Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on May 17, 2022 by ksedinger

Film music today!

This weekend was, among other things, the twentieth anniversary of the release of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, which is one of my favorite installments in the series. Even now, when the Prequel Trilogy has benefitted from the passing of time and some much-needed critical reassessment (way overdue, but I remain proud of having done a lot of that lonely heavy-lifting myself back when hating the Prequels was still the mainstream position), AotC still seems to be the one that gets picked on the most, which I continue to not understand.

The movie’s music is something of an oddity. John Williams turns in a lot of his usual inventive brilliance, even though the film’s last act was apparently still under heavy revision so late in the production game that the entire last act is largely scored with music re-used from the previous film, The Phantom Menace. Williams’s original work is typically amazing, centering on a new Love Theme for the romance of Anakin and Padme, which even at this point we know is (a) doomed to failure, and (b) going to produce the baby twins of Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa.

As the romance is doomed and tragic from the get-go, Williams wrote a lush love theme that leaps and yearns in suitably sad and tragic fashion. But he does some more with it: he gives that love theme a darkly militaristic middle section, for one thing, in line with the fact that Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side (which helps give the Empire its beginnings) is borne from this very love affair. Williams also crafts the love theme itself from a kind of minor-key inversion of the Star Wars main theme, and the theme’s final bars form a quote from the classic Imperial March.

In this selection, the Finale and End Credits Suite from the film, we start with some suspenseful music as the Battle of Geonosis winds down and the traitorous Count Dooku flees to Coruscant, so he can report to his master, Darth Sidious (the Sith alter-ego of Chancellor Palpatine, who is the puppet master behind everything). Then the music swells as the Republic’s Clone Army is revealed in all its terrifying majesty, setting forth to war–but the music here is the Imperial March from the Original Trilogy. Williams is telling us that this is the true moment the Empire is born.

Then, a blazing rendition of that love theme as Anakin and Padme marry in secret, before the film’s smash-cut transition to the end credits. This is the best of these transitions in the entire saga, in my opinion, and it’s the last time that Williams would end a Star Wars movie’s narrative with anything other than his iconic theme for the Force.

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25 years!

Posted on May 17, 2022 by ksedinger

The Wife and I were married twenty-five years ago today. We just got back from a celebratory mini-vacation, and now…our next quarter-century begins.

It’s a hard world, folks. Best to walk through it with someone you love.

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On the way home….

Posted on May 16, 2022 by ksedinger

My God, I love these lakes.

More later. Vacation isn’t over just yet….

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When in Rome….

Posted on May 15, 2022 by ksedinger

The Wife and I are traveling this weekend, spending a few days in the Finger Lakes. We got back to our rented cottage yesterday, when I found a Direct Message from a Facebook friend. It was something along the line of “I hope it didn’t happen in YOUR workplace, and I hope you’re OK.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

I learned quickly.

No, that was not my workplace. I do work in a Buffalo area grocery store, but not that chain and not in that area. It’s appalling nonetheless, on so many levels. I’ve often thought about what it would be like when it happened where I work. Not if, but when. I know every way out of my building, every place I can hole up if I can’t get out, every object I might use if defense becomes necessary.

I shouldn’t have to think like this.

But that’s not even the worst of it, is it?

It’s an entire community of human beings, specifically targeted again. Reminded that they will always be targeted, again. Reminded of this country’s long ghastly history of this stuff, again. Confronted by our nation’s abject refusal to admit its past and atone, again.

That’s all we do in this country: it’s just one big litany of again. Again. Again.

No horror, no injustice, no violent outcome is ever enough for us to collectively say, “No more.” We will be back about our business by, oh, I don’t know. Dinner time today, I guess.

I don’t have anything insightful to say about this. I have no suggestions for a way forward, because even if I did, we very clearly don’t want a way forward. We’re not interested. At this point, the warp and weft of America isn’t fate, nor is it judgment handed down from on high. It’s a choice.

We are the country we have chosen to be, and I see no reason to believe we are going to choose to be anything other than this.

And that is how America will fade into history.

I often wonder these days about Roman citizens around the year, oh, 350CE. Or 400. Maybe even a bit later.

The commonly accepted date for the fall of the Roman Empire is 476CE, but it’s not as if there was some grand proclamation in Latin officially ending the Empire. It just withered, and that’s when historians generally agree that beyond that point, with the deposing of that last Emperor, that nothing existed that could be meaningfully called “the Roman Empire”.

