Tonight for dinner, I made a dish called “Godfather Pasta”.
It’s a dish of pasta with a cheesy garlicy sauce, also stirred in with cured Italian meats, banana peppers, roasted red peppers, and olives. It’s freakishly delicious.
After we ate, I ventured next door to sit with my father for a while. When I got over there, Wheel of Fortune had just started, and the first puzzle was:
“Make an offer you can’t refuse.”
I like it when the world synchronizes.
(If you’re curious as to how to make Godfather Pasta, I used this recipe in my Instant Pot. I modified the recipe to add a small can of sliced olives, and a second pile of banana peppers in addition to the ones that actually cook in the pot with the pasta.)
Speaking of our anniversary yesterday, this song reminds me of…us. So many of our best memories involve getting in a car and going…someplace, and this song captures that feeling perfectly for me.
I wanna take you somewhere It’s all I know to do I need to feel your freedom, Come on darling, say you will go
North to the lights to watch the snow fall East to the city, we can see it all South to the ocean, west to the mountains It doesn’t matter where we go As long as we’re together, what we don’t know Won’t stop us now, I’ll take you anywhere but here!
The Wife and I were married twenty-six years ago today.
The years keep presenting new challenges, on and on and on…but they also keep producing memories, more than a few of which are happy ones.
I used to note that I could imagine a life without her, but it was worse in every way. Now, in what I’m taking as a blessing, that part of my strong imagination is losing its power…or it’s simply saying, “I don’t want to imagine this.” Either way…I’m fine with only imagining this life, with her.
It’s a tone poem by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, a Russian composer whose music has fallen into unfortunate and unfair obscurity over the years since his life. This tone poem is notable for featuring a soprano voice in addition to the orchestra, and it’s a rich tone painting of…something. In all honesty, I have found scant information about this piece so far. I actually sometimes like it when that happens because it means I can attend on the music alone, without any preconceived notions of what it is about or what it means….
Yesterday we saw Grease at a Fathom Events screening, for its 45th anniversary. Wow.
I saw Grease in its original theatrical run, back when I was six or seven (depending on when it was out). I went with my sister, and I remember digging the movie quite a bit. After all, I was a kid and Happy Days was regular viewing so this 1950s-nostalgia flick was something I could understand, for the most part. There were cool songs and whatnot, funny stuff along the way, and toward the end two guys even get pies in the face! What wasn’t to like?
When The Wife and I were first dating, at some point Grease came up, and it’s been one of her favorite movies all the time I’ve known her, even though–get this–her parents wouldn’t let her see it when she was a kid, because of its sexual content. Now, Grease was rated PG, but might well have been a PG-13 if that had been an option at the time. Nobody in it comes anywhere near uttering a profane word, but…yeah, sexual jokes abound. They’re there.
But hey, I got through it OK! I don’t know if my parents were unaware of how much sexual content is in Grease, or if they simply thought, “Meh, he’s a 2nd grader, he’s not gonna understand any of it.” Because that’s what happened: every bit of it went over my head. All I saw was leather-rocking boys and sweater-rocking girls and a teen romance and some really good songs and there’s a big dance scene at the end of the second act and there are cool cars and a big car race where the guy who drives the black car that shoots fire out its back end loses and so on. A scene where Jeff Conaway has to stop fooling around in the back seat of his car with Stockard Channing? I figured they were just kissing a lot. There’s a bit where Conaway pulls something out of his wallet but it’s broken and they go right on kissing; I didn’t know what that was. Later on Stockard Channing says to one of her friends, “I feel like a defective typewriter. I skipped a period.” Did 2nd grade me know what that meant? Not a chance!
Honestly, my Grease experience leads me to believe that a whole damn lot of American parents are simply too uptight about what their kids are watching.
But anyway, some random thoughts on the movie:
:: My favorite of the supporting cast is Marty Maraschino (played by Dinah Manoff). She’s cute as shit, but she has this constant air of not quite knowing what she’s doing. I love when Sandy asks her for some paper from her correspondence box, and Marty hands her some but then says, “Wait!” while she spritzes the paper with perfume for Sandy.
