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Instaweek!
Something for Thursday
Film music fans tend to really enjoy End Credit suites, because often times — although less so now than in previous years, what with the rise of pop tunes in films even with orchestral scores — the composer gets to write what is basically a concert overture blending the main themes of their score.
By way of examples, here are the End Credit suites from several of the Star Trek movies!
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, James Horner:
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Horner again.
(The actual suite for the rolling of the credits is identical to the
Wrath of Khan suite, but I really dig the intro, with the neat
way Horner used the original theme from the teevee series before sequeing
into his own stuff.)
Star Trek Into Darkness, Michael Giacchino:
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No doing WHAT in your toilets, now?
Journalists aren’t thrilled with their quarters in Sochi for the Olympics. Lots of photo of questionable stuff, but this one stopped me cold:
Can someone tell me just what the last panel there is demonstrating, by way of Things They Don’t Want You Doing In Their Bathroom? I cannot figure this one out, folks. Help!
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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
Reminder: Ask Me Anything!
Just a reminder that I’m taking queries for Ask Me Anything! for this month, so get ’em in! Leave them in comments to that post, or submit via e-mail or Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
In other news, I’m posting light for the rest of the week because I’m tired and I need to regenerate. No, wait, that’s the Doctor. I need to reenergize. Yup, that’s it. I did a lot of marathon editing over the weekend to get the second draft of Princesses In SPACE!!! II done, and now it is…but I’m still a bit worn out from that. I’ll likely start returning to normal tomorrow, in terms of writing…I need to get back to Lighthouse Boy, which I put on the back burner a few weeks ago. Time to start that thing simmering again!
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Super Thoughts
Wow, what an awful game. We haven’t seen an out-and-out blowout in a number of years, have we? Remember what it felt like, back when the Super Bowl was an annual ass-kicking? This was quite the throwback — it was even an NFC team beating up on the Denver Broncos!
Random thoughts:
:: I’m a Peyton Manning fan, so I was hoping he’d go out and have an indisputably great game, just to silence everybody. I figured that if he ended up losing, it would likely be the Denver defense that did him in. I honestly did not figure that Manning would look as bad as he did yesterday. It was painful at times, watching him play. His passes weren’t accurate, they didn’t have much zip, and he looked panicky. It was really pretty shocking. This is the first time that I have ever seen a Super Bowl where the very first play from scrimmage actually set the tone for the entire game. Amazing.
:: I was also rooting for the Broncos because I don’t like Pete Carroll or Marshawn Lynch. But I don’t dislike those guys enough to hate the entire team or anything like that, so I’m not heartbroken, here. Seattle has a heck of a team, and given their youth, who knows where they go from here? Maybe back!
:: The game’s musical offerings were excellent. Renee Fleming did a wonderful national anthem, I always love seeing Queen Latifah (she is just amazing), and I even found halftime enjoyable. I’m not a Bruno Mars fan, but I don’t hate him, either — his music is pleasant in that way of not really making me want to change the radio station when he comes on.
:: Troy Aikman and the rest of the commentators were sort of annoying. I loved — and by “loved”, I mean, “hated” — all the various commentaries about “How can the Broncos get back into this game?” They all went into lengthy explanations and such, when the answer was pretty simple: They needed to score points, and lots of ’em.
:: Oh, commercials? As usual, I paid no attention to them, except for a couple. I loved the Coke commercial with “America the Beautiful” in all those languages, and I’m saddened (but not shocked) to see the knuckle-draggers in our society attacking it because “In America you speak English!” or some such nonsense. Like I tweeted: If you were offended by that ad, you are a person I do not wish to know.
:: One last thing: The Denver loss puts their Super Bowl record at 2-5. And that means that the Buffalo Bills no longer hold a share of “Most Super Bowls lost”. So yay, us!
On to the Draft!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: I’ve heard of fore-edge paintings on books, but to my knowledge I’ve never seen one and certainly never owned one. What am I talking about? Watch!
(via)
:: Ten terrifying highways. I would cheerfully drive any of these, except one. Guess which one! [shudder]
My personal most nerve-wracking, but also eye-popping, drive of all time is probably US 14 across northern Wyoming. I remember driving that road years ago with The Girlfriend (now The Wife), and at one point I looked up at this giant mountain to our left and noted the presence of cars on this harrowing-looking road way, way, wayyy up there. And then a minute later, I realized that was our road. That was an amazing drive, though.
:: It seems to me that whenever you see a headline that some kind of crazy shit happened someplace, more often than not, you can assume it happened in Russia. I’ll say this for the Soviets: they really seemed to keep a tight lid on the crazy over there. This week’s case in point: two guys get into an argument, over the merits of prose versus poetry. The discussion turned into an argument, fueled by vodka, and ended when the poet stabbed the prose-stylist to death.
Most insane is the linked article’s last graf:
The killing came four months after an argument over the theories of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant ended in a man being shot in a grocery store in southern Russia.
Ummm…wow. Note to self: Never discuss, well, anything with anybody in Russia!
More next week!
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Ask Me Anything!
Wow, it’s February already! And that means it’s time for another fun round of Ask Me Anything! Get your questions in now, folks — either in comments on this post, or in e-mail, or on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or…wow, I’m on a lot of stuff. Anyway, Ask Me Anything!
(I do answer questions anonymously, if that is preferred.)
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Symphony Saturday
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.
There’s honestly not a great deal I can say about this work that hasn’t been said before and better. It’s one of the towering masterworks of all of music, and likely of all human art. The Seventh is that extraordinary. In this work you encounter the type of perfection that makes you marvel the notion that it emerged from a human mind at all.
Setting aside all that, Beethoven here crafts a work that seems to contain nearly every human emotion in its pages, with the gorgeous meditation that opens the work, the profound depth of the second movement, and the last two movements that abound in dance rhythms. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is one of those works of art to which I turn when I am feeling generally down about the human race. We have the capacity to do this, why not better?
My very favorite passage comes early in the first movement (3:30 in the first movement), and may well be the single finest transitional passage in all of classical music. The orchestra seems, just for a second or two, to be bogging down in bar after bar of dueling scales, when they all seem to get stuck on the same note, handing it back an forth between the flutes and the violins. A rhythm haltingly emerges…and then takes over as Beethoven slides into a melody of pure delight.
And amazing, he does it again, this time letting that same rhythm come boiling up and out of the orchestra’s depths (start at 7:30). Beethoven is so good at building up to something, isn’t he? You can always feel his energy gathering. There’s no mistaking with him, none at all, that something is coming.
Here’s the Seventh.
Is the Seventh Beethoven’s greatest symphony? Now that’s an interesting question. I discussed this once with someone on a Usenet group, and the case in the Seventh’s favor is extremely compelling. Next week, we’ll wrap up Beethoven with the other contender to the title of Greatest Beethoven Symphony.