Brigham's Blog: November 2011

30 Nov 2011

Angry Birds! Yes... sadly, I, too, have become addicted. I saw Ethan playing this on his iPhone when we were stuck in the London subway for a time in March; this was my first exposure to the Birds. Remembering that, I loaded the app onto my own iPhone the other day and have been obsessively flinging angry, explosive, hypersonic and splitting birds around ever since. I have only played a handful of video games in my life - Tetris, Dig-Dug and Elf Bowl - but I do like this one. Death to the green pigs!

I have elected to watch Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. I expect I won't like it, but it's a continuation of my current mode of watching films I think I won't like. (Buffalo Rider!) Why would I do such a thing? Because people sometimes accuse me of being closed-minded when I'm really not. For a while I was watching dated and rather corny old church videos - I called it "Diminished Expectations Theatre" - as well as productions of Shakespeare plays people don't usually see - just to expand my horizons a bit. I never know... I might like this stuff. I didn't like Clerks, but I liked Trainspotting, for instance. And I found old church videos I really liked. Buffalo Rider, however, was pretty hard to take. One viewing is adequate.

As I reported, I have become hooked on the songs on the Kinks' 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. The first one that got stuck in my head is Picture Book; it's hard for me not to like a song about scrapbooks! Now that I think about it, wasn't this once used as a commercial by somebody? (Some research ensues) Ah, yes... I remember now: HP Digital Photography - a very clever ad!

I watched another Robert Greenberg Concerti lecture last night. He really likes Mozart. He asserted that it took the earth something like 4.5 billion years to evolve to the point where somebody like Mozart was possible. I had never considered the age of the earth in those terms, but he does. He also said that the best piano concerti ever written were Mozart's - "that's not subjective opinion, that's fact." Well! I confess that I am partial to Khachaturian's and Rachmaninoff's Second, but I defer to Greenberg's far greater knowledge of the subject matter.

He also introduced Mozart's Concerto for Flute, Harp and Orchestra in C major. The piece was commissioned by the flautist Duke of Guines, Adrien-Louis de Bonnieres, but the man never paid Mozart for this transcendent piece - he stiffed him. So Greenberg honored the Duke by calling him a putz: "Adrien-Louis de Bonnieres, Duke of Putz." Ha ha! These Greenberg lectures are so interesting and funny... I wish I knew half of what Greenberg has forgotten.

We did Forestry Activity Pin Part II last night in the Webelos Den; for some reason those boys were noisier than usual and I had to separate a couple. At the end I fed them all a spoonful of real maple syrup and let 'em run around in the gym for fifteen minutes. Why the maple syrup? Because, as I suspected, a quick survey confirmed that they're all putting Log Cabin or Mrs. Butterworth's on their pancakes. Paugh! High fructose corn syrup. As the son of a New Hampshirewoman I cannot let this pass. My Webelos scouts should taste real maple syrup. I am firmly convinced that God gave us maple trees, maple sap and, yes, Mozart, because He wants us to be happy. I instructed them to ask their parents to henceforth buy real maple syrup. And thus the brainwashing of the young continues apace.

Yesterday, as a part of my pack's rechartering effort, I watched the Boy Scouts of America Youth Protection Program video, which is mandatory for all scouting leaders. There was one sequence which defined and depicted "grooming," whereby adult men seduce boys - the idea being, of course, to be on the lookout for it. It was unsettling. I was surprised, with as many various "out there" movies as I have seen, by being creeped out with this sequence. A high "ick factor," as a friend once said.

Last night I also watched another first season episode of The Wonder Years. This one was about a countercultural creep who dates Kevin's sister. I was feeling hostile just listening to him. I hate hippies! Guess that particular episode elicited a visceral response from me. I have to smile, though, when I remember that a friend of my daughter's once arrived in a car with a "Shut Up, Hippie - Cheer Up, Emo Boy" bumper sticker affixed thereupon.

29 Nov 2011

A tune has been obsessively bouncing around in my head for quite some time now... it's a flamboyant Syd Dale piece entitled The Hell Raisers; you may have heard it before. It's a two minute bit of commercial music written in 1968 intended to be used for... whatever. It was used as promotional music for a sleazy 1966 film about prostitutes called Another Day, Another Man, it was in an episode of the old animated Spider-Man show (you know, the one with the snappy "Spider-Man/Spider-Man/Does whatever a spider can" theme song) and was also used in network and local sports broadcasting. No doubt other stuff as well. But it's great! Very catchy. I know I sound old when I write this, but it's true: they just don't write over-the-top jazz band stuff like this any more. Do you, like me, enjoy this kind of thing? Search on youtube for "syd dale" or "kpm klassics." (KPM was the British music library Dale often wrote for.)

Last night I killed an hour and a half of my life watching an utterly ridiculous film from 1978, Buffalo Rider about, you guessed it, a man who rides a buffalo across the west and his adventures therein. Why did he decide to ride a buffalo rather than a horse? (A buffalo, like a 600 pound ape, pretty much goes wherever it wants to go.) I don't know. The funny thing is that this epic is supposedly based on the true life of an early conservationist Charles "Buffalo" Jones - but I can find no mention anywhere that Jones ever actually rode a buffalo. He was just interested in preserving them (after a stint as a buffalo hunter, that is.) I suspect the bit about Jones actually riding a buffalo is a result of some excessively creative thinking or bad weed on the part of the producers. I have to admit, there were some good laughs in this... when Jones finally learns to ride the buffalo there's a heartfelt theme song which is sung as incidental music which had me in tears. And the climatic scene, when Jones hunts down some murdering hunters, is pretty funny: he and the buffalo storm into a bar, knocking down tables and other furniture (buffalo don't care for such finery), Jones shoots up the place and the hunters, and departs. The narrator dutifully says, "... and nobody in the Crystal Palace ever forgot that day!" Well, I guess not.

I am ashamed to admit that my alma mater, Brigham Young University, had a hand in this daft production. Perhaps not surprisingly, the copyright has expired on this film and it is now in the public domain. You can see it here on youtube in its entirety, yeee-haa giddyup buffalo!

Syd Dale, Buffalo Rider... it wasn't all intellectual slumming last night. I also watched a couple of Robert Greenberg lectures. I learned something interesting about Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, especially about my favorite, #3 in G major. It's in three movements, but the second movement is nothing more than two chords, a "Phrygian half cadence." As the wikipedia article states, current performing practice can be anything from simply playing the two chords to improvising an extended cadenza to inserting another Bach piece. I've heard a number of recordings of this piece but I didn't know that! You can see it performed here, all fourteen seconds of it. As always, the youtube comments are funny: "I've got this WHOLE movement memorized," "This was written on a tissue while Bach went for a coffee break," "Isn't it funny that 247,487 people watched the shortest movement of baroque music ever?" Haha!

I'm currently on the Mozart concerti... thank goodness. I find baroque music to be pretty dry, actually. Most of it, to use Greenberg's own phrase in a prior lecture, sounds to me like musical wallpaper. I have always preferred the greater freedom and expressiveness in Romantic, late Romantic and 20th C. music. I am just now coming to appreciate the Classical period, however (via the Haydn London symphonies).

We got four new tires put on the VW last night at COSTCO: $435. Bridgestones were on sale. I wanted Michelins, but not for $150 more. (We have been slammed with expenses this year, not the least of which was a wedding.) I am happy to report that the car's ride feels grippier than before. A part of the recent "catch up on chores" weekend was putting a new headlight on the VW; what a pain. It's a good car and seems to be well-designed, except for the headlight assemblies, which require patience, accuracy, strength and technical acumen to remove and reinsert. In fact, when I arrived at work this morning I noticed that the headlight wasn't on - a shove on the assembly got it lit. %^#$%!$!@! I guess I need to tighten up on the locking cam when I get home. I needed a buy a 5mm socket to do it. Have you ever tried to find a 5 mm, 1/4" drive socket you can put on the end of a long shaft? Another delight.

28 Nov 2011

We had a great Thanksgiving weekend; hope you did as well. We drove down to Solomon's Island in Maryland and had dinner with friends - it was very nice. I won a game of Trouble. As I've been trouble ever since I was a small child I'm well versed. In fact, recently one of my physical therapists greeted me with, "Hi, Trouble!"

This past long weekend was something of a "get the chores done" time. I finally got caught up on the scrapbooks, we got all of our Christmas cards out and I raked/vacuumed the dead leaves from both the front and back yards (a major chore). I mowed our new lawn for the first time: it looks great! I also washed both cars and rolled up and put away the front hose for the winter. Today it's new shoes for baby: $600+ in COSTCO tires for the VW.

