I saw this image on one of NASA’s Flickr streams and I had to share it. It’s a Hubble image of a star-forming region called the “Chameleon Cloud Complex”. Look how gorgeous this is!
Here’s some explanation:
The segment in this Hubble composite image, called Chamaeleon Cloud I (Cha I), reveals dusty-dark clouds where stars are forming, dazzling reflection nebulae glowing by the light of bright-blue young stars, and radiant knots called Herbig-Haro objects.
Herbig-Haro objects are bright clumps and arcs of interstellar gas shocked and energized by jets expelled from infant “protostars” in the process of forming. The white-orange cloud at the bottom of the image hosts one of these protostars at its center. Its brilliant white jets of hot gas are ejected in narrow torrents from the protostar’s poles, creating the Herbig-Haro object HH 909A.
It was the weekend for our annual WinterHounds event, which is a meet-up for greyhound owners that takes place twice a year in the Finger Lakes. Lots of wineries participate, offering discounted tastings and/or purchases to people with greyhounds. There’s a summer event and a winter one, and we’ve been attending the winter one for several years now (we missed last year’s, because of reasons). It’s always nice to be able to get out of town for a few days, especially when winter is two-thirds done, and this year’s escape was no exception.
More notes on this year’s trip to follow, but for now, we’re back. And Carla (who, not being a greyhound and not liking car rides very much, did not go) is happy to have us home. (The Daughter stayed home, so it’s not as if Carla was stuck in her crate for three days! We’re not inhuman!)
Filmmaker and special effects guru Douglas Trumbull died earlier this month. His body of work is not large, but its influence is gigantic. For filmgoers of a certain age and a certain disposition to genre–say, 50ish and inclined to fantasy and science fiction–Trumbull’s work is likely as big an influence on how such stories are visualized as George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic.
Trumbull was instrumental in the look and feel of such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, and, probably the granddaddy of them all in terms of lasting influence, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull also dabbled in directing, with a number of short films and two features, Silent Running (a rather dour environmental allegory that actually makes you care about some robots) and Brainstorm, the infamous sci-fi thriller about a scientist who invents a way to plug memories and images directly into the brain. Brainstorm isn’t a bad film, nor is it a great one, but it certainly deserves better than to be chiefly remembered as the film Natalie Wood was almost done making when she drowned.
Trumbull’s experience on Brainstorm led to him never directing a feature film again, and it’s not hard to see why, given the tragic death of Wood and the subsequent attempts by MGM to kill the production entirely. I can’t assess Trumbull’s directorial skill on the basis of just two movies, but I do know that he was a huge part of the visualization of science fiction at the time I was being shaped most strongly by it. Trumbull’s work tended to be on the less action-oriented side of the genre; he wasn’t much for the “Explodey Spaceshippy Goodness” side of things, but rather he was an excellent visionary at creating futures that were plausible and beautiful. Even in the case of Blade Runner, a noir thriller that takes place in a rain-soaked Los Angeles of seemingly unending darkness, Trumbull infused the bleak cityscape with a type of beauty.
Trumbull’s work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind is particularly legendary, in the way he uses bright bursts of colored light throughout to suggest the UFOs until the film’s climax, when he gives us the Mothership in all its glory:
I can look at this image and fill in the exact chord from the John Williams score at this moment….
You can watch this scene here. Remember that none of the actors had any idea what they were reacting to, so it was up to Trumbull to make their reactions worth it. Obviously, he nailed it.
And then there is his now-legendary work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a film whose reception was mixed at the time (and remains so to this day), a film whose transition from planned teevee series to feature film was no doubt pushed along by the wild success of Star Wars two years before. But ST:TMP was a different kind of movie than Star Wars, a film in which there’s no “pew pew” action, and in which the main developments are all conceptual. Trumbull’s effects work had to carry a disproportionate amount of the film’s emotional heft, and for me, they rose to the occasion. One sequence that occasionally gets cited as an example of the film’s visual excess is the long fly-by of the Enterprise, but I have never been one of that sequence’s detractors. Here’s a video where Trumbull discusses his approach to that scene, as well as the lighting of the Enterprise itself:
That is fascinating stuff: Trumbull discusses the technical aspects of the shot, but also the thinking that went into it, the nature of the sequence in terms of the film’s storytelling, and he even singles out Jerry Goldsmith’s amazing contribution.
