Scenes of Almost-Winter

As I write this we're about eleven days or so from the start of winter. I live in the Buffalo area, though, and winter is starting to show itself, like an impatient performer eager to take the stage. In fact, around here the last third of autumn really tends to be indistinguishable from autumn. We're not blanketed with a snowpack that will last months just yet, but it's coming. Meantime, here is a set of wintry images from Western New York. The first photo is from November 3; the last from yesterday.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Enya.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

OK, so after a really busy day of errands and whatnot yesterday I suddenly remembered about 11:00pm that I hadn't posted a Daily Dose, so I went with a comedy number by Johnny Carson that I use every year. But that's far from the only comedic take on The Twelve Days of Christmas! Nope, not at all. In fact, it's probably more common to hear comedic takes on that old carol than to hear the thing actually performed straight. Cases in point:











This one here is particularly neat if you're a music history buff:



And what about twelve days after Christmas?


And if you must hear "12 Days" performed perfectly nicely with no comedy attached, here you go:

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

One of my favorite Christmas comedy bits:

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Even now it comes as a surprise to a lot of people that the trumpet isn't just an instrument for blazing fanfares and astonishing brass coluratura fireworks. The trumpet can be a deeply lyrical instrument as well, as is heard in this short selection by the amazing Tine Thing Helseth. Here is Ms. Helseth with "In the Bleak Midwinter".

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

So tonight I get to go see a live performance by the biggest star I will ever have seen live: Celine Dion! In that case, we'd better hear some of her Christmas work, right?

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Scottish singer and songwriter Dougie MacLean has been a favorite artist of mine for years, but I only just today learned that he wrote a Christmas song of his own. And here it is!

Tone Poem Tuesday

So this week we conclude our trip through Dvorak's trio of tone poems that he called "Nature, Life, and Love" with the Othello Overture. There was some definite Shakespearean inspiration for Dvorak here, but it's not wise to try to find exact correspondences in the music to the drama. The overture is definitely more stormy and takes a darker tone than the previous two installments in this trio of overtures. For a work whose alternate title indicates that what is being explored is love, it certainly seems that Dvorak has a view of love that doesn't exclude that emotion's more introspective and combative elements.

Here is Dvorak's Othello Overture.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

Here are some selections from the album The Bells of Dublin, a Christmas album by The Chieftains and various other artists. Enjoy! (The third selection is a bit of Christmas-themed gallows humor, if you thought that such a thing could exist!)

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

One of the great sopranos left us just a couple of months ago: Jessye Norman, who died September 30 at 74 years of age. Norman was not only an amazing singer with the kind of voice that could fill a cathedral, but she was also extremely versatile, refusing to be typecast or limited in the roles she was able to perform or music she was able to sing. (She was even quoted at one point as saying "Pigeonholes are for pigeons." Norman had impeccable dramatic control of her voice at all times, and she sang with a stunning clarity that was always something amazing to hear.

This song was actually written for Jessye Norman, by composer Donald Fraser. I haven't been able to find a whole lot of information about it, but Fraser might have written it while at a party at which Norman was guest of honor. The song's title is "This Christmastide", but it is also apparently known as "Jessye's Carol". Enjoy!

Memories of a Map

When I was a kid we had a map on the wall of the United States. I haven't thought of that map in years, until...well, I'll get to that.

The Wife and I just got back from a one-night trip to Rochester, where one of the things we did was shop at a very large antique mall. One reason I love antiquing, in addition to the fact that you can really get some unique items, is that each thing there has a memory of some kind attached to it. Not necessarily mine, but in this age of disposable stuff hanging from hooks in clamshell plastic boxes in stores, to look at things that belonged to someone once is pretty special. And if I can find an item that matches something I used to own, well, that's definitely special. Many times when I'm antiquing I'll see something--a particular set of cookie cutters, for example, or maybe a movie tie-in drinking glass that Burger King once sold, a glass that we actually had. When I see an antique item for sale that we used to own, it transports me instantly. It doesn't matter in the least bit if the item in question is one that I haven't thought about in several decades.

