Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Baritone Bennington attacks the Ode to Joy

November 13, 2024

From Benita Bendon Campbell back on 11/1, a joyous diversion from painful times (“Something funny, we need something funny”): Rowan Atkinson playing “distinguished British baritone” Robert Bennington singing the Ode to Joy … until things go awry and he has to improvise a German text to Beethoven’s soaring tune. You can watch the YouTube video here.

And now, much more detail, from the Classic FM site (“the most relaxing music”), “The time Rowan Atkinson ‘forgot’ the words to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in hilarious skit” by Maddy Shaw Roberts on 5/11/21:


The Ode’s progress (picture: YouTube)

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SoCal lads with spread-lip smiles

November 12, 2024

…  and boy-foot bear with teak of Chan … no, no, Kent McCord and the Nelsons’ Rick, that’s the ticket.

(Tales of male-male desire and sexual acts — so this posting will be edgy for some readers — but not particularly vivid tales, and the photos are there for faces and torsos, not genitals)

Rick and Kent, figures of attractive, desirable masculinity — the first from my teenage years (there was a lot I didn’t understand in the Rick, or teenage hard-on, years, during which Ricky got me off, a lot), the second from young adulthood (it was during the Kent years that I gained some self-knowledge and entered into serious, life-long relationships with other men; suddenly it was important that Kent was not only a really hot guy as Officer Jim Reed on Adam-12, but that he also presented himself as a sturdy, dependable and empathetic nice guy, so an eminently satisfactory object of adult lust). Note: I was perfectly aware that Rick and Kent were, by all accounts, uncomplicatedly straight (as it happens, they became buddies when they worked in tv together); what I had in my head were fantasy Rick and Kent, and their kisses were sweeter than wine.

Now I tell you that Rick, Kent, and I were / are all essentially the same age; Rick 4 months older than me, Kent 2 years younger. (Rick died in 1985, but Kent is still alive, and he’s a great-looking 82-year-old.)

And while they’re interesting as objects of desire (on tv and elsewhere, notably from the 1950s through the 1970s), they get a posting here because of a characteristic facial gesture that they share: the spread-lip smile, a feature of Rick and Kent that large numbers of straight women and gay men find powerfully attractive (and that, no doubt, makes many straight men envious).

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11/11

November 11, 2024

🎆 🎆 🎆 fireworks for 11/11, the double-lucky day the Great War was over (my parents, now long gone, were only 4 at the time and didn’t remember it; I was just short of my 6th birthday when V-J Day, recognizing the end of World War II, came along; celebrating it on the streets of West Lawn PA is my first clear memory of events in the larger world)

Hard to appreciate now what a gigantic rupture the Great War (beginning in 1914) was; the horrors of its modern warfare came along with those of the Russian Revolution (beginning in 1917) and the great influenza pandemic of 1918, and (as Paul Fussell argued in The Great War and Modern Memory) fostered a disillusioned modernist sensibility, wiping out much of what had gone before.

Then, as I wrote in my 11/11/22 posting “Carousing for St. Martin”:

It’s Armistice Day [commemorating the 11/11/1918 armistice ending World War I] (in the US, Veterans Day), solemnly following on the solemn anniversary of Kristallnacht, but it’s also (as Hana Filip just reminded me) the feast day of St. Martin of Tours: St. Martin’s Day, which has its serious saintly side — St. Martin and the beggar in rags — but is, as well, a day of wild revelling, initiating the winter season. An occasion that, ultimately, inspired a piece of music that is just sheer noisy unbridled fun: the Wine Chorus from Haydn’s The Seasons (aka “Juhe! Der Wein ist da!” from Die Jahreszseiten).

But now about 11/11:

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Video therapy takes a new turn

November 5, 2024

It starts at 4:30 am with today’s morning names: George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. Gershwin was in my head because when I woke my Apple Music had just finished playing an album of Gershwin songs. Gershwin immediately triggered Berlin, that’s an obvious leap — and also led to Porgy and Bess and the complexity of the relationships between American Jews and Blacks. And Berlin’s name triggered his “God Bless America” (from World War I), an uncomfortably sentimental patriotic anthem that I’ve always disliked, but on the other hand it’s a displaced person’s outpouring of love for the country that found a place for him, and then I was filled with dread, and the fear that my country had no place for me, that the troopers would come and drag me away to a concentration camp.

This is by no means an irrational fear, especially today.

But I pulled myself together and started the day, almost immediately returning to my regimen of video therapy (even before breakfast, and then during breakfast).

