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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I haven’t edited this photo yet, seeing as how I jut took it yesterday morning, and I’m a couple weeks behind on my photo edits. But I wanted to share this one now because I really love this vantage point. This was taken on Fuhrman Boulevard on Buffalo’s Outer Harbor, down by Wilkeson Pointe (which is supposed to be open this year and sure doesn’t look close to being open, but that’s another thing for another time). I love how the Skyway dominates, but as it falls away, the city rises beyond. Unfortunately this vantage point is slightly marred by the presence of a chain link fence (I’m just now realizing that I should have taken my lens hood off and got closer…but in all honesty, I actually rather like the effect the chain link gives. It lends a bit of perspective, a suggested framing, to the image.)
