The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
So yesterday, I received an e-mail from my mother, in which she simply told me what her favorite Christmas song is. I puzzled for some moments as to why she felt the need to tell me this.
Yes, folks, sometimes I can be just that dense.
Here is “Un flambeau, Jeanette, Isabella”, sing by Diane Taraz.
Somehow, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard this song before…or at least, if I did, I may not have noticed it. Now I have, though. Thanks, Mom!
I have just found a thing so awesome on the Internet that…I can’t even begin to describe this thing. If Shakespeare at the height of his powers had encountered this, the only soliloquy he could write singing its praises would boil down to “Yea verily, that is awesome. I beseech thee check it out, dude!”
That is all.
Yeah, I’ve stopped numbering these. No real reason why, I just got tired of having to go back and look it up each time out. Anyway, the linkage:
:: Good evening… come on in. Why don’t you get yourself some popcorn and a Coke from our stunning black-on-silver art-deco refreshment stand? (Be nice to the charming and vivacious young lady manning the counter; you’ll find her attitude very different from the sullen mouth-breathers at the multiplex. She actually likes her job.) Yes, I know our modestly sized bags of corn look puny compared to those MegaTubs you’re accustomed to getting at the other places, but trust me: this is all you need. (Errr…no. I mean, I’m with him all the way, except for the giant megatub of popcorn. When it comes in tubs, anyway. Nowadays, most times you get a bag.)
:: Really? Dreaming of overalls is good luck?? Dreaming of presents means you will always be showered with gifts?!? Is this pop psychology or pop mysticism?? (Yeesh, that’s weird, is what that is. I don’t dream of overalls, to my knowledge…hmmm….)
:: In spite of the extreme importance that Dickens places on Marley’s death right away in his story, all the film versions so far have left Marley out of the earliest scenes. Alastair Sim’s is the first to introduce him this soon. (Michael May is surveying all the various versions of A Christmas Carol that are out there. Good stuff, as always!)
:: Okay, this is all going to be heavily theoretical, possibly annoying, and maybe even misguided, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I need to try and verbalize this. And just to get the trigger out of the way, this is going to be some thoughts about racism, intentional and unintentional, in pop culture. (This is a fascinating post about race in Sesame Street and Star Trek. Check it out.)
More next week!
I think that my college choir performed this one year at our annual Big Christmas Music Hoopla, otherwise known as Christmas With Wartburg. Those programs were quite the undertaking, and they consumed four nights of our lives at the time: a performance on campus on Thursday night; a performance twenty miles down the road at a really big Lutheran church in Cedar Falls, IA, on Friday night; a performance at the Civic Center in downtown Des Moines on Saturday night; and a performance back at campus on Sunday afternoon. (The poor Choir, at the time, then had to do a performance of its own right after that fourth performance, during some kind of coffee hour, if I remember right.)
It was a lot of work and, coming as it did at the end of the fall semester, it put a lot of pressure on us students who also had to worry about finals and such. But those were some deeply special concerts, and I was more than a little bit ‘at sea’ in my senior year, when I was no longer in the band and thus was not involved in any way with the program. Those were wonderful times. In my sophomore year, I decompressed after the Sunday performance by watching Casablanca (this was the period when I discovered the film and watched it six Sundays in a row). The next year, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country opened on Friday, so right after the Cedar Falls performance, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) and I quickly changed and bopped over to the theater to see it. Good times. I miss those programs.
This is “Salvation is Created”, by Pavel Tchesnokov. It’s a live performance, so there’s audience noise, and ignore the graphic…the music is the thing here.
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Via Michael Dean Jackson, I see that the newest meme-thing to be sweeping the Interweb is “Unimpressed Astronaut”. I, of course, had to make a few of my own:
On that last: it always amuses me when people complain about a NASA mission that fails, such as lost probes to Mars. One of our standard cliches for indicating that a given task isn’t as hard as someone is making it out to be is, “Hey, this ain’t rocket science!” And yet, we get mad when people fail, even though they are actually doing rocket science. Anyhoo….
:: Hate Actually: the romances of Love, Actually tallied out and scored by pros and cons. I’m due for my annual viewing of Love, Actually soon….
More next week!
I’ve heard for years about The Big Lebowski, enough to know that it’s about a slacker dude who mainly hangs out in a bowling alley. I knew that he was called “The Dude”, and that his most famous line is, “The Dude abides.” And yet, I’d never actually seen the movie until recently. I always tend to take my sweet time getting around to things that everybody says I should already know about; most of the filmography of the Coen Brothers is one thing I most definitely need to get through.
The Big Lebowski most definitely involves a guy who goes by the name “The Dude”; he’s played by Jeff Bridges as a kind of mystical blend of Obi Wan Kenobi and Tommy Chong. He needs half-and-half for home, and he pays for it with a check written for $.69. In most scenes he has his favorite drink, a White Russian, in his hand. He wears sunglasses constantly, has a weird habit of incorporating things he hears into his everyday conversations, and – in the masterstroke that leads to most of the movie’s zaniest and funniest bits of comedy – actually turns out to have the strongest grasp of reality of any of the guys in his small circle of friends.