But I wonder about the citizens who lived in Rome not long before that. Did a Roman potter in 422CE sense that it was ending? A fisherman in what is now Napoli? A seamstress in modern-day Tuscany? Did they have some feeling that the Empire in which they lived was soon to be history?

And if they did, did it feel something like what it feels to be an American now?

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On Dams

Posted on May 14, 2022 by ksedinger

While on my lunch break the other day, I watched this short film about dam removal on streams in the Hudson River watershed. Fascinating film, with amazing photography (well-worth watching in full-screen HD). Were there a place I could say my soul resided, it would likely be alongside one of the forest streams of America’s Northeast.

 

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It’s Tab-Closing Day!!!

Posted on May 13, 2022 by ksedinger

Finally gettin’ our Spring on, here in The 716

I was not prepared for mid-to-upper 80 degree temps this week, folks. I’ve found over the last several years that I handle heat a lot better than I used to–time was when 85 degrees would reduce me to sitting in a pool of my own sweat, wishing for the sweet release of the Reaper’s icy touch (or, less dramatically, the inevitable return of winter)–but the heat made something of a sneak attack yesterday. It’s still a warm weekend to come, but not quite so warm as yesterday, thank the Gods! On the good side of the ledger, though, is that we’ve finally turned the corner into actual Spring. And this is no small thing: it’s worth remembering that just two years ago, we had snow on Mother’s Day. Yikes!

Anyway, it’s time to close up some tabs I’ve had open a while! Here are some links.

Transgenderism in the Old West. No matter what the TERFs and other creeps might have you believe, transgenderism is not a new thing. At all. It’s probably been around since we were drawing on rock walls in caves.

All Hail the Spiedie! What’s a spiedie, you ask? It’s a fantastic sandwich that has somehow never managed to move much beyond its regional beginnings in Binghamton, NY. Note to self: Buy a bottle of Salameda’s Sauce and get spiedies on the menu for this summer’s grilling! (Flavorwise, if you’re a WNYer, spiedies are in the ballpark of our beloved Chiavetta’s sauce.)

When murder-mystery writers have surprising real-life experience with their subject. Reminds me of a favorite exchange in my favorite Hitchcock movie, Dial M for Murder:

Tony Wendice: How do you go about writing a detective story?

Mark Halliday: Well, you forget detection and concentrate on crime. Crime’s the thing. And then you imagine you’re going to steal something or murder somebody.

Tony Wendice: Oh, is that how you do it? It’s interesting.

Mark Halliday: Yes, I usually put myself in the criminal’s shoes and then I keep asking myself, uh, what do I do next?

Margot Mary Wendice: Do you really believe in the perfect murder?

Mark Halliday: Mmm, yes, absolutely. On paper, that is. And I think I could, uh, plan one better than most people; but I doubt if I could carry it out.

Tony Wendice: Oh? Why not?

Mark Halliday: Well, because in stories things usually turn out the way the author wants them to; and in real life they don’t… always.

Tony Wendice: Hmm.

Mark Halliday: No, I’m afraid my murders would be something like my bridge: I’d make some stupid mistake and never realize it until I found everybody was looking at me.

On reading Ulysses on my iPhone. I’ve never read Ulysses, so I have no personal axe to grind here, but I continue to believe that the reading experience should be seen much more broadly than just paper.

Sheila O’Malley’s April viewing diary. Nobody does deep dives like Sheila does, and this is a case in point. She earned an amazing opportunity to write an essay about Raging Bull for that film’s upcoming Criterion Collection release, and in preparation she did a deep dive into Robert De Niro’s career. I’ve never seen Raging Bull, but I’ve seen a lot of De Niro through the years, and Sheila’s insights are always golden.

(Yes, I probably should see Raging Bull, if only to confirm my suspicion that Ordinary People‘s Oscar win really was a travesty.)

John Scalzi had thoughts a few weeks back when news broke of Elon Musk trying to buy Twitter. Since then there are other news items that alternately make it sound like the deal is all but done, or that Musk is looking for an exit strategy to kill the deal, so I’ve no idea what’s going on. That Musk has openly stated that among other things, he’ll reinstate posting privileges to the 45th President is not encouraging.

Roger on rote memorization. In all honesty, I never hated doing memorization in school, though I was always rather pigheaded about what we were required to memorize. It really is nice to be able to rattle off quotes of stuff; having King Henry V’s Agincourt speech in my memory bank (maybe not entirely accurately, but enough to get me by) is something that I am convinced will one day serve me well. It hasn’t yet, but it will!

