Eighty-nine years ago today, Carl Sagan was born.
Sagan is one of the true giants of my life, the people whose work shaped me into who I am today. A very large part of how I view the world comes from him and his commitment to skeptical rationalism always leavened with captivated wonder.
Listen to his words as he reflects on the image of Earth taken by one of the Voyager spacecraft, when it was so far away that it’s just another pinpoint of light in what looks like a starfield.
Yesterday was really busy, hence nothing but a short post about voting (by the way, nice work, America!). Today we have a piece by Aaron Copland, but the occasion is the passing of Donald Hunsberger.
Hunsberger was, for many years, a professor at the Eastman School of Music, where his main post was director of the Eastman Wind Ensemble. In that position, Hunsberger did a lot of important work to advance not just that college’s Wind Ensemble, but wind ensembles in general (and their larger cousin groups, the symphonic or concert band), as ensembles for serious music. Wind ensemble music has for many years had a “student music” stigma, or been mostly limited to marches and orchestral transcriptions. People like Donald Hunsberger, though, made a more serious approach to music making for large wind groups.
Hunsberger died the other day, aged 91, after a long life of conducting, composition, arranging, teaching, and recording.
This piece, Quiet City by Aaron Copland, is a suite culled from incidental music Copland wrote for a play of the same title by Irwin Shaw. The play, about a man who has renounced his dreams and is beginning to go mad, was apparently a flop in 1939 and is pretty much only remembered now for being the inspiration of this Copland piece. One scene involves the hero imagining hearing a trumpet playing in the distance as he wanders the lonely city, and it’s that sound which Copland captures so well here. To me, Quiet City sounds like the musical equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting.
Donald Hunsberger arranged Copland’s work, originally for orchestra, for the Eastman Wind Ensemble and recorded it with Wynton Marsalis playing the solo trumpet part. It’s as curiously austere and effective as the original work. Donald Hunsberger was a great musician, and if his name seems obscure, that’s only because for some reason our classical music culture has long undervalued the wind-only ensembles in performance.
I’ve discovered the last year or two that I really like eggnog. I’ve also discovered that my family dislikes eggnog, so…I get to drink it all! Yay! This year I’m going one step farther: I’m making my own eggnog. Specifically, I’m making Alton Brown’s Aged Eggnog.
Technically, I’ve already made Alton Brown’s Aged Eggnog, as I executed the recipe yesterday (and it’s really not a hard recipe at all, the work took all of fifteen minutes). Now I’m in the “aging” part of the job. My intent is to leave the jars unopened until no sooner than December 20. (Meanwhile, I’ll just get some eggnog in the cartons, because I’m not going to make this stuff my only eggnog for the year.) Brown says you can age this stuff for a year, if you want. I’ve no intention of doing that. (There are a few videos on YouTube of creators who do manage to wait the entire year, and they have reported back that it’s worth it. Maybe next year.)
Anyway, there’s my bounty of homemade noggy goodness, in the photo up above! The two jars look a bit different from the bottle because they are made of pink-hued glass. That’s all I could find at The Store when I realized I needed a few jars. Maybe next year I’ll track down more glass bottles, as I prefer those to jars for this sort of application, but who knows. I also have to remember, when I open these to imbibe, not to add booze to them. There’s a lot of booze in there already.
All that’s left now is to play the waiting game…which give me an excuse to use this evergreen Simpsons clip:
NOTE: I’ve had this in drafts for-EVER (I started this post in August 2022!), and I think it’s now time to go ahead and finish it, because it’s that time of year again. Not the time of year indicated in the opening paragraph, obviously: if that paragraph were written today, it would go like this: “It’s early November, which means it’s time for an increasingly dreary annual tradition: people posting on social media to complain that it’s not Christmas yet, wait until Black Friday at the absolute earliest, so on and so forth.” But the rest of the post stands.
(Image credit: “Father Time”.)
It’s late August, which means it’s time for an increasingly dreary annual tradition: people posting on social media to complain about the arrival of Pumpkin Spice items in the stores and elsewhere.
First of all, there’s the usual proviso: Let People Like Things! No, your summer isn’t any shorter because the Pumpkin Spice stuff is showing up. No, you’re not being forced into cold nights or flannel shirts or raking the leaves (by the way, raking leaves is dumb and you should stop doing it) or going back to school any earlier. Just relax. The clock is not actually affected by the arrival of the Pumpkin Spice stuff.
