Growing up
Two important milestones: Shostakovich and icecream.
The first was the distraction of the last hour and a half, a documentary on "The War Symphonies," painting a lucid and lyric portrait of great music squeezed out of one Russian. A beautiful spectacle, making the conducting and performance of Shostakovich's work a thrilling sight (the aerial camera that zoomed in behind a violin to accost the conductor just...worked). And the shots of old Russians, talking of their friend Dimitri Dimitrivich, of the tyranny of Stalin, of the fear, of the seige of Leningrad, of the starvation. "Some were not as strong..." recalls one, when the subject turned to cannibalism. The two decades of the film are still alive for me, rich in context and disturbing.
It felt good to understand this better; pieces fitting into place in later chronology. China's Cultural Revolution a decade later... the pageantry of the war and, then, bigger in the peace... even contemporary politics, as Stalin and his might provoked action and reaction through generations of Americans. And the music. I feel better able to appreciate the things I thought old people just know.
And the ice cream. I made it myself, with Jesse's long-waiting birthday gift. In the bowl before me is a Nestle semi-sweet chocolate glacier of cream concealing ore of Oreo. It is so smooth.....
I feel like bourgeois material stability may be just within reach, with my DIY ice cream. I'm accumulating life. (ah, but the recovering meth addict in Meth dispelled that myth. if the rule is that more X is better, we'll only be best when there's naught but X)
I'll leave it at that, for now.
The first was the distraction of the last hour and a half, a documentary on "The War Symphonies," painting a lucid and lyric portrait of great music squeezed out of one Russian. A beautiful spectacle, making the conducting and performance of Shostakovich's work a thrilling sight (the aerial camera that zoomed in behind a violin to accost the conductor just...worked). And the shots of old Russians, talking of their friend Dimitri Dimitrivich, of the tyranny of Stalin, of the fear, of the seige of Leningrad, of the starvation. "Some were not as strong..." recalls one, when the subject turned to cannibalism. The two decades of the film are still alive for me, rich in context and disturbing.
It felt good to understand this better; pieces fitting into place in later chronology. China's Cultural Revolution a decade later... the pageantry of the war and, then, bigger in the peace... even contemporary politics, as Stalin and his might provoked action and reaction through generations of Americans. And the music. I feel better able to appreciate the things I thought old people just know.
And the ice cream. I made it myself, with Jesse's long-waiting birthday gift. In the bowl before me is a Nestle semi-sweet chocolate glacier of cream concealing ore of Oreo. It is so smooth.....
I feel like bourgeois material stability may be just within reach, with my DIY ice cream. I'm accumulating life. (ah, but the recovering meth addict in Meth dispelled that myth. if the rule is that more X is better, we'll only be best when there's naught but X)
I'll leave it at that, for now.