There are not many pictures of me without glasses!

I’m not of an evangelical background, but I picked up the casual derogatory usage of “Pharisee” (and “philistine”) — it took someone calling me out pretty bluntly to hear what I was doing

What? This is probably just a simile that got out of hand, but it appears to be saying that law and politics are inextricable because the author doesn’t care about music. bbaumann.substack.com/p/the-vladec...

Quote post with something good that lasted longer than the Confederacy (1861-1865): The literary career of Arthur Rimbaud (1869 - 1875, depending a little on how you count)

Blossfeldt is so great. His plants appear to be made of a special substance -- I wonder if he varnished them.

Hey, I actually know a Guggenheimer this time around! Congratulations to Reinaldo Moya (who's not on here). www.gf.org/stories/anno...

One possible answer from a questionnaire. (Or is it a message from a fortune cookie?)

On my walk to work (at the sort of job which they're promising to eliminate). Really leaning into a corny villain style. And the company, of course, is called Artisan.

Concert coming up! My contribution is an arrangement of the Strauss horn concerto op. 11 for horn and string quartet. Bay Area Arts Alliance presents Opus 11 Saturday, April 25th, 7:30 pm Community Music Center, Recital Hall 544 Capp St., San Francisco, CA 94110 Tickets paybee.io/@baaa@19

This is one of the things about poetry that I've wanted to capture / reflect in music. Take Gray's Elegy, which has a characteristic stanza, but also an architecture. (For example, the first three stanzas are scene-setting and the last three are peroration.) www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/...

The arrival of the big trombone tune in Sibelius 7, especially the transformed minor version over unquiet seas (which sets up the triumphant return, etc.) youtu.be/Bi9QiDrJJmw?...

I just clicked Like on someone’s nice sentiment, then realized I didn’t exactly agree, and clicked again to un-like it. Then I remembered that I try to convey gratitude and interest with my likes rather than pure approval, and clicked again

La vita è bella stuck with me somehow through the decades

I can agree with 2, 3 and 4, but I really don't enjoy listening to this music. Since 1950 at the latest, pop music has had a tendency toward treacly arrangements with gross instrumental sound and rigid rhythm. Disco introduced new versions of both.

If you see this, post a Goth Girl! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna...

My arrangement of Strauss’s first horn concerto for horn and string quartet sounds great. It’s a personal best in the field of arranging, for sure. And the electric feeling of hearing it performed (just a first rehearsal) is energizing.

Regularly walking 45 minutes to work (about 10K steps), for three months now. It wasn't hard to get started, but after a little while I felt it in my back -- that resolved itself, and now it's a firm part of the routine.

While I agree that the proposal looks tasteless, I’m not confident that the Lincoln Memorial (or, say, the Oklahoma City memorial for the McVeigh bombinf) are tasteful. It seems like a shaky basis for criticism

"And we're on drogues".

The prizegivers demanding that the winner give publicity to them is certainly understandable humanly (like how major donors want to see their name on the museum or hospital wing), but it's embarrassingly petty.

“Masterclass” should not be used figuratively, as a mere superlative of “lesson”. (“L’eclisse is a masterclass in anomie.”)

Real tricky, if “only” two thirds of players solved it

Others might say that both claims are inane, and made up by the reporter. (The painting indeed is pretty similar in both orientations. That's neither a failure nor a success.)

The arts don’t necessarily do what’s demanded of them. A few of the British poet laureates were genuinely good poets, but not in their official capacity. “We should have sent a poet” — what if you did, and it turned out to be Jack Spicer or Susan Howe, making you question what words are for?

If you see this, I implore you to quote skeet with an unusual image from your posting device without explanation. Still definitely use alt text, though.

I'm here for the mockery and playing up his quirks, but this doesn't touch the poetry, which is unique. Inventive and assured, fabulously fluent, copious to a fault, teetering on or over the edge of nonsense, a verbal effect and atmosphere like no other. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45287/...

I like this in principle, but good food photography is a skill -- on Insta, someone I follow regularly posts meals I'm sure I would enjoy, but with sad lighting, and arrangements that look like the customer took one bite and gave up

Show me a non-selfie that shows how sexy you are

I did not know this poem! Link for the likewise uninitiated. On a first read, it’s less the titular encounter that grabs me than the sense of moving through a particular transitory time and place poets.org/poem/moose

Mine, previously stated but perpetually renewed, is that people who complain about autocorrect should *turn it off*. Go into your settings, search for “autocorrect”, and flip the switch. Text suggestions, a less intrusive aid, are separate.

It's National Film Score Day! QTP with your favorite film score. #FilmSky #Moviesky #musicsky www.youtube.com/watch?v=08Q-...

The Thomas Mann line, “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people,” is a bit glib, but has a kernel of truth: some people are more alive to the possibilities and challenges, and that’s a motivation.

Post something random or you will have an awful April. Not necessarily an exclusive “or”.

Pretty strong up here, but closer to Santa Cruz: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...

My feed has been blessedly free of hoaxes, except that over on Instagram, for some reason, the Arnold Schoenberg Center has posted several

Solid rule, but I found “Gravity’s Rainbow” benefited from imagining tunes for the Broadway-style lyrics scattered throughout

On the one hand, this is hugely embarrassing for the reviewer and the NYT. On the other, the typical newspaper book review, with a plot summary that wouldn’t be out of place on the book jacket, is tediously formulaic.

Today was the third puzzle in this series, and I find the difficulty is increasing. One difference in the presentation is that you're not told whether you've gotten it right until you click Submit, irrevocably. This time I really wondered if I was about to commit some embarrassing error -- not yet.

And yet theory can help articulate things you find interesting or not about a piece of music, which can help you in performing it, or in making your own music.

Worth digging into replies and followups to see the strange varieties of disagreement this has elicited

Without wanting to be proscriptive, I don’t think listening all the time can foster the most attentive listening

I had not seen this excellent use of Malevich before. Tangentially, the craquelure seems like an irresolvable problem for preservation: you can't recover the original effect of the painting without essentially replacing it. Maybe the gallery could commission a replica to hang next to it

Parmigianino, Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524

I was bemused to learn of the book "The Fifty-Minute Hour" (1954), by Robert Lindner (author of "Rebel Without a Cause"). Not to be outdone, Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco (son of the composer) wrote "The Twenty-Minute Hour" in 1965 archive.org/details/twen...

I developed my snobbery in vulnerable early teen years as a classical-music nerd. Somewhat later I learned to appreciate jazz and pop music of some eras -- but certainly not all eras, or all genres. "drivers license", to take KPL's example, is not offensive but leaves me pretty cold....

@michaelerard.bsky.social in the Letters of the LRB, pointing out that signed languages are not dependent on spoken ones. "[T]hey are not influenced by the languages spoken around them" goes too far in the other direction, I think, but that may be the editor's hand. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Typing in "Pink Pantheress" in the YouTube search bar, was offered the completion "pink parentheses"

While this is a good poem, it’s slightly cheating. O’Hara’s radical technique is tamed by serving one clear emotional moment. (It invites the kind of reading that Veronica Forrest-Thomson calls “naturalizing”, where the difficulties are explained as expression.)

Part of the charm is that the glasses are, uh, transparently unnecessary

Here's a sentence that surprised me mildly but in a way I can't remember being surprised before. It took me a second to see that there are two "it"s in quick succession that are used as different dummy pronouns.