You are currently browsing the daily archive for November 7th, 2008.
In answer to several reader inquiries, Mrs. R is home safe and sound and recovering nicely.
Earlier today she sent me over to Robek’s to get her a fruit smoothie with all sorts of stuff in it I’d never heard of before. (She had to give me a note with the names of the ingredients printed phonetically.) In case you didn’t know, Robek’s is some fru-fru juice joint. The one closest to us is on Route 7 at Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. In case you didn’t know, Route 7 at Tyson’s Corner is a good place to get yourself kilt dead by the traffic, both on the roads and in the parking lots. I actually got so mad at one jackass in particular that I flipped him off, something I simply never do. Oh, well, I was going to go to Confession tomorrow anyway….
Ironically, I seem to have picked up a cold from visiting Mrs. R in the hospital, so when I finally got home, she made me take a nap.
Having posted on candy and composers this morning, I am suddenly reminded again of a question that has long burned in my mind.
You no doubt recall the scene in the original Willy Wonka movie in which Wonka opens a door to one of his sekret candy-making rooms by playing a couple of bars on a musickal lock? Of course you do! And you also see now why my prior posts brought this back to me.
Anyway, after Wonka “plays” the combination, Mike Teevee’s mother says, with a smug look on her face, “Rachmaninoff”. There is then a fleeting shot of the others rolling their eyes slightly.
In fact, the musick that Wonka plays is the first couple bars from the Overture to Mozart’s Le Nozzi di Figaro.
What I have always wondered was this: Is the audience just meant to get that Mrs. Teevee is a musick snob or that she is, in fact, a spectacularly stoopid musick snob? The Overture to Le Nozzi, in addition to being quite famous and recognizable, isn’t even remotely close to anything Rachmaninoff ever composed. Only someone who hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about would make such a terrible mistake.
The movie came out in 1971. My guess is that the joke on Mrs. Teevee was probably meant to be understood by the audience, or at least a healthy percentage of it. These days I don’t expect that such a cultural reference would even be tried.
The 10 year old and I continue to make our way through The Lord of the Rings and I am happy to report that she is thoroughly consumed with the story. For my own part, I continue to relish the new perspective that reading aloud for the first time brings.
From the very first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, the gel developed a habit of asking questions that were usually answered by Tolkien himself within the next few lines or so. At first these queries used to exasperate me because they disrupted the flow of my performance. Also because the gel’s sudden fixation on a given point meant that she would then stop paying attention to what came next, thereby requiring me to go back and repeat that as well.
Well, I’m happy to report that we have sorted this out. Now when she asks a question to which I know the answer is coming up shortly, I simply ignore her and keep reading. When I come to the answer, I raise and flatten my voice. I also cock an eye at her. She thinks this is very funny.
Of course, not all of her questions have to do with the immediate plot. Last evening we finished up with Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli headed for Edoras to meet King Theoden. All of a sudden, she asked, “Hey! Whatever happens to Fatty Bolger? Do we meet him again?”
My stock reply to such questions is, “Patience, child. All will be revealed in good time.”
She now thinks that’s pretty funny, too.
“Brahms and Liszt” is Cockney rhyming slang for “pissed” as in “drunk”. I used to frequent a wine bar in London called the Brahms & Liszt. In fact, I may still have a beer mat from it somewhere or other.
One would be hard-pressed to find two more different musickal personalities of the 19th Century to pair together than these two. Although Brahms – who was younger than Liszt – admired the older man’s admittedly fantastic keyboard abilities, he became increasingly critical of what he considered Liszt’s wilder compositional style as he became more secure in his own technique. The relationship of these two started out cordially enough, but rapidly deteriorated over the years.
I have always wondered whether whoever came up with the expression realized this, or whether it was just a happy coincidence.
Personally, I have no trouble taking sides. To me, Liszt’s musick is the stuff of pure egomania, as, apparently, was everything else in his life.
In these post-Halloween days, I allow the gels to have one piece of trick-or-treat candy each after dinner.
In addition to keeping the tooth rot and calorie intake to a minimum, this policy has other interesting effects, promoting, for instance, a keen discussion and analysis of which kind of candy is to be chosen on a particular night. And to this end, it also promotes careful surveys and valuations of inventory, as well as a healthy barter. It is fascinating to watch the gels trying to make deals with one another as they strive to obtain their favorites while unloading that which they don’t particularly like.
Anyway, last evening as the eight year old was busy running through her stock, she began to ask me about trick-or-treating when I was a kid. Specifically, as she held up each kind of treat, she asked if it was around when I was her age – Snickers, Mounds, Reese’s Cups, M&M’s, Three Musketeers, etc., etc. And as she went through the list, it occurred to me that, in fact, all of them had been. It’s something close to 35 years since I last went trick-or-treating, and yet Halloween candy remains for the most part fundamentally unchanged. The realization of this conservatism amused me.
Also amusing was a game the six year old played with her M&M’s. First, she divided them up into groups by color. Next, she put together a chain based on a repeating pattern of those colors (orange, blue, brown, green, red, as I recall). Then she proceeded to eat them one by one. As she ate them, she sang, assigning a different note to each color. Because she had more of some colors than others, the pattern broke down toward the end of the line, with the last three M&M’s all of the same kind. She sang these last three notes in a decrescendo, ending pianissimo. It was all really quite pretty.
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