Douglas Trumbull’s innovations and achievements may seem a bit quaint in this day of computers being able to shape just about any scene a human can imagine, but they were innovations. Before 2001: A Space Odyssey, the idea of a film showing a starfield that actually looks like what you see when you go outside on a cloudless night and look up, and then being able to pan across that starfield, was unheard of. Every Star Wars movie’s opening pan across the stars, after the opening crawl, is owed to Douglas Trumbull.
When I started looking up Trumbull’s career information for this post, I remembered his body of work being larger than it was. That shows just how big the man’s influence was. You really can’t tell the story of science fiction and fantasy filmmaking of the last sixty years without giving Douglas Trumbull a big credit for how things look and feel. His reach will endure. I know this because it already does.
Finally, I note that films to which Trumbull was attached, either as director or visual effects supervisor, always seemed to boast great filmscores. I leave with two examples.
I’m not usually one to play the “Ahhh, they don’t sing ’em like that anymore!” card, but…no, they don’t sing ’em like that anymore!
Which isn’t a bad thing, because there is always great music in the offing. But still, I wonder what it was like, in a time when cars were bigger and shinier, and songs like this were on the radio.
Ugh! ‘Twas a crazy day at work and a busy evening at home, so I almost forgot entirely about getting this week’s selection posted. In fact, I’m not even posting this week’s selection; I’m saving it for next week. Meanwhile, here’s Mr. Bernstein, conducting Mr. Tchaikovsky. Enjoy!
It’s cold outside! This time of the year in The 716, we’re not usually suffering the kind of cold the Upper Midwest tends to get for weeks (or months) at a time, but we do get bursts of some seriously icy weather here and there. The real deep freeze around here usually won’t last more than a few days, but when it hits, as it’s hitting today–as I write this, it’s 20 degrees out and I woke up to 7 degrees at 7am this morning–it’s “hole up, layer up, and consume coffee and tea and soup” weather.
Not being dramatic. It really WAS this cold this morning!
Which makes me think about heat, and how we get it.
I never really knew how our houses were heated when I was a kid, up to when we moved into our house in Allegany, NY, when I was nine. I assume those houses were forced-air furnaces, because I remember heat registers in the floor issuing warm air when we needed it. But when we arrived in Allegany, we switched to wood burning. (Our last house in Oregon had used wood too, and we’d actually moved the wood stove with us because my parents owned it, but I don’t recall it being the main source of heat in that house in Hillsboro…but again, I was nine and this was Hillsboro, OR, where it doesn’t get as cold as it does here, so maybe the wood stove was our primary heat there.)
For the balance of my young life, from fifth grade until I headed out for college, I lived in a house mainly heated by a wood stove. This was fine, but it wasn’t without its challenges. For one thing, it’s very hard, if not impossible, to achieve consistent heat with wood. It gets really hot, so you choke off the flame and let it die down a bit, and maybe open a window if it gets too hot. This cooling process takes a while…and then, when you want it warm again, you have to restoke the fire, which takes time again to heat back up. There was a constant dance of being a bit too cold or a bit too hot.
Sometimes, if the wood was especially wet early on in the season (we’d get a cord or two of wood delivered each fall), you simply wouldn’t get great heat. The way it usually worked was that when you got up in the morning, all that was left in that stove were coals, so you (meaning me) shoveled out some of it to make room for new wood, which you would then toss in. This wood took a long time to start burning, so it would be cold in the morning and it wouldn’t be warm again until after I was gone for school.
And then there were times when we’d go away for a day or two, returning on a winter’s night to a completely dead fire. Nothing to do then but build a new fire in the stove.