:: We all make fun of movies and teevee shows where they have adults well into their 20s playing teens, but this one goes especially far, what with all the 5-o’clock shadow.
:: The sequence where Danny (John Travolta) is trying to figure out what sport he can do, under the coach’s guidance, is one of the underrated comedic sequences of all time. That whole sequence always cracks me up.
:: At the end, is Kenickie standing on the ground watching Danny and Sandy fly away in Greased Lightning and thinking, “Hey! That’s my car!”
:: At the risk of stating the obvious, Grease‘s songs are all great. Every one of them. I couldn’t name a favorite if I tried…well, that’s not quite true, since my favorite is very clearly “You’re the One That I Want”, but naming a second favorite? Can’t do it.
:: Speaking of the Danny-trying-sports sequence as an underrated comedy gem, why isn’t “Beauty School Dropout” remembered as a classic comedic song? Because it is.
:: The “Thunder Road” sequence isn’t the best, is it? The circumstance that leads to Danny driving instead of Kenickie is as goofy a contrivance as I’ve ever seen, and to this day I’m never sure exactly why the other guy loses. Is it that he drives through the water while Danny jumps over it, gumming up his engine? Is that it? No idea.
:: You want an example of a story that works perfectly despite giving us almost zero backstory? Grease is it. What history does Danny have with Rizzo? or with Cha Cha? We’re never told much of anything about these characters or their lives. And we don’t need to be! Does any of it matter? Nope!
:: Grease is shot very well, and it has some cool choreography. It’s a beautiful film to look at, especially during the musical numbers.
:: There’s a certain wistful quality to seeing the movies of your youth gradually become “the classic old movies”, isn’t there? I overheard one kid, who had been seeing the movie with his parents, asking them afterwards, “Why is it called Grease?” So they had to explain that to him. But more than that, it’s realizing how much of the cast is already gone. Olivia Newton-John’s death last year was deeply sad, but looking through the cast, it’s shocking to me how many have passed. Jeff Conaway (Kenickie), Dennis Stewart (Leo, the guy driving the black car with the fire jets), Annette Charles (Cha Cha)…all gone.
Ultimately Grease is not about any great insights into youth; it has nothing especially deep to say. It doesn’t need to. All it wants to be is fun and to leave you exiting the theater a bit more bouncy than you were when you went in, and if you’re humming a good tune or two as you go, so much the better. And that’s not so bad a thing for a film to be.
My mother doesn’t like Mother’s Day, having established quite early on when I was a kid that she found it a cynical ploy invented by the greeting card companies. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t cite just one of many memories for which I owe her for having them at all:
The oldest extant text ever printed with movable type predates Gutenberg himself (born in 1400) by 23 years, and predates the printing of his Bible by 78 years. It is the Jikji, printed in Korea, a collection of Buddhist teachings by Seon master Baegun and printed in movable type by his students Seok-chan and Daijam in 1377. (Seon is a Korean form of Chan or Zen Buddhism.) Only the second volume of the printing has survived, and you can see several images from it here.
Impressive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the honor of being the first book printed with movable type, only the oldest surviving example. The technology could go back two centuries earlier.
Causey’s most successful TikTok videos follow her as she packs old-school candies, like wax bottles filled with sugary juice and vintage candy buttons, into boxes for customers. Her videos also show off new offerings that she eats on camera: Think gummy Nerds clusters and chamoy-drenched dulces enchilados, or Gushers coated in chamoy syrup and rolled in Tajin seasoning. Her account features imported chewy Puchao candies and Pocky sticks from Japan, along with a slew of other Asian candies. There’s also weird stuff — sour candy that you spray in your mouth, candy shaped like unicorn poop, and gigantic gummies, along with nostalgic favorites like fizzy Zots and lemon drops. But Causey’s taste of viral success really began when the jelly fruits trend emerged on TikTok.