But on the other hand…I get it, to an extent. It’s all driven by Big Retail’s cost-control and inventory-management strategies. That’s the only reason all the seasonal stuff always shows up freakishly early and seems to be gone when the actual season is in full swing. Big Retail’s problem is that it wants to sell the popular seasonal stuff to the people that love it, but retail doesn’t want to get stuck with leftover stuff if they make too much of it after the season is over. Thus you have the inherent absurdity of seasonal merchandise hitting the market well before the actual season starts, and then–and this is the part that pisses me off–disappearing from the market before the actual season has even ended.
I guarantee you this, folks: for the most part, Pumpkin Spice stuff will have completely disappeared sometime in the first half of November at the latest, except for whatever hanger-on items exist because they just didn’t fly off the shelves as planned. So when Thanksgiving Week rolls around and you’re actually thinking, “Wow, I am really in the mood for a pumpkin spice item right now,” you will be out of luck. Because the Christmas stuff, with the eggnog and the mint flavorings, will have touched down.
And that will keep on going! Because you’ll try to hit the store up to buy some last-minute Christmas candy, maybe on December 23, and you’ll be out of luck, because the stores will have sold it all down and put out the stuff for that noted holiday for which everybody on earth is known for shopping for way in advance, Valentine’s Day.
That’s just how retail thinks, and yes, it’s deeply annoying. It’s the exact same mindset that leads to the absurdity of it being really hard to find a nice winter coat in February or a new swim suit in late July.
Another dirty secret of all this is that for a lot of specifically seasonal merchandise, stores can’t even re-order. They get one giant shipment of it all at once, and then they work through it until it’s gone. If you’ve noticed that the Halloween candy is already showing up at stores? And you’re thinking, “Geez, we’re still more than two weeks from Labor Day!”? Well, that stuff arrived at the stores almost a month ago. Yup.
Businesses can claim this is all about “market forces” and it’s just what the market wants, but that’s a lot of special pleading; what’s really at work is the desire to sell what one might while also not being stuck with what one can’t. And I don’t know what the solution to that is, but that is the problem you need to solve if you want the Christmas stuff to at least not be on display until November 15 and the Pumpkin Spice stuff to sit in reserve until September. What it all boils down to, as always in our Capitalist society, is profit. And it has been determined that this is the road to maximizing profit.
As I’m thinking of this, though, I remember my earlier thoughts from about thinking of the year less in terms of being punctuated by holidays and more like being a series of festivals, not unlike the old church calendar. I’m not much of a liturgical person, but I do think the church calendar from the Middle Ages did represent a relationship with time that might have been in ways more healthy than the one we have going on now. We seem to approach holidays grudgingly, don’t we? We make sure to limit our holidays to one day, and then the day after, it’s time to put it all away and get back to work. Holidays in America are occasional interruptions in the real important thing: working and ensuring profit for somebody (almost always not ourselves). Our approach to holidays, all of them, is of a piece with our approach to time off from work in general. We take less vacation time than anybody else on Earth, and when we do take vacation, we get back to work to an overflowing inbox that makes the mere act of taking earned vacation feel like something that merits a punishment.
And all of that is baked into our general societal distrust of pleasure and leisure, which is a bigger topic than I’m going to solve right here…but I do like the idea of framing our calendar into a series of festivals. Here’s how I would break it all down:
September 15 through November 1: Autumn Harvest. This is the Pumpkin Spice period. Flannels, earth tones, pumpkin, big pots of chili, falling leaves. Also Halloween! I know that lots of people, including some dear friends of mine, would straight-up make this entire Festival Halloween, but not everyone is into the spooky/supernatural scene as strongly. It would definitely have a strong presence, though.
November 1 through The Night Before Thanksgiving: Winter Gathering. I call it this because this is usually when a lot of us start loading up on things we expect to need soon: food for Thanksgiving, or heating pellets, or whatever. It’s colder, but not actually winter yet.
Thanksgiving through January 2: Winter Lights. I dunno, I might come back and change the name of this…I thought about just calling it “Christmas” and making that into a whole Festival, because that’s how I see it, but that’s not especially inclusive, is it? A whole lot of religions have winter celebrations, and it would be nice if our societal calendar was maybe a bit less centered on the trappings of Christendom.
