Roger wrote about cover songs last week, which is a big topic of its own! We could go on for days about favorite cover songs, which cover songs we prefer to the originals, and so on. Do we ever talk about songs we didn’t know were covers until we knew the covers well, so that the existence of an original came as a surprise? I haven’t seen that come up much, but here’s one of mine.
I’ve featured the band Blackmore’s Night in this space more than a few times; I’m coming up on twenty years of being a fan of theirs. Headlined by former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and vocalist Candice Night, Blackmore’s Night is a rock group with a folk-Renaissance focus. Both Blackmore and Night had a love of traditional Renaissance music, which they channeled into their new group when they formed it in the 1990s. The result is a group whose music combines modern sound and very old musical forms and melodies and rhythms. It’s this blend of rock, folk, and Renaissance music, that makes them so refreshing to listen to a lot of the time. Listening to Blackmore’s Night always puts me in mind of a late afternoon or early evening at the Sterling Renaissance Festival, when we’re sitting in the golden sunlight of the waning day watching the joust and munching our roasted turkey legs.
Most of their songs involve a feel of antiquity and old-school romance; think a more rock-oriented Loreena McKennitt. But one of their albums contained a song whose title flummoxed me: “Celluloid Heroes”. And the lyrics are as far from Renfest-stylings as you can get:
Everybody’s a dreamer and everybody’s a star
And everybody’s in movies, it doesn’t matter who you are
There are starts in every city
In every house and on every street
And if you walk down Hollywood Boulevard
Their names are written in concrete
Don’t step on Greta Garbo as you walk down the Boulevard
She looks so weak and fragile that’s why she tried to be so hard
But they turned her into a princess
And they sat her on a throne
But she turned her back on stardom
Because she wanted to be alone
I couldn’t fathom why there was this song about the names on the sidewalks of Hollywood in the middle of a folk-rock album, even if the theme of the song is pretty universal: the fleeting nature of fame and our tendency to make marble idols of people who were, as the song describes “dearest Marilyn”, “only made of flesh and blood.”
It turns out that “Celluloid Heroes” is a cover of a song originally recorded by The Kinks. I don’t know much about The Kinks at all–in fact, as of this writing, I haven’t even listened to their original version of “Celluloid Heroes”–so all I do know is that the song was written as part of a concept album called Everybody’s In Show-Biz. Apparently the album’s lyrics focus on the difficulties and stresses of the life of a touring rock band. In that context, “Celluloid Heroes” makes sense…and maybe that explains why Blackmore’s Night recorded it. They’re touring musicians as well, and both have been around much longer in that life than just the current band’s existence. Blackmore’s been at it for many, many years.
I wish my life was a non-stop Hollywood movie show
A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes
Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain
And celluloid heroes never really die.
This also reminds me of the permanent figures in Keats’s Grecian urn. The celluloid heroes don’t age, they don’t suffer, they just are. (Even if, these days, they’re not even celluloid heroes anymore. We’ll have to update the song to digital heroes.)
Harrison Ford is 80 years old today. He’s been one of my favorite actors–hell, for a lot of my youth he was my favorite actor–pretty much ever since I was aware of actors as actual people who had real names. Of course this was because of Star Wars! Han Solo was my favorite character early on, and I gravitated to Ford’s laconic and sarcastic portrayal of a space pirate whose heart was just waiting to be unlocked.
I would for years watch anything just because Harrison Ford was in it. I’d stay up late to watch a movie called The Frisco Kid, a Western in which Ford is an outlaw who ends up helping a wayward Rabbi (played by Gene Wilder) get to San Francisco. I remember Ford in a film called Heroes, starring Henry Winkler as a Vietnam vet who is struggling with PTSD. I badgered my mother into taking me, as an 11-year-old, to see Blade Runner, for which I was almost certainly too young. I was only vaguely interested in Raiders of the Lost Ark (what did I care if it was directed by the guy who did Jaws and written by the guy who wrote Star Wars?) until I learned that Harrison Ford was in it.
And there was Witness in 1985, still unequaled in Ford’s career.
I’ve seen most of Ford’s filmography, though not all of it. Ford’s been a constant presence in my moviegoing world for pretty much the entire time I’ve been seeing movies that weren’t kiddie-fare or animated features. He’s not the kind of chameleon actor who looks different each time out, like Daniel Day Lewis, but he has more range than I think a lot of people give him credit for. And there’s always that Harrison Fork twinkle in the eye, this reassuring gleam that tells us in the audience: “Hey, I’ve got this. Don’t worry.”
