What to put on your next hot dog

Posted on May 3, 2024 by ksedinger

Banana peppers and hot pepper jelly.

The banana peppers (sliced, mild) are under the dog. Next time I think I’ll put them on top.

As Emeril Lagasse often said, “Oh yeah babe.”

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Something for Thursday

Posted on May 2, 2024 by ksedinger

There was news this week on the TRON front: Jeff Bridges is returning to the franchise for the third film that is apparently getting made soon. I’m a longtime TRON fan, all the way back to the original film in 1982, and I enjoyed the eventual follow-up, TRON LEGACY, which doesn’t seem to have been received terribly well, but who cares about those people, anyway.

The 1982 film featured a “futuristic” (for 1982) score, dominated by synthesizers, by  composer Wendy Carlos. Carlos is a noted pioneer of electronic and synth music, and her work for TRON at this point in time sounds both groundbreaking in its approach to scoring a mainstream film with electronic music, and dated because of the state of the electronic gear at the time. But never mind the dated qualities; Carlos did an amazing job at suggesting the otherworldly nature of the World Inside the Computer, but she also composed music of genuine wonder and excitement.

I’ve just read that most of Carlos’s recorded music is unavailable for listening, in any format. This seems to me something of a cultural crime.

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“The personality of the photographer, his approach, is really more important than his technical genius.” –Lee Miller

Posted on May 1, 2024 by ksedinger

Sheila O’Malley has a typically amazing post about photographer Lee Miller, about whom I need to learn more because she is fascinating and because of photography:

Much of her history was erased through decades of obscurity and a total and shameful lack of a proper archive where her accomplishments get proper credit. Her son discovered a treasure trove of over 60,000 photos and negatives, and slowly but surely Miller is taking her proper place. More work needs to be done. There are biographies out now, and art books featuring her photos, and there have been a couple of very prominent exhibitions, heavily covered in the press.

Sheila outlines much of Miller’s life, and all of it is fascinating. I keep wondering: Why is this woman not a more household name? She was in Hitler’s apartment hours after his suicide. Her clothes were still spattered with mud from Dachau, and she wiped her feet on Hitler’s bath towels and took a bath in his own tub. Why had I never heard this?

Well, I’ve heard it now, and another name goes on my “Photographers to Study” list.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on April 30, 2024 by ksedinger

Another by Eric Whitacre, this one is called Sleep. Here it is for wind ensemble:

Lovely and meditative, isn’t it? But it’s not doesn’t end there. Whitacre actually composed this piece for choir first. The idea was to set a Robert Frost poem called “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening”, and Whitacre did in fact compose it that way at first…before learning that Frost’s poetry is still under copyright. So Whitacre had to get a new poem for the work, and he did, by Charles Anthony Silvestri. While Whitacre is happier now with the new lyric than with the original, to the point that he has no intention of releasing Sleep with the Frost poem even though the poem went into public domain five years ago, this still seems to me a very unfortunate use of copyright and a good example of how we’ve extended copyright to ludicrous lengths. Robert Frost has been dead for 61 years, after all.

Here is Sleep with its official choral text. I think I may actually prefer the vocal version to the band one!

 

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Today in “Ya never know….”

Posted on April 29, 2024 by ksedinger

Last Sunday morning I ventured out to Knox Farm State Park, a favorite local place of mine, to walk and do some photography. I wasn’t all that excited at the prospect, though, because the morning was quite cold and it was the kind of overcast that makes the light just dull and uninspiring. And it was something like the eighth, ninth, or even tenth day like that in a row. I’ll spare my long-time readers my rant about how the worst season in WNY is not Winter but rather Spring, but I did post a whine on TikTok and as a YouTube short about it. Anyway, the walking was unpleasant and dismal, with a constant breeze that was just enough to keep you cold, and of course by this time of year the trees still are bare so you don’t even escape the unpleasantness by going into the woods for shelter from the storm.

In short, I wound up staying at the park less than an hour, and I only took a dozen or two photos, most of which I didn’t even bother editing in Lightroom.

But…

…there was this bird.

 

Is this the best wildlife photo ever? Of course not. It’s not terribly sharp, and one photographer I follow on YouTube sometimes jokes about the ubiquity of what he calls “BOAS photos”: Bird on a stick.

This little bird (no, I’ve no idea what kind of bird that is, feel free to let me know!) sat in the tree above me long enough for me to get two photos, and then he flitted across the path to a birdhouse on a pole. I watched him there and I was happy to have snapped its photo twice, but then I realized that there was another bird inside the birdhouse, sticking its head out.

