Month: July 2015

The Lydster, Part 136: Award-winning photography

Stormy.20150530This spring, the local Hannaford supermarket had a contest to determine the best pet photos in a variety of categories. The Daughter decided to submit a couple of our felines, taken on The Wife’s iPad, then emailed to me so that I could print them out.

Frankly, I have no idea how many other participants, if any, there were, but the Daughter won with the picture of Stormy, shown above. She received various pet treats, food, cat litter and the like.

BTW, Stormy, who just turned two, has become much more affectionate to me, sitting on my lap – only when she wants to, because she IS a cat, after all – and rubbing her head on my feet.

midnight.20150530I’ll admit I prefer this photo, if only because it’s SO goofy, rather like Midnight, who’s about a half a year older than Stormy. He has always been affectionate to me, but, for a time, it got to be too much.

Quite often, at 4 a.m., he’d come into our bedroom and start licking my arms, and chewing on the hair on the top of my head and even on my mustache. I would get up and usually write. Then I had to get him down from the file cabinet next to the office desk, lest he jump down on the laptop and accidentally screw up some settings; he’s done it before.

But then he started his routine at 3 a.m., and I can’t function on that little sleep. So I would get up, put him in the basement and go back to bed. This seems to have (mostly) broken him of this annoying habit.

For a time, we thought Midnight was becoming too aggressive towards some strangers – he utterly freaked out at the vet’s office – and wondered how we could even go on vacation for more than a day or two.

We got a new child watcher (FKA babysitter) named Maxine and he was very affectionate towards her. Now, SHE can come in, feed the cats, change the litter box, and give them some love.

Helen Mirren is 70 (tomorrow)

Mirren’s paternal grandfather was in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War.

helen-mirrenIn June 2015, Dame Helen Lydia Mirren won the Tony Award for the Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play. Here is her acceptance speech.

I had forgotten that she had been nominated for Tonys twice before. In her win for The Audience, she portrayed Queen Elizabeth II. Playing the same personage, she won an Academy Award for Best Actress in 2006 in The Queen. Like much of her stage work, the role was developed in the West End, London’s equivalent to New York City’s Broadway.

She had won the first of her four Emmy Awards in 1996, Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Special, for Prime Suspect: The Scent of Darkness, making her a Grammy shy of an EGOT. I’ve watched her in much of her seven seasons of Prime Suspect.

She’s done a great deal of voice work. On TV, she was Becky’s Inner Voice on Glee and a caller on Frasier; in the movies, the dean in Monsters University (2013), and the queen, per usual, in The Prince of Egypt (1998).

I think of her primarily as a film actress, but I’ve not seen as many movies as I would have thought. On-screen, I’ve seen her in:
2014 The Hundred-Foot Journey
2006 The Queen
2003 Calendar Girls
2001 Gosford Park
1999 Teaching Mrs. Tingle
1994 The Madness of King George (playing Queen Charlotte)
1985 White Nights
1973 O Lucky Man! – here’s the O Lucky Man! trailer

From the Wikipedia:
helen-mirren (1)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Mirren was born Helen Lydia Mironoff in … London. Her father, Vasily Petrovich Mironoff (1913–1980), was Russian…and her mother, Kitty (née Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda Rogers; 1909–1996), was English.

“Mirren’s paternal grandfather, Colonel Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, was in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He later became a diplomat and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded during the Russian Revolution. The former diplomat became a London cab driver to support his family and eventually settled down in England.

“Helen’s father… anglicised the family name in the 1950s and changed his name to Basil Mirren. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II, and later drove a taxi cab… before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport.

“Mirren’s mother was a working-class Londoner… and was the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher whose own father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria… Mirren was the second of three children; she was born three years after her older sister Katherine (“Kate”; born 1942), and has a younger brother…named Peter Basil…

“Mirren married American director Taylor Hackford (her partner since 1986) on 31 December 1997, his 53rd birthday…. The couple had met on the set of White Nights. It is her first marriage, and his third (he has two children from his previous marriages). Mirren has no children and says she has “no maternal instinct whatsoever.”

“On 11 May 2010, Mirren attended the unveiling of her waxwork at Madame Tussauds London.”

Her Bio piece.
CBS Sunday Morning February 2015 (updated in June 2015).

Music Throwback Saturday: Could It Be Magic

By 1975, Manilow was sufficiently hot that his magical collaboration with Chopin was released as a single

BarryManilowI love the music of Frederic Chopin. Seriously, there’s a piece by him I want to be played at my funeral. This must explain the affection for my favorite song by Barry Manilow (born Barry Alan Pincus; June 17, 1943).

The Wikipedia narrative, which matches Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles information:

 

Before Manilow’s well-known association with Bette Midler began at the Continental Baths in New York City in 1971, he recorded four tracks as Featherbed, leading a group of session musicians produced and arranged by Tony Orlando.

