https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhVIMAiKZ-A
Fog, by lamplight
Tone Poem Tuesday
I’ve never been a big fan of composer Reinhold Gliere. I don’t know how fair that is, given my small sample size of his work with which I’m familiar, but he usually doesn’t really do a whole lot for me. I suspect a part of this is that when I was in 10th grade, we played in high school band a band arrangement of a specific excerpt from a ballet of Gliere’s called The Red Poppy. The excerpt, which might be Gliere’s most famous piece, is called “The Russian Sailors Dance”, and it’s pretty clear when listening to it that it’s meant to be a showpiece for the male dancers of the company. Problem is, it’s not that interesting to listen to; it basically plays the same melody over and over again, without enough variation to even call it a set of variations.
Adding to that is the fact that in this particular year the band director decided to let one of the fellow students, a senior who was going to be studying music, act as student conductor, so this kid led us in what felt like three months of rehearsals of “The Russian Sailors Dance”. Over, and over, and over again. It got to the point that I just simply hate the damned thing, to this day. (You can listen to it here; I’m not featuring it for this post. The guy who conducted us? He was a very talented musician who is a teacher someplace now, I think. He wasn’t the best conductor then, but sheesh, dude was 17!)
As for Gliere in general, as noted, I haven’t listened much to him. He’s a capable composer who hasn’t ever really captured me, though I will admit that I enjoyed a recent hearing of his first symphony. (His third, a gigantic programmatic work called Ilya Muromets after a popular hero of Russian legend, is something of a cult piece with people actually making substantial travel arrangements to attend live performances.) Gliere was of German descent and was born in Kiev, which makes him Ukrainian as well; and he became a particularly prized musical voice in Soviet Russia, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dmitri Shostakovich.
This piece is a wild orchestral showpiece of considerable energy and verve. It is called Holiday at Ferghana, and other than the fact that is a concert overture in D major, that’s about all I know about it. It’s quite a wild listen, and it has spots where it’s almost catchy in its rhythmic thrust. It’s a frankly swashbuckling kind of piece that makes me wonder what kind of film music Gliere might have produced had he emigrated to the west.
I’m still not sure that I’m ever going to love Gliere–but I may be warming on him a bit.
Share This Post
Happy Pi Day!!!
An item of local geography
A good marker of being an adult is when you find yourself regretting the lack of attention you paid in one class or another in grade school. In my case, sometimes it’s Earth Science, and I really did pay quite a bit of attention in that class! But geology was never really my thing, so I just kinda got through it. And now, I notice things about the world and I wonder how they got to be that way. Here’s a good case in point from my neck of the woods. This image (screen-captured from Google Maps, thanks, Google) is Chautauqua Lake in Western New York’s Chautauqua County.
Chautauqua Lake is a big lake, about seventeen miles long and two miles wide at its greatest width. Like the Finger Lakes, it was formed by glacier activity, but the glacier activity that formed Chautauqua Lake was actually different than what formed the Finger Lakes, so Chautauqua is not considered a Finger Lake for this reason. (Plus it’s a hundred miles away from the nearest Finger Lake and it faces the wrong direction!)
You can see that right in the middle it narrows to a really short distance, which used to be the only car crossing on the lake, by ferry. We rode that ferry a lot when I was a kid, but quite soon after we got here the lake was spanned by a bridge for what was then NY17, the Southern Tier Expressway, but which is now Interstate 86. Chautauqua Lake is a very popular resort lake, with tons of recreational uses of its waters and lots of cool stuff in the towns surrounding it.
In the picture you can see Lake Erie to the northwest, less than ten miles away. New York is a state of several varied watersheds: the Finger Lakes, for example, all empty into the Lake Ontario watershed (which then feeds the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean), and where I live, all streams eventually flow to Lake Erie and then the Niagara River, and so on. Other watersheds further east flow south to the Susquehanna or Delaware Rivers, and thus to the Atlantic; then there are the waters that drain into the Hudson and reach the sea at New York City.
I never really gave it much thought, but I always assumed that Chautauqua Lake emptied into Lake Erie, since it’s so close by; you could walk from Mayville to the Lake Erie shore at Westfield in a couple of hours. It turns out this isn’t the case! There’s a river in Jamestown, NY, called the Chadokoin, which I always thought fed Chautauqua Lake. Turns out the reverse happens: the Chadokoin is the lake’s outflow, and it confluences with another local stream before joining the Allegheny River somewhere south in Pennsylvania. The Allegheny makes a confluence with the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, famously creating the Ohio River, which then flows southwest to the Mississippi.
It turns out that there is a divide, called the Chautauqua Ridge, that runs roughly east-west just north of Chautauqua Lake. That divide is all that geology needed to divert waters from the Great Lakes just a handful of miles away, to the Gulf of Mexico, over a thousand miles away. If you’re a drop of fresh water, which side of a hill you fall on determines how long your journey is before you reach salt water again. That amazes me.
Share This Post
F*** You, Daylight Savings (but REALLY f*** you, clock changes)
Oh fer f***’s sake, here we go again.
At this point I’m willing to join the growing chorus of Americans (who are always completely ignored because a constant disconnect between public opinion and actual public policy is a weird but permanent fact in American democracy) who say “Just keep DST year-round and stop changing the stupid clocks twice a year.”
I say this even though I personally greatly dislike DST: mornings go from slowly brightening when I get up for work to being stone-dark again, and honestly, the extra daylight at the end of the day doesn’t do me any damned good. I hear testimonies to the contrary each and every year: “It gives me more time to get my yard work done!” And I’m always thinking, “Does it? Really? Are you really out there mowing the lawn at 8:45pm?”