Another factor here was the house itself, which was long and narrow. The wood stove was at one end, and the bedrooms were all at the other, and we didn’t run fans to move that air around, so that back end of the house would stay hold. For this reason we got a supplementary kerosene heater for the back end of the house. My years in that house are probably why to this day I tend to be more comfortable in a cool environment than a warm one.
Eventually my parents got a gas furnace and forced air installed in that house, I think because there were huge savings when the gas company ran lines out that way. And I moved out for good a while after that. Our first apartment had a gas heater in the living room; again the “long and narrow” problem reared its head and we kept rooms in the back half of the apartment closed. Another apartment had hot-water baseboard heaters, so when the heat kicked on we’d hear the flow of water followed by a chorus of creaking pipes as the metal expanded.
Our house now has a forced air furnace, which is nice. Even nicer is the programmable thermostat, so I’m not forever changing temp settings (maybe once in a while). The program has four settings that I can set for specific times: Sleep (which runs overnight), Wake (first thing in the morning), Leave (how warm for while we’re at work), and Return (how warm we want it for when we’re home at night). It’s nice being able to let the house cool overnight, and then start warming up again when we’re getting up for our day.
One problem I discovered is that our thermostat has a “Recovery” system. I didn’t understand this system until recently. I have the “Sleep” temperature set for 62, and the “Wake” temp set for 68. Originally I set “Wake” to start at 6:15am, which I interpreted to mean that the t-stat would keep things at 62 until 6:15, at which time it would start heating the place up to 68 and then maintain that until the time when the “Leave” setting takes over. Problem is…that’s not how it works! I was noticing that the bedroom would start getting a lot warmer starting at 5:45 or so, warm enough to actually wake me up half an hour before the alarm at 6:15.
What was going on?
Well, that “Recovery” system was kicking the heat on around 5:30 or so, because the thermostat interprets the “Wake” setting–68 at 6:15am–not as “Start heating to 68 at 6:15”, but rather, “Make sure it’s 68 by 6:15″. So, to achieve what I wanted, I had to change the Wake time to 7:15! It took me a week to figure this out.
On weekends lots of times it’s all not applicable anyway, because a certain greyhound decides that he needs out to pee; thus, when this happens, I tend to get up and stay up. Which means, layers and coffee. And, on the really cold mornings, I get out my handwarmers, too.
Later this week we actually hit the lower 50s…and then back down to the 30s for next weekend. It’s a roller-coaster, it is! Heat management is fun, it is. It’s more fun than cooling, that’s for sure….
“To me, Seven O’Clock Shout is a declaration of our survival. It is something that allows us our agency to take back the kindness that is in our hearts and the emotions that cause us such turmoil. … We cheer on the essential workers with a primal and fierce urgency to let them know that we stand with them and each other.”—Valerie Coleman
Valerie Coleman is a flautist and composer who grew up in Louisville, KY, before becoming an influential musician in a number of ways: a flautist who formed the Imani Winds, a prominent woodwind quintet, while following a busy solo career, and a composer of a diverse body of work for soloists and ensembles all the way up to full orchestras.
Coleman’s piece Seven O’Clock Shout was written for, and premiered by, the Philadelphia Orchestra. The work is directly inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic and the early response to it. From Coleman’s website:
Seven O’Clock Shoutis an anthem inspired by the tireless frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the heartwarming ritual of evening serenades that brings people together amidst isolation to celebrate life and the sacrifices of heroes. The work begins with a distant and solitary solo between two trumpets in fanfare fashion to commemorate the isolation forced upon human kind, and the need to reach out to one another. The fanfare blossoms into a lushly dense landscape of nature, symbolizing both the caregiving acts of nurses and doctors as they try to save lives, while nature is transforming and healing herself during a time of self-isolation.
