Something for Thursday

Posted on August 21, 2025 by ksedinger

The Music Man doesn’t get enough credit for how inventive it is, methinks. The Music Man is known for its Iowa setting, and it generally seems to be viewed as safe Americana. But it makes a lot of interesting choices, and those include its music numbers. This one, “Lida Rose and Will I Ever Tell You”, blends two different songs together, sung by entirely different characters, who aren’t even in the same place. How does that work?

It starts as our hero, con man Professor Harold Hill, is returning to his hotel room where he is met by the local school board, four guys who used to hate each other until Hill noticed that their voices lent themselves to music–and he somehow converted them into a barbershop quartet. The board members are tasked with getting Professor Hill’s educational credentials (which he has entirely made up); he keeps distracting them by tricking them into singing, whereupon he slips away. He does that again here, with a song called “Lida Rose”. But then we shift to Marian Paroo, the woman who is falling for Professor Hill, who is singing a love song called “Will I Ever Tell You”. And then, via the magic of some very inventively-done split screen, we hear both songs together.

The Music Man is a much more sophisticated musical than I think it gets credit for! That’s all I’m saying.

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Tuesday Tones

Posted on August 19, 2025 by ksedinger

I was going to launch my next series of themed music selections today, but I had to be up at 4am for work (an unusual early start for a special project that had to be done prior to open) and then when I got home I had to help take Carla to the vet (a likely urinary tract infection, she has meds now and is resting), so the brain power is not at its highest right now. So, today instead I share a movie theme that we heard on WNED on the way home from the vet: Rachel Portman’s lush and beautiful theme to Emma (1996). Not much else to say here…it’ll probably and hopefully be an early bedtime this evening!

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Buffalo Streetscapes: Men at work

Posted on August 18, 2025 by ksedinger

Last week I did one of my favorite things, on the last day of my August vacation: I went on a long photo walk in the city of Buffalo. I spent a chunk of that walk in downtown Buffalo proper, and one shot I took that I particularly like is this one, of two men on a crane lift working on something on one of the buildings. I had to look up the building, actually: Convention Towers, on the south end of the Buffalo Convention Center. At the end of the street, dominating the background of the photo, is the edifice of Buffalo City Hall.

This is the jpg as it came right out of the camera; I have not yet done any editing on this photo. (Or any of the day’s photos…right now I’m behind on all my editing!) So, a better version of this will be forthcoming. For now, here it is! (And for the embiggenable version, go here.)

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Sunday Stealing

Posted on August 17, 2025 by ksedinger

Another week, another quiz! Let’s see how this goes:

The 2×4 Meme

TWO foods you can’t stand

1. Broccoli! I’ve written before of my hatred for broccoli.

2. I love potatoes in just about every form in which they can be served…except mashed. I do not like mashed potatoes. And I always think I should! Every time I see a nice serving of mashed potatoes with delicious gravy, I think, “Ooh, that’s gotta be good….” And yet…no dice. I cannot get myself to love mashed potatoes.

FOUR foods you love

1. Blueberries. They’re heavenly. One of my favorite breakfasts is a cup or so of cottage cheese with a cup or so of blueberries on top.

2. Eggs. Eggs always make me happy. And they’re so versatile!

3. Bread. I don’t think there’s a bread I don’t like, and that can be a problem, I must admit.

4. Mustard. Spicy, brown, yellow, yellow with horseradish, dijon, honey, the stuff with the big seeds in it that you dip pretzels into, the spicy stuff in the little packet that I must have with my egg roll when order from Asian Star…yeah. Mustard!

TWO places you never want to see again 

1. Las Vegas. Now, given that when I saw Vegas I was 7 years old as we drove through it while moving from West Virginia to Hillsboro, OR, in 1979, a case can be made that I really haven’t seen Vegas, at least, not what it’s become. The Vegas I saw bears little resemblance to what’s there now. But still! No desire to go there whatsoever. I am not interested. I don’t gamble, and Vegas is an entirely artificial place that got plunked there for gambling. There is no natural geographic reason for there to be a city there. You can see this from aerial photos where the city doesn’t dwindle from urban core to suburbs to rural the way cities are supposed to; Vegas just stops. Now, a Vegas episode from the last season of Somebody Feed Phil did the best job I’ve seen yet of making Vegas look like a place I might like, but…no. Would I turn down a free, all-expenses-paid trip there? No! But do I have any intention of devoting any of my travel time or resources to going there? Also no. (Mark Evanier writes about Vegas. He likes it much more than I do, and his opinion has the virtue of him actually having been there since 1979.)

