Mysteries Abysmal

Catch up

Review of the Grant Park Orchestra playing 1930s American music.

Interview with Misha Dichter

Ramsey Lewis review 

MusicNOW review

We the people

Scions of David Lynch are travelling 20,000 miles around the country interviewing ordinary Joes and Janes about their dreams, their purposes, their upbringings, etc. This 121-part documentary is called the Interview Project and you can hear all about it here.  There's certainly an Errol Morris quality to these short chats which are each about 5 minutes long.  If you take these rather sincere and humble denizens of small town America at face value, you could get bored pretty quick. Just look at the cute but prosaic accompanying bios: Gordon is "devoted to the lord" and Clara became a "mother and a grandmother." But for whatever reason, it's hard to stop watching. (Bonus video: Lynch and Moby jam)

Postcard from LA

Shot on location at the timeless Fox Fire Room. 

Bloomsday twittered

Atlanta-based teacher and game designer Ian Bogost decided it was high time to put Twitter to good use, so he and Ian McCarthy gave the characters in Ulysses an account. Evidently at one time you could watch the tweets unfold in real time, but at the moment most of the action is up. It's a pretty significant accomplishment and here's a sample from Buck Mulligan:

@STEPHENDEDALUS He thinks you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English! Bursting with money and indigestion.12:09 AM Jun 16th, 2008 from web in reply to StephenDedalus

Musique d'ameublement

Paige Wiser, the Sun-Times' TV Critic, took a subtle dig at classical music during her recent piece on Digital TV channels:  

Classical PBS, 36.5: The Beethoven Satellite Network. It's just like being on hold.

Now Paige, honey, was that necessary? You may call it the pretentious straw that stirs the upper class's drink. You may call it long-winded. You may call it granny music. You may even call it trash. But please don't call it background music.

The Lincoln enigma

The measures of a man, Chicago Sun-Times. (The feature story in today's Sunday Showcase, with a Ravinia roundup ) 

During a recent trip to Iowa, my dad and I stopped in Galesburg, Illinois to explore the beautiful old campus of Knox College. (Why it never occured to me to attend a tiny close-knit liberal arts school I don't know.) We stumbled onto Old Main Hall, home of the 5th Lincoln/Douglas debate. Sadly, this is the last remaining original structure from the seven debates, but what a relic it is. That particular time coincided with a piece I was writing on Ramsey Lewis, who was commissioned by Ravinia to write a huge work commemorating and celebrating Lincoln. During that time, I caught a punchy episode of The Professors on Chicago public access television where a local prof. virtually portrayed Lincoln as a racist redneck. Now I know I'm no historian, but all these competing visions of Lincoln made my head swirl. He may have made some brutish misjudgments along the way, but I really believe it was his savage era that occasionaly got the best of him. I think it's clear he had a heavier heart for slavery than most of those around him. Here was a quote etched on practically every building at Knox: "He [Stephen Douglas] is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them."

ICE/Xenakis

My debut concert review at the Chicago Classical Review  has now been published. And shame shame to anyone who couldn't make one of the city's most talked-about cultural events of the spring season. (For the last three months on Facebook, I was reminded daily of this concert.)  Even if Xenakis is a drug you can take only in small doses, it was fresh air to see Chicago's musical youth movement out in full force.