Last night, the amazing Aurora Borealis:
This morning, Orion in all his glory:
I took both of these Ophelia (my phone), by the way! As much as I love Miranda, the Lumix FZ1000ii, phone cameras are amazing these days…and in truth, I haven’t really done much at all with Miranda in night and low-light settings. Hopefully this winter!
Born on this date in 1813: Giuseppe Verdi, one of the greatest of all composers and a titan of the operatic stage. Many composers lived short lives in ill health and little acclaim, but not so Verdi: he lived to be 87 and was such a beloved figure in Italy that when he died, over 300,000 people attended his funeral.
I’m sad to admit that I don’t know Verdi’s operas very well at all, but this particular excerpt is a favorite of mine. Here is the “Triumphal March” from Aida.
On mornings when The Wife has to work at the downtown Buffalo site (currently twice a week), it falls to me to take Hobbes out for his morning constitutional, so as to save her some time. Yesterday morning I took him out, looked up at the autumn sky, and saw…this.
So I made Hobbes stop in his tracks (frustrating for a dog on his morning walk, I know!) while I pulled out my phone to do a little astro-and-cloud-photography. (Is cloud-photography called “cumulophotography”? Seems to me it should be….)
I am always happy to see Orion the Hunter high in the sky again. It means the winter stars are returning, and I am here for it.
Good to see you again, Orion! May your hunt be fruitful!
Charles Tomlinson Griffes was an American composer whose life forms one of the better What ifs of music history. He was one of those composers who, being born in the late 19th century (1884, to be specific), learned and came of age while American music was still struggling to move beyond its European influences. American classical music would not really start to come into its own until European Romanticism was firmly on the wane, and American factors like jazz would arise. Griffes was enormously talented and his own influences seem to have been the kind of mystical impressionism found in the work of composers like Scriabin, as well as the sound world of the French impressionists like Debussy and Ravel. Sadly, Griffes was struck down at the young age of 35 when the Spanish flu pandemic swept the world. The music of his that survives is often fascinating and suggestive of what might have come to be had he lived to the fullness of his gifts.
The current work, The Kairn of Koridwen, is a chamber work intended for an unusual ensemble: one flute, two clarinets, two horns, piano, harp, and celeste. Since Kairn was composed as a “dance-drama”–I assume that means a ballet–it’s surprising how long the work is, but listening to it, it never feels overlong. Griffes gets a lot of color and almost mysticism out of his material and his scoring for that small ensemble. The work is downright dramatic at times, and never less than fascinating. Here is The Kairn of Koridwen by Charles Tomlinson Griffes.
This morning it fell to me to get up and take Hobbes out for his morning relief walk, which this time of year happens before sunrise. On the way back, I saw a jet contrail in the sky, and this one was neat because it wasn’t just a normal grayish-white contrail, but rather it was lit up goldren-red by the sun that was still beneath the horizon. I always like seeing the shiny contrails of early-morning flights, and sometimes the planes themselves are also catching the morning sun as they jet across the sky, carrying their passengers to adventures galore, some happy and some sad and some probably boring.
Ten minutes later, as Hobbes and I were getting home, I looked up again. That first contrail was much longer and was starting to spread out as they always do…but then I noticed not one but two other contrails, left by planes that were flying almost the exact same path. I had never seen that before. I briefly thought to run inside and check a flight-tracker site to see if I could figure out which planes these were and where they were going on their route that took all three right over our house, but I got wrapped up in dishing up Hobbes’s breakfast and making the coffee and whatnot, so by the time I remembered I had no chance of figuring it out. Oh well. Sometimes mysteries are better left unsolved!
Bon voyage, folks!
The Buffalo AKG Museum right now has an exhibit dedicated to “Op Art”. The museum describes the exhibit thusly:
In the 1960s, electronic media began reformatting the nature of images and how we see. Unlike static paintings or sculptures, video and digital images are dynamic and interactive, made of abstract patterns of information that are manipulated, stored, and shared as electronic signals or numerical bits of data.
