Oxfam recently noted that a mere 85 individuals possess as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population! Why do we, the masses, tolerate this? Probably for the same sort of reason that more people can name the members of the Baseball Hall of Fame or the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame than any living rich person beyond Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and a Koch brother.
Posts tagged as “essays”
I first came to Berlin in 2003, just after the great Claudio Abbado, who has died this week in Bologna, had passed the baton to Simon Rattle after more than a dozen years at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic. While living in Berlin, I had the chance to hear Abbado only once in what turned out to be his penultimate visit as guest conductor to the Philharmonie, one of the world’s greatest concert halls of any era, and proof that warmly welcoming and imaginative public buildings could be created in the harsh climate of the Cold War and, almost literally, in the shadow of the Iron Curtain.
You have probably heard the provocative news that the New York Times recently declared the village of Mendocino and the surrounding scenic coastline to be the Third Best Travel Destination in the World. Not the best place to visit in America or in the Western Hemisphere, but in the entire world.
When I was 18 years old a bookseller in Valencia clandestinely offered me, under the counter, a red-covered copy of Camus’s book Summer, which had been printed in Argentina. It came wrapped in brown paper and I read it in a hammock surrounded by the sound of cicadas and the odor of pine needles, sweltering in the summer heat.
After last year’s globe-spanning celebrations marking the bicentenaries of the births of Wagner and Verdi, the field of composers-to-be-commemorated may look rather sparse as we survey 2014. To be sure, none of this year’s honorees…
Every now and again I will come across an article or a documentary or a book about an artist no one ever heard of until that artist died and it was discovered she left behind paintings or drawings or sculptures or musical compositions or novels or poems or mathematical equations or architectural designs hailed by some authority or another as works of towering genius.
Friday I emerged from bed a couple hours after noon, made a pot of tea and went out back to toss a loaf of cheap ass white bread to the five hens and one cock…
Ithaca, New York — I live between a gorge and a cemetery, a position that often gets me to thinking about the fleeting nature of life. The gorge to our south began forming a mere 10,000…