Anthony Bourdain: 39 Books to “Unfuck” Yourself. I will never not miss Anthony Bourdain. Never. He was brilliant and curious and full of love for the world, and more than all that, he was literate. You could sense his deep reading in every word he spoke on his various documentaries, shows, and in his own writings.

Finally, I close with a song I heard just last night on the episode of Letterkenny that we watched. (More on Letterkenny another time. Suffice it to say that we love it, and it is not like anything else on teevee, anywhere.) I had, to my recollection, never heard this song before, but I have already put it into a playlist I’ve been working on. Here is “It Always Happens This Way”, by Toulouse.

 

 

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Something for Thursday: Conversation songs, No. 2

Posted on May 12, 2022 by ksedinger

Here’s another “Conversation Song”! This is my ongoing series, started last week, in which I feature songs whose lyrics give us one side of a conversation, and we are left to infer the other half.

This week’s song dates from 1976, and the singing duo England Dan and John Ford Coley. It’s a pretty straightforward song: one person is calling the other and suggesting that they get together to, I don’t know, talk old times, maybe rekindle an old relationship.

The lyrics suggest that this is a former love affair, or at least some kind of relationship that ended in a one-sided fashion. For this person to call the other, they have to have not been in contact in a very long time, and there’s a winsome sweetness in the suggestions for a place to go: “We could go walking through a windy park”. The entire song is the suggestion of a get-together; none of the real conversation is in the song at all. But there’s a hint of seriousness in the bridge of the song:

… I won’t ask for promises
So, you don’t have to lie
We’ve both played that game before
Say “I love you”, then say “Goodbye”

Our singer is trying to keep expectations low, downplay the whole thing–but even here they are assuring the other that it won’t get that deep again, even though they’ve “both played that game before”, a game which involves both “I love you” and “goodbye”. One wonders why it’s been such a long time, and what really prompted our singer to pick up the phone. It can’t just be that “warm wind blowing the stars around”.

Here is “I’d Really Love To See You Tonight”, by English Dan and John Ford Coley.

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Then: Hoovervilles! Now: Shapirovilles!

Posted on May 11, 2022 by ksedinger

So, a couple weeks back, a video made the rounds of social media that was billed as “A progressive DESTROYS Ben Shapiro!!!!” Now, this is an obnoxious tendency in our click-bait era, when any time a person on one side challenges someone on the other in “debate”, it’s described as “Joe ABSOLUTELY DEMOLISHES Donald!” or the like. It’s pretty tiresome, because every time I watch one of these, it’s never really one person UTTERLY CRUSHING the other. It might be a slight upper-hand, but that’s about it. And this video was a case in point.

The video wasn’t worthless, though, because while it didn’t show Shapiro getting reduced to a pile of sniveling tears, it did put Shapiro’s debate “style” on display. (If you’re not familiar with Ben Shapiro, you are really lucky and really not missing much. He’s one of the current darlings of America’s right-wing, and he’s as nauseating now as he was when he was a 15-year-old kid writing pro-Iraq war columns back in the early 2000s.) A guy stepped up to the q-and-a mike at one of Ben Shapiro’s events and challenged him on the topic of “wokeism” (which is in itself a deeply tiring and dull obsession of America’s right wing, but I digress). When the guy started talking, the audience went “Oooooooh!”, thus demonstrating part one of Shapiro’s strategy: Always have a friendly audience.

The next thing Shapiro did was to let the guy talk just long enough that he’d be able to say that “I let you speak”, and then he began talking over the guy, basically taking over. Shapiro then went into his personal definition of “wokeism”, which is a definition that is just full of nonsensical characterizations, but when the guy at the mike tried pushing back, guess what: Ben starts with the “I let you speak, now it’s my turn” stuff, and he spouted some more nonsense, very quickly. That’s the second of Shapiro’s debate tricks: speak quickly and sound authoritative. The strategy is to get so much BS into the air that it’s difficult for the other interlocutor to figure out where to start.

And when the interlocutor does start, Ben turned to his final trick: he had the friendly folks running his event cut off the guy’s mike.

People like Ben Shapiro are why I think “debate” is a giant waste of time. The ability to debate has little to do with being correct, or analyzing issues, or providing genuine factual context. It’s about speaking quickly and maintaining composure while speaking quickly. The person who controls the conversation is the one who “wins” the debate (and frankly, the idea that a debate should be “winnable” in the sense that a football game is “winnable” is utter nonsense), not the one with the better ideas or the more correct interpretation of the facts. This is why I never watch debates of any kind, not even the final Presidential debates.