As an action star, I always get the feel that Harrison Ford is playing normal guys who wind up in action scenarios. He’s not a guy who knows what to do, but a guy who takes stock of what’s going on around him. Ford’s characters are always aware in a way that makes Ford a part of the scene, really in the movie’s world, and not just acting on a set. Few actors show their characters thinking their way through their struggles as well as Ford. You can always see his character thinking, processing, their wheels turning.
Mark Hamill described working with Harrison Ford in a late-night appearance a few years ago, and this is a great testimonial because he describe’s Ford’s awareness extending not just to the scene but to the project as a whole. Ford always knows what the job is, and what he has to do to get the job done. It’s probably an attitude born of his years as a carpenter, before he caught on as an actor; a carpenter’s work is completely defined, after all! You know what you’re building, you know what materials you’re working with, you know what you have to do in what order to get the job done. Ford seems to have a similar approach to acting, and what a good thing. (This may also be why Ford always seems so bemused and out of place in interviews; the guy looks at acting as a job, so what’s there to talk about? Who brings the carpenter on to a teevee show to talk about what it meant to build a table?)
Here’s Mark Hamill:
For a long time it was almost a cottage industry to complain about Harrison Ford’s approach to his own career. The narrative was that he was just taking jobs to stay busy, that he didn’t care about rising to a challenge, and that he’d probably never rise again to the level of his work in Witness because he just didn’t seem like he wanted to. I honestly don’t know what to make of that, but I will note that for me, Harrison Ford’s body of work stands in much better light than many think. And I hope he’s still got time and desire to do some more.
Happy birthday, Harrison Ford! You always get the job done.
And that’s a hell of a thing.
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Let’s look at how delicately things are set up in this film – so much so that you don’t notice them. John Book has recovered (somewhat) from his wound and Samuel Lapp takes him on a tour of the farm. He shows him the well. (“It goes … it makes … it goes …” so cute) He shows him the silo and tells him how it works. He shows him the trap door. All of this will become crucial in the final scenes, as John Book sneaks around, trying to evade the murderers. But what becomes clear, beautifully, in subsequent viewings – is that it is SAMUEL who showed Book the way. It is SAMUEL who, innocently, gave John Book the tools for survival in those crucial end moments. And so the title of the film takes on even more meaning, more depth. WITNESS. “What’s up there?” asks John Book. “Corn,” answers Samuel. Notice the grace and simplicity of how that information is imparted. You might not even notice it. A lesser film would have just had John Book figuring out how the silo worked while he was under the gun (which is how so many thrillers operate – they ARE their plots. That’s it.) … but in Witness we are introduced, via Samuel, to “the way things work”. And he’s excited to show John Book around and to show him the well and also to show him how much he knows. It isn’t until later that we realize what Samuel Lapp has done, in that innocent tour.
She’s absolutely right. The exposition there is handled so well. Problems can often arise with this kind of thing, in movies like this; they’ve got to get that gun onto the mantle in Act One so it can go off in Act Three, but so many times, the filmmakers go overboard, making it blindingly obvious that they’re setting up something for later. This quiet scene between Samuel and Book, where Sam’s just showing Book around the farm, helps us get our bearings, and we never realize that we’re being set up for the climax.
Done wrong, this sort of scene-setting stands out like a sore thumb. A perfect example is in James Cameron’s Aliens, where we have that early scene where the one female Marine is demonstrating the robotic forklift-you-can-wear thing: there’s never one iota of doubt that Ripley will be putting that thing on and using it as a weapon by film’s end. That’s just badly done. Of course, Cameron would later get it right in Titanic, where he knew that he would have to make clear to the audience what exactly was going on at each stage of the ship’s sinking, but he also know that he couldn’t stop the tension of Rose and Jack’s harrowing exploits in the ship’s water-filled lower decks to explain it all, so he gives us the computer simulation of the sinking early in the movie. We never have to stop the action so Jack can tell Rose something like “See, the ship is going down by the head, so the stern’s going to rise up. I just hope the ship’s hull can withstand that pressure, because if it can’t, the ship will break in two!” Likewise, in Witness, we’re spared John Book talking to himself (us), saying things like “This is a silo! I’ll bet there’s corn up there!”
