The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Here are a couple of brief quotes from two different teevee shows, both of which (the quotes, that is) have been on my mind this week:
“Why are we still talking about this?” (Captain Mal Reynolds, FIREFLY)
“You’ll have doled out five thousand dollars worth of punishment for a fifty-buck crime.” (Admiral Fitzwallace, THE WEST WING)
No, I’m not going to illuminate just why those two quotes have been on my mind. But in both cases there’s not just a single reason.
A poem about yesterday’s birthday composer:
“Rachmaninoff” by Peter Halstead
On top of fluted spines
Between the massing pools
Of dark chromatic linesAnd using blood for fuel
Follow all the signs
And signaturesRead the fine print
On the flapping label
In the search for loveSo the incidentals
Of the dim rule
On the page aboveTake the clouded hint
Or later on you’ll
Tend to bluffIn the no man’s land
Of the intellectual
Handcuffed to chanceAnd lost in jewels:
A dream of hell
With inhuman hands.
Source. Peter Halstead is a poet, pianist, and photographer who with his wife Cathy founded the Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana.
I love the hints of musical terminology in this poem, and I assume the “inhuman hands” of the last line belong to Rachmaninoff himself, who had famously enormous hands, which enabled him to span gigantic chords at the keyboard (and which led him to unapologetically write gigantic chords in his own piano music). When he was on his deathbed, Rachmaninoff is reported to have bid farewell to his hands.
Way back in prehistory, we–that is, The Wife and I–decided that our love of popcorn needed to be treated more seriously, so we took our leave of the microwave popcorn that had been our main means of popcorn consumption for years and years. So it was that a little more than 12 years ago, we bought a corn popper and returned to the popcorn recipe of yore: corn, oil, salt, and butter. And it was good!
Until last year when the bowl for our popper broke. It had been sporting a crack for a while, a crack which slowly lengthened until it rendered the bowl unusable. We looked online for a replacement bowl, and while we did find them, they were almost the cost of a new popper. Now, a new popper wouldn’t really cost much at all–around $30 or $40, probably–but at this point I got even more analogue in my approach to popcorn. Why get a big unitasker appliance for something I could make using stuff I already owned?
For this attitude, I blame Alton Brown. Here he is, demonstrating his popcorn method in a video he made at the beginning of the pandemic. (Aside: I loved the “Pantry Raid” videos he made in 2020 and I wish he’d do more. Brown seems to tire quickly of specific formats and projects, though.) I’ve basically adapted Brown’s method to my needs, using not a steel mixing bowl but my wok.
I put in a few tablespoons of peanut oil, and then three-quarters of a cup of corn…
Then, on goes the lid and I give the whole works a shake or two every little bit or so, maybe twenty or thirty seconds. (Oh, medium heat.) Gradually the heat builds up and the popping starts!
And…the result!
(Those last two images are videos. I haven’t figured out how to embed video content from Flickr yet, so bear with me.)
The wok’s shape does the same thing as Mr. Brown’s mixing bowl: as the corn pops the popped pieces move off to the sides, while the heat concentrates on the kernels at the bottom. Brown would probably say that this method doesn’t allow enough steam to escape from the wok during popping, but I’ve honestly never really seen steam as an impediment to yummy popcorn.
Unlike Brown, who doesn’t like adding fat at the end of the popping process, I am a big fan of melted butter. I probably put too much butter on the popcorn, but…nah. “Too much butter” does not compute. Add a few generous shakes of sea salt (in his Good Eats episode on popcorn, the method of which the newer video is a refinement, Brown says at one point, “Few things you can put in your mouth are more disappointing than saltless popcorn”), and we’re ready for snacking!
Mr. Brown likes to put the salt in with the corn during popping, which I have tried, but I’ve never been in love with the results, so I don’t do this. I also haven’t tried his sprinkle-on seasonings like nutritional yeast, furikake, or sprinkly cheese. I do want to try popping the corn in ghee, because I’m curious about the result. I’ve never done anything with ghee before, though. I’ve also popped corn in coconut oil, and that does lend a bit of decadent mouthfeel to the proceedings.
