Author: Terrie Chen

That morning, when she wipes at the frosty window with a sleeve, the oddly bruised dawn light and hazy purple of the hills beyond beckons.

Come, come.

So on go the jacket and the grubby boots by the door, and the lock catches with a soft snick. She gets on the number seventy-nine down the road. It winds its way out of town, leaving behind the houses and the shops and the people trudging up the street. Today, it’s just her and an old man wearing a pair of field glasses over his flannel, just the two of them and the driver. The bus climbs up the quiet lane and around the bend, and soon enough, they’re deposited into an empty gravel lot. She stands, uncertain, for a minute in the chill air. The old man has already started down the lane, and that’s not what she’s looking for.

But- ah! That, that is. There’s a stile half-hidden in the scrubby little trees on the far side of the lot. She plants a foot on the worn step, swings herself over, and hops down into a grassy field, onto a much-trodden path. No one else is here, though, and the road is already invisible from here. She follows it up the ridge for a while, while empty real soccer predictions fields slope down one side, and long grasses flank the other. There would be something, eventually. Now there are cows. She pauses at the fence, observing them for a moment, while they gaze back at her with ruminant disinterest- it’s very quiet up here, and it feels odd that she could be not entirely alone.

It is some time, then, before she makes it up to the crest of this ridge. And here the land drops away before her, down to the lowlands where homesteads and farmsteads lie scattered. The air is brightening, the odd hue from the early morning leeching away and giving way to a soft, opaque blue-grey that blankets the distance in uncertain certainty. She imagines, on a clear day, that you’d be able to see clear to the sea, the city glittering on the coast, the hilly land a study in early morning contrasts, burnished bronze and deep powdery shadows.

A full preview for The Hobbit‘s new, yet to be released soundtrack was out recently- and  it is everything I’d hoped it’d be.

Howard Shore, who composed the music for Lord of the Rings, got things just right ten years ago and is doing just the same now. His iconic score, evocative and magnificent, opens up in the right places, stretches and builds, glides back down, is dark or brilliant or stately or hopeful or whatever it needs to be when it needs to be. There’s somehow almost always a sense of age, even in the lighter bits, of some underlying culture and knowledge or dignity. Sometimes, the music really does read like a wide-angle pan over the New Zealand landscape.

The score for The Hobbit loses none of the feeling, none of the nuanced technical skill. It retains nostalgically recognizable themes from the original trilogy, reminding the audience that they are still in the same world. There has to be continuity, naturally, for the characters belong to the same histories as the ones we know from the best soccer predictions present-day Middle-Earth we know from the Lord of the Rings. Yet there is of course new music, for different characters and a different story altogether. Some of the tracks are very fresh, and surprisingly so in their ability to explore a different feel and sound. Even the new material, however, blends seamlessly.

Howard Shore masterfully incorporates elements of both old and new into a cohesive work that covers new ground without abandoning the familiar. The level of attention paid to every detail and nuance finds a natural fit with Peter Jackson’s cinematic translation and complements the fruits of Tolkien’s extensive world-building. There is approximately an hour and forty-five minutes of music for this first of three installments of the The Hobbit, and every minute of it, I think, is worth the listen.

We are always in search of the perfect writing environment, for that one place that will let us finally get down to writing that novel. But it’s elusive, that place. You have the right lighting, your own nook in that little coffeeshop, new pens and a leatherbound journal, pristine pages waiting for inspiration to strike. Yet it never quite comes. There’s always something else happening. Commitments, distractions, other things that can be, ought to be, need to be done. So how? How does the great American novel begin?

There is no universal answer, of course. Getting the words down on paper is the most important part, and often the most difficult. Resist the urge to edit on the spot. No-one needs to hear all these trite bits of advice again, though. What we want to know is how? Where? Is there a better way to get started, to make progress?