Sheila’s post also gives an appreciation for Harrison Ford’s work in Witness, a performance that Ford has never since come close to equaling. His work in this film is as good an example of character creation as I’ve ever seen. There’s not one moment in the film where Ford in the slightest way echoes something he did as Han Solo or Indiana Jones. His performance is full of tiny little touches, moments it’s so easy to miss, that add up to John Book being a real person, and not just a guy on a screen. I commented over there as follows (fixing my own typos):
Every time I watch this film I get a little more sad that this appears to be the last time Harrison Ford really used his talent to great effect. His performance is full of so many little details. I love how, after Eli interrupts his dancing with Rachel, he heartbreakingly wipes the sweat of his forehead on his shoulder. I love how the first time he’s handed a glass of lemonade (by Rachel) he downs the whole thing in one gulp, but the next time (by Hochleitner) he takes a single small sip and hands it back. I love how at the end, after he’s beaten the bad guys and all the cops are there on the farm, he’s standing there, leaning exhaustedly against a police car, having a much needed cigarette, when we haven’t seen him smoke at all in the whole film to that point.
I think that a good test for people I meet is to see if they give me a knowing smile when I tell them to “Be careful out among them English.”
Of course, I could go on. I love the bashful smile that Rachel gives John Book when they’re in the workshop and Book’s working on fixing the birdhouse he’d earlier driven into. She’s smiled at him politely before, usually with her lips, but this is different; she shows her teeth here in a full smile that’s at once more revealing and yet more shy than she’s been to that point. I think that’s when she first starts realizing her attraction to Book, because of the line that accompanies that smile, a very simple observation on her part: “You know carpentry.” In that moment I think that Book stops being something alien to her, some being almost literally from another world she can never know. I think that’s where it starts. Witness really is full of tiny moments of magic that you don’t even realize are there until you think about them.
On another tangent, a recent thread over at FSM included speculation on the relative lack of eroticism in the scores of John Williams. While only a couple of readers make the obvious point that John Williams really hasn’t scored any movies much at all that would call for an erotic kind of tone, others bring up as an example of a “sexy” score Jerry Goldsmith’s Basic Instinct. Now, that is a terrific thriller score, but I’m not sure how sexy it is. Basic Instinct, for all its kinky subject matter, just isn’t sexy to me. In the whole of that film, with all its nudity and violent sex and infamous shots of Sharon Stone’s privates, there is nothing at all that is nearly as erotic and beautiful and sexy as in Witness when John Book and Rachel Lapp dance in the barn to a golden oldie, with no clothing being removed at all.
(One of my favorite bits of trivia about Witness is that the barn dance was filmed during daylight in the middle of summer. Since it had to be night, the crew basically draped tarps over every entrance to the barn, thus creating the necessary darkness, but also making it really really hot in there; hence the sweating that only highlights the emotion of the moment.)
For me, just about the only flaw in Witness is the film’s score, by Maurice Jarre. It was the mid-80s, and at the time Jarre was into heavy synthesizer use, and this score is just about entirely on synth, if not entirely outright. Some of the atmospheric music early on works nicely, but it’s all mostly long chords that set a tone, and of course, the barn-raising scene is a wonderfully scored sequence. (When watching it, there’s a bit early on where John Book introduces himself to a new group of Amish men he hasn’t met before. The first one whose hand he shakes, the one in the light green shirt? That’s a young Viggo Mortensen, there, fifteen years before he’d take up his role as Aragorn son of Arathorn, King of Gondor.) The score’s “suspense” material is all fairly routine and a bit repetitive; none of the music hurts the film, but I’ve always thought that the film would have been better served with a more strong touch of melody, excepting that great barn raising set piece.
ADDENDUM: At the risk of sounding like I’m damning Jarre’s work with faint praise, the afore-mentioned barn-raising scene really is something. Here it is in a full orchestral version, and it’s really quite something:
More than that, while I’m still not in love with much of Jarre’s work on this film–much of it is pretty much what you’d expect to hear in any 80s synth-driven police prcedural score–it’s better than what I describe above. Jarre avoids some of the obvious choices he could have made; he doesn’t try at all to echo a Coplandesque “Appalachian Spring” approach; instead he writes music that echoes the “plain” values of the Amish without resorting to obvious attempts to quote “Simple Gifts”, for example.
Anyway, you all be careful, out among them English.
In light of the stunning images being released today by NASA from the James Webb Space Telescope, I decided to look for “classical music inspired by space”, in hopes of finding a work that might evoke the cosmic sense of wonder that the Webb Telescope’s preliminary work is inspiring.
The search results took a bit of work to get though: nearly everybody who writes on the topic recommends Holst’s The Planets, which is fine but not so much inspired by space as by astrology. Many articles cite Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is indeed a great work that I’m sure I’ll feature eventually! But it’s not actually about space. Strauss’s inspiration was the philosophy writings af Friedrich Nietzsche, and the “space” association came many years later when Stanley Kubrick used Strauss’s work to great effect in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I did find several pieces that fit the bill, though, and this is one of them. It is the Sunrise Mass, bu Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo (born 1978). The work is a setting of the traditional Mass–the text is Latin–but with a somewhat stellar inspiration. The work has that cathedral-like feel in its sonorities that makes me think of, well, the universe.