(The answer to this, I’ve discovered, is in quite a few cases, “Yes”, because I’ve also learned that Americans are frankly deeply weird about their lawns. But that’s a thing for another day.)
I’ve never understood the people who like it to still be sunny well after 8:00pm, and it really screws up my Circadian rhythms when from mid-June to mid-July it’s still bright enough outside to read without lighting assistance after 9:30pm. I am by temperament a night person (forced by the requirements of employment to embrace mornings, with eternal skepticism and mistrust) who needs darkness to wind down! But I also need times of darkness (physical darkness here, let’s not get all metaphorical) to really live my life. I like contrasts in my life: light and dark, hot and cold, sweet and sour, dog and cat. When DST is at its peak, there’s no contrast for me to enjoy. The beauty of deepening dusk and the following night come too late, for an entire month, to really savor.
I suppose this might go back to when I was a kid. I remember being put to bed as a kindergartner at 8:00pm when the sun was still streaming through my bedroom window, and I’ve never recovered. (This is not intended as an indictment of my parents! I get the whole “set bedtime” thing. But I found it incredibly hard to go to sleep at such times, and I still do.) But for me, now, Daylight Savings’s peak period, when it extends useful daylight almost to the time when local news is airing its late-night installments, inflicts upon me a kind of reverse-Seasonal Affective Disorder, when too much sunlight when I don’t want it gives me a feeling of general disquiet, unease, and unrest. This only goes away by late July when the shift of sunset back the other way starts to give me noticeable dusk at a time when I can notice it. This is another reason why August is my favorite summer month.
But even so…as I get older, it’s the changing of the clocks that I hate most about this dumb American policy that benefits nobody at all except our weird sun-worshiping culture. I will spend most of the coming week in a sleep-debt fog, motivation will be harder to summon up, and I will probably hit to coffee pot harder than I really should. And honestly, the “fall back” version won’t be much of a relief when it comes, either, because we’ve now set that one so far back in the year that it feels like a plunging of the world into darkness too quickly.
I don’t like Daylight Savings Time, I don’t like changing clocks, and I don’t share our society’s obsession with SUN SUN SUN. But if I have to pick my poison, I choose keeping DST and shutting down this idiocy of clock-changing. After all, as Mr. Eastwood once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
Share This Post
Something for Thursday
My whole life, I’ve never been able to decide which version of this song I prefer. I should default to The Supremes, because it’s the original, but I actually heard Mr. Collins’s cover (which is pretty faithful) first, back in the 80s, so I have an attachment to it.
I dunno, I guess I don’t really have to pick a favorite, do I? My world is big enough for both versions.
Here is “You Can’t Hurry Love”.
And, here is “You Can’t Hurry Love”.
Share This Post
Space Coke!
Yes, I tried it.
Yes, I liked it.
It didn’t change my life or anything, and I’ll probably get some more of it at some point, but I don’t consider this stuff essential. I don’t much know how to describe the flavor, but there’s an odd strange fruity sweetness that isn’t there in “regular” Coke. Where the Coca Cola people got the idea that this is what space tastes like, I will never know. To me it’s just a neat new flavor for cola.
I had the Zero Sugar version, because filling myself with sugar via soda doesn’t seem wise these days, and besides, soda companies are really doing impressive things with the “zero sugar” thing nowadays anyway. The days of “diet” sodas having that unpleasantly weird metallic taste (which I’ll admit I loved in Diet Pepsi) seem to be over, as the Zero Sugar entries get more and more impressive. Sunkist Zero Sugar orange soda? That stuff is a gamechanger.
In the case of Space Coke (I only call it Space Coke, sorry, Coke, I know that “Starlight” is a pretty and poetic name, but it’s Space Coke), I suspect that I would find the full-sugar version ridiculously sweet. This also possibly tamps down the “space” flavor, which I’ve heard described as “cotton candy in a cola can”, which doesn’t sound appetizing, does it? But I liked this stuff.
I would suggest taking my recommendation with a grain of salt, though. I am, after all, one of approximately nineteen people who in 2004 actually liked Holiday Spice Pepsi.
Share This Post
Tone Poem Tuesday
Svitlana Azarova is a composer of Ukrainian and Dutch descent, born in 1976. She has written an impressive body of work, and she currently resides in The Hague.
This modernistic piece is deeply expressive and makes impressive use of orchestral colors, particularly in the percussion section.
Share This Post
The old stomping grounds…
…but from well before they were my stomping grounds!
This is a photo of downtown Olean, NY, from I assume 1954, since that’s when Sabrina came out. This is seventeen years before I was even born, and twenty-seven before I lived there. I saw this on a Facebook group for history and nostalgia of that town, and I really liked this photo for the datedness of it, as well as just a look of Olean when it was newer. When we moved there in 1981 the town still had some vibes of what it had once been (a decent-sized town that was the heart of a large rural region, with some manufacturing and a good population base). The decline was already underway, from a population that peaked around 25,000 around the time this photo was taken to under 14,000 today.
The theater there is one that I visited several times, before it eventually closed and was demolished. It was once a beautiful “movie palace” type of place, hence the name–but by the time we lived there it was run-down and only got worse, to the point where it was virtually impossible to actually enjoy a movie there (broken seats, popcorn from a coin-operated machine, terrible sound, a projector with a dim bulb). But still…Olean was once a place worth being. A place the trains ran to, instead of being a place the trains run through.