The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

I happened to catch the first 15 minutes or so of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three on TCM last night — one of several films I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to watch as a kid in the ’70s. It’s a great edge-of-your-seat movie, though, as promised by David Shire’s music for the opening titles. A little badass funk, a little avant-garde jazz, and a little Silvestre Revueltas mixed in for just enough chaos.

Fog Horns for Train Horns

One of the things that I knew I would miss about San Francisco, especially my Richmond District neighborhood, was the fog horns I could hear lowing from the Golden Gate.  It’s a narrow path with a lot of shipping traffic in notoriously poor visibility, so there’s a fairly elaborate concert that goes on whenever the weather is foggy (read: always).  It seems there’s at least one on the shore, and if there’s more than one ship passing through, you get some very beautiful low brass chords.

Hello, Oakland

After my longest blogging hiatus in three years, I hope there are still a few readers out there by RSS and otherwise.  Today I attempt to get my feet wet again.  We’ll see if I’m able to stick with it.

Following an incredibly stimulating and positive experience at the National Performing Arts Convention in June, the summer dealt me a couple of situations that rendered blogging among the lowest of priorities.

Update from NPAC

Stimulating, exhausting, fun, exhausting, interesting, exhausting. Useful? Maybe. (Did I mention exhausting?)

I’m in the middle of the National Performing Arts Convention in Denver, along with thousands of others from every imaginable performing arts discipline.

Here are some highlights in stream-of-consciousness order.

National Performing Arts Convention Coming Up

As you may or may not already know, the National Performing Arts Convention takes place next month in Denver. It is a major event for anyone professionally involved in music, theater or dance. As someone with an interest in opera, theater, orchestral and choral music, I am looking forward to attending this for the first time. I’ll probably be spending most of my time in the Opera America sphere.

Theremin Player

Well, I haven’t had much to blog about for a while, so just to keep this thing alive, here’s a kitty playing a theremin. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ONJfp95yoE

(Sorry, embedding has been disabled on that video.)

Real blogging to return soon.

Perusal Score Viewer (Maybe)

I discovered this service that converts any PDF into a slick browser-based document viewer, and immediately thought it might be a good way to present a score for cursory perusal. After playing around with it, I’m not so sure, but I’d love to know what others think. One of my complaints is that the icons are pretty inscrutable to those who aren’t up on the conventions.

John Cage Performs “Water Walk”

It’s a 1960 appearance on the television show “I’ve Got a Secret”

Sibelius and Leopard

I hope this information will be obsolete within a few days, but having done the research, I’d like to help out any other Mac/Sibelius users out there.

If you’re upgrading to Leopard and still using Sibelius 4, you’ll need to get a compatibility patch from Sibelius. Unless, that is, you don’t need to be able to, uh, open and save files.

Maryland

Saw this on the wall in a corridor in a San Francisco elementary school and had to share. I grew up in Maryland (even though I usually tell people D.C.), so it caught my eye.

No diseases? The “free religion” part I get. That was big stuff in the 1630′s. But, no diseases?

Oh, and what was I doing in a San Francisco elementary school? Philo starts kindergarten next year, so it’s time to start the process of choosing which schools to put on our magic list of seven. The system here is absolutely bananas. I’ll tell you about it sometime.