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Category Archives: Culture

Yes, someone still writes rags

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

I haven’t had a musical post for a while… If you do a YouTube survey of ragtime playing, I think you’ll find that, like country music, ragtime playing is an area in which a great many poorly trained musicians are in it a for a good time and wearing bowties and funny hats. I’m all […]

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Two parts snobbery per eight parts coffee

Sunday, December 31, 2023

An imaginary 1938 espresso machine, in Italy. Image created by DALL-E 3. I could not find an image of a classic espresso machine that was in the public domain. But if you search for something like “classic Bezzera” you can see what they look like. Given any good thing — wine, Scotch, or coffee — […]

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Trains: Social glue we Americans will never have

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

When people ask me why I love Scotland, I have lots of answers. Most of them are nice, because there are so many nice things about Scotland. But I also have a snarky answer: “Scotland,” I say, “is what white people are like when they aren’t Americans.” We Americans are overexposed to wedge-issue social toxins […]

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Try my French verb conjugator

Friday, December 1, 2023

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I made a valiant effort to learn French. For three semesters, I went to night classes at the University of California (Berkeley) extension in San Francisco. With that foundation, I started reading. I never claim to speak French, and my aural comprehension is terrible. But I did […]

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Music soothes the skittish cat

Saturday, September 23, 2023

Lily listens to Herbert Blomstedt conduct Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphoses.” The television doesn’t always terrify my cat, Lily. It depends on what’s on. Long ago I started using headphones when I watch television, to accommodate Lily. Loud blockbuster movies scare the living daylights out of her. But she likes music. Last week, after we watched the […]

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The Name of the Rose

Monday, September 11, 2023

1986 While scouring for watchables, I recently came across the 1986 film version of The Name of the Rose, on Netflix. It’s truly a classic film and always worth watching again. Back in the 1990s, I read Umberto Eco’s novel on which the film is based. The novel, too, is worth reading again, now that […]

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Orchestras hate it, too

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Jörg Widmann thrashes to try to help the orchestra detect a beat. Why would anyone pay up to $90 a seat to listen to someone beat on the back, the sides, and the neck of a violin, tunelessly sawing and scraping the poor thing when not beating it? Lots of people won’t, which is why […]

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Not a book for the squeamish

Sunday, September 3, 2023

Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Jacob Mikanowski. Pantheon, July 2023. 378 pages. If some perverse god created the earth, then it’s almost as though that perverse god reserved Eastern Europe as a place dedicated to the relentless refinement of human misery. The book describes how life there has never been […]

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Scapegoats 2, Republicans 0

Sunday, August 13, 2023

The political death wish of the Republican Party is mind-boggling. Why do they go on fighting battles that they’ve already lost and that accelerate their slide toward permanent minority status and the contempt of history? — at least, in civilized places as opposed to places such as Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. Banning books, and threatening […]

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The devil now polls 58 percent in America

Monday, July 31, 2023

But which one is the devil? “The Devil presenting St Augustin with the Book of Vices,” Michael Pacher, 1435-1498 There probably is a way to do the math, but my back-of-a-napkin estimate is that, at the current rate, the Enlightenment will have arrived in America in about 942 more years. The Washington Post has an […]

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