In 1980 Queen provided one of the best-known examples of a rock band providing significant amounts of music for a genre movie, the grand pulpy-sci-fi flick Flash Gordon. Several years later they did a similar task for an equally pulpy and campy epic fantasy film, 1986’s Highlander. Oddly, in terms of greater cultural visibility, Flash Gordon is probably better known than Highlander, despite the fact that Highlander actually spawned a franchise that may or may not still be going strong, where Flash went sequel-less and then the property has just kind of sat there, occasionally getting revisited but never in a big way. It’s weird how this stuff works.
Highlander has never been my favorite flick–it’s kind of thick and ponderous and its tone is, for me, wildly inconsistent (it would have benefitted greatly, I think, from the kind of commitment to camp that Flash undertook)–but its music, consisting of a score by Michael Kamen, is a grandly epic score full of sweeping melodies that are often better than the sequences they accompany. And then there are the songs by Queen, which aren’t quite as strongly central to the film as the ones for Flash; in the earlier film, the songs are part of, if not the main part, of the movie’s music in general. For Highlander the songs are more in the background. But they’re still good, because they’re by Queen. I don’t think Queen had it in them to do bad songs.
Here’s “Who Wants To Live Forever” by Queen, from Highlander, a movie about immortal combatants who can only dispatch each other by beheading, until only one remains to claim The Prize. (That’s about as much sense as it makes in the movie, I swear.)
Film music today! It suddenly occurred to me the other day that I haven’t heard anything by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek in a long time, so I gave a bit of his music another listen. My introduction to him was the gentle lyricism of his score to Finding Neverland, a wonderful movie you don’t hear much about anymore. Kaczmarek won the Best Score Oscar for this score, and he won it the year after The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won that honor, so in two years you had polar opposites winning the Oscar: a gigantic epic score of enormous complexity and orchestral grandiosity, and a quiet chamber work of delicate intimacy.
Finding Neverland tells a fantasized version of the story of J.M. Barrie and his creation of Peter Pan. The film abounds with dream-like sequences and flights of imagination, and these passages have a gossamer quality that is well served by Kaczmarek’s orchestral clarity. I love this score and hearing it again after a number of years was a delight. It’s always a pleasure to return to favorite works we’ve not visited in a long time, isn’t it?
I looked for a suite from this score, but the few that I found don’t feature the passages that I love most, so I decided to simply go with this: the entire score album presented at once. Plenty of tone poems are an hour long, so why not?
Here is Jan A.P. Kaczmarek’s score to Finding Neverland. If you can, listen to this someplace where you think there might be some magic lurking in the corners.
I love breakfast sandwiches. Whoever first put eggs and meat and cheese on some kind of bread should be awarded a Nobel Prize.
In fact, there should be a Nobel Prize for food. But that’s a thought for another time.
Tonight was Breakfast Sandwich for Dinner Night, which happens pretty frequently at Casa Jaquandor because we love them and we always have stuff on hand to make them. What’s nice about breakfast sandwiches is the variability: they’re not unlike burgers in that regard. About the only thing you have to have is bread, egg, and cheese. Anything else is fair game: extra protein, grilled veggies, more cheese, hot sauce, other condiments.
You can vary the cheese, obviously–smoked Gouda makes a nifty flavor change, and I’m a firm believer that you should make as much room in your life for different varieties of cheese as you can. Using brie as a spreading cheese on sandwiches? That’s great stuff!
I suppose you could even use different eggs from different birds, though I’ve never gone that far. The bread is the biggest option for changing things up. A good hearty bun is great, and biscuits are classic. Good old bread is great, too…but don’t stop there! Making waffles? Make a couple extra, cut them into segments, and use the waffles as the casing for your breakfast sandwich. The sky is the limit, folks.
And if you’re wondering what’s on the sandwich pictured at the top of this post? From bottom to top: Provolone*, a sausage patty**, egg***, Canadian ham****, and hot pepper jelly*****! Mine is on white bread; The Wife’s was on gluten-free bread.
*Never put a protein that has a lot of internal juices directly on the bottom bread. A fatty layer is best. In this case, cheese. On a burger, the bottom bun is where I spread mayo.
