ForgottenStars.net

July 16, 2026July 16, 2026

Something for Thursday

Singer Linda Ronstadt turned 80 yesterday. She’s been a fixture for my entire life, though I have to admit that I don’t know her musical output very well at all. In retrospect I kind of wonder why this is; she sang in genres of music that my parents listened to a lot when I was a kid, and she sang those genres very, very well…and yet, somehow, I don’t recall any of her music ever getting played much at home, so she was relegated to whatever got played on the radio when we were out and about. It’s a shame, then, that for me she’s always been a person of whom I think, “OMG, who is that singing?!” and the answer, supplied by a DJ, is along the lines of, “That was Linda Ronstadt.” Apparently she is now permanently retired from singing, due to an ailment that has rendered her unable to do so, which is very sad; we could use a musical elder stateswoman or two right now.

I am also belatedly discovering what a stunningly beautiful woman she is and always has been!

Here she is with one of her best-known performances. This song is just stunning.

And finally, how could I not feature this image? I think I need to track down a photo book of Linda Ronstadt’s looks in the 70s and 80s….

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July 16, 2026

“Timeline? This is no time to talk about time! We don’t have the time!…what was I saying?” (Cmdr. Deanna Troi, STAR TREK FIRST CONTACT)

OK, fine, I guess I’ll put all of my thoughts on Daylight Saving Time here, since there’s a really good chance we’re going to adopt Permanent DST in the United States, which seems to me a terrible idea. This is in no particular order and is not structured in any way.

Photo by Laura Lautner on July 14, 2026. May be an image of text that says 'NEW YORK IF DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME BECOMES PERMANENT JANUARY JULY SUNRISE 8:32 AM SUNRISE 5:31 AM SUNSET 5:42 PM SUNSET 8:43 PM'.

:: It is simply beyond dispute at this point that from a standpoint of human health, maintaining permanent standard time would be the best option. Circadian rhythms are best reflected by standard time, and doing away with the disruptive effects of twice-annual clock changes would also be a good thing. There is simply no questioning the biology on this.

:: Americans worship a lot of things: cars, guns, the military. We also worship sunlight, and oppositely, we generally do not like the night very much. This is a very odd cultural artifact that leads us to doing things like pushing for permanent Daylight Saving, on the basis that “I want to have a little light when I get off work!”

To that I ask, “Why? For what?”

Taking those times in the image above: my work shift starts at 7:30am and ends at 4:00pm. Now, I’m rarely actually out of work at 4pm; there’s usually a bit of wrap-up time, and quite a few days I have to stick around to do a bit of shopping. So, many days it’s close to 4:30pm by the time I actually depart work. At that point, by this time in the graphic above, there’s 1 hour, 12 minutes left of daylight.

My commute is about 15 minutes. Now, by the time I get home, there’s less than an hour of light. I have to bring in anything I’ve purchased, put it away, grab the mail, let the dogs out, greet The Wife if she’s working from home that day, and then change clothes and shower. By the time all of this is done, the available daylight is down to well under 30 minutes.

And there’s something else: note when all this is taking place.

January.

An extra hour, on the back end of my day when that hour is already taken up by post-work rituals, during the coldest time of the year. And I’m to believe this is a benefit? Give me a break.

:: As a matter of public policy, there is a lot to criticize about time in the United States. I’d say the biggest fish we could fry here wouldn’t even be fixing DST, but fixing time zones. A lot of New England should probably be on Atlantic time. Part of the problem with the discourse here is that we have a geographical situation where on January 1, someone in Portland, ME is watching the sun set at 4:15pm. Someone else in Kalamazoo, MI will watch the sun set at 5:21pm…and both cities, which are nearly a thousand miles apart, are in the same time zone. This is absurd.

:: No, I don’t know how we fix the time zone issue. Smaller time zones, separated by half an hour? Maybe. But I’ve always noticed that people I encounter online who really like Daylight Saving Time and who think keeping it year-round is a great idea are people who live in the eastern reaches of their particular time zone, making sunset earlier for them than most others. I get that concern, really.

:: The strange argument I keep hearing is along the lines of “Now you’d have more daylight to spend with your kids!” and “Now you’ll have an hour to enjoy your day!” Where did we get the idea that you can’t do any of those things if it’s not light out? Where did we get the idea that the only fun and enjoyment we can have in life can only take place in sunlight? Are we all coming home in utter darkness to sit, lonely and dejected, staring at a wall by the light of a single guttering tallow candle?