I had that same experience last night while scrolling through Twitter. One person re-tweeted (for those not on Twitter, that's when you re-post something someone else said, to call it to the attention of people who are following your Twitter feed) a tweet from a person who apparently regularly visits estate sales. This person said the following:

I go estate sale shopping regularly and whenever I find an unfinished embroidery project I buy it and finish it bc there’s no way that soul is resting with an unfinished project left behind. One day I found this stunner for $5.

She went on to tell a story about a series of embroidered quilt squares that she found, and her desire to buy all those squares and finish that quilt. That's a very lovely thought, but what stopped me in my tracks was the photo that accompanied the tweet quoted above. She refers to "this stunner", and the stunner was this embroidered map of the United States:

That is what stopped me cold.

My grandmother, you see, embroidered that very map for my family. It hung on our wall for years, but eventually...I honestly don't know. I suppose it went the route of many such things as the years passed and as we moved from house to house to house before finally settling. I couldn't even tell you reliably which house was the last one we lived in when I remember seeing this map on the wall, but...it was there, for a long time.

And I have never once thought about that old embroidered US map at all, not one single time, in all the years from whenever the last time I looked at it as a kid was to this very day. When it just showed up, quite entirely randomly, in my Twitter feed.

You never know what memories are lying around, buried deep enough to not be recalled but not so deep that a single image seen while lazily scrolling some corner of the Internet can't jolt it back to the present, as if that memory had never been mislaid in the first place.

The person who posted about that embroidered map is Shannon Downey of Badass Cross Stitch. You can read the account of her finding the map on her twitter feed, here. Just keep scrolling down.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Wow, it's December already! I remember when I was a kid having adults tell me how much quicker the years go by when you're older, and like every other kid I suppose, I pretty much blew off that wisdom at the time. After all, it stood in such blazing contrast to my own experience, when the years just ground on by, when the concept of "a year from now" seemed like an eternity. And now...here I am, a mere 48 years old with hopefully quite a few to go, and I find myself sitting here on December 1 saying, "Ye Gods, where did my year go?" Another year over...what have I done?

Those are thoughts for another day...but for now, as December dawns, here is Melissa Ethridge singing the words of John Lennon.

Tone Poem Tuesday

This week we have the second part of Dvorak's trilogy of tone poems that he called "Nature, Life, and Love": the "Carnival" overture. This overture launches into a dance-like rhythm from the very opening bars, and its energy almost never abates throughout, and by the time the work ends nine minutes or so later,you can almost hear the wild dancers in a village square exhaling with relief as they are finally allowed to fall, gasping, to the ground as the orchestra's work ends. As a representation of the sheer energy and joy of life that often inhabits Dvorak's music, the "Carnival" overture is unusually potent.

Something for Thursday

How about some Star Trek music!

Specifically, the incidental music from an episode of The Original Series. More specifically, the episode Metamorphosis.

If you've never seen this particular episode, I can't recommend it highly enough; I consider it Star Trek at its best. In the episode a mysterious energy field takes over a shuttlecraft on which Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy are en route back to the Enterprise after picking up an ambassador named Nancy Hedford, because the ambassador has contracted a rare disease and has to receive treatment. The energy field diverts the shuttle to an uncharted planet which is home to a single human man, and it turns out that this man is Zefram Cochrane, inventor of the warp drive and a man who should be dead because he lived something like two hundred years prior to the episode. We learn that he was brought to this planet by that energy field, and that the field has brought Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the ambassador there to provide Cochrane with companionship.

After some ill-fated attempts at escape, Kirk and company realize that the energy field (which Cochrane calls "The Companion") is actually female (keep in mind, this show was written by 1960s views on gender roles) and considers itself Cochrane's lover. They try to convince The Companion to let them go, with Kirk pointing out that since Cochrane and the Companion are different species, they can never truly love. The Companion merges with Ambassador Hedford, curing her disease and thus becoming human, and as Kirk and company depart, Cochrane and Hedford/the Companion are settling in for a lifetime together.

Setting aside the 1960s notions of love and gender, Metamorphosis is one of the finest science fiction love stories I know, relying on insight and discussion over phasers and fistfights. It also boasts a deeply lovely and finely textured music score by George Duning which highlights the otherworldly nature of the beings involved and the hesitant wonder of their first steps into the world of love. This suite was apparently edited together by someone with good sound processing abilities, even if they weren't entirely able to isolate the music from the occasional sound effects of the show. Enjoy!

