Ummagumma

Not all the Armadillos present made it into this pic of 2012 First Feast participants. Old concert t-shirts was this year's theme. This year’s First Feast gala featured ancient rock and roll t-shirts, comfort food munchies (as opposed to hors d'oeuvres ), followed by a course of two hearty salads, before a course of dueling meat loafs, with the usual decadent assortment of sides. Great rock music was enjoyed throughout as the conversations ran the gambit from musical trivia to secret cooking recipes to vacation travel fantasies to the Republican Party presidential race to where we all “earned” our various concert t-shirts. Every t-shirt has its story to tell. But it is up to the human to tell it. So there were several good stories of great memories. Plenty of beers and wines and, of course, port helped sustain the evening. Jennifer and I arrived at Mark and Eileen’s a little before 4. We got to enjoy about an hour of couple-to-couple time before Clint arrived next. Both Clint a

The Art Museum is a huge book, filled with art from all time periods and all over the world. The artwork is featured in very large images on pages about the size of a standard (in today's terms) newspaper. Jennifer and I both enjoy a nicely published book. For Christmas I gave her the most exquisite book we’ve ever owned, aptly entitled The Art Museum . Instead of chapters, the newspaper-sized thick book is organized by “rooms”. It covers art as would any world-class museum, beginning with sections on ancient pottery, engravings, carvings, and sculpture from all over the world. The over-large format of the book and the splendidly published photographs taken from works of art from all time periods and places affords the reader a high degree of visual clarity so that you can appreciate many subtleties of the works as if you in an actual museum viewing these objects from different angles. Most of the images are of such clarity it is as if you can actually touch whatever art work you

Since the tornado hit my parent’s property just before Christmas, I have spent much of my weekend time helping my dad with the slow, arduous task of cleaning things up. As of today he still has no storage building to speak of. The two tractors and all the mowers and four-wheelers and various other equipment are just sitting out in the open rain and wind and cold weather we have gotten lately. Last week we had continuous 15-20 MPH winds with frequent 30 MPH gusts for a period of about 36-hours. No wonder he is having trouble getting some equipment to run. By now, the barn has fallen in completely. Initially, the main support structure of hand-hewn 8 x 8’s nailed together with large wooden pins was leaning severely but still standing. Three of the giant hand-made beams were, in fact, largely unmoved and still upright. We were able to walk hunched over into the barn and pull most everything of value (damaged or not) out where it now sits in the weather with everything else there is no spa

Note: This is Part 11 of my series on the greatest classical symphonies ever composed, begun two years ago. Click the keyword “Classical Music” at the end of this post to see the entire series and other writings on music. I’ll conclude with Part 12 sometime in the future. The competition among Great Tenth Symphonies is rather sparse. Gustav Mahler did not live long enough to complete his Tenth, though a substantially finished opening movement along with four fragmentary movements remain for admirers to ponder. The 23-minute opening Adagio movement is wonderful to enjoy by itself and is occasionally performed today. Both Haydn and Mozart wrote Tenths, of course, but these were early efforts in far more extensive catalogs of work and are simply not very notable in and of themselves. But, comparative lack of competition does not diminish the power and splendor of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Great Tenth (1953). It is, in fact, one of Shostakovich’s greatest symphonic achievements and certai