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Donald's Blog
March 3, 2010 Is there a complaining-about-the-tax tax? When I first moved to Pennsylvania last fall, I immediately received a bill from a Keystone Collections Group, which I reluctantly paid, an annual one-off local school tax, I guess it was. March 1, 2010 O Pennsylvania I am convinced that public services both government and commercial are getting worse and worse; I wonder how much this contributes to the Tea Party phenomenon. We pay our bills and our taxes and get less and less in return. March 1, 2010 But We'll Always Have Philadelphia I have now visited Philadelphia three times. The first time was about 60 years ago, with my parents; I remember seeing the Liberty Bell. The second time was a dozen years or so ago when Ethne was attending some gardening jamboree; on that occasion I had lunch with the estimable Jason Greshes, leader of the Mahler-List, and I saw my daughter and my grandchildren for the first time in many years (they live not far away in New Jersey). But I did not really see much of the city. Now Ethne and I have just spend a weekend in Philadelphia, only an hour away from home, and the amenities are such as to compensate for a lot of the inconvenience of modern living. February 24, 2010 Diane Wittry and the Allentown Symphony Orchestra
We attended the Allentown Symphony's Romeo & Juliet program on Saturday 13 February, in Symphony Hall downtown. It was a Romeo & Juliet program (Valentine's Day weekend) and featured music by four different composers, including a generous chunk of Berlioz's four-hour opera on the subject. In the first half there were ballet dancers on stage in front of the orchestra. But the interesting part was interspersing four scenes from the Romeo & Juliet music of David Diamond with six from Prokofiev. It worked a treat! As we are members of the Allentown Symphony Association, we received an email asking us what we thought. Here is what I wrote:
I should also have mentioned the very fine string playing in the Berlioz, which was a love scene, after all. But my email response was immediately forwarded to Diane Wittry, who quickly responded, and who was responsible for stringing together Diamond and Prokofiev, and who has quite a history of doing things like that, including a semi-staged Peer Gynt some time ago. She is also a composer, and will be playing one of her own pieces soon. So it looks more and more as though Ethne and I have landed in a good place, and as much as we loved Austin, it is a nice coincidence that Diane Wittry and Peter Bay are friends, having met at the Aspen music festival. There are lots of good conductors around, by the way, who almost never make records nowadays. I should mention Joel Lazar, with the Symphony of the Potomac; Sybille Werner, whose very good Mahler 6th I have on a videotape; and Peter Olson, who makes a huge success of the MahlerFest in Boulder every year. If only we had a TV network or a cable channel that could broadcast the riches we have among us. February 24, 2010 Music from the Ceiling Gratuitious music in public places is bad for music, but Americans are going to put up with it, perhaps because they are already tone deaf. I can report however that there are two grocery stores in my area that play chamber music instead of popcrock. Wegmans in Tilghman Street in Allentown is our favorite supermarket, and The Fresh Market at the Promenade Shops in Central Valley Parkway is a smaller, even more special place. (The Fresh Market is so special it doesn't sell lottery tickets, so I have to go somewhere else to invest in my pension plan.) In either store, it is a pleasure to hear small-group music for piano and strings and sometimes woodwinds, instead of the ubiquitous bawling adolescents. The Promenade Shops are in the Saucon Valley (Central Valley is the local village), and it is much the nicest shopping mall I have seen for many years. The whole thing is high class, from the restaurants and the cinema to L.L. Bean. In the Barnes & Noble store there, the popcrock they are bribed to play can be heard all over the store, but it's relatively quiet except in the music department itself. I always like Barnes & Noble stores, but that one is exceptionally civilized. February 24, 2010 The Rock And Roll Hall of Fame Speaking of bawling adolescents, I was interviewed this morning on the phone by John Soeder, from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who is writing an article about the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. No, John is not a bawling adolescent, but I am afraid I gave him an earful. Here's the money quote: "The idea of the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame always suggests to me a generation calling attention to itself, like 'Hey, look at us! We're baby-boomers!'" John's piece will be published in March sometime, and I'll make note of it here. February 24, 2010 Would you pay to read this? Would you pay $10 every time you wanted to read my blog? Of course not; you don't have to read it at all. But you do have to have medical care. Nicholas D. Kristof's column in the New York Times on February 20 was hilarious: he asked, What if the news industry were like our unreformed health care system? Read it here. February 24, 2010 The End of the Democrats?
Still working in the car factory, I was a student at the University of Wisconsin/Parkside in 1968, and among my courses was Political Science (if that isn't an oxymoron). (During that period my brother called me a "liberal-intellectual", but I didn't know what he was talking about.) I campaigned for Hubert Humphrey, going around sticking picket signs in people's lawns; and I wrote a paper for school called "Will the coalition hold once more?" Well, it didn't hold, and we got the crook Richard Nixon, the first president who ever had to resign the office; and now, over 40 years later, the Democrats seem to have forgotten that they ever had a coalition, and don't know how to go on the offensive to save the very people who should be their supporters. Thomas Frank's column in the Wall Street Journal today reads almost like an obituary: "The free-market system blunders into recession; its victims flock to the free-market banner. And here we go again." There's no link, so go out and buy the paper. It's always worth it on Wednesdays just for Frank.February 24, 2010 Poor Toyota (Long live Toyota!)
