2010-2019: A decade in words

Wow, not just a year ending, but a decade!

Here is a selection of my favorite posts from the last ten years. How much longer will this go on? Who knows! I'd like to get back into more essay and photo content around here than the YouTube music selections, so here's hoping.

Grouped by year:

2010

Remembering Dr. Warren Schmidt
The Behaviors of Mr. George Costanza

2011

"Thy world, O master of the world, thy dawn: Reflections on On Her Majesty's Secret Service
On That Day

2012

On finally seeing Les Miserables on stage
An open letter to Castle
Last Dance: Farewell, Donna Summer
The Many Faces of Monti Carlo
How Superman's Butt Saved Christmas

2013

Tip Your Server!
On Rober Ebert
When I was a kid, I wanted to be Bud Herseth
Louis CK is full of crap.
A night with the Philharmonic

2014

Killing the darlings: How I edit
On building my library
First thoughts on dog ownership
We survived "Snowvember

2015

Ranking the James Bond songs
No, John Williams did not rip off Dvorak
On the passing of Leonard Nimoy
Meet Hank, my internal editor
On waffles
Keeping ahead of the Smiths: Thoughts on the Minimum Wage
I explain the plot of Octopussy

Thanksgiving in New York City:
one
two
three

2016

A moonlit triptych
Star Trek at 50
A love letter to Crazy Ex Girlfriend
A really good book about Star Wars

2017

On Richard Thompson and Cul De Sac
Dear 44
Dear 45
A memory from each grandmother
"Let Me Help": Thoughts on "The City on the Edge of Forever" at Fifty
STAR WARS at 40
On "Choosing happiness"
The final victory of JR Ewing: Thoughts on the 45th President

2018

Memories of Dr. Janice Wade

2019

On Books, Hoarding, and Joy
My grandfather's watch
Travels along the Yellow Brick Road
Apollo at 50

Keeping these separate, here are my thoughts on the Star Wars movies that have been released since the Disney takeover:

The Force Awakens

The Phantom Lucas
Wait, what?
Poe, Rey, Me
That kid ain't right
The praise awakens!

Rogue One

The Last Jedi

Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong.
It's time for the Jedi to end.
We fought to the end.
A flyboy, a mechanic, and a janitor walk into a bar....
A Rose is what Moses supposes his toeses!
People will come, Rey!
Snokin' in the Boys' Room
Are you the fellow who designed St. Paul's?
Attack of the Screw-ups
Happy beeps, buddy! Happy beeps!

The following are from my official site, ForgottenStars.net:

On THE WEST WING and storytelling in miniature
Remembering William Goldman
On Writing Longhand

In all honesty, I don't use my Official Site as strongly as I should, because I've never really figured out a focus for it. That's something I hope to do in 2020.

I have also been writing for the last few years for The Geekiverse. Here is a selection of my output:

An introduction, and five summer movies
Shhh! You'll spoil it! (Thoughts on spoilers)
THE PHANTOM MENACE at twenty
Farewell, MAD Magazine
Apollo at 50
Oh, snap: A closer look at Thanos's and Hulk's fingersnaps
The REAL ranking of the STAR WARS movies

Tone Poem Tuesday

Thus we end 2019! I'll hear this work newly performed tomorrow night, when it is the traditional second encore in the Vienna Philharmonic's New Years Concert. It's not a new year until I hear On the Beautiful Blue Danube.

See you in 2020, folks!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

TODAY'S THE DAY!!!

And if you didn't get to hear your personal favorite Christmas carol in this feature this season, I apologize...but here's an entire album that covers almost the entire gamut. This is one of the great Christmas music recordings of all time: The Many Moods of Christmas, featuring the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Robert Shaw Chorale, conducted by Robert Shaw. Interestingly, the digital Atlanta Symphony recording was a follow-up to a 1963 recording of mostly the same music, also featuring Robert Shaw and his Chorale (but back then with the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra). Enjoy, and may each and every one of you enjoy the very happiest of holidays!!!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

As Christmas nears each year, eventually the boisterous jollity of the season fades and the need for silence rises, and as we all adjourn from our daily lives to the sequestered comfort of our home (or, at least, so we hope), we look inward. I know that I do as the outside world fades away. I think this sentiment was captured wonderfully by Bill Watterson in this one-panel installment of Calvin and Hobbes:

Musically, this brings me to Silent Night, one of the most magical of all Christmas carols. It was written in 1818 by Franz Xaver Gruber, who was given the words by a local priest who needed a Christmas carol that could be accompanied by guitar as the organ in his church had been damaged by flooding. What resulted is one of the most enduring of all Western songs.

What makes Silent Night so effective? Well, the lyrics are quite wonderful and evocative, painting word-pictures of the miracle taking place in Bethlehem and exhorting us to sleep in peace before we wake to the new dawn, heralded by the birth of God's son. But it's not just the words. Those lyrics are wedded to a melody that almost perfectly captures the song's dual themes of restful peace in the face of a transcendent miracle. Silent Night combines falling intervals, especially the minor third which seems to eternally connote motherhood and the protection of rest at home, with upward leaps and climbs that musically challenge us to see the light dawning in that manger. That's how I see it, anyway. Just the way the tune of Silent Night unfolds speaks to something primal, something hard-wired in us.

Here is Sinead O'Connor performing Silent Night.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

As a film music lover, here is some Christmas from the movies!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

An annual selection here, as I feature a Christmas carol that is specifically near and dear to a particular reader of mine ("Hi Mom!" he said as he cheerfully waved). It's one that I never knew much about until a couple of years ago, though. "Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella" originated in the Provence region of France, which seems to be a particularly productive region of France for beautiful things. The carol's lyrics tell the story of two girls who discover that a certain baby has been born to a woman who has been bunking down in a stable. They run off to tell the villagers of the miracle that has occurred and bring them back to pay homage, cautioning them to remain silent so the baby can sleep. (One wonders if one of the villagers the two girls fetch happens to be a young boy with a drum, but anyway.)

