I like many many pieces of music, but few of them have words, and fewer still are songs. But if I had to pick a favorite song there would be no contest. Every time I hear it, I fight back tears; tears of joy for its beauty and tears of melancholy for its sentiment.
Supposedly, we are most fond of songs we listened to in our adolescence. Fortunately, though I was in my teens when "I want to hold your hand" swept over the country, today, I am most fond of the music I found in my 20's, including that of J.S. Bach, and especially J.S. Bach played by that ineffable pianistic genius, Glenn Gould.
Though Gould was a somewhat unconventional character, bundling up in coats and gloves when it was 90 degrees out, giving up live performances when he was but 32, and calling people in the middle of the night from his hermetic Toronto apartment, he was a master of Bach. He was given to conducting himself (with a free hand) and singing along with his playing. This singing, though it drove the record producers mad, is excused by Gould admirers as proof that he was so full of the majesty of Bach's music that it spilled out of him however it could: through his fingers on the keyboard and his Soto voice accompaniment.
My love of Bach inexplicitly includes a fascination with Gould himself. Before the advent of the Internet (and NetFlix), I once flew from Charlotte, NC to New York City to see the film, "Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould" as I was certain it would never show up in Charlotte. Today, with the Internet and with YouTube, you can almost get all the Gould you can stand... Enjoy.
P.S. The piece of music featured in the video is the Italian Concerto In F Major, BWV 971: third movement, Presto, which can be found at a very reasonable price here.
So, is it hot where you are? It sure is hot here. No one in San Franciso has air conditioning and when it gets close to 90 we all sorta drag our feet and wonder around like Zombies wishing we were at Stinson Beach. What to do? Well, you know what they say, "when in Rome, do as the Roman's do." I mean, "when in Venice, do as the Venicians do." That's not quite right, either. When it's HOT, do as the Venicians do. There. That's got it
When it's hot in Venice, they drink chilled Prosecco, a delicious, slightly bitter, sparkling white wine from the Veneto. Yesterday, while draging myself home from the scorching 95-degree (35 deg C) streets of Sausalito (from a trip to “Fish." ... perhaps I'll get enough energy to blog on that, too), I stopped in at K&L Wines and bought a bottle. Yummy. Here's a tasting note:
Some people have more tastebuds than others, making them "super tasters." However, from a food appreciation standpoint this isn't necessarily a good thing. Having more tastebuds doesn't allow allow super tasters to acheive quicker food orgasms than the rest of us, it intensifies taste. The sensation most often reported as an indication of supertasting is a low bitter threshold: something that seems bitter to a normal taster can seem overwhelmingly bitter and repulsive to a supertaster. Being "Super" is not always a blessing (see, for instance: Man of Steel Woman of Kleenex).
For more on tastebud counting see Test your tastebuds. For some ruminations on what this might mean to food and wine critics, see Are Supertasters Good Candidates for Being Human Ideal Critics?
P.S. Since my favorite snack when I was in highschool was Hydrox Cookies washed down with Schwepps Bitter Lemon, I strongly suspect I am not a supertaster.
People speak of the Internet as if it were a place. It certainly is filled with stuff, and you can't put something nowhere, so, logically you must be SOMEWHERE.
A fun project would be to create a map of the entire Internet, where you could eventually drill down to each file on every server on the planet. Google probably has a big enough database to undertake this project, perhaps they'll get around to it one day after they get their Boeing 767 corporate jet finished. Perhaps they'll call it GoogleSphere! (Remember, you saw it here first).
Anyway, I'm not Google, and I can't show you a map of the entire Internet, but I can show you a graph of Sweet and Sour Spectator as of this very instant (I trust you have noticed it by now; you can click on it for a bigger version if you are so inclined).
This complete map of all the links on this site certainly proves something, though at the moment, I don't have the time to explain exactly what it is.
If you want to map your own website, or Googl'e website, the very cool tool is here at Websites as Graphs.
Postscript: this blog now contains about 65,000 words, enough for a novella, but only about one-third of a novel. I really think writing a novel is impossible and those that can do so, must be from a superior alien race (double that for people who can write a symphony!!)
I recently reported that Whole Foods had decided to discontinue the sale of live lobsters on "humane" grounds. It seems the general public isn't to be trusted to "humanely" kill a lobster. Proving the theory that you can find everything on the Internet (Al Gore didn't invent the Internet, it was really Jorge Luis Borges, in "The Library of Babel"), I have recently discovered Trevor Corson's Lobster Blog. A recent post: How to Kill a Lobster, Redux reveals how Whole Foods intends to kill the crustaceans it will sell for its processed lobster meat. Not surprisingly, it appears to be potentially more profitable. It also involves some food processing technology from the military which provides a nice data point for my belief that best ideas are infinitely transmutable. In the Information Age, ideas are the alchemist's treasure.
If you read the blog entry, be sure to read comment #1 where my anonymous hero of the day comments
.... In any case, I lose patience very quickly with all this "humane killing" [malarky]. All you need to do is watch animals eat each other in the wild to see how it's supposed to be done!
P.S. This Lobster Blog post about how Anthony Bourdain feels about killing lobsters is also a must read!
Sad news on the restaurant scene: Winterland is closing next Saturday (July 15th). This is a tremendous and creative place and it is a damn shame that more San Franciscans weren't interested in putting a little spice in their life. Here is my recent review.
Except for Citizen Kane and A Touch of Evil, both of which are probably seen only in college cinema courses, the films of Orson Welles are mostly ignored today. This is a shame. He was a bigger than life character with great creative energy, and besides that, he spoke highly of Wolfgang Puck's cooking (the results of which no doubt inspired one of his great quotes: "Gluttony is not a secret vice".... see prior post).
So, I'm bummed that I missed the Welles documentary Edge of Outside on TCM last night. I'll be sure to catch the rerun at 11:00 p.m. on July 19th though.
