Ummagumma

This weekend is my daughter's first away from home when family or moving-in to college was not involved.  She has a free weekend.  Her boyfriend will be visiting her.  They are going to the Braves game tonight.  I Facetimed with her this afternoon.  And so she starts the path toward adulthood.  By coincidence, Jennifer found this video on Facebook.  I don't do Facebook.  But the video touched my heart thinking about time when my daughter and I did silly things at a silly age. Tonight You Belong to Me was first recorded in 1927.  I have blogged before about how much I enjoy music from this period .  My daughter and I used to sing songs together every morning when I took her to school from pre-K up until she started driving herself.  We practiced harmonies together and made up three or four songs that she often requested we sing.  So this video was particularly pertinent and poignant to me tonight.

Late Friday I stuck my head in the office of my company's IT manager. He is relatively new with us, an interesting guy, very knowledgeable about history and music, laid back and jovial. A pleasure to chat with. In recent weeks, we have discussed a wide range of topics albeit usually brief and punctuated with snide comments and humor. Nothing too serious. But this time our conversation drifted over to the fact that his wife was reading a book by the Dalai Lama , which naturally caught my attention. He and his family are Episcopalian, which is often one of the more open and liberal of the many Christian pathways. So I sat down and we talked a bit about Buddhism. I mentioned to him, for the first time, that I had spent six months in India in the mid-1980's mostly studying yoga (which, as I pointed out to him, had more to do with Hinduism). And that I had personally met the Dalai Lama in the late 1980's after a talk he gave at Emory University. I was part of a Buddhis...

Neil Young showed up at a small club  in the northeast two nights ago with his wife Pegi's current band .  He did a set with them that featured a nice bluesy jamming new song.  "Ain't going home to mama..."  Rock it, Neil.  Nice guitar work.  That's Spooner Oldham on keyboards and Rick Rosas on bass, both of whom worked the CSNY 2006 Freedom of Speech tour (among several other recent albums by Neil) which Jennifer and I caught in Atlanta.  Find out more here .  CSNY has a long-awaited live release of their 1974 tour  which is being delayed for various reasons until 2014, the 40th anniversary of the tour.  David Crosby , for one, hopes Neil will meander back toward the historic foursome and tour a bit next year to promote the album's release.  That would be awesome but you can never predict what Neil will do next. Neil is filling in some time since Crazy Horse had to cancel their remaining tour. ...

If you had told me in March that going in to September the Atlanta Braves would have the best record in all of baseball with Dan Uggla (.184) and BJ Upton (.194) both playing regularly and batting under .200, I would have thought you were an idiot. Image how you can play 136 baseball games saddled with two major free agent signings that cannot hit the ball. Yet that is the unlikely story of the 2013 Atlanta Braves. They are 83-53 going into to play today.  How did they get here? Well mostly with pitching. Good starting pitching from young arms. Great relief pitching, maybe the best in baseball. The Braves bullpen has the best ERA of any team .  The Braves offense has been mediocre overall this season but some players are shining.   Feddie Freeman (batting over .440 with runners in scoring position) and, surprisingly, Chris Johnson (leading the league in hitting with a .333 average as of this post) are hitting opposing pitchers without mercy. Brian...

Berthe Morisot Reclining,  by Eduoard Manet.  1873. The history of art contains several wonderful feminine achievements. But overall in terms of painting and music, for example, men dominate the scene, especially the further back you go in time. So, it is of interest to me when I come across a maverick woman who was able to break through the various cultural challenges for her time and gain notoriety alongside her male colleagues. Such is the case with Berthe Morisot , an impressionist painter whose work I have admired for years, though certainly not with the same awe as with Renoir, Monet, and Manet. I knew comparatively little about her, however. But recently completing Sue Roe's group biography The Private Lives of the Impressionists expanded my knowledge of all the French Impressionists and about Morisot in particular. The early impressionist movement was an extraordinary time in the history of art. Roe captures how Monet , Renoir , Pissarro, Sisley , and Cez...

This past Friday, we took a moment at work to honor our office manager's birthday.  Everyone piled into our rather modestly sized conference room for the surprise.  Another worker ran inference by calling her over to the nearby annexed office space we use for deliveries. The office manager was turning 59 and those in charge of the event (I was occupied with other work matters but designated two of my employees to handle all the arrangements) decided that instead of the all too common practice of placing a "5" candle and a "9" candle on the cake we would put 59 individual candles on the medium sized sheet birthday cake. When I entered the room to join in the surprise the candles were already lit and burning furiously.  I don't recall ever seeing such a fire on top of a birthday cake before.  You could actually feel the heat as you walked past the cake.  As it often goes with such things, we were successful in getting the office manager out of the space so thi...

I posted in 2009 and in 2010 about my enthusiastic appreciation for the great modern Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski . At those times I had few online examples of his music to offer in my posts. His work continues to interest me and I listen to some sort of Lutoslawski piece periodically throughout each year. In 2013 I am in general listening to more contemporary classical music than anything else music-wise. I intend to make some future posts on new compositions I purchased for my collection this year. Classical music is not dead, nor is it devoid of fresh material. New compositions abound but it is a challenge for a listener such as myself, living in a rural area largely isolated from the cultural vibe except for random snippets I find on the Internet, to keep up with what new CDs are coming out by my favorite living composers. Lutoslawski is not one of them. He died in 1994. But his music still surpasses most of what I listen to from composers today who are obviously infl...