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Archive:
Month: August 2016
Do Australians like being Australian citizens?
Take everything that Tracey Bryan said as read. Even if she does live in Brissie. Why, yes. I like being an Australian citizen. Let me count the whys. I like that I get to be an Australian citizen, and not a British subject. I am happy that my country finally cut itself from the apron […]
If you could go back time to 500 years ago, with your current skill and career training, what kind of job would you do? List your current job or your major in college. Feel free to disregard gender or social status factor.
Well, Lyonel Perabo mon vieux, this is going to be an unimaginative answer, but thanks for asking. University education: Bachelor of Electrical Engineering Well, no electricity, so that’s irrelevant. Good, I hated engineering. University education: Bachelor of Computer Science … No computers either. And too much damn competition from all the other time travelling geeks. […]
Alas I’m forty
I’m turning 45 in a month, actually; but this Cretan song I heard in my youth has been haunting me since I turned forty. I even had the first verse of it as my Skype mood message for a fair while. Άχι και σαραντάρισα, δεν κάνω μπλιο γι’ αγάπεςκαι μου ’ρχεται να τροζαθώ και να […]
What are some of the funniest results of censoring song lyrics?
Not a hip hop lyric, but then the OP didn’t put that in the question. When I was a young lad, I lived in Crete, and I explored Cretan folk music, because that’s what you hear in Crete. One of the greats of Cretan folk music was Kostas Mountakis. Nikos Xilouris was greater and more […]
If the Tanach (Jewish Bible) doesn’t mention heaven or hell, where did the Christians get this idea from?
There’s more to Judaism than the Tanach. As discussed in Bosom of Abraham and Paradise, the notion of heaven as a place where the righteous dead go, rather than Sheol for everyone, is a notion that was kicking around in late Judaism, including Jewish papyri and apocrypha such as 4 Maccabees. That understanding of heaven […]
Why did Nixon and Kissinger undermine the Secretary of State?
Kissinger undermined Rogers at every opportunity because he was profoundly insecure. Kissinger would yell at anyone available (quite often Haldeman) for hours about slights, real and imaginary. The story of Kissinger’s time as National Security Adviser was a story of constant tussling with Rogers, and making sure Rogers was kept in the dark. Nixon initially […]
What is your favorite Mahler movement, and why?
It’s an awful question to pose, to pick just one (or even several). I’m forcing myself to limit myself to five: The 2nd movement of the Ninth: a dialectic of nostalgia and dissolution, of wistfulness and nihilism. The 1st movement of the Ninth: an astonishing accomplishment both formally (everything is in the first two bars) […]
What is it about Mahler’s first two symphonies that keeps making me hit the repeat button over and over again along with breaking down and weeping?
The first four Mahler symphonies are called Wunderhorn symphonies for good reason: they all draw inspiration from songs in the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection, including quotations or rearrangements of song settings that Mahler had done. That correlates with the structure of the Wunderhorn symphonies, contrasted with his later work: more songlike, more scene-painting, more focus […]
What are your favorite movies and why?
Oliver Stone’s Nixon. It may be an eccentric choice. It may be the choice of someone who does not understand film at all. But it’s my favourite movie. Grand Shakespearean tragedy, operatic, intense, cinematic tour-de-force, encompassing the world like a Mahler symphony. And not that this matters anywhere near as much to me, but historically […]
How do you improvise on violin with your eyes closed?
Dexterity in playing a musical instrument is all about muscle memory, not looking at the fingerboard. After all, you’re meant to play the violin while reading a score. And the fingerboard is in a rather awkward position to be staring at all the time anyway. So, if there is no score around to be read, […]