It’s nice to step back and look at my progress in photography and notice that I’m reaching a point where even when I’m not really feeling it and am in fact going to pull the plug and go home early, I still stand a good chance of getting something good!

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Phil!

Posted on April 28, 2024 by ksedinger

Last night we went to see Phil Rosenthal at Buffalo State University. If you’re unfamiliar with Phil Rosenthal, you need to watch Somebody Feed Phil on Netflix, and you need to do so now. Right now. Go watch, I’ll wait for you.

[waiting music here]

OK, now that you’ve watched…well, if you went on without watching, Somebody Feed Phil is a travel and food show starring Phil Rosenthal, a comedy writer and television producer who is best known for creating the classic show Everybody Loves Raymond. In the show, Rosenthal travels to a city and, well, eats. He visits beautiful places, eats wonderful food, and meets wonderful people. Rosenthal is an evangelist for the idea of travel and food in terms of making connections between peoples of wildly divergent backgrounds. He is not unlike Anthony Bourdain in his approach to this sort of thing, though Rosenthal is more focused on humor and joy than Bourdain was in his explorations.

The night was a delight, with Rosenthal discussing the origins of Somebody Feed Phil and his life in television and in food in a guided conversation with a Buff State professor as emcee, before he spent the bulk of the evening taking questions from the audience. Most of the questions were good an insightful–especially three by children!–but a few were unfortunately undermined by the fact that several times someone saw their question answered before their turn, and despite their best efforts at rewording things, you could tell it was the same question.

(There were also a couple of strange dudes who used their time at the mic to execute a kind of weird performance art of their own, and Rosenthal was graceful in managing his clear desire to get these two guys away from the mic. That was embarrassing, honestly.)

Did I ask a question? I did not. I don’t know what I would have asked, in all honesty…though today, I think I know, so…maybe next time. Rosenthal deeply believes in travel and food as avenues to broadening horizons and cultivating empathy; what I’d ask is his thoughts on how we overcome the fact that as good as travel is for connecting peoples, it is still something that is reserved for people of certain levels of privilege. I do get frustrated with people around me, though: I know people who go to the exact same part of Florida each and every year, at the same part of the year, and I wonder, “Why not take a year or two off from Florida and go someplace new? Why keep going there and seeing the same shit, over and over again?” (The answer, in a lot of cases, backs into the “privilege” area because they’re going to Florida to visit retired family, which means they have lodging built in. But still…doesn’t the siren song of someplace other than Jacksonville or Orlando make itself heard once in a while?)

The Wife and I made a whole date of things, of course; we went to one of our favorite local eateries, Frank Gourmet Hot Dogs, a little miracle of a place that makes wonderful food that’s almost entirely gluten-free. We had High-Five Fries, which are French fries (and Frank has the best fries in WNY) piled with melted cheese, pickles, slaw, their special fry sauce, and Nashville chicken bites. The Wife really wanted this, so I let her eat most of it. Of course, I didn’t want to go hungry, so I got a hot dog: the Modern Chicago dog, which is one of my favorite things on any menu ever.

When we got to Frank, I briefly thought, “Hey, Phil Rosenthal needs to eat before his show tonight, wouldn’t it be cool if we run into him here!” After all, Frank Gourmet Hot Dogs is well-known in the area. Alas, Rosenthal ate at the West Side Bazaar last night. Maybe on his next visit to Buffalo, though!

 

Posted in Life, On Buffalo and The 716, On Food and Cooking, On Travels and Adventures | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Farewell, Hunter

Posted on April 26, 2024 by ksedinger
Orion the Hunter, sinking toward the horizon

This is likely my final photo of Orion the Hunter for this season; the time for the winter stars is passing quickly now. Farewell, Hunter, and good hunting in other skies until we meet again!

 

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Something for Thursday

Posted on April 25, 2024 by ksedinger

The other day may or may not have been William Shakespeare’s birthday. Seems as good a reason as ever to listen to some Shakespeare-inspired music!

 

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On the Romance of Old Maps

Posted on April 24, 2024 by ksedinger

Roger wrote a lovely post the other day about old maps:

When I was growing up, my grandfather, McKinley Green, gave me the maps included in his subscription to National Geographic magazine.

I still have many of those old maps he provided from about 1958 to 1971 when I went to college. For a time, I thought to throw them out. But there’s a fascinating thing about these documents. They become historical relics.

Remember Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which are now multiple countries? East and West Germany, now one nation? British Guyana and British Honduras, now Guyana and Belize, respectively?

I, too, love old maps, because they go from being a depiction of the world to being a depiction of the way humans used to view the world, and that in itself is informative. It shows how far we’ve come, for instance, to look at a map of a heavily-colonized Africa from a century ago to a map of an Africa where, for good or ill at any one point of time, the nations there are self-determining.