Speaking of the Wall Street Journal, on the same page as Thomas Frank there's a rare opportunity for me to agree with Holman W. Jenkins Jr in his "Business World" column. Today he imagines an inner monologue of Akio Toyoda as he prepares to testify in a congressional hearing. The field day the press has been having with Toyota's sticking gas pedals is greatly overdone. Regular readers of this space will know that the State of Pennsylvania's ridiculous inspection requirement is forcing me to get rid of my beloved 13-year-old Ford Ranger; Toyota is going to be offering mighty good deals because of all this (phony) bad publicity. I might just have to change brands. February 24, 2010 What the...? Express Scripts®, Inc. is a method of obtaining one's prescriptions conveniently and at a savings, associated with Capital BlueCross. Recently Ethne's attempts to use the system failed completely, the prescriptions not arriving for weeks while she ran out of meds she is supposed to take every day. So she complained, and today came a letter from Capitol BlueCross:
Not a word about how one is to pass judgement on a resolution which remains a secret. Is anyone in charge? February 18, 2010 Speaking of telephone companies
Our David is now in boot camp at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where he has no computer or cellphone, and might get to use a phone while he does his laundry. We sent him phone cards of a sort recommended for use by the military; all the men want to use the phone so they have to keep their calls short, we have never talked to him for longer than two minutes, and the telephone company charges his card for 15 minutes! They're even cheating the kids in boot camp, who are practically incommunicado and have no recourse! February 18, 2010 He probably had to walk to school, too
Some curmudgeon had a letter published in the Morning Call today: In an article from Tribune Newspapers about keyless entry and ignition, the authors write that "Industry officials note that the devices are wildly popular." Oh, no, they're not. I first came across this problem when I bought a second-hand pickup truck nearly ten years ago, and had to have the keyless entry system disabled because it didn't work properly, so that half the time I couldn't get into my own truck.I didn't catch the guy's name. February 17, 2010 Lots of Laughs "I don't belong to an organized political party," said Will Rogers. "I'm a Democrat." The main difference between the two political parties nowadays is that the Democrats pretend to have their hearts in the right place as they practice the same old same old, or may even believe it, while the Republicans make no bones about being out to wreck whatever most people want, because they know best. No matter who is in power, the result is gridlock. So in the Wall Street Journal this morning, Evan Bayh is not allowed to have his own reason for deciding to retire from the Senate, namely that body's dysfunction; the reason must be "the failure once again of liberal governance." And John Fund on another page recalls approvingly Ronald Reagan "pointing to California's nascent Proposition 13 tax revolt--the 'Tea Party' of its day." That was in 1978, the beginning of the destruction of Lotus Land, where the people wanted lots of government services but didn't want to pay for them. All we thoughtful observers can do is chuckle up our sleeves. February 17, 2010 It's the Same Everywhere I've been ranting about too many rules and regulations on us ordinary people, while the financial industries were deregulated to the point where they could gamble away the economy. Qwest wants me to pay for services that I thought I was already paying for several months ago. I spent all day yesterday getting Ethne's car inspected on behalf of the state of Pennsylvania; my poor old Ford Ranger cannot even be inspected, because an idiot light is glowing on the dashboard: it gets me back and forth to work perfectly well, but I will be forced to junk it or trade it in. Now I read in the paper that most cars nowadays have 'black boxes' in them just like airplanes. Now comes an email from our English gardening chum Mark Brown, who lives in France. His telephone service was completely useless for months, and calls to Orange obtained only excuses; he finally wore them down until they sent a technician to fix a faulty circuit breaker at a junction box down the road. February 17, 2010 The Triumph of Time
A review in the Times Literary Supplement for January 29 by the excellent Paul Griffiths of two books about music: Antithetical Arts, by Peter Kivy, 'On the ancient quarrel between literature and music', and Why Music Moves Us, by Jeanette Bicknell. A long, interesting article considering such questions as, What is absolute music? One contributor says that Mahler's music leaves him with the feeling that he has "shared to the full in the existential depth of the personality, lived the life." Griffiths says that Kivy, in discussing Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony,
Griffiths very sensibly thinks it's not that simple at all. The question would be whether the music can stand up by itself; the listener is not required to pay attention to any program. (But he skates over the question of whether Volkov's book has been discredited. Volkov could not prove that it was based on interviews, but a lot of people have confidence in the book, including people who knew Shostakovich, while contrarians dislike it for their own reasons.)
Precisely. Time is another dimension. If I am standing next to a haystack and I allow myself to fall upon it, I am not only falling forward, and downward, but I am falling through time. We do not fully understand time, any more than we fully understand music: if I call fall forward, I can also fall backward, but time travels in only one direction: if I could fall back up, I would still be falling through time that can never be recovered. There is only one end to our time travel, and that is death. Music above all the arts helps to soften that sting: it is a function of time passing, decorating it, explaining it, justifying it.
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