Ummagumma

Me and Jeffery.  Our friendship is the longest either of us have had so far. We were fellow partiers. We played and sang countless songs together. We played hundreds of games of chess together, played poker and bridge together, wargames, and probably a lot of other games I no longer recall. We were ‘Dillo friends long before the Cumberland Island Armadillos were even a thought, before I was married, before I went to India. We had so much fun together it is difficult now to even believe it was us. We watched each other change considerably over almost a half century of friendship. Jeffery is a surprising man of marvelous humor, inquiring mind, rugged skilled hands, innate creativity, and emotional intelligence. He is a bit of an odd-ball like me. We are both sort of like the people who live around here. But, in fundamental ways, we are like no one around here at all. We were born and grew up here, graduated together (though we did not know each other until after high schoo...

Under remarkable wartime conditions, this is the Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 on August 9, 1942.  To look at these people you would not know that all of them, without exception, are malnourished and under German artillery fire.  The orchestra itself fought fatigue to be able to learn and then perform the massive work of defiance dedicated by the composer to the city itself.   I recently completed Prit Buttar's excellent two-volume history of the Siege of Leningrad. I was struck by much in the books, but nothing of a non-military nature surpassed the extraordinary story of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony as described by Buttar in To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941-1942 . It's one of those intersections of history and art so improbable that it almost feels like myth, except that it happened among bombings, starvation, and bureaucratic terror. Shostakovich had already been through his own siege long before the Germans arrived. In the 1930s, Stal...

  P·U·L·S·E Boxed CD Cover.  Pretty cool! As I have said before, one thing leads to another .  I have an idea for a future blog post "All The Ways To Be Comfortably Numb."  There are several really good versions of this Pink Floyd song performed by the band as well as by Roger Waters and David Gilmour separately.  I decided I would blog about all the interesting facets of the different performances of that song.  There would be no covers.  At least one band member had to be involved.  I have my favorites and several that are not as good but nevertheless interesting. In putting the list together from YouTube videos naturally I came across in the incredible performance at Earl's Court on October 20, 1994.  This appeared in 1995's CD (and 2005's DVD) entitled  P·U·L·S·E .  This was the final full-on tour by Pink Floyd, so this music is special.  Suddenly, where I was once obsessed with just "Comfortably Numb" I became hyper-fixate...