Posted in Health, Life and culture, Memory Lane on Oct 13th, 2009 1 Comment »
I have just spoken with Paul and asked him if he were getting any exercise. He said, almost none. I also asked if he agreed with me that it was probably not wise for him to go out to exercise alone, given his tendency to have spells of dizziness and falling. He said that he [...]
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Life and culture, Memory Lane on Aug 1st, 2009 Comments Off
The other day when Paul and I were talking, I mentioned that I had heard this piece on NPR by Robert Krulwich about the fact that crows apparently can recognize and remember people’s faces and then evidently seek them out for particular scorn. As we talked I reminded him that he had written about an [...]
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Memory Lane, Music, People on May 17th, 2008 Comments Off
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 [...]
Posted in Life and culture, Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 9th, 2007 2 Comments »
[From my hard disk I've excavated some Stockhauseniana I put together in 1998, which has definitely not lost its relevance to this inordinately intricate personality:] Although Karlheinz Stockhausen at 70 has probably become globally the most famous living German composer (his only rival: Hans Werner Henze), comparatively few people actually know his music. During the [...]
Posted in Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 8th, 2007 Comments Off
This afternoon I actually started a bloggery, skimming the cream off the many times over the past half-century when Karlheinz Stockhausen’s path and mine crossed, but eventually I gave up on it for what I’d originally thought of as a casual stroll down Memory Lane unexpectedly touched off such an avalanche of recollections, from locations [...]
Posted in Life and culture, Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 1st, 2007 Comments Off
Howard Pollack’s 690-page biography Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man documents in some detail (the index cites me seven times) one of my life’s most enriching friendships with that almost saintly man, which began soon after I emerged from the University of Texas at 19 as a brand-new Bachelor Musicae and [...]
Posted in Life and culture, Memory Lane, Music, People on Nov 10th, 2007 Comments Off
Young Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead turned him into an overnight celebrity but it appeared early enough for its publisher to have serious problems with a pungent monosyllable that peppered the manuscript. Mailer had written naturalistically about the robust young Americans in uniform he’d known during World War II, and for him [...]
Posted in Commonplace Book, Letter from Berlin, Life and culture, Memory Lane, People on Nov 1st, 2007 Comments Off
Back during the period when German television strove mightily to adopt and adapt the lucrative magic formula that had created such American advertising bonanzas as the pioneer talk shows of Jack Paar, Dick Cavett, et al., I once with stricken eyes watched Cavett’s interview, conducted in Cologne by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk’s chief honcho Werner Höfer [...]
Posted in Commonplace Book, Letter from Berlin, Memory Lane, People, Politics, Reflections on Nov 1st, 2007 Comments Off
When a day begins with one unexpected pleasant surprise, it has the same effect upon me that William Wordsworth’s rainbow had on him. When two further unexpected surprises bless the day, that rare benison gooses me into at least mental writing – in this event into what involuntarily took form between my ears during a [...]
Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner
Life, people, and Kultur
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