In countless videos on the platform, users would eat the jellies — a type of candy sold in fruit-shaped plastic capsules — by popping the capsule with their teeth, causing the jelly to burst in their mouth, often to comedic effect. The hashtag #jellyfruitcandy has racked up more than 27 million views, and for a while Candy Me Up was one of the few places that sold it.
The article goes on to describe “freeze-dried candy”, which is something I saw in a store in Toronto recently. I thought about trying it, but that stuff was expensive, at least in the store where I saw it, and I’d already dropped a chunk of money in an anime-and-comics store that very morning. Alas!
I find Tiktok kind of fascinating, and I hope it, or at least something very much like it, survives the current challenges. (I have to be honest here: I don’t get terribly worked up about the Chinese maybe “spying” on what I’m doing. If they think they can learn something insightful from the odd doings of a guy in overalls who lives near Buffalo, well, have at it, Hoss. Something needs to be done about the car-theft thing, though.)
I actually didn’t watch V the first time it aired. I don’t remember any buzz about it in school, and right around then all our geeky energy was laser-focused on the impending arrival of Return of the Jedi. I think I remember one kid talking about the V show that he’d watched the night before. Plus, V aired on NBC, which was at that point languishing in third place on the networks, and it’s biggest hits of the 80s had either just launched and had yet to gain traction (The A-Team) or hadn’t even come along yet (The Cosby Show), and in those days (wow, there’s a phrase I’m not keen on using to describe the 19-freakin’-80s), buzz was based pretty much on if you saw the commercials on the network you were watching at the moment. So, for me, V came and went very quickly, and I missed it entirely.
A year later, though, the sequel dropped, and that one, I saw. By then we were watching NBC a little (thanks, A-Team!), and I might have watched a movie that I wanted to watch on NBC’s weekly movie telecast, back when the networks actually televised movies. In fact, I think it was a movie, because I remember a long preview at the movie’s end–maybe five minutes long, maybe more–for the upcoming Big! Teevee! Miniseries! Event!, called V: The Final Battle. Now that I was properly briefed, I watched V: The Final Battle faithfully, and I was a big fan right from there. The original miniseries from the year before was re-broadcast soon after, and I was now fully briefed.
V: The Final Battle was produced by a different team than the original series from just a year earlier, which led to some differences in tone and story; the second series is much more action-oriented than the original and it doesn’t focus nearly as much on the allegory of fascism that the original did. Also, the second series features one of the most gobsmackingly bad endings I’ve ever seen, even for a thirteen-year-old kid. But the preceding five hours and fifty-five minutes of the six-hour miniseries was great, so if the ending sucked, I was willing to forgive.
V was a big enough hit that the two miniseries led to a weekly series later that fall (1984, I think), which started off strongly but then bogged down a bit. There’s some handwavey-stuff in the series opener explaining how the humans’ victory from The Final Battle actually wasn’t, and then a favorite character from the miniseries was killed immediately, and the show just wound up bogging down. There was a reboot many years later (ten years ago, maybe?) on ABC, but I didn’t watch any of it.
Oh, and The Final Battle boasted a wonderful 80s-synth score:
SO MANY BRILLIANT songwriters came out of Canada in the Sixties — legends like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Robbie Robertson — that the talents of Gordon Lightfootare sometimes overlooked by those who don’t know better. He never even appeared on a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot before his death at 84. That’s a raging injustice when you listen back to gems like “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Carefree Highway,” and “Early Morning Rain.” These songs earned him a sterling reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter, which you can see when you check the list of people who covered them: Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and countless others. Or you can take it from Dylan himself, who famously remarked, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like. Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.” Here’s a guide to ten of Lightfoot’s best songs.
:: Color Him Busy: A profile of heavily-tattooed actor Robert LaSardo.
