humanity's tale
Apr. 15th, 2017 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yamamanamaI consider myself optimistic about people despite our many problems, you can tell that because I have nothing but nice things to say about the people I encounter through my life.
You might think the Boston Philharmonic picked Good Friday to play the Resurrection Symphony (Symphony 2) by Gustav Mahler but it was the other way around: they got the dates and Benjamin Zander said there's only one thing they could play on that day. For the Jews in the audience, Mahler was Jewish. For everyone else, it's a beautiful work of music.
It doesn't require experiences of death and loss, but they may enhance your enjoyment.
The first movement was written on its own but Mahler regarded it as part of a whole. It's as long as an entire Haydn symphony, or Miles Davis' Pharaoh's Dance or John Adams' Common Tones In Simple Time or Acid Mothers Temple's Pink Lady Lemonade (May I Drink You Once Again?), just to put things into perspective. Zander likened the second two movements to reminiscence of lost love and happier days, and then reminiscence of hardship and grief.
He turned the story of the Sermon of Anthony of Padua to the Fishes, about Anthony, tired of preaching to a vacant chapel, going down to the river to deliver a sermon to fish, who would watch enraptured and then go back to their own vices, and the entire movement is an undulating, watery, slithery, aimless melody in 3/8 time. Mahler implied that he did this while completely drunk. Then comes a scream of despair. During the talk, they were having technical difficulties with the keyboard so Zander was trying to make the sounds with his mouth. He called it Emotional Polyphony. The tam-tam is the sound of death and the glockenspiel is the sound of the afterworld.
Zander's parents were refugees from Nazi Germany.
And then the hope of the fourth movement. It's four minutes long and features a solo mezzo-soprano.
The last movement is itself a set of ten images, of the day of rapture, of the dead arising from their sleep and streaming on in endless procession, the songs of nightingales and a chorus of saints and Radiances, from darkness to light, from sadness to divine joy. The dies irae melody is used in this but is not as ominous or as obvious as, say, the Symphonie Fantastique. It's almost as long as Brahms' third symphony or the Dies Irae from Verdi's Requiem and slightly longer than Szymanowski's Harnasie or Merzbow's Frozen Guitars and Sunloop/7e 802.
It was a splendid performance aside from the fact that they must've had the air conditioning on. No, I don't think I caught anything from Jack, who was getting over a bad cold or a flu, because the incubation period isn't 5 days.
In front of me, some people were talking about Mahler's sixth symphony and the hammer blows and how Mahler was fired from his job so he removed the final blow.
I had a thought about wanting to hear every Mahler symphony before Trump leaves office, but no, I don't even want to see Mahler's 4th symphony before Trump leaves office. I don't even want to post my next entry before Trump leaves office. Sadly, his ego is too big for that.
Someone at the makeshift information desk wanted to be immortalized in a cartoon.
A man had a tattoo of an ourobourous, a snake devouring its own tail. I thought someone said Tammy but her name was Gabby. Michaela, Gabby, and a woman of unknown name had to get off at North Quincy.
Speaking of vipers, I ran into Lindsay at Park Street in the process of meeting some classmates coming forth from distant depths and far-flung reaches. I wasn't entirely satisfied with my drawing of her. In real life, she is pale and has big dreamy eyes and a shy smile. I thought she was wearing the same thing she was when I met her, a leather jacket and button-down shirt and jeans but I think her shirt wasn't striped but floral or paisley based on my swirls.
You wouldn't understand why I say viper unless you've played Final Fantasy XIII.
In the past, reunions have come in groups of three so I hope this means more strange great serendipity in the future.
There's a Treasure Hunt paper pairing revival jewelry with other works of art elsewhere in the museum. After Napoleon's conquest of Egypt and the opening of Pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, Egyptomania was a huge thing.
