8-bit Nintendo video game music charms me still. The Nintendo could have five channels of sound, one capable of a sampled sound (thanks, Wikipedia article “Video Game Music”). This restriction lends a chamber music feel to the music that I really missed once game technology improved.

This may be a blasphemous to some, but here’s a Bach fugue with four voices for comparison. I would like to hear the Nintendo perform some Bach fugues one day.

What delights me about the game music is also presenet in chamber music. Chamber music is named as such because it could be performed in small palace chambers. Composers for the game had to cope with a technological limit while composers for the palace had to deal with a spatial limit – but for each the limit was the same. Only so many voices could be happening at the same time. I like how composers for each platform had to deal with the same limit for such different but parallel reasons.

I’m not the first to notice: here’s a video of a string quartet performing a medley of themes from The Legend of Zelda.

Today, I haven’t finished it even though I enjoyed it well enough. The book contains lots of vocabulary I didn’t know – perhaps one of the reasons why I slowed with reading. Anyway, here are some words I learned while reading.

insouciant

Definition:

casual: marked by blithe unconcern

Her Usage:

I had just rounded a corner when [the falling bird's] insouciant step caught my eye

sere

Definition:

dried-up: (used especially of vegetation) having lost all moisture

Her Usage:

I couldn’t see whether that sere rustle I heard was a distant rattlesnake, slit-eyed, or a nearby sparrow kicking in the dry flood debris slung at the foot of a willow

bivouac

Definition:

camp: temporary living quarters specially built by the army for soldiers

Her Usage:

No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest.

sonant

Definition:

a speech sound accompanied by sound from the vocal cords

surd

Definition:

a consonant produced without sound from the vocal cords

Her Usage:

The wind shrieks and hisses down the valley, sonant and surd, drying the puddles and dismantling the nests from the trees

hummock

Definition:

knoll: a small natural hill

Her Usage:

the ridges bosses and hummocks sprout bulging from its side

eidetic

Definition:

of visual imagery of almost photographic accuracy

Her Usage:

But there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. We are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a memory for information, and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our own pasts

frangible

Definition (from wikipedia):

A material is said to be frangible if through deformation it tends to break up into fragments, rather than deforming plastically and retaining its cohesion as a single object

Her Usage:

because a sycamore’s primitive bark is not elastic but frangible, it sheds continously as it grows

memento mori

Definition (also wikipedia):

Latin for, “Remember you must die”

Her Usage:

That, I wanted to say as I recognized the prize she held, is memento mori for people who read too much.

susurrus

Definition:

susurration: the indistinct sound of people whispering; “a soft susurrus of conversation”

Her Usage:

I never merited this grace, that when I face upstream I scent the virgin breath of mountains, I feel a spray of mist on my cheeks and lips, I hear a ceaseless splash and susurrus, a sound of water not merely poured smoothly down air to fill a steady pool, but tumbling live about, over, under, around, between, through an intricate speckling of rock.

lambent

Definition:

softly bright or radiant

Usage:

the leaf was so thin and etiolated it was translucent, but at the same time it was lambent, minutely, with a kind of pale and sufficient light

If everything can seem indifferent when you have encountered the most beatiful of things, why don’t we regard the opposite situation as equally fateful: having read the worst book, having seen the dullest landscape, having met the stupidest, ugliest woman? There should be a perfection of – and hence an absolute limit to – the insignificant, the useless, the trivial and banal, beyond which, as in the contrary case, there would be nothing more worth waiting for.

In fact, it is not that way. After seeing the worst, you do not say “O time, suspend they flight!” There is no ecstasy of uselessness.

Before I acknowledge the tinyness of myself, my travel companions, and the park, we walk the cholla cactus trail. The cholla are the first locals we encounter on our trip through Joshua Tree.

I have to mention the holiness of these plants as well. When walking through a forest, you brush up against plants all the time. But this is not the forest, and these plants demand respect.

Look but don’t touch.

Walk slowly.

We drive on, leaving behind the cholla, and getting closer to my discovery of tinyness. After more space, we come upon fields of rocks. We can walk among them.

And climb among them.

We can stand and sit on them.

It’s the rocks that make me re-remember how tiny I am.

Not only am I tiny. Everyone is tiny.

Dan is in the next one too, look close.

Dan is hypothetically in the next 2 images. (This one from the Orange County Register)

(next image from NASA’s Visible Earth)

The rocks offer me anamnesis of scale, and allow us to play on top of them. But in exchange they demand a respect very different from the cholla cactus. A respect not so different from a wet city sidewalk. We must be careful with where we place ourselves, or else our selves get stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Or between two rocks, in this case.

But we’re careful, and today no one gets stuck between any rocks or hard places.

In Los Angeles, I climb the hill on Occidental College campus. At the top I meet a stranger who tells me to take a photo of these birds because they’re a rare site. For his whole life he’s lived near the hill we stand on, so I believe him. Click for the full size, they (the birds) are tiny.

Sunrise, 2010 Feb 11

I wake up early from a dream. It’s a bit chilly, and I know I won’t fall back asleep. I decide to climb the hill again and see the sunrise. I’ve not been awake for sunrise since… late August I think. Maybe early September.

The moon is waning, nearly new. I recall the full moon very well, and I’m surprised at how half a moon cycle has nearly passed. It’s felt like so long since then, but it’s not even been two weeks.

My perception (or my perception of my perception) of time has been miscalibrated for a while now. Or rather, newly calibrated. A week passes and the state of mind I have feels like my whole life has been that state of mind. I can’t tell if I’ve achieved a better understanding of my emotions, or if I’m just terribly confused about the rate time passes.

One of things I always find appealing about travel is how it dilates time. Removing myself from my routine places and activities changes something in my brain’s understanding of time. Perhaps our perception of time is based upon how much work our brain is doing, and the brain has to do more work to process the unfamiliar. This theory goes against the character in Catch 22 who lays in a hospital bed unmoving and bored. His claim is that being bored feels like a lot of time is passing. He’s attempting to reach immortality through time dilation through boredom.

Having woken from a dream, I wonder: how do dreams fit into this understanding time and the (un)familiar?

Anyway, this is all just to say, I saw the moon nearly new.

Another pre-sunrise image. It’s interesting to compare the difference of the city after sunset and before sunrise. More lights after sunset. The horizon has a brighter orange glow. You get the sense that things are receding. Before sunrise the sounds are less and so are the sights.

Ok, this one’s not a tree.

Here is Dan at the breakfast table:

Sara, pondering her soon-to-be-cut hair.

And Kevin reaching for his soon-to-be-shoed foot.

Today you could see outside. It’s like this, but lighter.

A store with lots of living friends. Bunnies. Don’t touch.

Birdies. Can you see them?