Sorry about the radio silence of late, folks, but I’ll be honest: Current Events are consuming more of my brain cycles than I want to admit, and while I could fill this space with my thoughts as to how the Election For All Time is going…I just don’t want to write about that. But I also can’t find a lot of mental energy right now to write about anything else.
So, you get pictures. I took these of the morning sky. The first is of Orion the Hunter, partly shrouded by clouds; this was taken on a morning when I was up at 6am to walk Hobbes. The other two I took when I got to work! That’s the view from behind The Store, just before sunrise and only a few minutes before my shift started. That sliver of moon captivated me. I love the sky, and the morning sky is just as wondrous, many times, as the night one.
Expect light posting, if any posting happens at all, for the next day, two, or three…basically until we know if Americans have risen up against fascism once again.
Orion the Hunter, shrouded by clouds. Taken with Ophelia (Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra)
Moon’s final phase, just before sunrise. Taken with Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii)
I actually love the sky as it appears at dawn behind where I work…the sky itself, of course, but also the blend of the natural and the industrial in the trees and the powerlines. And that moon! I could not have captured this shot a year ago. Taken with Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii).
This week’s selection is stretching the definition of “tone poem” probably past the breaking point, as this piece is not orchestral at all; it was originally written for harpsichord but we’re going to hear it on piano. It’s by Jean-Philippe Rameau, a French Baroque composer and musical writer who lived contemporaneously with J.S. Bach. And with that, you now know as much about Rameau as I do.
I heard this piece on the Open Ears Project podcast (which I highly recommend!). The Open Ears Project is kind of like my “Something for Thursday” series, only it’s a different notable person each week describing a particularly meaningful musical work. In this particular episode, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson discusses his experiences with Rameau in general and with this piece in particular. I really do recommend listening to the podcast for his thoughts. For this post, right here, suffice it to say that the piece is very fast, and very quick; it’s over in about two minutes and it really does seem to capture the energy, if not the exact sound, of a bunch of birds squabbling. There’s even a moment when the music stops, completely stops, for a second, as if the birds have just happened to all stop squawking and chirping at the exact same moment.
This is a tone poem, even if it comes nowhere near an orchestra. Here is Le Rappel des Oiseaux by Jean-Philippe Rameau.
Maybe I’ve mentioned this before, but my father once referred to one of the elections when I was a kid as “a referendum on the American people”. I don’t think that’s ever been more true, because if this is who we are….
Posted inCommentary|Comments Off on I don’t know, folks. I just don’t know sometimes.
So I have a big pot of soup on: the first cauldron of Buffalo Chicken Soup of the 2024-2025 Soup Season! Now, I tend to limit my soup consumption to the colder months, so for me, Soup Season usually starts in October and winds up, oh, March or April, depending on how grim that particular spring happens to be. This annoys my family members, who believe that there’s no such thing as Soup Season and who would cheerfully eat delicious soup even when it’s 85 out in July. What do you all think? Is all year Soup Season?
(Oh, and I made a couple of small alterations to my recipe this time around, and if I like the way it turns out, I may update my Official Buffalo Chicken Soup recipe on this site! Exciting! Stay tuned!
Moving on, we have this week’s Sunday Stealing quiz. The numbering is again wonky, so we’re not numbering these. And these questions lend themselves to short, pithy answers, which is always fun!
What’s your guilty pleasure?
I don’t really believe in “guilty pleasures”. If I like something, I like it. There’s more than enough opportunity for guilt in this world.
Which meal is your favorite: breakfast, lunch, or dinner?
Yes.
I mean, I like them all…and it’s also fun to have meals at each that is traditionally served at another meal! Waffles for dinner! Pizza for breakfast! Burgers for lunch–oh wait–
What do you do when you want to chill out after a long day?
Change into comfy clothes (almost always involving overalls), read a bit, watch something on the teevee later on. Maybe an adult beverage, but lately, we only indulge those if we don’t have to work the next day. This is probably best in terms of health and expense.
How would you spend your ideal weekend?
That depends! Maybe road-tripping, or relaxing at home, or going somewhere local and doing photography. Always a bit of time reading and writing, too.
