My world (most of it, anyway) in one photo

Posted on October 26, 2024 by ksedinger

It’s amazing to me how much of my life has unfolded within the boundaries of this photo:

(via)

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Something for Thursday

Posted on October 24, 2024 by ksedinger

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. 

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“Found On Road Dead”

Posted on October 23, 2024 by ksedinger

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.

Anyway, the truck:

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on October 22, 2024 by ksedinger

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.

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[shudders]

Posted on October 21, 2024 by ksedinger

I’m not going to wait until my “Movies from the second half of 2024” post for this one:

This is the kind of movie you’d think was entirely contrived from a deeply silly notion until you learn that it’s essentially a true story. (Yes, yes, some of it is fudged from what happened in reality, so what, it’s a movie, people. Schindler’s List wasn’t 100 percent accurate, either.) The bones of it are as follows: a serial killer who ingratiates himself to women by pretending to be a photographer before getting them alone and killing them goes on The Dating Game as one of the bachelors, and our heroine, played by Anna Kendrick–who also directed the film in her debut–is the contestant on the show picking between the three bachelors.

Guess who she ends up picking.

This is not a light-hearted comedy, so be aware if or when you watch it; it’s more disturbing than that. It is a deeply affecting movie on a very basic level, and I think part of that is because of how Kendrick has somehow managed to walk a tightrope here. The movie feels like it’s supposed to be a light-hearted comedy, even if of the “black comedy” variety, and yet, the more you watch the more you realize it isn’t. The “almost comic” feel lulls us into a feeling of calm acceptance…much as a skilled serial murderer does.

Woman of the Hour also depicts several of our killer’s actual efforts, and in each case Kendrick shows us a moment when the woman starts to feel a bit of discomfort, but by then it’s too late. There are moments, too, when glances are shared between characters, and it’s the women who are able to pick up on a bad situation developing while the men just nod and move on because hey, “nuttin’ to see here”. I’ll put it this way: If you, as a man, were offended at all by the recent “choose the bear” discourse that unfolded on social media, then maybe watching Woman of the Hour would be a good idea, because what happens to the women in this movie is far more a reality than we like to admit.

I suppose that Woman of the Hour is actually a horror movie, but it’s one where the monster is utterly and almost boringly human. Recommended…but beware, this one might linger.

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A little Stealing on a Sunday

Posted on October 20, 2024 by ksedinger

OK, I’m up early on a Sunday drinking coffee and we’re hoping to get to Letchworth today, but I’ll just toss off a quick quiz-thing! And I’m doing this one before I read Roger‘s answers!

  1. What’s the best birthday party you’ve ever had?

I never had a birthday party. Next! (When I turned ten we had a family dinner at the Big Restaurant in Olean, as we had just moved there. The place was called The Castle, and it was part of a resort-hotel thing that was quite the going concern back in the day. Nothing of The Castle remains. It fell on hard times and different fashions, the idea of vacationing in a place just for the resort and not much else kind of fell by the wayside, and The Castle gradually rotted and now is gone.)

  1. Where is your favorite place you’ve ever visited?

I love too many places to name a favorite, I think, but of all the places I have gone, I could see myself living in Ithaca, or Geneva (NY), in the Finger Lakes region.

  1. How do you like to spend your free time? 

Reading, writing, photography, listening to music. (OK, sorry about the weird numbering here. As I start a new paragraph to answer each of these the WordPress list thing is renumbering as best it can, so each question is ending up Number One, and I’m not going to bother changing it.)

  1. What’s one of your favorite bands?

Just one? Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors.

  1. What is the cutest animal you’ve ever seen in person?

Excluding our own pets? I’ll go with the otters I saw at the New England Aquarium with my mother back in the 80s.

  1. How would you describe your style?

Cottagecore, with overalls.

  1. If your wardrobe could only be one color, what would it be? 

Blue, I guess. Because of all the denim!

  1. What was the first concert you ever went to?

A concert band at the University of Wisconsin in LaCrosse. I was in kindergarten. If we’re talking rock or other pop music? That would be the first time we saw the Trans Siberian Orchestra.

  1. What is the best book you’ve ever read?

The Lord of the Rings. (BTW, I include The Hobbit in there.)

  1. What’s your favorite movie of all time? 

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

  1. What’s the stupidest movie or TV show you’ve ever seen?

Hudson Hawk. (Which actually has some kind of weird charm to it, believe it or not. It’s best known for being a colossal flop, but it has some real gonzo goofiness going in there.)

  1. If you could only have one food for the rest of your life, what would you choose?

OK, this particular quiz is really old-school, isn’t it? This feels like first-generation blog quizzes from back in 2003. Anyway, for purposes of this thing, I’d say…pizza? It has so many variations. But even that would get boring very quickly.

  1. What are your biggest pet peeves?

I’m reminded of George Carlin’s quote: “I don’t have pet peeves, I have major psychotic f*ckin’ hatreds!” I’m not sure what my biggest ones are, but fresh on my mind are dudes who have to voice every disagreement they have with any opinion they see, guys on crotch-rockets who are obviously riding that thing for Adventure (I use “crotch-rocket” to refer to a specific item; it does not mean a generic motorcycle), people who will run into someone they know someplace and then stand right there to catch up without ever once looking around to see if they are blocking traffic in some way (because they always are), and overalls worn with one strap unfastened (don’t ask me why, I just don’t like the look).

  1. Are you more into brains or looks?

If I have to interact with you, I hope there’s a brain in there.

  1. Do you celebrate any holidays? What’s your favorite?

In order: Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving. Halloween always feels like it should be more of a thing in our household, but it usually isn’t. I still have a weird thing about Valentines Day, even though I’ve been married for 27 years to a woman I started dating when I was 19. The last few years it’s been very hard to get excited for Independence Day, but here’s hoping we can get that mojo back.

Oh, and I don’t care what anybody says, “Sweetest Day” is not a thing.

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Marisol

Posted on October 19, 2024 by ksedinger
From the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
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Twenty-two

Posted on October 18, 2024 by ksedinger

That’s how long Sheila O’Malley has been blogging.

In her honor, a movie scene:

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Something for Thursday (Mitzi Gaynor edition)

Posted on October 17, 2024 by ksedinger

Actress and singer Mitzi Gaynor has died. She was 93, and she was one of the very last remaining stars with ties to the great era of the Hollywood movie musical. Her biggest role was likely South Pacific, the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein classic (which I may have never actually seen all the way through, it’s not lodged in my memory all that well at all), which is set in–of course!–the islands of the South Pacific during World War II.

This particular song is the one from that show which I know best, though I am abashed to admit that it’s not because of the song but because a teevee commercial for a hair care product used the theme as the basis for its jingle: “I’m gonna wash that gray right out of my hair!” It was some years before I learned the truth.

Here is Mitzi Gaynor singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair” from South Pacific.

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Apples

Posted on October 16, 2024 by ksedinger
From the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival 2024
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