I'm about halfway through reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic books; the local library has them all in bound form. They're good, but I don't think they are nearly as wonderful as the comic book types insist they are. Sometimes the illustrations are pretty awful and Gaiman's themes are mostly derivative (Greek myths, Shakespeare, the classics) - with added bits of nastiness. But I admit to a bias: comic books (or "sequential art" as it is pompously called), for me, will always take a second place as literature to books. The comic book producers hate that attitude, but, I'm sorry, deep within me I feel like guys over the age of about twenty who are still reading comic books need to grow up and move on to real literature.

I was a comic book reader and collector when I was a kid. I started reading Superman and Superboy comics when I was about eight or so and stuck with them (and others) until I turned thirteen or fourteen. Don't get me wrong - the comic books instilled within me a love of reading and were just the things I needed at the time. Had it not been for comic books I might not be the voracious reader I have been all my adult life. But then I switched to books: Poe, Doyle, Dickens, Steinbeck, Arthurian lit and the occasional adult best seller (in retrospect, perhaps not a good idea). I was done with comics. I would start reading them again when my son came along - it was a shared interest - but, in general, I feel that comics are for kids and books are for adults. To me there is something stunted, adolescent and creepy about comics for adults.

With the exception of one three month period - when I was in USMC boot camp - I have been constantly reading from book to book ever since I was about fourteen. Ever the archivist, I used to write the titles and page counts down in a little journal I kept - which I soon gave up maintaining! I tend to favor non-fiction over fiction and classics over best-sellers. I used to read the Dark Shadows serializations when I was a kid as well as the Doc Savage novels; it finally occurred to me that I was essentially reading the same novel over and over again, so I gave them up. In general, I try to stick with what I call "improving" books, books with themes of constant informative or uplifting value.

I have also now started another Professor Robert Greenberg Teaching Company classical music lecture series, this time on the subject of The Concerto. He is always fun to listen to - the man has an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter and an undoubted gift for teaching. Did you know that there is really bad descriptive verse that accompanies Vivaldi's (overplayed) The Four Seasons?

Thanks to the Shirlington library I found the Kinks' The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, a pop gem from 1968 that I wasn't aware of. Great album! I also like and approve of the overall theme in the lyrical content: there are old time things which are good and should be preserved. Let's be a little discerning with all this social revolution, okay? It was a totally unique message in the pop music of the time; the notion didn't become fashionable until the 1990s or so. It ties in with my belief that it's a bad idea to tear down walls and barriers until you've determined why they were erected in the first place.

I watched some videos over the long weekend:

Best of the Beatles (2005) - A documentary about Pete Best, who might reasonably be called The Most Unfortunate Man Alive. He was the Beatles' first drummer, and was sacked in favor of Ringo Starr on the eve of their superstardom. I think this will be my last film or documentary on the subject of the early Beatles; I'm getting rather burned out with the stories of Stu Sutcliffe, Pete Best, Astrid Kirchherr, Klaus Voorman, et. al.

Premonition (2007) - A rather disappointing Sandra Bullock thriller with not much in the way of a payoff as a conclusion. What really creeped me out about this film, however, was the leading man, Julian "Nip/Tuck" McMahon (shown above). Gahhh! What is with those eyebrows?!? They look like they're painted on! Or like they're two black centipedes who have decided to sit - absolutely horizontally - over the man's eye. How does a man get to be a star with eyebrows like that?

Mum's the Word (2005) - A dark comedy starring one of my favorite comics, Rowan Atkinson, and Maggie Smith, a veteran actress who is also always fun to watch. It was sort of a murderous version of Mary Poppins. Quite good.

23 Nov 2011

One last note about Roberts E. Lee: I got a note from a reader who looked at what I thought was the best Lee impressionist from last year's Gettysburg parade. The reader wrote, "That picture of the man portraying Gen. Lee has one oddity about him (at least from today's viewpoint). It appears for all the world he is wearing a lady's handbag. I suspect when he stands it looks more manly, but while sitting, it looks lady-like." Hahaha! He's absolutely right! Being a reenactor I looked at it and thought "leather dispatch case" and left it at that. But yes, to a non-reenactor I suppose he could look like a bearded old queen!

I just noticed... the 19th C. gal in the background looks like she's snorting something. Perhaps she's one of those nervous, fluttery Victorian gals and is sniffing some smelling salts to compose herself after being in the presence of that Paragon Of Southern Manhood.

Last night I did my annual Webelos instruction for the Forestry activity pin; for this one I bring in various types of wood, explain what they are and what they're used for. As our hardwood floor is made of acacia wood - a very hard, dense wood - I brought in an excess slat of that and did the thing the cub scouts all think is funny: pointed out that in the Old Testament it was called "shittim" wood (Gen. 26:15). I keep hoping that they'll run home and gleefully tell their parents and I'll get released, but that never seems to work. I once considered a "Scared Straight" pack meeting at the nearby Lorton prison; that would have been taking it to the next level. The prison is now gone, however, so that possibility has disappeared.

Seriously, when I was the Cubmaster I once considered, as something different, a pack meeting ("Life Isn't Always Pretty") where we go to some of the nastier places in the county: the county dump, past the Lorton prisons and have lunch in the McDonald's parking lot next to the bin where they put the discarded fats. Those boys would never have forgotten it and most of them would have thought it was pretty neat!

Ten year-old males are a trip. Last night, one kid kept going on about potatoes. I'd ask what kind of wood I was holding, he'd say "Potato wood." We had them draw a picture of a tree with roots, trunk and leaves, and he drew potatoes on the ground. I passed around a can of turpentine and asked them to describe the smell and this kid said "potatoes." And he wasn't even the oddest one in the room...

We talked briefly about maple trees. Being the son of a New Hampshirewoman, I pointed out that maple syrup comes from maple trees. However, the stuff they're putting on their pancakes - Log Cabin, Mrs. Butterworth's, etc. - is high fructose corn syrup, not real maple syrup. I think next week I'm going to bring in some plastic spoons and a bottle of the real stuff and let them all have a taste - AFTER we get done with the instruction. No sense in sugaring those boys up when you're expecting them to pay attention.

Last night I watched a wonderfully entertaining 2010 documentary about the career of legendary cameraman and director Jack Cardiff. Martin Scorsese said that when you saw the Archer's logo at the beginning of a film (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's production company was called The Archers) with Jack Cardiff's name on the credits you knew you were in for something special - the very same thought once occurred to me.

I'm a great fan of Powell-Pressburger films; perhaps my all-time favorite film is their 1947 adaptation of the Rumer Godden novel Black Narcissus. Cardiff was responsible for the Technicolor work on it, and it is really a treat. It's a gorgeous film. He later went on to do another, far more exuberant, film for the Archers: The Red Shoes, possibly the greatest ballet film ever. The central "Red Shoes ballet" sequence looks amazing, even today. Even the music is credible classical music... a top notch production all around.

I could do several blog entries about Black Narcissus... It's a film about a group of British nuns establishing a convent in a former palace for concubines set high atop a mountain in the Himalayas. (Here's a youtube video of the first ten minutes to give you a taste of the production. The storytelling magic for me begins at the four minute mark, when the Palace of Mopu is described.) There's a part of the film and the book I never understood, and so in 1998 I wrote Rumer Godden - who I understood was still alive - a letter to her home in Scotland to ask her about it. A few months later I got a reply: Sadly, she had died just before my letter had arrived. It's another one of those unsolved questions in my life. I hate loose ends. I hope I puzzle them out before I die.

I also recently watched a quirky Australian neo-noir, Noise (2007). It was a pretty good production, and maintained suspense during most of its running time. The only problem for me was the dialect, which was hard to follow.

Turkey Day coming. For some reason I keep remembering an advertising jingle which was broadcast in 1968 or 1969 for what I think was a football game. A Peter Max style production - all psychedelic colors featuring a singing turkey and set to the last part of the tune "Turkey in the Straw": "The day after Turkey Day on ABC! (pause) ABC!" Sinister, the way the Media can implant things in your head which lasts for decades.

22 Nov 2011

Back when I was in college in 1982, I strolled into a Radio Shack one day and saw the gadget of my dreams: a Moog Concertmate MG-1, a consumer grade synthesizer. I had always liked the "Switched-On Bach" recordings of Walter Carlos, and, later, the music of Kraftwerk, and so was interested. It had the necessary oscillators, filters, a small keyboard and, best of all, it was polyphonic! (That is, you could hold down two keys and get two tones - most synthesizers of the day were monophonic.) It was a nice little instrument, and it looked like a great way to learn all about modulators, low pass and high pass filters, portamento, etc. Best of all, it retailed for only $500. But I was a college student and it might as well have been $5,000. It was discontinued in 1983. By the time I graduated we had our first child and, soon after, mortgage payments. No Moog. (But I did buy other things.)

