Bob and Bruce (a repost)

Posted on June 22, 2025 by ksedinger

(This is a repost from a couple of years ago. I’m bringing it back in honor of the 50th anniversary of the release of JAWS, which opened June 20, 1975. I didn’t get to watch JAWS until I was a teenager, which is both probably a wise move on my parents’ part and also really lame. I mean, come on! JAWS! But hey, it instantly became one of my favorite movies ever when I finally did get to watch it all the way through, instead of seeing little bits and pieces through sneaky glimpses at this or that telecast. Anyway, here’s a bit of silliness….)

I’ve seen a few of these photos surfacing online the last few months, and they make me really happy because there’s a kind of absurdity going on. These are behind-the-scenes snapshots from JAWS, featuring actor Robert Shaw and “Bruce” the Shark, in between takes. Bruce, if you didn’t know, was the name lovingly bestowed upon the mechanical shark they made for the movie, which ended up not working half the time, forcing director Steven Spielberg to rely on implied-shots, shadows, oblique techniques and other ways of creating the sense that the shark was there without actually showing that the shark was there. It’s generally accepted that the difficulties with the model are a big reason why the movie ended up as good as it is.

I love these shots because they have a kind of absurdity to them, as if Bruce was really a living part of the cast, waiting for his next take like everyone else. They just scream out to be captioned, so:

“Come on, Bob, sing it with me! ‘Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies….” “Shut UP, Bruce.”

“I mean, it was a great fight scene and all, but you gotta admit, Bob, the way your character in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE lets James Bond get one up on him is kinda lame.” “I didn’t write it, Bruce.”

 

“Haha, in your big speech you’re supposed to say ‘We delivered the bomb’ but you make it sound like ‘We delivered the bum’! Hahaha…ouch, please get your hand off my eye! It’s not REALLY like a doll’s eye!” “Too bad, Bruce.”

As John Oliver always says, “Moving on….”

 

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Something for Thursday

Posted on June 19, 2025 by ksedinger

Given how highly I value this song, I’m surprised to see that I haven’t featured it much in this space. It’s a song about homesickness, written by Scottish master Dougie MacLean, and it’s one of his biggest hits and signature songs. Here it’s performed beautifully by Voces8.

And by comparison, because why not, here’s Mr. MacLean himself, performing the original.

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Things that fly

Posted on June 18, 2025 by ksedinger
Gull in flight, Buffalo Outer Harbor
Butterfly, Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens
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Tuesday Tones

Posted on June 17, 2025 by ksedinger

An old favorite, in two ways: first, because the music is obviously amazing, and second, because the accompanying animation is also amazing. Here is Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, as performed and animated for the Disney film Fantasia 2000.

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Open-source C+ (or something like that)

Posted on June 16, 2025 by ksedinger

And just where the hell have I been? Well, right here, with all the usual nonsense going on: busy at work, lots of stuff going on at home, and the usual existential stuff about whether or not I’m still a writer or if I’m morphing into a video person. I’ve been making content fairly regularly for Tiktok, and I’ve been sharing that content kind-of reliably to Instagram, but I need to get better about cross-posting it to YouTube.

What about this space?

It isn’t going anywhere. I’m just trying to figure out how to integrate all of this. ‘Tis not easy, Cap’n!

But here’s another thing that’s been occupying my attention the last few days. I swear, when it comes to serving up content I’d never have thought to seek out but I then find unimaginably amazing, YouTube is far and away the best of the major social media platforms. It’s mainly because of a YouTube suggestion that I decided to give in to possible temptation and give photography a go, after all. Last weekend I was up early with Hobbes (we seem to have settled on a weekend cadence where I get up first on Saturdays so The Wife can sleep in, when Hobbes starts whining to pee, which is usually around 6:30am or so), and after walking him I made coffee and sat down to watch a video or two while I woke up. And along with my subscription channels I saw something new: a guy who was trekking the entire length of the River Thames in Great Britain. “From source to sea”, he says, many times. (Hence the bad pun headlining this post.)

Well, OK, that’s interesting enough…only…this fellow was doing it in the water. And not just on it, in a boat. For the first several miles the Thames is barely a trickle that meanders through fields and forests. Light splashing becomes wading, which becomes swimming, and then finally boating as he takes to his kayak for the remainder of the journey. All of this unfolds over a series of fairly engrossing videos, and here’s where they start. I haven’t even finished watching this series yet–as I write this, our hero, one Ed Pratt–is just entering the Greater London area. Set aside some time and watch this!

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Thank you, Mr. Wilson

Posted on June 11, 2025 by ksedinger
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Tuesday Tones

Posted on June 10, 2025 by ksedinger

Continuing my exploration of queerness in music for this Pride Month, I turn to composer Wendy Carlos, a great transgender artist who is a notable late-20th century pioneer in electronic music. Carlos was born in 1939 as Walter Carlos, but after first experiencing gender dysphoria as a five-year-old, Carlos eventually underwent sex-reassignment surgery in the early 1970s.