**We buy our breakfast sausage from Hanzlian’s, a local sausage maker whose products we love.
***Only one egg this time, what with all the other proteins.
****I’m not sure if there’s a difference between “Canadian ham”, as this is packaged, and “Canadian bacon”. Canadian bacon is good stuff. As a kid I used to get pouty when my parents would order it on pizza, which was an incorrect position to take. Get over it, Young Me!
*****Hot pepper jelly is my new “secret weapon” condiment. I adore the stuff, and it probably deserves a post of its own.
I haven’t written about The World’s Greatest Overalls Collection* lately, so…let’s talk overalls. Specifically, the Liberty brand.
Liberty is a common brand that’s been around forever, but I’ve never owned a pair, until now. I have to admit that I’ve avoided the brand, because of their association with a teevee show.
Billy Carter appeared on Hee Haw, for some reason.
Imagine doing the whole 80s-poof thing with your hair and then having to put on a straw hat to stand and tell bad jokes in a fake indoor cornfield!
I have nothing against Hee Haw, as corny a show as it was–and let’s be honest, in the annals of corny earnest teevee, Hee Haw is way up there. There’s so much corn in that show that it could be squeezed for oil. Imagine The Waltons or Little House at their corniest, double the corn, and you’ve got Hee Haw.
Put simply, I’m acutely aware that at times I run the risk of looking like a backlot cast extra from Hee Haw, and I didn’t want to underline that by wearing the literal brand of overalls most associated with the show!
More recently, though, I’ve concluded that maybe I’m overthinking it a bit. I mean, how much cultural cachet does Hee Haw even have, at this point? No new episodes have been made in almost 30 years (it was finally canceled in 1993), and today it exists on cable channels and you can find episodes on YouTube. And heck, it’s not as if people would have really been paying attention even in the show’s peak of popularity as to the brand of overalls being rocked by the cast!
(Though I may be wrong on that particular point, because these things exist out there in the world:
That’s…a bit too on-point for me. The 70s were apparently a time for occasional overalls in various novelty prints….)
I must admit, too, that Hee Haw‘s status as a teevee staple in my household when I was “but a wee bairn!” is a likely influence in my lifelong sartorial tastes…and that probably wasn’t even its only influence on me:
Johnny Cash and Archie Campbell, both in Liberty overalls. Campbell’s face is obscured by a pie.
Liberty is still going strong as a company, and they maintain a nifty presence on social media. In recent years they’ve added a women’s line of overalls, of which I am jealous because they come in some nifty colors, particularly this “Frosted Sage” color:
Image from Liberty Brand’s Facebook page. I’m not sure what that gizmo is she’s holding…maybe it’s the smoke thing beekeepers use? Hmmmm….
I actually love that color, and if the Liberty folks made those available for men, I might very well snap up a pair.
I ended up not buying a new pair directly; my general taste now in overalls is for vintage, so that’s where I went. Also, I’ve read some reviews of the current manufacture that the new buckles Liberty is using tend to break, I also didn’t want blue denim; Hickory stripe is one of my favorite things, and sticking with my original hang-up, you didn’t see Hickory stripes much on Hee Haw. So, a couple of weeks of lurking around eBay auctions later, I ended up with this nifty pair!
It’s July and WAY too hot for double-denim; these last two were just to see how they look with the denim shirt, since Autumn will be here before we know it!
What differentiates Liberty overalls from others is the styling of the bib pocket. It’s a triple pocket, believe it or not: the main one has a zipper enclosure, and then there’s a second, smaller pocket with a flap enclosure that snaps. There is also the standard hidden pocket watch pocket (the “button” hole on the top of a bib is for a pocket-watch fob), and the slots for pencils. (I never use these, but the stitching adds nice highlights.)
In addition to the buckles being different on the vintage pair, there are also a few key difference in the way the fabric is laid out. On the vintage pair I got, the band across the top of the bib, the top of the bib pocket just below the zipper, and the flap enclosure are cut so the Hickory stripe pattern runs horizontal, which to my eye creates a neat contrast. The newer design has all the Hickory striping set vertical, which is still neat-looking but…not as neat as it used to be.
Image from the Liberty Overalls website. Note the differences in the bib pocket between this new pair and my vintage pair.