The composer has written:
The reason I used English titles for each movement in this setting of the Latin Mass has to do with the initial idea behind Sunrise Mass. I wanted the musical journey of the work to evolve from transparent and spacey to something earthy and warm; from nebulous and pristine, though more emotional landscapes, to ultimately solid groundedness–as a metaphor for human development from child to adult, or as a spiritual journey.
The piece is also inspired by several movies and film scores from the past few years that I love dearly.
The work consists of four movements:
The Spheres Sunrise
The City
Identity and the Ground
I listened to the piece twice today–once during lunch and again while doing some admin work–and it captivated me greatly. Gjeilo’s work is melodic without being cloyingly so, and his choral writing is top notch; his harmonies are easily parsed and the entire choir sings with balance and a huge sound. The work teems with the kind of sepulchral wonder that I hope we all feel when confronted with the infinite amazements of our universe.
In short, I loved this piece and I hope you will too. Here is Sunrise Mass.
The James Webb Space Telescope has returned its first imagery, and a teaser image was released today:
The field of vision here is the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. That absolutely astonishes me. Also, the visible “warping” effect, like a partial fish-eye lens, is because the galaxy cluster seen here acts as a “gravitational lens”, bending the light waves that have been traversing the Cosmos for billions of years.
More, so much more, to come. Webb is one of the most exciting things I can remember, and I’m so glad that even in times as dark as these humans haven’t shut down the quest for wonder and knowledge. Darkness doesn’t last, but science and knowledge do!
I love the full-screen shots I can take with my phone.
One of my favorite things about walking in the woods is the way the sunlight breaks through in spots, dappling the forest floor in pools of golden light while other spots remain shrouded. Here are several shots of just that:
Two shots of the Dumas Bridge, first from the southeast end, and then from the northwest. Same place, same camera, but two different vantage points make for very different moods in the photos!
Yes, I photographed a couple of photographers. I saw them several times on this particular walk. They were intently photographing things up close with those long-lensed cameras. (I enjoy my photography, but not enough to gear up to that degree…though occasionally I do find it tempting to try to move beyond the limitations of my phone’s cameras, amazing as they are, and my now seven-year-old point-and-shoot camera.)
Toward the end of our visit this big military plane flew overhead. I’m not sure what kind of plane this is.
Two adventurers, one of whom is thinking about the bowl of water and the air conditioning in the car.
I was going to return to the “Conversation Songs” theme this week, but then today news arrived that actor James Caan has died. Caan was just a terrific actor, always solid and reliable and skilled. He was always believable: you believed he was a prominent member of the Corleone family, or that he was a bestselling writer who happened to fall into the clutches of a crazy fan, or just about anything else he did. You never saw James Caan in a movie and thought, “Oh, come on, what were they thinking casting James Caan as that?!”
His most famous work is certainly The Godfather, so here is a selection from that film’s score, by composer Nino Rota. Well done, James Caan! Your body of work will live on.
A look at the unbelievably fascist document that is the official platform of the Texas Republican Party:
The fundamentalist religious fervor perhaps extends most strongly to gay rights and others of alternative sexual lifestyles. The platform directly declares that “Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice” and that “We oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity.” §§ 143–144 (p. 21). The Republican platform seeks to ban gay marriage.
And that’s just one example of the awfulness therein.
The press does not want to have a direct conversation with you about what’s really at the heart of Republican messaging. As a former Republican who now consistently votes for the Democratic Party in US elections, I will. When I came to realize what the true message of the Republican Party was, I was out, and have been voting Democratic ever since.
Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:
They can tell people what to do.
You cannot tell them what to do.
This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy, there’s an additional layer of complexity to this (we will discuss this later in the piece), but this is the basic formula.
By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them dependent).
Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.
It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked.
I don’t see the path out. Even if we were able to pack the Courts with jurists who believe in now outdated concepts like stare decisis all that would mean would be that we would be acknowledging that the Supreme Court is an unelected super-legislature. It actually always has been, but before this there were recognized limits on how far the Court could go. That’s gone now.
Increasingly we’re in a place where the only way to really fix things is to blow it all up and start over with an all-new Constitution, and when you consider how the one we have was a messy document full of compromises and good-enough’s that none of the rich white men who wrote it even liked very much, well, what are our chances of getting it right?