Zenwriter, for starters, is a free program that comes as close to replicating ideal writing conditions as I’ve ever seen. It’s simple, text on a pleasantly faded or dimmed background. The unobstrusive text-only menu fades when not in use. There are options for typing sounds (typewriter) and background music (ambient). It autosaves. (But please back up your work anyway.) The great thing about this is that it football predictions site ever fills up the entire screen- there is no start menu, no desktop unless you minimize, a greatly reduced temptation to draw up other windows and multitask. Its aesthetically pleasing minimalist design is not just task-oriented and distraction-reducing, but attention-retaining; it may not suit each and every single one of us, but it does certainly live up to its name.

To complement, there is Rainy Mood, which, for those who find the sound of rain and the occasional distant rumble of thunder soothing, will provide a textured, low-key white noise (that can be layered under sad music, for that extra kick). And if you’re writing a novel or some sort of story, there are resources everywhere. Like here. And here.

National Novel Writing Month (which, by the way, will also help provide that driving impetus to get on that writing) is halfway done. Sit down and get to work.

Fractals are generally considered highly mathematical, geometrically based structures, computer-generated and precisely constructed. But they are present everywhere, everywhere. These infinitely recurring patterns, in which structures are constructed of smaller versions of themselves, which are in turn constructed of yet smaller versions, are organic. They manifest themselves everywhere, be the scale microscopic or larger than perceivable to the eye.

How? The arrangement of veins on a leaf, for instance, is translatable to the arrangement of the branches’ spacing, which in turn might be translatable to the tree’s growth patterns or range distribution. There is a method in the shapes of waterways, their curvatures, erosion patterns. There is a pattern in the ridges of mountains, in the way lightning forks, in the formation of crystals, of the shapes and proportions of life-forms, for limbs and facial features and the famously cited nautilus shell spiral. The Fibonacci number and golden ratio are not purely isolated, theoretical concepts that exist only as abstracts. They just happen to be the most efficient way for organic forms to grow and propagate, for inorganic ones to form. It’s physics.

Slime molds are another oft-cited example; planted on a map of existing cities, for instance, it will develop optimal paths for nutrient transport—paths that very nearly exactly model actual major roads and highways. Patterns are not restricted to static structures, for in movements (eddies in a rivulet or air current) and behaviors (flocks, swarms) there is also something to be mapped.

Here, Catherine Ulitsky creates geometric networks out of flocks of starlings.

In another instance, photographer Thomas Jackson’s Emergent Behavior series is “inspired by self-organizing, ‘emergent’ systems in nature such as termite best wining today mounds, swarming locusts, schooling fish and flocking birds,” organic systems consisting of individuals but behaving as cohesive entities. This, posits a commentator, “[creates] an uneasy interplay between the natural and the manufactured and the real and the imaginary.”

The forms and shapes and patterns we observe everywhere are not as arbitrary as we are inclined to think. They organize themselves into strikingly orderly arrangements, creating forms that manmade designs might care to imitate.

Postmodern art forms are often criticized as being too arbitrarily abstract, for being too cerebral, for being inaccessible to the general audience. Yet, the deconstruction and reconstruction of known forms is oftentimes a marvelous exercise in imagination. Dance, as any other medium, is not exempt. As part of the Brighton Festival this past May, the Trisha Brown Dance Company performed a set of four distinctive pieces.

The set opens with If you couldn’t see me, a ten-minute solo during which the dancer uses the entire stage but never once faces the audience. Meaning might be gleaned from movement alone, but the intentionality is so indistinct (does it exist? Is it meant to exist?) that it is difficult to formulate any sort of evaluation.

The final piece, For M.G.: The Movie, is less amoebeous but no less difficult to interpret. Several performers stand but never move a muscle for the entire half-hour duration. Another jogs the same circuitous path over and over, at varying speeds, for just as long. Yet others move into and out of the area, though without any discernible pattern. The entire thing is set to a soundtrack of distant booming sounds, occasionally discordant, a murmur of voices, and once, very jarringly, an empty can being kicked down the pavement. For a while, too, the stage is muffled in thick fog, obscuring some of the performers. If a friend had not beforehand hazarded to me that it might be a train pulling into the station, I may not have guessed. Yet this reimagining is surprisingly coherent (if only in retrospect), surprisingly logical, and despite that, still unpredictable.

