so after reading this article by ben brantley in the times, i was kind of annoyed because most of his rant is predicated on the idea that musicals being based on pre-existing material is a bad thing. yes, yes, i get that it's not his central point, but still. if you think about it, most "great" musicals are based on previous source material. for example, here are the shows represented on some "best of broadway" compilation i have:

Oklahoma	play (green grow the lilacs)
Carousel	play (liliom)
Annie Get Your Gun	original
Where's Charley	play (charley's aunt)
South Pacific	short story collection (tales of the south pacific)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes	novel
The King and I	memoir which had already been a movie
My Fair Lady	play, took the changed ending from pre-existing movie
Bells are Ringing	original
West Side Story	play, but we'll say original
The Music Man	original
Gypsy	book
The Sound of Music	memoir
The Fantasticks	play (les romanesques)
Camelot	book (the once and future king)
Hello, Dolly	play (Einen Jux will er sich machen), adapted into a play (The Matchmaker) adapted into a movie.
Fiddler on the Roof	short story collection (various by shalom aleichem)
Funny Girl	original?
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever	original?
Man of la Mancha	original but drawn from a book
Mame	play (Auntie Mame) based on a book
Cabaret	book (berlin stories) and movie (i am a camera)
Hair	original
A Little Night Music	movie (some ingmar bergman movie)
Chicago	movie which had already been made twice
A Chorus Line	original
Annie	comic strip
Evita	original... sort of based on a biography
Dreamgirls	original
Cats	book of poetry (old possum's book of practical cats)
La Cage aux Folles	movie
Les Miserables	novel
The Phantom of the Opera	novel
Sunset Blvd.	movie
Rent	opera (la boheme), but in the spirit of west side story, say original

i don't mean to say that these are the shows i think are the best, i'm just using it as a list from an outside source of what are pretty inarguably some very, very popular shows. only 12 out of 35 (a definitive minority) are original, and that's counting west side story and rent. hell, make it 13, cats is pretty far removed from its source material, whatever you think of it. 5 of them were based on movies, and 4 of those are old enough and popular enough to have been revived.

most were based on either plays or books, and the fact that today's writers are now turning to movies and popular music speaks to the fact that movies and pop music have largely taken the place of books, plays and musical-theater-music in today's culture.

while i'm at it, some other well-regarded musicals based on movies: promises, promises (the apartment), sweet charity (nights of cabiria), kiss of the spider woman.

as long as no one tries to make a musical based on a video game. i don't know if i could handle that.

finally, how do you write an article about how the musical is very close to being dead but not quite there without invoking the "fabulous invalid" line? i guess brantley was too afraid to base his article on pre-existing material.

smallER

so believe it or not i already have two unfinished blog entries in the hopper about articles in the nytimes that are retarded, but i couldn't let this one slide. "Better Sound in Small Packages" by Michel Marriott, besides having a grammatically questionable title, has factual errors and is basically a shill piece for the consumer electronics and recording industries.

The big error is here: "DVD's have enough storage capacity for an album's worth of uncompressed music on them; CD's require compression, though not as much as MP3's and other formats read by digital audio players." That's just wrong. DVD's may contain higher quality audio by using a higher sampling rate or a higher bit-depth, and they may contain more audio information in the form of surround tracks, but standard audio CD's absolutely do not use any type of audio compression. On top of that, while DVD-audio (which is probably what this article is talking about, but who knows) isn't compressed, the standard DVD format ironically DOES support compressed audio, though I don't know how often it is actually used.

what really gets my goat though is how this article seems to unwittingly shill for the electronics companies. Regardless of what you think of it (and I don't necessarily think much) the triumph of the iPod and mp3 players in general (which DO use compression schemes) is a triumph of consumer preference over audiophile nonsense. The point is that in the market, portability totally trumps fidelity, for the simple reason that most people are listening to most of their music on the street, in the subway, on the bus, in a car, or even on a plane. These are places with a huge amount of noise. if you're really interested in listening on a nice stereo, go buy the CD; you can always rip it to your iPod.

So how is this shilling for the consumer electronics industry? Well, they loooove a format change, because that means everybody has to go out and buy brand new equipment to play their music. and the recording industry loves it to, because then they have to go out and buy all new music so that they can play it on their new equipment! so here's an article all about how horrible all of the music you have now sounds and how you should be keyed up to purchase what they want to sell you instead. honestly, i don't think that it's gonna happen again, what with the advent of the itunes music store etc. of course, that's a format change too.

when you get to the second page of the article, you realize that all of that has just been a set-up for more product shilling, this time for a few dsp processes that make you think your audio sounds better, when in fact all they do is make it sound more impressive. these audio effects have very little to do with the seemingly-misguided studio engineer who asks "Why shouldn't the listener at home hear what I hear in here?" (I don't set out to demean the engineer. I'm sure he does a great job, but the fact is there are very good reasons why, chief among them that they don't really care).

There's a scene in 24 hour party people where tony wilson wants to hear joy division's newly-recorded first single in the car. Another character complains that it will sound like shit in the car, but he replies that that's where most people will hear it so they should make sure it sounds good even there.

holy priceless collection of etruscan snoods!

watching the davinci code, I kind of felt like I was watching a riddler episode of batman.

julia child in a fireman's hat

mwahahahahaha.

to miss o

dear karen,

i just wanted to assure you that i'm ok. i know that you will be expecting me at one of the concerts this week, but i have to do a presentation on wednesday night and tuesday night will just be a whole mess of crazy. believe me, i'd rather be rockin' out. it's been such a long time since we danced in the rain in central park when you opened for devo... almost 2 years! i wanted to come to one of your february shows but unfortunately didn't have five bajillion dollars to give to a scalper.

i hope the microphones at roseland are tasty.

/brian