h/t The Failing

Pet Sounds is on the whole probably better than any Beatles album...just sayin'...

Baaach Baaach

This is enough to make a certain kind of Bach nerd do something in his/her pants:

This is not for the feint of Bach, like all (pseudo?) academic articles it's easy to get lost in the jargon. I get skeptical about these portrayals of Bach as the ultimate musical scientist. The B-Minor Mass is a fantastic but problematic work (there, I said it). Like a lot of Baroque music, it's one damned thing after the other. Many of the movements are perfect in of themselves, but I can't help it if I think it comprises a monotonous whole. This makes about as good a case that Bach has as god-like a power of creating musical form as any human is capable of having.

I'm really a bad Bach lover...

....and I should be reading about Indonesia right now.

Gays Too Precious to Risk in Combat

h/t Die Goldfarb

Cera v Eisenberg

Hardly an original observation...and pretty amateurish, but still a lot of funny lines in here.

Symphony of Psalms

Just because...



Incidentally, TIME mag named this the greatest piece of music written in the 20th Century. OK....so I mean....yeah it's pretty great but....I mean....is it even in the top 5 of Stravinsky?

Favorite Cultural "Stuff" 2010 (part 1 of ???)

What will follow over the next week or two is in no way an exhaustive list by someone who sees/hears everything.  It’s just a list of personal favorite things in the past year that correspond to my various interests/obsessions.  



Top Ten "Stuff" Made This Year (Part 1 of 5):

1.   Mad Men: Season 4 Episode 7 "The Suitcase" - My obsession with Mad Men is incessant, and hopefully a bit different from the usual fans who have nothing better to harp on than its period dress and behaviors.  I believe Mad Men is one of the greatest shows ever produced, and (among many other things) it's the grand summation of contemporary America's love affair with all forms of mass media. The show probably reached its emotional climax (and perhaps its qualitative zenith) midway through the past season.  Throughout its run, Mad Men has seemed to be ‘about’ less and less.  By season 3, the show sometimes seemed completely devoid of plot, action, or anything else except character development.  The whole show is about suggestion, just like advertising.  By the beginning of season 4, the show was so pared down that we'd get entire episodes seemingly about nothing except suggestions and we'd never notice until their completion. Midway through this past season, we got an episode that was no more substantial than a smoky hall of mirrors. It appeared to be about nothing but the increasingly infinite complexities in the relationship between Don and Peggy, and we were so accustomed to Mad Men's lack of action that nothing seemed odd about that.  Every word of their interactions seemed to have a hundred different allegorical implications behind it: from the smoldering sexual tension between two characters, to two competing visions of America, to a discourse on the meaning of acceptance. And for those willing to pay attention, the screws were turned as tightly as they've ever been on TV. It was a wrenching, claustrophobic interchange straight out of Bergman's world. For people not turned off by the endless understatement, the face-off between these two protagonists had to be the tensest, most exciting cultural ‘happening’ of the year.  

2.   The Social Network - I’m a young fogey - about the least ‘with the times’ person I know and I think most contemporaries would agree with me. I'm a 28 year old who can't find the buttons to perform a computer self-diagnostic without help, takes five minutes to figure out how to turn the TV and cable on seperately, and would sooner walk across hot coals than listen to 3 out of 4 pop songs. I saw The Social Network at a second-run theater, and I'm pretty sure it was the only movie I saw in the theater this year. Nearly all science and tech writing comes across to me as technobabble (entirely due to lack of ability), but I'm fairly sure that The Social Network was one of the only movies in my lifetime to come out of Hollywood that can hold its own with the best of movie history (at least since the early 80’s, perhaps not coincidentally when I was born).  
The Social Network was far from perfect.  Yes, Eduardo Saverin was mostly a weak foil and the Winklevii were irritating. The film clearly misstepped towards the end by trying to give Zuckerberg a humane core that he obviously lacked for the rest of the movie. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Mark Zuckerberg presented here is an awe-inspiring character - a Charles Foster Kane/Michael Corleone for the geek squad.  This is the best example I’ve ever seen in a movie of an ordinary guy capable of acting like a reptilian human being.  In another time and place, this Jewish boy from New Jersey could have conquered Eurasia. I didn't believe for a moment that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to win Erica Albright back. He wanted to humiliate her further by showing her what she lost. There is a black hole of inhumanity at the center of the Zuckerberg character, capable of sucking the whole world into his designs for it. The Mark Zuckerberg of real life may not be the anti-human monster created in this movie (and we’d better hope he’s not). But as fiction, this Mark Zuckerberg is a terrifying work of art.  As facebook's privacy continues to erode while its influence on our lives grows, I hope Sorkin and Fincher consider making a second chapter to show how far this modern behemoth has come.

For Captain Beefheart

Poor Mrs. Beefheart (I've always wanted to say that, though I'm not sure I ever realized it)

Dear Driver's License,

Fucka Yooooouuuu for being lost and stopping me from going out while I'm on vacation.

Quote of the Morning

Il Giovine:  finally watched seventh seal    :  moral of the story: dont play chess with death

Blogging will get scarcer in the next little while.  Driving up to State College PA with Der Schreiber (in from Thailand) and The Manning to visit Die Domask and The Failing in a minute while it's snowing....This is really the greatest idea ever.

Reason #2343456467 I could never go into academia: I'd write 232562345 papers purely in an effort to win this contest.

h/t Le Malon

Putin Sings

Fats Domino no less.  h/t La Kozak.

h/t Superjew.

Pavarotti Padre

Amazing. Pavarotti always said that his father could have been a great opera star too if he didn't have terrible stage fright. Judging purely by my extremely scientific analysis of this 100-second clip, there's no way to argue. Both Pavarotti and his father have the exact same perfect Italian vowels (albeit this is a French piece by a Belgian composer in Latin) and the exact same way of inflecting phrases when they get really into the music. Luciano is clearly holding back here to give his untrained father a chance to be heard equally well, and Fernando Pavarotti had to have been at least seventy here, but even at that advanced age he seems to have a greater squillo (trumpet-like resonance) that would have made him better than his son at the heavier roles (late Verdi, verismo stuff) which gave Luciano so much trouble in later years.