There will also be info on recent films viewed, so just hang in there. In local news I have recently reconnected with a childhood best friend. Dino and I hung out all through high school and into a few college years. He moved to Toronto to work, like most of my Sudbury friends, while Deb and I headed to Windsor. Dino and I were avid readers as kids, mostly of fantasy and SF, and he still reads a lot. He and his second wife have a cottage northeast of Toronto, and they have visited Detroit with us once. Dino is Canadian/Italian, and has travelled a fair bit with his wife, including visits to Italy, where he was born. We seem to have reconnected, which is a good thing. His mother is also still alive and living in Sudbury, so that is where we will likely meet again, hopefully in the Spring.
A few posts back I discussed the 2-part keyboard inventions of J. S. Bach. I will be performing #9 at my next recital. I will also perform #9 of the Three-Part Inventions, also in F Minor. With the three part works listeners and performers get 50 % more notes. Though Bach somehow makes 2 part writing sound full and intense, adding a 3rd voice makes a lot of difference to the richness of both complexity and harmony. Unlike the 2-part works, I have not learned (yet) all 15 of the 3-part ones. I am currently learning my 6th one. While each set of inventions, both 2 and 3 part, cover all the emotional bases, #9 of the three part set goes way beyond anything else in either series, or even in much of his other keyboard writing. At first I had difficulty getting a handle on the depth of the work and its single-minded affect, or emotion. It is a very slow piece based on only three notes, initially F, Ab and G. Bach was a very religious man, and most of his greatest pieces are religious in nature. The only thing to which I can compare invention #9 is Christ bearing the cross and carrying it up the mount. The three notes could represent three steps taken, then a pause, then three more steps, and so on. There are many extreme dissonances in the work, sometimes making it difficult to tell if the performer is actually playing the correct notes. Thus a lot of pain is being expressed, and not just a physical kind. As just a piece of music without any religious connotations, it is still a truly sublime work, whose deep feelings immediately affect me when I begin to practice it. It is probably one of two extremely minimalist works on the program, which is the theme of this recital.
For something completely different, I will talk about the Haydn Sonata I will be playing during an upcoming blog.
Turning now to weather, one day it was November and the next it was January. And it's going to stick around. It snowed a tiny bit on Thursday and some of it is still around three days later. Usually that kind of snowfall is gone by afternoon. With the Great Lakes still being quite warm compared with the air, lake effect snowstorms have shut down many highways and towns in both the US and Canada. Our snow in A'burg comes from Lake Michigan, luckily a long distance from us. We get very little from lake effect snowstorms. However, some areas have had nearly 48" (4') of snow. A bit too much for me to contemplate. A big snowstorm is usually 10-12". We get one here about once a decade. In Sudbury they get about two per year. But 48"? Seriously? There are still people stranded on Ontario highways, who have been there over 10 hours. Even the snowplows are getting stuck. The interesting thing is that this thing was predicted. Also, you could see it happening on weather radar. So what do idiots do? Get in their car and drive. Even truckers and other professional drivers should know better; yet there they are, stuck during a blizzard on the highway.
In movie news, there are three to report. Deb's leaving choice was Francis Coppola's mini-disaster of a film, One From The Heart, Reprise. The 1989 version nearly sunk Coppola, it was such a flop. Reprise is a re-edited version from 2004. If this version is an improvement, I would not wish to ever see the original. Tom Waits wrote and performs much of the music. There are way too many songs, all sounding pretty much the same. A couple seems in love at the beginning (Frederic Forrest and Terry Garr). However, they soon fight and she leaves him. Neither are interesting characters at the beginning, and they never change. She meets up with Raul Julia. They seem to hit it off, and don't make a bad couple. He meets up with Nastassja Kinski. Despite her energy and charm, he wants his original woman back. She rebuffs him again and again. He is the kind of guy that needs a restraining order. She is not happy with him, but at the end goes back to him, leaving Julia stranded at the airport just before their flight to Bora Bora (of course it's all on his dime). This is the entire plot, without nothing left out. It is a far too simplistic plot to hold attention more than 15 minutes. We both struggled to get through it. It features a wonderfully moody fake LA, with terrific lighting and photography. But give it a miss, unless you simply have to see every Nastassja film ever. She is cute in this one, too, and does a high wire act.
After that she chose something warm and comforting. We rewatched The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes. It's a poor title for this wonderful film, with a Holmes who blunders badly (which is why we've never heard of the story before) and a Watson who comes very close to being irritating, but just manages to escape it. Christopher Lee plays an aloof and self-superior Mycroft. There is a wonderful scene where the snobbish Mycroft has to listen to Queen Victoria praise Holmes and his adventures, which Mycroft detests. This might be our 3rd viewing, but it's been as long time. After suffering through the Coppola, it was as if a window had been opened to fresh Scottish air. It was written and produced by Billy Wilder and stars Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely.
My main choice this week was Robocop, a film we had somehow managed to never see (like Hellboy). It takes place in a futuristic Detroit, and is great comic book fun from start to finish. From 1987 and directed by Paul Verhoeven, it was mostly filmed in Dallas. A cop is brutally gunned down by a mob, and is somehow brought back in the form of a superhuman robot. But his old memories come back when he is in his new metal skin. He remembers the bad guys, and decides to take them down. Of course the real bad guy is a white collar boss of a huge company trying to sell their own brand of private army to the city to tackle crime. Lots of fun to watch, since the bad guys actually get the worst of it. Way ahead of the Marvel movies et al, this one is a pretty good movie. One major slip was that Anne Lewis, his original patrol partner, sees him killed, sees the faces of the bad guys, but never thinks to go after them. Screwy. The film went on to several sequels, as well as video games, comics, toys, and the rest of the media junk that follows a cult hit, especially a violent one. I am on the lookout for the 2014 remake.
Mapman Mike