Do you listen to podcasts, or mostly just music? What’s your favorite podcast?
I do listen to podcasts, though not many; I listen to music more than that. Some podcasts I like are: James Bonding (guess what that one’s about!), Functional Nerds (interviews with geeky writers), Noble Blood (somewhat gory tales from history), and The Open Ears Project (in which notable people discuss a particularly meaningful piece of music).
Do you prefer to go to the movies or watch movies at home?
Ooof, this can get contentious on social media. I love going to the movies and yes, the actual act of movie viewing is better in a theater than at home…but everything else about going to the movies has become sufficiently a hassle that we just stay at home. The expense and the time costs just aren’t worth it anymore, except in very special circumstances.
What was your favorite TV show growing up?
It probably depends on when “growing up” can be said to have happened…but through it all, there was Star Trek, so…Star Trek.
What’s your favorite TV show now?
The Repair Shop (which is going through a bit of thing because its host got into legal trouble). For non-“reality” shows, I’m thrilled that Ghosts has returned. It’s interesting to me that I have now had two beloved shows whose premise was “Couple ends up running an inn in a rural location where they have to contend with a very quirky population, and by the way, she really looks great in sweaters.” (The first was Newhart.)
How would you spend your birthday if money was no object?
A week somewhere in the Finger Lakes, including the Ithaca Apple Festival, and I’d take a thousand photos.
What’s your favorite season? What do you love most about it?
Fall. I love the relief of breaking temperatures, I love the color, I love the food. All of it.
Do you prefer camping or going to the beach?
I haven’t been camping since I was a kid and I’m not sure I really have a hankering to do it again at all (though I’m intrigued by “glamping”), so…the beach. Especially if it’s Waikiki.
Which phone app do you think you use the most?
Chrome or Gmail. Or my phone’s camera app. Also Snapseed and Lightroom.
Would you instead cook, order delivery, or go out to eat?
Cook first, go out second. We never order delivery.
How do you drink your coffee?
From a mug. (OK, fine: mostly with cream. Sometimes black. Never sugar.)
If you could have any animal as a pet, what would you choose?
The other day I featured an instrumental medley of tunes from the Lerner-and-Loewe Broadway show Camelot, and since then I’ve had the music of Camelot on my brain, so I’ve been listening to the songs quite a bit–both from the movie soundtrack and from the Original Broadway Cast recording. As I noted, the songs are much better than the book (in Broadway lingo, “book” is basically the “screenplay”: all the spoken-word stuff that takes place around the songs and creates the dramatic settings for the songs). Some of these songs lodged in my brain as soon as I heard them way back when I first watched the film of Camelot, but a few others had to wait to work their magic. This is one of those.
If you’re familiar with the Arthurian legend, basically King Arthur forms a glorious realm centered on his castle of Camelot, from where he and his Knights of the Round Table keep the peace. But a truly great knight named Lancelot comes along, and Lancelot and Arthur become best friends immediately, forming what we might now call a “bromance”. All should be well, only…Lancelot falls in love with Arthur’s wife, Queen Guinevere, and she with him. They try to keep from acting on it, but that turns to secret attraction which in turn becomes secret trysts and eventually they can’t hold back anymore, and the exposure of their affair becomes the event that drives a wedge into Camelot and destroys Arthur’s realm forever. (Depending on which version you read, there might be a Quest for the Holy Grail in there, and some stuff about Arthur having children slain, Herod-like, to avoid a prophecy, and evil sorceresses and…it can get complicated.)
In the show, there finally comes a deeply sad song as Guinevere sings to Lancelot about the love that should never have been allowed to flower. It is called “I Loved You Once In Silence”, and it is honestly a heartbreaker of a song. Secret and forbidden love can be ruinous…but that doesn’t mean that revealing the secret and forbidden love can be any the less ruinous, as this song demonstrates.
I’ve posted both the Original Broadway Cast album version of the song and the film version here. It may seem an unfair comparison at first: Broadway had Julie Andrews, after all, and it’s perhaps axiomatic that nobody can sing something better than Julie Andrews. Vanessa Redgrave is cast as Guinevere in the film, and she makes a game effort but nobody is going to confuse her with Julie Andrews, whose voice in her singing days was golden perfection.