Tone Poem Tuesday

Let's check in on Antonin Dvorak, shall we? He's always good for a solid listen, and today's work is no exception. It's the concert overture In Nature's Realm, which Dvorak composed as part of a trilogy of concert overtures. The entire trilogy was called Nature, Life, and Love, but Dvorak eventually split the three component works of the trilogy up, resulting in the present work, Carnival, and Othello. We'll hear the other two in due course, but In Nature's Realm is a typically wonderful Dvorak work, full of pastoral beauty, natural lyricism, and that ever-typical Dvorakian energy and momentum. Like most of this composer's works, there is a sense of proportion that hews throughout, and the opening passages with answering motifs that sound like horn calls as they build to the first big statement suggest the magic of a sunrise in verdant hills.

Antonin Dvorak is the type of composer to whom I like to return when the air is coldest and the sky darkest, if that makes sense. He reminds me of warmer and sunnier days. Here is his In Nature's Realm overture.

Tone Poem Tuesday

Oddly, given my love of Sergei Rachmaninov, it's odd that I've heard this particular work of his only a couple of times, and not at all in the last five or six years. "The Rock" is a tone poem Rachmaninov wrote early in his career, when he was just twenty years old. The piece is surprisingly impressionistic and colorful for a composer who would later be known for achingly lyrical post-Romanticism, but the work also displays Rachmaninov's skill for orchestration, all the more surprising for a composer so strongly associated with the piano (contrasting with, say, Franz Liszt, whose orchestrations were occasionally bound by his deep understanding of the piano).

The Rock is partially based on a fragment of poetry:

The golden cloud slept through the night
Upon the breast of the giant-rock

The piece also draws (according to the composer) from a Chekhov short story in which a man, stuck in a blizzard, tells a young woman the story of his life and his struggles. There is certainly that kind of brooding at work here in this piece...but of course there's brooding. We're talking about Sergei Rachmaninov here.

Here is The Rock.

Something for Thursday

I just read a short while ago that Valerie Heywood, a violist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, recently passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. Harper served with the orchestra as principal violist from 1991 to 2017, and she remained with the orchestra after stepping down from the Principal Viola chair. The viola has always been my personal favorite of the string family for a number of reasons, but I am chiefly drawn to its mid-range tone between the soaring heights of the violins and the tenor body of the cellos. The viola tends to be overlooked a lot of the time, and while the concert literature abounds with great concerted works for violin and cello, there are fewer such pieces for the viola, so when the violist gets a chance to shine, it's usually a special moment. The solo viola is used to amazing effect in Berlioz's second symphony, Harold in Italy, but that work isn't a concerto designed to exhibit the violist's skill but rather a symphony where the solo violist is an extra, added voice that adds perspective to the symphony's action.

Here, offered in remembrance of Valerie Heywood, is the Viola Sonata in D minor by Mikhail Glinka. Thank you for your musical gifts, Ms. Heywood.

Tone Poem Tuesday

After the month of dark and grim and scary and brooding music, let's return to something a bit lighter, shall we? This duofold selection is one of the most beloved opera extracts of all time; in fact, this selection is so popular that it has almost completely overshadowed the actual opera from which it comes. The Polka and Fugue from Schwanda the Bagpiper is nine minutes of pure delight. The opera was written by Jaromir Weinberger, a Czech composer who later emigrated to the United States. Weinberger was apparently prolific, but only this particular opera lives on of all his works, and that only occasionally. The Polka and Fugue is a mainstay of concert halls and recordings, though. It's quite an orchestral showpiece and a complex bit of contrapuntal writing (apparently a particular strength of Weinberger as a composer), and this performance especially puts the "showpiece" aspects of the work on display. You should listen to this with the sound up a bit, if you can; this is vintage Chicago Symphony Orchestra when Fritz Reiner was at the helm. The former trumpet player in me thrills at these old recordings, hearing Adolph Herseth soaring above it all. Just try not to dwell too much on the fact that the photo of Reiner on the video itself shows him as he apparently always looked: as if the joy was a concept completely alien to him. Reiner was by all accounts an absolute tyrant on the podium, and if there are any personal stories about him that show his warmth and humor I've yet to read them, but the man was able to pour warmth and joy and humanity into his musicmaking.

