Something for Thursday (Halloween edition!)

Yes, it's Halloween today! Oooooooh! Anyway, I wrote an article for The Geekiverse the other day summing up a selection of eerie, scary, and spooky classical and film music selections, some of which have previously run on this blog; go check it out for some good stuff!

But we also need something here, so--if I've done this correctly--we should have embedded below a playlist of the album The Truth and the Light, which takes Mark Snow's wonderfully ethereal and haunting music from the first few seasons of The X-Files and combines it with sound effects and snippets of dialog to make a pretty compelling soundscape. Enjoy, and Happy Halloween!

UPDATE: The list I embedded wasn't satisfactory (the album tracks are supposed to lead into one another, and whoever put the tracks on YT included long pauses), so I've embedded a different version that may or may not play the next track automatically. Sigh....

Tone Poem Tuesday

(via)

OK, we're gonna stretch the idea of the tone poem to its breaking point here: it's an entire scene from an opera! Specifically, the wonderful opera Der Freischutz by Carl Maria von Weber. This opera is often cited as the first true opera of the Romantic era, and in its pages one finds (in addition to wonderful music) a lot of ideas about musical storytelling and motif that would later be taken to their logical apotheoses by Richard Wagner. Der Freischutz tells the story of a marksman who, in order to win a shooting contest, enters into a contract with the Devil for seven magic bullets. The first six will kill anything the hunter wishes, never missing their targets; the seventh, however, will be under the control of the Devil himself.

One of this opera's most famous passages is the scene in the second act where our hero, Max, goes to a wooded glen--called the Wolf's Glen--to meet with the Devil and contract for the casting of the magic bullets. This scene is stark and horrific, and Weber's scoring of the scene has been called "the most expressive rendering of the gruesome that is to be found in a musical score". Even now, two hundred years after the opera's composition, the Wolf's Glen scene is unnerving stuff. Here it is, and Happy Halloween!

Tone Poem Tuesday

Time for a departure for this series: instead of an orchestral work, a solo piano work! This is the Piano Sonata No. 9 by Alexander Scriabin, a single-movement work that is highly unsettling and even delirious as it moves through its eight minutes. The piece's dissonance and reliance on trills throughout creates a strong feel of unsettling unstability, so much so that the work took on the nickname "The Black Mass," as a counterpart to an earlier of Scriabin's that was subtitled "The White Mass".

Recent Adventures

It's been a whirlwind at Casa Jaquandor ever since, oh, Labor Day weekend! September was an abnormally busy time at The Store for me (I worked more than 46 hours in two different weeks), I got sick in the middle of all that (one of those annoying colds that's only really bad for a day but lingers, annoyingly and hackingly, for two weeks afterward), and we took our annual trip to Ithaca in the midst of my first real vacation since last winter. Now we're more than halfway through October, and things are settling back to our usual Dull Roar. But what's been going on, you may ask? (Well, even if you don't ask, I'm telling you, because that's how I roll.)

:: I guess we'll start with writing: With The Savior Worlds (The Song of Forgotten Stars, book IV) off with beta readers and with two other manuscripts in a state of near-readiness for beta reads themselves, I've moved on to working through the manuscript for The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy, Book One (not the actual title). This isn't a full edit, per se, although I am making revision notes and will make one more pass through the manuscript when I'm done with this one. This is instead a refresher course of sorts as I get ready to draft Lighthouse Boy, Book Two, which is actually the second part of this massive book. This is my epic fantasy duology, although in light of it containing no actual magic whatsoever and the only real fantastic element being that it takes place in a completely fictional world, this book is more Dumas than Tolkien. I haven't read Book One in a long time, and before I write Book Two I need to refamiliarize myself with the minutiae of the story.

It's a big book, though! Did I mention that it's a big book? Because it's big! Here's me, holding the Blunt Force Trauma weapon of a manuscript (which is over 235,000 words):


This being the case, I am not sure that I'll be doing NaNoWriMo this year. I am, in fact, leaning toward a year off before I come back in 2020.

:: Over the last couple of months, I've written things for The Geekiverse! Here are a few links:

Book review: The Throne of the Five Winds, by S.C. Emmett
Oh, snap! Thinking about the realities of a post-Thanos fingersnap world
The Real ranking of the Star Wars movies
Graphic novel review: On a Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden

More to come! I enjoy writing for The Geekiverse. It's a fun bunch of folk!

:: Thanks to a deal I spotted on eBay (thank you, email alersts!), I managed to snag a particular Holy Grail of mine in the bib overalls department: a pair of new, raw denim hickory striped Lee overalls. I've written before on how Lee overalls tend to be my Platonic ideal of the entire overalls concept, and while I already owned a pair like this (and love them!), that pair is very soft and well-worn. These...are not. I managed to win the auction to buy them, and once I got them I soaked them, dried them, and started wearing them. And they are fantastic.










:: I enjoy writing in public libraries more than anyplace else, except for my own desk in my own home library. My favorite local libraries that I enjoy the most are the one in my own hometown of Orchard Park, the Julia Reinstein library in Cheektowaga, and the Central Library in downtown Buffalo. While on vacation a few weeks ago I was able to also visit for the first time (after driving by a lot over the years and always thinking, "Wow, that's a cool-looking library") the Lancaster, NY branch. And it is indeed a lovely library!




Public libraries are always amazing places, to me. I don't remember ever not loving them, all the way back to when my parents would drop me off at a local library for a couple of hours while they went and did something at work or took a class or did something that they didn't need me around for. (You could get away with that in the 1970s, after all.)

:: I mentioned above our trip to Ithaca. More on that in another post.

:: And more doggo-related adventures!




More to come!

Bad Joke Friday

A friend posted this on Facebook, and it is well and truly bad.

My dentist said he could put me under with gas, or with a canoe paddle. It was an ether/oar situation.

Something for Thursday

On Twitter the other day, one of my fellow scribes indicated a big fondness for gold old fashioned love triangles. And me, being the huge Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fan that I am*, immediately thought of one of my favorite songs from that wonderful (and even though it's only been gone since last season, deeply-missed) musical comedy show. So here it is: "The Math of Love Triangles"!


* Goodness, it appears that I never waxed properly poetic about that show's last three seasons! Add that to my list, I suppose....

Tone Poem Tuesday

My October tradition in this series is to feature works of music that are dark, or macabre, or outright tinged with terror. This one is a melancholy meditation, a brooding work on the journey to death. Here is Sergei Rachmaninov's epic tone poem, The Isle of the Dead. The work pulses and rocks with the uneasy waves, but as the work progresses, a sad lyricism takes over, and the whole work is punctuated by quotes from the Dies irae, the death-chant that Rachmaninov found uniquely compelling and quoted in a number of his works.

Tone Poem Tuesday (Wednesday Edition)

It's October, so it's time to feature spooky stuff here! First up, some film music: A suite from John Williams's score to The Fury, a Brian De Palma-directed horror movie from 1978. This was right in the middle of Williams's most notable creative stretch, but this score is generally unfamiliar because the film itself has pretty much vanished into obscurity. (Whether deservedly or not, I couldn't say; I've never seen it.)

Something for Thursday

Abbey Road is fifty years old this week. This kind of blows my mind. I don't know why it does, but it does. Anyway, my favorite Beatles song ever happens to come from that very album, so here it is.

Tone Poem Tuesday

A repeat today, but one I haven't posted in nearly two and a half years, so I don't feel so bad about it. It's a work by Jules Massenet called Visions, and I know nothing more about it now than I did then (see the earlier post for details). It's a dreamy, meditative, and affecting work. Enjoy!