A couple photos today, from a morning walk I took a month ago at the Charles Burchfield Art and Nature Center in West Seneca. Yes, I said a month ago. It seems that I edit my photos with the same philosophy that I use to edit my stories and novels: I let them lie fallow without looking at them for a while before I bring them all into Lightroom and then go through them.
One of my favorite visuals in any forest is when sunlight shines through a small gap in the trees, creating a shaft of golden light that strikes the path or the forest floor. I always, always, always find this captivating, like I’m getting a glimpse into something magical.
The problem I’ve had as a photographer is capturing this. It never looks right, no matter what device I use…phone, camera, no matter what, this particular image has always eluded me.
Until now.
I think I’m starting to crack this particular puzzle of mine.
I really think I may be starting to level up at this whole photography thing.
(Speaking of “leveling up”, the title of this post is derived from a computer fantasy role-playing game.)
Continuing a short investigation into classical music inspired by the moon, we have a piece by Benjamin Britten. The Four Sea Interludes are taken from his opera Peter Grimes, which is in turn one of Britten’s most well-known works. Grimes has endured in the operatic repertoire ever since its premiere, and the Four Sea Interludes have taken their own place in the orchestral repertoire. As interludes, these four pieces are derived from the incidental music Britten wrote to bridge scenes and allow scene changes to take place behind the curtain. The composer did need to do some extra work to convert the interludes, which lead straight into their new scenes in the opera, into successful standalone works.
Though there are four “Sea Interludes”, I’m only including the third here today, because of its theme. Called “Moonlight”, it sounds soothing and meditative at first…but as one listens it becomes somehow more restless, until it ends on an unresolved chord. The pulsing underneath seems like the insistent lapping of waves against the shore, with drops of silvery moonlight breaking through the clouds.
I’m enjoying a quiet Labor Day, which happens to be September First. We made it, folks! We’ve made it to the -Ber Months! This is the best time of year. And now it’s time for me to start making dinner. I’m grilling burgers.
Here’s Mr. Diamond.
Posted inOn Music|TaggedSongs|Comments Off on Something for Monday
:: To be fair, I didn’t even read this article. It’s by a woman who moved to Pittsburgh for a job, kinda liked the place, but quickly lost her job, didn’t like the place as much then, and moved to Los Angeles. All that’s, well, fine, whatever. No big deal. But what caught me on this one was the article’s insistence that Pittsburgh is in the Midwest.
Uh…no. Nope. Ixnay.
Now, admittedly, Pittsburgh is a kind of outlier, region-wise. It’s far enough west that calling it part of the Northeast doesn’t seem right. It’s not close enough to Lake Erie to be considered a Great Lakes city. Its best regional claim is probably the unfortunately-named “Rust Belt”, meaning, that group of industrial cities not in the Northeast but kinda-sorta around the Great Lakes, which fell on hard times starting in the 1970s when American manufacturing began its serious decline. Pittsburgh may be “Midwest-adjacent”, but it’s not “Midwest”. Harumph!
:: While on the Business Insider site looking at that Pittsburgh article, I saw another article about my least-favorite sartorial item of all: the golf polo. I don’t know what it is about them, but I despise polos in general, and the golfing variety in particular. There’s just something about polos that never looks right. For me, polos always scream out a weird half-stop between formality and casual, and they always end up looking frumpy. I’ve never yet seen a man who really makes a polo shirt look good. What especially annoys me is when I see hetero-couples oot-and-aboot and the woman is well put-together with a nice-looking, well-thought outfit, and the guy’s in crappy khakis and a polo. Ugh! (I’m on record as hating neckties, but that’s a functional dislike: I hate wearing neckties. I don’t question that they look good, though.)
:: Speaking sartorially still, a few years ago when I was starting to seriously add button-up shirts to my wardrobe, I noticed something curious that I never really thought enough about to dig into: on some of the shirts I acquired, the bottom-most button-hole is horizontal rather than vertical. I made a number of mental notes to look this up, but the problem with my mental notebook is that I don’t consult it as much as I should. But I finally did, and learned some stuff! Basically the idea is that particular button is most likely to shift and come undone, so making it horizontal helps prevent that. Amusingly, for me this turns out to be a non-issue since I wear overalls all the time anyway.
:: I saw some link somewhere this morning about one of our Techbro Overlords really wants to start using AI to help “prevent crime”. Sure, right. Meanwhile, in AI land….
:: If you have ever wondered what you might look like at the moment of impact while receiving a pie in the face, but you didn’t want to actually receive a pie in the face, apparently an interactive sculpture exists that will let you see exactly that! I am of mixed mind on this. Fun and whimsical? Absolutely! But if you’re gonna do a thing….