The one genuine, and kind of convincing, answer I’ve ever received to my eternal question of “What the hell do you all need all this LIGHT for at the end of the day, anyway?” came from a local friend who is also a sports coach for young people. In reply to a version of that question, he simply answered, “Playing baseball.” I really can’t argue that particular point. If the park you play in has no lights, and you want to play a lot of baseball, then yes, later summer light is clearly your friend.

But I keep coming back to my original thought: WHAT IS SO DAMNED AWFUL ABOUT NIGHT AND DARKNESS? Seriously, why do we venerate sunlight and hate the night so much in this country? I will never understand the American fixation on sunshine and light. Is the night not beautiful? Is it not wonderful to watch the world at Golden Hour become the world at Blue Hour and then see the night?

:: In the end, fixing the problems created by DST, and by changing the clocks twice a year, is likely more complex than this one simple bill will achieve, and it’s pretty clear to me that this bill will just make things worse. Sadly, we are not living in a time when American government is particularly oriented toward making nuanced policy changes. To the extent that we are able to address policy at all, our approach seems to often boil down to: “We have to do SOMETHING, and THIS is SOMETHING, so therefore we have to do THIS.”

Over the past few days I’ve seen a bunch of Congress people and Senators posting to social media: “Look what we did! We’re fixing an issue! Yay!” And look, I’m never one to get deep in the weeds of “Why are you thinking about X when Y is so much worse,” but…seriously, this was a priority, but fixing just about any other issue was not.

Anyway, I hope this bill dies and if it doesn’t and it becomes law, well, I reserve the right to point back at this post when a whole lot of the country concludes that this was, and is, a bad idea. Sadly, this being America, it won’t be the first time.

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July 14, 2026July 14, 2026

Tuesday Tones

Continuing our exploration of Japanese composers, we dig back now to one of the early voices of Japanese classical music. (By “early”, I mean, the period when Japan, relatively newly opened to the influences of the Western world, started producing music in what we recognize as “Classical music”. None of this is to suggest that Japan was a culture devoid of music until the West came along.) The composers of that early period tended, therefore, to reflect that new Western influence in their music, perhaps to the exclusion of anything that would make it particularly and uniquely Japanese. Such is the case with today’s work, which to my ears sounds like it could have sprung from the pen of any of the fine post-Romantic or early-Modern composers.

Kosaku Yomada lived 1886-1965, so in his lifetime he witnessed a transformation of Japanese culture, for good and bad, that must have been a constant source of astonishment. Yomada studied music both in Japan and in Europe and the United States; among his teachers were Max Bruch, so the Western stamp upon his music was indelible. He did not completely eschew Japanese influence in his music, however; he was one of the first musical voices in Japan to start the work of expressing Japanese thoughts in a Western musical language.

This piece, the Chromatic Symphony “Maria-Magdalena”, is derived from a ballet Yomada wrote based on a play by a Belgian playwright. In this work you can hear most readily the European influences on Yomada’s early work: Wagner, Strauss, and even Scriabin seem to be the main influences here. This is not criticism, by any means; the work is dramatic and effective in a way that makes it highly compelling. The development of classical music in Japan seems to have followed, at least in part, a similar track to American music: heavy European influence before the indigenous and new elements arose to have their own influence.

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July 13, 2026

Peeking

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July 12, 2026

An aspirational goal…

…is to have a personal library so grand that after you’re gone, the entire thing is preserved, as-is. One prominent example is the personal library of Samuel Pepys, which now resides at Magdalene College in Cambridge. Not only are all of Pepys’s personal books–over 3000 of them–collected there, but they are kept in the arrangement that Pepys devised, in the bookcases he had built for them. I would love to visit this library someday, which is open to the public (though not right now as the building is undergoing preservation and restoration work).

There’s a new notable personal library that has been preserved, and this one, at more than 32,000 volumes, exceeds the Pepys one tenfold. It’s the famous personal library of Umberto Eco, which now resides at the University of Bologna.

The collection was donated to the Italian state by Eco’s heirs in 2020, on condition that it be placed on permanent loan to the University of Bologna.