If you’re wondering what kind of popcorn I use, I’m not brand-loyal, in all honesty. I’ll buy the store brand, or Jolly-Time. I also like to get different varieties from the local farmers markets, though those kinds of popcorn can be a bit more temperamental in the popping, resulting in more unpopped kernels and smaller popcorn bits.
I was going to spend this month writing about, among other things, composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was born on April 1, 1873. Then I did the math and realized that a whole month-long focus on Rachmaninoff might be a better idea for next year, Rachmaninoff’s sesquicentennial.
Meantime, I can’t let this great composer’s birth date go unmentioned, so here’s a wonderful performance of his Piano Concerto #2 in C minor, performed by Khatia Buniatishvili and the Filarmonica Teatro Regio Torino, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. This is one of the finest performances of this work I have heard. Ms. Buniatishvili is an amazing musician. Note her attentiveness to the orchestra during the passages when she is not playing. (The music starts around the 1:45 mark; there’s some introductory stuff.)
I want to post a poem each day this month! Here is the first, a poem about writing poetry, by Seamus Heaney. Note how he compares his own work–writing, with the pen as his tool–with that of his father, who is digging up potatoes in the garden. It’s a metaphor that works in a lot of ways: if one characterizes writing as “digging”, then one sees writing as a way of delving deep into the regions of the mind as digging is a way of delving deep into the regions of the world.
But Heaney also sees a disconnect between the work that he does, the work with which he is accustomed and comfortable and skilled at doing, and the work that his father and his grandfather did with such strength and skill, stopping only to drain an offered bottle of milk. How vivid the details: the smell of the potato plants and their fungi, the sound the peat makes as one digs, the sharpness of the lines left by the men doing the digging. A tone of possible regret creeps in as Heaney notes that he has no spade to take up of his own. He cannot dig in the earth as his forebears did.
But he can dig with the “squat pen”.
“Digging”, by Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests; snug as a gun.Under my window, a clean rasping soundWhen the spade sinks into gravelly ground:My father, digging. I look downTill his straining rump among the flowerbedsBends low, comes up twenty years awayStooping in rhythm through potato drillsWhere he was digging.The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaftAgainst the inside knee was levered firmly.He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deepTo scatter new potatoes that we picked,Loving their cool hardness in our hands.By God, the old man could handle a spade.Just like his old man.My grandfather cut more turf in a dayThan any other man on Toner’s bog.Once I carried him milk in a bottleCorked sloppily with paper. He straightened upTo drink it, then fell to right awayNicking and slicing neatly, heaving sodsOver his shoulder, going down and downFor the good turf. Digging.The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slapOf soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edgeThrough living roots awaken in my head.But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I’ll dig with it.
If you’ve seen the great movie Amadeus, you may recall a scene toward the end when Salieri, having driven poor naive Mozart to his literal deathbed, takes him home after he collapses during a performance of The Magic Flute, and then–under the guise of friendly helpfulness–grabs some paper to help Mozart compose a section of his Requiem (because Salieri is actually planning to pass the Requiem off as his own composition once Mozart is dead).
Of course the scene is utter fiction–Salieri and Mozart had no such adversarial relationship, and while a local noble did scheme about stealing Mozart’s work and claiming it as his own, it wasn’t Salieri, who lived a long and productive life after Mozart’s death and certainly did not end up in a sanitarium–but it’s an interesting piece of drama anyway, because it depicts how even adversaries can find themselves working collaboratively on a shared goal (no matter why the goal happens to be shared), and it underlines the film’s main theme of Salieri being a gifted professional musician who still can’t grasp the depths of Mozart’s genius, even when Mozart himself is sitting in the same room, talking him through it.