A few detail shots here, because Liberty uses green highlights to nifty effect, with the bib label, the fabric setting the zipper, and even the enameled inlay in the button engraving:
Apparently Liberty actually carries a patent for the design of their bib pocket. I suppose that makes sense, but I’d never thought about that before. There are other overalls on the market with a similar, but obviously not identical, set-up with the bib pockets.
As for the fit and comfort? These are terrific, to the point that I’m regretting avoiding Liberty overalls for so long. I really like the way they look and feel when I’m wearing them, and as long as the forecast isn’t absurdly hot, I’m hoping to wear them to the Sterling Renaissance Festival when The Daughter and I attend next weekend. Here’s hoping!
*My overalls collection is now officially The World’s Greatest Overalls Collection. I have dubbed it thus.
Setting aside all the various issues with its interpretation–and honestly, I’ve pretty much conclusively come to the conclusion that it should simply be repealed entirely–I realized anew that other day just how weird the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is. It’s just a strange piece of writing, even for its time.
I came to this when I read news of an unfortunate encounter with a police officer that took place in Rochester. (I know, a bad police story, big shocker there.) Summing it up: a cop parked his cop car in a space outside a hospital’s Emergency entrance that is marked for ambulances and EMT vehicles only, because…it doesn’t matter. I’ve long observed that cops take it as a given that they get to park wherever the hell they want, for any reason. But now an ambulance comes in with a patient, and in parking, bumps the cop’s car. This pisses off the cop, who can’t think the actual thing he should have thought: “Yikes, I shouldn’t be parked here, my bad.” No, the cop jumped out and started being all “KNEEL BEFORE COP!!!” while the EMT was all “I really gotta get this person into the hospital for treatment.” And since the EMT did not KNEEL BEFORE COP!!!, the cop put the EMT in cuffs. (The cop is now on desk duty. Personally, I think he should be on laundry duty, but that’s just me.)
As I have always noticed how cops tend to view themselves as somehow above the laws they’re supposedly enforcing, I looked up the Second Amendment and recast it as follows:
“A cowed populace, being necessary to the security of a police State, the right of the constabulary to do whatever it wishes, shall not be infringed.”
I wanted to make sure I got the wording exactly the way I wanted it, complete with the Amendment’s phrasing and punctuation. And that’s when I realized, typing it out, how strange a piece of actual writing the Second Amendment is. I mean, look at it:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
There is, quite famously, no helpful text to explain just how the first clause relates to the second, which has naturally caused all manner of unfortunate shenanigans in American history. And what is with all those commas? There are three commas in this single sentence, separating this thing into four distinct language clauses. Just on its own, the Second Amendment is a linguistic calamity. I can’t believe anyone at the Convention didn’t look at this thing and say, “Guys, this makes no sense as written and we need to clarify it.” That was a room full of good writers (as well as drunkards and nitwits), and yet, this terribly-written Amendment was allowed to stand. Why? Well, maybe they thought the meaning they intended was so clear and unlikely to change that it would never be an issue. Or maybe they figured, given the general ambivalence to the Constitution at the time, that it would be fixed on revision anyway. Or maybe…well, who cares. Fact is, we’re saddled with it. As is. Which is itself absurd, but hey, 21st Century America is, if nothing else, a great national monument to absurdity.
I also glanced at the other Amendments surrounding the Second. Were they all this badly written? Why…no! Here’s the First:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
That’s pretty damned clear. The commas are used logically, and the clauses clearly relate as part of the same sentence. Odd capitalization abounds, but that was just a Thing back then. (I assume there was some Rule by which those writing chose which words to Capitalize.) But the First reads very clearly: Congress is forbidden to do this.
The other Amendments are all pretty specific in the way they limit government, except for the Ninth and Tenth, which are clearly intended to forestall arguments down the road of the “Well, the Constitution doesn’t specifically SAY you can’t do this, so you CAN!” or vice-versa. (Pssst, Messrs Jefferson et al: It didn’t work.) So then I look back at the Second, aghast anew at is appalling lack of specificity, its foggy language, and its unique phrasing (nowhere else is the construct “shall not be infringed” used).
