The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I may have settled on a theme for this site that I like! I will be doing more tinkering with the appearance later on, but I am currently liking this one. I spent some time this morning trying themes on for size, and there were a couple that I liked on preview but weren’t working for me across the entire site. This one may actually get me where I want to go (though I also still miss the block editor and wonder if I can get it back….).
Stay tuned!
I’m reading The Uncool by Cameron Crowe right now. This book, which came out last year, is pretty much an answer to the question: “Hey, Crowe, we know that you based Almost Famous on your own life experiences as a kid, so why don’t you tell us the real story?” And I’ll have more to say when I finish the book, but here’s a passage that really stuck with me already:
“Take It Easy” hit the airwaves a few weeks later, like a blast of California sunshine. The band was called Eagles. (You were not supposed to call them the Eagles back then.) The song was instantly memorable, a potent stew of the stuff I’d loved. I always felt that a favorite song has a mind of its own. It arrives just when you need it, and that arrival memory remains for the rest of time. Every time you hear the song, you can remember the feeling, like you’re reading a diary entry. It’s one of music’s great gifts. I bought a used electric guitar, turquoise, of course; learned the play the song; joined a band called the Masked Hamster; rehearsed with the Masked Hamster twice in my schoolmate Russ Schumacher’s garage; was told the band had broken up; walked by Russ’s house a few days later; heard the Masked Hamster practicing with a new guitarist; and decided my instrument was the typewriter. All to the soundtrack of “Take It Easy”.
That thing Crowe says there, about a favorite song being like looking at a diary entry? I could not agree more. A whole lot of “Something For Thursday” has simply been just about that: sharing songs or pieces of music that have been a part of my life. (And yes, some of it has been about exploring new stuff, too. One needs to hear music, not just because you never know when the next song or symphony or filmscore or overture of your life is going to come along, but also because the new music informs the old favorites, gives them context. When you hear some new band that is flying because the band of your youth taught them how to walk, that’s really something.)
So…heck, where was I? Oh yeah, this is a Something For Thursday post. Here’s “Take It Easy”.
Back before The Six Week Gap, I had started a series of posts in this category exploring the work of Japanese composers. I think I only lost three of those posts, but those were all the posts in the Japanese Composers series, so I guess now we’re just going to start over. Yay! [bangs head on desk]
Japan is a fascinating culture in just about all respects, but musically as well. It has its own music traditions that date back thousands of years, but since Japan’s opening to the West in the middle of the 19th century, the influence of Western music can be keenly felt in the classical traditions that emerged there starting in the early 20th century. Many Japanese musicians studied in the west before returning home, and not even the great conflagration of World War II could stem the tide of those influences. (In fact, it may be that the realities of the postwar era hastened those influences, but that’s for a more learned person than me to assess.) For years I have found enormous fascination in the concert music of Eastern Asia, and in Japan specifically, so that’s what I’m going to explore in this series.
The work with which I am re-starting this series is a superb example of what I often find in Japanese classical music: deeply pictorial music that borders on outright impressionism, bathed in orchestral color that is at times overwhelming, but all in service to a formal architecture that conveys emotion in ways that stand entirely outside the traditional forms of Western music.
Takashi Yoshimatsu was born in Tokyo in 1953, and while he did not have any particular musical upbringing in his early years, music captivated him in his teens and he went on to both study music formally and to perform rock music in bands. It’s interesting to see how similar this particular bio is among Japanese composers, or at least the ones I was reading about when I launched this series. This sort of thing cements my long suspicion that rock and classical are not so far apart as we like to believe…but while a lot of Japanese composers of Yoshimatsu’s generation worked in modernist and even avant garde traditions, Yoshimatsu seems to have kept his voice in the lyrical and even neo-Romantic traditions.
This work, Ode to Birds and Rainbow, was written in response to the death of Yoshimatsu’s sister. He apparently did not intend it as a requiem, or something so somber; he called it “an ode to a soul at play amongst the birds and a rainbow in the sky”. This definitely accounts for the work’s strongly emotional content. I have found this piece deeply moving, and in fact, moreso with each play-through.
My Aunt Alice–my father’s big sister–used to own a cottage in the Poconos, and we would visit her there once or twice each summer, during the 1980s. One year, which probably would have been summer of 1984 because I was going into 8th grade, she asked me what I was going to be studying in the coming year. On the specifics of science, 8th grade at that time was half a year of intro physics and half a year of intro chemistry, and when I mentioned the chemistry thing, Aunt Alice brightened up and said, “I know a chemistry joke! Alas Poor Johnny, he’s with us no more; he thought it was H-two-O, but he really drank H-two-S-O-four.” I’ve retained that in my head for 42 years now, and I’m quite happy to have done so. Now, if you’re up on your chemistry, you know that to mistake sulfuric acid for water you’d have to be exceptionally goofy, or visually impaired, since they don’t even look alike. But who cares about that? There’s a funny joke to be had!