Three of the tracks, [including]… an early version of his own composition “Could It Be Magic”, all flopped on the charts, a fact for which Manilow himself is fond of saying he is eternally grateful… That was because the arrangement of “Could It Be Magic” was an uptempo pop tune. Manilow had arranged the tune as a classical piece that slowly built.

From the greatest hits Ultimate Manilow album liner notes:

The earliest song here that Manilow actually wrote was Could It Be Magic, which originally appeared on his 1973 debut album… “I thought I had come up with the coolest batch of chords in my composing experience,” he remembers. “And then I realized that before I had that glass of wine, I had been playing my Chopin preludes. And I wrote the song around the Chopin ‘Prelude in C Minor.” By 1975, Manilow was sufficiently hot that his magical collaboration with Chopin was released as a single and rose right into the Top Ten.

Listen to the Chopin Prelude in C Minor, then Could It Be Magic by Barry Manilow, which sounds, to my ear, like an earlier iteration than the hit version.

Or go to WhoSampled.com, linking to both the Chopin Prelude and Could It Be Magic, which went to #6 in 1975.

But to a real shock to the system, listen to Could It Be Magic from Featherbed featuring Barry Manilow from c 1971 HERE or HERE.

Rehearsing with Leslie

As far as we know, there are not any recordings of Dad, Leslie and me singing.

Leslie.littleMy sister Leslie and I don’t talk that often on the phone, but when we do, it usually goes on for a while.

Recently when we were chatting, she noted that she has figured out the difficulty with singing in the various musical groups she has led or has sung with, over the years and currently.

It’s that, when we were growing up, singing with our father, it felt as though we never rehearsed. That was actually untrue: in singing in the car, at the dinner table, in the living room, and at the campgrounds, we WERE rehearsing all the time. It just didn’t FEEL as though it was rehearsing, because we never had to set time aside to do so.

One of the sad truths is that, as far as we know, there are not any recordings of Dad, Leslie, and me singing, or even of Dad solo when we were still living in Binghamton, NY in the 1960s.

She thinks that we, plus perhaps her daughter Rebecca Jade, ought to get together and work on some musical thing. The family being bicoastal – they live in the San Diego, CA area – I’m not sure how that would work. I did note that, if I get out there, and we were going to try to record something, we would – alas! – have to actually rehearse.

Happy birthday to the middle child.

The Donald v. McCain, et al.

DailyNews.DonaldI had this terrible thought recently: Donald Trump, whose corporations have filed for bankruptcy protection four times, could be President of the United States.

OK, I mean I don’t really believe that he could (do I?), but the skirmishes he has experienced recently have only enhanced his brand.

When he made those disparaging statements about Mexicans, the conventional wisdom was that it would hurt him politically. When his poll numbers went UP, early pundits suggested that they rose IN SPITE OF his comments. Now we’re pretty sure they went up BECAUSE OF his remarks.

He’s become a hero to those who are concerned about border security, and they don’t worry about the… lack of nuance, let’s say, in The Donald’s delivery. After Trump’s Phoenix, Arizona visit required securing a larger facility to hold the thousands of folks concerned about Mexican immigration, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) referred to them as “crazies.”

In retaliation, Trump attacked McCain’s military record, first saying that the former Vietnam War POW was not a hero, then, upon prompting, he says he is a hero, only because he was captured. On the subsequent news shows, he says that McCain IS a hero, and blames the media for distorting what he said.

(There’s a small group of Vietnam-era vets who seem to believe that McCain WAS no hero and ratted out the US to the North Vietnamese. Others believe that, as Senator, McCain buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.)

While there were veterans’ organizations that denounced Trump, there are others who embraced him as someone speaking on behalf of the less-than-stellar treatment our returning soldiers have often endured.

McCain’s friend Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who’s running for President, called Trump a “jackass,” and in response, Trump gave out Graham’s personal cellphone number.

The Donald also took a shot at former Texas governor Rick Perry, suggesting those glasses he’s now wearing don’t actually make him any smarter. I may have made a similar observation.

Trump is even being credited by some with getting President Obama to order flags over the Capitol and the White House lowered to half-staff, in respect of the five military service members murdered in Chattanooga.

Currently, Trump holds a double-digit lead over his nearest Republican opponent. The leading paper in Iowa, who referred to him as a “feckless blowhard”, called on him to drop out of the race, which he most assuredly won’t do anytime soon, certainly not before the August 6 debates. Perhaps in January, if he’s tired of the game.

Trump’s biggest problem and this is important to Iowa Republicans, is that he doesn’t sound like a born-again Christian.

Ultimately, I think that some people are impressed with the way he will take on all comers. Most of the folks, who appreciate The Donald bringing up issues they believe in, also know in their hearts that he doesn’t have the temperament to hold the highest office in the land.

Or so I’m counting on. David Kalish wrote a humorous column about dreaming about Trump, who has a case of NTBH, or “Need to be Hated” syndrome. I quipped that NTBH is currently covered under Obamacare, but as David noted, it wouldn’t be if Trump were elected.

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