So it was some interest last night when I downloaded a minisynthesizer app for my iPhone for the princely sum of $2. Hey! It's not bad... Last night I hooked it up to my car stereo and played around with it and made the usual swooshing noises synthesizers made. It has two oscillators and various filters, attack and delay controls, echo and some other features, all realized in software. It is monophonic. Of course it is nothing like the Radio Shack Moog, but it's a lot of fun to play with. For only $2! On my cell phone!

After a trial of a few weeks I got rid of the Time magazine reader app. I knew it would prove to be a left-of-center publication, but thought it might be nice to read an article now and then. What galled me, however, was when a Time journalist called George Bush "crass" for referring to North Korea as the "axis of evil." Excuse me, anyone who can open a newspaper or who is in any way aware of world events knows that North Korea is a miserable, corrupt, totalitarian government that strips its citizens of not only their liberties and rights, but food and the basics of life as well. It appears that most of the government's energy is spent sabre-rattling and enforcing an exceedingly heavy-handed personality cult for that wretched man-child Kim Jong-iL. If that isn't "evil," what is? Enough of Time, and enough of their namby-pamby, slanted journalism. App deleted.

I mentioned the highly regarded British crime film Get Carter yesterday... other than being soulless and pointless (which are acceptable characteristics for nihilistic films noir), it uses that hokey-looking magenta fake blood. You know, that theatrical blood that just doesn't look right... it isn't the proper shade of scarlet. I've seen this in other films quite often - it must have had something to do with the Technicolor consultant determining a shade that came out looking right taking into account the film processing and the characteristics of the projector systems - I don't know. But on a DVD you see a scene with it and you don't think, "Gah! Blood!" you think, "Film!"

As Get Carter was a British film, it may have used an early form of a fake blood trademarked as "Kensington Gore." (I was going nuts trying to remember that phrase the other night.) Certainly, by the time Stanley Kubrick required thousands of gallons of it for the famous elevator sequence in The Shining (1980), the stuff looked like real blood. Kubrick, celebrated as being a perfectionist who endlessly re-shot scenes, would have never have accepted magenta blood!

(Ah, I see I have blogged about Kensington Gore before. I shall not re-tell my story about seeing the elevator scene as a trailer for the first time, then. I shall merely refer you to this.)

I do have something new and rather eerie to add about Kubrick's elevator sequence, however, which I came across when trying to find the phrase "Kensington Gore." It appears that if you look carefully, you can see that something falls out of or appears at the left elevator door during the shot. This web site looks at it in detail. Once again, Stanley Kubrick was a celebrated visual perfectionist and this is no mistake. It must be intentional. But what is it? (Fear not... it's not one of those pages that says "Look here carefully" then throws a ghoul face and a loud scream at you. It's legit.)

More of Gettysburg: It's funny... as I pointed out in my photographic essay, every year at the Gettysburg Remembrance Day Parade my pard Don gets his photo taken with one of the various Robert E. Lees strolling around. (You can't swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting a couple.) He used to do bunny ears behind them, but doesn't any more. "I'm maturing," is his comment. We thought this past Saturday was a Three Lee Day, but as it turned out it was really a Two Lee Day. As you can clearly see, Lee #2 is the same guy as Lee #3. Oddly, neither Don, nor Lee#2/3 nor I realized that we were shooting the photo that we had already taken earlier in the day!

But wait! Being reenacting, it gets weirder. The Lee from last year was the very same guy as last weekend! This poor guy probably thinks we're stalking him... Don Tracey: Stalker of Lees! Hahaha! This is why I love reenacting...

Final Note: The best-looking Lee, in my opinion, was the one we chatted with last year, this guy. He was in town to testify at a local public meeting as to whether or not to let a casino into town. The motion failed - no casino in Gettysburg. (Hooray!) Don and I reflected that he is one Robert E. Lee who won the Battle of Gettysburg!

21 Nov 2011

I had lunch at a nearby Irish Pub Friday and met a former rugby coach of mine, "Schnauzer." Schnauzer is notable in my life because he bears a tattoo I once designed! The story is here and in the photograph which follows it.

Saturday was the annual Gettysburg Remembrance Day parade; this year Don and I marched down Baltimore and Steinwehr Avenues carrying the colors which were mounted on ridiculously tall staffs. It felt like we were carrying antenna masts. We spent the entire parade squinting upwards taking care not to snag telephone lines, tree branches or traffic lights. We won't be volunteering to do that again next year! Photos here.

As promised, I also got some videos of the Federal City Brass Band's sunset concert atop the Little Round Top: "Old Joe Hooker," "We Are Coming Father Ab'ram."

I also saw the U.S. Navy Band's wind octet perform in Alexandria yesterday; it was nice. Beethoven, Saint-Saens, Mozart. The Masonic Memorial amphitheatre is a cool performing space few locals know about. Access is easy, there's a ton of free parking and the acoustics are great.

My bride and I watched three films over the weekend:

Follow the Fleet (1936): A breezy and rather brain dead Irving Berlin musical starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. But who watches these for the plots? You watch them to see Fred and Ginger dance, of course. It was a bit overlong. There was one hilarious scene where Fred is teaching sailors on a ship how to dance - naturally, this being 1936 there are no dames aboard, so the sailors must pair up together. You might know just then a squad of Marines arrives and witness this; the tough old sergeant does the world's funniest 1930's double take and the inevitable fistfight ensues. Back then they didn't ask, tell or dance. I liked the opening number, We Saw the Sea, which my pard Don alerted me to.

Get Carter (1971): The Michael Caine one, of course, not the remake. (In general, I don't like remakes.) My first take on this film was that it was soulless and pointless, but the more I think about the film the more inclined I am to like it. It can still be soulless and pointless - there are plenty of nihilist films noir in the canon (1961's Blast of Silence is a notable example) - but what's winning me over in part is the bleak, windswept ending and the musical theme, "Getting Nowhere in a Hurry." There's a good video of the theme song being played here. I like the Indian percussion and treated piano, but then I would. I'm a fan of John Barry's scores, and this is very much in his style: a hooky ostinato with the main theme being played on an exotic sounding instrument.

The Sting (1973): Seven Academy Awards? This won seven? And beat out American Graffiti for Best Picture that year?!? Graffiti - a far better film, in my opinion - was robbed! I know why... this has Stars. It has an overly-mature Robert Redford (he attempts to portray a winsome twentysomething in this but was 38 when it was filmed) and Paul Newman, modeling clothes. See Paul Newman in his fedora and wife-beaters! See Redford in his striped suit and 1930's workingman's cap - then watch as he switches into his tux for the sting operation! Meh. Like a couple of Ken dolls. I could see the trick ending a mile away and I thought this flick suffered from terminal cuteness. A little too much sparkle and wit, thank you. And I also don't buy the plot: a mobster kills a black man and so various grifters and con artists extract revenge. Could that really have happened in 1936 Chicago? No. Like Redford's unauthentic hairstyle, the sensibilities of this film are firmly set in 1973's Hollywood.

It also doesn't help that the film ushered in a fad for Scott Joplin rags; I remember being really, really tired of hearing The Entertainer intruding into my classical station, KFAC.

Perhaps what I really disliked about this film is summed up by Roger Ebert as a compliment in his contemporary review: "The style here is so seductive and witty it's hard to pin down. It's like nothing else I've seen by Hill, and at times, it almost reminds me of Jacques Tati crossed with Robert Altman. It's good to get a crime movie more concerned with humor and character than with blood and gore; here's one, as we say, for the whole family." No thank you. I'll take my crime films straight.

Get Carter is looking better and better.

18 Nov 2011

I posted another fifty or so Meredith-n-Chris wedding photos onto my Picasa photo album, they are here. These are the ones from the Las Vegas temple - they're the ones starting at #13, with a sort of golden cast (we caught the "magic hour" light). I made prints last night at COSTCO - I'll be spending a good part of the weekend putting all this stuff into the family scrapbook. Whew.

By the way, all of my publicly-viewable photo albums are here. Feel free. Since I started posting here in May '09 I've accumulated quite a few.

In March 1991, ever the family photographer, I brought the camcorder to the grocery store while we shopped for food, just for kicks and to document our daily lives as a family. Ethan was 7, Julie was 4 and Meredith was a toddler sitting in the shopping car. I highly recommend this: the segment has gone into legend in family lore because the kids weren’t behaving all that well – they were crawling around on the floor, dropping boxes from shelves, running up and down the aisles and whining for foods they couldn’t have, etc. In other words they were playing for the camera. It seems very funny now, seeing how exasperated Cari was becoming by the time we were nearly done. At one point she said, “Take some records of the prices,” which I did. I picked up a gallon of milk and said, “This milk is $2.31 a gallon. We think it’s expensive but maybe in twenty years it’ll seem cheap.” Indeed. An Internet check of a flyer for the very same store reveals that milk is now $3.99 a gallon (with a club card). That’s nearly a 73% increase.