January 3 through February 15: Winter Meditation. This is when winter gets quieter, more reflective. But not always! This period includes Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl, so…yeah. Generally, though, this period can be for refocusing, thinking things through, and just plain living.
February 16 through March 17: Spring training. Because there’s a sense that things are starting to shift a bit once the pitchers and catchers report!
March 18 through April 30: Reawakening. Obviously this includes the Vernal Equinox and Easter. In most places in this country this is when Spring really takes place. (Not in my neck of the woods, sadly…spring in Buffalo is generally awful, but we’ll see what our old friend Climate Change does for that….)
May 1 through June 20: Beltane. Yes, I’m co-opting an ancient Celtic festival name for this period. By this point spring is well underway, baseball games actually count toward the standings, and hockey and basketball are starting to work toward their respective championships.
June 21 through July 31: High Summer. Yup, this is summer proper. Grilling, campfires, trips to the beach, yada yada yada. It’s also generally my personal least favorite time of year, after spring (again, this is just because of the nature of where I live), but I do acknowledge that I’m liking it more with each passing year, as my body does that thing that most peoples’ do as the years accumulate: feeling cooler every year. I wonder why this happens….
August 1 through September 14: Golden Summer. There’s a term in photography: Golden hour, which indicates roughly the hour right after sunrise and the hour right before sunset, when the sun’s angle in the sky is low and thus the light is less harsh and, well, more golden. This is the hour when the day tends to be its most beautiful, just in terms of the light that’s in the air. And yes, it’s a magical time for taking photos. Well, I think that this particular stretch of time is when summer is its most beautiful. By this point it’s still warm and bright, but the summer days feel less like a thirteen-hour bath in hot blazing sunlight. This is the time of cooling and fireflies in the woods and the campfires blazing under actually darkening skies.
And that brings us back to Autumn Harvest.
Nothing here suggests the replacement or abandonment of specific holidays, mind you! But I really do tend to see the calendar as a grouping of “times of year” than of specific dates, and I even go a bit broader than what I outline here: In my life, I tend to see “Golden Summer” and “Autumn Harvest” as not-entirely-distinct periods that begin with the Erie County Fair and last up to, and even beyond, our annual trip to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes in late September or early October. And I really do mentally file all of November and all of December and the first few days of January into one big “Christmastime” season. I just don’t see why every holiday has to be its own unique and separate atomic entity whose celebration is a complete in-and-of-itself kind of thing.
No, that’s not my joke in the post title, that’s a quote from Airplane!
Anyway, tonight for dinner I made nachos, and I washed down my nachos with beer. Beer and nachos…this makes me remember this scene from The Simpsons.
I hope y’all are starting a lovely weekend!
From The Muppet Show. This is one of my very favorite songs from that show; there’s just something about this that’s so pleasing…maybe it’s the simplicity of the song, combined with its lovely backing vocal, that gets me. The song was featured twice on The Muppet Show, once by Danny Kaye and this, by Charles Azvanour. I like this one better, with the kids in the schoolhouse singing the “two and two are four” bit in silhouette. I don’t think The Muppet Show always gets the credit it deserves for introducing sheer beauty to the world.
The first snows of the 2023-2024 winter season have fallen.
Yes, I know it’s not winter yet, technically…in the astronomical sense of the Winter Solstice having come and gone. Nor is yet Meteorological Winter yet; that begins on December 1. But I submit that it is now Emotional Winter, because that’s determined by when the snow first falls. What’s interesting about Emotional Winter and Actual Autumn is that they can both hold sway at the same time.
Anyway, the local social media was, of course, loaded with all manner of whining and wailing and rending of teeth and gnashing of garments, but…I love snow and to me, the world was beautiful this morning in a very special way.
It’s late, I know, but it’s still Tuesday and it’s still Halloween! Here is the Original Soundtrack album presentation–on vinyl!–of one of my favorite horror film scores of all time, Dracula by John Williams. Enjoy, and don’t eat too much candy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP3Z7YjVjc0
“The poor man can’t concentrate for more than an hour. YOU gave him four.”
The title quote comes from Amadeus, when Mozart protests to Salieri that his new opera, The Marriage of Figaro, has closed after just nine performances. The opera’s fate, according to the film, was doomed when Emperor Joseph II of Austria yawned during the fourth act.
