As part of my ongoing* efforts to extend myself into video content, here are some thoughts I shared on Tiktok earlier today regarding Taylor Swift. These thoughts are more a matter of concern, not any kind of “red flag” thing I’m seeing, and I’m not criticizing her music here at all (though I have to admit, I did not like the newest album very much). Enjoy!
* By “Ongoing”, I mean…I keep thinking that I want to do more video content, and while I guess I have been doing more video content (I’m getting downright consistent on Tiktok!), I still need to get better about doing YouTube, longer-form content.
Water Abstract Taken at Canalside, Buffalo, NY Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii) f/5.0, 1/4000sec, ISO 500
This theme ought to yield some good things! That’s right: after completing an exploration of music inspired by the moon, we’re going to explore music inspired by water, in all its forms. And we’re going to start with a work premiered over 300 years ago, the usefully-titled Water Music by George Frideric Handel.
And maybe this isn’t the best place to start, because the work wasn’t actually inspired by water. Handel wrote it for the water…or rather, the boats upon it. Let me explain…no, is too much. Let me sum up.
In 1717, King George I decided to take a barge up the Thames in London, using the tide to propel the barge upstream before coming about for the return trip. The King wanted music, though, so he commissioned Handel to write some; this was performed on another barge that accompanied the Royal Barge on its journey. Some fifty musicians played Handel’s music on that other barge, and apparently many Londoners took to the water in boats and barges of their own to hear the music and pay homage to the King. This must have been quite a spectacle, and honestly, were I given the keys to Doc Brown’s DeLorean and told I could go back in time to witness one concert, the initial performance of Handel’s Water Music might well be the choice.
And the concert was very much a success: the King liked the piece so much he had it performed again on the return trip back down the Thames.
I’m not the best listener when it comes to Baroque music, but Handel and Bach are always exceptions. The Water Music is one of the most pleasant works I know: in its short movements over three suites, Handel deftly creates music of opulent delight and meditation in simple pleasure. As you listen to it, you may notice familiar themes throughout; the Water Music has provided a great deal of familiar music used for other things beyond some King’s barge journey. One movement was the theme music to The Frugal Gourmet, for instance.
Here is a wonderful original-instruments performance of Handel’s Water Music.
LEO: (Leo is the stoner who owns the local Foto Hut) I saw a UFO once, man. It was awesome! It just hung in the air, then it sent me a message. In big, bright, yellow letters. Said I was going to have a good year.
STEVEN HYDE: (Steven is one of the main teenagers on the show) Did this, by any chance, happen at a football game?
LEO: Yeah, man! And the weird thing is, I was the only one freaking out about it, man! Wait a second… Good year? No, it was a terrible year, man! Stupid aliens.
Why do I bring this up? Because that same UFO was visible from outside my house as it hovered above Highmark Stadium during the Bills-Chiefs game. That’s a good idea, if you’re flying a UFO; you can study humans from right above the stadium where an NFL game is happening because nobody there is looking up at your alien craft. Except for the photographer-writer who lives one neighborhood away. I’m onto you, aliens!
Way back in Season Three of MasterChef, there was a competing cook who quickly became one of my favorite people ever on any food-related show. Her name is Mairym Carlo, but she goes by “Monti”, to which Joe Bastianich reacted with quite a bit of skepticism when she introduced herself to him on the show. He quickly came around on her, though, and she lasted deep into the competition. She didn’t win (honestly, nobody was going to beat Christine Ha that year, Christine was the ’91 Redskins of MasterChef contestants), but she lasted and since then she has gone on to quite a lovely career as a food blogger, podcaster, occasional judge on other food competitions, and so on. (She appeared on an episode of Cutthroat Kitchen where she told one cook that their dish “tasted like divorce”. Ouch! That must have been a terrible dish.)
More recently, Carlo has made a nice career for herself as a food influencer, particularly on Instagram, where she posts videos of her visiting restaurants that feature a specific thing they’re really good at, and also where she shares a ton of information about product recalls in the food world. This last service seems especially important right now, seeing as how we have a government that I’m not sure, ahem, has our best interests at heart.
Yesterday, Carlo shared a slideshow on Instagram in which she describes a lot of what’s happened in her life over the last quarter-century, starting with this:
“Twenty-six years ago today, I was run over by a dump truck.”
That is not a metaphor. From that horrible moment that could have ended her life, she emerged laser-focused and has done all the things I mention above, and more…and all of that leads up to her announcement that she has a book coming out next year, called Spanglish: Recipes and Stories. I, for one, will be buying that book on sight. Watching Monti Carlo forge a career and identity for herself out of passion, warmth, and unending energy has been truly inspiring, and I can’t wait to see what she has in store next.
