The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
In truth, I don’t think I’d ever heard a single song by Amy Winehouse until just a few minutes ago. It was this one: her cover of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”, which is a long-standing favorite love song of mine to begin with.
On the basis of that, it seems clear to me that a talent was lost today. And that’s always a sad thing. I hope she has found peace.
No weirdness this week, just awesome, in honor of saxophone great Clarence Clemons, who passed away yesterday. This is my favorite Bruce Springsteen song: here’s “Born to Run”.
In truth, I don’t know Springsteen’s oeuvre all that well; he’s always been one of those people whose work I eternally mean to explore more without ever actually doing it. I think it may be time. I always thought Clarence Clemons was all kinds of terrific. May his work be remembered for decades to come!
I’m listening to James Newton Howard’s score to Green Lantern, and…well, I really hope that the rest of the movie rises above the music Howard has written for it.
Howard is one of the more respected composers active today — quite a few of the “Goldsmith was God” freaks at FilmScoreMonthly, for instance, seem to view Howard as Goldsmith’s heir apparent. But not on the basis of Green Lantern. Boy howdy, this score is awful.
Like many scores nowadays, this is a blend of orchestral and techno elements. I have no problem with this at all. What I do have a problem with is how depressingly conventional this score is. There is literally nothing distinctive about it. There is no sense of epic scope, to suggest Green Lantern’s blend of space opera and superhero genre. The action music could be slotted into nearly any action sequence in any film of the last twenty years; the “wonder” music for when Hal Jordan first flies as one of the Green Lanterns sounds like any other “wonder” music out there.
And worst of all, there is virtually no melody to be found here. None. There are some motifs that I heard several times, but nothing that ever develops into anything of substance. I recall when superhero flicks had themes. John Williams wrote one of the most famous ones of all time for Superman. Danny Elfman did a fine theme for Batman. Jerry Goldsmith wrote a good theme for Supergirl (it’s virtually unknown these days because, like most Goldsmith scores, it accompanied an absolute dog of a movie).
But these days? There are no big melodies, no big themes, just subdued motifs that you have to study the score to find and which aren’t remotely memorable when you do.
God, what a crashing disappointment. James Newton Howard can do so much better than this. He has done so much better than this. I truly, deeply hope that melody can make a triumphant return to film music one day soon. Michael Giacchino can’t do it all by himself.
Today is “Record Store Day”. I won’t be going to any record stores today, simply because I’ve got other stuff to do today. But like many folks of my age group, I miss the music stores of yore.
Record stores for me always ran a close-second to bookstores for sheer amazement potential. Depending on the size of the store, I could spend quite a bit of time in a record store. If it was your typical small record store in a mall, I could be in there for twenty minutes or so — long enough for me to dig through the soundtrack section, and later, the classical and rock sections. But at bigger stores — Buffalo’s old Record Theatre locations, for example, or my personal recorded music Mecca, Toronto’s Sam the Record Man — I could get lost in those places for hours. (Ahhhh, Sam the Record Man — what a great place that was! I’d get so excited, seeing those giant spinning neon records on the storefront.)
As I grew up in a small town in Western New York that only had one record store — which was a mall store — I never had the experience of “being a regular at the local record store”. I’d catch glimpses of that culture when I’d come with my parents to Buffalo and sometimes beg for a stop at Record Theatre or some such place (joints which were usually a bit off the beaten path of wherever else we wanted to go that day). I’d see customers casually gathered around the registers, talking about the finer points of albums by various artists. I’d walk right by on my way to the classical section, where I’d invariably be the youngest person there.
There was a small classical-only store in Rochester years ago that I liked; this place had the same kind of record-store vibe to it that any rock-centric record store has, except the regulars at the register would be vigorously debating things like which was better, Herbert von Karajan’s first Beethoven cycle or his second one, or whether the Fritz Reiner era of the Chicago Symphony was better than the Sir Georg Solti era, and so on. I once bought a Berlioz record there, and seeing that the conductor was Charles Dutoit, the guy at the register nodded and said, “Oh yeah, this guy does some good Berlioz. But you really need to hear Colin Davis do Berlioz.” And luckily, I was able to say, “I’ve already got it. Davis is awesome!”
