The roster of commentators at MSNBC (the US tv channel) includes two white guys in their 40s who look like they might be brothers, dress very similarly, and often appear together in split-screen discussions, which I find vaguely disconcerting. The brothers in news:
(#1) Jonathan / Jon Lemire, from Morning Joe
(#2) Willie Geist, from Way Too Early
Last night: a long — stretching over three hours of sleep, with a whizz break in the middle — and vivid story dream in which Ellen Kaisse (an old friend and a frequent character on this blog) and I were holed up for an entire night in an elegant hotel — much like the actual Beverly Hills Hotel — where we had a suite in which we were expected to produce a script for a film. The place looked like your ordinary luxury suite, except that it was dominated by a huge desk. Which, at the pressing of several buttons, converted magically into a fully functioning office, with computers, printers, phones, paper files, assorted office supplies, and of course a coffee maker. (But no staff, not even assistants to take things down for us. If we got hungry, we were to order food from room service.) Our work site for the long dark night.
We were expected to hack out an entire draft script, as well as suggestions for casting for the parts, costumes, and sets, plus a sketch of a score for the movie (I suspect that the score was especially significant to my having this dream; details to follow).
Somehow the actual subject of the film, which Ellen and I labored over, elaborately, for all those hours of my sleep, has dissolved, as dream material often does on awakening.
We didn’t question being put to work at the Hotel De Luxe through the night; apparently, that was a regular thing in Hollywood, just the way things worked there.
The dream was not at all unpleasant, sometimes actually delightful. Well, Ellen is wonderful company and an excellent person to exchange ideas with.
It’s Holy Thursday, and today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro: cartoon jumps the Easter gun, / with an outrageous rabbit pun:
Wayno’s title: “Side Effects May Include Hallucinations” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)model /ístǝr/ Easter, pun /íθǝr/ ether, shared /í…ǝr/, with coronal obstruents between the two syllabics, so not bad for an imperfect pun; meanwhile, the Easter bunny is administering ether as an anesthetic, so the pun fits the image nicely
Two things: Holy Thursday (and Easter Sunday); and anesthetic ether.
(Male bodies, one full frontal, allusions to sex between men — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
On the male art of the young NYC artist Todd Yeager (recently encountered in Pinterest, though his drawings have been featured in Advocate magazine several times). Especially devoted to faun / satyr / goat-god Pan images (you can pretty much smell the sex on them), male buttocks and penises, and loving male couples (and to chronicling his domestic life and the street life of NYC). Also to self-portraits of many kinds; well, he’s a good-looking hunky young man who can do pensive or flagrantly sexy, as it suits him. Here’s a sexy one: boots, buttocks, and profile (really big boots):
(#1) Self-portrait With Boots and Jock
In recent days, I’ve been exchanging e-mail with my (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi) linguistics colleague Luc Baronian about ethnic and linguistic history, with special reference to the Welsh (and the Welsh language, Cymraeg) in Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Dutch (and their language, Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch); and about tracing ancestral history. Three pieces of background here:
First, Luc is an Armenian-Canadian, the way I’m a Swiss-American. Luc is by recent paternal ancestry Armenian (as you can tell from his surname), by upbringing French Canadian; I am by recent paternal ancestry Swiss (as you can tell by my surname), by upbringing (and maternal ancestry) Pennsylvania Dutch (a descendant of primarily 18th-century immigrants to southeastern Pennsylvania, mostly from the Palatinate region of southern Germany).
Second, some years back, Luc — whose ancestry-search competence is vastly better than mine — helped me trace connections on my mother’s side and correct my misrecollections of several facts.
Third, Luc had gotten interested in the history of the Welsh language in Pennsylvania, which begins in colonial times, with late 17th-century negotiations over the Welsh Tract as a landmark event, and then apparently vanishes, leaving only place-names in its wake.
On the heels of yesterday’s posting about the early 19th-century composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, more people named Hummel (with the accented vowel rounded [U] (as in English put) in German or German-influenced English varieties, like Pennsylvania Dutch English; but unrounded [Ʌ] (as in English putt) in ordinary American English). The German landscape painter Carl Hummel. The fictional Kurt Hummel in the American tv series Glee. And the artist nun Maria Innocentia Hummel, whose paintings provided the original models for Hummel figurines, which is what this posting is mostly about.
