7/4

I don't agree with that - I still appreciate a well thought-out review, whether it's in print or online. Same here. It's the not very well thought out reviews that bother me.

Automatic web searches by engines like Google run up counters like that.

True camembert, the pungent and oozing king of French cheeses, is made from raw milk from Normandy cows, unpasteurized, unsterilized and largely untouched by modern technology.

ANABlog about Stockhausen.

Apparently the back cover of NY 1974. It's been so long since I've seen it, I'll have to take their word for it.

Happy FreeDay! Let me know how that 50 thing works out...

Before I owned a CD copy, I used to make a fresh tape of Chaupaqua Suite every few years.

$300 at Musicians Friend...that's one in-ek-spensive guitar!

Cool.

What did you pay? I'd love to have one, but don't have the room and I'd really rather have a cello. I don't have room for that either.

Five Myths, Direct From Pyongyang What Not to Think About the Philharmonic Concert By TERRY TEACHOUT March 1, 2008; WSJ Now that the New York Philharmonic has paid its long-awaited visit to North Korea, the floodtide of justificatory gush has begun. Lorin Maazel, the orchestra's music director, intoned that "in the world of music, all men and women are brothers and sisters." A South Korean newspaper described the trip as "an overture to peace between the North and the United States." The Los Angeles Times called it "a publicity coup for an institution . . . much in need of a lift." And Eric Clapton says he's been invited to play in Pyongyang. Eric Clapton? Things are starting to get a little silly here. So before any more 62-year-old rock stars decide to hop the next plane to Pyongyang, allow me to point out five mistaken ideas about the Philharmonic's concert: - The fact that the audience responded warmly to the concert proves that it was a good idea. "We just went out and did our thing," Mr. Maazel told reporters, "and we began to feel this warmth coming back. . . . I think it's going to do a great deal." Bunk. All it proves is that apparatchiks can be sentimental, too, a fact that the Wagner-loving Adolf Hitler proved long ago. Every North Korean who was permitted to attend that concert was undoubtedly vetted by Kim Jong Il's secret police. No wonder they wept when they heard the Philharmonic play their national anthem. End of story. - Any direct contact between North Korea and the U.S. is by definition desirable. Not if it makes things worse for the North Koreans -- and it may. Kim Cheol-woong, a musician who defected from Pyongyang to the West in 2001, warned the Journal's Melanie Kirkpatrick that "there will be educational sessions . . . [on] the triumph of Kim Jong Il's political leadership, which resulted in the fact that even the American artistic group is coming to knock their foreheads on the floor in front of General Kim." - Even if only a handful of North Korean musicians heard the concert and found it inspiring, it was worth giving. Really? Are musicians more important than "ordinary" North Koreans? Remember that North Korea is a tightly shuttered society. All that its people know about the concert is what Kim tells them. Will they see the Philharmonic's visit as a beacon of hope, or proof that their Dear Leader is so powerful that the Americans come running when he crooks his little finger? As for the handful of North Korean musicians who were allowed to meet with the members of the Philharmonic, they did so under the severest of constraints. A quartet of Americans led by Glenn Dicterow, the orchestra's concertmaster, rehearsed the Mendelssohn Octet with four young North Korean string players and found their performance "attuned and sensitive." But Daniel J. Wakin reported in the New York Times that they "exchanged few words" with their American counterparts -- and that the moment the performance was over, "the North Koreans quickly left the area. . . . At the end the four Americans received bouquets, and Mr. Dicterow tried to hand his to the North Korean next to him. The player refused it." If you're wondering why, I suggest you read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" to learn what happens to people under totalitarian rule who make the deadly mistake of talking to foreign visitors. - People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. So said Mr. Maazel in response to charges that the Philharmonic had agreed to play for a monster who starves and jails his own people en masse. "Is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated?" he asked before leaving for Asia. "Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others." In other words, the U.S. is morally equivalent to a country thought to have imprisoned some 150,000 North Koreans in Soviet-style prison camps. That notion is beneath contempt. - Great art can change the world. As for Mr. Clapton, he would do well to lend an ear to his fellow rocker Neil Young. "I think that the time when music could change the world is past," Mr. Young recently said. "I think it would be very naïve to think that in this day and age." Indeed it would, but far too many artists are just that naïve, not to mention vain (which makes one wonder exactly why Mr. Young is joining with Bruce Springsteen in contributing songs to the soundtrack album of the forthcoming antiwar film "Body of War"). Clement Greenberg, the great art critic, called such foolish folk "art-silly," going on to issue the following warning: "Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art." Least of all does it have the power to tear down the high walls of tyranny -- or to feed the terror-stricken people of North Korea. Irene Breslau, a member of the Philharmonic's viola section, got it right on the nose: "I've had a lot of moral reservations based on wondering what a concert for the elite is going to do to help the people starving in the street," she told the Associated Press. Too bad Ms. Breslau's bosses didn't ask themselves that question before sending her to Pyongyang.

Right now, 7-9 am, but I do have problems getting to sleep sometimes and I'll be up after midnight. I've been taking a lot of afternoon naps that tend to screw things up...

There is no 5 second rule.