Les Yeux et l’âme, set to Pygmalion, is perhaps the most accessible of the four, and the most familiar, employing the symmetry and fluid movement one has come to expect of dance. The performers play off of one another in a contemporary reimagining of Renaissance-to-Baroque choreography, employing a great deal more physical contact than dance of that evoked period, but still essentially recognizable.

Foray Forêt, however, is quite possibly the most notable not only in the way it defines the performance space, but in the way that it is possible to be aware of the way the performance space is defined. Much of the performance is carried out in silence. It is not entirely silent, of course; there is still the swish of fabric, the weight of landing on the floor, the turn of bare feet on polished wood. Then, at one point, music filters in home team win predictions, barely discernible, from offstage. It grows louder, then starts moving around from one side of the performance hall to the other (they’ve hired a local brass band to walk about outside).

It’s interesting, at this point, how uncomfortable people are with silence, and with things that are ambiguous in their role. The performance frame is traditionally clearly defined; there is a set timeframe and physical space and context in which what happens within that frame occurs as part of a cohesive text. This production manipulates these boundaries, reframing events that occur outside of it as peripheral, but within. Eliciting audience consciousness of what the production is playing with, is, I think, the point at which the performance becomes more understandable as a whole, is what in the end ties everything together.

Scandinavian crime dramas filter over to the US slowly- slowly, but surely. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy has in recent years made a name for itself. Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels have similarly given rise to a long-running Swedish television series, and become so immensely successful that the BBC has started to air an English-language one of its own. BBC’s Wallander is comprised of a mainly British cast, though many minor characters are themselves Swedes or natives of whatever setting they are in. It is filmed in Sweden, and any text that appears— street-signs, documents, the lettering on the side of police vehicles— are in Swedish. And somehow, it feels entirely natural, despite the fact that everyone speaks English.

Wallander is a quiet affair, stretched across an open landscape, a great Scandinavian landscape, under a wide expanse of sky. It’s not particularly gritty, but there is nonetheless a very real quality to everything. The people are earnest, if not to others then at the very least to their own desires and ends. The colors take on a cool cast, a just very slightly washed out. They’re clean, in a whitewashed boards and birchwood sort of clean; plain, but not glossed-over. In this way, the cinematography is deceivingly simple, but astoundingly beautiful. There are little gems everywhere: poppies in a frosted meadow, a moth fluttering against the window, an undulating flaxen field.

This production is a well-shot series that never feels like it tries too hard. Even the darkest moments are never too horrifying; they might be tense, fraught with danger, but never quite jumping-in-your-seat, eye-shieldingly terrifying. It’s not about spectacle and never about special effects, but about the characters and about the story, about cool logic and human emotion all at once. The titular Kurt Wallander is played by Kenneth Oddslot Branagh, who does an admirable job in channeling the constantly exhausted (but strongly principled) police detective who sees far more in lifetime than anyone rightly should. The poor man falls asleep in his car, at his desk, in his chair, but seemingly never in his own bed. Wallander is very good at what he does, but out of a sense of nobility tends to dash into danger without feeling the need to notify his colleagues, and even worse, grows very emotionally attached to the victims he sees.

Having never seen the Swedish-language program, I can neither counter nor affirm the frequent insisting that it is better acted, more faithful to the tone of the novels, or generally better than the BBC version. However, I can confidently attest that BBC’s Wallander is a production of integrity and quality. It is subtle. It is not afraid of a quiet, low-key flow of events, but at the same time is never stagnant. It is a long drive across a wide landscape, a watery sun through the trees, and the house by the sea. It is the quiet little town and not-so-quiet happenings, and the road that curves the next hill and disappears into the distance.

BBC Wallander has just concluded its third series of three 1.5hr. episodes. PBS has also recently picked it up in the US.