I re-watched Les Bernstien's Night Train (1999) last night. I have forgotten what a sleazy flick this was. It takes place in Tijuana, Mexico - some reviewer called it the "greasy side of film noir." That pretty much describes it. I'd like to say that I enjoyed last night's viewing but... no... I didn't, really.

My son called my attention to a book entitled Mail Order Mysteries. These are, of course, the advertisements of dubious and non-existent worth I grew up looking at in the backs of comic books. Even as an eight year-old I wouldn't have fallen for the X-Ray Specs ad. I did, however, fall for the "Jet Rocket Space Ship X-1 - the Most Sensational Toy in America" for $4.98. It was a massive disappointment, which I describe here. The one that really captured my imagination - and still does, to a lesser extent - is the 1967 "Win this full size Gemini Spacecraft" contest by Revell. To this day whenever I visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in D.C., I gaze into the interior of the Mercury capsule with longing. I wanted so badly to be John Glenn! The Gemini one would be great: I could wire it up to "operate" and me and a grandchild could sit and play in it. That would be heaven on earth, without a doubt. Feed the kid freeze-dried spacefood lunches, install a computer monitor with space scenes for the windows... make the dashboard lights and switches do things... We don't need three spare bedrooms, do we? Can't we get by with two?

Tomorrow me and the pards (or the pard if Chris' kids don't get over their colds) attend the annual Gettysburg Remembrance Day parade. (The last two: 2010, 2009.) The weather forecast is tolerable: "Except for a few afternoon clouds, mainly sunny. High 52F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph." Not quite greatcoat weather but not entirely woolen sack coat weather, either. I may be cold. Perhaps I'll bring a warm shirt to wear under my sack coat...

I am hoping to hear a twilight concert by the Federal City Brass Band tomorrow - in the last few years they have been playing little impromptu concerts at the top of Little Round Top. They play authentic band arrangements of Civil War music using authentic period instruments. It is very cool. This time I hope to get an iPhone video of a performed song I can share with you.

Have a great weekend!

17 Nov 2011

Wow, I had an odd dream last night. Before I describe it, however, I shall mention that I am never entirely happy with the result of describing dreams in this blog. I read them later and go, "Gak! Why did I put that in?" Nevertheless, I shall forge on.

Somehow or another I had been indirectly involved with the accidental murder of a person (I didn't do it, but I was an accessory), and it had been decided that we would hide the body in the back seat of a car and park the car in a small room of a big freezer warehouse facility. When it had been done, one of the guys said to me, "Are you in?" (Meaning, "Do we keep this secret?") And I reluctantly said "Yes," knowing that I would be haunted by guilt about it for the rest of my life. It had occurred to me that I had seen enough films noir to realize that you cannot escape your past, and unconfessed, unrepentant sins weigh you down as if you were carrying a leaden knapsack. I was happy to have awakened and realized that it was just a dream, and that I had no leaden knapsack of buried crimes. In other words, it was a dream about guilt. It probably was based upon the film I watched the night before.

I watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). I wasn't expecting much - the third X-Men film sucked out loud - so I was agreeably surprised. It was good. I won't be watching it again (I am sort of burned out with comic book movies), but it was okay. Wolverine and Sabertooth in the American Civil War - hahaha!

I have a photo album called the "drop box" where I can send shots from my camera to my Picasa site - here it is. It's a collection of odd and interesting stuff I see; I use my cell phone camera for these, mostly. Anyway, check out this tree. Interesting, huh? A totally natural sunburst finish on a tree!

I was also struck by a clever Steve Jobs/Apple display in the atrium of the Patent and Trademark Office, where I work. As I mentioned before, I am reading the third in Arthur C. Clark's "Space Odyssey" series. It occurred to me that a blank standing iPhone (in black, not white) bears a resemblance to Clarke's Monolith. Was this intentional, I wonder?

Ahhhh.... I see I'm not the only person who thought this.

Yesterday we got the Meredith wedding Las Vegas photographer's DVD in the mail, so I'll be spending a few hours going though those, Photoshopping my see-through hair, making prints and reformatting shots for web use. I may have them up tomorrow.

On the drive into work this morning I listened to the 1973 James Brown song Doin' It to Death aka Gonna Have a Funky Good Time, an unusual tune. It's not much a song as it is a beat with a really good bass (Bootsy Collins?) accompanied by James talking to members of his band - with a great trumpet solo. And, of course, Brown's unique and odd vocalizations: "I need a grit/Got the grit/Got a job/Need a job..." then he drops it and starts chatting with this trumpet player. What a great act!

I've loaded a free Mahjong solitaire app onto my iPhone; I used to play a PC version of this game. It's a fun way of wasting a few minutes. The problem, however, is getting all those tiles onto a small iPhone screen and being able to differentiate them without powerful reading glasses! My interest is partly the game and partly the cryptic and interesting glyphs on the tiles. How old is majong? Nobody is sure.

I am also becoming a bit frustrated with my iPhone chess app. Putting the difficulty slider bar in one position means I can never beat the machine. Backing it off from that setting one tiny little bit means that it makes dumb mistakes and I can beat it fairly easily. I may have to buy a better app.

It's time for new shoes for baby. We went to COSTCO last night to look at a set of four tires for the VW. Bridgestones are on sale; Michelins (what I prefer) are available for about $50 more. I have almost 44,000 miles on the Michelins which came new with the car - not bad. The last time I bought a new VW in January 1975, it came with a crappy set of Continentals which lasted me about 20,000 miles. In general, by the way, my 2007 VW has been solid and trouble free. No major mechanical problems for 4 1/2 years - nice. (I had a couple of minor things which were fixed under warranty.) Even nicer: the car is paid for. Every now and then I get a postcard from the dealership trying to sell me the newly-designed 2012 VW Beetle. As nice as it would be to have the greater acceleration a turbo provides, the fact that we're not making car payments means so much more. And they haven't introduced the convertible version yet, so no dice. I really like the top down driving.

16 Nov 2011

I watched Cloverfield (2008) last night. It was okay, kind of. It's sort of a cinema verite Godzilla as told with The Blair Witch Project shaky cam. The plot can be summed up easily: a cocktail party of annoying twentysomethings ("Yo. Hey. What's up? Totally. Yo. Dude. Whatever.") is interrupted by aliens, who fling bits of New York City and the Statue of Liberty around. The government retaliates by destroying what's left of Manhattan. No big loss either way, really. Obviously, I was unmoved. The usual Hollywood tropes are in place, including a male being rescued by a spunky, physical, bellicose female (does Hollywood recognize any other kind?) and obvious product placement (the escapees linger around a Sephora storefront and use Aquafina water as first aid).

When I saw the Blair Witch Project back in 1999 I was intrigued because the filmmakers had managed to do a new thing: tell a story in a new way (via the plot device of "recovered" films). I also appreciated that the scares and bogeymen in that film were suggested or imagined, rather than explicitly seen. I always like that... it engages the viewer to use his imagination and thus become a part of the production. (Old-timers insist that radio was better than television because of this.) I had an idea that in its way, Blair Witch was a ground-breaking film. And so it has proven to be... Cloverfield and Gang Tapes, for two, owe a debt of gratitude to the earlier film.

And as for product placement in films, I would like Congress to pass a law requiring that identification of commercial sponsors be posted during the closing credits. Why? Because producers and directors don't want to do that. They like the little bubble of "artistic quality" they grant themselves and each other... I say phooey. If you're getting money from Taco Bell or Mentos for promotional consideration/product placement during your modern day reimagining of Love's Labors Lost or Dante's Inferno, I say fess up. You know, that Obama mantra: transparency.

After Cloverfield I returned to the real world and watched another episode of The Wonder Years, a breezy, fun and frequently thought-provoking half-hour. I mentioned yesterday that the junior high scenes were filmed at Muir. As it turned out it's the Burbank school where two - not one - of my best friends attended, and Kevin's locker was a row or two down from my pal Mike's when he attended there. As easy as it is to mentally insert myself into scenes with a twelve year-old Kevin, this makes it even easier. The show is about me and my friends. It is not for nothing that I have included the voice over from the final episode on the main page of my Avocado Memories (scroll down).