Description of the plot of The Big Lebowski is something of a fool’s errand, as some of the particulars of the plot evade description entirely, while others seem utterly, utterly silly when described outside of their context. This is one of those movies that you have to see to really get, and even then, you might not really get it. Our story opens with an introduction to The Dude, who is out of cream for his White Russians so he goes to the grocery store in his bathrobe and slippers to get some, paying with a check he writes for $.69. (In a spooky bit of coincidence that couldn’t possibly have been planned, we hear in the background as The Dude writes his check the voice of President George HW Bush, talking about Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait – and the date on the check is Sept. 11, 1991.)
The Dude goes home with his half-and-half, where he is attacked by hoodlums in his own apartment who are demanding that The Dude “pay up”. But, he’s with it enough to realize that they have accosted the wrong Lebowski. Not that this matters to the hoodlums, one of whom makes his big exit statement by urinating on The Dude’s throw rug. This will become a major driving point in the plot: The Dude’s desire to get restitution for his crappy rug, a rug which all of The Dude’s friends agree “really tied the room together”. So The Dude tracks down the right Lebowski, which draws him into some kind of rich-family intrigue involving kidnapping, money drops, and…well, a whole lot of gonzo stuff.
The Dude endures all this with the support of his two best friends: a clueless bowler named Donny who is constantly trying to catch back up to the conversation, and Walter, a Jewish security contractor who served in Vietnam and who has all manner of anger issues and who is unbelievably foul-mouthed. These three oddly-matched friends discuss things at their sanctum sanctorum, a local bowling alley where they are members of a league. Donny is forever not quite hearing the discussion, but his every attempt to catch back up is met by a harsh “Shut the f*** up, Donny,” from Walter.
The Big Lebowski is one of the most foul-mouthed movies I’ve ever seen. This doesn’t bother me at all, but for folks who are turned off by salty language, this movie will turn you off within five minutes of the first title card on the screen. The language forms its own poetry, though, giving nearly every conversation in the film a kind of rhythm all its own. It’s really very fascinating to listen to the permutations of the various curses, expletives, and naughty phrases our language has to offer. John Goodman’s Walter engages in a lot of this, and he has what is my favorite line in the movie: “Life does not stop and start at your convenience, you miserable piece of shit.”
A movie like this desperately needs a cast capable of pulling it off, and Jeff Bridges as The Dude is…well, I figured Bridges had been born to play Kevin Flynn in TRON, but now I see that he was really born to play The Dude. I just love his weird blend of wisdom and stoner slackitude; all through the movie, Bridges makes it seem like The Dude understands what’s happening to him on some instinctive, subconscious level, but he can’t really put it into words. And it’s that inability which leads him into new situations, each one more bizarre than the last, because he wasn’t able to just articulate things. I also love how he’s able to come up with some witty responses to some of the things that happen to him, such as when the thugs first break into his apartment and threaten him. One of them shoves The Dude’s head into the toilet several times, each time shouting “Where’s the money, Lebowski? Where is it?” The Dude clearly has no idea what he’s talking about, but instead of protesting, he says, “Uh, I think I see it down there. Let me take another look.” And down goes his head, into the toilet again.
Given that this is a Coen Brothers movie, there’s a liberal use of music and song to create mood, right from the 1970s bowling-alley graphics that form the main titles. O Brother Where Art Thou? may have had a more famous soundtrack, but the musical choices in The Big Lebowski are as skillfully made, with each song seeming to exist, as do the people in the movie, in some backwater world that we on the outside aren’t always aware of.
Near the end of the film, The Dude utters his most famous line, “The Dude abides.” He sure does. He’s probably out there right now, somewhere, abiding away. I wonder if he ever got another rug, or if whatever rug he eventually got tied the room together as well as the first one.
I don’t care if the eyes are creepily unreal; I like the movie The Polar Express. Part of it is the music, by stalwart composer Alan Silvestri. Silvestri is not a great composer, by any means, but he is a very solid and professional one, with a fine gift for melody and clear orchestral writing. He was really the ideal composer for a project like The Polar Express. (He also tends to be the composer-of-choice for director Robert Zemeckis.) Here is Silvestri’s Suite from the film.
Ayup…I missed a day, but through the magic of backdating posts, I can act as though this was here all the time! Huzzah! I had to work very early yesterday morning, and then after I got home from work, there was a nap followed by a shower followed by a lovely evening out with The Family, so I never really got a chance to do any blogging whatsoever. Hence this entry…a day late.
Anyway, it’s something of a law that we’re all supposed to watch A Christmas Story a bunch of times each year. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of this movie, to be honest. It’s enjoyable enough, but I don’t find it essential — in fact, I didn’t even see the whole thing, start to finish, until just a few years ago. It basically puts me in mind of an overlong episode of The Wonder Years, without the earnest life lessons and Kevin’s eternal yearning for Winnie Cooper. Still, the scene with the kids going to see Santa at the department store is comedy gold, so here it is.
I’m not one to wax poetic a lot about the stuff from yesteryear that’s been lost to the Onward March of Time, but I do kind of miss downtown department stores at Christmas, from the era when each city had its own store instead of every city having a Macy’s downtown. (Except Buffalo, of course. Our downtown department store died years ago and ain’t coming back, ever. Fuhgeddaboudit.)