2. For the foreseeable future? Florida.

FOUR places you’d like to revisit

1. Hawaii!

2. New York City!

3. Chicago!

4. Seattle! (These aren’t arranged in preference, but by how long it’s been since I’ve been to any of them. It’s been 4 years since Hawaii, this December; 10 years this November since NYC; 24 or so since Chicago (and that was a drive-by); 43 or so since the last time I saw Seattle.

TWO musical artists who make you want to change the station 

1. Toby Keith. I’m told his early stuff was quite good before he went all “Lee Greenwood’s Republican Country heir-apparent”, but I’ll never know.

2. It depends on the song, but sometimes Rush bugs me. “Tom Sawyer” is a frankly unpleasant thing to listen to.

FOUR musical artists you love to listen to

1. The Beatles! Longtime readers will know that I was not always a Beatles fan, but I came around quickly when I started listening to them with new ears after watching the movie Across the Universe.

2. The Killers. I missed them when they were first getting big (in the 2000s), but I’ve been listening to them quite a bit the last couple of years, particularly their live album taken from a concert they did at the Royal Albert Hall in London. I love their sound and their combination of tech-dance, pop, and even yacht rock with saxophone styles.

3. Glen Campbell. He’s a part of the soundtrack of my life.

4. Annie Lennox. Her voice is a miracle. She could turn the Alphabet Song into a work of art. She probably has!

TWO moments you’d like to erase

1. The 2016 and 2024 elections. Yeah, a two-fer, but seriously: when they write the story of how America might have done herself in and done so voluntarily, those are going to be the moments she did it.

2. I don’t want to write about the details–not now, maybe not ever–but my mother did not deserve for her last year to unfold the way it did. At all. (Though honestly, seeing the 2024 election turn out the way it did would not have done her any favors.)

FOUR moments you’d like to relive

1. 2008’s election…but honestly, with a lot stronger sense of keeping the foot on the gas. America’s progressives had a serious chance there to change things for good and for better…but they just said “Mission accomplished!” after that election and retreated to their napping chambers, allowing the Tea Party to rise up and set the stage for the transition to MAGA.

2. I’d like to have been able to see Avengers: Endgame in theaters in that first weekend. I don’t recall what was going on, but I couldn’t make screenings any of those first three weeks. It vexes me to this day.

3. OK, I’m taking these not so much as reliving the exact moments but somehow recapturing their energy and their feeling, right? There was a night some years ago, when The Wife was still working nights at the restaurant she managed, and I was home by myself (The Kid was here but playing games and whatnot), and I started watching a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 on YouTube while I ate the pizza I had bought for dinner. I’ve known that piece for years, since I was first learning classical music in my teen years, but something about that symphony just clicked in my head and in my heart that night. That happens with art: you can know a work and be familiar with it and somehow your love of it, your appreciation of it…its grip on you…just goes to a next level at some point, and you don’t see it coming. (The performance was Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela at the BBC Proms. You can watch the performance here…unfortunately the HD versions are no longer on YouTube, so far as I know, which is a pity. The performance is raw and imperfect–the Bolivar Orchestra was originally a youth orchestra–but the music-making is utterly superlative. Sometimes the energy of a good youth orchestra outstrips that of a seasoned professional ensemble.)

4. Finally? It’s silly and weird, but the best things are silly and weird, right? I’d love to relive the first time The Wife hit me in the face with a pie. It’s strange how often the key moments in our lives are ones we really can’t explain very well, isn’t it?

 

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Something for Thursday

Posted on August 14, 2025 by ksedinger

Well, I don’t know how often I do this. It’s not very often. Probably the last time was something like Ravel’s Bolero.

I’m about to share something I don’t like at all.

See, there’s this thing that’s been going around social media of late, particularly Tiktok, where you share what the Number One song was when you were born. I looked mine up…and my shoulders sagged. My stomach fell. My heart sank.

I had never heard this before, so I had to go listen to it, hoping against hope that maybe it’s not terrible.

Oh, it is.

Look, I have no problem with this particular artist, but I knew upon seeing this song title that I was not going to dig this particular song. And lo! I did not.

