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It’s FAB!

Via Roger comes this Sunday Stealing prompt, which is easy enough I may resurrect it every so often! Here’s how it goes:

F.A.B.

F. Film: What movie or tv show are you watching? 

A. Audio: What are you listening to?

B. Book: What are you reading?

That’s easy enough, innit?

F: We were actually out this past Saturday night, so we didn’t watch a movie this week. And we’re going to be out this Saturday night, so we won’t watch a movie then, either. So what shows are we watching? We’re in the midst of rewatches of both Brooklyn Nine Nine and Letterkenny, and we’re on a first watch of High Potential, which is a crime procedural in which a cleaning woman who is brilliant and observant on a Sherlockian level helps the LAPD solve crimes. And even though each case is a standalone, all teevee shows now must have an arc churning away underneath, and this show is no exception. The cleaning woman’s husband disappeared a few years ago, and she refuses to believe he just abandoned her.

A: Listening? Well, there’s all the usual stuff that shows up on this site, but lately I’ve started listening to The Killers. I like their sound, and they’re one of many bands I missed the first time around. I’m also listening to several podcasts, including James Bonding, for which I am a few years behind…it’s weird hearing them refer to “Bond 25”, as No Time To Die was known before its title was announced, and before its production ended up being a death march….

B: Book! I finished Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song for Arbonne a week ago, and now I’m reading Ione Skye’s memoir Say Everything. I’m actually doing a GGK re-read (though I’m pausing in between his books for other things), and I found myself rediscovering Arbonne, which I haven’t read in a long time. Skye’s book caught my eye because we just watched Say Anything a few weeks ago.

I think I’ll dust off this FAB thing every once in a while!

 

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Bloody big ship!

I had a nice photo walk down by the Outer Harbor this morning. The inner canals and harbor inlets are still full of ice, but the main ship canal and Lake Erie itself are open. I saw this ship heading out to the open water from the Buffalo ship canal.

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Something that was supposed to be for Thursday but some stuff happened and the problem persisted into Friday but now it’s Saturday and I think the problem is fixed, so….

The problem was that my Samsung Galaxy earbuds suddenly stopped producing audio with my Samsung laptop. They would connect and I could use the tapping motions to make videos stop and start, but the sound refused to come through the buds! It would only come through the main speakers. My buds still worked normally with my phone, so after a couple restarts and a re-pairing of the buds with the computer, I think we’re back on track. That was weird…I love tech when it’s working perfectly, but not so much when it ain’t.

(And yes, I could have just listened to this song on my phone and then posted here, or I could have posted from my phone directly, but I like my workflow and it annoys me when it’s screwed up!)

So anyway, the other night we were watching an episode of The Repair Shop, and one of the people who brought something in to be fixed was an old British folk singer named Ralph McTell. He brought in a large stuff kangaroo that had something to do with a kid’s show he did songs for, but what caught my ear during the “profile” section of the segment was that McTell had a big hit in the late 1960s called “Streets of London”. I gave the song a few listens, and it really hit me. Not only is it a beautiful song with a touching, lilting melody, but McTell’s voice is exactly the kind of deep baritone you would want for a song like this.

The lyrics at first seem to be thematically simple, though the imagery they use is definitely poetic. It’s easy to listen to “Streets of London” and hear a kind of “People have it worse off than you” message, but I think it goes a bit deeper than that. The song seems to me a kind of statement about a society that allows these levels of loneliness and despair to exist at all. Anyway, here is “Streets of London” by Ralph McTell.

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Spring in the Woods (supposedly)

The other day I went to Chestnut Ridge on what was the first sunny Sunday morning in what felt like months. Of course, being a typical Western New York spring, it was a cold morning and nothing at all is growing up there yet. But nature is nature, and photography is photography!

One of my favorite trees.
I almost love this shot…but the focus is off. I needed to change it to Auto-focuse Continuous, and I needed to set my auto-focus for detecting faces.
A bed of acorns and moss
I love all the old crumbling stonework in this park.
My new content-creation tripod fits perfectly in the leg tool pocket of my overalls!

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Tuesday Tones

Some pieces of music, like Beethoven’s Fifth or the William Tell Overture, become so overplayed as to become virtual cliche. The same can be said of Mozart’s Serenade #13 in G Major for strings, which is better known for the title Mozart gave it: Eine kleine nachtmusik,  or “A Little Night Music”.

What kind of night was Mozart thinking of here? Clearly he wasn’t thinking of the night itself, with its darkness falling over Vienna or its surrounding landscape. I think he was rather thinking of inside, with candles and fires burning. This music is too bright, too joyous, and too elegant to suggest an external darkness.

Eine kleine nachtmusik is likely best known for its opening movement and its opening bars in particular. Milos Forman uses those bars to convey how well-known Mozart’s music is known even years after his death, when a bitter Antonio Salieri plays that famous opening phrase for the priest who has come to hear his confession, after the priest has previously failed to identify any of Salieri’s own melodies, each one having been “very famous in its day”. The inner movements and the finale contain their own sparkle and magic, though. 

