Ummagumma

I recently finished watching Our Planet , a wonderful documentary series on Netflix.  Each episode is filled with surprising, often almost unbelievable, facts and photography.  I have seen many nature programs in my life but the cinematography in Our Planet surpasses all of them.  The shots are often breath-taking and sometimes leave me wondering how the hell they managed to capture particular video imagery.  The series is a visual and educational marvel.    The series is hosted by the incomparable and ever-enduring David Attenborough , who has been writing and producing material on the natural world since the 1950’s (all of my life).  I was a big fan of his The Living Planet series back in the 1980’s.  I have the book Attenborough wrote for that series as well as the complete series on VHS tapes.   But, compared with that series, Our Planet is a major advance in both content and technical achievement.  Our Planet caused a lot of controversy in Episode 2 which broadcasts the h

Yo-Yo Ma and Esa-Pekka Salonen clasp upraised hands in triumph following the world premiere of Salonen's Cello Concerto in 2018.  This performance is captured on a newly released classical CD. Esa-Pekka Salonen is one of my favorite living classical composers.  I discovered him while following the later musical career of Witold Lutoslawski .  The two composers held great admiration for each other.  Salonen conducted the world premiere of Lutoslawski’s Symphony No. 4, his final composition, in 1994 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  For years Salonen conducted this great American orchestra, delivering several elite recordings of classical performances.   Earlier this century, Salonen ended his conductorship to devote himself more to composition (he recently returned as conductor of the San Francisco Symphony).  The results are generally superb.  His Violin Concerto (2009) is outstanding, as are many of his briefer orchestral pieces.  His Piano Concerto (2007) left me uni

Alex and his droogs relaxing at the milk-plus bar. “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.” This statement by the prison chaplin in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange alludes to the central philosophical question of the film.  The movie explores sex and violence , nihilism and decay, conformity and individuality, freedom and behavior modification in a manner that was controversial when it was released in 1971.  It received an X-rating in America due to its sexual content.  Kubrick ended up personally withdrawing the film from distribution in the United Kingdom due to a disturbing rise of copycat violence in London and other cities.  Obviously, the film made a strong impression, but that is nothing new for a Kubrick work. Though he never shied away from pushing boundaries and generating debate from his audience, Kubrick abhorred the violent reaction the film invoked. Still, due to its low-budget, it generated a healthy profit and made the director even more famous

The title of Within a Budding Grove is a lyrical rather than a literal translation of second book to Proust’s novel.  The book’s more accurate rendering from the French is In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower , which is even more lyrical but also more sensual and perhaps a tad scandalous to English readers of the 1920’s.  This part of the novel was ready for printing in 1914 but was delayed due to the outbreak of World War One.  Finally published in 1919, it won France’s highest prize for literature and made Proust, already somewhat famous for his literary criticism, translations, and other works, a sensation across cultured Europe. Though the boy’s naïve love relationship with Gilberte in the book’s first part plays into this title, the “young girls in flower” are principally the topic of the book’s second part, “Place-Names: The Place.”  Here, the narrator has grown into adolescence which transforms the quality of the narration to into a much more exciting, detailed, and passion