Monday, February 22, 2010

Skate Love

I thought about writing a (lengthier) post about how I've rediscovered my love of figure skating this year, but for now I'll just leave it with this routine, which I'm totally in love with.



LOVE.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Ta-Dah!













It may never happen again. I'm enjoying the achievement while it lasts.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

A Classic Film Interlude

Today I put on That's Entertainment to watch while I sorted clothes and folded laundry. I love That's Entertainment for both its collection of clips from MGM musicals and its 1974-set framing narrative. It was made at the perfect time - the studio era was effectively over, as illustrated by the general disrepair of MGM's backlot in the narrator scenes, but that era was still recent enough that stars like Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire were still around to act as the film's tour guides. The numbers chosen for That's Entertainment - Astaire's coatrack dance from Royal Wedding, the cast-of-hundreds numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley, the selections from Esther Williams' water-based musicals - somehow make today's movies feel so flat and unimaginative. Sure, you can create whole worlds with a computer, but the tactile realities of old-school song and dance just feel more impressive to me.



"Good Morning" doesn't appear in That's Entertainment - it's in the sequel - but it still illustrates what to me is so unique and essential about classic musicals. The quality of the dance is simply unmatched today; you can see the hard work involved in making it appear easy. To me, the moment at the end when all three come up and over the couch in perfect unison is transcendent.

Speaking of classic film, a few days ago I made a film-related impulse purchase on Etsy. Definitely excited to share once it arrives...

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Valentine's Day Playlist

Around Valentine's Day every year, I get this impulse to comb my music collection and construct a multitude of playlists. Bouncy, poppy love songs, crazy desperate breakup songs - romance is a fruitful topic for musicians and lyricists. This year, I hit on a previously unrealized subgenre that is actually ideal for the holiday: show tunes. Musicals are one place where wearing one's emotions on their sleeve is a necessity, and some fabulous love songs have been created for them. Here are some of my favorites:

A couple of years ago, I watched a documentary on Broadway musicals where they discussed Oscar Hammerstein's skill with what they described as the "speculative love song" - it allows the writers to place a love song for the romantic leads in the first act by talking about it as non-real. (I don't know, I thought it was interesting.) Anyway, here's some of my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein selections.

"If I Loved You" from Carousel



"People Will Say We're in Love" from Oklahoma



"Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?" from Cinderella



"Ten Minutes Ago" from Cinderella



Let's just take a moment to bask in the very concept of a musical created specifically for television. The original version, from the 1950s and starring Julie Andrews, was filmed live. Live! A live original musical on television! When the fairy godmother gives Cinderella her new gown for the ball, they just sort of pushed Julie Andrews out of camera range and changed her clothes super-fast! It just makes Glee seem like they're not really trying very hard, doesn't it? The sixties version (with Leslie Ann Warren, up top) is the one I watched to death as a kid before misplacing the tape, the nineties version (with Brandy) resurrected the show in my mind, and the fifties version is the one for which I have the soundtrack. Really, I love all three because of songs like these.

"Make Believe" from Show Boat



This is actually Jerome Kern, not Richard Rodgers, but it still fits the whole Hammerstein speculative song thing. Oh, Show Boat. So deeply problematic, so academically intruiging.

And from other writers and shows:

"One Boy" from Bye Bye Birdie



Hugo is kind of a lame character (that whole super-chaste kiss sequence in the middle of this scene cracks me up), but I love how Bobby Rydell's voice sounds in this song. It makes early-sixties conformity sound so appealing.

"Someone is Waiting" from Company



Having had groups of close male friends, the whole conceit of wishing to pick and choose everyone's best parts to create someone ideal is so terribly spot-on.

"I Can Hear the Bells" from Hairspray



Hairspray always manages to have just the right amount of edge and humor in its songs, which acts as a buffer against what can be saccharine about them.

"Tonight" from West Side Story



Just so wonderfully swoon-y. I love "Somewhere," too, but this is my favorite.