In person, LaSardo comes across as a sensitive soul with a sense of humor. In an interview in his agent’s office he lifted his right forearm as if to prove it, and there, amid a roiling sea, is winsome Betty Boop in her flirty pose. “That’s my comic relief,” he said. He’s reluctant to make too much of the other tattoos — or as he prefers, “illustrations” — that cover both arms, his abdomen, neck, hands, fingers, back and legs. He’s even a bit self-conscious about discussing their significance.
LaSardo admitted the ink has helped him establish a 20-year career portraying thugs, drug dealers and gritty undercover cops. But he said landing roles through his tattoos was never his intention. “It’s my life story,” he said. “It’s the trip through my world.”
A bit of background here: a while back I found a YouTube channel that posts clips from the classic show NYPDBlue, and just this morning there was a clip that features a guest stint by Robert LaSardo. Now, La Sardo has been one of my favorite “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors for years–the proper term is “character actor”, obviously, but “Hey, it’s that guy!” or “Hey, it’s her!” works to convey the same idea. His work as a particularly nasty bad guy in CSI: Miami is a standout in my mind, but he’s always good when he turns up. A quick glance at his filmography reveals five different appearances on NYPDBlue, each time as someone different!
Actors like LaSardo tend to get lots of reliable work by being, well, not only good, but also professional and reliable. The linked article above, which I found on a simple Google search, is almost twenty years old, but LaSardo’s career does not seem to have slackened one bit since then.
Shortly before each Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert is set to begin, someone discreetly walks onstage to place a score on the conductor’s music stand, then returns to retrieve it when that first piece is over — a process repeated for each selection on the program.
Those brief, easy-to-ignore trips across the stage are the only times that audiences get a glimpse at the three staff members who work in one of the CSO’s most important if little-known behind-the-scenes departments — its library.
Located one floor below the Orchestra Hall stage, this windowless space serves as a repository for the music the orchestra owns and a work space for three librarians.
Here’s a fascinating article about a little-known facet of professional orchestra operations: the library and its librarians. The music they’re playing–the actual physical music, consisting of the conductor’s score and the orchestral parts for all the musicians–comes from somewhere, after all!
In 1984, The Voyage of the Mimi debuted on PBS. The groundbreaking educational science series, part of the curriculum of many elementary and high school students (including this writer!), captivated kids throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, spawned a sequel, and kicked off Ben Affleck’s career.
If you’re my age, you may remember watching The Voyage of the Mimi, either in school or on PBS at some point. I’m honestly not sure when I first saw it, but it’s been on my radar for years, so I’m assuming it was in the 80s at some point. It’s a 13-episode series about a research expedition into the North Atlantic to study whales, aboard a ship called the Mimi. There’s a crusty sea captain, two research scientists, their graduate assistant (who is deaf), two teenagers, and the sea captain’s grandson, who was played by a young Ben Affleck, if you can believe that. The whole show is available to watch on YouTube, and it actually holds up pretty well, as period educational shows go. Each episode consists of fifteen minutes of story followed by a fifteen-minute mini-documentary that applies to that particular episode’s topic. I wish it was viewable in better resolution than YouTube’s max from eleven years ago.
Sadly, the Mimi herself fell on funding and ownership difficulties that led to her eventual scrapping (though she was a long-lived ship, originally built in the 1930s!), but I did get to see her once! We were on our honeymoon in May 1997 in Boston and New England, and we went one day on a whale-watching expedition that set out from Plymouth. On the way back in, the boat’s tour guide pointed out two ships anchored nearby: one was a replica of the Mayflower, and the other was none other than the Mimi. I wish I’d taken a picture, but this was in the days (there I go again) of film cameras and I don’t even think I took my camera with me on that trip. Alas!
There was a sequel series to Voyage of the Mimi that I don’t think I ever watched, and sadly, a proposed third series never managed to get funding. Anyway, I like to think that the characters from the show got together again for more adventurey science voyages in the future!
