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 I’ve recently made an important decision regarding my wardrobe. It’s time to make a change. No, I’m not ditching overalls. I’m adding something. Yup: I’m starting to wear a hat. For me, this is kind of big, because I’ve never been a hat person. I had a black-and-white fedora in high school that I liked, especially for jazz band concerts, but that was about it. Baseball caps were never my thing, and I’ve never actually owned one aside from the ones I wear at work when I’m entering a food production area (it’s a health department requirement). I have nothing especially againstDown the rabbit hole….

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 Here’s a curiosity: a film music tone poem that’s actually a tone poem, and not a group of film music cues arranged into one. Composer Michael Kamen (much missed, he died too young and vibrant in 2003) scored the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, from which this piece comes. The movie–which I quite like–tracks something like thirty or forty years in the life of Mr. Holland (Richard Dreyfuss), a young man at the start of the film who envisions himself as a composer of serious music. He quickly finds that he’s not going to be able to support him or hisDown the rabbit hole….

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 Last week was the 40th anniversary of the initial theatrical release of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Raiders arrived in the summer that my family uprooted from Hillsboro, OR, for Allegany, NY, all the way across the country. I was still three months shy of turning ten, and this would be my sixth cross-country move in that time. (Fortunately it was the final such move.) Raiders was the big movie that summer, and when it came out I knew nothing about it at all, save for that it starred my favorite actor at the time, Harrison Ford. I also knew from theDown the rabbit hole….

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 I’ll have more to say about Raiders of the Lost Ark later this week (the movie came out 40 years ago this week!), but for now, here is John Williams conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in one of the most iconic of his many iconic themes, the Raiders March. I especially love Marion’s Theme, which forms the mid-section of this march; her theme has a lot more of a yearning sensuality to it than any of Williams’s lyrical themes from the Star Wars movies to that point. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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Actor Ned Beatty has died at the age of 83. Beatty had a long and wonderful and varied career, and he played a wide variety of characters. I suppose he’s seen more as a “character actor” than as a lead, but…I don’t know, surely there should be something between a character actor and a proper lead, right? Beatty was always recognizable, but he never seemed the same, if that makes any sense. Every time I saw him in something he managed to create something all new. My first exposure to him was in Superman: The Movie, which remains my favoriteDown the rabbit hole….

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 The Internet, for all its annoyances and horrors, is also a place of fun and wonderment, and it’s always nice to see a reminder of that. One example is a person on Twitter who has made it his job to post the same thing, each and every Friday. It’s a video clip of actor Daniel Craig, from an episode of Saturday Night Live that he hosted. It came time for him to introduce the episode’s musical guest, a Canadian singer named Abel Makkonen Tesfaye. Tesfaye’s stage name, however, is “The Weeknd” (spelling intentional), so what Daniel Craig says is: “Ladies andDown the rabbit hole….

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 Classic rock is often on the playlist at Casa Jaquandor, for many reasons. This is the popular music I grew up with, the “soundtrack of my youth” as it were, though in my case, not as strongly as for others (because the main part of the soundtrack of my youth was John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, and their comrades). Nevertheless, I couldn’t help hearing a great deal of classic rock as it was new, in restaurants and on car stereos and in bars and camps and generally all over the place. I tend to associate a lot of this musicDown the rabbit hole….