It is 25° F., anyway, with clear skies and the lovely spectacle of the morning stars. Am not going out for my morning spatiamentum but did in order to behold the glories of approaching Dawn.
Am reminded that if I don't turn the VPN on, I may as well not have it.
Haven't looked at the concerts site yet-- am now going to say Prime-- but I do know that Klassikaraadio is streaming the performance of Arvo Pärt's Passio Domini Nostri Iesu Christi secundum Ioannem from August's Helsinki Festival at, I believe, 0900 here.
Was interested to read this article by Justin Shubow in the New York Post from the 23rd. The National Civic Art Society people sent an email this morning; I try to skim the opinion writers over there but not very successfully as it happens.
... What do the American people have to show for all the post-war construction done in their name? Much of it would have looked more at home in the dreary cities of our Soviet rivals: buildings like the Brutalist J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, famously loathed by President Trump. The hulking concrete pile that is home to the Department of Housing and Urban Development has received bipartisan condemnation from its various occupants. Republican HUD Secretary Jack Kemp called it “10 floors of basement,” whereas a later Democratic successor, Shaun Donovan, said the building was “among the most reviled in all of Washington — and with good reason.”
The General Services Administration, the agency overseeing the design and construction of government buildings, insists on calling the HUD headquarters an “outstanding Modern achievement.” More recent GSA buildings, some of them avant-garde, have been variously derided as a “Borg cube,” “hulking, aggressive tower” and having a “sinister dimension.”...
The NCAS commissioned a Harris Poll on the question of Americans' preferences so far as federal architecture goes. (It is a small minority, after all, that actually likes e.g. Brutalist nonsense.)
Have been occupied with other things but out of the corner of my ear, as it were, it began to dawn on me that the man on the Klassikaraadio channel was talking about Hercule Poirot and Agatha Christie, ha. This turns out to be a half hour reading of the first part of one of Christie's short stories, "Fourth Floor Apartment" from a 2012 audio book. I don't recognize the story of course but did the character's name, Jimmy Faulkener. The story is actually entitled "The Third Floor Flat"-- but Poirot lived on the fourth floor. Poirot was introduced to us in October 1920.
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