When a composer has the rare opportunity to create for musicians they have gotten to know, the act of composing becomes an embrace tailored to the personality and capabilities of the musicians with elements of both challenge and appreciation. One such moment is dedicated to humanity and grace, as a clarinet solo written for Ricardo Morales, followed by a flute solo with both Jeffrey Khaner and Patrick Williams in mind, providing a transition into a new upbeat segment. Later, to continue tradition from the first commission the composer received from the orchestra, a piccolo solo dedicated to Erica Peel dances with joy.
The piece is lyrical and optimistic, even in the face of the horrors of the pandemic–especially the early days, when everyone was sequestered from one another, with no real sense at all for when, or even if, things might start to get back to “normal”.
Who knows how we might have responded back then if we had realized that two years would then elapse during which we couldn’t entirely return to “normal”…but that’s a discussion for another time. Seven O’Clock Shout is one musician’s response to the great difficulty of our time. And why not? Much great art is.
Raise your hand if you grew up in a town with terrible pizza.
[raises hand]
OK, good. I’m not alone. But more on that later.
Today is apparently National Pizza Day. I have no idea why today is National Pizza Day, but I do not generally question such things. But at least I can honor the occasion by dining on some pizza!
That’s leftover frozen pizza that I’ve reheated, actually. But no, this is not a bad thing! Frozen pizza has come a long, long, long way since the days of the really cheap crusts that tasted vaguely (or not so vaguely) of the cardboard box. This is actually a new brand to me, by a company called the Motor City Pizza Company. Every few weeks at home we have Frozen Pizza Nite for dinner, whereupon I buy a gluten-free pizza for The Wife (she is partial to the Freschetta brand), and I buy something for myself. I don’t have a favorite, which is nice for some pizza exploration each time out.
This last one was apparently a Detroit-style pizza, which means that it’s oblong rather than circular, the crust is thick and chewy (not unlike Buffalo-style pizza, in all honesty!), and the cheese (Wisconsin brick cheese) is spread all the way to the edge, so that it melts and scorches a bit around the edges, giving the outer crust a cheesy, carbonized crunch. I don’t know how well this particular frozen pizza holds up as an example of Detroit-style pizza, but I did like this brand and I would buy it again.
(Pro tip: When reheating leftover pizza, don’t use the oven OR the microwave. Use a frying pan, on the stove, on medium to medium-low heat. Put a lid on it to get the cheese melty again, while the pan re-crisps the crust.)
Generally speaking, pizza might be the single food I’ve eaten more than any other (maybe second after sandwiches), and I suspect I’m far from alone in this. Americans tend to be nuts about pizza. What’s one of the first question anybody asks in this country when they relocate to a new city? “Where’s the good pizza around here?” Pizza is so huge that it’s simply not acceptable that celiacs live a pizzaless existence, hence the existence of many gluten-free pizzas.
I don’t remember a time of my life that was Before Pizza. In our oddly-nomadic life in my first ten years, during which we moved each year, we had a favorite pizza place in each town. Pizza Caboose was a run train-themed pizza place in the Portland area (some locations had an actual caboose inside, which you could sit in as long as the whole thing wasn’t rented out for a party), and there was another place (now gone) called the Organ Grinder, which was a trip in itself. These places, I remember liking very much, even if I, as the youngest member of the family, rarely got to pick the pizza toppings, so I had to deal with sliced tomatoes and mushrooms and having Dad admonish me for trying to pick the pepperoni off the freshly-served pizza.
(But really, isn’t it a pizza law that you pick off one slice of pepperoni from the fresh pizza? How many things in life are better than that first, and only, piece of pepperoni, picked from the top of the still-bubbling pie, dripping hot grease and pulling along with it a fine tendril of molten cheese?)
Another joint I remember, from the year we lived in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, was Rocky Rococo’s. This place served up slices of deep-crusted goodness. I also remember a couple of other pizza joints in LaCrosse…one of them had barber chairs that kids could play in while waiting for food (maybe this was actually Rocky Rococo’s? I dunno) and another was a bar/restaurant in LaCrosse’s downtown section, whose name I don’t recall but I do recall their pizza being very well-endowed in the cheese department.
And then there was Olean, my hometown of roughly twenty years.