Demands upon audiences have been a concern of artists for…well, pretty much forever, I suppose. When an orchestra puts, say, Mahler’s Third or Bruckner’s Eighth on the program, those symphonies take up the entire evening’s work. Do the performances include intermission? I honestly don’t know.
I’m thinking about this after reading Mark Evanier’s post about the new Martin Scorsese movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, which has a running time of 206 minutes: almost three and a half hours. The question is simply: Should movies like this have an intermission?
I remember having an intermission during a three-hour movie a handful of times in my life. I recall one during Gandhi, way back when, and during Dances With Wolves. In both cases, neither film was made with an intermission in mind, so the projection simply stopped around halfway through and a theater employee called out, “Intermission!” In each case, the stoppage was artificial and might have even hurt the story: Gandhi‘s came right after the harrowing sequence of the massacre at Amritsar, and the Dances one came right before the buffalo hunt. Neither film really suffered, exactly, but a much better experience came with My Fair Lady, which we saw a few years ago via Fathom Events. There was an intermission there, too, but the movie was made to end on a full stop before the intermission (it’s an adaptation of a Broadway show, after all), so the story reaches a satisfying point, goes to intermission, and then gets the ball rolling again once the intermission is over.
Mr. Evanier says the following:
That seems to me a pretty accurate summation. He’s actually responding to an earlier article in Salon in which a writer specifically argues against intermissions:
The Salon article is, I submit, deeply weird, in a lot of ways. The idea that an intermission is “detrimental to the moviegoing experience” just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Seeing My Fair Lady on the big screen was a revelatory experience for me, almost an exercise in pure joy. How was it lessened by having an intermission, especially since the film was made with an intermission in mind? For that matter, how were the other films I saw with intermissions artificially shoe-horned into the experience by the theater lessened? They weren’t.
You know what does detract from the experience? All that squirming as one realizes one might need to go relieve oneself. All that wondering: “Can I make it to the end of this?” That’s an actual breaking of the “immersive experience” of moviegoing, not to mention the actual act of finally getting up and going to the rest room. The rhythm and flow of a “perfect film” is interrupted anyway, so why not just build it in?
For that matter, are we seriously maintaining that Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest cinematic storytellers in history, can’t structure his films to accommodate these simple needs? Especially when just about every other art form out there does? No Wagner opera is played without break. You can pause a movie at home at will. In a follow-up post, Mr. Evanier posts a comment by a correspondent:
What the hell makes movies so special that they must be consumed in one singular and unbroken sitting? Seriously, literally no other art form or past-time makes this demand. What’s so sacredly immersive about seeing a movie that doesn’t apply to watching a television program, or attending a classical music concert or opera, or watching Shakespeare in the Park?
Further, why are movies the one art form where we put such primacy on “how it is meant to be seen”? That ship has pretty much sailed, right? Let’s be honest here: artists don’t really get any say at all in how we experience their work. If they did, the only way to hear Wagner’s Parsifal would be to go to Bayreuth. If they did, Shakespeare would only be done in a theater on the Thames. Am I going against the artist’s intent when I listen to music on recording as opposed to a live performance? How about if I read a novel on a Kindle by an author who died in 1952?
The artistic vision in a movie is what’s on the screen. Nothing more, and nothing less. How far does this go? Does Scorsese get to tell us not to see his movies in modern theaters with reclining seats?
These objections may sound extreme, but really, I do not get for the life of me why the moviegoing experience is so sacred, especially now that our living rooms are getting better and better at presenting movies. No, I don’t have a full size 32-feet-by-18-feet screen, but what of it? One of the best movies I’ve watched in the last year is Hugo, by none other than Martin Scorsese. Am I to believe that my experience watching it was so much the worse because I didn’t see it in a theater but in my own home? And when I hit the ‘pause’ button at home, am I really disrespecting the artistic intention of the filmmaker?
Anyway, yes, I feel that long movies should have intermissions, and moreover, that they should be constructed to put the intermission in a good place, story-wise. If they don’t want to do that, fine…but then I’m almost certainly not sitting through a movie that long at the theater again. For me, biology tends to trump artistic vision. Movies are an art, yes, and they are a wonderful art. But they are not an art that demands a unique degree of unbroken immersion in the experience, any more than one must read The Brothers Karamazov in one sitting to get the full Dostoevsky experience.