April 29, 2023

Road dawgs are still talking smack to each other about last month's road trip. (The oregano plant seems singularly unimpressed.)

 

April 26, 2023

 

April 16, 2023

Penultimate PSO concert of the season: Beethoven's first piano concerto and Shostakovich's tenth symphony, two VERY different pieces that were both wonderful. The Beethoven concerto, written when he was quite young, was exquisite. The guest soloist, Kirill Gerstein, had a feather-light touch, and even the largo second movement had an underlying carefree breeziness to it, as if to say even somber moods will soon pass (and the final movement bore that assertion out joyously). The Shostakovich symphony, by contrast, was just overwhelming. Written in the months after Stalin's death, its first two movements felt like an exorcism, and the despairing mood it slides into in the third and much of the final movement seemed to be working through the trauma of those brutal decades. Bursting out of that despair, the piece's final crescendo was at the same time exhilarating -- the sheer virtuosity of the ensemble playing was breathtaking -- and profoundly unsettling, a sort of assertion of individual will in the face of everything that came before it, like an emphatic iteration of Samuel Beckett's "I can't go on, I'll go on." Taken as a whole, the piece was one of those experiences that cleanses you, and leaves your spirit feeling in alignment. I normally listen to music in the car on the way home, but today I turned off the stereo to be with my emotions.

 

April 13, 2023

Today was transplant day: road dawgs' new digs!

 

April 8, 2023

Preparing my Easter week dinner entrée, lamb and white bean chili, while listening to the glorious psychedelic mess that is Amon Düül II's Yeti. A Saturday night for the ages.

 

April 6, 2023

When I left the East End Co-op this afternoon, a woman with a baby and a boy of 7 or 8, presumably her son, beside her carrying two large empty water jugs were approaching me. As we pass each other, the boy looks up at me and says, "Nice hat!" (I was wearing a black beret.) I love complimenting people, so I thought to myself as I smiled and thanked him, "A kid after my own heart." 🥰

April 2, 2023

Leslie Stahl interviewing Marjorie Taylor Greene for 60 Minutes, and lets Greene's accusation that Dems are "pedophiles" because they support "transgender surgeries" for minors -- which ftr are very rare -- with a tut-tut sigh. Thanks, Leslie. Thanks, CBS.