Alex Takes Some Lumps <h2></h2>

March 9, 2008 Digital Domain They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know. By RANDALL STROSS, NYTimes ONE year after the birth of Windows Vista, why do so many Windows XP users still decline to “upgrade”? Microsoft says high prices have been the deterrent. Last month, the company trimmed prices on retail packages of Vista, trying to entice consumers to overcome their reluctance. In the United States, an XP user can now buy Vista Home Premium for $129.95, instead of $159.95. An alternative theory, however, is that Vista’s reputation precedes it. XP users have heard too many chilling stories from relatives and friends about Vista upgrades that have gone badly. The graphics chip that couldn’t handle Vista’s whizzy special effects. The long delays as it loaded. The applications that ran at slower speeds. The printers, scanners and other hardware peripherals, which work dandily with XP, that lacked the necessary software, the drivers, to work well with Vista. Can someone tell me again, why is switching XP for Vista an “upgrade”? Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals. Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.” Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says. It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows. Their remarks come from a stream of internal communications at Microsoft in February 2007, after Vista had been released as a supposedly finished product and customers were paying full retail price. Between the nonexistent drivers and PCs mislabeled as being ready for Vista when they really were not, Vista instantly acquired a reputation at birth: Does Not Play Well With Others. We usually do not have the opportunity to overhear Microsoft’s most senior executives vent their personal frustrations with Windows. But a lawsuit filed against Microsoft in March 2007 in United States District Court in Seattle has pried loose a packet of internal company documents. The plaintiffs, Dianne Kelley and Kenneth Hansen, bought PCs in late 2006, before Vista’s release, and contend that Microsoft’s “Windows Vista Capable” stickers were misleading when affixed to machines that turned out to be incapable of running the versions of Vista that offered the features Microsoft was marketing as distinctive Vista benefits. Last month, Judge Marsha A. Pechman granted class-action status to the suit, which is scheduled to go to trial in October. (Microsoft last week appealed the certification decision.) Anyone who bought a PC that Microsoft labeled “Windows Vista Capable” without also declaring “Premium Capable” is now a party in the suit. The judge also unsealed a cache of 200 e-mail messages and internal reports, covering Microsoft’s discussions of how best to market Vista, beginning in 2005 and extending beyond its introduction in January 2007. The documents incidentally include those accounts of frustrated Vista users in Microsoft’s executive suites. Today, Microsoft boasts that there are twice as many drivers available for Vista as there were at its introduction, but performance and graphics problems remain. (When I tried last week to contact Mr. Shirley and the others about their most recent experiences with Vista, David Bowermaster, a Microsoft spokesman, said that no one named in the e-mail messages could be made available for comment because of the continuing lawsuit.) The messages were released in a jumble, but when rearranged into chronological order, they show a tragedy in three acts. Act 1: In 2005, Microsoft plans to say that only PCs that are properly equipped to handle the heavy graphics demands of Vista are “Vista Ready.” Act 2: In early 2006, Microsoft decides to drop the graphics-related hardware requirement in order to avoid hurting Windows XP sales on low-end machines while Vista is readied. (A customer could reasonably conclude that Microsoft is saying, Buy Now, Upgrade Later.) A semantic adjustment is made: Instead of saying that a PC is “Vista Ready,” which might convey the idea that, well, it is ready to run Vista, a PC will be described as “Vista Capable,” which supposedly signals that no promises are made about which version of Vista will actually work. The decision to drop the original hardware requirements is accompanied by considerable internal protest. The minimum hardware configuration was set so low that “even a piece of junk will qualify,” Anantha Kancherla, a Microsoft program manager, said in an internal e-mail message among those recently unsealed, adding, “It will be a complete tragedy if we allowed it.” Act 3: In 2007, Vista is released in multiple versions, including “Home Basic,” which lacks Vista’s distinctive graphics. This placed Microsoft’s partners in an embarrassing position. Dell, which gave Microsoft a postmortem report that was also included among court documents, dryly remarked: “Customers did not understand what ‘Capable’ meant and expected more than could/would be delivered.” All was foretold. In February 2006, after Microsoft abandoned its plan to reserve the Vista Capable label for only the more powerful PCs, its own staff tried to avert the coming deluge of customer complaints about underpowered machines. “It would be a lot less costly to do the right thing for the customer now,” said Robin Leonard, a Microsoft sales manager, in an e-mail message sent to her superiors, “than to spend dollars on the back end trying to fix the problem.” Now that Microsoft faces a certified class action, a judge may be the one who oversees the fix. In the meantime, where does Microsoft go to buy back its lost credibility? Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Terry Riley: "The Cusp of Magic." Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, pipa. You don't need to eat peyote buttons to appreciate "The Cusp of Magic" -- though it probably wouldn't hurt. The opening and closing movements of this fascinating work by California composer Terry Riley are based on Native American peyote rituals, and the music in between -- at turns luminous, frightening and unbearably lovely -- shimmers with the elusive delicacy of a dream. Performed by the Kronos Quartet (which commissioned the work), "Cusp" takes its title from the summer solstice, and evokes those transitional moments in life when the sharp edges of reality become blurred, and anything seems possible. Riley has grown in recent years from a minimalist to a little-of-everything-ist, and in "Cusp" he incorporates singing, a synthesizer, children's toys, a drum and the traditional Chinese "pipa" lute (played here by Wu Man) to bend and blend musical genres with protean ease. The effect is, in a word, magical: You have the sense of being swept into a surging ocean of memory, where lullabies float up over mysterious drones, nervous waltzes twist suddenly into quirky little marches, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. But the music never descends into runaway eclecticism: Riley's touch remains both sure and deft throughout, and the effect is powerful. -- Stephen Brookes Washington Post 3/9/2008 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...8030700957.html

the Kronos Quartet and Terry Riley's Sun Rings.

I used to love these kinds of things, but sometimes when I listen...I find I'm listening to something I already own. They do serve an educational void for those who need it. I'll tune in later and maybe there will be something I haven't heard before.

It is a magazine. They do sell advertising. GP isn't too bad. GW is awful.

Dick Laurent is dead.

In Heaven, everything is fine. In Heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good things. And I've got mine.

Sub are cheaper. I should get one to GP, I hear about the latest issue and then it's a week or two before I can check out a copy.

I vaguely remember the triangle makes it a maj7. Isn't the triangle an Abersold thing?

Yeah, it's a bit of a strange question.

It was a dark and rainy night.