There was 9 foot long python necklace. Etruscans would fuse tiny balls of gold to a gold surface. Castellani revived granulation but neglected to write about it so contemporary jewelers have to experiment. Someone made the star Chort, which is not Coach Z for The Cheat, it's mangled Arabic for "small rib," and a polyp colony pendant. There are vipers and vipers with the heads of falcons and animals facing each other and dung beetles; Macodinan coins and Renaissance motifs; amber shaped like amphorae on a necklace, brooch, and earrings; heads of Medusa meant to ward off evil; Elizabeth I.
Most of the objects are the MFA's. A few are from Cartier's collection or are otherwise loans.
Łodź was renamed Litzmannstadt after a World War I general who joined the Nazi party and died some time before the Anschluss and Japanese invasion of China.
All their money was seized and they were given banknotes that had no value outside the ghetto.
Rumkovski had the idea to put the ghetto inhabitants to work making mattresses and whatever in order to ensure their survival. It kind of worked; Łodź lasted longer than any other ghetto on Europe. Nonetheless, the Nazis demanded the deportation to Chełmno of those who can not work: the old, the young, the injured, the recalcitrant. The Nazis had no intention on letting the inhabitants survive forever, and so they were all deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Makes you wonder what the point was. Makes you wonder if he knew what was going on outside the ghetto, about their pyrrhic victory at Sevastopol or their crippling losses at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, the coups in Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Finland. Anne Frank knew about it but then again, she was living in a crawl-space and not a ghetto. Hitler only outlived her by a month or two. He's still a controversial figure for this. He met his end at Auschwitz, not by the Nazis hand but by pissed off Jews.
877 people survived at the glorious liberation by the Red Army and it was the Poles who saved them.
Gustav Mahler's niece was killed there. Alma, however, was able to escape.
Henryk Ross was given a camera and the duty of photographing life in the ghetto and factory workers but also took secret pictures showing that things were bad from the start and only got worse from there. Most of the inhabitants were suffering from starvation and malnutrition and photographs showed them digging for food. The photos were buried and instead of restoring them, they're depicted with all the damage done by groundwater.
It ends with art depicting other atrocities; a physical scar from the Bosnian genocide, the taking of Babylonian and Chaldean women by the Assyrian Empire, the Armenian genocide, the destruction of Qing artifacts and one being saved by writing things like LONG LIVE MAO ZEDONG in red and yellow paint, rare photographs of destroyed Warsaw.
I wonder if this was meant to coincide with the ascendancy of the alt-right, which, spoiler alert, is fascism for the 21st century, and unlike the farce that is 21st Century Socialism, does not reject everything fascist, except for maybe that bit about trains running on time. Turner's Slave Ship is in that gallery.
I didn't get to see Matisse. I'll write more about this when I have more time to write notes. I'd post pictures but between trying to find Holocaust deaths per year because I was under the impression that the pace of killings increased after Stalingrad (except in Romania) and Kursk because the Axis knew they were fighting a losing war and they'd feel a lot better if someone were punished and also because Hitler got sick of Hungary dragging their feet on deportations and because I was unexpectedly called in, which had another consequence: I'm playing Baten Kaitos right now and I have to fight a rather easy boss, watch a few cutscenes, and snag a few magnus. Someone wrote this: life is ephemeral. Memories are forever.
I don't know about that one.
Near me at Mumbai Spice was a cellist originally from Tokyo who ate her first meal of the day, a chicken in cashew sauce dish.
I had a very spicy dish called Fish 65, which was my first meal of the day as well. The official description is "fish sauteed with ginger, garlic, onions and spiked with curry leaves." Yep. It's some kind of white fish. I was expecting a filet but instead I got pieces, but then again, this is a Chinese-Indian place and in Chinese culture, it's very rude to give someone food and expect them to cut it up themselves. Given how complicated utensil etiquette is in western countries, I'm glad they didn't assimilate to our etiquette.
The music in Mumbai Spice sounded like post-rock and Indian pop played at the same time, and I think it was. If that isn't a thing, it should be.
