Nobody talks about poor Pippet

Posted on September 27, 2024 by ksedinger

We just watched JAWS last weekend, which is always a delight, so this sequence–the attack at the beach that makes everyone aware that a shark has taken up residence in the waters off Amity Island–is fresh on my mind. I’ve always loved the almost impressionistic nature of the shot of Alex Kintner’s actual demise, as someone on the shore might have seen it–just a glimpse of something big, caught from the corner of the eye in half a second. Apparently the sequence was originally intended to be more than that, though. This YouTuber went down the rabbit hole:

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Something for Thursday

Posted on September 26, 2024 by ksedinger

Completing my small survey of music from the films of James Cameron, we have a short suite from the score to Avatar, written by James Horner. I like this score a lot, for its suggestion of an alien world that is still deeply beautiful, and the tie the people of that world feel to their surroundings. The film often gets ripped for being “derivative”, but I don’t know…I tend to think most films are “derivative”, and what they bring to the table in terms of creativity is how they blend all of their influences into something new and interesting. That’s how I see it, anyway.

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And now, a cat.

Posted on September 25, 2024 by ksedinger

For lack of any posting inspiration, here’s Rosa absorbing some rays.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on September 24, 2024 by ksedinger

Well, an apology of sorts is needed here: I had a new-to-me piece cued up and ready to go, but I wanted to give it a few more listens before I actually posted it, and then I lost track of that during a pretty hectic bunch of days recently. So…if you’ve been around a while, you know what that means. Here’s Franz von Suppe, with his Boccaccio Overture! This actually is one of his overtures that I know quite less well than some of the others, but it’s typical von Suppe, sparkling and delightful.

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An abstraction from nature

Posted on September 23, 2024 by ksedinger

A few weeks ago I spent a morning at a particular spot in Chestnut Ridge Park, about as far into the park as one can get without getting out and walking. It’s a spot most people at the Ridge don’t go to, because it’s so far into the park’s interior, but it’s hardly deserted; it’s just far from the entrance. At this spot, one of the park’s streams–I believe this one is actually the one that goes over the Eternal Flame Falls, farther upstream–drops something like, oh, I don’t know, maybe 20 or 30 feet, over a few hundred feet of stream bed. So there are a lot of short drops, sloped spots, and deep plunge pools.

On this particular day there wasn’t much water–there usually isn’t, in August and September–so there wasn’t much to photograph by way of flowing water. So while I did get in some nice practice with shutter speed and working with the light, I didn’t get a ton of images from the session that I really liked…but I did like this one. It’s almost an abstract, almost impressionist in what it suggests without being able to depict it without enough water to do so.

Also that day, I photographed this wonderful old well house. Chestnut Ridge has a lot of these, and I’m saddened to think that they’re probably going to all have crumbled away within another decade or two. This one, by its surroundings and the way it always seems to be sitting in half-light, makes me think that I’ve entered a Hayao Miyazaki movie every time I see it.

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Something for Thursday

Posted on September 19, 2024 by ksedinger

Continuing our little series here of music from the films of James Cameron, who earlier this year turned 70, we have the big one.

Titanic.

Wow, this movie is nearing 30 years old. I remember when it was dominating popular culture, totally and utterly. In 1997 Titanic was just huge. It’s hard to overstate just how big a phenomenon it was. Musically, it was carried by a stunning ballad sung by Celine Dion, one of the biggest hits of my entire life; but there was also its score, which sold a huge number of records all by itself. This was one of the few times a movie was so big that its composer actually entered the zeitgeist–in fact, when had the last one of those been? Probably Star Wars, twenty years earlier, with John Williams. Anyway, Titanic made James Horner a huge name.

Horner had already been a big name in film music for years prior to that. The man paid his dues, first with scoring low-budget Roger Corman flicks before he started getting bigger assignments; his first big break was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, for which he turned in a classic score. My own relationship with Horner’s music was always complicated, but credit where due: A number of my personal desert-island filmscores that I love dearly are by James Horner.