Before the move, the library was surveyed shelf by shelf in Milan, with the position of every volume, thematic groupings and connections between authors and disciplines carefully documented, so that the new premises in Bologna could reproduce Eco’s original arrangement exactly, down to which books he kept lying flat and which stood upright.

That arrangement follows the “good neighbour” principle developed by art historian Aby Warburg, which Eco adopted for his own shelving: placing seemingly unrelated texts side by side so that unexpected connections between them could emerge.

The library’s themed rooms, covering subjects from mediaeval philosophy to popular fiction, comic books and occultism, allow visitors to trace the same interdisciplinary connections that shaped Eco’s own research and writing.

Eco’s library is one of the most famous personal libraries of the last century, even now, ten years after Eco’s death. Nicholas Basbanes wrote about Eco in his amazing book Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture:

Before taking up residence in a sprawling suite of rooms overlooking the historical Castello Sforzesco fortress in a picturesque district of Milan, Umberto Eco had twice been forced to give up comfortable quarters elsewhere because he owned too many books. “The floors were about to collapse,” the world-renowned semiotician, medievalist, philosopher, essayist, educator, cultural critic, and author of three best-selling novels said as we walked about the beautifully appointed apartment where he and his wife, Renate, are surrounded by thirty-thousand volumes, and where the concept of a personal library takes on an almost bewildering aspect. The floors in the the stone-faced building Eco now calls home, once an elegant hotel, were constructed to bear considerable weight loads; the ceilings, moreover, are high, allowing the placement of shelves that can accommodate eleven tiers of books. To help him reach the highest levels, Eco had several ladders mounted on steel tracks that move effortlessly from room to room. His own writing is done at the rear of the apartment in a secluded cove surrounded by another complex of bookcases, arranged almost like a fantastical maze. Eco insisted that I note the depth of the shelves, which had been designed to his specifications. A quick examination indicated about nine inches of space, just enough room for one book per slot. “No more guessing,” he said, arching his eyebrows for emphasis. “Never again will I have two books deep. Never. Now I can see every title I have at a glance. Everything is in a single line.”

Well, that’s another dream, isn’t it!

Apparently there exists a full-length documentary about Eco and his library. I should watch it.

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July 11, 2026

Sometimes being responsible sucks!

After three years of shooting on Miranda (my Lumix FZ1000ii), I’m finally reaching the point where I’m ready to upgrade to a full body-and-lens system. I’ve been doing my research and planning and saving for a possible purchase later this year.

So of course, tonight I see a package deal for one of the leading contender camera bodies, with a lens I’d been planning to start with, and a whole bunch of useful accessories. Oh, how tempting it was to tap “Buy it now!” on my phone…but I did not. I chose to keep waiting and planning and saving. Who knows if this deal will be available in a few months…but I’m better off waiting, even if I end up paying a bit more for the new kit.

But still! New stuff! Shiny! Sigh….

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July 10, 2026

HEY ROGER!!!

I just saw this on YouTube!

Roger originally hails from Binghamton, so I’ll let him weigh in on whether or not Binghamton actually is the “weirdest” town in Upstate NY.

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July 9, 2026

Something for Thursday

Born this day, 1879: Ottorino Respighi, who after a slow musical development in his youth would become one of most notable Italian composers of the 20th century. Respighi’s music is wonderfully pictorial and lyrical, often with a sense of size that is nevertheless modern enough to sound removed from the traditions of Romanticism. Italian music tends toward the dramatic anyway, and Respighi’s work is certainly that.

For all that, I’m not nearly as familiar with Respighi’s music as I should be; I’ve listened to several of his tone poems (The Pines of Rome is one of the greats, and a favorite of mine), but not much else. So here, to honor his 147th birthday, I present a work for solo piano: “Notturno” from Sei pezzi prr pianoforte (“Six pieces for piano”). Apparently the “Notturno” is one of Respighi’s most popular piano pieces, all by itself. I can certainly hear why. Its pianistic tone painting is certainly redolent of Chopin, but with a decidedly modernistic twist to it.

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July 8, 2026

Kusama: a farewell

For quite a few months now, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum has been maintaining an exhibition of the work of Yayoi Kusama, called One With Eternity. That exhibition has now ended, and I am sad to see it go, even as excited as I am for the next exhibit in that space.

