A Zoom performance, by the reigning crew of Wicked.
Recent Book Notes!
Here’s some recent reading I’ve done! I don’t have pictures of the covers, unfortunately. (Several of them I forgot to snapshot before I whisked them back to the library.)
:: Maybe you didn’t know that you needed a graphic novel about the Bronte sisters, their brother, and the imaginative life they lived in their youth, but you do need that graphic novel, and thankfully for you, it exists! It’s called Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontes, by Isabel Greenberg. Apparently in their younger years, the Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) and their brother Branwell passed the time by creating a fantasy world called Glass Town, which they populated with all manner of interesting characters (no doubt providing the girls with valuable experience in character creation that would serve them well when they turned to their own literary works years later). As the siblings fight over the nature of their world, two break off and make their own world, and in Greenberg’s graphic novel–based on extensive research into the materials left behind by the Brontes themselves about this period of their lives–Charlotte Bronte becomes the focus. She seems to have the strongest relationship with the people of Glass Town, to the point where she actually speaks to them and finds herself drawn into their struggles.
Greenberg’s art is unusual; I’m not sure how to describe it. It took me some work to get used to, and even until the end I didn’t always find it easy to tell which character was which. But the narrative as a whole has some interesting things to say about stories, how we relate to them, and the difference between how adults relate to stories and how kids do. If you’ve never seen a couple of kids get in a fight over a fictional character or world, well…that can be some serious stuff. Good book.
:: I’ve read of the graphic novel series Monstress over the years, so I decided to give the book a try. It’s a highly regarded fantasy set in a steampunk Asia kind of world…and honestly, even though I read the whole first volume (collecting issues 1-6), it was long enough ago that I honestly remember very little of the story at all. I do remember the series’s incredible art–the book is worth looking at on that basis alone–but I also remember finding it very hard to care about the characters, and disliking the story’s tone. This is along the lines of SAGA and A Song of Ice and Fire: tons of violence and rape and murder and cruelty. Monstress isn’t remotely my cup of tea, but if you like your fantasy full of horrible people being awful, there it is.
:: More my speed was Elizabeth May’s The Falconer, the first book in a trilogy set in Edinburgh about a willful young lass named Aileana who has to contend with societal expectations, her father’s desire to see her wed, and the fact that she can see the magical beings who are obsessed with killing humans, so she has made it her mission to kill them first. Yup!
May (who I’ve been following for years on Twitter, she’s awesome) writes a really fun book here, with enough humor and “comedy of errors” kind of stuff, along with crackling dialogue, to offset the story’s occasionally grim tone. There are steampunk elements and cool magical doings, fairy beings whose loyalties aren’t entirely clear, and on our side of the magic-realism divide, people who want what’s best for Aileana and people who think what they want is best for Aileana and people who just want her married off so they don’t have to think about her anymore.
Aileana’s efforts to balance her “Magic hero” thing with her societal obligations put me in mind of the best Spider-Man stories, when Peter Parker was always this close to getting his high school or work or romance shit together, only to have to run off to fight Green Goblin when he was just on the cusp of getting a job or a date with Mary Jane or some such thing. May keeps that whole pot boiling nicely. I liked this book immensely and I look forward to the other two books in the trilogy. (They’re all out already; this series has been out for a few years.)
All for now! Keep reading, folks!
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Tone Poem Tuesday
French composer Emmanual Chabrier isn’t much known these days, but he is represented in the standard repertoire by his intoxicating dance Espana. That work is one of the most compulsively joyful in its bright orchestrations, sparkling melodies, and effervescent rhythms in the entire classical music canon. This piece, from one of Chabrier’s less-performed operas (and none of his operas are often staged), is cut from the same cloth as Espana, being a five-minute burst of energetic dance.
From what I’ve read, Chabrier is a curious composer in that his work has never really cracked through into the mainstream of classical music, even though his music was greatly admired by great composers who followed, like Ravel and Stravinsky. Chabrier was innovative in his own way, and he may have simply lived too early and therefore just missed a time which might have been golden for his music. Anyway, here’s a bit of pure delight: the Danse slav from the opera The Reluctant King, by Emmanuel Chabrier.
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Speaking of Albums: “Frank Sinatra Sings For Only the Lonely”
Each place I go, only the lonely go
Some little small cafe
The songs I know, only the lonely know
Each melody recalls a love that used to be.
Look, for the purposes of this post, let’s just stipulate that there’s no way I’ve heard every single Frank Sinatra album, and therefore I cannot really justify having an anointed favorite Frank Sinatra album, OK? Let’s just talk about my favorite Frank Sinatra album: Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely.