For Titanic he turned in a surprisingly folk-tinged score, eschewing obvious approaches like a nautical sound or some kind of Edwardian-Elgarian sound. While I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Titanic score, I do think it’s very, very good, and concert performances of suites from this score abound. Here is one that I found quite good:

And while I’m discussing Titanic, one cue that is utterly magical in the film and was inexplicably left off the OST album (perhaps intentionally, as an extra enticement for the later Back to Titanic album) was the delicate solo-piano rendition of “My Heart Will Go On”, titled “The Portrait” on the record, which accompanies the scene where Jack draws Rose. If James Horner’s entire musical output had been limited to just this cue, I think his name would still be known, at least a bit.

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How to Not Freeze to Death

Posted on September 18, 2024 by ksedinger

I don’t remember when the YouTube algorithm started serving these up to me, but over the last year I’ve started seeing “Survival” videos, in which an intrepid creator will purposely venture out into a difficult situation to see if they can survive. They’ll have titles like “30 below in a snowstorm with NO SLEEPING BAG and NO TENT!!!”…but when you watch a few, a lot of them turn out to be surprisingly watchable as relaxing nature videos. And you learn a few things along the way.

Here’s one of my favorites, by a channel called “Outdoor Boys”, which is apparently one of the biggest and most prolific producers of this sort of thing. This kind of survival is fascinating to watch, and I like this particular video because a lot of what our hero does here is not what I’d expected. He does not find a nice large fallen tree against which he makes a lean-to out of branches, and while he does make a fire, it’s not just a little campfire which he uses for warmth and for cooking food. He uses the fire as a tool, and how he does it is really fascinating. Have you watched any survival videos? Do you find them as interesting as I do?

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on September 17, 2024 by ksedinger

I’m having a busy week at work, so here’s a piece that might come in emotionally handy by Friday: it’s basically a collection of drinking songs! Here is one of my absolute favorites, the Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 by Georges Enescu, Cristian Macelaru conducting the WDR Symphony Orchestra.

WHOA, hold on!

OK, the above is a great performance, so give it a listen. But also watch this, because this turns it into something really nifty:

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“I scream, you scream, we all scream for non-fat tofutti rice dreamsicles”

Posted on September 16, 2024 by ksedinger

MULDER: Did you bring enough ice cream to share with the rest of the class?
SCULLY: It’s not ice cream… it’s non-fat tofutti rice dreamsicle.
MULDER: Ugh… I bet the air in my mouth tastes better than that.

–“The Unnatural”, THE X-FILES

It’s Monday, so I’m going to do a Sunday Stealing quiz that’s a few weeks old. Hey, sue me. Here we go–the topic is ice cream!

1. What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Coffee, and going even more specific, coffee Haagen-Dazs. There are a lot of wonderful coffee ice creams out there, but Haagen-Dazs’s is the best. I don’t know what it is about that particular stuff, but…well, let’s just say that one of the most memorable nights of my college career centered on acquiring some.

2. If you could invent a new flavor of ice cream, what would it be?

Wow. I don’t know if I’m that inventive, but you know what we need? We need a pumpkin ice cream that does not have graham cracker crust shit in it. And I’m sure it exists out there somewhere, but I can never find any locally, and that makes me crazy. The problem is that the graham cracker crap doesn’t really add anything to the ice cream that’s necessary, in terms of flavor or texture–but it does add one thing that in our household is very unwelcome: Gluten. I wish I had a dollar for every wonderful-sounding ice cream flavor that we had to let pass us by because the manufacturer just had to put graham cracker crap in it, thus making it inedible for my celiac wife.

3. Who do you like to eat ice cream with?

The Wife, of course! Also the kid. But we love ice cream. In fact, one of the best little dates you can have is to go for ice cream with your significant other!

4. If you were a flavor of ice cream, what flavor would you be?

Ooof. Maybe a really high-quality vanilla bean. People would assume I’m boring, but then if you got to know me….

5. Does your family eat ice cream regularly, or just for a special treat?

Not as regularly as we used to (seriously, ice cream used to be a nightly thing!), but it’s definitely more than a special treat!

6. What is your favorite treat from the ice cream truck?

Hmmmm! Probably a strawberry crunch bar, or a Creamsicle. (I’m the only member of my family that likes the orange-vanilla thing. I do not understand this.) And of course, since I developed a hard-core love of all things Shoresy, I have adopted a newfound love of “sticks”.

