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Not even a pandemic can stop summer!

True, the pandemic has put the kibosh on a lot of things we normally do this time of year: no trip to the Sterlink Renaissance Festival for us, nor will there be an Erie County Fair. But we still eat like it’s summer, though! Every year when the ripe tomatoes start showing up at the Farmers Market, it’s BLT time.

Since work I have: walked doggos, listened to 1/3 of #folklore, eaten this BLT, and quaffed this beer. #ahhhhh #yum #blt #beer
Sweet corn can’t be far behind!

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Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

Yeah, the usual disclaimer: a busy week full of activity has led to a day’s delay. I don’t have a great deal to say about this song, so just listen to it. This is one of those songs that takes you places, which is fitting given its title and lyrics. Here is “Midnight Train to Georgia”, by Gladys Knight and the Pips.

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RIP, Pizza Hut

Every Pizza Hut restaurant in Western New York has permanently closed.

I’m not going to pretend that this is a loss, except in the sense that this is a few hundred jobs down the drain. I worked for Pizza Hut back in the 1990s, when we lived in Olean, NY, and I posted years ago what that was like. It wasn’t a horrible place to work back then, but it sure wasn’t great, either; pay was a joke, and for all the lip service paid to the idea that Pizza Hut was supposed to be a step above fast food, it was clear that even then the higher-ups had no idea what they were doing with respect to the shifting restaurant scene.
I have no idea how long it’s been since I’ve even eaten at a Pizza Hut, and it’s something of a long-running joke in this region that the number of buildings that used to be Pizza Huts far outnumbers those that house actual Pizza Huts.
Oh well. Support your local pizza joint, folks. Let the chains figure it out on their own.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Ulysses Kay was a Black composer who lived from 1917 to 1995. Born in Tucson to parents who encouraged music-making in the home, Kay went on to study music at the University of Arizona and the Eastman School of Music, working with such musical luminaries as William Grant Still and Howard Hanson. Kay’s music is (so I’ve read, having not heard much of it at all!) mostly written in the neoclassical style, which makes sense from my hearing of today’s piece. I don’t hear a great deal of jazz or African influence here. This work has an almost academic kind of feel to it, which may be simply because the piece is called “Fantasy Variations” and does not seem to have any programmatic content at all, which puts it in a different category, more of an “absolute music” kind of piece, than a lot of what I’ve been featuring over the last few weeks.

This work rewards several listens, I have found. It opens with a lyrical passage that quickly gives way to stark modernism, and then the mood alternates several times before arriving on an almost hymnlike conclusion. The piece stands in much the same kind of musical tradition as a great deal of American 20th century music, and I am entirely unsurprised to read that Kay studied with Still and Hanson.
Here is Fantasy Variations by Ulysses Simpson Kay.

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Hot!

This has turned into a hot, dry summer in Buffalo Niagara. Even the streams at Chestnut Ridge, up in the wooded hills, are beginning to dry up.

Very hot day makes a pretty short hike. I'm better with heat than I used to be, but I am still not made for 90 degrees. #ChestnutRidge #wny #orchardpark #summer #nature #hiking #trees #TooDarnHot
I’m not nearly as bad about hot weather as I once was, ten or fifteen years ago, but even so, too much time north of ninety degrees still makes me grumpy and/or lethargic. The week before last, we endured something like eight consecutive days above the ninety degree mark. That is highly unusual for this region.
I’m hoping that this doesn’t become the norm for summers around here. While we do have our share of hot-and-humid, one selling point of summer in Buffalo is that it doesn’t get as sultry as the summers in Philadelphia, New York City, or Boston. Every year we hear anew the fact that since authorities started recording temperatures, Buffalo has never hit one hundred degrees. I suspect that this streak is likely to end one of these years.
I’m ready for August, though!

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Tinkering, complete! (Mostly)

I spent a bit of time this past weekend making a few changes to Byzantium’s Shores, which you may notice if you’re particularly eagle-eyed and you’re familiar with the old lay of the land here. Some of these changes were long overdue, and given that Blogger has recently updated its interface, I figured I should make some of the obvious (and less-than-obvious) changes.