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“What’s the meanings of this?!” –Squirrely Dan, LETTERKENNY

A startling development from yesterday morning:

Yes, that is the Sun, rising in the east like it is maintained is still the protocol for this sort of thing, behind Casa Jaquandor, and its rising is visible and not obscured by the April cloud-cover in The 716 that can only be properly described as “Venusian”. Our last sighting of direct sunlight was February 27*, and normally this time of year we would not expect any hope of such a thing happening again until the day after Mothers Day, at the earliest. And yet, there’s the Sun, in the sky, being all bright and stuff.

Someone needs to answer for this, I tell you what.

  * This date may not be accurate.

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See, that was more of a one-time thing….

I’m not like many Americans when it comes to the “Founding Fathers”. I do not fall a dead-faint at their feet, the way many of my fellow Americans do. I find that sort of thing fairly performative, and I get a bit irritated whenever a political discussion is raging and the Founding Fathers are invoked: “What would the Founders think of [policy]?” It is fun, though, to see the sputtering that invariably results when I respond, “I don’t care about the Founders.”

We love to get all weepy and lump-in-throat about the Declaration of Independence, but really, we only pretend to get moved about very few of the actual words in that document. Right now, the important stuff probably isn’t the flowery first couple of paragraphs and the “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness” stuff, or the truths we hold to be “self-evident”, because honestly, nothing in recent American history suggests that we hold any of those truths to be evident at all, much less SELF-evident.

Right now the relevant part of the Declaration seems to actually be that long section that comes AFTER the flowery stuff, which is the long list of things that George III did that had those colonists thinking it was time to dissolve the political bonds, et cetera. Particularly interesting, in light of very recent events and the current administration’s activities, are these two items:

For depriving us in many cases, the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

How interesting to find those two things among the list of issues the Colonists had with their Royal government.

Like I said above, I’ve never been one to factor the Founders much into my political thinking–I see no logical reason why political thought in 2025 should be governed by that of a few rich white guys who lived closer to Shakespeare’s time than our own–but that doesn’t mean they’re useless, though. There are still lessons to be found in those dusty old documents, I think.

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Incomprehensible….

I’m not sure why, but I find it comforting sometimes to think about the vastness of the universe and our own general insignificance when one thinks about that very vastness. And here’s the thing: you don’t even have to think about gigantic voids in space so huge that it takes light millions of years to cross it. We like to think that our own Earth is small, “it’s a small world after all”, and that our home in the universe is tiny. Which, I suppose, it is.

But compared to us? This world is still pretty gigantic and contains places that make us look individually like the tiniest of fleas on the largest mammal.

Consider a place called Point Nemo. This has been a particular fascination of mine of late (I even linked a piece about it last fall). It’s a spot in the southern Pacific that is the single point on Earth where you are farthest from any land mass at all.

Such places are called “poles of inaccessibility”. There are such poles on land as well–spots where you are farthest from any ocean, for example–but Point Nemo is the planet’s Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Point Nemo’s three nearest land masses–each islands in either the Pacific or off the coast of Antartica–all lie about 1,670 miles away. And not only is Point Nemo that far from human habitation (though at times there are humans within a few hundred miles of Point Nemo, whenever the International Space Station’s orbit takes it over the area), but Point Nemo is pretty much that far from life at all. Because of its distance from land and the ocean currents that surround it, the water there–all 13,000 feet deep of it–has virtually no nutrient content, and thus there is almost nothing living beneath the surface.

Because of that depth and the remote location, the region surrounding Point Nemo is generally the target area for satellites and spacecraft that have been abandoned and allowed to crash back to the planet.

I don’t know if it’s the times we’re living in, but where the idea of being stranded in a place like Point Nemo is genuinely terrifying, I also find it strangely comforting to remember that human concerns are still very small in comparison not just to the entire universe, but to this little planet of ours.

Here’s a video about an expedition to Point Nemo. Why go to such a place? I suppose for the same basic reason one climbs a mountain: because it’s there.

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Something for Thursday

Sticking with the theme for this month (which I’ve only just now decided was a theme for this month), here in National Poetry Month, I’ll continue exploring the intersection of music and poetry. Back when I was a serious music student, I sometimes thought about setting favorite poems to music, including what is likely my favorite poem of all time, “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe. This complex and meaning-laden poem has thrilled me ever since I first read it, likely in 11th grade:

It was many and many a year ago,
   In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
   By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
   Than to love and be loved by me.
 
I was a child and she was a child,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
   I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
   Coveted her and me.
 
And this was the reason that, long ago,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
   My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
   And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
   In this kingdom by the sea.
 
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
   Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
   In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
 
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
   Of those who were older than we—
   Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above
   Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
 
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
   In her sepulchre there by the sea—
   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

So when I went searching for settings of “Annabel Lee”, one of the first ones I discovered was…a bluegrass setting.

And it works. Listen for yourself!

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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