Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

Lenten music Friday: Barber Adagio

Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” would be played at the state funerals of both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

Samuel_Barber Thomas Larson called Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” “the saddest music ever written,” and he may be right.

NPR describes the premiere performance on 5 November 1938 with conductor Arturo Toscanini leading the NBC Symphony Orchestra, broadcast to millions of radio listeners.

From This Day in History:

Adagio for Strings had begun not as a freestanding piece, but as one movement of Barber’s 1936 String Quartet No. 1, Opus 11. When that movement provoked a mid-composition standing ovation at its premiere performance, Barber decided to create the orchestral adaptation that he would soon send to Toscanini.

In later years, the piece would be played at the state funerals of both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, taking its place as what one observer has called “the semi-official music of mourning.”

It is an adaptable piece, which has been arranged for solo organ, clarinet choir, woodwind band, and, as Agnus Dei, for chorus with optional organ or piano accompaniment, among others.

9/11 tribute. Leonard Slatkin, conductor. LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL IN ENGLAND – 2001.

September 11: 10th-anniversary memorial concert, Steven Schneider, organist. St. James’ Episcopal Church, Marietta, GA.

The Lydster, Part 132

She gets a thrill when she gets a question right on JEOPARDY!

Lydia.NYCThis is probably true: the Daughter will be taller than her mother, and quite likely, her father. She’s about 5 feet, 4 inches tall, which is about 1.6 meters.

She is generous of spirit, contributing her money to causes, especially those involving dogs and cats.

She relishes being helpful. She teaches me about current music, even as I share with her the Beatles and Motown.

She is quite good in math, instinctively, though the showing of the work, especially with those bar charts, is tedious for both of us.

She LOVES reading, but some of her “compare and contrast” writing assignments suck the joy out of it.

She gets a thrill when she gets a question right on JEOPARDY!, and at least once she got an answer that none of the three contestants could come up with.

She probably watches the news too much, though I was the same at her age. (But the news didn’t seem so grim then: Cold War and racial tension, whereas now it’s terrorism and ethnic tension.)

She went to two funerals this year, one for a person she cared deeply for.

She still likes it when her mother and/or I watch the scary parts of the movies with her, e.g., in Brave, when the mama bear was in peril.

She still loves her papa, and he’ll always love her.

MOVIE REVIEW: Still Alice

“The film Still Alice doesn’t so much progress as fade away, leaving only the memory of its central performance intact.”

stillaliceThe Wife and I saw the movie Still Alice the Saturday after Julianne Moore won the Best Actress Oscar.

I didn’t see the other nominees in the category, save for Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything, but she was fine. Great, actually, as linguistics professor Alice Howland, who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

Alec Baldwin plays her husband John, somewhat self-absorbed with his own academic career; Baldwin’s played this type of character before.

Kate Bosworth is the annoying married daughter Anna. The guys playing her brother and her husband were mostly ciphers because they didn’t have that much to do.

The key family relationship is between Alice and her youngest daughter, an aspiring actress named Lydia (good name, that), played by Kirsten Stewart. I had NEVER seen her in any movie. The Twilight series actress was surprisingly not bad, though, as a friend of mine who happened to attend the same showing, she has a tendency to mumble.

Weeks later, I’m still trying to figure out why this movie, based on a book I have not read, felt a bit distant to me. I’m not sure, but here are some observations:

*There’s a scene that is out of focus, save for Alice. I KNOW it was showing her feeling disorientated, but it LOOKED as though perhaps she was going blind, and that was a distraction.

*Perhaps the emotional center was a speech, which came more or less in the middle of the movie, a time I actually teared up.

*The bathroom scene at the summer house was the most painful.

*The scene involving the video of Alice’s younger self almost played as a very dark comedy.

*The family, save for Lydia, seemed so shiny and put together.

This Spectator review says it better than I:

“The film doesn’t so much progress as fade away, leaving only the memory of its central performance intact. Still Alice thus joins a growing band of movies… which seem plucked into existence solely to fatten up a single performance for awards season, while everyone else — the rest of the cast, director, crew — goes on a starvation diet. The people around Alice are sketches.”

My mother had some sort of dementia in the months before she died, and of course, the disease manifests itself in many different ways. She was far older than Alice, not as well educated, not as self-aware. All of that probably colors the movie for me as well.

K is for Kellogg’s Cereal Bowls

I have NO recollection of ordering these bowls.

kelloggs cereal bowls
This is an odd little story.

Back in early 1980s, my (now) parents-in-law had befriended this older woman named Alice. She became part of their family. I met her a few times; she was a nice lady.

Around 2003, she died, and my parents-in-law were tasked to take her stuff from the trailer in which she lived, plus a storage unit. The items were removed en masse, without looking much at what items were present. They did sorting as time allowed.

Jump to 2014. In the midst of their own move, the in-laws discover this box with Alice’s handwritten note, “A Gift From” my wife. But the box initially had been mailed to ME at my address before we got married, from E.P.I Fulfillment in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Contained therein were four Kellogg’s cereal bowls, the same ones pictured above, with a 1996 copyright date.

