Random stuff

[decibel45]

Why do people put stuff like "kissing" and "sex" in their LJ interests? Aren't those pretty much a given? Does anyone *not* like sex? Or kissing? I don't get it...

Long day at work today, but things are going well. They seem open to change, which is good.

Finally, what he said. It'd be awesome to be able to hear live Bach organ music every day.

Comments

Doh...

[decibel45]

Tim Kreider:

I am temporarily living in the apartment of my evil friend Ben Walker while I look for more permanent winter lodgings in New York, and I’ve learned that Grace Church on Broadway, a short walk from here, has free Bach concerts daily at noon. I’ve taken to going. Today I was sitting there in the quiet before the concert reading a novel when suddenly the shattering opening of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor played on the pipe organ, making me start in my pew. (You know it, I’m sure: it’s become clichéd through overuse in films and ads. It’s in Fantasia.) I have no grasp of musical theory or structure at all but even my dull ear can intuit the symmetry and inevitability of this music, as immediately as my eye can see how perfectly wrought a gothic cathedral or double helix is, ignorant though I am of architecture or biochemistry. I had to ask myself: has anything anybody’s written in the entire twentieth century--Charlie Parker or Miles Davis or Hank Williams or Johnny Cash or the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix--been as awesome, as beautiful and terrible as this music? No. Not remotely. Listening to Mozart’s Stadler quintet for clarinet and strings or Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E, you can hear that this is a piece of music written by a very brilliant man, far more brilliant than you could ever hope to be, but Bach… it’s hard to believe it’s even a human artifact. It’s like the difference between Venice or Angkor Wat and the Alps. Listening to the Toccata and Fugue in a cathedral is like getting to sneak in and watch the Big Bang. It is better than the pastrami at Katz’s.