Of course, record stores transitioned to “music stores” once the compact disc pushed the vinyl out the door. I always liked the vinyl, personally — the sound of a brand-new record was great, but the drawbacks were obvious, primarily in the way the LP sound deteriorated a tiny bit with every scraping of the grooves by the needle. I spent two or three years primarily listening to music on cassettes, mainly from 1988 to 1991 or so. I’d buy blank tapes a lot of times and record my LPs onto them, so as to avoid the wear-and-tear on the records, a task which was supplanted once the CD took over for good. I still loved going to music stores, though — I was never so much in it for the format as I was for the music, and for a time there, the music store selections got better and better, as the small CDs took up far less rack space than the old LPs (especially once CDs stopped getting packaged in those ridiculous tall cardboard boxes, and when stores stopped using those idiotic plastic guard-things for theft deterrence).
Of course, we all know where this ended up; the rise of digital music and downloading and a general degree to which music lovers were sick of being asked to pay $17 for a CD pretty much drove the mainstream record/music store into oblivion, leaving select few outlets open as niche stores. I do sometimes miss browsing at music stores, but I’ve adapted quite a lot to the “new” way music gets around, by following recommendations from people I trust, by sampling, by listening to clips on Amazon and YouTube and the like. Record stores were a big part of my adolescence; I’m kind of surprised to reflect on it and realize that I don’t miss them more than I do.
I need to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s again, because I’ve only seen it once and it’s just silly to allow a film you loved the one time you saw it to go unwatched again. I’ve just read a new book called Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., by Sam Wasson, about the making of the movie. Interestingly, the book takes a wider view of the making of Breakfast, by showing us the lives of the principals involved in the film leading up to the project that would bring them all together. He gives biographical sketches of Truman Capote and Audrey Hepburn, of screenwriter George Axelrod and costumer Edith Head, of Mel Ferrer and Blake Edwards and many others who came to make the movie. Wasson’s approach is almost novelistic, and if it’s not an exhaustively detailed account of a single film’s production, it compensates for that by being more of a portrait of sorts of the film’s genesis.
It’s not a portrait in which all the particulars look perfect, either. Truman Capote was apparently a fairly odd individual with a train-wreck of a childhood; Audrey Hepburn is seen as something of a tragic figure as well, enduring multiple miscarriages in a marriage that doesn’t appear terribly happy. For all the skill Blake Edwards brought to the film, he is not without fault: he cast Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi. And though he is only in the book briefly, George Peppard — the film’s male lead — was apparently a colossal jerk on the set.
Here is an excerpt from the book, detailing Henry Mancini’s efforts at coming up with a song for the movie…and more specifically, a song for Holly Golightly, Audrey Hepburn’s troubled and wounded character.
For a full month, slouching on the rented piano he kept in the garage, Henry Mancini agonized over the song. What had he gotten himself into? Over and over again, he replayed, again and again, Audrey’s voice in his head. He caught Funny Face [a musical Hepburn had done previously with Fred Astaire] on TV a few nights earlier, and with the short range — her range — of an octave and one, tried riffing on Audrey’s rendition of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” I could cry salty tears….Everything he tried died on the second or third note. I could cry…But for lack of an alternative, he stuck to it. Cry salty…cry salty tears…But the stucking didn’t stick. Nothing did. If Mancini didn’t deliver on this, what would he say to Jurow and Shepherd [the film’s producers], or to Blake [Edwards, the director], who’d had faith in him, who stuck his neck out? Even worse, what would he tell himself the next tim ehe sat down with a pipe at the piano? “You’ll do it, Hank”? There were only so many times his wife, Ginny, could say it to him. Only so many more times he would let himself go on to her about what kind of song this girl would sing. Was a Broadway-style melody actually the right choice for “travelin’ through the pastures of the sky”? That didn’t seem to fit with the private moment on a fire escape. But maybe the blues would. Where have I…Maybe like a jazzy pop thing. Or a country thing. Was that what was in her heart?
