Last weekend was a good time to be out and about in Buffalo. We visited the new Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which is the renamed, updated, and expanded Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The Albright-Knox was always a favorite place of ours, and the museum got some good news back in the 2010’s at some point: a wealthy benefactor named Jeffrey Gundlach gave the museum a big pile of money, which led to the museum’s expansion. A whole new building was erected, new art was collected (the museum’s primary mission is modern art), and last year the newly re-done Buffalo AKG Art Museum was finally re-opened. (The COVID pandemic had a predictable effect on the project, that is to say, delaying it a few years.)
As one of her Christmas gifts, I bought The Wife a membership (for both of us, actually), and this past weekend we finally made it to the Buffalo AKG. And yes, it is amazing. It was always a wonderful museum, but the new addition and reorganization of the galleries makes it feel like something from a different city entirely.
The next morning–Sunday morning–I ventured down to Canalside in Buffalo, mainly choosing that destination because the weather had been warm and rainy all weekend, so my usual hiking haunts were likely to be unpleasantly muddy.
‘On one rainy night in Tokyo, three strangers experience solitude from three unique perspectives.’
That’s the description of this short film, Tokyo Solitude, which YouTube’s algorithm offered up for me the other day. I found this utterly captivating; the imagery is amazing, with one breathtaking composition after another. It’s especially fascinating because my overwhelming impression of Tokyo at night is that it is ablaze with light and packed with people, but this film suggests otherwise: darkness and solitude exist there, and neither is necessarily a bad thing.
Take ten minutes and enter another world (set your resolution as high as it will go, turn up the volume or listen through headphones for the immersive soundtrack, and put it in fullscreen):
Ozawa was best known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, all twenty-nine years of that tenure–the longest of any of that great orchestra’s many amazing conductors.
In addition to his direct music-making, Ozawa was always deeply invested in teaching young musicians and young conductors. Here is a clip in which he steps in to correct a young conducting student on a matter of technique: “I try to understand you. I don’t do this…[conducts with a vague circular motion of the hand]…that’s like, ‘eighteen minutes, cook the spaghetti.'”
Here is how the Boston Symphony marked his passing:
And here he is, not too many years ago, looking perhaps a bit frail…but still able to bring the goods when Beethoven is on the program.
Thank you for all the music, Seiji Ozawa! You made the world better.
It is rapidly turning out that water is one of my favorite subjects for photography. It does so many fascinating things, and its relationship with light is particularly fascinating….
The top three are of Buffalo Creek as it flows past the Charles Burchfield Art and Nature Center. As the Creek tumbles over the rock beds there, it makes a nice bit of mild whitewater. The very first photo shows a phenomenon that whitewater boaters call a “hole”, when the water rushes over a rock in the stream and then falls back on itself, making a small water feature that looks like a pile of water flowing upstream.
The bottom two photos are of one of the many tiny streams that flow through Chestnut Ridge Park. The channel through which the stream is flowing in the first of these two photos is only about six or seven feet deep at that point, but just a few hundred feet downstream this small gully becomes a deep gorge that I assume to be at least fifty feet deep, if not more. The bottom photo is of one of the waterfalls that this stream plunges over. Note the ice crystals covering the far wall of the gorge, where the winter sun never shines….
I love a great bit of character writing, and this is terrific.
By way of set-up: at this point we’re probably, oh, two hours into the movie. Oskar Schindler started the film by using Jewish investors’ money to buy a factory and he staffed it with Jews after the crackdowns resulted in Jews being forced to give up property and ownership and move into ghettos. Throughout the film, as the crackdowns become more and more severe, Schindler deftly spreads money around to many Nazi officials–including, most prominently, labor camp commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes)–to keep his factory running with more or less the same group of Jewish workers he’s been using all along. This makes Schindler an enormous amount of money.
But eventually, as Germany’s fortunes in the war are going south, the Germans decide it’s time to step things up. They shut down the labor camps and send everyone off to Auschwitz, a process that will probably take, as Goeth indicates, a month, maybe two, to get all the logistics right. (One of the fascinating things about Schindler’s List is that it depicts the developing Holocaust through the prism of it was all just work that needed done, which is probably one big reason it ended up being so easy a pill to swallow for the German citizenry…but I digress.) Schindler, horrified at the prospect of his workers going off to their deaths, decides to make one last big gambit: he’s going to launch a new factory near his hometown, and he wants his own workers to be sent to him to staff it.
But he has to convince Amon Goeth, who is a spectacularly evil and small-minded man, to make it happen.
That’s when this short scene takes place:
Now, the scene as filmed is fascinating: we’re looking at these two men, talking on the balcony, but we’re watching them through windows and doors. The key dialog is this:
GOETH: You’re probably scamming me somehow…if I’m making a hundred, you’ve got to be making three. Hmmm? And if you admit to making three, then it’s four, actually. But how?
SCHINDLER: I’ve just told you.
GOETH: You did, but you didn’t. [grumbles] Yeah, all right, don’t tell me. I’ll go along with it. It’s just irritating that I can’t work it out.