My next film is X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009); I'm guessing that I won't exactly fall in love with this flick, either. But it's an easy-to-check-out-and-return DVD from the nearby library. I'm trying to find Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (2004); I've seen it on the library shelves. Why? Because Korean-American comic Bobby Lee is in it - I like him. And, to be honest, I'm hoping to provoke a, "Dad, I can't believe you watched that!" comment from one of my kids, the way I did when I found a VHS copy of Clerks (1994) at a yard sale. I didn't like it, but I have a certain satisfaction in having seen it and thereby knowing who Jay and Silent Bob (pictured above) are. I also surprised my son and myself when I watched Trainspotting (1996 - another yard sale VHS), a thoroughly discreditable and irresponsible film which, as it turned out, I liked. Is it possible to make a worthwhile film which celebrates crime, drug abuse and a contemptible lifestyle? Yes - but only if it's British. I am SUCH an Anglophile...

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you will know that I tend to favor classic art - the kind of thing they require you to read, listen to or look at in school. I actually like this stuff! Shakespeare, Euripides, Vaughan Williams, Klee, Bartok, Homer... but I occasionally go slumming. When you think about it, the entire film noir genre - which I have spent many hours and much energy with - is a pretty dumbed-down pursuit. The source material for noir is usually pulp fiction, after all. It's just that since about the Seventies, critics have intellectualized film essays on the subject. When Gaby Rodgers opens the "great whatzit" at the end of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me, Deadly, it isn't a sophisticated mid-century cultural essay about the paranoia consequent to the Atomic Age. Contemporary viewers would have simply taken it to be a big explosion. The director, Robert Aldrich, would be amazed at the scholarly text which has been produced about his little thriller movie since it was released in 1955.

15 Nov 2011

I mentioned that my wife's friend's funeral was last weekend; here's a eulogy Cari wrote. I added some photos from our scrapbook. We will miss Pam.

I am now reading Arthur C. Clarke's 2061: odyssey three. I read the first in his trilogy, 2001, in 1968 just after I saw the movie. I was thoroughly perplexed by the film and, like the rest of America, wanted to know what the heck was going on. Undeterred by the fact that 2001 was nothing like Clarke envisioned it, I read the next installment, 2010, in 1984, just after I graduated from college. I also saw the movie; it was okay. It had nothing like the impact of Stanley Kubrick's magnum opus, of course... And, undeterred by the fact that 2010 was also nothing like Clarke envisioned it, I am starting this final volume. (Final because Clarke is dead. But perhaps I'm being premature, and some other author will be hired to write equally wrong forecasts of what the future will be like.)

I used to like science fiction more than I do now. For instance, as a boy I liked the original Star Trek series. A franchise that started out capturing The Wonder of It All (which is very much at the heart of good sci-fi) degenerated into Business as Usual, Except in Space by the time that Enterprise, the last series in the franchise, came around.

The other night I watched a favorite original series episode on Netflix streaming, The Cloud Minders (1969), as tarted up by the Paramount special effects team in 2006 for a 40th anniversary remastering reissue. In the original series episodes, whatever planet the Enterprise happened to be orbiting looked kind of murky. Now the planets look much more credible - and so does the Enterprise. While the story and acting behind the The Cloud Minders is badly dated and rather corny, I've always liked the idea of Stratos, the Cloud City. The original effect was pretty primitive. It got the idea across, but that was it. However, I am happy to say that in its new guise Stratos is much more impressive: Image one, image two - a place I'd very much like to visit. Good work, guys!

I should mention in passing that a feature of this particular episode is a little musical cue, a fanfare and an arpeggiated harp chord, which plays whenever the city is shown. I've always liked that, too.

In the story, the city of Stratos is dedicated to the genteel life, and is the repository of art, beauty and refinement. When I was younger I always thought of the Brand Library in Glendale - "El Miradero" - as being like that. Unlike the other branches, its holdings were specifically based on the Arts. I always felt at home there. I wrote up a little homage to the place. Whenever I visit Burbank I try to make it up there, look around, and do a little contented sigh. I wish we had such a library near where I live now.

One last thing about The Cloud Minders: At the end, as the cast credits flashed by, I cynically commented that, "...none of the guest actors were ever seen in anything else." How wrong I was! I didn't recognize him as a bearded older man, but the part of the High Advisor of Stratos - the chief guest starring role - was played by Jeff Corey. Who's he? In addition to being a sometime film noir actor, he was one of the most influential actors in Hollywood via his acting school. I have blogged about him before; here is his IMDb bio.

I watched the pilot episode of The Wonder Years last night. Given that its known as being a well-written and well-acted production, that the protagonist is supposed to be my age and grew up when I did (he's twelve in 1968) and that the thing is often set in Burbank (I recognized the Verdugo Hills right away in a street shot), I should watch all the episodes, I suppose. The IMDb says the school shots were filmed at John Muir Junior High in Burbank, where my pal Mike went, and John Burroughs High School, the rival school to Burbank High, where we attended. As I've mentioned before, that's the nice thing about being from Burbank - you see your home town in the Media a lot.

Funny story: I maintain an e-mail address, "wes@wesclark.com," via my website as a permanent address. It auto-forwards to an address I always check frequently. It stopped working recently, and people trying to send e-mails to me on it were telling me that they were getting responses back saying that the mailbox was full. So I checked. Ha! I hit my 300 MB mailbox limit on it with 37,000 e-mails - all of them spam and junk mail. So I contacted the web hosting service, who cleared it out and enabled some spam and virus filters I didn't know I had. Problem solved. Can you imagine? 37,000 male enhancement e-mails? Sheesh.

14 Nov 2011

The events of my past three day weekend for your reading enjoyment (next time, consider improving the level of your reading):

Attended the funeral of our friend Pam; my wife was asked to speak and told some funny anecdotes of our times with her. In general, of course, it was a sad affair and caused us all to reflect upon our own mortality.

There was a "Spirit of the Civil War" concert I attended at the NOVA Alexandria campus. It featured Civil War music and slide shows... it was generally good, except that it was talky. If you are producing a program with notes to hand out, there is no need to repeat the notes at the start of each piece. The best piece was a number for brass band called "The Blue and the Gray," arranged during the centennial back in the 1960's. The least successful was the inevitable reading of the Sullivan Ballou letter while an augmented brass band played "Ashokan Farewell," from the 1989 Ken Burns TV special. (This is not a piece that is contemporary with the war, although people think it is. It was, in fact, written in 1982.) They should have throttled back the accompaniment to a quartet - with full band it sounded like the Narrator vs. the Brass Band. The brass band won that Civil War skirmish easily.

With the power I invest in myself, I hereby declare Yard Sale season to be OVER. The Little Red School House near me was open again, but this was just the stuff they couldn't sell last Saturday. Nothing new. I bought one book at another sale: a treatise about Monopoly strategy and tactics.

I was mesmerized and haunted by the rediscovery of a commercial jingle from my youth: the 1965 Polaroid Swinger jingle, sung by none other than Barry Manilow. Here is the link. Hey! Meet the Swinger! Polaroid Swinger! Open carefully... once this dratted melody gets into your head it doesn't want to leave! And yes, the brunette with the long straight hair is a pre-Love Story Ally McGraw.

Sometimes I dwell on the oddest things... this past weekend it was Bugles, Daisys and Whistles. I explain it all on today's Avocado Memories update here.

My wife and I watched the British television production of My Boy Jack (2007), an excellent work about Rudyard Kipling's son in World War I. It stars Harry Potter.

I also watched a bunch of other stuff...a documentary about building cathedrals (did you know Amiens Cathedral is falling to pieces because they didn't put the flying buttresses in the right places?), a documentary about the Great Financial Crash of 1929, a rather boring work about how D.C. Comics came to be, and, most interestingly, Kimjongilia (2009), wherein North Korean refugees talk about conditions within the realm of the "Dear Leader."

What a wretched, pathetic, miserable excuse for a man Kim Jong-il is! He's in the same category inhabited by Fidel Castro: the sooner he dies, the happier millions of people will be. Want to see a simple depiction of life under capitalism vs. life under communism? Here it is, a satellite view of the two Koreas at night. The South is lit, ready for business and booming. Vibrant. The North is dark and benighted, just like their government. Says it all.

Short of military action or diplomatic sanctions, what can those of us in Western democracies do about tyrants while waiting for them to die? Laugh at them, of course. I used to love Bobby Lee's Kim Jong-il segments on Mad TV: here's a good one, The Kim Jong-il Show.

I also played around with my iPhone some; learned how to take videos and post them directly to youtube. Video one, video two, Video three. Obviously, I need to work on production. Next time I promise I'll have an upgraded wardrobe, too. I also bought an app which allows me to display my .ged genealogical data - all 4,500+ names and 2,000+ families. I no longer have to lug my laptop with me when I do research - all my notes and data are on my cell phone!

