Saturday, February 26, 2022

Drowning in Sentiments: How many words does it take to make a mistake?

 The heart unites whatever the mind separates, pushes on beyond the arena of necessity and transmutes the struggle into love.

— Nikos Kazantzakis, born in 1883



Silas Farley talks about the unique role of dance in society

Silas Farley, Dancer, educator, and choreographer and Dean of the Trudl Zipper Dance Institute at the Colburn School shares the extraordinary role of dance in society and preparing young people to excel in this art form.




Eros commits crimes of passion because, first and foremost, it commits crimes of thought. It is an intellectual monster  






The UK has been corrupted and accountants, lawyers and bankers are to blame

Andrew Rawnsley wrote this in The Observer yesterday:

Once upon a time, Britons would have been astonished and appalled to find scandal simultaneously bespoiling their royal family, prime minister and largest police force. We are less shockable now. There’s a good reason, which is that there is much less naive reverence for institutions than there was in the past. There’s also a bad reason for our diminished capacity to be scandalised by scandal. We have become wearily accustomed to seeing the public trust betrayed. Where once jaws would have dropped, grotesque misconduct in public life often provokes no more than a fleeting furore or a resigned shrug. That makes us part of the problem, too. When we expect to be let down, we settle for further decay. The British won’t get better service from their institutions until they start demanding it and so insistently that they can’t be ignored.

I added the emphasis.

I agree with Andrew Rawnsley. As I argued yesterday, corruption is now so pervasive that the blind eye that we have turned to it has now led to the possibility of war.


The Theatre Wisdom Of Stephen Sondheim

I learned all of these compositional principles from Babbitt. What it amounts to is, music exists in time, so how do you make it cohere? And that’s just as true with a three-minute song as it is with an hour-and-a-half opera, you know? - The New Yorker