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2010-2019: A decade in words

2010 !!!

Wow, not just a year ending, but a decade!

Here is a selection of my favorite posts from the last ten years. How much longer will this go on? Who knows! I’d like to get back into more essay and photo content around here than the YouTube music selections, so here’s hoping.

Grouped by year:

2010

Remembering Dr. Warren Schmidt
The Behaviors of Mr. George Costanza

2011

“Thy world, O master of the world, thy dawn: Reflections on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
On That Day

2012

On finally seeing Les Miserables on stage
An open letter to Castle
Last Dance: Farewell, Donna Summer
The Many Faces of Monti Carlo
How Superman’s Butt Saved Christmas

2013

Tip Your Server!
On Rober Ebert
When I was a kid, I wanted to be Bud Herseth
Louis CK is full of crap.
A night with the Philharmonic

2014

Killing the darlings: How I edit
On building my library
First thoughts on dog ownership
We survived “Snowvember

2015

Ranking the James Bond songs
No, John Williams did not rip off Dvorak
On the passing of Leonard Nimoy
Meet Hank, my internal editor
On waffles
Keeping ahead of the Smiths: Thoughts on the Minimum Wage
I explain the plot of Octopussy

Thanksgiving in New York City:
one
two
three

2016

A moonlit triptych
Star Trek at 50
A love letter to Crazy Ex Girlfriend
A really good book about Star Wars

2017

On Richard Thompson and Cul De Sac
Dear 44
Dear 45
A memory from each grandmother
“Let Me Help”: Thoughts on “The City on the Edge of Forever” at Fifty
STAR WARS at 40
On “Choosing happiness”
The final victory of JR Ewing: Thoughts on the 45th President

2018

Memories of Dr. Janice Wade

2019

On Books, Hoarding, and Joy
My grandfather’s watch
Travels along the Yellow Brick Road
Apollo at 50

Keeping these separate, here are my thoughts on the Star Wars movies that have been released since the Disney takeover:

The Force Awakens

The Phantom Lucas
Wait, what?
Poe, Rey, Me
That kid ain’t right
The praise awakens!

Rogue One

The Last Jedi

Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong.
It’s time for the Jedi to end.
We fought to the end.
A flyboy, a mechanic, and a janitor walk into a bar….
A Rose is what Moses supposes his toeses!
People will come, Rey!
Snokin’ in the Boys’ Room
Are you the fellow who designed St. Paul’s?
Attack of the Screw-ups
Happy beeps, buddy! Happy beeps!

The following are from my official site, ForgottenStars.net:

On THE WEST WING and storytelling in miniature
Remembering William Goldman
On Writing Longhand

In all honesty, I don’t use my Official Site as strongly as I should, because I’ve never really figured out a focus for it. That’s something I hope to do in 2020.

I have also been writing for the last few years for The Geekiverse. Here is a selection of my output:

An introduction, and five summer movies
Shhh! You’ll spoil it! (Thoughts on spoilers)
THE PHANTOM MENACE at twenty
Farewell, MAD Magazine
Apollo at 50
Oh, snap: A closer look at Thanos’s and Hulk’s fingersnaps
The REAL ranking of the STAR WARS movies

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Thus we end 2019! I’ll hear this work newly performed tomorrow night, when it is the traditional second encore in the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Years Concert. It’s not a new year until I hear On the Beautiful Blue Danube.

See you in 2020, folks!

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

TODAY’S THE DAY!!!

And if you didn’t get to hear your personal favorite Christmas carol in this feature this season, I apologize…but here’s an entire album that covers almost the entire gamut. This is one of the great Christmas music recordings of all time: The Many Moods of Christmas, featuring the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Robert Shaw Chorale, conducted by Robert Shaw. Interestingly, the digital Atlanta Symphony recording was a follow-up to a 1963 recording of mostly the same music, also featuring Robert Shaw and his Chorale (but back then with the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra). Enjoy, and may each and every one of you enjoy the very happiest of holidays!!!

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas

As Christmas nears each year, eventually the boisterous jollity of the season fades and the need for silence rises, and as we all adjourn from our daily lives to the sequestered comfort of our home (or, at least, so we hope), we look inward. I know that I do as the outside world fades away. I think this sentiment was captured wonderfully by Bill Watterson in this one-panel installment of Calvin and Hobbes:

Musically, this brings me to Silent Night, one of the most magical of all Christmas carols. It was written in 1818 by Franz Xaver Gruber, who was given the words by a local priest who needed a Christmas carol that could be accompanied by guitar as the organ in his church had been damaged by flooding. What resulted is one of the most enduring of all Western songs.

What makes Silent Night so effective? Well, the lyrics are quite wonderful and evocative, painting word-pictures of the miracle taking place in Bethlehem and exhorting us to sleep in peace before we wake to the new dawn, heralded by the birth of God’s son. But it’s not just the words. Those lyrics are wedded to a melody that almost perfectly captures the song’s dual themes of restful peace in the face of a transcendent miracle. Silent Night combines falling intervals, especially the minor third which seems to eternally connote motherhood and the protection of rest at home, with upward leaps and climbs that musically challenge us to see the light dawning in that manger. That’s how I see it, anyway. Just the way the tune of Silent Night unfolds speaks to something primal, something hard-wired in us.

Here is Sinead O’Connor performing Silent Night.

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas

An annual selection here, as I feature a Christmas carol that is specifically near and dear to a particular reader of mine (“Hi Mom!” he said as he cheerfully waved). It’s one that I never knew much about until a couple of years ago, though. “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” originated in the Provence region of France, which seems to be a particularly productive region of France for beautiful things. The carol’s lyrics tell the story of two girls who discover that a certain baby has been born to a woman who has been bunking down in a stable. They run off to tell the villagers of the miracle that has occurred and bring them back to pay homage, cautioning them to remain silent so the baby can sleep. (One wonders if one of the villagers the two girls fetch happens to be a young boy with a drum, but anyway.)

The tune is lovely in that wonderful way of pre-Baroque music, and even when played slow it has a gentle dance rhythm befitting the folk music of the peasants of Provence. Here are several renditions of this lovely carol (including a couple of instrumentals).

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