Old maps aren’t just about history; they can even be political items in themselves. Witness this sub-story from an episode of The West Wing, which has all the scenes from this little subplot edited together:

Setting aside the notion of why President Bartlet would want to hang a map of the Holy Land in 1709 in a West Wing office in the first place, the question raised here–would the map’s presence there imply anything regarding official American Israel policy–is a good one.

One of my favorite reference books is a tome I boosted from one of the Discard piles way back in 1989 or so, when I had my first part-time job working in the Technical Services department of the library at St. Bonaventure University. It’s simply titled, Historical Atlas, and that’s exactly what it is.

The book was pretty beat-up around the edges when I liberated it. I assume that the book was being discarded because it had been replaced with a volume that was more up-to-date. I’ve determined that there was at least a ninth edition of Shepherd’s book. Obviously his work was updated by other individuals, as Shepherd himself died in 1934.

The book is loaded with fascinating historical maps: Europe in the age of exploration, for instance, or near-view maps of a typical medieval cloister, or maps of the trade routes to Asia in the Renaissance, and more. The maps within this book aren’t just informative, they are beautiful to behold.

What’s interesting, in the “meta” sense, is that these maps have become historical items in several ways. These maps always depicted the world as it was at some point, so they don’t age in quite the same way that a new NatGeo map does; historical maps serve as a retroactive freezing of one moment in time, after all. But they also capture how history was done, decades ago; these maps demonstrate what was prioritized for historians and how they looked at the world back in those days. These maps capture history in a double way: not just depicting history, but the history of history.

Here are several of the maps from Historical Atlas:

Finally, a nod to the greatest old map I have ever seen, because you don’t just see it, you walk through it: the Mapparium at the Christian Science headquarters in Boston, MA. Now, setting aside the rather odd set of beliefs that lie at the heart of Christian Science, the Mapparium itself is a stunning exhibit. It is literally a walk-through globe, three stories high, with the maps painted on individually backlit panes of stained glass. You take this all in from a glass walkway that crosses the globe along an equatorial diameter. The effect is deeply affecting (and not just because the acoustics inside the Mapparium make all whispers audible anywhere you stand); there’s something about standing inside a truly proportional representation of our world that’s incredibly moving. The Mapparium is, however, another example of a depiction of a world gone by; the maps have not been updated since the thing was built in the 1930s, so you still see places like French Indochina and the still-uncolonized Africa.

Of course, the best old maps are the ones that lead to treasure, but that’s a-whole-nother thing!

Posted in On Books, On History | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on April 23, 2024 by ksedinger

NPR has a podcast called the Open Ears Project:

Part mix tape, part sonic love-letter, the Open Ears Project is a daily podcast where people share the classical track that means the most to them. Each episode offers a soulful glimpse into other human lives, helping us to hear this music—and each other—differently.

I’ve been listening for a while, though I’m behind on episodes right now, and the most recent one I’ve heard is the episode with Tom Hiddleston in which he shares a work called Spiegel im Spiegel, by Estonian composer Arvo Part. Part is apparently the most frequently performed composer alive today, after John Williams, which is really saying something. I’ve heard very little of Part’s music, but what I have heard I always find hypnotic in its minimalism, and that’s certainly the case with Spiegel im Spiegel, which breaks from my usual habit of featuring orchestral music here. This is a chamber work featuring solo violin and piano, and it’s simply wonderful.

Spiegel im spiegel translates to “Mirror in the mirror”, and according to the notes on Wikipedia this refers to an “infinity mirror”, where two mirrors face each other and produce infinite reflections into the eternal distance. This makes me remember something as a kid, in all the department stores: the clothes sections had mirrors so you could see how something looked as you tried it on. The nicer stores had a three-mirror set-up so you could see how something looked from several angles. And if you were really lucky, the two angled mirrors on the sides were hinged so you could bring them in around you. I’d go up to one of those and enclose myself in a triangle of mirrors, and this was pretty trippy fun for a seven or eight-year-old kid. (My mother, for some reason, did not approve when I would do this. To this day I don’t see the problem.)

Spiegel im Spiegel is delicate and contemplative, and the sound is open and clear…almost infinite, like a perfectly mirrored pane of glass. Listening to it I can certainly hear an aural version of the imperfect infinity of endless reflections that bend slightly to one side, since you can never get the perfect vantage point to see all the way into infinity because your head is in the way. What a wonderful piece.

(And I heartily recommend The Open Ears Project. I won’t even accuse them of stealing my Tone Poem Tuesday idea for a podcast!)

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