Here, folks, is what was Number One in the land on September 26, 1971. I’m not even going to name it! If I’d waited another week, I’d have arrived during “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart’s chart-topping success. Alas!

Sigh. Here it is….

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Tuesday Tones

Posted on August 12, 2025 by ksedinger

OK, I think we’re going to wrap up the short survey of classical works that either appeared, or were composed, in 1925, thus giving us an idea of where classical music was one hundred years ago. (I’m not bored of the topic at all, but there’s another one I’m wanting to explore, so time to move on!)

One of the great symphonists of the twentieth century was the Russian-Soviet master Dmitri Shostakovich. He wrote fifteen symphonies over the course of his prolific musical life, and taken together they form a fascinating picture of the musical and artistic life that was possible during the Soviet Union. Shostakovich, like all artists in those regimes, had to walk a tight rope of expressing himself in his art while also pleasing the masters in charge of everything, and no, he was not always successful on either score.

I always find Shostakovich’s music more appealing than his contemporary, Sergei Prokofiev’s. I’m not really sure why; perhaps it lies on Shostakovich’s tendency to a starker sound and his sometimes satirical, if not outright sarcastic, tone. In some of his works there is an outright tone of mockery going on. For some this can date his work, but for me it depicts something fascinating. Among the standard emotion there is real humor in Shostakovich’s music, even if it tends to be dark humor, the kind of humor that is whispered in the background lest someone in authority hear.

Shostakovich completed his first symphony in 1925 (though it was not actually premiered until 1926). He was only 19 years old when he wrote it, and it is in some ways a student piece. The work’s orchestration is particularly interesting; Shostakovich employs interesting instrument mixes throughout, such as starting the symphony with a duet between a trumpet and a bassoon. A piano is used in the work, not as a soloist, but as a part of the orchestral tableau. I always find something rather refreshing about listening to Shostakovich, which I suppose springs from my main temperament when it comes to Russian music: with Shostakovich you get the Big and the Epic, but not necessarily the Giant Sweeping Heart-on-their-Sleeve TUNE that you get with the Tcaikovskys and the Borodins and the Rachmaninoffs of the world.

Here is the Symphony No. 1 in F minor by Dmitri Shostakovich.

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One source of local inspiration

Posted on August 11, 2025 by ksedinger

Here’s a video about a local photographer, Pat Cray, whose work I’ve been following for a year or so now, since I discovered it. He does Buffalo-centric street photography, which suits me perfectly: I love Buffalo, and I love street photography. I will be buying his photo book!

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Goodness! (And an ABC quiz thing)

Posted on August 10, 2025 by ksedinger

Wow, I haven’t posted here since last Tuesday? Oh noes!!!

Nothing major or nefarious or bad is going on. In fact, it’s going pretty well. I’ve been on vacation since I left work on Wednesday, and I don’t return to work until Thursday. Also, my sister is visiting from out of town and we made our annual trip to the Erie County Fair on Friday. I’m swamped!

As far as this site goes, I didn’t make a conscious decision to take a posting break, it just happened. I’ve been active on Teh Socials, so if you follow me there, you’ve seen a few of my shenanigans. Just a few, anyway. More to come, especially a bunch of photos; I took a ton at the Fair, and I have others that are still awaiting editing from last week, and I am hoping to go on an all-day streetscape photography binge on Wednesday, weather permitting. (Oh, on the subject of weather? This summer has been loaded with hot-and-humid, and I’m rather tired of it. Also, this summer has not been loaded with rain, and we need some of that, too.

Anyway, let’s do the Sunday Stealing for this week, shall we? It’s a list of alphabetical prompts.