By this point, Schindler’s bona fides as a war profiteer who makes money hand over fist is so well established that he’s become something of a mythical figure to the very Nazis whom he’s spent years bribing. So when he lands on the idea that he’s going to have to spend an enormous amount of money on an operation that obviously will bring him little profit if any, he barely has to expend any effort at all to convince the Amon Goeths of his world, because he knows they will assume the exact opposite and that Schindler has put together another scheme that will line his pockets all the more. That he’s intentionally going to spend himself broke to keep this small group of Jews safe never enters their minds.
That’s just amazing writing: Goeth’s frustration that he can’t put the scam together because he knows there’s no profit in what Schindler is proposing, but because it’s Schindler, there has to be profit in it. It’s a great scene, and it unfolds in just about a minute of screentime.
At Chestnut Ridge last Sunday, I turned around as I headed for the hiking trail and noticed just how much crosswalk signage they have there. Safety first! (I am not mocking or complaining. This is the busiest part of one of Erie County’s biggest and busiest parks, and there are always lots of families and children about.)
“In case of emergency, the exits are here-here-here-here-here-here-here-here-here-here-here – anywhere! Keep your hands and arms inside the carpet!”
John Williams turns 92 today…and he’s still working.
In his honor, let’s listen to some of his work!
Williams won a Grammy just the other night for this: “Helena’s Theme” from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It’s a typically gorgeous theme that manages to evoke Marion’s Theme from all the way back in Raiders of the Lost Ark without echoing it or quoting it.
Here’s something that vexed film music fans for years: the unavailability of the End Credits music that actually was heard in the film of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The suite that appeared on the album was nice enough, but the film version is longer, quoting several of the movie’s themes as the last scene in the Indian village plays out. And when we finally go to credits and the Raiders March fires up, it actually fades out in the repeat (at the 3:32 mark) so that we can here a brief quote of Short Round’s Theme. Williams’s ability to put seemingly disparate themes together into an actually cohesive whole is always amazing.
Going back even farther, here’s one of Williams’s earliest contributions to film music: his score to the law-school drama The Paper Chase. Yes, it sounds a bit dated, but you can absolutely hear the fingerprints of the Williams-to-come in this cue, the End Credits suite from that movie:
It’s the lot of most film composers to have to turn in really good work for movies that…aren’t. Hook is, for me, one of the few misfires in Steven Spielberg’s output; it fell in that weird late 80s-early 90s era when Spielberg hadn’t really transitioned into the finer drama work that was to come, but you could tell that his heart wasn’t entirely in the magic-and-fantasy flicks he was still doing. But along comes Williams with this amazing score, and this almost perfect tone-poem-in-miniature:
When Williams’s score to 2002’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones arrived, a lot of people were a bit befuddled by that score’s mix of darkness and lyrical love music. One person quipped on some message board or someplace, “It sounds like Nixon on a date.” That was pretty funny, but it seemed to highlight the fact that Williams’s score to Oliver Stone’s Nixon has never been particularly beloved. And that interests me, because I have always found it one of his most fascinating scores. He brings just the right blend of paranoid darkness and throwback Americana to Stone’s film (which I consider a masterpiece). Nixon has some of Williams’s most powerful and most overlooked music.
I do have to make an admission: I’m not always a big fan of Williams when he is scoring comedies or really light movies. For whatever reason, I always feel better when there’s a tinge of darkness in Williams’s music. (I can live quite happily without hearing Home Alone again, to be honest.) But in this wonderful march for Spielberg’s early big-budget misfire 1941, you can tell that John Williams has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. This is absolutely delightful.
I’ve never seen Seven Years in Tibet. I couldn’t even tell you right now what it’s about without Googling it, other than…a guy is in Tibet for seven years. But I love this theme:
Finally–and I’m only ending this here because let’s be honest, I could go on a lot longer about John Williams and how much he’s meant to me and to my creative life throughout my years, but I actually have to eat dinner tonight–here’s a suite of another of what seems to me an underrated score, which is all the more surprising to me because every time I listen to it, I’m dazzled anew by how new this sounds, even for a throwback score. It’s Catch Me If You Can.
Ugh! I don’t know why this didn’t publish. I could swear I clicked the right thing on here. Anyway, this should have run the day before yesterday. Admittedly, this is one of my “Fallbacks because I’ve been having a busy week” kind of Tone Poem Tuesdays, but the thing should have at least gone live on the site! Here’s the post, as originally written:
Ever wonder how orders are communicated from the server to the grill cook and back again at Waffle House? No? Well, that’s OK, you’re still not going to understand it after you watch this training video.
There’s a bright thing in the sky! Has anybody contact NORAD about this?!
I kid, obviously…and complaining about the lack of sunshine this time of year is just a thing we WNYers do, along with bemoaning the latest Bills playoff loss, noting how crappy the Sabres are, or speculating on what our favorite MLB team’s Opening Day roster might look like, since pitchers and catchers report soon. But really, this particular “Long Gray Slog” has certainly felt, well, longer and grayer and sloggier than usual. This is likely not really the case and it only feels so because of the way Real Life Stuff has been mirroring the weather of late. (Some of this is stuff I haven’t written about yet.)
Today, though, the sun is back in the sky, and that’s a good thing. Maybe I can even get out my camera for once…January was bad for photography. Just Godawful. Sigh….