Bad writing has consequences, folks. Especially when a big part of your country’s population has decided to treat a certain piece of bad writing as if it was handed down by God on a third tablet.
(For an amusing bit of Constitutional comedy, here is John Mulaney in one of his SNL monologues. The relevant bit is at the 3:52 mark:
I love the line, “They knew how to make a pen, they were just being jerks.”)
Roger wrote about cover songs last week, which is a big topic of its own! We could go on for days about favorite cover songs, which cover songs we prefer to the originals, and so on. Do we ever talk about songs we didn’t know were covers until we knew the covers well, so that the existence of an original came as a surprise? I haven’t seen that come up much, but here’s one of mine.
I’ve featured the band Blackmore’s Night in this space more than a few times; I’m coming up on twenty years of being a fan of theirs. Headlined by former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and vocalist Candice Night, Blackmore’s Night is a rock group with a folk-Renaissance focus. Both Blackmore and Night had a love of traditional Renaissance music, which they channeled into their new group when they formed it in the 1990s. The result is a group whose music combines modern sound and very old musical forms and melodies and rhythms. It’s this blend of rock, folk, and Renaissance music, that makes them so refreshing to listen to a lot of the time. Listening to Blackmore’s Night always puts me in mind of a late afternoon or early evening at the Sterling Renaissance Festival, when we’re sitting in the golden sunlight of the waning day watching the joust and munching our roasted turkey legs.
Most of their songs involve a feel of antiquity and old-school romance; think a more rock-oriented Loreena McKennitt. But one of their albums contained a song whose title flummoxed me: “Celluloid Heroes”. And the lyrics are as far from Renfest-stylings as you can get:
Everybody’s a dreamer and everybody’s a star
And everybody’s in movies, it doesn’t matter who you are
There are starts in every city
In every house and on every street
And if you walk down Hollywood Boulevard
Their names are written in concrete
Don’t step on Greta Garbo as you walk down the Boulevard
She looks so weak and fragile that’s why she tried to be so hard
But they turned her into a princess
And they sat her on a throne
But she turned her back on stardom
Because she wanted to be alone
I couldn’t fathom why there was this song about the names on the sidewalks of Hollywood in the middle of a folk-rock album, even if the theme of the song is pretty universal: the fleeting nature of fame and our tendency to make marble idols of people who were, as the song describes “dearest Marilyn”, “only made of flesh and blood.”
It turns out that “Celluloid Heroes” is a cover of a song originally recorded by The Kinks. I don’t know much about The Kinks at all–in fact, as of this writing, I haven’t even listened to their original version of “Celluloid Heroes”–so all I do know is that the song was written as part of a concept album called Everybody’s In Show-Biz. Apparently the album’s lyrics focus on the difficulties and stresses of the life of a touring rock band. In that context, “Celluloid Heroes” makes sense…and maybe that explains why Blackmore’s Night recorded it. They’re touring musicians as well, and both have been around much longer in that life than just the current band’s existence. Blackmore’s been at it for many, many years.
I wish my life was a non-stop Hollywood movie show
A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes
Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain
And celluloid heroes never really die.
This also reminds me of the permanent figures in Keats’s Grecian urn. The celluloid heroes don’t age, they don’t suffer, they just are. (Even if, these days, they’re not even celluloid heroes anymore. We’ll have to update the song to digital heroes.)
Harrison Ford is 80 years old today. He’s been one of my favorite actors–hell, for a lot of my youth he was my favorite actor–pretty much ever since I was aware of actors as actual people who had real names. Of course this was because of Star Wars! Han Solo was my favorite character early on, and I gravitated to Ford’s laconic and sarcastic portrayal of a space pirate whose heart was just waiting to be unlocked.
I would for years watch anything just because Harrison Ford was in it. I’d stay up late to watch a movie called The Frisco Kid, a Western in which Ford is an outlaw who ends up helping a wayward Rabbi (played by Gene Wilder) get to San Francisco. I remember Ford in a film called Heroes, starring Henry Winkler as a Vietnam vet who is struggling with PTSD. I badgered my mother into taking me, as an 11-year-old, to see Blade Runner, for which I was almost certainly too young. I was only vaguely interested in Raiders of the Lost Ark (what did I care if it was directed by the guy who did Jaws and written by the guy who wrote Star Wars?) until I learned that Harrison Ford was in it.
