Music
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It's focused on her connection to two other people: the writer of the profile, and the little-known '60s pop musician Curt Boettcher, who holds a deep fascination for both of them: "She Told Herself She Couldn't Die Because She Had to Write His Story." It's extremely interesting, and a little surprising for the NYT in…
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Weekend Music And so I'm not posting any of his music. You can listen to it here.
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Weekend Music Be warned: this is an emotionally intense song. I've seen this referred to as an anti-war song, and implicitly it is, but it's more personal than political, not a statement but a picture of an all-too-real human situation. Pug himself said: The song nearly wrote itself and yet I released it with…
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I can't let 2013 go by without noting the 100th anniversary of the performance that came to be viewed as Day 1 of the era of modern art. It wasn't really that, of course. Schoenberg's much stranger Pierrot Lunaire had been performed more than six months earlier, and cubist painting had been under way for several…
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Weekend Music Several years ago my friend Robert sent me a CD of the Chopin Ballades played by Krystian Zimerman. It disappeared among a welter of home-burned CDs that I was having a lot of trouble keeping track of, and then was forgotten, until Robert mentioned it to me a few weeks ago. I found…
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I pretty much agree with this, except that I don't think Dylan's voice sounded old when he was young. On his first album, which I've never much liked (I almost said "unlistenable," but that's overstating it), he sounds to me like a kid who doesn't really know what he's doing. He wants to sound authentic…
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Weekend Music This is for Fr. Matt Venuti, in compensation for my having failed to deliver the post on H.P. Lovecraft that I told him to expect last weekend and still haven't finished. I suspect not many people who read this blog regularly will care for this music, and I can't defend it musically from…
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Weekend Music Last week's bit of Asleep at the Wheel made me want to hear more. Here's a nice bit from a live show. This is not the same lineup I saw, at least in that the steel guitar player was a blonde woman (who seemed to be having a great time). I think the…
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Who or what, you ask, is Varg? Varg Vikernes, the most notorious of the Scandinavian black metal musicians who took the ordinary heavy metal fascination with darkness and violence far more seriously than other bands. In an awful lot of metal, there's an element of schtick in the whole thing; sometimes there's a bit of…
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Weekend Music I was having trouble finding what I wanted on YouTube (maybe next week) and this appeared in the sidebar. I like it better than what I was looking for. The Wheel, as their fans call them, as you may or may not know, are a Western swing (sort of country-jazz hybrid) group…
Light On Dark Water 