Daily Entries for the week of
Sunday, November 28, 2021
through
Saturday, December 4, 2021
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It’s Saturday, December 4, 2021
Welcome to the 1,286th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Ralph Stanley
And The Clinch Mountain Boys: 1971-1973
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Commentary
Consider here food abuse. Overeating causes overbuying contributes mightily to food waste. Flatulence, a by-product of digestion, contributes to global warming. Although I have friends [one, anyway] who find a smelly bed reassuring. Oh, well. No names.
The call for reparations might better be morphed into a call for ending ALL poverty, including establishing universal savings accounts. Reparations will be a hard sell if we tell impoverished white families that there is no help for them. It’s all going to black families.
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Reading and Writing
I am reading the passage in Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky that relates to the Grand Inquisitor. I find it fascinating and excellent background for my own manuscript.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
"Spread love everywhere you go.
Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier."
~Mother Teresa
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
This from Sally C:
Dear Dom,
With regard to the necessity of acquiring an aged rib-eye steak in order to test a bottle of wine, and now needing to get three more bottles, it would appear that you also need to get three more aged rib-eye steaks to go with them. N’est pas?
With regard to your friend giving you such in-depth consideration of the section of your manuscript that you shared with him, we all need people like him to study our work, as official or unofficial beta-readers, editors, or otherwise. The perceptions and ideas of others always reveal (to me, anyway) astonishing angles or concepts that I hadn’t thought of, or they distill the essence of a rambling piece into specific focus, which defines the work so much more clearly. People like that are invaluable and precious, a blessing on our lives.
Kudos!
Sally
Blog meister responds: You know this from the inside. You know it well.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
My new friend Luna and I had lunch at Douzo on Thursday. The food was terrific. The company was engaging.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Memphis Restaurant.
Visited thanks to a friend’s recommendation.
It was a great night.
I wish I remembered the name.
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Short Essay*
Stanley was born, grew up, and lived in rural Southwest Virginia—"in a little town called McClure at a place called Big Spraddle, just up the holler" from where he moved in 1936 and lived ever since in Dickenson County. The son of Lee and Lucy Stanley, Ralph did not grow up around a lot of music in his home. As he says, his "daddy didn't play an instrument, but sometimes he would sing church music. And I'd hear him sing songs like 'Man of Constant Sorrow,' 'Pretty Polly' and 'Omie Wise.'"
I got my first banjo when I was a teenager. I guess I was 15, 16 years old. My aunt had this old banjo, and Mother bought it for me ... paid $5 for it, which back then was probably like $5,000. [My parents] had a little store, and I remember my aunt took it out in groceries.
He learned to play the banjo, clawhammer style, from his mother:
She had 11 brothers and sisters, and all of them could play the five-string banjo. She played gatherings around the neighborhood, like bean stringin's. She tuned it up for me and played this tune, "Shout Little Luly," and I tried to play it like she did. But I think I developed my own style of the banjo.
He graduated from high school on May 2, 1945 and was inducted into the Army on May 16, serving "little more than a year." He immediately began performing when he got home:
... my daddy and Carter picked me up from the (station), and Carter was playing with another group, Roy Sykes and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys, and they had a personal appearance that night. So I sung a song with Carter on the radio before I even got home.
Clinch Mountain Boys
Ralph Stanley in 2006
After considering a course in "veterinary", he decided instead to join his older guitar-playing brother Carter Stanley (1925–1966) to form the Clinch Mountain Boys in 1946. Drawing heavily on the musical traditions of the area, which included the unique singing style of the Primitive Baptist Universalist church and the sweet down-home family harmonies of the Carter Family, the two Stanley brothers began playing on local radio stations. They first performed at Norton, Virginia's WNVA, but did not stay long there, moving on instead to Bristol, Virginia, and WCYB to start the show Farm and Fun Time, where they stayed "off and on for 12 years".
