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“Found On Road Dead”

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

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]

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

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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Something for Thursday (Mitzi Gaynor edition)

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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Tone Poem Tuesday

Dame Judith Weir is a British composer with whose work I am entirely unfamiliar except for the present work, which I just heard for the first time the other day. But my lack of knowledge of Weir’s music shouldn’t be taken as any kind of statement of her skill, because her work is apparently of sufficient renown in the United Kingdom that Queen Elizabeth II actually named her Master of the King’s Music, a post which is analogous to a Poet Laureate but for composers. Weir held this post for a ten year term which just ended earlier this year. (Her successor, named by King Charles III, is Errollyn Wallen, whom we’ll investigate another time.)

The welcome arrival of rain is a work Weir wrote under commission by the Minnesota Orchestra. Her inspiration was the arrival of the monsoons on the Indian Subcontinent, and the joy with which the rains are seen when they come. Weir writes:

This profuse and exuberant piece arose out of bare beginnings; a scale passage followed by a simple melody. Whilst I composed it, as the notes and the pages multiplied, I began to think of a comparison with the arrival of the monsoon in India, when aridity is pierced by life-giving rain; and humans, animals and vegetation revel in sudden activity and fertility. Although the monsoon is expected yearly, its arrival is always joyously surprising. The music¹s title was inspired by a passage from the 18,000 verse Hindu text, Bhagavata Purana ( quoted in the score.)

A 6-phrase scale pattern is heard at the beginning of the piece in highly compressed forms; in rushing passages for the winds and as chords for the solo strings. Then an 8-phrase melody is heard in a lush and spacious version where strings predominate above horns and trumpets. From here on, these two melodic sources are alternated as the basis of melody and harmony, right up to the utterly energetic culmination where both melodies are heard together with their respective variations; there follows a gentle, rainy coda. A prominent solo for the drum section (rototoms, tomtoms and timpani) starts in the middle of the piece and reinforces the ever-growing energy of the music.

Here is The welcome arrival of rain by Dame Judith Weir.

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

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