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 I’m reading a book right now called Seasons of a Finger Lakes Winery, by John C. Hartsock. The book is just that: a year in the life of a single winery in New York’s Finger Lakes region, a place where wine and winemaking have become a major industry and a vital part of the tourist trade there. I’ll have more to say about the book later on (I’m greatly enjoying it!), but for now I want to highlight this lovely passage that captures some of the geographical appeal of the region for me. I’ve enjoyed the Finger Lakes ever sinceDown the rabbit hole….

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 The other day I was looking for something completely different in my archives, and I found a post from July 2010, eleven years ago: I haven’t talked about writing in a while, so here’s a brief note about it. My main energy lately has been going to the space opera project I’ve had in my head for seven or eight years now; it’s an idea that’s been kicking around and kicking around and kicking around, until I finally decided that hell, it was just time to start writing the thing. The entire long-form story involves two princesses from some planetDown the rabbit hole….

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 Here’s a deep cut from a classic musical! Singin’ in the Rain would be my favorite musical of all time if not for My Fair Lady, and like all the greatest musicals, it is packed with songs and numbers, some of which are classics in their own right. But there are several other numbers in the film that aren’t as well-known, for one reason or another. One of these is the “Beautiful Girl Montage”. This number appears in the film just after the silent film industry has been absolutely rocked by the first “talkie”, The Jazz Singer, which is forcing allDown the rabbit hole….

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 When I was a kid and my mother’s family still lived in the Pittsburgh area, we would obviously go to visit on occasion, which meant a lot of driving through that city. If you’ve never been to Pittsburgh, it’s a very hilly place, and when it came time to build expressways through the region, this involved the construction of tunnels, some of which are quite long indeed. There are two very well-known tunnels around Pittsburgh, one through the Fort Pitt hill and another through Squirrel Hill. The video below takes you from the Fort Pitt Tunnel all the way toDown the rabbit hole….

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 There’s a quote by composer Gustav Holst that strongly resonates with me: If nobody likes your work, you have to go on just for the sake of the work. And you’re in no danger of letting the public make you repeat yourself. Every artist ought to pray that he may not be ‘a success’. If he’s a failure he stands a good chance of concentrating upon the best work of which he’s capable. Those words come to mind as I consider the work of American Modernist composer Charles Ives. For much of his life his music was completely ignored, andDown the rabbit hole….

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 As another Independence Day arrives, I find myself increasingly unable to really understand what’s happening in America. I find myself these days oddly optimistic about the future of humanity, but a good deal less so about my country. Here’s a piece I just saw for the first time this morning. It was written last September, before the election, but you don’t have to change many words to make it relevant for this day, today, this morning. From “A New American Manifesto”: From the People of the United States of America: From time to time in human societies, things get so badDown the rabbit hole….

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 Maybe I should just start calling this feature “Something for Friday”…but then I’ll start screwing it up and it’ll just become “Something for Friday (Saturday edition)”, so why not stick with what’s kinda-sorta working… …anyway, here’s a song by Taylor Swift, because I think Taylor Swift is awesome and so should you. This is a recording of one of my favorite songs of hers, and one of her first big mega-hits, though this particular version is the newer version that she re-recorded this year in her ongoing bid to reclaim control of the rights to her own music. (It’s allDown the rabbit hole….

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 I suspect these little controversies have been erupting all over the United States over the last few months, as the COVID-19 vaccines have rolled out. My local version had a prominent member of the Buffalo Bills, a wide receiver named Cole Beasley (who is quite a good player indeed) opining quite loudly that he will not be getting vaccinated, because of, well, reasons. As his reasons are almost entirely transparently goofy anti-science BS, his entire position ended up boiling down to amorphous concepts like “Freedom!” and “Personal choice!” and “Respect my opinion!” and, in one very strange utterance, “I’d rather dieDown the rabbit hole….

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 Returning to the work of Black American composer William Grant Still today, and yet another work by a Black composer that makes me think, “Why have I never heard that before?” It’s a work of American Impressionism called Kaintuck, and from what I’ve read it’s intended to express Still’s own feelings and impressions of mist-covered blue grass meadows of Kentucky. It’s not a long work, but it packs a lot of thoughtful lyricism and introspection into its roughly ten minutes. We open with the solo piano playing a motif of leaping intervals, and then the orchestra comes in and meandersDown the rabbit hole….

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 It’s been a while since I posted an update on books I’ve been reading, so here’s a bit of catch-up! ::  Edge of Sundown is a noir-mystery set in Chicago, by indie writer Jennifer Worrell. A writer who was once a fixture on the bestseller lists for his genre potboilers has spent the better part of a decade in the creative doldrums, until he starts writing what is a marked departure for him: a dystopian thriller in which alien beings are ridding the city streets of “undesirable” elements. But when real-world events start to mirror those in his novel, our heroDown the rabbit hole….