At first they covered "a lot of Bill Monroe music" (one of the first groups to pick up the new "bluegrass" format). They soon "found out that didn't pay off—we needed something of our own. So we started writing songs in 1947, 1948. I guess I wrote 20 or so banjo tunes, but Carter was a better writer than me." When Columbia Records signed them as The Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe left in protest and joined Decca. Later, Carter went back to sing for the "Father of Bluegrass", Bill Monroe.
Ralph Stanley gave his opinion on Bill Monroe's apparent change of heart: "He [Bill Monroe] knew Carter would make him a good singer ... Bill Monroe loved our music and loved our singing."
The Stanley Brothers joined King Records in the late '50s, a record company so eclectic that it included James Brown at the time. In fact, James Brown and his band were in the studio when the Stanley Brothers recorded "Finger Poppin' Time". "James and his band were poppin' their fingers on that" according to Ralph. At King Records, they "went to a more 'Stanley style', the sound that people most know today."
Ralph and Carter performed as The Stanley Brothers with their band, The Clinch Mountain Boys, from 1946 to 1966. Ralph kept the band name when he continued as a solo act after Carter's death, from 1967 until his death in 2016.
After Carter died of complications of cirrhosis in 1966, after ailing for "a year or so", Ralph faced a hard decision on whether to continue performing on his own. "I was worried, I didn't know if I could do it by myself. But boy, I got letters, 3,000 of 'em, and phone calls ... I went to Syd Nathan at King and asked him if he wanted me to go on, and he said, 'Hell yes! You might be better than both of them.'"
He decided to go it alone, eventually reviving The Clinch Mountain Boys. Larry Sparks, Roy Lee Centers, and Charlie Sizemore were among those with whom he played in the revived band. He encountered Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley arriving late to his own show: "They were about 16 or 17, and they were holding the crowd 'til we got there ... They sounded just exactly like (the Stanley Brothers)." Seeing their potential, he hired them "to give 'em a chance", though that meant a seven-member band. Eventually, his son, Ralph Stanley II, took over as lead singer and rhythm guitarist for The Clinch Mountain Boys. His grandson Nathan Stanley became the last lead singer and band leader for The Clinch Mountain Boys.[citation needed]
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Friday, December 3, 2021
Welcome to the 1,285th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Grand Inquisitor
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Lead Picture*
Grand Inquisitor
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Commentary
In anticipation of my first Christmas event, Dec 5, I spent a chunk of the day retrieving Christmas stuff from storage and setting it up.
I also started a Christmas Playlist on Spotify. The list will come to include both pop songs like, “Grandma got run over by a Reindeer” to the Messiah.
And I ordered some dried flowers.
Happy holidays. In America we mean this greeting to cross all religious celebrations.
After all, we all love Santa Claus.
And the Grinch.
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Reading and Writing
I made my Dec 5 deadline and sent the manuscript off to my editor. Am working on my Dec 12 deadline. I will finish a week ahead of time.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on."
~Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
Yesterday I spent an hour on the phone with my friend Jim P. We talked about 11 pages of my manuscript that deal with mysticism and meditation. His erudition is wonderful. He was immensely helpful.
Blog meister responds: Thank you, Jim.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Wednesday night I had two bowls of Turkey Soup. It was delicious and I now have two vats of it in my freezer.
Between my manuscript and holiday celebrations, I’m not doing a lot of experimenting in my kitchen.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Dom at Hungry Ghost on Thanksgiving
Kat and I were walking Tribeca on our way to dinner.
It was time for an afternoon cortado.
She took the picture.
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Short Essay*
"The Grand Inquisitor" is a poem contained within the text of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov. It is recited by the character Ivan Karamazov, who questions his brother Alexei, a novice monk, about the possibility of a personal and benevolent God. "The Grand Inquisitor" is an important part of the novel and one of the best-known passages in modern literature because of its ideas about human nature and freedom, and its fundamental ambiguity. In a long soliloquy, the Grand Inquisitor defends the following ideas: only the principles of the devil can lead to mankind's universal unification: give man bread, control his conscience, and rule the world; Jesus limited himself to a small group of chosen ones, while the Catholic Church improved on his work and addresses all people; the church rules the world in the name of God, but with the devil's principles; Jesus was mistaken in holding man in high esteem.
