aworks five-star links and tracks :: april 7, 2009 /serious, weird, outrageous.../

Für Lennart In Memoriam. Arvo Pärt. (lala). Now what's what I call (serious) music. Update: I happened to be listening to this again when I saw this somber military casket photo.

Digits. Neil Rolnick. (lala). And his A Robert Johnson Sampler is weird.

Bob Dylan on reading Obama: His writing style hits you on more than one level. It makes you feel and think at the same time and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He’s looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people and he’s wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors. (Andrew Sullivan)

TIME Magazine Cover: Hipper Than Thou - Aug. 8, 1994 - Popular Culture - Society (DTYBYWL). Hard to believe it's been fifteen years since the heydey of alternative rock.

I would require our young critics to write down their first responses to a given work of art, as well as the opinions they arrived at after some contemplation and reading. Enthusiasm is not a sin; neither is contemplation. (Dragoncave)

yet another post mortem: I've had a chance to listen to Wednesday's concert a couple of times now... (Steven Rubio). If only classical concerts had (legal or not) MP3s available shortly after a concert, like the recent Springsteen concert in San Jose or Radiohead in SF and Berkeley. Was John Adams' String Quartet as good as I heard yesterday?

Comments

[Steven]

Thanks for the visit. You raise an interesting question. Since, even now when everyone seems to have software to make music sound nice, bootlegs tend to be marginal from a sound standpoint (esp. the ones that come out a day after the show), wouldn't bootleg classical concerts just sound like crap?

[Robert Gable]

It's like blogs: valuing immediacy over permanent perceived quality. But I may be the exception among classical music lovers, on that one.

And while the Springsteen bootleg I have from the 1970s has really bad , the more recent bootlegs I have of Radiohead are not bad.