A bad scene here in Southern California the last couple of days, as you may have seen on the news. Four major fires, including one that began late last night. I woke up to see video of it on Facebook : a hillside off of the 405 Freeway, close to The Getty Center, was engulfed in flame. It was a weird and scary scene, orange fire in the darkness, with cars driving by. Fortunately, firefighters had that one mostly under control by late this afternoon. Several people lost their homes, though, in Bel Air, which always seems to get hit during fire season.
The worst fires are up in Santa Paula, in Ventura County, about 40 miles away, and up above Sylmar at the north end of the Valley. The Santa Paula fire has already burned 80,000 acres.
These winds are awful and I hope they end soon. I have said before that I absolutely hate wind, more than any other weather condition, and this is a main reason why. And even when there is no fire, wind is just a bad vibe.
So, we are just hunkering down and waiting for it to be over. We are not getting blasted in the Valley the way folks are in the hills and canyons, and we are thankfully not experiencing fire, but we are close enough to feel it, and see it on the news, and we feel the wind and all the static electricity in the air and we smell the smoke. So, just staying inside mostly. Just a very short walk the last two nights, and certainly no hikes.
Tonight I watched yet another Esther Williams movie, "Dangerous When Wet" (1953), acquired again from the Libe, which seems to have purchased all of her films just recently. You know the drill by now, the setup for her movies. There was a basic formula, because it was a franchise (waaaay before modern franchises like "Star Wars" or "Harry Potter" or all the CGI Comic Book movies now in theaters), and the formula always featured two things : Swimming and Romance. And the stories were always light comedy.
This one had a slightly more serious theme, however. Esther is the eldest child in a health-conscious farm family, where the Dad (William Demarest) monitors the family's nutrition and has his wife and three daughters swimming laps in their nearby pond every day.
Of course, a promoter shows up in town (part of the formula). He is pushing a "health tonic" full of vitamins. He discovers the family of health-nut swimmers and comes up with a great idea - to have the whole family, Dad, Mom and all three daughters, swim the English Channel in a contest sponsored in England each year. So from there, the movie takes off. The romantic subtheme involves the Handsome and Suave Fernando Lamas, who was just as Handsome and Suave as Ricardo Montalban, our other recent romantic interest in these movies. And in fact, Fernando Lamas out-Handsomed and out-Suaved Ricardo Montalban, because he actually married Esther Williams many years later, in 1969. But in the movie, he gets second billing to the quest to swim the Channel, which is featured quite dramatically in the last 15 minutes of the movie. "Dangerous When Wet" doesn't have the comedic element of the films in which Red Buttons co-stars, nor does it have the exotic pizzaz of Xavier Cugat, who is not in this film, but it does have one element that it has been famous for, a Dream Sequence in which Esther falls asleep and dreams she is swimming the English Channel with the help of Tom and Jerry, the famous cartoon characters. This animated sequence is quite advanced for the time, and it looks fantastic. For the cartoon sequence alone the film gets Two Thumbs Up.
Elizabeth, if you are reading, I saw the post from Yasmeen Olya in which she describes her compositional methods. I think the most important thing she said, or intimated, was that she just starts to play, and basically waits for a musical idea to present itself. Like "here it comes".
She also said that she has a notational or chordal structure, or several of them, that she works with to bring ideas to the forefront.
But I think that the main thing she is demonstrating is that, just by starting to play (i.e. practice, but fully engaged, with feeling) and playing within certain frameworks, you can pull musical inspirations out of the sky, so to speak. You know what I mean, or rather, what she means, but what I liked about her presentation was that she has a framework for it, a way to set up musical inspiration.
I hope you are feeling inspired, and I also hope you have had a chance to play your viola! You were planning to record some viola duets, and maybe those are still in the works.
You have the ability to pick up and play an instrument such as a viola, which as you know is a rare talent....... :)
I'll shut up now, because you know all this stuff.
But it would be great if you could play the harp again, too!
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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