And oh, imagine my delight earlier this year in seeing that she is also apparently a member of Team Poofy Shirts And Overalls!
And as long as I’m celebrating Monti Carlo, let me repost something I put together way back in 2012 when her run on MasterChef came to too soon a finish. (I still don’t understand why Josh didn’t get sent home on that dish, when he actually won a basket of the exact ingredients in the dish the cooks were supposed to replicate and he didn’t get it done.) I have to admit that I miss the early years of MasterChef, when the personalities seemed bigger. There are cooks I remember from those seasons even though they were a decade ago, and yet I have to really try hard to remember anybody from the season that just finished. Anyway, the balance of this post is a time capsule of sorts…let’s go back to August 2012….
[Insert weird time travel music and wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey sound effects and shimmering here]
Well, I will find whatever episodes of Master Chef remain a lot less interesting, because my favorite contestant, Monti Carlo (yes, that is her real name), has been eliminated. Her departure was pretty upsetting: it was the first time in the whole season she ever found herself in the Bottom Two, and the other one there, Josh, had managed to completely screw up the assigned dish despite having won the earlier challenge and thus having literally been handed a box of the exact ingredients for the dish they were supposed to replicate.
Oh well. I thought Monti was just terrific. She was smart, skilled, and funny. She clearly didn’t know as much about food as some of the other contestants, but she made up for it with an adventurous spirit and a self-confidence that grew as the season went on. I loved the episode where she was given a John Dory fish to filet and cook, and she’d never even heard of that fish before, much less cooked one. The judges noted how long it was taking her to start fileting it, but when she did, she took the knife right to it and muttered, “I’m gonna figure you out.” I loved that.
I don’t think she was destined to win, really; I expect the finale to boil down to Frank (the Italian stockbroker with mad kitchen skills) and Christine (the blind woman with mad kitchen skills). Becky is annoying with her oddly inflated sense of self-worth, and so is Josh, with his pouting whenever he doesn’t get what he wants. I don’t think Monti was going to win, but I think she should have come closer than this. And if Graham (the fat judge) was going to offer the last guy to get eliminated a job in one of his restaurants, why no offer to Monti? Why didn’t Gordon Ramsay offer her the money for a down payment on the food truck that she wants to run?
Oh well.
I also loved Monti because she had fantastic facial expressions. She mugged for the camera wonderfully, so I took some screengrabs and captioned them…as if Monti was the heroine in some kind of cheesy Asian martial arts/fantasy flick. At least, that’s the notion.
[Wow, I used to generate some really weird content, didn’t I??? –Present Day Me]
It’s Monti Carlo’s world, and we’re all living in it, is all I’m saying.
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Ohio Street rail yard, Buffalo, NY f[9.0, 1/160sec, ISO100
A few weeks ago I went down to the foot of Ohio Street in Buffalo, near its southern terminus at Fuhrmann Boulevard, near the Outer Harbor. My main purpose was to do some shooting of the amazing graffiti that adorns the Ohio Street overpass (I’ll feature that work in a future post, though I’ve already posted the images to Flickr), but as I was there some railroad activity. The overpass carries Ohio Street over the rail lines that service the cargo areas near the big grain silos downtown, a remnant of what once was in terms of freight transport in this region. They were moving lines of cars from one line to another, connecting and reconnecting the locomotive as needed. It was a fascinating process to watch, and in the photo above, that locomotive is actually pushing that line of cars down the track, not pulling them as it arrives.
Still, trains and locomotives are absolutely fantastic subjects, and if there’s one nearby and I have a photographic device on my person, I will get a shot of it!
(And the title of this post comes from here, which is the single greatest cover of an already great song in the history of popular music, a position against which I will listen to no argument.)
I’ve added a bit of extra functionality to encourage subscribing to this site, so if you subscribe you get every new post sent to your email. And yes, you should do this because I make good content and who wouldn’t want good content in their email? I mean, sure, somebody out there doesn’t want good content in their email, but that person probably likes turkey roasted until it’s bone dry and watching old Lawrence Welk shows with the sound turned off. I mean, come on, it’s a no brainer. Subscribe!
(By the way, I am also gearing up to relaunch my actual news letter, which runs independent of this site. More to come on that. I don’t recommend subscribing to it now because I’m almost certainly going to be migrating away from Substack, but I haven’t selected a new platform yet, and I want to have several “issues” ready to go before I actually pull the trigger, so to speak. I’ve spent a lot of 2025 experimenting with various forms of content creation, and I want to hit the ground running in 2026 in terms actually generating said content. Stay tuned!)