And there was Witness in 1985, still unequaled in Ford’s career.
I’ve seen most of Ford’s filmography, though not all of it. Ford’s been a constant presence in my moviegoing world for pretty much the entire time I’ve been seeing movies that weren’t kiddie-fare or animated features. He’s not the kind of chameleon actor who looks different each time out, like Daniel Day Lewis, but he has more range than I think a lot of people give him credit for. And there’s always that Harrison Fork twinkle in the eye, this reassuring gleam that tells us in the audience: “Hey, I’ve got this. Don’t worry.”
As an action star, I always get the feel that Harrison Ford is playing normal guys who wind up in action scenarios. He’s not a guy who knows what to do, but a guy who takes stock of what’s going on around him. Ford’s characters are always aware in a way that makes Ford a part of the scene, really in the movie’s world, and not just acting on a set. Few actors show their characters thinking their way through their struggles as well as Ford. You can always see his character thinking, processing, their wheels turning.
Mark Hamill described working with Harrison Ford in a late-night appearance a few years ago, and this is a great testimonial because he describe’s Ford’s awareness extending not just to the scene but to the project as a whole. Ford always knows what the job is, and what he has to do to get the job done. It’s probably an attitude born of his years as a carpenter, before he caught on as an actor; a carpenter’s work is completely defined, after all! You know what you’re building, you know what materials you’re working with, you know what you have to do in what order to get the job done. Ford seems to have a similar approach to acting, and what a good thing. (This may also be why Ford always seems so bemused and out of place in interviews; the guy looks at acting as a job, so what’s there to talk about? Who brings the carpenter on to a teevee show to talk about what it meant to build a table?)
Here’s Mark Hamill:
For a long time it was almost a cottage industry to complain about Harrison Ford’s approach to his own career. The narrative was that he was just taking jobs to stay busy, that he didn’t care about rising to a challenge, and that he’d probably never rise again to the level of his work in Witness because he just didn’t seem like he wanted to. I honestly don’t know what to make of that, but I will note that for me, Harrison Ford’s body of work stands in much better light than many think. And I hope he’s still got time and desire to do some more.
Happy birthday, Harrison Ford! You always get the job done.
In light of the stunning images being released today by NASA from the James Webb Space Telescope, I decided to look for “classical music inspired by space”, in hopes of finding a work that might evoke the cosmic sense of wonder that the Webb Telescope’s preliminary work is inspiring.
The search results took a bit of work to get though: nearly everybody who writes on the topic recommends Holst’s The Planets, which is fine but not so much inspired by space as by astrology. Many articles cite Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is indeed a great work that I’m sure I’ll feature eventually! But it’s not actually about space. Strauss’s inspiration was the philosophy writings af Friedrich Nietzsche, and the “space” association came many years later when Stanley Kubrick used Strauss’s work to great effect in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I did find several pieces that fit the bill, though, and this is one of them. It is the Sunrise Mass, bu Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo (born 1978). The work is a setting of the traditional Mass–the text is Latin–but with a somewhat stellar inspiration. The work has that cathedral-like feel in its sonorities that makes me think of, well, the universe.
The composer has written:
The reason I used English titles for each movement in this setting of the Latin Mass has to do with the initial idea behind Sunrise Mass. I wanted the musical journey of the work to evolve from transparent and spacey to something earthy and warm; from nebulous and pristine, though more emotional landscapes, to ultimately solid groundedness–as a metaphor for human development from child to adult, or as a spiritual journey.
The piece is also inspired by several movies and film scores from the past few years that I love dearly.
The work consists of four movements:
The Spheres Sunrise
The City
Identity and the Ground
I listened to the piece twice today–once during lunch and again while doing some admin work–and it captivated me greatly. Gjeilo’s work is melodic without being cloyingly so, and his choral writing is top notch; his harmonies are easily parsed and the entire choir sings with balance and a huge sound. The work teems with the kind of sepulchral wonder that I hope we all feel when confronted with the infinite amazements of our universe.
In short, I loved this piece and I hope you will too. Here is Sunrise Mass.