By way of itemizing the alterations, here’s what’s up:
::  New masthead image, obviously. I think I did a pretty good job at creating a masthead that reflects my personal branding!
::  I updated the blog tagline, to run beneath the masthead.
::  I moved the menu of Blog Pages up, so now it’s the first thing you see on the sidebar. You may notice that the Comments Policy is not there anymore; the page still exists but I want to tweak it a bit. That link will reappear when that’s done.
I have also created an information page for my books! As of this writing, the page contains nothing at all, but getting that page done is a priority for the next week or two. It seems weird that this particular blog, which is in many ways my main outpost online, never had direct information about my books and their availability. That changes…well, soon. Stay tuned!
Also note that I have removed the blogroll. This is, sadly, permanent, at least as far as I can foresee. Blogging is more and more of a niche thing, and as I clicked around my blogroll’s links a few days ago I discovered a distressing number of links that go to blogs that are, sadly, no more. An on-site blogroll is just not an important resource anymore.
::  I tightened up the wordage in the “Informational” section of the sidebar, which is now titled “Greetings, Programs!” (This is a geek reference to the movie TRON, if you must know.) This includes a link to ForgottenStars.net, as well as a link to my LinkTree. LinkTree is a service that manages links, so links to all of my various social media and other web hangouts are there, instead of taking up lots of sidebar space.
::  There was a section for old blog aggregation services; I’ve removed this entirely.
::  All that remains is the shifting about of the photo sections and my sidebar quotes.
Does all this mean that I’ll be posting more frequently? Ummm…look, over there! [runs away while you’re distracted]

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Something for Thursday

I have to admit something: it took me years to warm back up to this song, after a college professor ruined it for me. She used a cover of it as the background song to a video she had put together showing photographs of homeless people. I cannot for the life of me remember the point of that video or what she was trying to convey to us, but it was a class about politics or society or…something. The class was called “Person and Society”, and I really couldn’t tell you what the point of the class was at all, these many years later. It was one of three classes Wartburg College had at the time that were required of every student, summed up under the label “Foundational Studies”. This class might have been about political expression…or…hell, I don’t know. All I really recall from this class is this godawful video, and the fact that one of our textbooks was a ranty volume by a guy named Dinesh D’Souza. (Yeah…I know.)
So yeah, it took me quite a long time to warm up to this song again, and when I did, it was to the original, by Bill Withers. It really is quite a good song, after all — too good to be ruined by a weird A/V presentation in a college class.
Here’s “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

This may be something of a cheat, since Tone Poem Tuesday has always featured orchestral music, and this week all we have is a solo piano work. But what a work it is, juxtaposing traditional melodies with interesting sound effects, some produced by the piano and some not.

But first, let’s meet our composer: Blind Tom Wiggins.
He was born a slave in 1850, but–as one might expect from his name–he was blind. A blind slave might have expected to simply be killed by their owners, since they offer little by way of economic benefit, but for whatever reason, Tom’s owners let him live, and he seems to have been allowed to simply wander about the plantation and entertain himself as best he could, which ultimately led to his finding his way to a piano. He played songs from memory upon first hearing, and he had other strange gifts of recall as well: he was able to recite speeches he had heard years before, even aping the speakers’ intonations, and he could repeat entire conversations verbatim. But he couldn’t communicate his own thoughts or needs beyond grunting.
It is now thought that Blind Tom Wiggins was an autistic savant, in a time when such individuals were unheard of. He traveled extensively, performing concerts where he would entertain “audience challenges”: someone would play for him a new, unheard composition, challenging him to reproduce it by ear, and he would. Wiggins also composed a lot of music of his own, little of which has been heard since his day.
One of his best-known pieces is this week’s feature. It is called The Battle of Manassas, and it begins with rolling piano chords possibly signifying the drums of an army on the march. Then comes a series of familiar tunes from the Civil War era, some of which come as a surprise. As the piece goes on, the drumming in the bass gives way to pounded dissonant chords, possibly signifying gun and cannon fire. At one point the performer is to whistle a single note over the entire proceedings, while in another the performer makes a “Ch-ch-ch” sound.
It’s a bizarre and fascinatingly modern piece, written by a man who was enslaved, misunderstood, and exploited. Here is The Battle of Manassas, by Blind Tom Wiggins.

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