Nothing If Not Eclectic
Two CDs I ordered came in the mail today, Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart and The Gyuto Monks Tantric Choir. I got the monks for meditation–it’s extremely low frequency chanting in very slow rhythm that I find very soothing. This particular recording was made by Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead’s drummer, and is exquisitely [...]
My Favorite Songwriter Who Isn’t Bob Dylan
A portrait of the young poet as an old man, or perhaps the old man as a young poet. In any case, here is an admiring profile of Leonard Cohen in the New Yorker.
Stone Age Flutes
Human beings seem to be inveterate makers of pattern, whether musical, visual, or verbal. The people who hollowed out the bird bones and cut holes at regular intervals were also making stunning pictures on the walls of caves and, I have no doubt, singing songs to their children and telling each other stories. All of [...]
Dawn Birds
Even before dawn, when the sky is just lightening around four o’clock, a few birds begin turning up. I don’t know which birds they are — from the timbre they might be robins, but this is not daylight robin song. Just a kind of quiet noodling around. Lovely to lie there in the dark listening [...]
Sleep
I wonder what it would be like to be one of those people who sleep soundly virtually every night of their lives. I never have, not since I was a kid. Last night, though, I slept deeply & almost continuously. The extent to which sleep, or my waking relationship to sleep, has directed the currents [...]
There’s a Bailout Comin’ But it’s Not for You
Via Scott McLemee’s blog Quick Study, some trenchant social criticism from Neil Young:
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 [...]