This album is a masterpiece of mood. It starts with that cover. There’s no cheerful Frank Sinatra with his crisp suit and his hat just-askew; here we see Sinatra as a sad clown, with the colored checked pattern of a Harlequin figure to the other side.
The album is a collection of torch songs, and what torches they are. This is the music of lonely ex-lovers, walking through foggy streets at night only occasionally illuminated by the light of a blinking streetlight as they pass beneath it. Maybe there’s rain, but not a soaking rain, just a constant drizzle that somehow soaks through no matter how many layers you wear.
This is the music of men whose only sartorial concession to their emotional state and the time it happens to be is a loosening of the neckties of their suitably dark suits. This is the music of cigarettes and glasses of Scotch into which too much ice has melted. This is the music of men who don’t want to go home because the person they were going home to isn’t there anymore, or because that was their home and now they don’t even have that.
Frank Sinatra’s voice was an amazing instrument, but I believe that his biggest gift was his unfailing instinct to find the emotional center point in any song. So many of the songs he recorded have an aspect of story, a sense of conveying things that actually happened, and when Sinatra was really on, you never had any other feeling than that he was the fellow to whom these things happened. So in Frank Sinatra Sings For Only the Lonely, he’s not singing words about loneliness. He is performing songs of loneliness. There’s a difference.
Sinatra and his collaborator, Nelson Riddle, who wrote the song arrangements for the album and conducted the orchestra, had both suffered personal losses as they adopted this project, but as always with Sinatra, it barely seems to matter, so completely does he always enter the content of a song.
Hey drink up, all you people!
Order anything you see.
Have fun, you happy people–
The drink and the laugh’s on me.I try to think that love’s not around
Still it’s uncomfortably near;
My old heart ain’t gaining any ground,
Because my angel eyes ain’t here.
This album doesn’t sound like it should work. It’s an entire album of a single mood, an entire album of very little variation in tempo. Sometimes Sinatra keeps his register and mood subdued, but other times he does that wonderful “Frank” thing where he lets his voice climb into his almost operatic sound. Aside from that, though, the general tone of Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely stays steady throughout: slow songs of lost or unrequited love.
I first discovered this album in the late 1990s, when I “rediscovered” Frank Sinatra. He had been a staple of my house growing up; he’s one of the first singers I remember (more on that another time), along with John Denver and Bing Crosby. But you do have to discover things for yourself, don’t you? At some point you have to listen anew to the music you already knew for years and realize, all on your own, just how good it is. That’s what happened with me and Frank Sinatra. (I try not to feel too guilty about the fact that within months of me buying my first Sinatra album of my own, he died. Ouch.)
I listened to Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely a number of times when I was driving home from my job in Jamestown, NY. My commute during the year and a half I worked that job was about an hour long. It made for long days, but the commute home gave me ample time to get the day out of my system, and I listened to a lot of good music on that commute. (This is also when I discovered that I am not the least bit good at listening to audio books, but that’s a thing for another day.) Some albums worked well any time, but there were some that really lent themselves to the night time drive, when it was just me and my headlights on rural Interstate 86 in New York’s Southern Tier. Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely was one of the best for this…especially when the album’s last song rolls around.
“One For My Baby” is really the only song that can end an album like this, isn’t it? Is there a song whose mood, whose sense of place, is more perfectly evoked by its tempo, those sad tinkling piano chords that open it, and Sinatra’s opening words? I can see the dim light reflected in the backbar mirror, the guy mopping in the corners, the bartender barely listening to this one last gin-filled drunk as he washes those last glasses and eyes the not-quite-adequate couple of bills the guy has been weighing down with his ashtray. Frank Sinatra’s gift for musical storytelling was one of the greatest ever, and he almost never put his gift to better use than this song, right here, as he closes his greatest album with the anthem of the drunken loveless whose barkeep has said, “Last call.”
It’s quarter to three.
There’s no one in the place,
‘cept you and me.
So, set ’em up, Joe;
I got a little story I think you should know.We’re drinkin, my friend,
to the end of a brief episode.
Make it one for my baby…
and one more for the road.
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Happy Birthday to the Maker!
Happy birthday to George Lucas!
It’s no accident, or exaggeration, when I say that George Lucas is the biggest influence on my storytelling. Star Wars imprinted on me at a very young age, and it is still my guiding star, even with all the other influences that I’ve blended (and, let’s be honest, pillaged and stolen from).
I’ve gone so far as to dedicate The Savior Worlds to Mr. Lucas. In terms of the stories that are in my heart, I may not owe him all of them, but I owe him a whole damn lot of them.
Thank you, Uncle George!
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Something for Thursday
I’ve made it one of my many missions in life to sing the praises of the United States Marine Band, because they’re great, but let’s not forget the other armed services! The United States Army Band is also really good. Here they are, playing the theme from The Mandalorian.
I love those recorders at the beginning! The recorder is often a first musical instrument for kids (I had one!), so it’s easy to forget that the recorder is a serious instrument capable of serious musicmaking.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
A repeat today (I think), but it’s been a while (I hope). Felix Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides is a concert overture, inspired by the composer’s journeys in Scotland and specifically his tour of the Hebrides islands and a basalt cavern called “Fingal’s Cave”, which is a place that would absolutely appeal to someone of Romantic mindset. The black basalt, the sharp columns, the waves of the sea…in Mendelssohn’s hands, all that became this wonderfully brooding and Romantic work of adventure and heart.
Here is The Hebrides by Felix Mendelssohn.
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The Strooping of the Waffles! (Or is it the Waffling of the Stroop?)
So, like many others in this COVID hellscape, the search for entertainment of a more cheerful kind, to take our minds off the dystopian virus-afflicted nightmare world in which we live, has led us to The Great British Baking Show. (Yes, I know that the BBC’s actual title for the show is The Great British Bake Off, but I live in America where Pillsbury has a trademark on the term “Bake Off” so the show has to be called something else, because heaven forbid we get in the way of somebody’s ability to make a buck while doing nothing at all, so Great British Baking Show it is for capitalism-addicted America.) I can, and might, wax poetic about the show at some point in the future, as we’ve now watched five seasons of it on Netflix, but for right now, I’m just going to talk about one item.
If you haven’t watched the show, it’s a cooking competition of the “Start with a dozen folks, make them cook stuff, judge them and eliminate one each week until you’ve got a champion” variety. It’s a lot more cheerful and kind-hearted than, say, Hell’s Kitchen, which is nice. The format each week is the same: the bakers are given three challenges, the second of which is a “technical” challenge in which they are instructed to bake something they may or may not have made before, which tests specific technical skills, and for which they are given a recipe with many key details left out. They are given the ingredients they need, and the first step might be “Make a dough with the ingredients.” That sort of thing.
One week, the technical challenge was to make Stroopwafel cookies (“biscuits” in British lingo). These are some of my favorite cookies (“biscuits” in British lingo). They’re a thin sandwich cookie (“biscuit” in British lingo), consisting of two waffles with some caramel syrup in the middle. I always figured they were made using two separate waffle cookies (“biscuits” in British lingo), but when the GBBO folks made them, it turned out that they only make one waffle for each Stroopwafel, and then they actually have to cut it laterally into two waffles, which are then used to make the sandwich! This takes some knife skills that I will admit that I do not have, and neither did some of the GBBO bakers, which is what made the Stroopwafel a good challenge.
Of course, the process for making Stroopwafels has been mechanized for scale, as it would have to be, since you can buy Stroopwafels in just about any grocery store these days. I found a video of the process, from the bakery attendant scooping dough into the machine to its final emergence as a complete cookie (“biscuit” in British lingo). I had to watch this video five or six times before I finally spotted the point at which the waffles are sliced laterally across their width. Let me know if you figure it out sooner! (Actually, don’t let me know, because then I’ll feel dumb.)
By the way, Stroopwafels go wonderfully with coffee (and, likely, tea). They make small ones, about the size of a silver dollar, but if you get the full-size ones, about four inches across, you can actually sit them atop your mug so they absorb some of the radiant heat energy from your hot beverage. The caramel gets all soft and the waffle takes on the heat and…well, that’s just a great cookie (“biscuit” in British lingo).
And also by the way, what do British people call the thing that Americans call biscuits, the salty buttery glob of wondrous flakeyness that pairs so beautifully with fried chicken? Just wondering….
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And now, a Timeless Sports Moment
Something for Thursday
It’s fun to look up live performances of anime music on YouTube, because Japan takes this stuff very seriously but also does a lot of interesting stuff with this sort of thing. If you want just standard orchestral renditions, you can find that…but if you want to hear your favorite anime theme played by an orchestra and a marching band as it marches through a stadium, you can find that, too!
Here’s a concert performance of Joe Hisaishi’s main themes from Laputa: Castle in the Sky. This one is somewhere in the middle in terms of how flashy it is. I love this music and I’d love to hear one of these concerts one day!