Yes, Zurich. If this is Eurotrash, I'm all for it. … [Read more...]

Is there anybody not paying tribute to John Cage this year, the centennial of his birth? My own favorite tribute is a performance that began more than a decade ago "in a crumbling medieval church” in Halberstadt, an eastern German city that has been described by The Wall Street Journal as "forlorn." The piece, called "ASLSP (As Slow As Possible)," was originally written for piano and is 20 minutes long. In the Halberstadt adaptation the music is not forlorn so much as long-lived. “Each movement lasts 71 years," The Journal reported. … [Read more...]

Dylan Mattingly by name. He's got a thing for Amelia Earhart, the famous pilot who disappeared 75 years ago near Howland Island in the Pacific. Inspired by the story of her last flight, Mattingly wrote a forty-minute work for chamber orchestra, "Atlas of Somewhere On the Way to Howland Island," as an homage to her and (forgive him the flight of words; he's just a kid) "for all those voyagers between horizons; for those—past and present—who have flown into storms, for those floating dreamscapes out beyond the curvature of the sunrise, … [Read more...]

Here's a change of pace. It's a parody music video. Guy who made it calls it 'Casual Pimpin.' I call it catchy. Guy's name is Tim Ellis. He's something of a one-man band. Wrote it. Performs it. Shot it with his "fly girl." He also happens to be a friend of mine. Now that I've embedded it, he hopes the thing will go viral. Poor guy. (Crossposted at HuffPo) … [Read more...]

If Malcolm Gladwell had written about you in his latest best seller, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, you'd probably know it in a New York minute. If you were Abbie Conant, who is the subject of the book's final chapter, you wouldn't. When pressed, Conant recalls speaking with Gladwell (right) by phone. But she lives in Germany and had only a vague idea of who he was. She didn't subscribe to The New Yorker, where he's a staff writer, and hadn't read The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, his previous … [Read more...]