This was a time when Holly would cut through the pretense and show, for the length of a song, who she really was beneath all the sophistication. Right: beneath the sophistication. Whatever that sounded like, it had to be simple.
And then — as these things tend to happen — it came suddenly. Three notes: C, G, F. It was promising. Not a song, but a beginning. Staying within the range of an octave and one, and being careful to keep the melody all in the same key — much simpler that way — Mancini turned out the next several notes, all on the white keys. They didn’t sound bad — actually, they sounded good. At first, he went ahead carefully, mindful of not leaping too far beyond his flow, and then, as he gained momentum, proceeded half consciously. Now it was all falling out of him. A moment later it was automatic — he was taking dictation. As if they knew just where to go, as if they had been there many times before, the remaining notes obediently assumed their place on the page. Twenty minutes later, the composer looked up from the piano. The song was written.
The next day, Mancini made a record of it and took it in to Edwards. Blake loved it. Then it was to Paramount to play the tune for Shepherd and Jurow. “Hank brought a 78 record up to our office,” recalls Shepherd, “and he said, ‘Let us know what you think of it.’ He just laid it down and left. Marty and I listened to it and we thought it was terrific.”
“Who do you want to write the lyrics?” they asked.
“Johnny Mercer,” was the reply. Mancini didn’t even have to think about it.
The result, of course, was “Moon River”.
Maybe I can’t hold myself up as any kind of expert, but this surely has to be one of the perfect moments in all cinema. This woman is having a moment all for herself, on the fire escape at the back of her apartment. We first saw her in an elegant black dress, but now she’s in jeans and a sweatshirt with her hair beneath a towel. She has no idea anyone’s listening, and maybe she doesn’t even care; all she is doing is singing this simple tune with its lyrics that are both sad and hopeful. And the setting of the music is so wisely done, the way the muted strings rise up underneath the song in the second verse. Hepburn’s Holly Golightly seems so sad here — but the nature of the sadness isn’t spelled out at all. Does she miss something or someone? Does she feel that her life has gone awry? The film will fill in some of those blanks, but the song is, all at once, sad and hopeful and mysterious.
And that little thing Hepburn does at the end, there, when she’s done singing? When she looks up and sees her upstairs neighbor listening? And without a trace of embarrassment, she just smiles and says “Hi”? That’s one of those Audrey Hepburn moments, the ones that make me want to give her my heart, just because.
John Barry, one of the most distinctive film composers of all time, has died.
Barry could often, for me, be a “hit or miss” kind of composer, but when he hit — which in my experience was more often than not — oh man, did he hit. He’s probably best known for his work on the James Bond series, but Barry had a very long career of composing. He had a seemingly inexhaustible ability to come up with lush, gorgeous melodies, and he had an approach to film scoring that was all his own (and which, sadly, fell out of favor in the 1990s).
I could probably come up with dozens of examples of Barry’s music, but I don’t have time this morning (I’m writing this before work, because I don’t want to go all day without acknowledging his passing), so here are just a few.
Farewell, Mr. Barry.
Yeah…I’m trippin’ on the classic Discovery Channel commercial again. This time I’m discovering cool parodies!
The original, for reminder’s sake:
But I didn’t know that the Discovery Channel did a newer version:
And a few take-offs….
I could listen to that friggin’ song all night. Boom de yada!
I was nine years old when John Lennon died; I had no idea, really, who he was when I first heard the name. I remember hearing the news on the radio as I was driven to school the next morning. I knew nothing then about him or The Beatles. And ultimately, since I didn’t start loving his music (and the rest of ’em) until just a couple of years ago, he’d really been dead 28 years before he came to mean something to me.
So, in a way, John Lennon is, to me, not unlike Berlioz or Wagner or Mozart: a dead artist whose work came to mean something to me when he was already gone. That’s not intended to be any kind of deep statement, just a thought….
Imagine.