Olean, bless its heart, was not a place for great pizza. I know that some of the locals down there will quibble with this assessment, but I cannot tell a lie. One local joint, located in the mall there, is absolutely beloved, but it’s really on par with Sbarro, and it serves the same kind of product (the cheap thin NYC-style slice that you can fold). It wasn’t bad, but I never once pined for it the way many there do. Another joint served slices of square pizza cut from sheet pans, and each slice had two pepperoni slices on it. That’s it: two. This place was also beloved. I never understood why.
There were a few other mom-and-pop joints that came and went, but generally, Olean was not really a place to get great pizza. Maybe its pizza scene has improved since I moved away–it’s been more than twenty years now, after all–but at the time, well…a case can be made that Pizza Hut really was the best game in town. (And honestly, as much as I might say about working at Pizza Hut, I do still believe that their product, at least back then, was perfectly respectable, at least for a corporate “Every pizza must be the same!” joint.)
One special mention must be made of a pizza place in Pittsburgh, the city of my birth: Vincent’s Pizza Park is the home of some amazing pizzas, but they’re rather idiosyncratic. They are big, heavy, loaded with grease, and the crust goes for miles. I mean, look at these:
That’s some amazing pizza–I have never been able to find Italian sausage on a pizza that had quite the same bite as the stuff that Vincent’s uses–but when you’re eating it, you might well flash back to that episode of The Simpsons when during breakfast Bart is complaining of chest pains while Homer orders him to butter his bacon.
(Vincent’s was also apparently a bit less well-maintained, in earlier days when sanitary standards were a bit more lax than they are nowadays. My father loved telling the story of how once he was at Vincent’s when my parents were relatively newly wed, in the early 1960s, and he called home from the pay phone to tell Mom he was going to be a while because some poor guy had gotten locked in the bathroom and was shrieking to be released from whatever eldritch terror dwelt within. Dad had to see that one play out.)
What are my pizza preferences? I mean, everybody has a preference, right? My favorite right now would almost certainly be Imperial Pizza in South Buffalo, a joint that is rightfully legendary. It breaks my heart that The Wife can’t eat their product anymore. Curse you, Gluten Gods! But Imperial’s crust is that wonderful thick pillowy Buffalo crust, topped with a sweetish sauce and piled with cheese and whatever your toppings are. Each year at Christmas I treat myself and a couple of coworkers to pizza and wings from Imperial, and given the opportunity to have pizza from any place right now, I’d likely choose Imperial.
Or Cappelli’s…they may an amazing chicken finger pizza that tastes like pizza and wings all in one dish…and their crust, a bit thinner than the standard Buffalo crust, is ideally suited for one of my favorite topping combos, Italian sausage and banana peppers.
But more generally? I really do love all kinds of pizza. The New York City thin crust experience really is special, and I love it to death. But I am equally fond, if not moreso, of the Chicago deep-dish experience, in which a buttery and flaky crust contains multitudes in terms of tomatoes, cheese, and who knows what else. And everything in between! Buffalo pizza, Detroit pizza, and from my little experience with it, that super-thin crust stuff they make in St. Louis.
Pizza is so amazingly versatile that I can’t imagine ever tiring of it, or getting militant about one particular variety of it. Pizza is large. Pizza contains multitudes. You can make breakfast pizza, you can make white pizza, you can make any variation of the “traditional” pizza you can think of, you can make dessert pizza. Pizza makes life better, and we owe eternal gratitude to whichever ancestors it was who made a flatbread and then started putting stuff on it.
And then to those who made beer to wash it down with, and wings to pair with it.
I last featured the work of 20th century American composer Ulysses Kay two years ago, which is probably too long to have allowed to lapse without revisiting him. Kay is an important voice in the Neoclassical tradition, but his music represents a broad array of influences, some of which show up in today’s work. Chariots is an orchestral rhapsody in which Kay’s main literary influence was apparently the use of chariots in the poetry of William Blake. The work was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra, under the baton of the composer himself–and that’s the performance featured here.