The tune is lovely in that wonderful way of pre-Baroque music, and even when played slow it has a gentle dance rhythm befitting the folk music of the peasants of Provence. Here are several renditions of this lovely carol (including a couple of instrumentals).

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Here's the entire album of A Charlie Brown Christmas, because it's just a classic.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

A lovely work by John Rutter for today.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

I've always loved "The Little Drummer Boy," so here are several to choose from. Pa rum pa pum pum!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of On Her Majesty's Secret Service (see the next post down), here's the only Christmas song ever specifically composed for a James Bond movie: "Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?"

"Thy dawn, O master of the world, thy dawn....": ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE AT 50 (a repost)

Fifty years ago today, on December 18, 1969, the sixth James Bond movie opened. Its initial reception was mixed, partly because the Bond mania of the 60s was simmering down, and partly because it was the first time that Sean Connery had not starred as Agent 007, in favor of complete unknown newcomer George Lazenby. While I didn't see the movie until an ABC telecast sometime in the early 80s, I liked it from that very first viewing and it very quickly shot up my personal rankings until by the time I was fifteen or sixteen I was willing to crown it as my favorite Bond movie of all time. And while certain opinions that we have in our youth shift as we learn and grow, some do not...and for me, this is one of the opinions that stuck. To this day, almost 19 movies later, OHMSS has never been equaled.

I wrote the following essay almost nine years ago and repost it here without a single word changed, except to fix a broken link.




Sometimes I change my mind about movies. Sometimes I don't. Some movies meant a lot to me, years ago, but have dropped away to the point that I've forgotten about them. Other movies, though, have stayed with me forever. One of those is On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the sixth James Bond film, which I have regarded since I was a teenager as the best Bond film ever made. In fact, I consider it one of my favorite films of all time, in any genre.

My long examination of the film, with lots of screencaps, after the page break.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

I love traditional Christmas music as much as anybody, but it's also fun to hear Christmas music performed on non-traditional instruments! Here are a couple of selections of such:

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Another song I feature annually: Dan Fogelberg's Same Old Lang Syne. For my thoughts on this song, I refer you to this old post. Suffice it to say that this song's bittersweet nature appeals to me more and more with every passing year.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Oddly, I cannot conceive of the Christmas Season without The Nutcracker, and yet to this day, I have never attended a live performance of the ballet. This is something I very much need to correct one of these years! But I was fortunate to play principal trumpet in my college orchestra for four years, each one of which saw The Nutcracker Suite on our Christmas program. Few pieces of music transport me to a specific time and place, but The Nutcracker Suite to me is always brightly-lit rehearsal halls as another icy Iowa winter revs up outside through those tall windows, with Maestro Janice Wade leading the orchestra (and always, always, always yelling at us for trying to slow down, in spite of the complete lack of instruction to do so in the score, at the end of the "Waltz of the Flowers."

Anyhow, I'll give you two options here! If you have time, give the entire ballet a listen! I'm always of the belief that given the choice between hearing the entire work and hearing extracts, one should hear the entire work. But if you don't have time, the Suite is perfectly acceptable. Here are both: the whole thing, and the Suite.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

A Star Trek holiday classic!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Sometimes the definitive version of a song really is the first one.

Here's Judy Garland.

Something for Thursday

If you read the Daily Dose of Christmas below and wonder which Frank Sinatra song I remember from very early in my youth, it's this one. Here's "Love's Been Good to Me".

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Wow...today is the birthday of the Chairman of the Board himself, Mr. Frank Sinatra! He would have been 104 today. What a star he was! There's never been a time when his voice wasn't a part of my life. One of the songs I remember most from when I was very young was a Sinatra song.

Here's something I found earlier today: a complete episode of a Dean Martin teevee show, with Frank Sinatra joining along with a bunch of family members. This was recorded more than fifty years ago, and it's sobering to see a number featuring Sinatra's and Martin's sons Frank Jr. and Ricci, and to know that both of those men--young, good-looking fellows here--have also died.

Enjoy!


(Long-time readers of mine may notice that late in the show here, Mr. Sinatra sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"...without the lyric change that Sinatra himself later foisted upon the world, totally changing the feel of the song! Amazing!)

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

It snowed at Casa Jaquandor today! Not an awful amount, just six or seven inches or so. Nothing to get nervous about. But that kind of conjures up a mood for a sleigh ride, right? Here are a few versions!

Tone Poem Tuesday

If you're familiar with the work of Robert Russell Bennett, you're almost certainly familiar with the work he did using the tunes and melodies of other composers. And if you have any love of American musical theater of the 20th century, then you're almost certainly familiar with the work of Robert Russell Bennett, and you may not even realize it! Bennett was largely known for his work as an arranger and orchestrator for many of the great Broadway shows of the classic era of American musical theater. Look at the fine print of many of those albums and you'll see something along the lines of "Arrangements by Robert Russell Bennett" or "Orchestrations by Russell Bennett".

Bennett also arranged many fine orchestral suites of Broadway music, which have become staples in the repertoire of Pops orchestras all over the world. Bennett's suites are almost always fine compositions in their own right, with Bennett giving a lot of thought to the melodies and how they should sound in a purely orchestral setting. The suites are more than worth listening to on their own, proving that dramatic music does not always need to be heard in its original context to be effective.

Here is the Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture by Robert Russell Bennett. Enjoy!