11/11/11

Veterans Day! And since I'm a federal employee, I have the day off. I felt the need to do a blog entry, however, to observe the date, 11/11/11 - the latest in a twelve year series of repeating dates I first commented upon in a rugby club e-mail on 01-01-01, more than a decade ago. And also to comment.

Veterans... what is there to say other than "thank you?" We literally owe them everything. The best expression of this is a quote which I insert here every year: "It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag." - Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, USMC.

So true!

Last night I watched a documentary film about soldiers serving in Afghanistan, but, being oddball me and wanting a twist on the subject, I watched a production about Danish soldiers. Danes in Afghanistan? Yes, indeed, Denmark is our ally on the Global War on Terror and sends military units to serve. The film was Armadillo (2010), and it was excellent. The title is taken from the name of the fortified camp where a unit of Danes spent a six month tour serving alongside British troops. It is a good companion piece to Restrepo (2010), if you've seen that.

There's are interesting scenes at the start where parents bid their sons goodbye. Someone asks, "I don't know why Denmark is involved in this," or words to that effect. This is easily answered: because terrorism in New York City, Washington, D.C. or London can easily become terrorism in Copenhagen. Or Madrid, Paris, Athens or Rome. Radical Islamic terrorists hate secular Europe and will attack wherever a target presents itself and they are ready.

And so veterans answer the call and the young become new veterans. It's a quote that Plato may or may not have have said, but it is attributed to him: "Only the dead have seen an end to war." It has the sort of truthful, self-assured finality I attribute to classical Greek thinking... I certainly believe it.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all get along on a global basis? Certainly, it seems to be the case that war is becoming unpopular, if this graph is true. (Or it could be the case that modern war results in comparatively fewer deaths but more wounding? I don't know.) But despite the apparent fact that free democracies are reluctant to wage war on each other, there will always be some tin horn dictator, some tyrant, some historical grudge between peoples or some lust for empire which will prevent a perfect peace. And so the veteran takes his place among society's essential citizens.

My thoughts this year turn especially to the matters of war and peace because last month my youngest daughter married a young man who is scheduled to be commissioned in the Army to serve. The matters of war and peace move directly into my extended household, in other words. No telling where he will be deployed. As Chris has been assigned to serve within the Army Signal Corps, it appears that his first stop will be in Georgia for training; that's where the Signal Corps has its headquarters. After that, who knows? Only the Army's planners.

My mind is also occupied on matters of life and death, as well. A dear friend of my wife's died earlier this week - the viewing is this evening and the funeral is tomorrow. The family are longtime church associates and friends of ours; I had their youngest son in my Cub pack and Scout troop back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

So Happy Veterans Day to all vets! God bless you!

10 Nov 2011

Happy Birthday United States Marine Corps! 236 years young today. The Nobel Committee are fools: There is simply no better peace program on earth than U.S. Marines armed to the teeth.

I had a dream last night where I was at a party and a woman asked me what my I.Q. was. I said, "That's rather a personal question, don't you think? But to answer it, my I.Q. is high enough for me to appreciate symphonic music but not high enough to give me a swollen head about it." Good answer; I wish I was that glib when I'm awake!

My business trip to Boyers, PA was fun. The Annandale mine was created in 1902 and abandoned in the mid-1950's, when a company decided to buy it to house archival information. The successor to that company is Iron Mountain, Inc., the current owners. Whizzing around in the mine in a golf cart reminded me partially of the Snow White ride at Disneyland (heigh-ho!) and partially of an old episode of Dr. Who which takes place underground. Speaking of Disney, they have a storage area there; their door has their castle logo painted thereupon. The original Snow White film - in addition to many others - is housed within. Check out this video - you can see who else has a presence there.
We got a data center tour (the company is eager to sell data center space). When you think about it, the place is ideally suited to such a use. The rock walls stay at 55 degrees year-round - they act as a perfect heat-sink, in other words. And there's a lake above the mine with all the chilled water you would need. It's like the Lord is saying, "Build here."

Like most other travelers on the Pennsy Turnpike, we stopped in Breezewood, PA, one of the most charmless areas on the East coast. It's primarily a truck stop. How do I describe it? Take every crass food franchise, hotel chain and gas station and condense them - and their signage - into a retail strip district about a mile long. That's Breezewood. Nevertheless, the place does have some interest... read about its history here. Business Week stated in 1991, Breezewood is "perhaps the purest example yet devised of the great American tourist trap...the Las Vegas of roadside strips, a blaze of neon in the middle of nowhere, a polyp on the nation's interstate highway system." Precisely. I sent my friend Mike a postcard!

My son likes the place because they sell fireworks.

Here's what I saw recently:

They Live (1988) - An odd and funny little sci-fi flick about space invaders living among us. WWE wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper stars. He can only see the invaders as they really are with special sunglasses. And guess what? These aliens are Reagan Republicans! It's director John Carpenter's really lame attempt to criticise what he saw as the evils of 1980's affluence. (Not to fear, Obama would help solve that problem decades later...) It also stars Meg Foster, she of the uncanny slate gray eyes. She doesn't portray an alien, however... she just looks like one.

Maxed Out (2006) - A left wing diatribe about predatory lending. How does one deal with predatory lending? Don't borrow from predatory lenders, maybe? In this all the bad guys are Republicans and all the good guys are Democrats including, get this, Chris Dodd and Eliot Spitzer! Hahaha! What's even funnier is that this production greatly laments the rise of government debt. (It was made in 2006; Bush was in office and therefore it was a safe criticism.) I wonder if the producers would totally ignore the Obama years in an update? Anyway, I quit watching after about 40 minutes. Crap.

Magnificent Desolation (2005) - I wouldn't have thought it possible to make a boring production about walking on the moon, but this one succeeds. I guess you need to see it in 3-D and in the original IMAX format. It isn't very impressive otherwise.

Einstein's Big Idea (2005) - A docudrama about everyone's favorite equation, E=mc squared. I liked it as it dealt with Faraday's work with electromagnetism and Lavoisier's work with the conservation of mass, both of which played into Einstein's insights about space and time and their interconnectedness. Einstein cheated on his first wife; I guess one of his other insights was that marriage vows were binding only in a relative sense. With his enlightened views about sex and morality, it is perhaps not surprising to learn that Einstein was a political liberal - in fact, a socialist. Yet another example of really intelligent people holding really dumb views. Thank heavens we're not all as smart as Albert Einstein!

Time to give some credit and attention to an otherwise neglected basso, Thurl Ravenscoft. He was cool for so many reasons:

1.) He was the voice of the original Tony the Tiger.

2.) He sings the basso signature song Asleep in the Deep better than anyone. Check out that descending passage leading to that last note - wow! (His rendition of A Life on the Ocean Waves is also great.)

3.) He's one of the singing busts in the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland.

4.) He sang You're a Mean One, Mister Grinch.

5.) By all accounts he was a nice guy, active in his church and married to the same woman for 53 years to her death.

6.) That name, "Thurl Ravenscroft," is unsurpassably cool.

8 Nov 2011

No update today or tomorrow. I'm visiting this place.

7 Nov 2011

Well, I was disappointed by the U.S. Navy. The tuba/euphonium concert didn't come off. They did a substitution of a woodwind quintet instead. I mean, it was good... but I wanted to hear tubas! Even worse, Chris brought his family out for this - no tubas. So we left early...

Yard sales were good: I bought three classical CDs, two LPs and a book (every New Yorker cartoon ever printed). I also got a Tower of London keepsake: a CD of a Yeoman Warder describing some of the stories attached to the place. Quite nice. One of the Lps is Tennessee Ernie Ford singing Confederate Civil War songs (which, as it turns out, I already have - I need the Union one, now) and a 1977 Lp by Charo (depicted) - the wet tee shirt cover. "Cuchi-cuchi?" Mine is autographed by Charo!

We had to have our new Hyundai towed on Saturday: Cari got into the car and it wouldn't start. Fortunately it's covered by warranty but it's still a bummer. The service tech thinks it's a malfunctioning brake switch.

My daughter Meredith got herself a generation 4 iPhone on Saturday, so now we can do Face Time conversations - nice.

By the way, I added some of the professional photographer's D.C. and Virginia reception photographs here. They're in the last rows.

I watched some movies:

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008) - The tale of an influential but down and out rock band attempting to recapture their early Eighties fame. This was pretty funny. It's best described as a true life version of Spinal Tap. In fact, the comparisons are uncanny: Stonehenge, a knob that goes to eleven, redemption via Japanese audiences... even a (non-combustible) drummer named Robb Reiner. A lot of fun. One of the better rock and roll movies I have ever seen.

The Kings of Pastry (2009) - This, too, was excellent. It's about a high-level pastry bake-off in France for entry into the MOF (Meilleur Ouvrier de France), the Best of the Best, in other words. The sugar pulling and baking these guys were doing was simply incredible. What seemed especially hard-hearted was the requirement to move the brittle and breakable finished products from the kitchen to a judging area; talk about nerve-wracking.