Burning Question: What do you make of Chaim Rumkowski?
You might think the Boston Philharmonic picked Good Friday to play the Resurrection Symphony (Symphony 2) by Gustav Mahler but it was the other way around: they got the dates and Benjamin Zander said there's only one thing they could play on that day. For the Jews in the audience, Mahler was Jewish. For everyone else, it's a beautiful work of music.
It doesn't require experiences of death and loss, but they may enhance your enjoyment.
The first movement was written on its own but Mahler regarded it as part of a whole. It's as long as an entire Haydn symphony, or Miles Davis' Pharaoh's Dance or John Adams' Common Tones In Simple Time or Acid Mothers Temple's Pink Lady Lemonade (May I Drink You Once Again?), just to put things into perspective. Zander likened the second two movements to reminiscence of lost love and happier days, and then reminiscence of hardship and grief.
He turned the story of the Sermon of Anthony of Padua to the Fishes, about Anthony, tired of preaching to a vacant chapel, going down to the river to deliver a sermon to fish, who would watch enraptured and then go back to their own vices, and the entire movement is an undulating, watery, slithery, aimless melody in 3/8 time. Mahler implied that he did this while completely drunk. Then comes a scream of despair. During the talk, they were having technical difficulties with the keyboard so Zander was trying to make the sounds with his mouth. He called it Emotional Polyphony. The tam-tam is the sound of death and the glockenspiel is the sound of the afterworld.
Zander's parents were refugees from Nazi Germany.
And then the hope of the fourth movement. It's four minutes long and features a solo mezzo-soprano.
The last movement is itself a set of ten images, of the day of rapture, of the dead arising from their sleep and streaming on in endless procession, the songs of nightingales and a chorus of saints and Radiances, from darkness to light, from sadness to divine joy. The dies irae melody is used in this but is not as ominous or as obvious as, say, the Symphonie Fantastique. It's almost as long as Brahms' third symphony or the Dies Irae from Verdi's Requiem and slightly longer than Szymanowski's Harnasie or Merzbow's Frozen Guitars and Sunloop/7e 802.
It was a splendid performance aside from the fact that they must've had the air conditioning on. No, I don't think I caught anything from Jack, who was getting over a bad cold or a flu, because the incubation period isn't 5 days.
In front of me, some people were talking about Mahler's sixth symphony and the hammer blows and how Mahler was fired from his job so he removed the final blow.
I had a thought about wanting to hear every Mahler symphony before Trump leaves office, but no, I don't even want to see Mahler's 4th symphony before Trump leaves office. I don't even want to post my next entry before Trump leaves office. Sadly, his ego is too big for that.
Someone at the makeshift information desk wanted to be immortalized in a cartoon.
A man had a tattoo of an ourobourous, a snake devouring its own tail. I thought someone said Tammy but her name was Gabby. Michaela, Gabby, and a woman of unknown name had to get off at North Quincy.
Speaking of vipers, I ran into Lindsay at Park Street in the process of meeting some classmates coming forth from distant depths and far-flung reaches. I wasn't entirely satisfied with my drawing of her. In real life, she is pale and has big dreamy eyes and a shy smile. I thought she was wearing the same thing she was when I met her, a leather jacket and button-down shirt and jeans but I think her shirt wasn't striped but floral or paisley based on my swirls.
You wouldn't understand why I say viper unless you've played Final Fantasy XIII.
In the past, reunions have come in groups of three so I hope this means more strange great serendipity in the future.
There's a Treasure Hunt paper pairing revival jewelry with other works of art elsewhere in the museum. After Napoleon's conquest of Egypt and the opening of Pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, Egyptomania was a huge thing.
