So this is supposed to be the “slow season” for political junkies? If you haven’t already read Adele Stan’s terrific AlterNet piece from Monday on how millionaires, lobbyists and special interest media strategists have gotten thousands of teabaggers to invade congressional town halls, you must! Also: I know you don’t need more evidence that right wing bobbleheads have no shame whatsoever, but you have to read this.
Category Archives: Blog
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Lee, Ling sprung by Clinton
MSNBC reports that North Korea has granted a “special pardon” to Euna Lee and Laura Ling, two US journalists for Current TV, and will release them following a meeting between Bill Clinton and Kim Jong-Il. In a related story, the No Quarter blog reports on just about the last headline one would expect to see from the usually insufferable Drudge Report.
Monday Morning Feed Your Brain Link
Go read David Sirota’s detailed analysis of corporate-parent interference with journalism. And if you missed Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the real scandal behind the GE/NewsCorp “truce,” it’s here.
Summer Reading
Real life has again intruded on semi-regular blogging, but look for some fresh comments later this week (including my review of a must-have Handel release). Meanwhile, I’ve picked a recent-but-not-new books for vacation reading:
- Barry Miles, Zappa
- Kevin Bazzana, Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy [namely, Ervin Nyiregyházi]
- Ray Raphael, Founding Myths: Stories that Hide Our Patriotic Past
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene [that’s a subsection of a chromosome, not me!]
On the CD Player: Furtwängler From the Urbanden
First, some full disclosure: I’ve been a Wilhelm Furtwängler fanboy since my high school years.
Continue reading On the CD Player: Furtwängler From the Urbanden
Regional Blogging Done Right: Clem Guttata Calls Out Sen. Rockefeller
Go read Clem’s comments on Rockefeller’s fealty to Big Coal at his blog. I’m generally bullish on the senator, but he has long had a good deal of explaining to do to his real constituents on the matter of his ties to one of the world’s biggest environmental wrongdoers. This is a great example of regional/state blogging done right.
Mystery Track: Maestro Revealed
The artists playing the mystery track of Sibelius‘s Tapiola? The Berlin Philharmonic conducted by someone more closely associated with Bruckner, Mahler and the Second Viennese School – Hans Rosbaud, from a studio recording for Deutsche Grammophon made in 1957 – just before the label began stereophonic recordings.
{enclose 2009.myst.10.answer.mp3}
Upgrade Your Firefox Now
Yes, I like Google Chrome and Opera, but Firefox is still my standards-compliant workhorse Web browser of record. Its new version 3.5 brought major improvements – along with some startup bugs and a security issue that immediately surfaced. If you're using Firefox – 3.5 or otherwise – go to the menu and hit Help ⇒Install Downloaded Update or Help⇒Check for Updates, depending on what you find there.
Maestro and Lady Downes End Their Lives
Heartbreaking – but also enormously courageous. With the Maestro “nearly blind and increasingly deaf” and his wife facing terminal pancreatic and liver cancer, they decided to end it together and on their terms. Sir Edward Downes was perhaps best known for his work in the opera pit, but his thrilling recordings of Gliere’s Ilya Murometz and powerful, propulsive Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No.2 remain favorite recordings of mine. Every one of his recordings that I’ve heard yields consistently excellent orchestral playing and character.
More details here.
When Bach’s “esoteric” music becomes the vogue
Jan Swafford, whose Brahms biography proves that a rigorous scholarly study can indeed be a compelling page-turner, has an interesting piece over at Slate about the surprising recent popularity of Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge thanks to the formidable Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s recent recording for Deutsche Grammophon. I would only add that there are parallels between Aimard’s achievement and the remarkable recording debut of Glenn Gould over half a century ago – through which he turned Bach’s Goldberg Variations, then regarded as a similarly “esoteric” work of more interest to the musicology set than a broader listening public, into a chart-topping hit.