7. Does frozen yogurt taste different than ice cream?

Yes, but I don’t hate it. I also don’t seek it out, if that makes sense.

When I was a kid we had a cat who loved ice cream. Now, most cats like it (and the dogs love it), but this cat was bonkers for ice cream. She’d come running as soon as she heard you clinking your spoon on the bottom of the bowl, but only if you had ice cream. Finishing a bowl of soup or cereal or ramen? Nope. Ice cream? There she was…unless you were having this horrible shit called “ice milk”, which my parents bought once in a while because, I dunno, they thought it was healthier or something. Well, Poppie would have nothing to do with ice milk. Wise cat.

8. If you could make a super sundae, what would it have?

You know, it would depend on my mood, but a good base would be chocolate sauce or hot fudge, some peanuts (salted), and maybe a bit of caramel sauce. I’m not big on piling tons of toppings onto a sundae.

Sliced apples, cinnamon, and caramel sauce? Oh yeah babe.

A scoop of ice cream on a waffle? Now you’re talking.

9. Can ice cream make a bad day better?

Yes, it can. All good food can. At some point during the whole “weight-loss” craze, probably starting in the 80s or 90s, we started preaching against “comfort eating”. And I suppose I understand, on a certain level, but as usual we Americans took this concept and inflated it to our usual Puritanical heights. Moderation is key and one should try to be healthy and diverse in their food choices, but dammit, enjoying something because it tastes good and it makes us happy to eat it is important. (And then there’s all that stuff the Frugal Gourmet used to say about food and memory. I believe all of it.)

10. Have you ever had homemade ice cream?

Probably? But I don’t recall offhand where that might have been. Hmmmm!

11. When is your favorite time to eat ice cream?

It’s good any time! I’ve even had ice cream for breakfast. There’s a restaurant we love in Rochester called Simply Crepes which is a favorite stop of ours for breakfast when we’re staying overnight in that area. They have a menu item that’s a sweet hazelnut crepe with ice cream on it. The Wife ordered it one morning, not realizing it came with ice cream on it. That was a hell of a breakfast!

But I suppose I would really gravitate to late afternoon or early evening, around sunset or just after. There’s an ice cream joint just down the road that we love that is done up like an old-school gas station from the 1930s, and it just feels right.

12. What is the best kind of ice cream you ever had?

See above, the coffee Haagen-Dazs. But also, Ben&Jerry’s had a wonderful flavor called “Scotchy Scotch Scotch”, which they released in conjunction with the Anchorman sequel, because Ron Burgundy loves Scotch, see? It was a butterscotch ice cream with some other stuff in it, and it was fantastic. B&J is notorious for flavors that are gone to memory, sadly enough.

Oh, and the maple ice cream we get at the County Fair each year. That’s wonderful.

13. Do you prefer your ice cream in a cone or in a bowl?

An edible vessel is a thing of wonder. I love cones. We’ll usually have bowls at home, though.

14. Is there such a thing as a bad flavor of ice cream?

Setting aside all the weird “prank” flavors that some places like to cook up for April Fools Day, I am not a big fan of marshmallow in my ice cream, or banana flavors.

15. They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. What does an ice cream a day do?

If done to excess, it certainly makes the overalls tighter! But it doesn’t seem to have done President Biden any bad favors, so….

16. Is ice cream better when it’s fresh or slightly melted?

Honestly, I’ll take it either way, but if it’s in a cone it should be harder. (Unless we’re talking soft-serve, which is different entirely.)

17, What is the craziest flavor of ice cream you’ve ever seen?

Probably the stuff that had Gummi Bears mixed right in. Not a fan.

 

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Golden Hour shining on Buffalo

Posted on September 14, 2024 by ksedinger

Last weekend I had an opportunity to go out and do some shooting at Golden Hour, which is what photographers call the rough hour at sunrise or sunset. I hadn’t had an opportunity like that yet, and I am thrilled with the results. I haven’t edited them much, but I did edit this one just to give a taste of what the evening was like.

Lookin’ good, Buffalo. You’re lookin’ good.

Big version available here.

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