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.
Peter Falk died the other day, after living a good, long life of acting. Of course his most famous role was as Detective Columbo, and naturally I saw a whole bunch of variations on his standard “Oh, yes, one more thing…” quirk as Columbo on Twitter and Facebook yesterday. I love Columbo as well, although I was a bit too young to really enjoy it in its first run; I came to know Columbo through re-runs in syndication years later and through ABC’s resurrection of the character in the late 80s. (One episode I recall had William Shatner as the murderer, who was also a Rush Limbaugh-type talk radio loudmouth. Shatner and Falk played off each other pretty well in that episode.)
As much as I like Columbo, though, Peter Falk’s iconic role for me is — and always will be — the Grandfather who reads to Fred Savage in The Princess Bride. All he does is sit in a chair and gruffly read a book, but it’s just so pitch-perfect a performance. The final line of The Princess Bride is, for my money, one of the best closing lines to a movie ever, and the movie gives that line to Peter Falk. The line? It’s just three words, and Falk delivers it perfectly.
Here’s a video I found, with Falk’s entrance in the first scene and his exit in the last scene of The Princess Bride, complete with that oh, so perfect final line.
Thanks for the entertainment, Peter Falk!
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!
Roger Owen Green’s mother has passed away. Roger is one of my favorite bloggers, as well as one of my most reliable commenters and readers. I’d noticed yesterday that he hadn’t commented on any of my posts over the last few days, which is very odd…and when I went over to his blog, I saw a post that indicated that he was on his way to North Carolina to be with his mom, who had just suffered a stroke. Alas, she has now died.
Roger’s a good egg, a librarian (librarians rock) and a thoughtful observer of life (and he’s raising a terribly cute little girl). I’m saddened by his loss, and I offer him and his family my deepest condolences.
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.
I was in ninth grade, the day the Challenger exploded. I heard the news in the hall, going from one class to the next. Some kid that I thought was kind of a dork pops up and says, “Hey, didja hear about the space shuttle? It blew up.” And he smiled, like it was funny. Or maybe not that it was funny; maybe that was just his goofy 14-year-old-kid way of expressing something along the lines of “Huh. That’s not what was supposed to happen.”
By this time in my high school career, I was well on the way to becoming a music geek and wasn’t nearly as interested in the space program as I had been in my “I’m gonna be an astronaut!” phase four or five years earlier. Therefore, I didn’t know much at all about that particular shuttle mission outside of the publicity because a civilian, a teacher, was going to be on it. What was really weird, though, about that day in my school was that the news didn’t rip through the school; few people were talking about it; none of my classes had teevee’s with the footage. I didn’t see any of the coverage until I got home from school that afternoon, at which point I planted myself in front of CBS.
It seems to me that the Challenger disaster really soured this country on space exploration, or at least it put some punctuation on a souring process that had been going on for a while. There were no goals, no real sense of purpose to the whole thing. We had once built ships to reach the Moon; now we were content to stay in low-Earth orbit. Most news items on teevee relating to shuttle missions were to show the whacky choice of music Houston had chosen for the astronauts’ wake-up call. The shuttle itself was a dull-looking vehicle. The future had arrived, and it was clunky and boring…and then, awfully dangerous as well.
What are we doing in space? I have no idea. That makes me sad. When I was a kid, my conviction was rock solid that I was living in the generation that would walk on other worlds. I didn’t realize that we were basically done walking on other worlds within a year of my birth. Alas.
To wrap this up: I was, as you can probably tell from my personal politics, never a big fan of President Ronald Reagan. But his speech to the nation after the Challenger disaster was masterful.
And then there was Richard Feynman’s tenacity in focusing on the O-ring seals in the booster rockets:
Almost a month ago, I lamented the fact that one of my favorite blogs, Mental Multivitamin, had gone behind “closed doors” by switching to an open-to-invited-readers-only status. Today, M-Mv is back, and I’m happy for that…but now I’ve got a pretty good idea as to what the reason was for Mrs. M-Mv’s temporary pulling in of her cyber-welcoming mat. The tone of this post, coupled with the tone of this one, makes things regrettably, awfully, and soul-searingly clear.
I would like so very much to be wrong in my supposition, but when she writes this:
Life, though not as we knew it, does go on, although for a while there, I would not have been able to tell you how. And now all I can say is that it just does.
Well…I just don’t think I’m wrong. Thus, as one who has seen a son go before me into the good night, I can only say, I am so, so sorry, and that I wish Mrs. M-Mv and her family peace, such as they may find.
–JRRT
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.
How can it possibly have been five years since I last held my son? Time is awfully relentless. Wow.
This photo was taken just days before he decided that he’d had about enough of his limited life here with us. I can’t say I blame him for that, but…well, it would have been nice if he could have said something first. But then, it would have been nice if he could ever have said anything, at all.
Anyway, I sure hope he’s OK, wherever he is right now.
