Our spiffy high-speed wifi router that we got a few months ago died. Now we’re back on our older, less fast high-speed router. Sigh! This is like going back to a horse-drawn carriage for the several-hour trek to Mankato!!! That is all. Hopefully more tomorrow. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
This week’s selection is stretching the definition of “tone poem” probably past the breaking point, as this piece is not orchestral at all; it was originally written for harpsichord but we’re going to hear it on piano. It’s by Jean-Philippe Rameau, a French Baroque composer and musical writer who lived contemporaneously with J.S. Bach. And with that, you now know as much about Rameau as I do. I heard this piece on the Open Ears Project podcast (which I highly recommend!). The Open Ears Project is kind of like my “Something for Thursday” series, only it’s a different notable personDown the rabbit hole….
Maybe I’ve mentioned this before, but my father once referred to one of the elections when I was a kid as “a referendum on the American people”. I don’t think that’s ever been more true, because if this is who we are…. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
Gramps turned eighty the other day,and everybody was there.He was dressed up in a brand new suit,sittin’ in his big arm chair. Then a beautiful, young, naked womanstood up in front of the group.She offered gramps some super sex,So he said, “I’ll take the soup!” –“Bad Jokes“, Prairie Home Companion So I have a big pot of soup on: the first cauldron of Buffalo Chicken Soup of the 2024-2025 Soup Season! Now, I tend to limit my soup consumption to the colder months, so for me, Soup Season usually starts in October and winds up, oh, March or April, depending onDown the rabbit hole….
It’s amazing to me how much of my life has unfolded within the boundaries of this photo: (via) Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
The other day I featured an instrumental medley of tunes from the Lerner-and-Loewe Broadway show Camelot, and since then I’ve had the music of Camelot on my brain, so I’ve been listening to the songs quite a bit–both from the movie soundtrack and from the Original Broadway Cast recording. As I noted, the songs are much better than the book (in Broadway lingo, “book” is basically the “screenplay”: all the spoken-word stuff that takes place around the songs and creates the dramatic settings for the songs). Some of these songs lodged in my brain as soon as I heard them way back when IDown the rabbit hole….
That’s a mocking phrase that car folks who prefer Chevy tend to invoke when discussing Ford vehicles, implying that “Ford” is actually an acronym whose letters stand for that phrase. Or, “Fix Or Repair Daily”. Or my favorite, “F*cked Over Rebuilt Dodge”. These kinds of things are amusing to a point. There’s one someone cooked up for “Pontiac” where the N stands for a word that’s only referred to nowadays in polite company by the fact that N can stand for it. I wouldn’t use that one, personally. Now, I have no animus toward Ford vehicles; I actually liked theDown the rabbit hole….
I suppose it’s something of a cliche: the composer who aspires to serious work and yet finds their greatest success in crafting music for the popular world. Such was the fate of Robert Russell Bennett, whose name will be well known to anyone well-schooled in the history of twentieth century American musical theater. Bennett worked for many long years as an arranger and orchestrator for the most famous Broadway composers: George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Frederick Loewe, among others. Bennett adapted the melodies written by Rodgers for the acclaimed television documentary series Victory at Sea, with Rodgers laterDown the rabbit hole….
I’m not going to wait until my “Movies from the second half of 2024” post for this one: This is the kind of movie you’d think was entirely contrived from a deeply silly notion until you learn that it’s essentially a true story. (Yes, yes, some of it is fudged from what happened in reality, so what, it’s a movie, people. Schindler’s List wasn’t 100 percent accurate, either.) The bones of it are as follows: a serial killer who ingratiates himself to women by pretending to be a photographer before getting them alone and killing them goes on The Dating Game asDown the rabbit hole….
OK, I’m up early on a Sunday drinking coffee and we’re hoping to get to Letchworth today, but I’ll just toss off a quick quiz-thing! And I’m doing this one before I read Roger‘s answers! What’s the best birthday party you’ve ever had? I never had a birthday party. Next! (When I turned ten we had a family dinner at the Big Restaurant in Olean, as we had just moved there. The place was called The Castle, and it was part of a resort-hotel thing that was quite the going concern back in the day. Nothing of The Castle remains.Down the rabbit hole….