At the very same moment, an emerging movement called “Op” (short for “Optical”) took art and popular culture by storm. Op artists use abstract patterns to create optical illusions that are dynamic and interactive, much like the electronic images of the time. Could it be more than coincidental that the curves of Op art resemble electronic video signals, or that its grids suggest pixilated digital pictures? In fact, Op art emerged at the same time as video and digital art, and many Op artists would turn to using these technologies, just as many pioneering video and digital artists turned to Op art for inspiration.
I walked through this exhibit the other day, and it was absolutely fascinating, not just for the art itself, but because it is in many ways representative of the popular art that was culturally prominent when I was a kid. A lot of this stuff was like a time capsule. I already plan to return to that exhibit again. (I took a bunch of photos, but I haven’t edited any of them yet.)
One item was a film by John Whitney Sr. called Matrix III. This was projected on a large screen that was overhanging one of the exhibit rooms. It’s an abstract animation of geometic figures moving around a confined area. Whitney is viewed as one of the pioneers of computer animation, and I have to admit a certain nostalgic feeling for the days of early computer animation, when realism wasn’t even a goal and the whole mechanistic nature of the art was what made it art in the first place.
If you’re local, I strongly recommend this exhibit! It runs until January 27.
Yup, here we go again. Time to get some tabs closed.
:: This is an older article, so I don’t know if the phenomenon described here has continued, but…as you know, our dear dog Carla is considered a “pittie”, though breed-wise she’s not an American Pit Bull Terrier but rather an American Staffordshire Terrier (plus some other stuff in there…we had her genetics done some years ago, mainly out of curiosity). There are a number of outlets on Facebook for pittie appreciation, as you might expect…but many of these also draw attacks from trolls who insist that the entire pittie “breed” is deeply dangerous. It’s very annoying…but one night when I was looking for some actual research I turned this up. Ontario banned pitties years ago, and the effect in Toronto was that the pittie population dropped to almost nothing.
And yet, dog bites went up.
Hmmmmm.
:: An AI-developer convention called “Dreamforce” booked comedian John Mulaney to perform at its closing ceremonies. It did not go well for them.
“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future,’” Mulaney said.
“If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die,” he said, looking out to the crowd from center stage. “So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”
Ouch!
:: Some swimmer tied for fifth at a swim meet, which is something that happens all the time, right? And given that, you’d expect that swimmer to never become anyone of note in any capacity that relates to swimming. Ahhhh, but wait! The swimmer tied for fifth with a transgender athlete, and therein a young woman named Riley Gaines saw an opening for her real career goal: to become the next big name in the Ann Coulter-Tomi Lahren “blonde MAGA doll” pipeline. Right-wing heroes even have nauseating origin stories.
:: How shitty is Jill Stein? This shitty. The woman is completely useless, and if you’re thinking of voting for her “just to keep the Green Party relevant” or some such crap, you’re falling for a bill of goods. Just ask yourself: What has Jill Stein done, ever, to help the Green Party, other than emerging from her coffin every four years?
:: How shitty is the guy who came up with Project 2025? Even shittier than Jill Stein. No, I’m not typing the words out. I’m just going to note that so many of these people are human filth.
OK, after a couple of angry links, time for some positivity again. This article takes a sympathetic look at one of the most notable film antagonists of the 1980s, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) of Fatal Attraction.
As she is framed by Lyne [Adrian Lyne, the film’s director] and as she is seen by Dan [the Michael Douglas character], Alex is the film’s villain. She functions in the film as a femme fatale—with her audacious autonomy, self-assuredness, and heavily-kohled eyes, Alex is the dictionary definition of the archetype—a function that gives her a sinister sheen. She is a dangerous specter that haunts, a hangover that refuses to take a hint. As a product of the ’80s—an era with strict, almost post-WWII-like gender roles delineated by the Reagan administration as a backlash to feminism’s gains, and re-articulated by Hollywood, which was incentivized, Faludi notes, to leave the status quo unchallenged because it received much of its financial backing from the rich, who Reagan favored with his policies—Alex, a single woman with her own income and a clear understanding of her desires, is cast as a threat to the married man’s way of being, to patriarchal ideals, and therefore needs to be punished. Lyne held the Reaganite understanding of gender: he thought single women in the publishing world were “sad” and “lacked a soul,” while his own wife, a woman who “has never worked,” quotes Faludi, has no ambition nor an interest in a career, simply lives with him, and so is “a terrific wife. […] I come home and she’s there.” Just like Dan’s wife Beth. Accordingly, by its end, the film brutally snuffs Alex out.
