A Lost Song by Aaron Copland
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Memories, Music, People on May 18th, 2008 No Comments »
Archive for the 'Memories' Category
A note on Copland’s setting of "I Bought me a Cat"
Posted in Life and culture, Memories, Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 30th, 2007 3 Comments »
[This afternoon at the Komische Oper zu Berlin, the American baritone Kevin Deas sang this captivating little song Aaron Copland adapted as one of his "Old American Songs", and when I got home I emailed him this addendum:]
Dear Mr. Deas,
as Berlin correspondent for www.MusicalAmerica.com I attended - and enjoyed - your concert this afternoon at [...]
A fetish I bet you hadn’t even DREAMED of…!
Posted in Commonplace Book, Life and culture, Memories, People on Sep 7th, 2007 2 Comments »
I’d intended to write something quite different this time (in essence: about the almost innumerable subtly nuanced little psychological surprises and “gotchas!” directly connected with my recent naturalization as a German citizen), but into my lap this morning dropped this tasty tidbit of sexual esoterica - and who could possibly resist passing it on to [...]
A "new left" in Germany?
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Memories, Politics, Reflections on Jun 19th, 2007 No Comments »
Two things during the past 24 hours have taken me on a backward stroll down my own personal German political Memory Lane. Last night a hard-hitting television documentary (from our classy tri-national German-language satellite network 3sat) took an exceptionally sharp look at the neuralgic issue of old Nazis in positions of power after the postwar establishment of [...]
Playing catch-up
Posted in Commonplace Book, Memories, People on Jun 16th, 2007 No Comments »
Excavated from June 4th (with me still struggling to whup this damned blog technology to the mat), this excerpt from my long-suffering, much put-upon father substitute Perry (a.k.a. St. Perry) Nelson:
” . . . I enjoyed reading these reminiscences of the times you spent with Rostropovich. Such an intimate portrait as emerges here provides a [...]
My "Sex-Priest" friend Father Robert Cromey
Posted in Commonplace Book, Letter from Berlin, Life and culture, Memories, People, Reflections on Jun 15th, 2007 No Comments »
During my San Francisco years (1982-95), “Time” once began its report on an election there with this sentence: “San Francisco is a tree-house for adult delinquents.”
I believe that story reported the November 1982 election that listed one candidate for the city’s Board of Supervisors as Sister Boom-Boom, with the explanatory addendum one line lower “Nun [...]
Misha my love. . . .
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Memories on Jun 11th, 2007 7 Comments »
{I’ve exhumed this from fifteen years ago, written in San Francisco three years before I returned to Berlin, revived here especially for Christine von Grafenstein, who wrote so kindly about my experience a week ago when two homicidal crows divebombed Maxe the Dauntless Dachshund and me.}
November 6, 1992
Misha My Love
From the very beginning, [...]
The Beeb, Lor’ luv it!
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Memories, People on Jun 10th, 2007 1 Comment »
Berlin’s mercury stands at 88 degrees (F.) for the second of three forecast days, so I’ll make this little Sunday supplement short and (I hope) sweet.
The almost innumerable reasons this wonderful Berlin has long since become my all-time favorite city in the entire world (after leisurely samplings of such other inferior burgs as New York, [...]
W. H. Auden - remembered at second hand
Posted in Commonplace Book, Letter from Berlin, Life and culture, Memories, People on Jun 7th, 2007 1 Comment »
Coincidence has brought this great (British-born) American poet into my consciousness twice in recent days. On June 3d I attended one of the Berlin Philharmonic’s most enjoyable concerts in quite a while: with its regular conductor Sir Simon Rattle on the podium, Daniel Barenboim (who ordinarily presides as Generalmusikdirektor of the Deutsche Staatsoper over in [...]
Edward Albee & David Diamond
Posted in Life and culture, Memories, People on Jun 5th, 2007 3 Comments »
A coincidental message this morning touched off this new stroll down my own personal Memory Lane. It came from an email buddy in San Francisco (apropos of a recent flap down in Astraya over Albee’s quasi-bestiality play “The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia?”) and reported: “I saw this play when it was produced here by [...]