This has been an interesting phenomenon to watch unfold the last month or so: a song by 80s singer Kate Bush featured prominently in an episode of the new season of Stranger Things, which has in turn led to an enormous resurgence of interest in Bush herself. The Internet and social media have exploded with discussions of Bush and her songs. I am always happy to see older cultural material get another crack at the limelight; we are too focused on the new-and-shiny as a culture, and it depresses me that lots of good things disappear if they don’t have their Big Moment quickly enough when they’re new.
In my particular case this is helpful because somehow I managed to completely miss Kate Bush in the 80s. I have no memory of her music at all, none whatsoever. I don’t know how this came to happen, but I have a few suspicions, and it had to do with (a) the music I was consuming in 1985 or so, and (b) how I was consuming it. I liked rock and pop a great deal back then! I spent too many hours in front of MTV, and I owned a lot of rock and pop records. But even so, most of my music listening around that point focused strongly on classical, and that didn’t let up until…well, it hasn’t, actually, though I’ve added other genres along the way.
My consumption of rock and pop had nothing at all to do with the usual way of hearing such music, the radio; in the Southern Tier there wasn’t all that much radio at all other than what was powerful enough to reach that far from Buffalo, and when we were driving around, my father asserted the “Driver chooses the music!” rule, which meant country music a lot of the time. So as far as pop and rock went, if I didn’t hear them on MTV, I didn’t hear them at all. I don’t know if Kate Bush made music videos, but I don’t recall seeing them much, if she did.
And that just means I have something new to explore!
Since July 4th is a time when many enjoy fireworks, here is this image of a supernova that looks a lot like a fireworks explosion. Explosions of actual stars are a focus for scientists who hope to better understand their births, lives, and deaths and how they interact with their surroundings. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2015, astronomers have studied one particular explosion that may provide clues to the dynamics of other, much larger stellar eruptions. This is an image of GK Persei, an object that became a sensation in the astronomical world in 1901 when it suddenly appeared as one of the brightest stars in the sky for a few days.
Tab Closing Day
Time to close out some tabs I’ve had open for a while:
:: The Future Republicans Want
A look at the unbelievably fascist document that is the official platform of the Texas Republican Party:
And that’s just one example of the awfulness therein.
:: The Message of the Republican Party: Don’t Tread On Me, I Tread On You.
:: Dear Republicans: We Tried Your Way and It Does Not Work
:: Bill Altreuter, a Buffalo trial lawyer, on the Supreme Court:
Increasingly we’re in a place where the only way to really fix things is to blow it all up and start over with an all-new Constitution, and when you consider how the one we have was a messy document full of compromises and good-enough’s that none of the rich white men who wrote it even liked very much, well, what are our chances of getting it right?
:: Roger’s thoughts on Independence Day are not much rosier than my own.
:: ‘An old strain of English magic had returned’: stars on why they fell in love with Kate Bush
This has been an interesting phenomenon to watch unfold the last month or so: a song by 80s singer Kate Bush featured prominently in an episode of the new season of Stranger Things, which has in turn led to an enormous resurgence of interest in Bush herself. The Internet and social media have exploded with discussions of Bush and her songs. I am always happy to see older cultural material get another crack at the limelight; we are too focused on the new-and-shiny as a culture, and it depresses me that lots of good things disappear if they don’t have their Big Moment quickly enough when they’re new.
In my particular case this is helpful because somehow I managed to completely miss Kate Bush in the 80s. I have no memory of her music at all, none whatsoever. I don’t know how this came to happen, but I have a few suspicions, and it had to do with (a) the music I was consuming in 1985 or so, and (b) how I was consuming it. I liked rock and pop a great deal back then! I spent too many hours in front of MTV, and I owned a lot of rock and pop records. But even so, most of my music listening around that point focused strongly on classical, and that didn’t let up until…well, it hasn’t, actually, though I’ve added other genres along the way.
My consumption of rock and pop had nothing at all to do with the usual way of hearing such music, the radio; in the Southern Tier there wasn’t all that much radio at all other than what was powerful enough to reach that far from Buffalo, and when we were driving around, my father asserted the “Driver chooses the music!” rule, which meant country music a lot of the time. So as far as pop and rock went, if I didn’t hear them on MTV, I didn’t hear them at all. I don’t know if Kate Bush made music videos, but I don’t recall seeing them much, if she did.
And that just means I have something new to explore!
:: Meet Jillian Hanesworth, Buffalo’s new–and first ever–poet laureate!
:: And finally, fireworks…in space!!!
Not fireworks, actually:
Amazing!