The Wolfman (2010) - I am a fan of the 1941 original, and so wasn't really keen on watching this remake. But... it was better than I thought it would be, despite some modern day Hollywoodisms. (For one, Anthony Hopkins is in it, so you know automatically he has a major part in the plot. The rule is, if a major star is in the film, he isn't a secondary character. See the Ian Holm Jack the Ripper film.) It looked great and it appears that Universal has treated one of its properties well. I enjoyed it. Funny thing is, Ebert calls this a "date film." Huh? It might be if your date doesn't object to seeing guts and body parts flung about. Unlike the 1941 original, which had to conform to the standards of its time, this is a very bloody, gory film.

Plymptoons (1991) - The handmade cartoons of Bill Plympton. I've heard of him but have never seen any of his work. I was not especially impressed.

A Day at the Races (1937) - The Marx Brothers classic with comedy, musical performances, slapstick, singing tenors, an elaborate Negro dance production and a Busby Berkley-style water carnival. They threw everything they had into these old flicks! I remain staggered by the convention of Groucho's painted on big moustache and enormous eyebrows. People stare right at him but nobody ever comments on them during the productions. Weird!

Roxy Music Live at the Apollo 2003 - I've always liked this band and this was an excellent concert video. They're a Seventies/Eighties band, but in 2003 were still credible. Great songs... they have a solid back catalog of stuff to play.

4 Nov 2011

The Face Time feature on the iPhone is a great way to stay in touch!

Yesterday I mentioned Scared Straight!, the famous 1978 documentary about wayward teens visiting the Rahway, NJ maximum security prison and getting yelled at by lifers (murderers, drug dealers, thieves and the like). The update section on the DVD asserts that only one of the teens is today in prison - oddly enough, the young man who predicted that his career would be crime. Well... that's not quite true.

In the original documentary a scrawny teenage boy with large, soulful eyes - Angelo Speziale - made his appearance in prison; in the update he is shown playing ball with his kids and described as being stable and happily married. (Despite the fact that he's had a few run-ins with the law subsequent to his prison visit as a teen.) He repeatedly asserted that the Scared Straight! experience reformed him. However, it turns out that Mr. Speziale is indeed speziale.* Earlier this year DNA evidence provided Bergen County police with the ammunition to convict him for the 1982 rape and murder of his next door neighbor. (Details here.) So, guess where he is now. That's right, the Rahway prison he visited as a teen. Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back.

Last night I watched In the Shadow of the Stars (1991), about the more or less unsung folks who sing in opera choruses, specifically, in this case, the San Francisco Opera. In any theatrical or performing arts troupe you're likely to find divas, drama queens, flamboyant extroverts and homosexual men ("theatre people," as Victorians sniffed), and this production was no exception. I liked the scenes where the sopranos are all gathered, chatting about opera. Some are Toscas, some are Carmens. Intelligent, pretty female musicians - what fun! The documentary pointed out that what most people don't know about opera choruses is, 1.) They are professional musicians and many can also be solo artists, 2.) Like the stars, they, too, have to know how to act on stage, and, 3.) It is paid work. They don't do it for free. It was interesting and I will never again view an opera chorus quite the same way.

Did I mention that we now have a freshly sodded new lawn? Indeed we do. Here it is. Home improvement continues. Hopefully we won't have the enormous dandelion crop this spring we normally do. Who is "Albo?" A Republican running for Virginia state representative in our district. We normally don't put political signs up at our house but Dave is different because he requested that I play bass in a musical rock ensemble in his annual "Albopalooza" fund-raiser. (But I'm not.)

It looks like I'm going to have to move government bureaucrats off their hind ends for my benefit; never an easy job. Back in 1993 I paid nearly $1,000 to "buy back" my four years in the Marine Corps in order to improve my retirement benefit; I have a photocopy of the paperwork and the front of the check. (Sadly, I do not have a photocopy of a canceled check, or the check itself.) Unfortunately, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), doesn't have a record of this, which suggests that my agency screwed up somehow. So now I have to have personnel office people investigate. If I buy it back now it will be over $2,400 due to interest. It's still worth it, but grrrr. I may have to initiate a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request... a little voice in my head is telling me that this will ultimately be fruitless. And this is the organization that people want to run their health care?

The weekend approacheth! Sunny weather tomorrow for yard sales; in fact, I know of a number of flea market type activities being held in indoor venues. The season is winding down fast - tomorrow might be it until March.

Tomorrow night the U.S. Navy Band is putting on a Tuba/Euphonium quartet (shown above) performance near where I live. They are described as being an international "driving force in low brass music." Huzzah! This I want to hear! My pard Chris, who used to play the tuba, may or may not be going.

I wish the Navy had one of those clever four man saxophone ensembles, like the kind you hear on Main St. at Disneyland... I like those sonorities. Next time I go I'm going to make a point of finding out when they play so I can hear them live...

Have a great weekend!

* My little pun is not quite accurate. "Speziale" in Italian means "apothecary," not special. But I couldn't resist.

3 Nov 2011

My wife and I finished the Edward VII series last night with the last DVD - Good Old Teddy! Excellent series - on Netflix DVD. Recommended.

I also watched as much of Young@Heart (2007) as I could take. It's a documentary about a geriatric choir who sings rock songs. At the start of the film a little old lady with a cane totters up to the microphone on a stage in a packed hall, screams, and, with her British dialect and an interrogative speaking/singing style (the Germans called it sprechstimme), begins the punk song Should I stay or should I go? What gives this particular choir its uniqueness - in addition to the fact that their average age is around 80 - is that none of them are professional musicians. It's an hour and a half work that really merits about an hour; that's about when I tuned out. The trailer is here, if you'd like to see a group of old folks sing Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze.

I also watched the 1978 classic Scared Straight!, wherein a group of wayward teens are led into a prison - a New Jersey prison, no less - and are screamed at by inmates. The murderers and lifers describe (in graphic language) day to day existence around the prison, and what generally happens to handsome young men as they arrive as newcomers. Would a convicted murderer screaming in my face about anal sex have a transformative effect on my developing life of crime? Oh, yes. There's also a "twenty years later" update describing what happened to the teens and the inmates as time went by. One became a preacher; nearly all reformed after the experience. It seems that a high proportion of the inmates later died of AIDS - go figure. Wikipedia link here.

Yesterday I mentioned MadTV; wikipedia has what sounds like a funny skit based on Scared Straight!: "On Mad TV, Will Sasso & Aries Spears play as two convicts in a program called "Scared Straight Anywhere" in which they are used to scare people straight literally anywhere such as at a business meeting, a Boy Scout meeting and Hollywood." Ha ha ha!

The Jersey girls who showed up to prison that day were scared to death and decided to avoid a repeat of the experience in their subsequent lives. Thing is, however, they all turned into scary middle-aged Jersey women with strange hairstyles. And is there anything an unmelodious as that heavy, working class Jersey/New York dialect? I think not. My Dad was from Brooklyn but he never used "dese" and "dems" - thank goodness.

I just finished reading a fascinating chapter in my Michael Wood book about England; it's about a house in Devon, built in 1619 upon earlier foundations. Wood did some research on the surrounding area and it appears that the house sits within what was a Roman fort. And, even earlier, Neolithic finds were recovered in the area. There is such a long continuity of use in places in England - it's immensely interesting to me. I shall never forget visiting the wonderful Guildhall Art Gallery in the "Square Mile" in London - and then finding that the remains of a Roman amphitheatre was in the basement level! An amazing place...

iPhone apps: I think AP wins the news feed app war over Fox and CBS. But why confine myself to just one? I can create a folder called "News" and put all three in here. User configurability is one of the great advances in recent computer devices, I think. Yesterday, on a shuttle bus to and from facilities at work, I played chess on my iPhone. The software is interactive in that it increases its playing ability to match yours. It was doing stupid things like giving up the queen in peril, but it has now stopped doing that and is getting harder to beat.

The iPhone protective case I ordered via amazon.com came in the mail yesterday, but they sent me the wrong item. So a call to one of their reps (a South African; I commiserated with him the recent loss of the Springboks to achieve the Rugby World Cup) set things right. Or at least I think it has... we shall see.

2 Nov 2011

We got a 617 page Restoration Hardware catalog last week; surely the magnum opus of catalogs. It's the type of thing not seen since the glory days of the Sears catalog. What struck me about it as I thumbed through it one morning while eating my corn flakes was that it is composed of 617 pages of cheerless, drab, depressing rooms of a severely limited color palette, all dark browns, grays, blacks and off-whites. No cheery reds, greens, oranges, purples or yellows anywhere that I could see. An occasional beige-toned room, but that's it. Their signature color now seems to be slate. Is this seriously what's in? People want to live in homes which look like Tim Burton movie sets?