The tale is told by Ivan with brief interruptive questions by Alyosha. In the tale, Christ comes back to Earth in Seville at the time of the Inquisition. He performs a number of miracles (echoing miracles from the Gospels). The people recognize him and adore him at the Seville Cathedral, but he is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be burnt to death the next day. The Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell to tell him that the Church no longer needs him. The main portion of the text is devoted to the Inquisitor explaining to Jesus why his return would interfere with the mission of the Church.
The Inquisitor founds his denunciation of Jesus on the three questions that Satan asked Jesus during the temptation of Christ in the desert. These three are the temptation to turn stones into bread, the temptation to cast Himself from the Temple and be saved by the angels, and the temptation to rule over all the kingdoms of the world. The Inquisitor states that Jesus rejected these three temptations in favor of freedom, but the Inquisitor thinks that Jesus has misjudged human nature. He does not believe that the vast majority of humanity can handle the freedom that Jesus has given to them. The Inquisitor thus implies that Jesus, in giving humans freedom to choose, has excluded the majority of humanity from redemption and doomed it to suffer.
Despite declaring the Inquisitor to be a nonbeliever, Ivan also has the Inquisitor saying that the Catholic Church follows "the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction." He says: "We are not with Thee, but with him, and that is our secret! For centuries have we abandoned Thee to follow him." For he, through compulsion, provided the tools to end all human suffering and for humanity to unite under the banner of the Church. The multitude then is guided through the Church by the few who are strong enough to take on the burden of freedom. The Inquisitor says that under him, all mankind will live and die happily in ignorance. Though he leads them only to "death and destruction", they will be happy along the way. The Inquisitor will be a self-martyr, spending his life to keep choice from humanity. He states that "anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him".
The Inquisitor advances this argument by explaining why Christ was wrong to reject each temptation by Satan. Christ should have turned stones into bread, as men will always follow those who will feed their bellies—but the author's point is also that people follow him whom they see is capable of producing miracles. The Inquisitor recalls how Christ rejected this, saying "man cannot live on bread alone", and explains to Christ: "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue! That's what they'll write on the banner they'll raise against Thee and with which they will destroy Thy temple. Where Thy temple stood will rise a new building; the terrible tower of Babel will be built again, and though, like the one of old, it will not be finished". Casting himself down from the temple to be caught by angels would cement his godhood in the minds of people, who would follow him forever. Ruling over all the kingdoms of the Earth would ensure their salvation, the Grand Inquisitor claims.
The segment ends when Christ, who has been silent throughout, kisses the Inquisitor on his "bloodless, aged lips" instead of answering him. On this, the Inquisitor releases Christ but tells him never to return. Christ, still silent, leaves into "the dark alleys of the city". Not only is the kiss ambiguous, but its effect on the Inquisitor is as well. Ivan concludes: "The kiss burns in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea".
Christ's kiss may also mirror an event that occurs earlier in the novel when the elder Zosima bows before Dmitri Karamazov. No one seems to understand why Zosima does this, and Fyodor Karamazov exclaims: "Was it symbolic of something, or what?".
Not only does the parable function as a philosophical and religious work in its own right, but it also furthers the character development of the larger novel. The parable reveals Ivan's contempt for organized religion. After relating the tale, Ivan asks Alyosha if he "renounces" Ivan for his views. Alyosha responds by giving Ivan a soft kiss on the lips, to which the delighted Ivan replies: "That's plagiarism... Thank you, though". The brothers part soon afterward.
*The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Thursday, December 2, 2021
Welcome to the 1,284th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Glen Canyon Dam
Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, Arizona, USA
Agunther - Own work
Glen Canyon Dam and Bridge from the Observation Platform. Source: Glen Canyon Dam Photograph
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Commentary
On Tuesday, my homeless friend, Yan, came to my table and signaled me that this day was her day for giving. And she gave me a package of Keebler Cheddar Crackers. She was pleased. I was touched. I sent emails to the two people who also know Yan. Check out the Mail section for their responses.
