The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I wanted to post something by Dougie Maclean and couldn’t decide which of his many wonderful songs to use, so…here’s the entirety of my favorite album of his. Enjoy! It’s just a Scot and his guitar and his audience. Sometimes it’s the simple things, innit?
Lord, what a task moving a household is. And we’re still not done! Probably about eighty percent of our stuff has made the move, and then there’s still the cleaning to be done in the old place. It really is amazing how much dirt and dust can accumulate underneath things when they don’t move for over eleven years. (It’s also amazing that I lived in one place for eleven years. Of all the places I’ve lived, the duration spent at the last apartment is the second-longest I’ve spent at a single address, and the longest if you disqualify addresses where my “living time” was occasionally broken up by things like semesters at college.)
Anyhow, I’ll have more to say about the move in the future. For now, this is a piece of music that’s been on my mind through a lot o this process: “Building the Barn”, from the score to the film Witness, by Maurice Jarre.
We’re settling into life in our new home. In fact, as I write this, I’m sitting on the new couch we just bought. It’s the first couch that The Wife and I have bought together since…ever. Almost seventeen years of marriage, and over twenty-three years of being a couple…and we’ve finally reached the point of “Hey, we should buy a couch.” Oh well, it’s not like there’s a correct order to these things, is there?
Yup, still here. My head has not exploded yet from this moving crap, which I take to be a good sign. All moving and no writing make Homer something something.
Anyway, here’s a small musical item in memory of actor Bob Hoskins, who sadly passed away yesterday. I saw him in lots of stuff — his cameo as J. Edgar Hoover in Oliver Stone’s Nixon is memorably chilling — but I suspect I’m like many in that he achieved his greatest share of immortality as Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Here is the End Credits suite from the score by Alan Silvestri.
My mood sucks and is in need of adjusting.
Why is this? Well, everything I saw in the news yesterday pissed me off. I gave a brief (and not even exhaustive) list on Twitter earlier:
CNN has made it the country's one-stop shop for Events In Which Lots Of People Die.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) April 17, 2014
Oklahoma decided to penalize homeowners who install their own solar panels, because that means Big Oil isn't getting the money.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) April 17, 2014
Oklahoma also decided that local governments that want to establish a higher minimum wage in their own area can suck it.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) April 17, 2014
Coverage of the Ukraine situation seems intent on framing it as a grade school recess fight over who gets to control the jungle gym.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) April 17, 2014
One of the Kardashians purposely tried to look like Audrey Hepburn.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) April 17, 2014
Today's installment of Pearls Before Swine (always a favorite) relies on a tired joke about Star Wars.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) April 17, 2014
My city just had a ceremonial event where a government leader "pardons" a lamb made out of butter.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) April 17, 2014
In short: Nothing is sacred and everything is terrible.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) April 17, 2014
Yeah, I’m in a crap mood. So, time to pull out the big guns: a few songs that always cheer me up when I hear them. I’ve posted some or all of these before, but so what? Mood enhancement begins…now.
In the course of writing Lighthouse Boy (not the actual title), I’ve been listening to more film music lately (more than usual, anyway), with a special ear for classic scores of the Golden Age. Without doubt, my favorite Golden Age film composer is Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose music formed the backdrop for many a fine Errol Flynn adventure. Here is a suite of his score to The Adventures of Robin Hood, played live at The Proms. (My newest addition to my “Things I Gotta Do Before I Die” list is to attend a concert or two at The Proms.)
(And as a onetime trumpet player, I was interested in one particular practice I saw here for the first time ever (it happens at the 7:28 mark, among others): the trumpeter stretches a mask of what looks like felt over the bell of the instrument. I imagine this softens the tone somewhat, muffling the trumpet without changing the instrument’s tone outright, the way a mute does. Korngold knew his way around the orchestra, that’s for sure!)
It’s not much of a secret that my musical tastes sometimes run to the more obscure, and this band is no exception. They’re not unheard of — you still hear a couple of their songs on “Greatest Hits of the 1980s” things — but The Hooters never really cracked into the mainstream, alas. I loved their blues-influenced sound and their singers’ voices, both of which sounded like they’d smoked just enough Marlboros in their lives to get a little character.
Anyway, this song is off their album One Way Home, and it’s easily my favorite off that album (which is, in turn, one of my favorite albums from the 1980s). It’s an eerie song with supernatural undertones, and I eventually ended up writing a short story based on it. That story ended up being the first tale I ever submitted for publication anywhere. It was rejected, of course, but the editor wrote a note in the margin that she’d come this close to buying it. Oh well…funny thing was, that first rejection slip felt pretty good. It felt like I was in the game, you know? (Every rejection slip since then, though? F*** those editors!)
Here are The Hooters, with “Graveyard Waltz”.
Whoa, sorry to be so late with this feature! But anyway, I was reading an article on Cracked a bit ago that said some mean things about the 1980s era for the band Genesis. I take exception to this, because, well, that’s the only era of the band whose music I know, and I like it quite a lot — in fact, as luck would have it, Invisible Touch is one of my favorite rock albums ever. I am not kidding, and those who disagree can lump it. Yes, I suppose I should investigate the earlier, more “proper” and truly progressive music of the band, but for my money, Invisible Touch is 80s rock as good as it gets, even if the lyrics do occasionally stray into silliness. I love the sound of the band, and I really dig the album’s variations of mood throughout, from bright dance-pop to bleak moodiness to two of the best 80s ballads ever. Yes, I love Invisible Touch, and I’m not afraid to say it! Nor am I afraid to feature it on Something for Thursday. Here’s the entire album: Invisible Touch.
A short song today, but a favorite of mine.
Sheila O’Malley often sets her music player to “shuffle”, and then she will post the list of songs that it plays, with comment. I always look forward to these posts, even if I usually don’t have a lot of knowledge of the songs she mentions. This one, however, I know quite well: “Lodi” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
CCR is one of my favorite bands of all time, and The Wife and I have an odd ritual where whenever CCR comes up in the background of our daily lives — car radio, music in a store, whatever — I have to say, “CCR!” Just one of those weird things…but this song isn’t usually one of the ones that comes up in general listening situations. I’m not sure why that is, but “Lodi” is a sad song about failed dreams, about what happens when life doesn’t meet our expectations. It’s along the same lines as the famous admonition (by John Lennon?) that “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”
The lyrics to “Lodi” are simple, but the words are so perfectly chosen to the song’s message: “Rode into town on a Greyhound, I’ll be walking out if I go”; “You know I’d catch the next train back to where I live”…that last is a killer. “Where I live”. By this point, our singer’s been stuck in Lodi for a very long time, and yet, it’s not where he lives. He still believes this is temporary, a hitch in the plan. But we know: You live in Lodi now. Lodi’s home, Lodi’s the best you’re ever gonna have in this world.
Here’s “Lodi” by CCR.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s revisit of Carl Sagan’s seminal Cosmos arrives in just a couple weeks. One of the finest aspects of the original show was its music, carefully selected to form almost its own version of the Voyager record. Here are a few selections of the Cosmos music!
The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.