Music
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Weekend Music Yeah, ok, I can't resist starting this up again, mainly because there's always something I want to share. This is one of the bands of the early '90s for whom the term "shoegazer" was coined. Originally it referred to peforming mannerisms: standing still, looking down. Now it means…well, stuff that sounds something like…
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Sometimes advertising actually tells you something you wanted to know. Yesterday I saw an ad, I think on National Review, for an encore presentation of the Metropolitan Opera's Wagner cycle, which was shown in theaters in some sort of broadcast arrangement at intervals over several months, last fall I think, and maybe into the winter.…
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I'm not calling this Weekend Music because I'm not sure I want to commit myself to doing that post every week. So let's just call it weekend music. I posted this on Facebook the other day as a recommendation apropos the racial tensions in this country. Not that anyone who would have seen it there…
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Notes on a couple of movies I’ve seen recently. Islands in the Stream I saw this movie when it was released in 1976 or 1977 and liked it a great deal. I’ve thought about it occasionally over the years and wanted to see it again. Now I have, and I found it at least as…
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The death of Levon Helm a day or two ago means that three-fifths of The Band are gone. To my taste, they didn't produce a great deal of great music. But the best of it, created in the space of a few years in the late 1960s, was really great, and extremely influential. I think…
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Here's the first obituary I've seen; there will be many, many more. I saw Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys somewhere around 1968. They were honored by the folkies of the early '60s, but by the late '60s there were some reservations about them because they were politically suspect. And certainly the country…
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Sowing the Wind From some Olympian height it might be amusing to see the dedication with which mankind pursues folly. No sooner do we flee one error than we fall, swooning, into the arms of another. How naive we were in the 1960s to think that the end of legal racial segregation would mean a…
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My wife's grandmother, Viola Brown, was born in 1904 into a very poor family in rural Mississippi. Those were not good old days if you were poor. Her mother died when she was quite young, and her father, whom she remembers as harsh, handed off the children to relatives and went away to start another…
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Weekend Music Yes, same sonata as last week. But I listened to the last movement again and decided I like it as much as the first two. And I guess to be fair to the harmless little scherzo I should include it, too. Is the scherzo ever anybody's favorite movement of anything?
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Yesterday, doing one of my frequent scans of Google News, I saw a headline Anatomy of a Tearjerker. I thought that sounded intriguing and clicked on it, which took me to this analysis of why Adele's song "Someone Like You" makes people cry, or at least get tears in their eyes. I have not heard much of…
Light On Dark Water 