Aunt Alice also attended our wedding in 1997. She was at my parents’ house when we arrived there after the rehearsal, and I got home before The Fiance did; I didn’t even realize Alice was there before she came right up to me, hugged me, said congratulations, and asked, “Is she here yet?” She was so excited to meet the soon-to-be new Mrs. Sedinger. When The Fiance arrived a few minutes later and I introduced her, Aunt Alice nodded and said something about how I was adding blond hair and blue eyes to the gene pool. I like that she approved. I also noticed that Alice was wearing my grandmother’s old ring, the one that Grammy had had set with the birthstones of each of her grandchildren. That was a great thing to see.
I never had a lot of contact with Aunt Alice, as she lived quite a ways away (my whole life, she lived in the Philadelphia area, on the Jersey side). But every time I did see her, I found her an absolute delight. She was smart, warm, and funny, and she valued arts and creativity in ways that sometimes I felt was slightly lacking on the home front. The last time I saw Aunt Alice was sadly, over ten years ago when we took a trip to Cape May. Alice rented a cottage up the shore from Cape May each summer so we got to meet for dinner one night. Seeing her that night was quite lovely, and even then she looked strong and raring to go. And she must have been; she still had over a decade left in her at that point.
I have three first cousins on that side of the family, all Alice’s children, and there are second cousins descended from them as well, though I don’t know any of them much at all. That’s always struck me as something of a shame, though I suppose that’s the reality. I know people who are quite close with all their cousins, but in every case those folks grew up in the same region, sometimes even the same town, as those relatives. I have never been less than an eight hour’s drive from any of those cousins, so I guess that explains the lack of contact over the years. They’re all good people, though, and I’ve been happy to see them at each point. The first wedding I ever attended was for one of those cousins, back in…1983, maybe? I think it was 1983. Might have been 1984. I’m pretty sure it was that year. It was also the first Catholic Mass I had ever sat through…or was it Catholic? Now I’m running up against the limits of memory.
Aunt Alice died recently, I am told. Several weeks ago, at the age of 94. She had a long, good run. That generation is almost entirely gone, as far as my own family goes; only my father remains. It’s a hell of a thing…but anyway, thanks to Aunt Alice, I can chuckle every time I hear about sulfuric acid, and I also have some lovely memories of the Poconos and the Delaware River and a mansion that belonged to onetime Governor of Pennsylvania, Gifford Pinchot. I also have a lot of memories of lots of long road trips from WNY to Philly and New Jersey to visit Alice and my grandmother. Thinking back, I’m a bit surprised we never did much sightseeing in Philly at all; it’s a city I’ve been through a bunch and yet I don’t think we ever stopped once to look around. I wonder why that is. I wonder if my father thought he’d be cheating on his beloved Pittsburgh if he stopped to admire Philadelphia. And I remember the Jersey Shore, and the first time we went down there, back in 2011, and The Daughter got to dip her feet in the ocean for the first time.
Anyway, goodbye, Aunt Alice. I wish I’d been able to get to know you better, but I knew you well enough to know that you were a hell of a person.
One last story: on one of our visits, when I was leaning toward studying music in school, Alice told me about how one of her kids, my cousins (I can’t remember which one!), was in music for a while and one year was in a choir. Alice asked what song they were working on, and my cousin replied, “Somethin’ stupid.” Alice said “That’s not very nice!” and my cousin replied, “No, that’s the name of it! ‘Somethin’ Stupid’!” I assume it’s this.
The Obama Presidential Center opened today. In honor of former President Obama, this.
Well, if you remember back to before the Great Functionality Disaster that ate six weeks of content of mine, I was in the midst of a series of works composed by Japanese composers. And I’m going to get back to that, but for now, here’s an old favorite of mine. Why am I choosing this one? Because of a certain sonic effect in the third movement! Yes, it’s relevant to something I’ll be posting in the near future. Here is The Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. (This is a very fine performance, by the way, but what appears to be a student orchestra. I’m as big a fan of great orchestral recordings as anyone, but there’s often something wonderfully sincere about the music-making that the young people do, even if the technical work isn’t always quite as clean.)
On our back dock at The Store, we keep, among other things, a rack housing the supply of wood that we have on hand for various carpentry needs throughout the year. And many years–not every year, but quite a few of them–a bird, usually a robin, will make a nest in my woodpile. This year was no different, and as soon as I saw her making the nest I started keeping tabs on things. By sheer accident of a couple of pallets nearby, I was able to actually get a good vantage point to track the progress of Mama’s eggs and, soon, her babies. All this unfolded over the last two weeks:
The circle of life, indeed….
One minor waterway that makes its way through the Buffalo region is Scajaquada Creek. It’s a small stream that rises somewhere in Lancaster, NY, and flows westward through Lancaster, Cheektowaga, and Buffalo before finally draining into the Niagara River near where I-190 and NY198 split. Owing to its urban nature and the fact that occasionally there are sewage overruns, it’s not the cleanest run of water around. And in Cheektowaga, the stream was actually diverted years ago into an underground culvert that’s about three miles long. It only emerges again in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. What’s it like inside that tunnel? The best way to find out would absolutely be to actually kayak it, but surely no one would want to do that. That stream is gross.
Surely no one would…oh the hell with it, you already know where this is going, don’t you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEW6TXzjg9c
