And fairly humid, eh. Have watched the Steller's jay on my window sill this morning; left the blinds up and it no longer seems daunted by the sight of me, at any rate as long as I'm doing nothing more than typing. It put one peanut in its shell into its throat and seized another one in its beak before finally flying off, after performing the usual routine of picking up two or three nuts and then returning to the first. The Encyclopaedia of Jays must contain a chapter on this feeding routine.
At 1045ish, a livestream of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra's performance of Shostakovich's Symphony no 9 and Sibelius's Symphony no 3, conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste.
Tsk, tsk, I see that I forgot that at Saint-Eugène was yesterday celebrated a Requiem Mass for Nicholas Krasno, who died a month ago. He had been a singer in the Schola Sainte-Cécile there for a number of years. What happens when I don't write something down, tsk. Requiescat in pace.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescat in pace.
***
Have only now realized, after a fortnight of quite a number of hours of listening, that the Estonian Radio Klassikaraadio channel has a display of the currently airing, streaming, piece running across the top of the display: it's not necessary to refresh the specific program page in order to see that information. Tsk.
Maestro Saraste looks like he enjoys a medicinal liter of whiskey a day-- it is almost comical, so am supposing my fantasy here has to do with the lighting or allergies or late summer catarrhs rather than with those imagined bottles of drink.
After the concert, Andreas Lindahl, one of two orchestra managers and the fellow who has been introducing etc these livestreams, and Johan Stern, cellist, sitting in the empty aula, answered three questions that the audience had proposed via YouTube etc. The first two were rather straightforward: the livestreaming gratis appears to be a consequence of the plague, and perhaps it will continue in October, and M. Stern said he would direct the interested listener next to Sibelius's Fifth or perhaps to the Seventh.
The third question was, why were all the musicians dressed simply in black 'everyday' clothes instead of in the customary black tie and tails? M. Stern said that as a consequence of the plague nonsense, and in the interest of reducing the amount of time all of them have to be backstage, the decision to switch to black informal wear was made (I'm quoting from memory of course) "it being hard to ride the bicycle to work in tails". M. Lindahl looked on approvingly through all of this, commenting after that 'yes, yes, that's it exactly, as I know since it was my decision'. So we know that the orchestra manager is responsible for this sort of thing, anyway. Why there are two such officials remains one of those minor mysteries that I'm sure isn't one at all, really.
This is the reason I read at Althouse, other than Dr Althouse's posts themselves of course-- always literate, sometimes quite insightful, almost always of some interest. A commenter responds to another commenter's comment:
It may the cultural anthropologist & newsperson in me-- mulling the Anthropology of the Now-- but one thing I love about being alive is reading sentences I am pretty sure have never been spoken in any language ever in the cosmos, like this one: "If there's one thing the trans movement has taught us, it's that a cunt is in the eye of the beholder."
The use of the vulgarity is not at all gratuitous, given the context.
***
Comments
Post a Comment