Here’s another video via Scott McLemee. Seems appropriate since yesterday was May Day:
We got fundamentalist Muslims
We got fundamentalists Jews
We got fundamentalist Christians –
They’ll blow the whole thing up for you
But as I travel around this big old world
There’s one thing I most fear –
It’s a white man in a golf shirt
With a cell phone in [...]

May Day: “To Fan The Flames of Discontent”

Via Scott McLemee at Quick Study, with a further comment at Crooked Timber. And here is a link to the Little Red Songbook, “to fan the flames of discontent.” Back in the seventies I had the good fortune to meet a couple of old Wobblies who had worked the docks in Seattle and knew people [...]

Very Cool Music

With an interesting backstory. Check out Dengue Fever — Cambodian rock music. I had heard something about the band last week on one of NPR’s news programs & today Terry Gross did an interview with lots of music that I heard while drive to work. Immediately ordered the new CD, Venus on Earth. So, go [...]

Bach Cello Suites (III)

3/1 — Prelude: This sounds like practicing scales. I return again to the pedagogical nature of these pieces. But what sweet, dramatic teaching / learning. Busy & thoughtful at the beginning, rising energy through the middle but still meditative, then those urgent pauses, trying to think of exactly the next thing to say, in the [...]

Bach Cello Suites (II)

Note: Suite I here. Jonathan Mayhew’s posts here.
2/I — Prelude: Gorgeous long lines in a low register. Imagine this played on a baritone sax! Speeds up a little as it goes along. This was the first piece of the suites I ever heard, waking to it on a clock radio thirty years ago in Bellingham, [...]

Bach Cello Suites (I)

Note: Jonathan Mayhew is blogging the Bach Suites for Solo Cello & I thought I’d play along. He is listening to Yo Yo Ma, I’m listening to Rostropovich. I intend to keep things relatively gnomic — I’m a poet not a music critic — & I’m also going to keep all my responses in this [...]

“A Soft Spot for The Band”

Gary Sauer-Thompson has a post with a link to a video of the late Richard Manuel singing “I Shall Be Released.” This resonated with me because I just finished reading John Nivin’s novella Music From Big Pink, which is a lightly fictionalized account of the period during which The Band recorded their first album. (The [...]

More on Copyright

A couple of days ago, the Dean of Arts & Sciences at my school forwarded this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Ed to me & several other people with an interest in such matters:
Washington — So a professor wants to show Monty Python and the Holy Grail to her class on British humor, [...]

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