:: It’s interesting to note the way the social media algorithms serve up random stuff based on your “interests”. For photography, this manifests as links to articles on nearly every photographic subject, some of which are useful and some of which…aren’t. One stalwart is camera reviews. I get served up a lot of camera reviews. I’m not currently in the market for a new camera, and when I do get there I’m pretty sure what my front-runner is, but the algorithms keep showing me reviews of cameras I am almost certainly never going to buy. But keep trying, y’all! Meanwhile, this week I got served up an older review of…the very camera I’m using now! I’m glad to learn anew that when I bought Miranda two years ago, I got a nice camera indeed.
:: I saw a post on Reddit recently, on a board called “What is this?”, where you post a picture of something that you don’t recognize and ask, basically, “What is this?” The picture was of a large concrete enclosure, apparently on the grounds of the airport in Glasgow, with several enormous yellow helix-shaped objects inside. Now, as soon as I saw the picture I knew they were water-screws (one of the oldest mechanical methods of moving water up an incline in human history), but I didn’t know why there is a set of giant water-screws at the Glasgow airport. Now I can wonder no more! This is fascinating stuff. I love infrastructure. (The short version is that Glasgow’s airport actually has a stream running through it, so the water-screws are there as part of the airport’s flood mitigation mechanism.)
:: Finally (for today…I have a number of other tabs still open to essays that I still need to read before I link them), I thought it would be funny to open a post about clearing out tabs with a picture of a can of Tab, the diet cola from the 70s that my parents insisted on keeping around even though it mainly tasted of Coke where they forgot to put the sweetener in it and also submerged a penny, so it was maximally metallic and unpleasant tasting. I know, some people think Tab was the best thing evah, but I hated it and I have naught but bad memories of it. It was one of the weird instances in my child life where I’d ask for a thing I loved (a bottle of pop) and they’d hand me a version of it that I hated (a bottle of Tab). At the time this included things like mushrooms and tomato slices on pizza. (Mushrooms I’m on board with, but I’m still not a fan of tomato slices on pizza, and I love tomatoes.)
Anyway, I was looking for the photo of a can of Tab that now graces the top of this post (via!), and I came across this stunning image:
Until just this morning I never thought Tab was anything other than a diet cola. Now I see there was an entire line-up of Tab flavors? Orange Tab? Tab Root Beer? Tab Ginger Ale? The mind reels! Here’s the source for that image. I’m fine leaving Tab to history, but I’m amazed that it was this much of a thing.
This was our son’s theme song. It’s also a song that seems to have dropped off the musical consciousness over the last bunch of years. You just never hear this one anymore. Well, I’m doing my part. Here it is!
If the picture above doesn’t make our new post-series theme clear, we’re talking about Moon Music! Or, classical music inspired by the moon. Why did I land on this particular theme? Well…why not! I did a search for some pieces in this vein, and there’s some really nifty stuff out there, much of which I haven’t heard. So I’m kind of excited by this.
We’re going to start out with an aria by Antonin Dvorak. This, the “Song to the Moon”, is from his opera Rusalka, about a water spirit who falls in love with a mortal man. Obviously this love-match is not destined for an easy time of it. In Act I, Rusalka (our titular spirit) sees the Moon above and sings this aria to it, pleading the Moon to give the mortal man dreams of her. The music is sad and sensuous and deeply lyrical…and now I want to track down the entire opera and hear it. Dvorak’s operas have tended to languish in obscurity, mainly because their librettos are in the composer’s native Czech language, which most singers do not study.
Here is the “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka, act I, by Antonin Dvorak.
We have a mulch bed with a bush in it right outside our front door, and in recent years, milkweed has taken up residence there. Many folks would rip out the milkweed, but not us! We know it’s a haven for pollinators and for Monarch butterfly caterpillars. (See two years ago!) We didn’t see any caterpillars last year, but lo! we had one this year.
He was there for a few days, and then we lost track of him. We assume he found a nice place to make a chrysalis, and has by now completed his metamorphosis into a Monarch butterfly. We hope.
(I very well may be misgendering this caterpillar, right? Hmmmm.)
In addition to that caterpillar, the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens has this summer dedicated one of its rooms to butterflies. We visited this exhibit twice, and here are a few of the denizens there:
I really like that last shot. It’s not the sharpest image I’ve ever taken, but I like that it captures the gossamer threads of the spiderweb beyond the butterfly.
Finally, one of my favorite subjects in the region is this Buddha statue in the Botanical Gardens’s tropical display room. I take pictures of this Buddha every time I’m there (well, both Buddhas, there are two, but this one is the larger). Granted, it’s getting harder to get creative with shooting the same thing every time we visit, but…still, I do it. Here the Buddha isn’t even the focus of the image. I like the way this one turned out.
