strip the CSS before rebuilding it one section at a time. This last act usually removes a staggering amount of lines, gets rid of tiny weird problems, and generally smooths everything out so it’s not a couple of thousand lines of not really connected styles. It’s pretty methodical, like digging the garden, and fits my mania for as much cleaning up as possible.
And in eighteen months, that’s like a couple of decades in real life, so there was masses to change. One sad thing was the departure of WPAlchemy, which I’d been using as my always-use code for custom fields. It’s just not being developed as much as it used to, and the absence of repeating fields is something I can’t work with. So obviously I swapped the entire site over to Advanced Custom Fields (more digging of garden), which I feel vaguely confident will still be here in another two years. It’s actually brilliant and I can’t imagine doing a project without it.
Another big change was the rolling into Core of MediaElement.js, my favourite audio and video player (when I’m not using FlowPlayer, which doesn’t support audio anyway), which meant removing all my stuff that I’d set up to use this, and hooking into the core for all of Thomas’ audio and video — of which there is masses.
So, what else? Typography is using exlijbris’ Delicious family, which I find beautiful either for body or headlines; the M+ M Type 1 monospace, not sure when I discovered this, but it’s a very nice monospace; and a couple of occurrences of Genericons, which I find pretty useful for the slew of times icons are needed.
When I first began Thomas’ site, I was using jQuery to make images greyscale and then go colour on hover, which for some browsers (*cough*Safari) was mostly painful. Lucky in the intervening months pure CSS greyscale has become common enough to use, and it’s very nice (except in Firefox, which doesn’t animate the transition).
And then there’s all the loops for the individual projects pages, which hide sections if there’s no content (easy with ACF), and with the check of a box shift them around according to how wide the upper and lower rows (I call them ‘rooms’ …”Upper Room” harhar) are.
That’s about it. When I started it, I wasn’t doing any responsive design, and in the months since it’s become something I don’t even think about, it’s just part of the process, which means I suspect on some devices this site isn’t going to be so coherent. Maybe something to organise later, as making the horizontal layout collapse for smaller screens is fairly simple.
Fourth site for the month, then. The beautiful musician, composer, friend of dancers and choreographers who I really don’t see enough of (too much working to be hanging around in Berlin, where he doesn’t live anyway), Thomas Jeker now has a website where you can see what he’s been doing for the last several years, listen to his work and watch videos. I’d probably take an hour or so just to wander around: thomasjeker.ch.
Sometimes I feel as if everyone who made the world brilliant, whose lives and works simply took humanity to new places is slipping away, and we are only left with the detritus, the shadows and the gutter. Gyorgy Ligeti died on Monday this week.
As a man who grew up in Hungary under German and Soviet tyrannies, when home was exactly where you did not want to be, who moved to Western Europe after the Russians extinguished Hungarian independence, and who had been footloose ever since, Mr. Ligeti had no simple notion of where he belonged, and this feeling informed his work.
One movement in his Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano from 1982, for example, is composed, as he put it, of “an imaginary, synthetic folklore of Latin-American and Balkan elements”; another recalls “the Gypsy music which affected me so strongly as a child.”
What, Mr. Ligeti asked himself, is being expressed here: “Nostalgia for a homeland that no longer exists?” And there he put his finger on something: home is not just a place, but also a time.