The proper way to engage Ben Shapiro, if engage him one must, is shown in the following video. Apparently this guy managed to so get under Shapiro’s skin with this that Shapiro blocked him on social media:

(This is actually an excerpt from a longer video.)

Video like this, where you can isolate each bullshit bullet point that comes from Shapiro’s mouth and bask in the scent of its idiocy, is the best way to deal with him and his comrades-in-arms. (I was going to say “ilk”, but wow, do I hate the word “ilk”. It sounds like an incomplete word, like someone choked out a syllable and someone else decided, “OK, that’s the word, I guess.”) His intellectual nonsense is so much more obvious when he’s not able to surround it by a lot of other rapid-fire nonsense.

This specific brand of Shapiro dopeyness came to mind earlier today when I saw this on Twitter:

In honor of Ben “Don’t you think they’d have already sold their houses and moved?” Shapiro, I propose that since we’re going to see much, much, much more of these “houses crumble into the sea” videos in the years to come, we should dub such locales where this happens as Shapirovilles. Not unlike the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression.

Shapirovilles: where the real estate trends favor mer-people!

 

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Bob Lanier

Posted on May 11, 2022 by ksedinger

I remember when we moved to Allegany, NY in 1981, I started hearing the name “Bob Lanier” a lot. He had been, as far as I could tell, a very good basketball player who had attended St. Bonaventure University, where my father had just started teaching. Even though he’d been gone for ten years by the time we got there, his star was sufficiently bright to still be lighting up local college basketball talk. Lanier led SBU to its only appearance in the NCAA Final Four, and many are convinced to this day that SBU had a very real shot at winning it all that year, until Lanier was injured in the tournament.

[Aside: One of the common clichés of sports opinion is that you can’t, or shouldn’t, blame injuries for your defeats. This is such obvious nonsense that I can’t believe it’s still accepted as true by sports fans and commentators the world over.]

Anyway, Lanier was a huge name in the Southern Tier, and in Western New York in general. I didn’t realize just how big a name he was beyond my local home region, though, until I went to college in 1989. I was in Iowa, a thousand miles (maybe minus a hundred) from home, in a place where if I told people I was constantly explaining that my residence in New York State did not translate to a proximity to New York City. But one night I was at a season-opening dinner for the college orchestra (which also used local musicians from town), and I ended up sitting near an older guy, one of the trombone players, maybe. He asked me where I was from, and I told him, “Near Buffalo, NY.” He asked why I was in small-town Iowa, and I told him it had to do with my father being a professor at St. Bonaventure.

The guy’s face lit up and he said, “Ahhh! Bob Lanier!”

By this time, Lanier’s college days were twenty years in the past and his pro career five, but he was still well-known, that long afterward. Now, sure, Iowa is a state where college basketball is a part of local religion and thus the locals will tend to know their sport a lot better than in other places, but still, that’s impressive.

I’ve read a lot about Lanier’s outreach work after his retirement from the game, and he seems to have been a genuinely good man as well as a gifted athlete. He’s one of Western New York’s better exports out into the world, and I’m sorry to see him go.

(photo credit)

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on May 10, 2022 by ksedinger

A suite of film music today! We watched Avatar the other night, our first time watching it since we first saw it when the DVD came out after the movie’s initial release, way back in 2009 or 2010 or so. The movie was such a huge hit back then, but it oddly became that huge hit that somehow disappeared down the memory hole, never much being talked about except for when news about James Cameron’s more-than-a-decade of work on a bunch of sequels drips out. In fact, a kind of backlash has arisen around Avatar, for reasons that I might go into in another post. For now, though, here’s a suite culled from the film’s score, by James Horner.

I’ve always had a tough relationship with James Horner; some of his music is indispensable, but his strange habit of self-borrowing and self-repeating is often maddening (in this way Horner was the Aaron Sorkin of film music). For me, Horner’s work peaked in the mid-90s, and little of his work after that period really hit my sweet spot, with one exception: his score to Avatar. This music is evocative and exciting and it conveys the sense of wonder that I find when I look at the stunning visuals of the moon of Pandora.

It’s too bad that Horner died several years ago, and thus won’t be able to write the music for the sequels that are going to finally start coming out this December. I’m sure his work will be quoted, but still, his voice will be missed.

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