There was 9 foot long python necklace. Etruscans would fuse tiny balls of gold to a gold surface. Castellani revived granulation but neglected to write about it so contemporary jewelers have to experiment. Someone made the star Chort, which is not Coach Z for The Cheat, it's mangled Arabic for "small rib," and a polyp colony pendant. There are vipers and vipers with the heads of falcons and animals facing each other and dung beetles; Macodinan coins and Renaissance motifs; amber shaped like amphorae on a necklace, brooch, and earrings; heads of Medusa meant to ward off evil; Elizabeth I.
Most of the objects are the MFA's. A few are from Cartier's collection or are otherwise loans.
Łodź was renamed Litzmannstadt after a World War I general who joined the Nazi party and died some time before the Anschluss and Japanese invasion of China.
All their money was seized and they were given banknotes that had no value outside the ghetto.
Rumkovski had the idea to put the ghetto inhabitants to work making mattresses and whatever in order to ensure their survival. It kind of worked; Łodź lasted longer than any other ghetto on Europe. Nonetheless, the Nazis demanded the deportation to Chełmno of those who can not work: the old, the young, the injured, the recalcitrant. The Nazis had no intention on letting the inhabitants survive forever, and so they were all deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Makes you wonder what the point was. Makes you wonder if he knew what was going on outside the ghetto, about their pyrrhic victory at Sevastopol or their crippling losses at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, the coups in Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Finland. Anne Frank knew about it but then again, she was living in a crawl-space and not a ghetto. Hitler only outlived her by a month or two. He's still a controversial figure for this. He met his end at Auschwitz, not by the Nazis hand but by pissed off Jews.
877 people survived at the glorious liberation by the Red Army and it was the Poles who saved them.
Gustav Mahler's niece was killed there. Alma, however, was able to escape.
Henryk Ross was given a camera and the duty of photographing life in the ghetto and factory workers but also took secret pictures showing that things were bad from the start and only got worse from there. Most of the inhabitants were suffering from starvation and malnutrition and photographs showed them digging for food. The photos were buried and instead of restoring them, they're depicted with all the damage done by groundwater.
It ends with art depicting other atrocities; a physical scar from the Bosnian genocide, the taking of Babylonian and Chaldean women by the Assyrian Empire, the Armenian genocide, the destruction of Qing artifacts and one being saved by writing things like LONG LIVE MAO ZEDONG in red and yellow paint, rare photographs of destroyed Warsaw.
I wonder if this was meant to coincide with the ascendancy of the alt-right, which, spoiler alert, is fascism for the 21st century, and unlike the farce that is 21st Century Socialism, does not reject everything fascist, except for maybe that bit about trains running on time. Turner's Slave Ship is in that gallery.
I didn't get to see Matisse. I'll write more about this when I have more time to write notes. I'd post pictures but between trying to find Holocaust deaths per year because I was under the impression that the pace of killings increased after Stalingrad (except in Romania) and Kursk because the Axis knew they were fighting a losing war and they'd feel a lot better if someone were punished and also because Hitler got sick of Hungary dragging their feet on deportations and because I was unexpectedly called in, which had another consequence: I'm playing Baten Kaitos right now and I have to fight a rather easy boss, watch a few cutscenes, and snag a few magnus. Someone wrote this: life is ephemeral. Memories are forever.
I don't know about that one.
Near me at Mumbai Spice was a cellist originally from Tokyo who ate her first meal of the day, a chicken in cashew sauce dish.
I had a very spicy dish called Fish 65, which was my first meal of the day as well. The official description is "fish sauteed with ginger, garlic, onions and spiked with curry leaves." Yep. It's some kind of white fish. I was expecting a filet but instead I got pieces, but then again, this is a Chinese-Indian place and in Chinese culture, it's very rude to give someone food and expect them to cut it up themselves. Given how complicated utensil etiquette is in western countries, I'm glad they didn't assimilate to our etiquette.
The music in Mumbai Spice sounded like post-rock and Indian pop played at the same time, and I think it was. If that isn't a thing, it should be.
Burning Question: What do you make of Chaim Rumkowski?