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Reading and Writing
Just a couple of days before I complete my work for my Dec 5 target.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
Whoever is happy will make others happy too.
~Anne Frank
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
See Commentary above for the background.
This from Ann H:
awww. I'm pouring wines at the Star Pru now and I see her sometimes. She is looking pretty good. How kind of her.
Xooxox
And this from my daughter Kat:
a very sweet moment
Blog meister responds: I was touched.
Walking along Charles
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
I had my sixth and last turkey dinner in the last two weeks.
I will not miss turkey for a long time.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Swans Reflecting on Charles
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Short Essay*
A dam is a barrier that stops or restricts the flow of surface water or underground streams. Reservoirs created by dams not only suppress floods but also provide water for activities such as irrigation, human consumption, industrial use, aquaculture, and navigability. Hydropower is often used in conjunction with dams to generate electricity. A dam can also be used to collect or store water which can be evenly distributed between locations. Dams generally serve the primary purpose of retaining water, while other structures such as floodgates or levees (also known as dikes) are used to manage or prevent water flow into specific land regions. The earliest known dam is the Jawa Dam in Jordan, dating to 3,000 BC.
The word dam can be traced back to Middle English, and before that, from Middle Dutch, as seen in the names of many old cities, such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Wednesday, December 1, 2021
Welcome to the 1,283rd consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Mako Komuro
Mako Komuro at the Tokyo Imperial Palace in 2015. Image: User:Kounosu1.
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Commentary
Winter is with us. As I pull out my Canada Goose coat that is impervious to the cold, I think of my friend Yan, the homeless woman whom I see from time to time at the Prudential Center. She often walks by my table at the Blue Bottle and I treat her to a meal at Wagamama.
But her clothing does not seem warm enough to ward off the cold. She’s not alone.
I think of Yan and I think of Pres. Biden’s efforts to restructure the United States into a fairer society.
And I pray that his programs get passed.
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Reading and Writing
December 5 is my first scheduled manuscript checkpoint. I will make it. I’m sure. Likely a little early.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
It is during our darkest moments that
we must focus to see the light.
~Aristotle
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
I sent out some pages of my manuscript to my dear friend, Jim Pasto. He is erudite in the fields of dreams, mysticism, and meditation. He was praising in his response but more importantly, Jim’s detailed ideas and his references to parallel writings for me to examine are brilliant.
Blog meister responds: Am looking forward to a telephone meetup with Jim to discuss his ideas. Thank you, my friend.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Monday night I had an aged Rib-Eye Steak. I was forced into it because I needed to test a Barolo that is on sale at Eataly, usually $45.00/bottle, now $35.00. The wine is terrific: elegant, quaffable, and rich. Perfect. I’ll need three bottles.
Mako Komuro at the Tokyo Imperial Palace in 2015. Image: User:Kounosu1.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
William and Katherine’s cat Uma playing with Dom at Kats on Thanksgiving Day.
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Short Essay*
Mako Komuro and her husband, Kei Komuro, travelled to New York yesterday to start a new life together outside of the Japanese Royal Family. Their relationship had been heavily criticized by members of the public in Japan due to its unconventional nature and breaking social norms for the nation. The couple arrived at Tokyo’s Haneda international airport to much media attention and under heavy security.
Mako Komuro, a former princess and niece of the Japanese emperor, gave up her title in order to marry Kei Komuro, her college sweetheart. While Japan is generally modern in many ways, the status of women and family values are still rooted in feudal practices; Japanese royalty are forbidden from marrying "commoners".
New York was chosen because Kei has a job at a New York law firm, though he has yet to pass the New York bar exam. According to the Associated Press, this fact was used by Japanese media to discredit and attack him, despite it being common place to not pass a bar exam on the first attempt. Comparisons have been drawn by The Straits Times between scrutiny that they have suffered and that of the Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex of the British royal family.
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Welcome to the 1,282nd consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Schindler’s List
This is a poster for Schindler's List. The poster art copyright is believed to belong to the distributor of the item promoted, the publisher of the item promoted or the graphic artist.