Baking: 1-2-3-4 Cake

So I baked this cake on Sunday, and had plans to frost it and bring it in so my friends in my program could enjoy it, but I cannot for the life of me find the energy within me to find and execute a decent frosting recipe. The ones I've made before have felt really work intensive and by the time I'm home and have anywhere approaching enough time to work on it, I just feel like I'd rather take a nap instead. I'd also rather not use frosting out of a can for sharing with others. However, I wanted to discuss the cake anyway, since the recipe came from an interesting place. Maybe I'll still bring it in, maybe I'll just keep it to practice decorating techniques on (and to eat, of course).

One of the cooler things about going to an old school is that you can find some neat old books in the library just wandering through the stacks. (Also, old magazines, but that's another story entirely.) One day I came across The Ebony Cookbook from 1962:

In case you had any doubts that this came from the sixties, here's the endpaper:


And the photo accompanying the "Desserts" chapter:


I liked the idea of baking something from the cookbook as a sort of Black History Month celebration. It's a sort of artifact of the intra-United States Black diaspora; Ebony readers sent in recipes to construct a compendium of African-American foods. There's a chapter specifically devoted to "Creole Dishes," which culminates in a recipe for Stewed Turtle. Where does one even find turtle meat these days?

So I decided to make the "Old-Fashioned 1-2-3-4 Cake." I used my new turn-crank handled sifter for the first time! It's a pretty basic yellow cake; the name comes from the ingredients:

One cup of butter


Two cups of sugar


Three cups of flour (I used cake flour, which is superfine. Sifting it can end up leaving a fine layer of powder all over the kitchen, which makes me feel like I'm in Debi Mazar's apartment in Goodfellas.)


Four eggs


I love the concept of the name corresponding with the recipe; for me, it conjures an image of passage from one generation to the next as a means of teaching kids to remember the recipe easily. Here's the finished product on Sunday:


And still unfrosted today:


If I end up doing something fancy decoration-wise, I'll post that too. Otherwise, I'll just move on to Valentine's Day stuff (I got a heart-shaped cake pan! I'm excited!)

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Mood Music XXVII

For some reason, I feel like Gold Diggers of 2010 is a remake I could get behind.



Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Mood Music XXVI

I'm bummed to hear the news about Fall Out Boy breaking up, but crazy thrilled about the accompanying news of Patrick Stump putting out a solo album.


I've mused on my love of Stump's voice before, but this looks like an entirely new level of awesomeness. (And if I may be permitted a detour into shallowness, he looks good, too.) He's worked as a producer on some of my favorite non-FOB Decaydance albums (The Hush Sound's Like Vines and The Cab's Whisper War) and I can't wait to see how this endeavor shakes out.

Monday, February 01, 2010

Best of the 00s: Odds and Ends

In reading all the various final season retrospectives on Lost, I realized that I had forgotten yet another favorite music moment, this one from the show's second season premiere.



By now, it's become old hat that Lost's writers end their seasons with insane cliffhangers then pick up the next in a completely different place; in fact, the season three and five openers also begin with new or previously unstudied characters waking up and selecting music. This may have been the most shocking simply due to the novelty of it all - the then-unfamiliar retro Dharma aesthetic paired with the show's flashback structure up until that point made the setting maddeningly oblique up until that final pan up the hatch. Frankly, I don't think I'll ever stop being creeped out by the progression of daily chores culminating in the shot in the arm. The music is perfect, too; I sought out "Make Your Own Kind of Music" soon after this originally aired - Cass Elliot's voice makes the song somehow less silly than it could be with a more soprano singer - and the way Michael Giacchino's always haunting score comes in after the explosion is eerie as ever.

The first four minutes of Tuesday's premiere have apparently leaked online, but watching the opening moments of the other premieres makes it seem more than likely that no substantive information would be available to spoiler-seekers anyway. Personally, I'd like to think that Lindelof and Cuse have another retro track in store, but that's just me.