But I’m not going to sell Redgrave’s work short. No, she’s not anywhere near the singer Andrews is…but I think she does capture more of Guinevere’s anguish and pain in this song. She genuinely sounds like someone trapped in a horrible emotional situation that offered nothing but suffering at each turn. Andrew’s performance, while gorgeous, sounds to me like a performance. (Now, that’s not to say she performed it like this on stage. Original Cast albums are hardly good vehicles by which to approximate the affect of an actual production.) I conclude that these are both excellent versions of a heartbreaking song, but in very different ways.
That’s a mocking phrase that car folks who prefer Chevy tend to invoke when discussing Ford vehicles, implying that “Ford” is actually an acronym whose letters stand for that phrase.
Or, “Fix Or Repair Daily”.
Or my favorite, “F*cked Over Rebuilt Dodge”.
These kinds of things are amusing to a point. There’s one someone cooked up for “Pontiac” where the N stands for a word that’s only referred to nowadays in polite company by the fact that N can stand for it. I wouldn’t use that one, personally.
Now, I have no animus toward Ford vehicles; I actually liked the Taurus back in the day (remember how oval that thing was? And how the interior seemed to be nothing but ovals, ovals everywhere?), and The Wife currently drives a Ford Escape which has been totally fine and is now our main vehicle for any excursion where the Resident Greyhound is joining us. (Which, given The Wife’s insistence on taking Hobbes with us to the farmer’s market lately, has saved me some weekly gas!) My father was a dedicated Chevy guy and often made fun of Fords, but I honestly have no idea if there was anything factual supporting his anti-Ford sentiments back in the day.
I will say this: Ford pickup trucks of a certain vintage are really quite lovely, and let me present as evidence this example that I saw in the parking lot of Knox Farm State Park a while back. This is a truck that has done some work and has seen some stuff. That’s the kind of truck that has been down maybe not a thousand dusty roads, but quite a few. You know those romance movies where a pretty woman from the city ups and moves to a little town in the mountains and finds love? The local Wise Aged Person who is always dispensing True Wisdom is almost certainly driving around in a truck like this.
I suppose it’s something of a cliche: the composer who aspires to serious work and yet finds their greatest success in crafting music for the popular world. Such was the fate of Robert Russell Bennett, whose name will be well known to anyone well-schooled in the history of twentieth century American musical theater. Bennett worked for many long years as an arranger and orchestrator for the most famous Broadway composers: George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Frederick Loewe, among others. Bennett adapted the melodies written by Rodgers for the acclaimed television documentary series Victory at Sea, with Rodgers later admitting that Bennett “made his music sound better than it was”.
If you’ve ever attended a “Pops” concert where your local orchestra played a medley of selections from one or more of the great Broadway musicals of the mid-1900s, you’ll have heard Robert Russell Bennett’s work, whether you knew it or not. He was deeply skilled at this job, crafting wonderfully dramatic and musically consistent suites from melodies that weren’t his. This particular suite is one that I played in college, and in truth, it was my first real introduction to the music of Frederick Loewe. So much did I love these melodies that I later explored the musicals themselves, and found myself entranced with the particular magic that unfolded when Loewe’s tunes were wed to lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. We played this piece in the Symphony at the same time that I was becoming mildly obsessed with Arthurian literature, so of course later that year I watched the film version of this particular musical. Camelot is…well, it’s a stretch to call it any kind of a classic, in all honesty. It feels oddly bloated and somehow kind of lifeless on the screen, no matter how gamely Richard Harris throws himself into his work. It’s an odd duck of a film, and I’m told that the stage show was pretty hit-or-miss as well.
But oh, those songs. Those amazing, wonderful songs…and this wonderful suite. Here is the Suite from Camelot, original music by Frederick Loewe, and arranged by Robert Russell Bennett.
I don’t know, folks. I just don’t know sometimes.
Maybe I’ve mentioned this before, but my father once referred to one of the elections when I was a kid as “a referendum on the American people”. I don’t think that’s ever been more true, because if this is who we are….