Listening to John Adams (II)

One of the John Adams' albums I've got is called The Chairman Dances.

The first track on the piece is The Chairman Dances itself and it's subtitled, A Foxtrot for Orchestra, but for the 12 and a half minutes of its duration, it’s more like a train traversing the country, maintaining an almost constant speed, click-clacking over the rails, and hitting bridges and viaducts and long stretches of plain, where only the telegraph poles passing provide any variation. That’s not to say it’s dull: for something that maintains such constancy, it’s full of detail and variety, seldom staying around the same pitch or chord for more than a few beats. There’s are patches where the rhythmic approach varies, but underneath there’s still the same basic pulsing, and invariably it takes over as the main focus within a short time. Finally things do wind down a bit, and fade away into the distance.

Christian Zeal and Activity begins its ten minutes with slow movements from the strings, takes a breath for a moment, continues, and then eventually a preacher’s voice comes in. It’s looped, but edited, so that it makes sense and so that there’s emphasis on certain statements. This is a very warm piece.

Two Fanfares for Orchestra consists firstly of Tromba lontana – in other words, the trumpets sound distant, reminiscent of that frequently used idea of military trumpets blowing away over a battlefield. And secondly of Short Ride in a Fast Machine. Unlike the much longer Chairman Dances, which it resembles in its constant pace, it lacks musical interest, but it’s quite exciting – probably more so in the concert hall, I’d think.

Common Tones in Simple Time is rather wandery and waffly to my ear. Things happen, but seem to lack some of the direction and motivation of the other pieces I’ve mentioned so far. There’s a lot of hanging around in one particular spot, like the music just can’t get up and dance; it’s got sort of stuck in a rut. The pianist(s) have a bit of a painful time hammering away at short phrases – think there must be two of them gradually getting out of synch with each other a la Steve Reich. Anyway, this track goes on for twenty minutes until it dies a kind of long, slow, lingering death.

Beware the Machine

A friend had an incident with an exercise machine tonight rather like Bill Murray did in the film Lost in Translation. There was a short scene in that movie where Murray is trying to find things to do to fill in his time in Japan, so he goes on the treadmill machine. A female Japanese voice is instructing him in a rather sergeant-major way, and gets increasingly hyper about what he’s supposed to do at the same time as the machine increases its speed. Finally Murray is thrown off in a flurry of elbows and knees while the voice burbles on for him to keep on moving!!
My friend apparently got kicked off his machine, according to his wife. He then got up and it hit him and bit him at the same time. Her suggestion was that keeping fit was too dangerous.

Vending Machines Again

I like what one site says about the value of vending machines: they do all the selling for you, are always on the job, never call in sick, never insult customers, never give away free samples or steal your profits. And they collect the cash in advance…

You may think I’m just about to take up a vending machine franchise. Well, the more I look at the info on the idea, the more I wonder if there isn’t something in it. Of course, it would have to be a vending machine that sold something of reasonable value – I believe there are machines that sell pornography. Can’t see me getting into that!

Nevertheless, when I return home after my sabbatical in England, I need to find some work. And having a few vending machines bringing in cash would leave me some time for doing what I really enjoy: writing!

Might have to go back and check out more about what Multivend has to say on the subject. It may be just what I’m looking for.

Vending Machines

Vending machines. They’re just there, aren’t they? Nobody ever looks after them, or refills them, or takes the money away, do they? They just somehow fill themselves up. Don’t they?

Vending machines might look like perfect robots, endlessly doing their task without complaint, but of course there are humans behind the scenes, who keep the machines stocked, keep them happy – and, of course, who take the money.

Owning vending machines is a way many people make a living. In fact, in the United States, one company called Multivend which focuses on vending machines with candy in them has some 9,000 people working with it, people who work from home, don’t have an office, and can choose their own hours.

Think about it. How many vending machines do you come across in a day? They’re everywhere, growing like triffids! In Japan, it’s estimated that there’s one vending machine for every twenty people. This works out to some 5.6 million machines in that country alone. And a huge income for the vendors.

As a little exercise. Next time you go into town, check out how many vending machines you see. And what they sell. You may be surprised at just how many you find.

Ranting about parking machines

I’m puzzled about one thing to do with parking machines. I don’t mean the parking meters littered along practically every road in Dunedin, but the machines that are installed in parking buildings. Most particularly the one in the building in Moray Place that was only opened up for parking less than a year ago. Firstly they installed a machine that takes coins and notes. Notes, you say – that’s pretty radical. Well, it would be if it was effective. One morning I stood beside a young fellow trying to put a five dollar note into the machine over and over and the machine just wasn’t interested. But the machine was installed not long before the advent of our new coinage, which the Treasury decided in its wisdom would be as different from our old coinage as possible. Thus the machine was out of date as soon as it was installed.
All that would be okay, but whenever I go to park in this place I have the problem of whether I have any change or not. I barely ever carry change, since I pay most things with my Eftpos card.
Why on earth wasn’t a machine installed that would take cards rather than coins? It would have been twice as cost effective in the first instance, and not only that there must be a lot less wear and tear on an Eftpos style machine than a coin-operated one. It’s not as though the machine is stuck out in the street where access to phone lines would have been an issue.
Most of the other parking buildings in town still have humans operating the system. I don’t want to put anyone out of a job, but again, Eftpos would be far more satisfactory. Heck, I can even go to the tip (sorry, the transit station, I think it now is) and pay by Eftpos.