Here’s something cool: Franz von Suppe’s overture Poet and Peasant, played by the MGM Symphony Orchestra in a film made in 1955. My understanding is that films like these used to be part of the pre-feature entertainment in movie theaters. Would that they would do stuff like this again!
I’m especially fascinated here by the orchestra itself: it’s a big group, with a ton of strings, and the layout is pretty interesting, too, with the harps right down between the cellos and the violas, and the basses way up in the back of the entire orchestra. This is very cool!
Something a bit different for this week — an entire episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. This is one of my favorite episodes. It’s not one of the “famous” episodes, like “The Trouble with Tribbles” or “The Menagerie” or “The City on the Edge of Forever”, but this one is one of the series’s best episodes anyway, with its SFnal weirdness, a scary mystery that gives way to a gently beautiful love story. This is the kind of story that makes me wonder what various writers or creative folks in Hollywood are talking about when they imply that their work is better than SF because their stuff is about characters. Without terrific character writing, this wonderful episode just wouldn’t work.
This episode features some outstanding acting by the leads, and some of the series’s finest music. Here’s “Metamorphosis”.
OK, a bit different, inspired a bit by my Wednesday Dichotomy post from yesterday.
I’ve always loved the movie A Fish Called Wanda, the raunchy and hilarious diamond heist caper flick that starred John Cleese, Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin. I remember when I first saw it, with my parents, and I was thinking, “Hmmm, for a movie that’s getting rave reviews for how funny it is, so far it’s only mildly amusing here and there.” Well, it turns out that the movie has about thirty minutes or so of set-up stuff that’s amusing but never hilarious — but once the movie gets going, it’s one of the funniest damned things I’ve ever seen. I’ve never once watched the movie and not laughed at it and its sly wit. (Even some of the “meta” humor in it, such as the fact that the character George Thomason is played by an actor named Tom Georgeson.)
Anyhow, Wanda was a staple of our movie viewing in college. We watched the movie all the time, probably at least once a month, to the point that we wore out my VHS copy. What was cool about that VHS tape is that it’s one of the first examples I can remember of an advertisement for something other than another movie preceding the film itself. Now, usually ads annoy me and I ignore them, but this one was awesome because they tied it right into the movie itself, so much so that we never ever ever fast-forwarded through it. To this day, when I need to write a post about something relating to the nuts and bolts of this blog, I always use the phrase that leads off this ad, “A Very Public Service Message”.
Anyway, here’s the ad. John Cleese is hawking Schweppes beverages. Schweppes Schweppes Schweppes Schweppes Schweppes Schweppes Schweppes!
UPDATE: What happens when you try throwing together a post about anything you can possibly think of late at night on a day when you’ve been up since five in the morning? Errors, that’s what. So, below wherever you read “Bakshi”, substitute “Rankin Bass”, if you please. I don’t know where my head was on that, but….
Sorry, folks, but today was a solid kick-in-the-arse kind of day. A very early start at work for a big project, resulting in a brain of mush in the evening.
Anyway, way back before Peter Jackson took the reins of filming Middle Earth, the Ralph Bakshi animation studios took a shot at the work of JRR Tolkien. The animated Lord of the Rings is legendarily bad, as is the later follow-up for teevee, Return of the King. But their film of The Hobbit is not without its charms. The animation wasn’t the best, but the actual art was quite good, and the Bakshi Middle Earth had a look all its own. It took me a little while, actually, when watching Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring the first ever time to get my head past the fact that his hobbits didn’t look like this:
The film did a fairly nice job with the songs. It all has a 1970s folk sound to it, but they are still quite charming. Here’s the title song, “The Greatest Adventure”:
And this, Glenn Yarborough’s setting of the “old walking song” that is heard throughout all of The Hobbit and LOTR:
In a scene where a bunch of goblins are attacking Bilbo and the dwarves, the goblins sing this nasty ditty (words by JRRT):
And one of my favorite selections, the song sung by the Dwarves to Bilbo at the beginning, when they are explaining their mission to go back to Lonely Mountain and take back what is theirs:
As a tonic for the latest crime against music perpetrated on American Idol by the inexplicably beloved crappy singer Lee DeWyze, here’s Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” the way the thing is supposed to sound:
Lee turned it into an arena-rock anthem. It was the most vile thing I’ve heard since…Lee ruined “Falling Slowly” by Glen Hansard and Markita Irglova…or since Lee brutally strangled “Hey Jude” and then dragged the bloody corpse around the stage….
Here’s a favorite song of mine, sung by Tony Bennett: “Stranger in Paradise”.
The song is from the musical Kismet, but the melody actually goes back farther than that, being actually taken from the Polovtsian Dances by Alexander Borodin.
How do I feel about mining classical music for melodies for popular song? Generally I’m fine with it, actually. Especially since it has often gone the other way, as well, with many great classical composers creating masterworks out of their own native folk songs.
I’ve never been the biggest fan of Wynton Marsalis, but my favorite album of his is definitely the recording he did with the Eastman Wind Ensemble of solo pieces for cornet, light virtuoso pieces which date back to the era of concert bands touring from town to town, playing concerts in the gazebo in the park. This is the type of music the River City Boy’s Band would have played, had Professor Harold Hill actually been a music teacher instead of a swindler.
Anyway, here’s Wynton Marsalis playing a set of variations on Carnival of Venice.
It’s Earth Day. Here’s Vangelis’s “Heaven and Hell”, the part used for the main titles of Carl Sagan’s great series Cosmos:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
I discovered the music of Percy Grainger in college. Grainger was a pretty odd fellow, and his music could be very odd as well. He was keenly interested in folk song, and composed treatments of folk songs that tried to preserve what he recorded when he walked around, collecting songs, meter and odd deliveries and all. And not that anyone listening would ever know this, but his scores eschewed the traditional Italian musical words, using, for example, “Louden lots” in place of crescendo.
Here’s Grainger’s wonderful “Children’s March: Over the Hills and Far Away”.