A. Auto: Buick Encore (2019). It’s in pretty good shape! Earlier this year I had to get all new brakes and tires; I could have done without those things needing done at the same time, but so be it. I also have a somewhat busted passenger-side mirror, from an errant backing-in incident.
B. Bed size: At home, Queen. When we go to a hotel, we try for King.
C. Cats: Three: Remy and Rosa, whom we adopted a few years ago, and we have added Daisy, my mother’s cat who was left behind when Mom died.
D. Dogs: Two: Carla, our pittie mix, and Hobbes, our greyhound.
E. Essential start to your day: Coffee and feeding Hobbes breakfast. Hobbes is usually up first.
F. Favorite color: If pressed, I say purple, but really, I love all colors. Brown isn’t one I tend to wear a whole lot, but I don’t dislike it at all.
G. Gold or silver: They each have their places, to be honest.
H. Hand you favor (righty or lefty): Right.
I. Instruments you play: I used to play the trumpet (very well!) and the piano (less well, though I wasn’t terrible). I have not touched either instrument in many years, sadly. My musical life is purely as a listener now.
J. Job title: Facilities Technician. 
K. Kids: One. (Not by choice. Those stories are sad.)
L. Live (rural, suburb, city): Suburb. I wouldn’t mind living farther out, in a decent-sized house on a nice lot with tons of trees…but then, I also wouldn’t mind living in a nice apartment in a vibrant city, either.
M. Meal plans: Right now? As I write this, I’m not sure what we’re doing for dinner!
N. Nicknames: None, really. “Hey you,” I suppose.
O. Overnight hospital stays: For me, as of now? None. I suppose I can’t dodge that bullet forever, but I’m trying.
P. Pet peeves: Ohhhh, we do not have time for that conversation right now! Let me name just one: People who don’t utilize right-of-way properly when driving, and then do shit like sit at the STOP sign and wave at me to go when it’s their turn, or worse, when they stop at a YIELD sign while I have a stop and start that “No, you go!” shit. GAH.
Q. Quote from a movie: “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go.” –Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark
R. Regrets: I’m not a big fan of regrets…but the one I wonder about most is leaving my music studies in college for Philosophy. I’m not sure that was a great idea.
S. Siblings: One. She’s actually visiting right now!
U. Underwear: Yes, I’m wearing some. Why are we asking? What are we asking? (And where is ‘T’?)
V. Vegetable you love: Corn. Though technically it’s not a vegetable, it’s a grain. Tomato! Which is a fruit. Asparagus? I’ve come to like it a lot, though not steamed, which for years was the only way I knew it. Brushed with olive oil, dusted with salt and pepper, and grilled? Oh yeah babe.
W. What makes you run late: Panicking over if I have everything. I really try not to run late, though.
X. X-rays you’ve had: Teeth and my collar bone when I was in 7th grade.
Y. Yummy food: Chicken tikka masala. We discovered Indian food this year! Why only this year? Who knows…I think we were a bit skittish to try it ourselves without someone along who was “in the know”. That turned out to be my brother-in-law. Now we love it.
Z. Zoo animal: I don’t really like zoos anymore; I find them depressing, even though I know that most of them really try to do the best they can by the animals in their care. That said, I always love seeing elephants.

 

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The Tones of Tuesday

Posted on August 5, 2025 by ksedinger

Continuing my small survey of the classical music of 1925, one hundred years ago, we have a work by one of the most interesting composers of the 20th century. George Antheil is mainly known as an “avant-garde” composer, and in keeping with that label he composed a great deal of experimental music that made use of mechanistic sounds, as he was initially fascinated by the sounds of industry. He wrote a work called Ballet mecanique, which calls for, among other things, sixteen player pianos. Antheil wasn’t just about sonic experiment for the sake of sonic experiment, though; he would later find work scoring films in Hollywood, and this work required a more traditional tonal hand. How traditionally tonal he was is for the listener to determine.

A Jazz Symphony is Antheil’s work from 1925. The work, which premiered at the same concert as Ballet mecanique, created quite the stir in 1925, but to our ears now it sounds like exactly what it claims to be: a work for orchestra that is deeply steeped in jazz. American music was at the time starting to embrace jazz as more than just a “Tin Pan Alley” kind of thing, and Antheil was part of the first wave of such composers.

(An interesting footnote on Antheil, who is mainly known as a composer: he worked during World War II with actress Hedy Lamarr to co-invent a new radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that would not be subject to Axis frequency jamming.) 

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“Mr. Looper? Where did YOU come from?”

Posted on August 4, 2025 by ksedinger

Maybe I’ll make Monday the day I post something new and kooky that I’ve learned lately…kind of like the old “Sunday Burst of Weirdness” I used to post back in the old Byzantium’s Shores days.

Anyway, here’s something I didn’t know, and wow, did kids in 1986 dodge a bullet: there was actually discussion about having Big Bird fly on a space shuttle mission.

Yup. That space shuttle mission.

Imagine if that had come to pass. An entire generation of then-children would still be in therapy.

 

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