May be found at the following website: http://www.impawards.com/1993/schindlers_list.html
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Commentary
I note a little confusion in my meals planning.
I forget that high fiber often means high calories.
Just saw Schindler’s List again. What a terrific movie.
Dr. Fauci recently advised us to accept that Covid we shall always have with us. Of course, we will all be more conscious of transmissible viruses than we ever were. This is a good thing. Frequent handwashing and masks in crowded areas and other safety habits will be our new norm, with or without a pandemic.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
~Dr. Seuss
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
Lots of conversations re: December appointments. I have the honor of a constant flow of activities with my children and family, including a big event on Dec 5 with a group of ten nephews, nieces, and sons.
Then comes a dinner @ Legal with son Chris. Then a three-night NYC visit with son Mino, daughter Kat, and boyfriend (Kat’s) Will. Then a trip to Florida to a town called Apalachicola.
Blog meister responds: All this and a determination to stay on schedule with my manuscript.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Chris and I went to Legal Seafood to discover they were out of Fried Clams. The substitute, Fried Calamari, not even close.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Some of the plates we enjoyed at Locanda Verde in NYC on Thanksgiving Day
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Short Essay*
Schindler's List is a 1993 American epic historical drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Steven Zaillian. It is based on the 1982 historical fiction novel Schindler's Ark by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. The film follows Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as SS officer Amon Göth and Ben Kingsley as Schindler's Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern.
Ideas for a film about the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews) were proposed as early as 1963. Poldek Pfefferberg, one of the Schindlerjuden, made it his life's mission to tell Schindler's story. Spielberg became interested when executive Sidney Sheinberg sent him a book review of Schindler's Ark. Universal Pictures bought the rights to the novel, but Spielberg, unsure if he was ready to make a film about the Holocaust, tried to pass the project to several directors before deciding to direct it.
Principal photography took place in Kraków, Poland, over 72 days in 1993. Spielberg shot in black and white and approached the film as a documentary. Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński wanted to create a sense of timelessness. John Williams composed the score, and violinist Itzhak Perlman performed the main theme.
Schindler's List premiered on November 30, 1993, in Washington, D.C. and was released on December 15, 1993, in the United States. Often listed among the greatest films ever made,[4][5][6][7] the film received worldwide critical acclaim for its tone, acting (especially Fiennes, Kingsley, and Neeson), atmosphere, and Spielberg's direction; it was also a box office success, earning $322 million worldwide on a $22 million budget. It was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, and won seven, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score. The film won numerous other awards, including seven BAFTAs and three Golden Globe Awards. In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked Schindler's List 8th on its list of the 100 best American films of all time. The film was designated as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress in 2004 and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Monday, November 29, 2021
Welcome to the 1,281st consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Stephen Sondheim
Autographed publicity photo of Stephen Sondheim. The fact that this is a signed photo given to an apparent fan indicates it was previously used for that purpose. The original photo was 8" x 10". See also: film still article for general description of non-copyright status of publicity photos. No copyright information shown on photo.
Unknown photographer - RR Auctions
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Commentary
Last night I spent three hours in the kitchen preparing enough dinners for six nights.
I feel good about how I handled the second turkey.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
The best and most beautiful things in the world
cannot be seen or even touched —
they must be felt with the heart.
~Helen Keller
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
Lots of conversations re: What did you do on Turkey Day?
Blog meister responds: The results were varied but all happy.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Last night I had a turkey club sandwich. It was delicious. I put aside turkey parts for one last roast turkey of the season.
I also froze enough of a turkey breast for a turkey club in the future.
Then I put the entire remains in a large stock pot and made a delicious stock.
From that stock I made a turkey soup [enough for six people for dinner] and took some of the clear soup and reduced it to add to my store of Turkey Gravy.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Black Saturday at the PRu
It’s only anecdotal but the crowds at the Pru both Friday and Saturday seemed robust.