I think I have this figured out: Restoration Hardware is currently helmed by a fellow named Gary Friedman - but he's really Killer Bob from Twin Peaks. He just got a haircut so he'd look more corporate. The whole idea of those depressing interiors is to spread misery and despair throughout the country, just as Killer Bob did in the little city of Twin Peaks. (Garmonbozia, if you remember the show's lore. And I don't expect you do - you'd have to be as weird as I am for that. So I provide a link.) So just remember, the next time you step into a Restoration Hardware store and enter into one of those lachrymose interiors: smile and laugh. They hate that.

Speaking of laughter ("Does anyone remember laughter?" as Robert Plant once asked in the Led Zeppelin live album), last night I was watching some hilarious episodes of the late, lamented MadTV's "The Lillian Vernor Game Show" sketches. It is a signal bit of unfairness that MadTV is off the air but its pallid competitor Saturday Night Live is still broadcasting episodes of shallow wit. Here, check out these Lillian Verner sketches:

Lots of Crap to give away
The contestant with no chin
the Segway episode
Survivor Probst as host

There are more; look on youtube.

The comedian who puts this sketch over the top is, of course, Michael Hitchcock as Simian Dyson, the hopped-up announcer. He also served as a writer on the show.

Last night I watched two documentaries, one female and one male, if you will. The female one was Tupperware!, a PBS American Experience production about the invention, promotion and, especially, sales of this iconic American product. It specifically dealt with the efforts of Brownie Wise, the energetic and charismatic sales executive who developed the "party plan" system. A fun documentary! Like every other household in America, we have some Tupperware. My wife insists that there is no better product for the storage of staple foods. As a follow up show I wanted to watch the Eerie, Indiana episode "Forever Ware" about the kid who sleeps in a Tupperware vault and never ages, but Cari declined and went to bed.

That left me to watch The Matador (2008) myself. The DVD cover has, "Barbaric, Elegant, Primitive, Erotic, Revolting, Thrilling... more drama than most blockbusters!" - Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times. The whole title is, "The Matador - A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Triumph and Love" - not to mention superlative phrasing! Seriously, however, this production was excellent. Watching it, I felt as I did the first time I watched a televised rugby match or read a Greek tragedy: I could really like this. It's called bullfighting, but the common error people make is in thinking it's a sport. It isn't. It's the ritualized killing of an animal bred for the purpose. What makes a bull ring different from a slaughterhouse, however, is the fact that the bull can fight back and kill or maim the matador.

Yes, yes, I know, it's not politically correct at all, and the PETA people hate it. (Which is reason enough for me to like it.) In the film someone says "Spain without bullfighting is inconceivable," and I agree. I shall not defend the indefensible; it's savage and a bit revolting. But it is also fascinating. There is something primitive and grand about a man dispatching an animal many times his weight and strength. True, the bull is exhausted by the time the matador finishes him off. But he's still dangerous. And it's the danger that makes the thing so fascinating. I am also intrigued by the fact that advertising is not allowed in the bull ring... good for the Spanish!

The film centered on the career of David Fandila, "El Fandi" (shown above), a young man every bit as athletic as the most advanced professional rugger.

For years I have wanted to see a bullfight. I'm told that you can take a bus in Southern California into Tijuana to see one; the bus returns later that day. The next time I visit Los Angeles and Burbank I plan to check it out... Ole!

1 Nov 2011

The first of November... what some reenactor friends and I used to call "Cranky Season." The days get shorter, there are no more outdoor events to do and, with me, I think, seasonal affective disorder (SAD) starts to set in and the world seems a less cheery place. And this coming weekend we go back to standard time, which means go to work before the sun's up and come home as it's setting. UGH. Certainly last night was a bummer; Halloween is no fun without kids. I thought of all the Halloweens I did 1985-2003, taking a kid or kids from door to door, and sighed. I miss that.

I'm playing around with the apps for my iPhone; I'm looking for a good news app. Right now I'm trying Fox, CBS and AP. MSNBC is out of the question - they're way too liberal. While I like the "look" of the CBS app (I have always liked their television eye logo - I'm glad they never changed it), the Associated Press app seems to have a fuller and more unique set of links to news stories, which they seem to change more often. I'm not concerned about op-ed features, talking heads or videos (too many ads); I just want an app that will take me to the latest news and breaking news articles. News in detail I can get elsewhere. And yes, I have the Drudge app.

I am quite enjoying using the Face Time videoteleconferencing feature on my 4th generation iPhone. Last night my wife and I had a running conversation going on while my daughter Meredith was baking cookies; Chris showed us their new apartment. I have also Face Timed my high school friend Bob and my Civil War pard Don, as well as CW pard Chris, who has a non-iPhone smart phone. I use Tango for that and it seems to work okay. Bell Telephone heralded the videophone for the future all the way back in the 1964 World's Fair - it has finally come about.

It's funny. Back in 1994 or so, when we first exchanged e-mails across the Internet with one another, with a fine sense of occasion Don's first message to me was the famous 1844 message Samuel Morse telegraphed between Baltimore and Washington D.C.: "What Hath God Wrought?" Don't laugh... we take it for granted now, but e-mail was a big deal back in the early Nineties. I recall being astounded the first time I exchanged e-mails between with a Scotsman in Glasgow from my home PC. Anyway, when Don's face appeared on my smart phone I repeated this line and we both laughed. When they get full dimensional 3-D holographic telephony (the next obvious technological leap) going we can use it again. And then again when they get quantum displacement transportation worked out...

My son is encouraging me to get games on my iPhone, but the only one I have is chess. It's the only game I need. Free app. (I like "free.")

I also loaded the NASA app: that one has great photos. Ever since I was a kid I've been interested in the planets, and it seems I can never get enough of looking at photos of them. (I hope I see a good image of Pluto-Charon before I die.) And, of course, I got an astronomical app, Planet Finder. The way it works is that I can find a planet, star or constellation, hold the phone up and point it around until it's found. Or, conversely, hold the phone up to a star and it tells me which one it is - nice. I paid $2 for that one.

I am looking for a useful genealogical app... the ancestry.com app I tried repeatedly seems not to work at all. What I want is a carry-around reference to all 4,000 + names I've entered into my genealogical database. I may have to buy a .ged (a standard file format for genealogical data exchange) viewer for $4 or so.

There's a Nike-iPod app that came with the phone. I think it does timed exercise walks and plays your mp3s, and then figures out calories burned, or something like that. I'll play with that later this week. And I should get serious about losing weight again and find an app like the web page I used to use, where you enter in your age, weight, height and activity level and it tells you how many daily calories you need to confine yourself to to lose 1 or 2 pounds a week. That would be very useful to have. It just might kick start my interest again...

I loaded the Netflix app and actually watched a movie on my iPhone: Microcosmos: le peuple de l'herbe (1996), a rather astonishing film about insects using macro lens, incredible resolution and sensitive directional microphones. It seems somehow fitting to watch a film about the microscopic world on a cell phone. Like my wife I'm not a big fan of insects, and so seeing a spider pounce upon its prey and beetles warring against one another, etc., kind of made me fidget a bit. And there's a scene of mating snails set to what sounds like an opera aria by some soprano - that I could have done without. But all in all, an amazing film. Leave it to the French!

I was also able to download some of my own mp4 videos to the iPhone. This is cool because I can watch 50 years of family films and camcorder videotapes which I have previously digitized. The iPhone is only an 8 GB model, so I can't put them all on there. (I have over 300 GB of this material.) But I can load and watch them one at a time for use on planes, etc. Neat. I have my daughter's brilliant short comedy Dumpster Divers loaded as part of the permanent collection - ha!

Of course I loaded a flashlight app. And I also loaded a Wikipedia interface; I note that when I'm away from my computer the resource I most want to access is an encyclopedia, to answer questions. ("Let's see... when did Edward II reign?") I also loaded the Shazam app my son demonstrated for me - amazing thing. Cause it to "listen" to a song playing on the radio and it identifies it for you. How does it do that?

The rugby world needs a good iPhone app. The best one I could see is a England rugby app, but that's just one nation. I want an app that reports the scores of matches, etc. on a worldwide basis. The IRB - International Rugby Board - would seem to be the logical producer, but all there are from them are Rugby World Cup 2011 apps, and that's over.

WQXR, the New York City area-based classical station, has an app I've loaded, but I haven't listened to it much yet.

And that's about it for now. As with many of the things in my life I expect I'll be dorking around with iPhone apps for a while yet, and then move onto something else.

Brigham's Blog