But as she is portrayed by Close, Alex is also the film’s victim. Just as Lyne didn’t hear about how women, for the most part, remained silent during screenings, many don’t hear Alex’s words throughout the film. Time and again, she articulates exactly what it is she wants; time and again, she asserts her humanity, but it is ignored by Dan, silenced by the film itself. When considered with the respect that she demands, it’s fairly easy to see that Alex is not so evil, her desires and wants are not so terrible. She is not a calculating and machinating monster existing solely to ruin a man’s life. She is a woman who is aching and vulnerable and scared, quick to fall in love, but most importantly, she is a woman who refuses to be used by a man, used and discarded as though she were an object.
:: Contact: Looking Outward from our Pale Blue Dot
A lovely article looking back at Contact, the film of Carl Sagan’s novel. I admire the film a great deal, though certain aspects of it always hold me back a little (I’ve written about this before), but it is a thoughtful science fiction film that poses interesting questions and considers real issues.
Carl Sagan died before the film was finished. He worked on it right up until his death, but he never got to see it. So he never had the chance to say what he thought about it, nor about how the movie’s ending differs from the book’s—the bit about the 18 hours of recorded static is an addition that implies less ambiguity about Arroway’s experience. I think that addition was the right choice for the movie, as it provides us with a satisfying little ah! moment, the sort of conclusion that implies forward momentum rather than a big question mark.
As I was watching, I kept thinking about one aspect of the story that’s somewhat rare in science fiction cinema, although it’s more common in sci fi books and television. Sci fi movies in particular tend to be rather skeptical of science and technology, and cynical about what humanity will inevitably do with the things we invent and discover. That wariness is present in Contact, but it’s not the driving force behind the story. The premise is not built on the assumption that humanity can’t handle future discoveries or advancements, even one so astonishing as first contact with an alien civilization.
:: Finally, here’s a piece on Point Nemo, the remotest location on planet Earth.
First of all, Happy October! October is the best month, and on this topic I will hear no debate.
Now, onto some music. This one I came upon by happenstance: I’m on vacation today and tomorrow (I’ve been on vacation since last Friday, actually), but The Wife had to work today, so I’m up but I’m staying home while she’s off to the office. But my car was parking her in! So out I went to move my car so she could get out…and this piece was on WNED at that moment. I only heard about ninety seconds of it, but I was intrigued, so I made note of the title and looked it up on YouTube. Now I’m sitting here finishing up my first cup of coffee while I listen to Ouverture bardique by Ferdinand Ries.
Who is that, you ask? Well, Ries is yet another of those common figures I like to feature here: composers of talent whose work may not be good enough to earn a spot in whatever “Musical Pantheon of Greatness” we’re celebrating, but whose work is too good to merit the obscurity into which it has fallen. Ries was a contemporary of Beethoven’s, living 1784 to 1838, but he wasn’t just a contemporary of Beethoven’s: he was an associate of the great master’s, actually serving for a time first as a pupil of Beethoven’s and later as his secretary and copyist. I assume that as a copyist it fell to Ries, at least in part, to decipher Beethoven’s manuscripts and put things in order as to create actually playable sheet music. In the annals of art preservation, not enough credit is given to Beethoven’s copyists. I mean, look at this–we’re talking seriously heroic work here.
Ries turns out to have been one of those composers who didn’t have to really wait for obscurity. He worked hard and had a modestly successful musical life, but he never heard a number of his later works performed, and his own passing at the age of 53 wasn’t even noted by the music publications of his day. But again, I listen to this and think, “Does he really deserve to be forgotten?” This overture, a concert work not written to introduce a dramatic piece, starts off with a typically “muscular” intro, common to the classical overtures of the time, but then it goes to very interesting places. No Rossini-style overture, this–Ries’s piece is thoughtful and exciting, and it’s also orchestrally interesting when you notice the degree to which Ries has given some of his most fascinating material to the harps. So here’s a work that is deeply classical in its conception, but you can feel the Romanticism whispering around the edges.
I liked this piece a great deal, and I hope you will, too. Here is Ouverture bardique by Ferdinant Ries.