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Short Essay*
Stephen Joshua Sondheim (March 22, 1930 – November 26, 2021) was an American composer and lyricist. One of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, Sondheim was praised for having "reinvented the American musical" with shows that tackled "unexpected themes that range far beyond the [genre's] traditional subjects" with "music and lyrics of unprecedented complexity and sophistication". His shows addressed "darker, more harrowing elements of the human experience", with songs often tinged with "ambivalence" about various aspects of life.
Sondheim's best-known works as composer and lyricist include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Into the Woods (1987). He was also known for writing the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959).
Sondheim's accolades include nine Tony Awards (including a Lifetime Achievement Tony in 2008), an Academy Award, eight Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a Laurence Olivier Award, and a 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also had a theatre named for him on Broadway and in the West End of London. Sondheim wrote film music, contributing "Goodbye for Now" for Warren Beatty's Reds (1981). He wrote five songs for 1990's Dick Tracy, including "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)", sung in the film by Madonna, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Film adaptations of Sondheim's work include West Side Story (1961), Gypsy (1962), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), A Little Night Music (1977), Gypsy (1993), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Into the Woods (2014), West Side Story (2021), and Merrily We Roll Along (TBA).
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Sunday, November 28, 2021
Welcome to the 1,280rd consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Jon Hamm
Actor Jon Hamm at The Paley Center For Media's PaleyFest 2014 Honoring "Mad Men"
Dominick D - https://www.flickr.com/photos/idominick/13334288855/
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Commentary
So I’m on the train home to Boston.
It was a terrific trip.
Can’t wait to come again.
Traveling by train on Thanksgiving night had the distinct advantage of having an entire car to yourself.
Spread out. Charge your devices. Nap. Get up for the toilet at will. Type away without interruption or distraction.
Nice.
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Reading and Writing
Despite spending the greater part of the last two days with my daughter and Will, I stayed on schedule with my writing. Dec 5 is fast approaching but I have no doubt that I will achieve what I set out to do.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
Tell me and I forget.
Teach me and I remember.
Involve me and I learn.
~Benjamin Franklin
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
The abundance of holiday greetings made me feel like I didn’t do enough of my own reaching out.
Blog meister responds: I will do a better job over the Christmas holidays.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
For Thanksgiving, Katherine and I ate at Locanda Verde in NYC, a Guide Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurant. And the restaurant lived up to its recognition. Excellent. We ate a dozen plates and each one was perfect. Next time in NYC we will return for a knockout Italian dinner.
The place is beautiful and lively and besides great food, the service was great.
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Community Photos**
My daughter Katherine and I spent our Thanksgiving afternoon café time at Hungry Ghost Café in NYC. She is a pretty one. She hates me to focus on the unimportant but she’s my daughter, and I am old and not always PC. And it’s my blog.
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Short Essay*
Jonathan Daniel Hamm (born March 10, 1971) is an American actor and producer known for his role as Don Draper in the period drama television series Mad Men (2007–2015). His performance earned critical praise and recognition, earning him a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama in 2008 and again in 2016, and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2015. Hamm has received 16 Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his performances for acting and producing Mad Men. He also directed two episodes of the show. Hamm has also appeared in the Sky Arts series A Young Doctor's Notebook and guest starring in Channel 4 dystopian anthology series Black Mirror and the Amazon Prime fantasy series Good Omens. Hamm is also known for his comedic roles in various sitcoms including his guest starring roles in 30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Parks and Recreation, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp.
Hamm is also known for his appearances in film including the remake of the science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), before making his first leading film role in the 2010 independent thriller Stolen. He continued taking leading roles in Million Dollar Arm (2014), Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016), and Beirut (2018), and supporting roles in The Town (2010), Sucker Punch (2011), Bridesmaids (2011), Baby Driver (2017), Tag (2018), Bad Times at the El Royale (2018), The Report (2019), and Richard Jewell (2018). He has also provided his voice for the animated films Shrek Forever After (2010) and Minions (2015), along with the second season of the FX series Legion (2018).
*The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Community Pictures with Captions are sent in by our followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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