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The sound of silence

November 3, 2024

On a posting on 11/1 I reported that I was using my writing here

for escaping current events and my bodily miseries. I am not cut off from the world … but I have entirely stopped following the news and commentary on the news on tv. The background for my days is re-runs (on dvd) of all six years of the tv series Major Crimes (details in my 10/29 posting with that title)

Video therapy continues. (Today on Major Crimes, Rusty told Gus that he loved him and said the mantra: You changed my life. I am a better person because of you.) Meanwhile, as the week drew on, my withdrawal from the world was more and more often interrupted by phone calls, eventually coming about every 20 minutes. From callers — most of them, I assume, calling to press me to vote — who left no messages. All very deranging.

And then this morning, the sound of silence, My phone has not rung once all day.

I assume that we are now in the eye of the hurricane, and that soon all hell will break loose. And I’ll be terrified again.

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The AMZ Serengeti mailbox

October 21, 2024

This morning’s query from Benita Bendon Campbell:

Have you “done” Flanders and Swann’s “I’m a gnu”? (León Hernández Alvarez’s I have a new brought it to mind.)

(that is, L’s report in my 10/20 posting “I have a ##”)

But of course. Among my gnu postings there’s my 3/14/12 “The news for gnus”, where I wrote:

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

I can’t think of gnus without being reminded of Flanders and Swann’s delightful Gnu Song — which you can hear here, along with photos of real-life gnus. The lyrics: [in full in the 2012 posting]

An elaborate play on silent letters in English spelling: “restoring” the G of GNU and GNASH, the K of KNOW, and the W of WHO, with the initial /g/ of /gǝnú/ spilling over onto /n/-initial nicestnatureneithernot, even know, and, most marvelously, the climactic (a)nother. (Plus “Cockney” initial /h/ in elk and ain’t.)

Hunky Halloween Hamlet

October 15, 2024

From Tim Evanson, on Facebook this morning, his image for 16 days to Halloween:


(#1) Hunky Halloween Hamlet, let’s call him Hunklet, contemplating Peter Pumpkin (who really should have a grinning face carved in him) instead of Yorick’s grinning skull

The Shakespearean context (written as connected text rather than as poetic lines):


(#2) “Here hung those lips that I have kissed” — so Hamlet cries in iambs dread

(though I note that #1 could be read as God — or Zeus / Jupiter — surveying the Earth; everybody sing: “He’s got the whole world in His hands”)

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You’ve gotta eat your Froot Loops, kid

October 13, 2024

The cartoon. Today’s Zippy strip is a translation of an everyday family drama into a surreal Dingburg version, in the household of Zippy and Zerbina and their children, the boy Fuelrod and the girl Meltdown:


“Eat your Froot Loops, Meltdown, or th’ force field will remove your topknot”

Just think of that as how Dingburgers say “Eat your spinach, kid, or the lack of iron will make you weak” — but much much more dramatically. Or as the song “You’ve Gotta Eat Your Spinach, Baby” (from the 1936 movie Poor Little Rich Girl) puts it:

You’ve gotta eat your spinach, baby
That′s the proper thing to do
It’ll keep you kind of healthy too
And what it did for Popeye it’ll do for you

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Penguins at play

October 10, 2024

Max Vasilatos had warned me they were coming, but I didn’t know when. But today was their day, and they were a cheering relief from the deep dysfunction that a week of extravagant heat has visited upon me: from the Play Visions company in Woodlinville WA (but, yes, made in China), the Club Earth Penguin Parade — 6 nesting penguins (the biggest only 5 inches tall, so they fit in easily with almost any home decor):


(#1) An ad display of Les Six Antarctiques; can you tell which of the six is the Swiss penguin (known professionally as Arthur Honegger)? What gives him away as a Swissie and not a Frenchie like all the others?

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Weeping for the Marche militaire

September 23, 2024

The famous one: Schubert’s composition for piano four hands, his Marche militaire Op. 51 No. 1 (later re-arranged for various combinations of instruments, up to a full symphony orchestra). Which was posted today by the Classical PIANO Geniuses (their spelling) group: in a wonderful warm performance by Daniel Barenboim & Lang Lang, along with three other performances, of which one — by Salim & Sivan (with the Israeli Symphony Orchestra sitting behind them, and a symphony audience in front of them, so it was part of a larger program) is brilliant, great fun; and the video is worth watching just to see Salim’s body language and facial expressions.

You can watch B & LL on YouTube here. And S & S on YouTube here.

(A bit more on Salim & Silver below.)

I had in fact intended to write about this four-hand piano piece before; I’ve never played it, but it’s a great favorite of mine, a masterpiece of joy.

What I was not prepared for was what happened a few bars into the B & LL performance: I began to weep with some mixture of sadness and joy, and when S & S began, I had tears running down my face.

Then it occurred to me that my joints were singing with pain, which I’d put down to the sudden ferocious heat of the day (in the low 90sF). But then I checked Weather Underground, and the air pressure had just nosedived. So the pain and the depression were barometric. And my plans for the day were toast.

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