Watching
STOPMOTION
Robert Morgan
UK, 2024
EMIL CIORAN
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Playing
Johannes Brahms
PIANO QUINTET IN F MINOR, OP. 34
STRING QUARTET NO. 1 IN C MINOR, OP. 51
STRING QUARTET NO. 3 IN B FLAT MAJOR, OP. 67
Takács Quartet
András Schiff
WILHELM RÖPKE
The German Question
Whether in Bolshevism, Fascism, or Nazism, we meet continually with the forcible and ruthless usurpation of the power of the State by a minority drawn from the masses, resting on their support, flattering them and threatening them at the same time; a minority led by a charismatic leader and brazenly identifying itself with the State.
It is a tyranny that does away with all the guarantees of the constitutional State, constituting as the only party the minority that has created it, furnishing that party with far-reaching judicial and administrative functions, and permitting within the whole life of the nation no groups, no activities, no opinions, no associations or religions, no publications, no educational institutions, no business transactions, that are not dependent on the will of the Government.
Playing
FACCE D'AMORE
Jakub Józef Orlinski
Il Pomo d'Oro
Théâtre du Capitole Toulouse
July 21, 2021
-
Arias by Nicola Matteis, Giovanni Antonio Boretti, Giovanni Bononcini, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti, Luca Antonio Predieri, Pietro Antonio Locatelli, Giuseppe Maria Orlandini, Nicola Fago, George Frideric Handel
ALICE CORBIN HENDERSON
“From the Stone Age”
Long ago some one carved me in the semblance of a god.
I have forgot now what god I was meant to represent.
I have no consciousness now but of stone, sunlight, and rain;
The sun baking my skin of stone, the wind lifting my hair;
The sun’s light is hot upon me,
The moon’s light is cool,
Casting a silver-laced pattern of light and dark
Over the planes of my body:
My thoughts now are the thoughts of a stone,
My substance now is the substance of life itself;
I have sunk deep into life as one sinks into sleep;
Life is above me, below me, around me,
Moving through my pores of stone—
It does not matter how small the space you pack life in,
That space is as big as the universe—
Space, volume, and the overtone of volume
Move through me like chords of music,
Like the taste of happiness in the throat,
Which you fear to lose, though it may choke you—
(In the cities this is not known,
For space there is emptiness,
And time is torment) . . . . .
Since I became a stone
I have no need to remember anything—
Everything is remembered for me;
I live and I think and I dream as a stone,
In the warm sunlight, in the grey rain;
All my surfaces are touched to softness
By the light fingers of the wind,
The slow dripping of rain:
My body retains only faintly the image
It was meant to represent,
I am more beautiful and less rigid,
I am a part of space,
Time has entered into me,
Life has passed through me—
What matter the name of the god I was meant to represent?
SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography
For [Diane] Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is safe no long monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.
Playing
Pancho Vladigerov
STRING CONCERTOS
Capriccio Edition Vol. 3
Pancho Vladigerov
Georgi Badev, Dina Schneidermann, Emil Karmilarov, Ventseslav Nikolov, Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra
-
- Violin Concerto No. 1 in F minor, Op. 11
- Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 61
- Burlesque, Op. 14
- Bulgarian Paraphrases, Op. 18
- Rhapsody Vardar, Op. 16
- Bulgarian Dances, Op. 23
- Concert Fantasy for Cello & Orchestra, Op. 35
MARGARET ATWOOD
“Frogless”
The sore trees cast their leaves
too early. Each twig pinching
shut like a jabbed clam.
Soon there will be a hot gauze of snow
searing the roots.
Booze in the spring runoff,
pure antifreeze;
the stream worms drunk and burning.
Tadpoles wrecked in the puddles.
Here comes an eel with a dead eye
grown from its cheek.
Would you cook it?
You would if.
The people eat sick fish
because there are no others.
Then they get born wrong.
This is not sport, sir.
This is not good weather.
This is not blue and green.
This is home.
Travel anywhere in a year, five years,
and you’ll end up here.
SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.
SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
-
SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The World of Yesterday
Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never—and I say so not with pride but with shame—has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[The ringèd moon sits eerily]
The ringèd moon sits eerily
Like a mad woman in the sky,
Dropping flat hands to caress
The far world’s shaggy flanks and breast,
Plunging white hands in the glade
Elbow deep in leafy shade
Where birds sleep in each silent brake
Silverly, there to wake
The quivering loud nightingales
Whose cries like scattered silver sails
Spread across the azure sea.
Her hands also caress me:
My keen heart also does she dare;
While turning always through the skies
Her white feet mirrored in my eyes
Weave a snare about my brain
Unbreakable by surge or strain,
For the moon is mad, for she is old,
And many’s the bead of a life she’s told;
And many’s the fair one she’s seen wither:
They pass, they pass, and know not whither.
The hushèd earth, so calm, so old,
Dreams beneath its heath and wold—
And heavy scent from thorny hedge
Paused and snowy on the edge
Of some dark ravine, from where
Mists as soft and thick as hair
Float silver in the moon.
Stars sweep down—or are they stars?—
Against the pines’ dark etchèd bars.
Along a brooding moon-wet hill
Dogwood shine so cool and still,
Like hands that, palm up, rigid lie
In invocation to the sky
As they spread there, frozen white,
Upon the velvet of the night.