Chain reaction
An evening pause: “A grid of over 300 wooden matches is lit from one corner.” No sound, but you’ll watch anyway. There is something about a fire that compels us to watch.
Category: The Evening Pause
A nightly pause from the news to give the reader/viewer a bit of classic entertainment.
Neil Diamond – Coming to America
An evening pause: The video is a bit too darkly lit, but the chemistry of the audience with Neil Diamond’s singing is enthralling. “Today!”
Beethoven — second movement, Fifth Symphony, performed by NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini
An evening pause: This March 22, 1952 television performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony from Carnegie Hall by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, was probably the most remembered by the generation of our parents. I show the second movement, because it happens to be my favorite. Listen as the opening theme returns several times during the piece, only changing the last time into something even more beautiful.
Watching Toscanini as he conducts is fascinating as well.
The Ten Tenors – Bohemian Rhapsody
Shawn Colvin – I don’t know why
An evening pause: Shawn Colvin, at the 1988 Philadelphia Folk Festival, early in her career, singing one of her early hits.
Santa Catalina Mountains – hike to Romero Pools
An evening pause: A hike to Romero Pools in the Santa Catalina Mountains just outside Tucson, Arizona. The hiker in the video calls this one of the toughest hikes he’s ever done, but it is only 5.6 miles round trip, with only a thousand foot elevation gain. Compared to most of the other Santa Catalina hikes, which routinely require elevation gains of 3000 to 5000 feet, this one is easy.
Hope and Crosby – The Road to Zanzibar
Autumn Story – chalkboard animation
Yanni – Nostalgia
Exploring an abandoned mine in Nevada
An evening pause: From the youtube webpage:
This inclined shaft is located outside of Searchlight, NV. The shaft itself is about 350 feet deep with two extensive drift levels along its length. We found a winze [a vertical shaft] in the lowest drift level that went down to what appeared to be an additional level.
I must emphasize that mines are very dangerous, and should be approached with great care and caution. Unlike a cave, which has had eons to slowly establish its stable structure, a mine is cut into the rock instantly (compared to geological time), and is thus very unstable and prone to collapse.
Loreena McKennitt – The Stolen Child
An evening pause: William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Stolen Child, set to song.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breat,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping
than he can understand.
Pu’u Kalena on Oahu
Cats – Gus the theater cat
New York Mets – September 24, 1969
An evening pause: In 1969 the lowly New York Mets, doormats in the National League from the moment the team was created in 1962, came out of nowhere to win the pennant and the World Championship of baseball. Forty-two years ago tonight I and my friend Lloyd attended the game in which the Mets clinched first place in the National League Eastern Division. Below is video showing highlights of the game plus the final out, with the crowd pouring onto the field. Though you can’t see me, I am in that crowd, jumping for joy at this most unlikely sports miracle. There was no rioting, only happy fans chanting “We’re number one!” in exuberant disbelief.
And I still have that small piece of turf from Shea Stadium, collected on that night, proof that the unexpected and improbable is always possible.
Monty Python – The Cheese Shop sketch
Moody Blues – Forever Autumn
Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers – Follow the Fleet
Clark Jaman – a song from Shakespeare
An evening pause: Words by Shakespeare, one of Feste the clown’s songs from Twelfth Night, Act 2, scene 4. Music by Clark Jaman, done, as he says, “for a school project.” Very nice.
John McDermott – Voyage
Bjork – It’s oh so quiet
Gordon Lightfoot – Canadian Railroad Trilogy
Spelling negus
Walking on water
An evening pause: Walking on water. As the youtube website explained, “They filled a pool with a mix of cornstarch and water made on a concrete mixer truck. It becomes a non-newtonian fluid. When stress is applied to the liquid it exhibits properties of a solid.”
Demi Lovato – Skyscraper
An evening pause:
You can take everything I have
You can break everything I am
Like I’m made of glass
Like I’m made of paper.
And go on and try to tear me down
I will be rising from the ground
Like a skyscraper.
Manfred Mann – Blinded by the Light
An evening pause: I dare anyone to watch these guys perform this song and still claim that rock stars aren’t talented musicians.
Andrews Sisters – Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B
An evening pause: From the Abbott and Costello film Buck Privates (1941).
To me, the word that best describes this is exuberance. Faced with war and threatened with destruction, the American nation responded with defiant humor.