The best insult in all of literature.

Oswald.  "What dost thou know me for?"

Kent.  "A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats;
    a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
    hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave;
    a lily-livered, action-talking, whoreson, glass-gazing,
    superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave;
    one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and
    art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward.
    pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom
    I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least
    syllable of thy addition."

- King Lear

The American Dream Begins . . .

"Let's remember the energy.  Americans were governing not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan.  The war-crimes trials were cleansing the earth of its devils once and for all.  Atomic power was ours alone.  Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; an explosion of self-assertion, auto workers, steel workers - laborers by the millions demanded more and went on strike for it.  And playing Sunday morning softball on Chancellor Avenue field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the boys who had come back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets full of separation pay, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they could not have imagined possible before the war.  Our class started high school six-months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history.  And the upsurge of energy was contagious.  Around usus nothing was lifeless.  Sacrifice and constraint were over.  The Depression had disappeared  Everything was in motion.  The lid was off.  Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together."

American Pastoral

Describing machines and complex systems...

"They are alive, she thought, but their souls operate them from remote control.  Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from this earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going - not the oil under the floor, the oil that would become primeval ooze again - not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages - the power of a living mind - the power of thought and choice and purpose."

Dagny Taggert, from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?

The violin concertos, represent for me one of the most passionate mediums for musical expression.  Here are a few of my favorite.

Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto

Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto

Max Bruch's Violin Concerto

Johann Brahm's Violin Conerto

Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto

Ludwig Van Beethoven's Violin Concerto

Camus' The Stranger

"Well, so I am going to die."  Sooner than other people will, obviously.  But everybody knows that life isn't worth living.  Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn't much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living - and for thousands of years.  In fact, nothing could be clearer.  Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying.  At that point, what would disturb my train of thought was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty more years of life ahead of me.  But I simply had to stifle it by imagining what I'd be thinking in twenty years when it would all come down to the same thing anyway.  Since we are all going to die, it's obvious that when and how doesn't really matter.

My Favorite Symphonies

"A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything" - Gustav Mahler


Here is a list of my favorite symphonies, try listening to all or some of them.  There's the uplifting and emotional symphonies by Beethoven;  Shostakovich's haunting and macbre Soviet era Symphony No. 5.  Dvorak wrote his ninth symphony based on American folk music.  Haydn is considered the father of the symphony with over one-hundred beautiful compositions.  The boy genius, Mozart, started writing symphonies when he was still in single digits.  And Beethoven wrote his magus opus, the Ninth, when he was 100% deaf.   Try Rachmaninoff's 2nd, it contains some of the most beautiful and innate music you have ever heard!

Enjoy!!


Shostakovich
Symphony No. 5

Mahler
Symphony No. 1 (Titian)
Symphony No. 2
Symphony No. 6

Mozart
Symphony No. 40
Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter)

Beethoven
Symphony No. 3 (Eroica)
Symphony No. 5 (Fate)
Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral)
Symphony No. 7
Symphony No. 9 (Choral / Ode to Joy)

Debussy
La Mer

Rachmaninoff
Symphony No. 2

Brahms
Symphony No. 3
Symphony No. 4

Dvorak
Symphony No. 9 (The New World Symp.)

Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 6 (Pathetique)

Haydn
Symphony 94 (Surprise)
Symphony 95

Next month:
Favorite Piano Concertos!!

Do you believe in all this?
The opera we draft and stage everyday,
just to hide the absurdity of it all.

I tell you don't reason or query,
but embrace and love it.
For it is what it is -
absurd and meaningless,
humorously sublime, and curiously hedonisitic.
With no heaven or hell, no right and wrong,
no history or epics.

I beg you don't worry about eternal itineraries,
or deathbed contemplations of living "a good life,"
for this whisp of being isn't recorded or matters.
Whether you be forgotten in a year or decade,
or be you a Caesar or a Christ, in years a thousand,
what will matter in a millennia will not be us.