Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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A musical interlude

August 26, 2026

About my daily life, because I’m so backed up in things to do that I’m just picking little stuff out of a hat. (The incidental good news is that my lab tests were very pleasingly improved, and I’m now starting, eek, a very slow withdrawal from prednisone; think good thoughts about woolly mammoths for me.)

Meanwhile, I took an early break in my sleep last night, to search, I don’t really know why, for material on the dog books of my childhood.

I did indeed speed-read (and barely comprehend, though I got Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear for life) all of Shakespeare at the age if 9, of my own volition, but I also adored imaginative fiction for kids. Dr. Doolittle, Freddy the Pig, every Oz book there was. And books about noble dogs. My West Lawn PA companion for several years was a sweet mutt dog (part terrier, the rest mystery). Spot / Spotty (not an imaginative name, but fitting).

Out of this I will produce soon a posting on what we all called at the time LadADog (three syllables rushed into a ball). And Albert Payson Terhune. But that’s not what this posting is about. This posting is about the music that Apple was playing for me when I went on my computer dog search around 9:15 pm last night.

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Posted in Books, Language and animals, Music, My life | 4 Comments »

Some Latinity

August 25, 2026

Material I’m stashing here for future reference. It’s about death and grief, approached in an elegant way, so indirectly as to be soothing in terrible times.

First from Suetonius, then from Catullus.

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Posted in Death and dying, Latin, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

Rhinoceros

August 23, 2026

The ultimate topic here is my sleep patterns, which I will post about more systematically in a while. Here I’m trying to take some of the burden of background material off that posting by stashing it for easy reference later. Picking an item — the revival by Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre of Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros — that I also view, in desperation, as carrying an urgent message about today’s sociopolitical climate.

It will start with odd everyday routines of no consequence, but will end with contemplating literal dehumanization, staring evil in the face.  I’m touchy on the point, having never fully recovered from the shock of seeing the Nazi death camps exposed when I was a child. And understanding that that could happen to me. (No, I don’t think children should be protected from such knowledge. They should be treasured and supported, as I was, but they should also see the dangers clearly, so that they can arm themselves against them.)

But first, the routines. (If you think I’m just a nutter or a pathetic neurotic in need of professional care, fuck off; it’s none of your business. I’m doing stuff that works for me; why should you care?)

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Posted in Education, Language and politics, Language and the body, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Play, Plays, Pop culture, Princeton, Sleep, Surrealism, Writing | Leave a Comment »

The titanium in me

August 22, 2026

My right hip joint is now a metallic wonder, a titanium replacement in 2012 for the joint nature gave me, which had excruciatingly degenerated from osteoarthritis. I love the name titanium: it trips off the tongue, and as a proud gay man and an enthusiast of MND (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in several of its incarnations, I choose to understand the name as a reference to Titania, Queen of the Fairies — silly faggot, titanium is for ur-deities.

Now to unpack all of this.

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Posted in Chemistry, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and medicine, Language in advertising, Music, My life, Myths, Physics, Play, Plays | 3 Comments »

silentio

August 19, 2026

Latin silentio ‘in silence’. Where I live now (also vivide ‘vividly, vigorously’, but that’s a topic for another posting). I’ve had profound laryngitis (probably a concomitant of cryptosporidiosus, which I’m otherwise holding at bay), occasionally moderating a bit so I can have actual conversations. But mostly I’m a whisperer, and the people on the reception desk at my facility have begun to ask me to write things down instead of whispering unintelligibly to them.

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Posted in Language and religion, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

Gooner music videos

August 18, 2026

(Raunchy content, which some will prefer to avoid)

From WIRED on-line, “The Gooner Music Video Boom Is Here”, by Jason Parham on 6/26/26, in summary:

Porn music videos have circulated on the fringes of the internet for years. Featuring everything from narrative-driven stories to hypnosis, they are proliferating across X as “bate fuel” for gooners.

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Posted in Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, Pornography, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

The first step

August 15, 2026

Now, a piece of my life story you have heard about from my side of the event — the first meeting of Ann Walcutt Daingerfield and Arnold Melchior Zwicky (which happened in the bowels of the Firestone Library at Princeton University) — from Ann’s viewpoint, as rehearsed in e-mail yesterday from our old friend Benita Bendon Campbell:

In September of 1959, I called Ann, who was languishing in Lexington [KY] and said something like, “I have a job and a nice apartment in Princeton. Would you like to join me?” She replied, “Bonnie, I am so miserable that if someone said ‘I have a job and an apartment in Hell. Would you like to join me?’ I would say, ‘Yes!'”

So she did. A week or so thereafter, she started a job in the Language Lab. Mr. Keefer [AZ: possibly Kiefer] was her boss and she reported in pleased tones about a pair of Student Assistants called “Franklyn and his partner Arnold.” [AZ: partner as in teammates / buddies; Frank Carr and I were roommates for three years]

That is how the milk got into the coconut.

I Did It. By Jove, I Did It.

And deserves credit.

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Posted in Earworms, Music, My life, Princeton | 3 Comments »

We dance, and then we march

July 28, 2026

Today’s musical question: how to describe the music that came to me this morning on my Comcast cable’s channel 942, “classical masterpieces”. Well: some delightful band music in a thick Viennese pastiche of Mozart’s melodies. It turned out to be:

Franz von Suppé’s (1819-1895) Overture from the incidental music for Leonhard Wohlmuth’s (1823-1889) play Mozart, about the life of the composer (produced at the Theater an der Wien on 23 September 1854). Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Dario Salvi (Naxos, 2022)

Lots of fun. Which you can listen to here.

 

 

 

Posted in Music, Parody | Leave a Comment »

Notes: Sacred Harp

July 15, 2026

Notes from my new life at the Avant independent living community. Still coping with piles of stuff moved from my old house and distributed more or less randomly over a completely different arrangement of rooms and built-in furnishings (or, in a startling number of cases, a lack of those built-in furnishings — or defective installations requiring repair and reworking). It’s been a long hard slog, still painfully unfolding.

With some triumphs on Opal Armstrong Zwicky’s part; I was stunned and delighted to discover that changing my address with the DMV, for my senior ID card, allows automatic transfer of my voter registration — this is the way things should work, but oh so rarely do they. But also was reminded of how truly awful Merrill Lynch’s website is.

Gradually re-instituting daily routines. Applying healing coconut oil to my legs, feet, arms, and hands. And Sacred Harp singing, which I’m supposed to do (using some wonderful YouTube videos of SH conventions in Ireland) every day as lung therapy and also do, via Zoom, with the Palo Alto singers twice a month, for two hours each session.  I have in fact been free of DOE — shortness of breath on exertion — for months now, which is indescribably pleasurable. Meanwhile, the experiences are often so moving they bring me to weeping in delight.

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Posted in Music, My life | 5 Comments »

Overnight delivery

July 6, 2026

The backstory, from my 7/5 posting “A Catch-22 of sorts”:

Now, I understood that this particular Sunday was going to be part of a long solitary holiday weekend, so I thought to lay in extra supplies. I would, in fact, give myself a holiday gift: Naked Sword’s well-crafted gay porn DVD Spain in the Ass 3 (2026) — sorry about the regrettable name — which I put in a rush order for, so it would arrive before Sunday (today).

But then [because my Xfinity tv account had been closed at Ramona St. (where I still am) and a new one created at the independent living community Avant (where I will be moved on Wednesday 7/8)] I no longer had any way of playing it here on Ramona St. And in fact, it seems that the shipment was diverted to Avant anyway, so the DVD is not where I am.

But then…

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Posted in Gay porn, Holidays, Music, My life, Race and ethnicity | 1 Comment »

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