:: Finally, speaking of Tiktok, this particular creator has found an incredible pair of overalls. I’m actually envious of these! The Big Smith brand made a lot of funky-patterned overalls years ago, I’m assuming in the 1970s, and they do turn up on eBay and vintage shops now and again.
A few weeks ago I was doing a job at work. (I know, right! I was surprised, too!) It was a long job: repainting the walls of a small bathroom and then re-doing the floor, so I was in this small room for basically two days. To pass the time, I listened to music; I have a little Bluetooth speaker at work that pairs to my phone. It’s this speaker, actually:
Mini Bluetooth speaker, by Klein Tools.
I’m a fan of the Klein tools brand, and this speaker has pretty decent sound for a single-speaker jobsite-style item. But this isn’t a speaker commercial, so moving on: I was listening to an album by Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors on YouTube Music, which is generally my streaming service of choice. YouTube Music has an “autoplay” setting where, if you’re listening to an album and the album ends, it moves right on to…something else. It might be a playlist or album of yours, or it might not be; it might be the same artist you just listened to, or…it might not be. Sometimes this leads to interesting musical discoveries; sometimes, not so much.
This was one of the interesting ones. I have no idea how YouTube Music’s algorithms work, but in this case it brought up a song that stopped me in my tracks, and I had to look it up when I got a chance. (This was a few hours later, so thankfully I was able to find my listening history and ID the song!)
Gregory Alan Isakoff is a singer-songwriter who lives in Colorado. His bio states:
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and now calling Colorado home, horticulturist-turned-musician Gregory Alan Isakov has cast an impressive presence on the indie-rock and folk worlds with his five full-length studio albums: That Sea, The Gambler; This Empty Northern Hemisphere; The Weatherman; Gregory Alan Isakov with the Colorado Symphony; and Evening Machines (nominated for a Grammy award for Best Folk Album). Isakov tours internationally with his band, and has performed with several national symphony orchestras across the United States. In addition to owning his independent record label, Suitcase Town Music, he also runs a small farm in Boulder County, which provides produce to the farm’s CSA members and to local restaurants.
As for this song itself, it seems to be a distillation of wistful regret the looking back at various missteps that marred a beautiful thing:
Now I’ve been crazy, couldn’t you tell? I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell Now I’m covered up in straw, belly up on the table Well, I drank and sang, and passed in the stable Mhm, mhm
And that tall grass grows high and brown Well, I dragged you straight in the muddy ground And you sent me back to where I roam Well I cursed and I cried, but now I know Oh, now I know
And yet…there’s something here, some little hint of optimism, lurking behind the song’s sad melody and lyrics. Would “turning these diamonds back into coal” be such a bad thing? And maybe it’s just me, but the main stringed instrument here is a banjo, and while the banjo isn’t always a happy instrument, it’s not a purely sad one, either. Consider Kermit and “The Rainbow Connection”, for example.
Anyway, here is “The Stable Song” by Gregory Alan Isakoff.
I’ve featured this piece before, and it’s not even by Rachmaninoff. So how does it tie in? Because when it was composed for the film Dangerous Moonlight, a World War II potboiler whose protagonist is a talented pianist and composer, it was as a replacement for the originally planned work: Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto (which will be the major topic of my next Substack newsletter). It’s not entirely clear why the Rachmaninoff couldn’t be used–copyright fees, perhaps–and the producers tried commissioning a work from Rachmaninoff directly, but he turned the offer down. So, in the Concerto’s stead, a new work was composed–in pieces, which are heard through the film. The entire work was basically stitched together by the film’s orchestrators, resulting in the work that is fairly well-known today as a single-movement work: the Warsaw Concerto, by Richard Addinsell.
It’s also one of the best intentional pastiches of a specific composer’s style that I’ve ever heard. Here it is:
Thanks, Mom
My mother doesn’t like Mother’s Day, having established quite early on when I was a kid that she found it a cynical ploy invented by the greeting card companies. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t cite just one of many memories for which I owe her for having them at all:
Moonbow over Waikiki
And, a theme song for the ages!