Ummagumma

Lutoslawski looks admiringly toward his orchestra before he enthusiastically begins conducting. [ Read Part One ] In 1964, Witold Lutoslawski completed a string quartet commissioned by Swedish Radio for the LaSalle Quartet. He had the music. But there was no score. Not in any form the LaSalle Quartet could read, anyway. A conventional score — four staves aligned vertically, showing what each player does at each moment — would have been, in his own words, false. Misleading. It would have represented a different work entirely. So what had he given them? The notes each player was to play. The figures, the gestures, the precise melodic content for each instrument. What he could not give them was a document showing how those parts aligned in time, because the alignment was the piece. The four players were to operate independently of each other — their own tempos, their own rhythmic streams — converging at points the conductor would cue and diverging again freely in between. Write that down ...

Note: This review quotes the text from two novels verbatim, including racial slurs. It is not a word I would use myself, though I think about the power of the word today from time to time. I am quoting the actual text of a 19th century American literary classic. Percival Everett draws the same distinction publicly. In a 2024 interview with Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post, Percival Everett said he still uses the word himself when lecturing in college, even though his students won't, adding that "it's just two syllables" and there's no reason to fear it when the subject is honest history.  Further, he says swapping it for a gentler substitute (like "slave") while keeping the same intention behind it is “no replacement at all.” Everett states if someone used a euphemism to insult him, he'd know they understood exactly what they were doing and chose to be insulting anyway. I quote Mark Twain and Everett here in that spirit. The word appears whe...

[ See all my Iran stuff. ] (11 a.m. Eastern Time) And then the whole mess started spilling over. Wars like to connect. Maybe they are drawn toward one another. If everyone's not careful this will escalate further in spite of the fact Iran's military is getting hammered. As I have said, whoever actually controls the Strait of Hormuz is winning the war . The Houthis have opened another maritime front in the Red Sea, attacking Saudi tankers and oil facilities while threatening shipping connected to Saudi ports. On July 20 they formalized it into a declared blockade against Saudi-linked vessels in the Red Sea. Tankers have changed course, disabled tracking equipment, and accepted higher insurance costs to move through waters that had already become dangerous. Saudi-backed forces have resumed attacks on Houthi positions in Yemen, threatening to restart a civil war that had been mostly dormant since the 2022 ceasefire.  Iran's regional war now reaches both of the great shipping...

The great Odysseus takes the long way home.   I saw Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey in IMAX on Friday. I am a Nolan fanboy, as my reviews on Memento , The Dark Knight , The Dark Knight Rises , Inception , Interstellar , Dunkirk , Tenet , and Oppenheimer attest. I went to the theater, the exact same theater I saw Oppenheimer in three years ago, ready to be surprised and amazed. I had my doubts, to be honest. I did not think the source material could be tamed into a watchable film. To some extent I was right, but not like I expected to be let down. And I was actually amazed at various parts of the film even if the whole thing didn't make me applaud in the end, which half the sold-out theater did. But I left the theater unwowed. It was raining and I rushed back to my car without feeling anything except I did not know how I felt. It wasn’t a bad film. The anti-woke controversy of casting a transgender warrior and a black Helen seemed ridiculous. They were both well-acted but...