Someone took that scene from the movie and cut it together with a very clever animation of the actual score of the Confutatis (the section of the Requiem on which Mozart and Salieri are working). I love this kind of thing: when someone takes a piece of great filmmaking and uses it as a starting point for more terrific filmmaking.
William Grant Still wrote a suite for solo piano called Three Visions, consisting of three short movements. A program of sorts exists for the work, according to Still’s daughter:
“Three segments of the suite, Dark Horsemen, Summerland and Radiant Pinnacle, tell the story of the human soul after death: the body expires, and the soul goes on to an apocalyptic judgement. If it is seen that the past life has been a good one, the soul may enter ‘heaven’ or ‘Summerland’. After a period of time, the soul may reincarnate to learn additional earthly lessons on the human plane. Some souls reincarnate many times in a constant circular progress toward Godly perfection.”
“Dark Horsemen” is a brief burst of rhythmic dissonance that ends quickly, in favor of “Summerland”, a lyrical and optimistic portrayal of the afterlife that will be enjoyed by those who lived well.
Here is the Three Visions suite, played by pianist Umi Garrett:
(By the way! When I was watching Ms. Garrett’s performance the first time, I didn’t take much note of the fact that she’s playing from sheet music, because pianists do. Not everybody plays from memory all the time…but then I looked closer. The sheet music is actually displayed on a tablet. This had me thinking, “I’ll bet that makes page-turning easier!” After all, reaching up to flip a page without breaking the musical phrase isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, and many times in performance pianists will actually have a page-turner sitting nearby. I figured a tablet would be easy: she just has to reach up and tap the screen on the right side and the page will flip. However, if you watch, she does not do this! The tablet turns the page automatically! Which means that there must be a music display app that listens to the performer and tracks them along with the score, and turns the page accordingly? That kind of blows my mind, I must admit. And for all I know, they’ve been doing it this way for years!)
The center movement, “Summerland”, has taken on a life of its own as a standalone work, even being arranged for wind symphony. It’s always interesting to hear the way a work changes depending on a change in performance instrument or group. It’s still the same work…and yet it is also a completely different work.
Here’s the scene in my back yard, Sunday, March 27:
Ayup.
It’s funny about this area: we always get snow this late in the year. One recent year we actually got snow on Mother’s Day, which is still six or seven weeks away. This is not unusual. Granted, snows this late in the year don’t generally pile much on (unless you live in the hillier climes downwind of Lake Erie, areas which are ten to twenty miles south of Casa Jaquandor), but as much as I really do like snow, generally by St. Patrick’s Day I’m emotionally done with the stuff.
Being vexed by snow this late in the year is one thing, but what always gets me is how surprised a lot of people in this region are by it. Every year, we get our first post-equinox snow forecast, and I hear a lot of “Oooooh, I thought we were done with it for this year!” It amazes me that people can live in a place for years and still be caught by surprise by something that happens every year. Weird.
I continue to believe that Buffalo’s winters really wouldn’t get nearly the bad rap they do if spring here wasn’t like this: two months of mostly gray-and-muddy, punctuated by a random stray 50-degree day here or there and more often by a snowfall. We don’t start seeing real, honest green around here until mid-May, and I think a lot of people just mentally combine the cruddy two months of spring into the actual winter. And yes, it does get old. So I look out on our new fresh bed of snow, and all I can muster is, “Well, at least we don’t have to wipe off muddy dog paws today.”
Here’s the same photo from above, with a Prisma filter applied. Just because.
And I’ll probably get to take another just like it before long!
Yup, missed a day. And here it is, a day later, and I still don’t know what to post! So, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to sign onto my SiriusXM account, see what the first song comes up on whichever of my favorite stations loads first, and that’s what I’ll post here. Here we go!
[clicks a few times]
Huh. Well, OK, here it is! (And I solemnly swear that this really is what came up first. I did not choose this song for any particular meaning!)
I’m going to take a break for the weekend as I try to do some catch-up stuff. See y’all on Monday!
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
