It’s not only dangerous to have the head phones on or the earbuds in when on the bike; I want to hear what’s going on, whether it’s the blackbirds whis tling in the chestnut trees or the metrobus bearing down on my back tire.
The man credited with convincing the global consumers that it is worth the effort and money and environmental degradation to condense their music libraries onto a matchbook-sized (or somewhat larger) gadget has announced his retirement. While Facebook has made it common practice to make privacy and the confessional mode semi- or fully-public, iPods have conversely [...]
There is no such thing as old music. Regardless of when a piece was composed, it comes to life only at the moment when someone plays or sings it. Music only exists as sound, even if imagined in the head of someone recalling an unrecorded jazz improvisation or scanning a Gregorian chant notated on parchment. [...]
When a friend tells you he is going to make a feature film, it’s rather like hearing him say he plans to climb Mt. Everest. You immediately want to mention the obvious fact, already known to him, that many have gotten to the top and made it back down, but many have not. Yet you [...]
For an American musical expatriate with ample means and the right connections that money brings, a musical tour of Europe might include Wagner in Bayreuth and Verdi at La Scala. Tickets for these two houses are impossible to get unless you inherit them or know the right people, and/or can buy your way in. A [...]
Recent news that Ridley Scott has signed on to do a sequel to his 1982 film Blade Runner fills that movie’s devotees with a mixture of dread and anticipation. The overwhelming likelihood is that any effort to capture the old magic will be a colossal failure, but one still holds out hope for unlikely victory [...]
That debt and sin are synonymous in Christian thought and liturgy might help explain the righteousness of Tea Party discourse, as well as the genuflections of Obama and his acolytes. It’s true that the Sojourners and other progressive Christian groups have attacked the debt ceiling non-deal as devastating for the poor and antithetical to Christian [...]
They were still there long after the last showing of Kung Fu Panda 2, the vampire-tracking Priest (in 3D!), and The Hangover 2 had released their meager midweek audiences out beneath the canted neon crown of the Regal Cinemas into the wasteland of a mall parking lot ringed distantly by stubby pines and, somewhere beyond [...]
Here in the Homeland there is jubilation. The YouTube site of teen idol, Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” hosted the virtual party to celebrate the unarmed bin Laden’s killing. As of this morning the video had been visited more than 215,000,000 times, and viewers posted thousands of celebratory sentiments — along with racist slurs [...]
For me it is life and taxes that are inseparable: I was born on April 15. Only when I turned forty, six years ago did my friend David Borden, founder of the pioneering synthesizer trio Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company (of which I am a proud and long-standing member), wish me happy birthday this way: [...]
