Checking in! And here are some tabs!

Hello, everyone! As noted several days ago, we have company from out of town and we’re having a good time doing the usual “cheerful visit from out of town” stuff, hence the lack of posting. Things should start normalizing tomorrow…but meantime, some stuff and a clearing of the open tabs:

::  My newest Substack newsletter is out! It’s about baseball in the movies (and a couple of teevee episodes). And see if you can spot the glaring error in my first few sentences! Oops!

::  Variety did a wonderful profile of John Williams a while back:

Over the decades, he was aware of how the great film composers before him had a reputation for being cranky at best or tortured at worst. “Alex North, David Raksin, Jerry Goldsmith and others — brilliant, beautiful talents. All unhappy.” Most had barely suppressed ambitions to write concert music or symphonies instead of scoring movies. They believed that they were, in a sense, slumming it and laboring for directors who they described as “imperious and obstructive.” 

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s not a complaint that I want to have to live with.’ So I went about it not to try to compete with Igor Stravinsky or the great classical composers, but to learn from the process of doing — the best school of all.”  

Williams also notes that times have changed. Today, orchestras are happy to play film music. “If you went to the New York Philharmonic 40 years ago, they would be condescending about playing anything from Hollywood,” he says. “So I’m lucky that I’m living in a different period.” 

Williams’s career has spanned the final decade of the “Golden Age” of film scoring and everything since, so the changes he has seen are amazing to consider.

::  Did I link this one already? I think I may have linked this one already, but the tab is still open, mainly for my own reference, so possibly here it is again: Fifteen essential New York City books. NYC is one of the most fascinating places on the planet to me, and I love reading about it and looking at photos of it and seeing movies about it or set in it. And that’s with the sum total of time in my life actually spent in NYC totaling less than one week! (This is something I hope to address in the next few years.)

::  Not long ago, somehow they were able to project scenes from Star Wars onto the Empire State Building. How? Like this!

::  Whenever you criticize the idea of the Electoral College, someone will invariably protest, “But without it, ‘small states’ won’t matter at all!” Uhhh…no:

It’s not hard to discern what is going on here. Conservatives currently perceive that the Electoral College provides them with a partisan advantage, and so they are reverse-engineering arguments to support it. They typically boil down to this sort of maudlin appeal to an idyllic image of family farms and small towns. But they just don’t hold up under any scrutiny.

And if a Democrat ever wins the presidency while losing the popular vote, it’s a safe bet that the Electoral College will be gone in about five minutes.

Though honestly, in this day and age when everybody is walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that gives them access to all the information (and misinformation) in the world, the idea that any voter should be making their decision based on a local campaign event is increasingly nonsensical. I’m always annoyed whenever anybody tells me that Hillary Clinton lost because she didn’t campaign enough in Wisconsin, as if that absolves the Wisconsin voters from executing their responsibility to the country.

::  A Man Goes to the Movies: Matthew Zoller Seitz looks back at Roger Ebert’s annual Top Ten lists. One of Ebert’s best qualities was his willingness to go against the grain a lot of the time, or if not go against the grain, to at least follow his own personal tastes in guiding his love of film.

All for now! And just like that, my browser is actually pretty manageable again. Yay!