In addition to her work in electronic music, Carlos also composed the scores for several notable films: Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, and the Disney “world inside the computer” classic TRON.

TRON was one of my first sources of exposure to electronic music. From the vantage point of over 40 years since the movie came out (40 years, OMG!), the score sounds dated in some ways, but entirely fresh in others. Carlos isn’t just interested in making weird noises with her synthesizers; she is a composer, we have to remind ourselves. There are melodies and recurring motifs and development. This score would not work if it was simply electronica for the sake of being electronica. 

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The Queries of the Sunday Past

Posted on June 9, 2025 by ksedinger

Here are questions from this week’s Sunday Stealing! Which are a day late. Oh well.

1. What’s your life’s motto?

Life’s too short to not wear what you want. (I just made that up, to be honest.)

2. Where were you living 13 years ago?

Same town, but in an apartment just a few miles away from where we are now! At that point we were already looking into the house idea. My mother wanted to move with my father up to Buffalo from the Southern Tier, and live in a duplex with us on the other side so they’d have a support system. That’s how it played out.

3. Is anyone jealous of you?

There’d better be! I don’t manifest this much weirdness to not have someone out there envying me.

4. Where were you when you heard about the 9/11 terror attacks?

In my car on the way to work. I was at the shitty telesales job at that point. (In fairness, I sucked at that job.) At that point, it wasn’t even clear what kind of plane it was. I was picturing some doofus in a Cessna.

5. Do you consider yourself kind?

I try to be. I fall short at times.

6. Can you change your car’s oil?

Yes. I don’t, though. I like having skills, but I don’t worship at the altar of DIY.

7. What’s the last thing you heard about your first love?

Sheesh, who even is my “first love”? I suppose the one I’d have to consider shared something on Facebook. (Yes, we’re friends. She lives in Florida now. Terrific person, there’s a reason I crushed on her hard. A while back her sister was cleaning out the family house and found my confessional note that I wrote way back in, I dunno, eighth grade? Yikes!)

8. Have you ever been burned by love?

Oh, yes. Luckily, it’s been many years. I still remember 18-year-old me, swearing off the whole damnable business, just thinking, “I’m just gonna have fun for a while and stop looking for love because it’s never gonna show up….” (yes, I was a dramatic weirdo, whaddaya want from me), and then my roommate’s birthday celebration was joined by, among other folks, a cute oboe player I didn’t know very well….

9. What was the last thing you paid for with cash?

Popcorn and asparagus at the Farmers Market the other day.

10. Do you hug your friends?

Not usually, though I’m not unwilling.

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A musical offering….

Posted on June 7, 2025 by ksedinger

Any accounting of the greatest composers of the Baroque era would include, as a short list, the names of J.S. Bach, Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Vivaldi, and George Frideric Handel. We’re talking about Handel briefly today, partly because of his immense status in the history of music, and also partly because he may have been gay. Possibly. There is very little information about that to go on, but it is known that Handel was an enthusiastic member of several communities in his life where homosexuality was known and condoned. Is that enough to make any conclusion? Obviously not…but there does seem to be a high likelihood that many of our great musical masters–our great artistic masters, come to that–were queer in one way or another.

Handel is best known mainly for a few of his towering masterpieces–the oratorio Messiah, most importantly, and his Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. But Handel was highly prolific, and also among his great works are his Concerto grossi. The concerto grosso is a form that arose during the Baroque era and then fell into disuse as other forms, like the symphony and the more familiar modern concerto, arose. A concerto grosso features a group of soloists engaging in musical interplay with a larger orchestra. Handel was a master of the form, composing eighteen concerto grossi over his lifetime. Here is the first in a group of concerto grossi that was later organized as Handel’s Op. 6, numbered 319-330 in the HWV numbering of all Handel’s works. (The numbering of composers’ works can be a surprisingly messy affair.)

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Exposure

Posted on June 6, 2025 by ksedinger

Heavens, what a week it was! Bad? No, not at all. But very, very busy. Work gave me a quite proper arse-kicking this week, oh yes it did. I’ll recover in days to come, but for now, here’s a shot I quite like from our trip to Toronto in April. I love that city and this was our first trip there since my new dedication to photography in general and street photography in particular. This was taken on a Sunday evening at Sankofa Square, which is at the corner of Yonge and Dundas, just across from Eaton Centre. For this shot I slowed down my shutter speed to roughly 1/5 of a second, which is just about as slow a shutter as I can manage while shooting hand-held. The idea here is for some elements to be still and sharp, while elements that are in motion (people, cars) are slightly blurred.

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