Another chapter in the musical world of Europe in the early 19th century, in the transition from Classical to Romantic times. Today’s transitional figure, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, started his musical career as a child-prodigy pupil of the former child prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and went on from there. I’ll start by reviewing some postings of mine on others in this transitional cohort; then turning to his Wikipedia entry, focusing on his music (rather than his life); and ending with information about the one album of Hummel’s music I have in my Apple Music, which provides some pleasant surprises.
This morning I awakened to a sparkly, flashy, melody-filled piano concerto that I didn’t recognize — it sounded like a cross between Chopin (but much more expansive) and Louis Moreau Gottschalk (but without the Caribbean flavor) — which turned out to be by Friedrich / Frédéric Kalkbrenner (hereafter K): his Piano Concerto #4 in A Flat, Op. 127 (of 1835). K, a major figure of the transitional period between the late Classical music of Beethoven (1770 – 1827) and Schubert (1797 – 1829) and the early Romantic music of Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847) and Chopin (1810 – 1849) who was in fact admired by both Chopin and Gottschalk (1829 – 1869).
From Wikipedia:
Friedrich Wilhelm Michael Kalkbrenner (7 November 1784 – 10 June 1849), also known as Frédéric Kalkbrenner, was a pianist, composer, piano teacher and piano manufacturer. German by birth, Kalkbrenner studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, starting at a young age and eventually settled in Paris, where he lived until his death in 1849. Kalkbrenner composed more than 200 piano works, as well as many piano concertos and operas.
… It was not until the late 1830s that Kalkbrenner’s reputation was surpassed by the likes of Chopin, Thalberg and Liszt. Author of a famous method of piano playing (1831) which was in print until the late 19th century, he ran in Paris what is sometimes called a “factory for aspiring virtuosos” and taught scores of pupils from as far away as Cuba. His pupils included Marie Pleyel, Marie Schauff, and Camille-Marie Stamaty. Through Stamaty, Kalkbrenner’s piano method was passed on to Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Camille Saint-Saëns.
He was one of the few composers who through deft business deals became enormously rich. Chopin dedicated his first piano concerto to him.
Despite all this, you’ve probably never heard of K, or of Johann Nepomuk Hummel, or of Ignaz Moscheles, two other figures of this transitional period who, like K, were once really famous and then largely vanished from sight.
An old One Big Happy strip in my comics feed today — posted here on 3/28/14 in “OBH roundup”, but with little comment — in which Ruthie reveals her aide-memoire for the name of a fish her mother sometimes cooks for dinner:
(#1) buncher, crowder? — or flocker, packer, ganger, batcher, schooler? — but actually grouper
At this point, you’re probably thinking that groupers are so called because they travel in schools, that is, in a kind of group. But no; there’s an etymological surprise here.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, with yet another pun on the name of a rock band; this time it’s Rage Against the Machine that’s being punned on:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Tomato Based Ideology”, alluding to the fact that what’s commonly called ragu (or Bolognese sauce) in the US is tomato-based (and sometimes meatless, as in the “traditional” variety of the commercial brand RAGÚ), though classic Italian ragù (aka Bolognese sauce) is a meat-based sauce with only a bit of tomato in it, and though the most common US name for meatless tomato-based pasta sauce is just spaghetti sauce (in fancier settings, AmE marinara sauce) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
The text in the speech balloon — with a RATM anti-corporate political message — coming from a thoroughly American source, emphasizes the meaty side of (some) American ragu; this is ragu used to name what is mostly called just spaghetti sauce in the US (a tomato-based sauce with substantial amounts of browned minced meat, usually ground beef, in it), though in fancier settings this everyday pasta sauce might be billed as AmE Bolognese sauce.
Obviously, food naming in this domain is a gigantic rat’s nest, but vocabulary isn’t the point of the cartoon, the band name pun is, so I’ll put off the lexicography for the moment and focus first on the pun and the rock band.