Kusama is, at 97 years old, one of the world’s most successful living artists, and her work has been shown and re-shown all over the world. One of her signatures (she has a number of them) is the “mirrored room”, in which a small room is erected in a larger room with interior surfaces covered with mirrors so that when you enter, you are presented with an infinity. The two mirrored rooms displayed as part of the One With Eternity exhibition also displayed one of Kusama’s other signatures: the polka dot, as well as thoughts on gender as one of those two rooms involved shapes that are distinctly phallic in nature:

One of the best things about the mirrored rooms–beyond the way they provoke your eye into perceiving something approaching infinity–is the way they yielded interesting opportunities for photographing that very infinity. I found this particular room challenging from that standpoint, I must admit, but I got some results that I liked.

Kusama’s use of polka dots is hardly unique to this one mirrored room. In fact, the polka dot recurred in all of the art throughout this installation:

Another recurring motif in Kusama’s work is pumpkins. Yes, pumpkins.

One entire room of the installation space was given to the display of one of Kusama’s pumpkins. Just one. But what a pumpkin it is! If you’ve never thought that the pumpkin could be a thing of grandeur, well, that’s probably because you haven’t seen Yayoi Kusama’s take on a pumpkin. And it wasn’t just set down in the middle of the room, either…or actually, yes, it was, but no easy display this. Look:

It’s hard to describe my emotions from the first time I walked into this room and saw this thing sitting there. First, the size–it’s huge! Second, the sheer absurdity–it’s a pumpkin, writ large upon the floor, almost glowing in its gigantic nature. Third–did I say “absurdity”? Well, that’s not right. This is pure whimsy. And fourth–the sheer assault on the visual sense when you entre this room was almost a force of nature in itself. All that orange, all those dots, the bright lights gleaming off the pumpkin’s burnished surface…it felt like the sensation of looking up at a sky on a cloudless night, well away from the city. The whole thing just takes you in and for as long as you’re there circling this thing, it becomes your world. This pumpkin.

I won’t be looking at pumpkins the same way this fall, this much I can promise.

I would very much like to hear from the people who do the physical work of setting up an installation like this. Are the walls, floor, and ceiling painted like that for the duration? Does Kusama have wallpaper in that pattern that is hung wherever this pumpkin goes? Floor tile? I really want to know!

(And this wasn’t the only giant pumpkin at the AKG as part of the Kusama show. This one was in another hallway entirely, waiting to be discovered. No less the whimsical, though this time feeling more like a piece of art set in a place for viewing.)

The other major part of this Kusama exhibit was another mirrored room, and this one was pure magic. If the first one, the one with the polka-dotted phalluses, was a brilliant and stark infinity, this next one was a purely dark one, dominated by colors that transitioned and shifted as you gazed into the distance. This room is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

The photography temptation here was intentional camera movement with a longer shutter speed:

If the first room was a bright and phallic infinity, this one was just pure psychedelic wonder. And in the first one, you couldn’t help seeing yourself as part of that infinity; in the brightness there you were, everywhere, you, repeating into the endless haze beyond the limits of your vision. This room, though, erased you. You might be able to pick yourself out in the reflection, somewhat nearby, but that was all.

The other day I went to walk the Kusama exhibit one last time, and I saved this room for last. I could have gone back in the line to go through again, but I decided not to. I visited this exhibit five times during its run here, and when my final walk-through of that mirrored room came to an end–how short 45 seconds can feel, when you spend it staring into infinity!–I stopped on my way out. One look back, and then back to reality and the finite world.

But how finite can it be….

For all of my photos from the One With Eternity exhibit, and to see bigger versions, go here.

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July 7, 2026July 7, 2026

Tuesday Tones

Getting back to my exploration of Japanese music, here is a film score by one of Japan’s most noted and prolific composers, Toru Takemitsu. In his sixty-five years, Takemitsu produced hundreds of musical works, as well as nearly a hundred filmscores and he somehow also found time to write extensively about music. He was one of those creative people who seems to do nothing but spout creative work.

I’ve always found his music to be somewhat cool and distant, but also captivating in an almost hypnotic way. This particular score, for a 1977 film called Ballad of Orin, is a very good example of this. Minimalistic motifs recur throughout, with scoring that is intimate and itself minimalistic. I know absolutely nothing about the film itself, and I also don’t know if this video presents all of the music Takemitsu wrote for the film. Nevertheless, I found this a compelling listen, albeit–as mentioned–cool and distant. This is music for a day of cool rain, I think.