Enjoy the "Polka and Fugue" from Schwanda the Bagpiper!

Bad Joke Friday

A curious new establishment sprang up on the summit of Mount Olympus overnight. Where once the Gods would sit, there was now a fast-casual bakery-cafe featuring salads, sandwiches, bagels, and soup in bread bowls, staffed entirely by satyrs playing reed pipes. The Era of Zeus was over. The Pan Era had begun.

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!

"Oh, just one more thing," said Inspector Colombo....

The people in this photo celebrate birthdays today. Well, I'm not sure if George Gershwin is actually celebrating, but I hope he is. Happy birthday to him, Jim Caviezel, Olivia Newton John, and that fourth guy.

Something for Thursday

Tomorrow The Wife and I set out for our annual trip to the Finger Lakes region, for adventure and food and books and crafts and all sorts of niftiness! In that vein, here's some adventure music by James Horner. I need to watch this movie again someday....

Tone Poem Tuesday

It's always been interesting to me that so few great and enduring works of classical music have been inspired by the Arthurian legends (or "the Matter of Britain"). There's some crossover in the operas of Richard Wagner, mostly in his use of the Grail in Lohengrin and Parsifal, but that's really about it, outside of the work of today's composer, French Romantic Ernest Chausson. I suppose this can be possibly explained by the fact that nationalism in art also arose during the Romantic period, so when composers were most inspired by legend and myth they also tended to be inspired by their own nation's legends and myths. This, coupled with the fact that very few of the "great" composers of the Romantic era came from Britain, may explain the paucity of Arthurian operas and symphonies and tone poems.

Except for this Frenchman, Ernest Chaussons, who wrote a tone poem and an opera directly inspired by the Arthurian legends. Chausson was a "bridge" figure, connecting the earlier era of French romanticism with the emergent forms of Impressionism that followed the Romantics. Chausson was primarily influenced by Wagner and by Cesar Franck, and even though his output was small, his music is highly individual and deeply felt. In this way--and in his untimely death--Chausson almost seems like a French counterpart to Alexander Borodin.

The tone poem Viviane is inspired by the love affair between Merlin the wizard and the maiden Viviane, which ends tragically in the eternal imprisonment of Merlin inside a cave of crystal. The work is lush and mostly introspective, but with passages of rapturous passion before concluding on a sad note. One can definitely hear in this work the drama of a Wagner but also the atmospheric introspection of the impressionists to come.

Here is Viviane by Ernest Chausson.

Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

So, they're talking about a remake of The Princess Bride. This is, of course, a bullshit idea that needs to be lured into a quiet and dark alley someplace and strangled until dead.

But that gives me an excuse to post (a day late, sorry) a bit of music from The Princess Bride! Enjoy!

Tone Poem Tuesday

The operas of Giacchino Rossini aren't performed very much today, but they were once all the rage, and the overtures to those operas have remained mainstays of orchestral music even while the operas themselves have lapsed into some neglect. Rossini's overtures sparkle with energy, adventure, and lyrical wit, and a few have managed through use in other areas of popular culture managed to become even more well-known now than they were in the composer's own time. Think of William Tell's final section, reused later as the theme for The Lone Ranger, or of the amazing use a Looney Tunes cartoon made of The Barber of Seville.

Today we have a different overture: L'italiana in Algeri, or The Italian Girl in Algiers. The overture starts off quietly before a surprising smash erupts from the orchestra, and then as the overture progresses the tunes and rhythms become more and more dancelike as the overture propels toward its close. As always, the overture is full of Rossini's sparkle and delight.

Enjoy!

Something for Thursday (Happy Birthday Hans Zimmer edition)

Today is the birthday of film composer Hans Zimmer! Zimmer tends to be a rather controversial figure in movie music fandom circles (mainly for the way his style of sound has been influential to the point of making a lot of recent film music rather homogeneous), and he's written a lot of stuff that leaves me cold. But he has also written a lot of frankly wonderful music that deserves to be celebrated. Here are a few selections of his work that I enjoy!

Eighteen

Eighteen years. I wonder what we have learned, if anything; how we've grown, if at all; if we've changed in the ways we needed to change.






I wrote this story not long after the events of 9-11-01. It is not the story I would write today. How could it be? I was on the cusp of turning thirty, and at that point the scope of an attack of that magnitude was nearly impossible to process.

The City of Dead Works

There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.

I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. "Come aboard," I say. "I will take your coin for passage." One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.

When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.

This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.

"Please," a young man says as he turns to me, "I have to go home to my daughters."

"You are going home now," I reply. "To the home where all eventually return." Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.

"This can’t be," a woman cries out. "My mother needs me."

"She will be with you soon enough."

"When?" Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.

"I cannot say," I reply. "The Ferryman has no hand in Fate."

The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.

"Where will you take us?" someone asks.

"To the place you are promised," I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.

We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. "What is that?" he asks.

"It is the City of Dead Works," I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.

"I don’t understand," someone else says. "The City of Dead Works?"

"Aye," I reply. "Behold!"

From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.

"That one looks Egyptian," a woman says.

"The Great Library of Alexandria," I tell her. "Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead."

A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.

"The Temple of Solomon," I say.

"There are ships in the harbor," says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.

"I don’t understand," a young man says. "Why this City? Why here?"

I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.

Almost.

Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.

"Who lives in that city?" It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.

"No one lives there," I tell him. "The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires."

The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.

"We will be there soon," I say. "Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold." No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.

But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.

I know these things.

I am the Ferryman of the Dead.

Finally, music. I was unable to listen to any music at all for several days after the attacks, until I finally put on this recording of Elegy, a wind ensemble composition by Mark Camphouse. It is one of the most haunting, meditative, and ultimately affirming works of music I know. I offer it not quite in remembrance or observance of 9/11/01, but rather as a meditation on the sadness of that day and as a balm for its passage.

Tone Poem Tuesday

Time for some film music! One thing that a lot of movie music fans discover is how often it turns out that they love a particular filmscore while disliking the film for which it was written. This is an example of mine. The 80s urban fantasy flick Highlander is a cult fave for many, but I have never much liked it at all. Not even the inherent coolness of Sean Connery or Clancy Brown are sufficient to make the movie interesting to me (if you haven't seen it, it's about immortal beings who are fated to battle one another through the ages until only one remains). The movie is shot with flare and the action sequences are cool, but the script is...well, it's mostly ponderous and dull.

Not so, however, is Michael Kamen's score, which soars and swoops and gives the entire film a gravitas that it honestly doesn't earn by virtue of its story. This is a suite that someone edited together from Kamen's work for the film, and it highlights the best parts of Kamen's work. Enjoy!

Recent Adventures

After a hectic (and sick!) couple of weeks at Casa Jaquandor, things are starting to finally settle out a bit! Work at The Store has been going through a crazy patch, but that's starting to die down at last, and the cold that walloped me week before last is almost entirely a memory now, so maybe I can get a bit focused again. And just in time, too, as my favorite time of year is fast approaching! We're talking Autumn, the time of big pots of chili and cool crispness in the air and apples and our annual trip to Ithaca and, of course, overalls!

Anyway, here's some photographic goodness from the last ten days or so.

Something for Thursday

A wonderfully ethereal rendition of one of my favorite classic romance songs, "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square".

Tapping the Microphone

Oh look, somebody left a blog here.

Yes, folks, it's been the usual set of reasons for low posting here: focus on getting edits done on a book, plus some very busy days at work owing to an important event we're hosting next week (I worked 46.5 hours last week, with one day going 13 hours), plus an irritating late-summer cold that started off mild but then mustered itself into Serious Pain In The Ass territory for the entire week. And oh, the week I was sick was also the week I worked 46.5 hours, so even though I have since had a three-day-weekend and seen the workload drop off to more manageable levels, in a lot of ways I'm still recovering.

The digging out continues...but here's a small list of things I've published recently over on The Geekiverse over the last few months:

Twenty Years of The Phantom Menace
The Real Ranking of the STAR WARS movies
The Best Fictional Clubs, Bars, and Restaurants
Apollo at 50
Farewell, MAD Magazine

Reviews: On a Sunbeam, Tillie Walden
The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore
Runaway Max: A STRANGER THINGS Novel, Brenna Yovanoff


I really do hope to return to regular posting here, folks. The last few weeks did not cooperate....

Bad Joke Friday

This is a real sign, by the way! It belongs to Ipswich Lumber and Hardware in Ipswich, South Dakota.

Something for Thursday

I've never been a big Fleetwood Mac fan. I have nothing against them, and I tend to like their songs, but for one reason or another I've never really heard much of them beyond their biggest hits, like "Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow." It's weird how some big names just manage to never quite penetrate through to really being on the radar, isn't it?

But lately during our evening reading and hanging-out time at home, The Wife has been playing a "Classic Hits" station on Pandora, and there's been more Fleetwood Mac on that station, so I've been hearing more of them...and I've realized just how good some of their songs really are, such as this one. I've heard this a lot over the years but it's never really hit my sweet spot until now, when I've decided that it's one of the most beautiful rock songs ever.

Here is "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac.

Tone Poem Tuesday

As a composer, Leonard Bernstein is almost certainly best known for having written the score to the classic musical West Side Story (a remake of which is now being shot by Steven Spielberg, interestingly enough--at this point just about the only thing Spielberg hasn't done is a musical). As iconic as much of Bernstein's score to West Side Story is, and as memorable as some of its numbers are, as a musical it definitely displays notions that Bernstein had been considering for a number of years prior to writing it. Much of Bernstein's life was spent in search of a true American vernacular in concert hall music, and one can sense a bit of chafing in his three symphonies regarding the symphony's genesis not in American musical traditions but from European (and particularly German) ones.

Bernstein's belief in a developing American musical vernacular wasn't limited to the symphony hall, either; he believed it was coming in theater as well. A chapter of Bernstein's book The Joy of Music briefly traces the development of musical comedy in America up to the point where George Gershwin arrived on the scene, and another chapter from the same book has Bernstein mourning the titanic loss to American music that Gershwin died so early when it seemed as if he was about to move into the most profound part of his career, after Porgy and Bess. For Bernstein, American musical comedy arose from the European operatic tradition just as American symphonic music had, with German singspiels and French operettas providing the templates.

So with West Side Story, Bernstein was trying to move the needle in the direction that Gershwin had been pushing at the time of his death. Did he succeed? I don't know, but perhaps it is easier to see the direction the musical theater took, away from individual songs and into more complete works. Hence today's featured piece, the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, is comprised of a number of extracts from the show, arranged together to form the backbone of a ballet that could, in twenty-five minutes or so, roughly sketch out the action of the three-hour show. Bernstein didn't just stitch together a collection of numbers and call it a piece. The Dances are very much their own work with their own formal demands and their own sense of drama. The themes are not arranged in the exact sequence that they appear in the show, either; Bernstein was less about a "greatest hits" type of thing (obviously, perhaps, given that "I Feel Pretty" and "Tonight," to name just two of the show's most popular numbers, are not reference in the Dances) than about the creation of a single work that exists on its own. This he does, quite marvelously.

Here are the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein. In this performance, recorded at the BBC Proms in 2007, Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. This match of conductor and orchestra is responsible for some utterly amazing musicmaking, by the way.

Scenes from the Faire

A couple weekends ago, The Wife and I attended the Sterling Renaissance Festival. Here's a bit of photographic rundown of this year's edition of the Fair.







(Her Majesty, the Queen)







(Her Majesty, the Queen, with Royal suitor.)



(This fellow read uproarious poetry of a bawdy nature.)



(Milady in Blue, as always. I have a headcanon involving her, secret lovers, rendezvous in wind-swept caves and on bridges on forest paths, races to catch the last ship from Calais for Dover, secret dispatches to a spy in England, poisoned daggers, and a pistol with one shot hidden in the folds of Milady's blue gown.)



(A mere several hours later, and the Royal suitor does not seem quite so close to Her Majesty the Queen as he was before. Perhaps he is already falling out of favor and will awaken on the morrow to find himself in a stone cell in Her Majesty's tower.)

Something for Thursday

Yup, still quite busy. Lots of reading and writing. Here's Harry Belafonte: