Sticking with Alfred Schnittke, to whom I introduced myself last week, we have extracts from a film score of his. The Story of an Unknown Actor is a Soviet film from 1977 for which Schnittke provided the music. I have turned up very little information about the film at this point, save its year and its director, one Aleksandr Zarkhi. I’m wondering if the film isn’t best known now precisely for its score by Schnittke, which has shown up on several recordings.
The score is mainly monothematic, as far as I can tell, but the arrangement here into a series of extracts casts it as a theme-and-variations work, and it ends up being a fairly interesting listen, particularly when Schnittke does different things with his orchestrations. Even in an obscure score to a very obscure film from a nation that no longer exists, Schnittke is an interesting composer.
I saw this on County Executive Mark Poloncarz’s Twitter feed this evening. It’s a beautiful shot of post-sunset over downtown Buffalo. Our city has sunsets over water. Just like Waikiki! (I know that this is a reach…but really, our sky does beautiful things.)
Interesting article about the proliferation of numerical analysis for just about everything these days:
Smarties approached baseball like an equation, optimized for Y, solved for X, and proved in the process that a solved sport is a worse one. The sport that I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore. In the 1990s, there were typically 50 percent more hits than strikeouts in each game. Today, there are consistently more strikeouts than hits. Singles have swooned to record lows, and hits per game have plunged to 1910s levels. In the century and a half of MLB history covered by the database Baseball Reference, the 10 years with the most strikeouts per game are the past 10.
On another note, I should write a post sometime about the movie Moneyball, which is a fascinating sports movie from the standpoint of the front office, a good piece of evidence for my belief that Aaron Sorkin is at his best when he’s paired with another writer to neuter his more annoying quirks, and also an interesting case study in how to not manage.
:: A post about the title song from the movie That Thing You Do!, the wonderful 90s flick about what happened when a bunch of teenagers from Erie put together a garage rock band and ended up being a national one-hit wonder. The film was directed by Tom Hanks, and he directed it very well, which is why I’m often surprised to think how he never really pursued directing much at all after this one. Maybe he just didn’t want to. That’s fine!
As for the song, though, I did not know that it was written by Adam Schlesinger, the brilliant songwriter who was behind a lot of the amazing satirical songs that formed the backbone of Rachel Bloom’s masterpiece series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Schlesinger, sadly, died at the too-early-age of 51 in the first wave of COVID-19.
Oh, here’s the song, if you don’t remember it. It got quite a bit of airplay in the 90s when the movie was a thing:
When Jeri Lynne Johnson made it to the finals of an orchestra tryout in California and didn’t get the job, she didn’t think much of it.
“It happens. It’s like dating — you kind of work or you don’t,” says Johnson of the chemistry that gets tested when a conductor stands before an orchestra for the first time.
But when Philadelphia-based Johnson asked the head of the selection committee what she could have done differently, “He said, ‘We just didn’t know how to market you. You don’t look like what our audience expects a maestro to look like.’”
Orchestra conducting has been the almost entirely-exclusive bastion of white men for just about the entire two century period that the job has even existed. Woman conductors have only started breaking through into the mainstream in the last couple of decades. Black conductors? Imagine that quote above: “We didn’t know how to market you.” Why not…as a thrilling and exciting musician? The same way you market every new conductor who takes a music director position with an orchestra?
My God, we have so damned far to go.
(Classical music’s racism is often obvious, but it’s also worth noting the crustacean-like resistance to change at all in the genre and in people who follow it. I remember attending a Buffalo Philharmonic concert some years ago where the first half of the program was a modern work, and the second half was a Beethoven piano concerto. At intermission I heard the old ladies behind me saying things like “At last, now we get to the good stuff.” I can hear them now, exiting the concert hall after a Black conductor has led a performance of, oh, Brahms’s Third: “Well, I like Brahms, but I suppose he’s woke now.” Ugh!)
If that sounds confusing–and it did to me at first, too–it’s referring to fictional writers who also end up being detectives, like Richard Castle of my once-beloved show, Castle. (Who is on the list, by the way. He’s not Number One. If you’re wondering who Number One is, I won’t give it away, but it’s really kind of obvious, especially considering recent events.)
:: Finally, here’s an excellent Twitter thread about what a gigantic mess everyone’s favorite WonderGenius, Elon Musk, is making of Twitter.
I've seen a few people claiming that Musk, despite his seemingly chaotic approach to overhauling Twitter, is actually playing 3D chess and actually totally "gets" the site.
I, myself, have never been much for the notion that people are to be automatically afforded massive amounts of deference and respect because they have simply managed to amass some large amount of wealth. But in this country, I am in a distinct minority in this viewpoint, I think.
That’s all for now. Time to start letting the tabs pile up again!
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My favorite constellation has almost always been Orion the Hunter–and I only hedge on this just a bit, because maybe there was a point when I was in first grade and just starting to learn about constellations that I preferred the Big Dipper or some such thing.
Orion is a winter constellation, and it always starts showing up in my sky around the mid-point of autumn–that is to say, it shows up at a time when I can see it around that time. It’s possible that Orion rises first at midnight or something…I don’t really know. All I do know is that the other morning I left for work and it was early enough that the stars were still visible. I glanced southward…and there was the Hunter.
And here he is, in all his glory!
By the way, I hope that once in a while you take time to stop and reflect on the fact that most of us now carry around a device on a mundane basis that is capable of astrophotography. That’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?
A long and busy day with no time for thinking about posting means, as always, that when I get home I throw up a quick post with an overture by Franz von Suppe.
This time I’ll change it up a little, though: no orchestra this time! Just a pianist, playing the Poet and Peasant Overture.
Luckily, I have a surplus of USB-C cords for just such an occasion.
(Not that anyone asked, but my favorite brand for such items is Anker. I have several of their bluetooth speakers, their bluetooth earbuds, two of their portable chargers, and a whole bunch of their cords.)
One of the eternal questions in relating to art is how to separate one’s feeling for the art from one’s feelings for the artist. This is not the least bit new; it’s a problem that is probably as old as art itself. There have been so very many artists whose own lives and statements fall well short of the art they produce. I find myself thinking anew, as one of the oldest and yet most irritatingly persistent of hatreds, anti-Semitism, just keeps arising again like the very worst of pennies, of Richard Wagner.
You can barely read a biography of Wagner that covers the man’s life in any depth beyond “He was born in 1813, died in 1883, and wrote operas” without confronting what a staggering boor he was, a fact which…
…[shit]…
You know what, to hell with that. I love Wagner’s music, but I don’t want to write about Wagner right now, not when my country’s discourse is once again mainstreaming awful crap about the Jews again.
Let’s talk about Jewish composers instead. We’ll start with Alfred Schnittke.
Schnittke, of whose music I am mostly ignorant, was a Russian composer of Jewish and German ancestry. I’m sure that particular blend of ethnicities and nationalities made for some strife in his life. He was born in 1934 in Russia, and started his musical education in 1946, after the war and after the Holocaust. Not long after, he moved along with the rest of his family back to Russia, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. Thus he had to toil in the air of state control that was the artistic scene in Soviet Russia, until he finally left for good in 1990. Schnittke died in 1998.
His music–and I am going on reference here, rather than my own personal insight–is influenced early on by the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, but later on in his life, as great artists do, he developed his own sound and voice. It’s a voice I know little about. So many voices to hear, so little time!
This work is a ballet called Sketches. In a sequence of twenty-two short pieces, Schnittke puts on display a great deal of sardonic wit, seemingly poking fun at the entire proceedings. He even goes so far as to quote or reference other classical composers along the way, and his use of rhythm and color are infectiously amusing. One of the segments even utilizes a spoken-voice part, which threw me off the first time I heard it; at first I thought one of my other open tabs had stumbled upon a voice recording.
As a former Pizza Hut employee who spent four consecutive Halloweens becoming a nervous wreck driving pizza deliveries around town, please allow me to appeal to your humanity on this matter:
DO NOT ORDER PIZZA DELIVERY TONIGHT!!!
Seriously. Just don’t.
Halloween is a terrible night for pizza drivers. It’s a nerve-wracking night to be driving, with many children and families walking around in low-visibility situations. If you want pizza for an easy dinner, please order takeout early and grab it on your way home.
If you just have to order delivery, please take the drivers’ safety concerns into account and lower your expectations as far as delivery times go. Don’t give them shit about how it took 45 minutes, and tip them well. (You should tip them well anyway, but tip them even more tonight.)
And if you’re ordering delivery but you’re not giving out candy so you’ve got your light turned off so that the driver has to try to figure out which house is yours while they’re trying to not hit small children…well, that’s just being a straight-up jerk. Don’t be this person.
Look, folks, Halloween is why God invented frozen pizza, and we’re doing amazing things in the frozen pizza department these days. (Seriously! Try one of these. Or one of these! You’ll be happy you did!) Just get one of those and leave the overworked delivery folks out of it.
With the arrival of cooler weather comes the appetite for hearty crock-pot dishes, and a favorite of ours is good old chili! As I write this, the chili is crockpotting away in the kitchen; as you read this, we’ve already eaten a bit of it. With some cornbread!
(I’ll have to supplement this with a white-chicken-chili recipe I’ve found, next time I make it. And I also want to do Cincinnati Chili sometime this year, which I love and haven’t made in years.)
And now, the post:
I saw this pic on someone’s Instagram story last week and it made me laugh, because when it comes to food, I think I may be part-Southerner, in a lot of ways.
I have no idea whose IG account this is from! If you recognize it, let me know and I’ll credit!
The first pot of chili of the season is a big deal for me! I love chili. I love making it. I love how easy it is to make. I love how versatile chili is in the way you serve it. You can do so much with the leftovers over and above eating re-heated bowls of chili for the next four days. So yes, as a Northerner*, I get it!
Now, I make no claim that my way of making chili is “authentic” or “definitive”. Chili is like pizza or sandwiches: subject to enormous variety in how it’s made, from ingredients to flavor profile to cooking techniques used. I don’t even make one kind of chili! I have a recipe that I recently found to my liking (after trying several over the last few years) for White Chicken Chili, and I also love Cincinnati Chili, which is its own thing entirely, being at its root more of a thick chili-like meat sauce with Middle Eastern flavors enhancing sweetness rather than spiciness.
By way of some food history, here’s an excerpt from what Jeff Smith**, the “Frugal Gourmet”, wrote about chili in his cookbook The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American:
Most Americans think that the wonderful rich, beefy, and beany dish that we call chili came from some other culture. Mexico, perhaps, or Spain. Not so. I am afraid that both Mexico and Spain refuse to have anything to do with what we call good old American chili. One Mexican cookbook even goes so far as to scornfully describe chili as “A detestable food with a false Mexican name sold in the United States from Texas to New York City.” Hey, watch that! The rest of the country loves chili, too!
The original dish is truly American, though I have found that a lot of Americans in different locales think that it was invented in their backyard. After much research (two days) I have come to the following unquestionable decision. Chili was invented in San Antonio, Texas, in 1840. It was a blend of dried beef, beef fat, chili powder and spices, and salt. It was pressed into a brick and it was so potent that it would not spoil quickly. It was then taken by the prospectors to the California gold fields. There it could be reconstituted with water and cooked with beans. It was very much like the pemmican that had been used in earlier times but with spices added….
San Antonio has the distinct privilege in history of laying claim to “Chili Queens”. These ladies had little carts and tables and would appear late in the evening and sell chili and whatnot…I expect more whatnot was sold than chili. They were forced to close down in 1943 due to city health regulations of some sort…mostly sort.
I would have thought that all of Texas would have been involved in wonderful chili. But in 1890, when chili arrived in McKinney, a town just north of Dallas, all blazes broke loose. It seems that some wayward ministers claimed that chili was “the soup of the devil–food as hot as hell’s brimstone.” I wonder if these clergy ever bothered to taste a good pot of chili.
Well, isn’t that to be expected. Show me something, anything, being enjoyed by someone, and I’ll show you some tight-assed cleric who thinks it’s evil or the Devil’s work or some bullshit.
Anyway, I fully expect that most of you have your own method for making chili. I don’t say “recipe”, because I honestly believe that one should have a basic chili method that is so ingrained that the idea of referring to a recipe is simply nonsensical. Here is mine. Now, while I note above that I do make other kinds of chili, this is what I make when I simply say that I’m going to make “a pot of chili”.
This is a dish for the crockpot. We own two; for this I use our smaller one. I have no idea what the size is in terms of quarts. Into the crockpot (spray it first with cooking spray!) go the following:
1 can crushed tomatoes (28oz)
1 can diced tomatoes (15oz)
1 can black beans (rinsed)
1 can dark red kidney beans (rinsed)
1 can “chili” beans in sauce (not rinsed; I like Bush’s)
Half (or so) of one bottle of commercial chili sauce (I buy my store brand)
Hot sauce. No idea the measurement. I pour a bunch in and taste it. This is how hot sauce should always be used in recipes. If a recipe specifies an amount of hot sauce, ignore it.
I try to buy the “No salt added” versions of those first four canned ingredients, but it’s not a deal-breaker.
Here’s what all this looks like, if you want to see a picture of a crockpot full of cans of stuff that’s red:
Chili stuff. In the crockpot.
Obviously you can use a can of whole tomatoes, if you like your tomatoes in bigger chunks, and obviously you can change up the beans. I like a blend of beans and I like a lot of beans in my chili.
Meanwhile, into the frying pan goes:
1 onion, diced
However much garlic seems reasonable, and then double that
1 lb ground meat
Several tablespoons chili powder
(Sometimes I add 1 bell pepper, diced, if I have it on hand. Today I do not.)
Well…hold on. That all doesn’t go in at once. Heat up the pan, then add a few tablespoons oil and then the aromatic veggies. (Add the oil to the hot pan. As long as we’re talking about the Frugal Gourmet, remember his rule: “Hot pan, cold oil, foods won’t stick.” This actually works.) I like to saute the onion, garlic, and optional bell pepper on a high heat for a minute, and then reduce the heat to medium to sweat the veggies for a few additional minutes before I add in the ground meat.
Now: what ground meat to use? Sure, you can use ground beef or pork or whatever, but I prefer hot (or spicy) pork breakfast sausage (Bob Evans is a fine brand, and I’m not just saying that because The Wife and I both worked for Bob Evans at points in our lives), because you get more flavor this way. Remember Alton Brown’s commandment for stews: Never miss an opportunity to add flavor! Get it in there and start breaking it up with your spatula, splitting the chunks up as you go. Oh, and a minute or so after the meat’s in there and has started browning? Dump in the chili powder. A lot of it. The color of the stuff in the pan should noticeably change.
I generally stop breaking up my meat chunks when they’re about the size of a marble, because I like the meat in my chili to be in large pieces. (I’ve even done chili with stew beef, which is quite tasty. If you do that, flour and brown the meat before anything else, then set aside and re-introduce to the pan after you’ve sweated the aromatics.)
Here’s what the action in the frying pan looks like:
The frying pan part of making chili. And really, why don’t chefs wear overalls? I always wonder this. They’re perfect attire for cooking: protective, lots of pockets for stuff, and you can even hang a towel from the hammer loop.
Then what? Well, it’s obvious: Put the frying pan stuff in the crockpot with the rest of the stuff.
Into the pot!
Stir! Stir! Stir! (Actually, you don’t have to get super-aggressive about mixing the stuff up. Just a few gentle folding stirs should do it.)
Stir it up, lid it up, set the pot on low for, I dunno, six or seven hours. I like to crank it to high in the last hour, but that’s just me. The Wife makes fun of me for this (“How can I tell you if I like it? You served me a bowl of molten lava!”), but I’ve seen her send back way too many bowls of soup in restaurants for not being hot enough, and I am not making that mistake. Top it with cheese, or not. Sour cream, or not. Guacamole, or not. Chili is the pizza of stuff-that-comes-in-bowls, when it comes to versatility. (Stay in your lane, pizza! I don’t care if Steve Martin’s first movie The Jerk has a joke about the local “Pizza In A Cup” place.)
I’m writing this post, by the way, while we’re still two hours out from eating, so I don’t have a picture of a bowl of chili yet. Stay tuned. My stuff works great for chili dogs, though! And poured atop a bed of Fritos! And though I’ve never tried it, I always think it would taste good as an omelet filling.
And that’s how I make chili. Believe me, folks: a crockpot filling the house with wonderful aromas, be it chili or something else (the natives are already starting to clamor for Mississippi Roast!), is one of the finer pleasures that the autumnal time of year can give.
* By “Northerner”, do we mean anyone north of the Mason-Dixon line, or more along the lines of the Northeast? Because Buffalo is more a Great Lakes area. That’s a thought for another time, I suppose.
** Yes, I know. But I still own his books, I learned a whole damned lot about cooking from his books and his shows, and he’s been dead for years. I grant that he was a problematic sumbitch and will not litigate it here.
UPDATE: Since I wrote this last year, a lot of the old Frugal Gourmet shows have turned up on YouTube. This is always an ephemeral thing, but I also can’t entirely fathom anyone making this big of a copyright stink over forty-year-old cooking shows featuring a guy whose career was ended by a ghastly scandal. Here’s the episode on chili. (And yes, I’ve watched a bunch of his old episodes. His episode on Philadelphia has me planning on making pepper pot soup sometime this winter, once I get myself to an actual butcher shop and buy some tripe.)
