newleftreview.org/issues/ii157...
04.03.2026 12:38
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You know she is going to take that sepulchral low option at the end even at the very beginning of the song, and boy does she ever. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Buqh...
--and then moving finally to D major to create a feeling of creepy churchyard serenity at the end. Schubert gives singers the option of a low D at the very end if they have it. Some singers don't have it--Fischer Dieskau, Ludwig--and some do--badass Brigitte Fassbaender, Norman. Anderson def has it!
But I do really like her recording of Der Tod und das Mädchen, in which the singer first personifies a terrified girl to whom death has appeared, and then sings the part of Death, seductive, suave, somnolent, with the music modulating surprisingly from D minor to F major,--
--but really her finest recorded work is her spirituals, where she was able to exploit that otherworldly, almost androgynous low register (she was a contralto, after all) to chilling effect, as here. Brividi! www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PdM...
~Speaking~ of Marian Anderson, she made some creditable recordings of German lieder, a fine Alto Rhapsody, some touching Bach alto arias (and she would've been recorded and performed more but for racism)--
To mark 2/27, when the best people were born (Liz Taylor, Marian Anderson, Mirella Freni, Dexter Gordon, Lotte Lehmann, & certain ~others~), posting the most awkward celeb interview ever, featuring a distraite (charitably) ET, a Siamese, & a honey-voiced Dinah Shore. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz-c...
Rob Arcane posted the opening of David F Noble's In Defense of Luddism (1993) and damn it's like it was written and hour ago.
I also like Winter Garden, a Cold War caper about a group of British artists on some kind of cultural exchange tour of the Soviet Union. Very black, suave, paranoiac, mysterious, and of course ~funny~.
Current listening. Highlights: Three songs from Les nuits d'été, hardly ever sung by men; Philippe's Act 3 aria from Don Carlos (French orig., of course); incisive, Rabelaisian performance of Poulenc's Chansons gaillardes. Missing, sadly: Mahler; JVD was quite the Mahlerian (see his Rückert-Lieder).
But actually--imho--it's Abismos de pasión, Buñuel's suitably palpitating and lurid Mexican adaptation, with Irasema Dilian and Jorge Mistral in the Catalina/Cathy Alejandro/Heathcliff roles.
A Burial at Ornans
A Burial at Ornans https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-courbet/a-burial-at-ornans-1850-1
Not sure I buy Elliott Gould's bumbling shtick, but maybe we don't need a sly, sussed private eye to provide the narrative logic and connective tissue between scenes when there's VZ's slowly gliding, morally aloof camera to do it, seeing everything but abjuring comment.
Watched better part of Long Goodbye during insomniac interval btw 1 & 3 last night & wow is Sterling Hayden terrific as a spent, blustering drunk, using his towering physique and manic strength to reveal weaknesses in a key scene in which he is humiliated by the diminutive Henry Gibson.
There's a kind of moral disorder, a reckless licentiousness visible in the disfigured syntax and willful, profligate misspellings. Sentences in this case become a kind of moral x-ray, a register of transgressiveness.
Reading the Epstein emails does suggest that at least among privileged people with the education and wherewithal to know better there's a connection between an extreme, almost perverse disregard for grammar and spelling and moral conduct that wouldn't be out of place in Pasolini's Salò.
LFL with snow ushanka (and bad books inside).
Have seen family trees and genealogical charts in the preliminary pages of novels but never an astrological index in which each character is assigned a zodiac sign--until ~Un giorno e mezzo~ by the divine Fabrizia Ramondino.
🚨 I've obtained a list of secret watchlists the Department of Homeland Security uses to keep tabs on American citizens
www.kenklippenstein.com/p/ices-secre...
This just a month after Mara Liasson's extremely tendentious pro-abundance piece in which she spoke to three crack democratic strategists who have figured out how Dems can win again: Rahm Emanuel, Adam Jentleson, and Neera Tanden.
Unsure if the militant psychopathy of the official line of the Tr*mp goons, their unwillingness to fall back to a position of supporting the mission but decrying a few bad apples, is a sign of their frailty and imminent collapse or of a deranged assurance that will cost many more lives. Maybe both.
Another friend put it to me like this: "ICE has made the classic Nazi mistake. They've invaded a winter people in the winter."
Really is extraordinary to watch citizens who've been brutalized by the fascist thugs in the WH and abandoned by the putative "opposition" party making a stand--completely alone--against unchecked federal power with nothing more than cell phones and their own wits.
Have been looking for a while for a book that does exactly what this accomplishes. Really impressive.
Cover of Nick Srnicek's Silicon Empires.
Performs a disquieting scan of the economic and geopolitical context of the current scramble for AI dominance among the tech giants that adroitly weaves together a number of elements: the rise of the tech right, the transition from globalized neoliberalism to nationalism, the face-off with China.
For those times when one wants the dusty-mauve mothballed musical ambience of a lunchtime concert at the National Gallery ca. 1948 w/women in utility suits & pillbox hats listening dutifully to performances of French chansons with very ~English~ diction & weird tempi www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2rp...
With his exuberant working-class bonhomie, rumbustious American manners, & fondness for chewing the fat with the common man on the street, Studs Terkel seems the most improbable interviewer imaginable for Ivy Compton Burnett--but somehow this conversation works? studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ivy...