I have NO recollection of ordering these bowls. Nor does my spouse remember having given them to Alice. Still, they’ve made their way back to us.

They go for about $20-$45 for the set on eBay, depending on condition, and they appear to be in near-mint condition, so I doubt she ever used them. I’m not inclined to sell them anytime soon.

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

The word “apothic”

apothic crush

My friend Dan, always with a question, writes:

Apothic: A mysterious word. Searching Google, apothic is used for a lot of commercial enterprises, particularly a cheap red California wine that appears to be popular. It also pops up as a scent, as an alternative medicine peddler, a carpentry shop, etc. But mostly the wine.

Urban Dictionary gives “beautiful or stunning,” but there’s only one entry which makes that definition highly suspect. The word “apoth” appears to have nothing to do with it, that is an archaic derogatory term for someone who is an apothecary, plus apoth is also a Northern English local word meaning “silly.” Not to be confused with aphotic, which means “unfathomable depth.” My spell checker keeps trying to make the word apothem, which is a line drawn in a polygon from the center to one of the sides.

So in desperation I checked the wine maker’s site, and found Apothic Red Wine is put out by Gallo. (Urp.) On their site I found, “Inspired by “Apotheca,” a mysterious place where wine was blended and stored in 13th century Europe…” So I find Wiktionary which defines apotheca as a warehouse or repository. But then I see “apotheca” appropriated as a coffee house and as another herb peddler, flower seller, a hair shop, etc.

So finally I zeroed in. It seems that an apotheca, back in ancient Greek times, was a storeroom usually in the upper part of a house used particularly for storing wine. So I’m guessing that “apothic” is a modern made-up word that has not been copyrighted (although it appears that someone tried to claim copyright) that is supposed to sound like something technical to do with wine. But, judging by the variety of commercial names, the use of the word is scattered all over the place.

Perhaps a Librarian can help me out here. Am I missing something? Or is this too tedious to bother with? Is this what I do when I get up early?

“So I’m guessing that ‘apothic’ is a modern made-up word” – well, all words are ultimately made up. And my best guess is someone made an adjective out of apotheca, which is the antecedent to boutique and bodega.

To your last sentence: I think you already have the bulk of your answer, a variation of apothecary: Mid-14c., “shopkeeper, especially one who stores, compounds, and sells medicaments,” from Old French apotecaire (13c., Modern French apothicaire), from Late Latin apothecarius “storekeeper,” from Latin apotheca “storehouse,” from Greek apotheke “barn, storehouse,” literally “a place where things are put away,” from apo- “away” (see apo-) + tithenai “to put, to place” (see theme). Same root produced French boutique and Spanish bodega. Cognate compounds produced Sanskrit apadha- “concealment,” Old Persian apadana- “palace.”

Surely THE answer you seek may be derived by the right librarian or linguist. But I’m hitting the same references as you are. I DO agree that the “beautiful” definition is suspect.

The only reference I found you did not mention is the Thesaurasize definition, “Of, or relating to the eye or to vision,” which I find even more puzzling. Maybe this was confused with aphotic, “being the deep zone of an ocean or lake receiving too little light to permit photosynthesis.”

I looked at the USPTO.gov website. Yes, E. & J. GALLO WINERY CORPORATION has a lot of trademarks that are LIVE (active), Apothic, Apothic Brew, Apothic Dark, Apothic Fire, and Apothic Smoke. Two of them they have even trademarked not just the name but the logo design:

APOTHIC CRUSH (pictured)
The color(s) red is/are claimed as a feature of the mark. The mark consists of a red label with a letter “A” surrounded by various swirl designs centered at the top. Centered below is cursive lettering spelling out CRUSH in what appears to be fabric, and directly below that are printed capital letters spelling APOTHIC CRUSH. Forming a rectangle around the border of the label are swirl designs.

APOTHIC RED
The color(s) red is/are claimed as a feature of the mark. The mark consists of a three dimensional configuration of a glass bottle for the goods, namely, a bottle with a round circumference and vertical sides that gradually curve in at the neck; the bottom of the bottle is concave. Around the middle of the circumference of the bottle it is shaded darker than the rest of the bottle, and at the top of the shaded section on one side of the bottle is a label, which consists of the red letter “A” surrounded by various red swirl designs. Directly underneath the label are the words APOTHIC RED in capital letters, with APOTHIC in white lettering and RED in red lettering. The top of the bottle is covered by red sealing material that goes halfway down the neck of the bottle and covers the cork at the top of the bottle.

GALLO has abandoned the trademarks for Apothic Frost, Apothic Ice, Apothic Lust, and Apothic Spice.

The only other company that has trademarked the word apothic is LUX BEAUTY GROUP, West Hollywood CALIFORNIA 90069.

This title is DEAD (abandoned) – ROYAL APOTHIC INVISIBLE SKIN: Cosmetics, toiletries, non-medicated skin care preparations, non-medicated bath and body gels and lotions, body washes, and soaps for personal use

But this is LIVE (in use) – ROYAL APOTHIC: Non-medicated bath and body gels and lotions, non-medicated skin care preparations; soaps for personal use; perfumes; and scented room sprays.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial