All by itself, independent of how it comes about, exquisite taste is neither good nor bad. In my opinion, some things are worthy of cultivation and some seem like a foolish joke. Some exquisite taste just happens without cultivation and it is hard to condemn it, however trite it may be.

Young French children drink wine as American children drink milk. I doubt that American children can develop a preference for one brand of milk over another but I suppose French children can readily tell the difference among Bordeaux and Chardonnays, and perhaps they are encouraged to do so. So be it; and not much more can be said about that, however worthy or unworthy wine flavors may be.

As it happens, my father, being in the food business, brought home sturgeon, nova scotia lox and swiss cheese every Saturday. Before I was four years old, I could appreciate many differences. I could tell (if my memory is right, but I don’t guarantee it) whether cheese was aged six months or not at all. I think I can still tell differences. I regard this ability of mine as frivolous and wouldn’t mind at all if it evaporated suddenly.

I am dismayed when I think how many thousands of people take classes in wine tasting. It may be, for all I know, possible to make very discriminating distinctions between types of wine and, within types, brands. Even the ability to recognize the number of years a wine sits in an aging cask may be possible. My feeling, not shared by many, I suppose, is that this ability is DISGUSTING, mainly because it has to be worked at and it concerns a matter not worthy of anybody’s time and efforts and too often it is cultivated for despicable reasons, and you can guess what those are.

I don’t feel this way about music. It is a fact that some people with a natural passion for what I will haughtily call “great music” proceed to work hard at developing an exquisite taste for distinctions. Let them. I don’t think it is praiseworthy but neither is it cheap and vulgar. It does seem to me to be self-defeating. I have heard live performances of great music that for some of my companions misses the mark. Only a small percentage of concert goers can tell a fine performance by a great conductor from a somewhat lackadaisical performance by a somewhat less than great conductor. It strikes me that people with this exquisite ability are losing out if they cannot appreciate anything but the very best. For many years I used to listen to Sviatoslav Richter’s best performances of Beethoven’s Appassionata Piano Sonata, insanely bent on developing expertise in Richter’s style. Today, I wonder why. I will give you links to Richter and to one other professional performer and one amateur, and you can judge for yourself whether knowing the differences are worth a damn.

So my advice is this: Enjoy your cheese and don’t check the label to see how long it has been aged, enjoy your $10 wine and don’t make a move to the $20 variety. Go listen to music and don’t criticize if you can help avoiding that.

Life is short; eat cookies.

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Richter – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ2J1eFM-Rs

Claudio Arrau - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdg-DT8rTUQ

Amateur performance – 1st movement only. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2edfqJnb8w

Ezra Pound set the precedent. Widely regarded as the best of the best, so far as poetry is concerned, Pound received big bucks when he was awarded the Bollingen Prize. This set up a great furor because Pound had advanced from fascist follower of Mussolini to rabid supporter of Hitler and nazism. Many of the literati questioned his getting a prize, as if to honor his viciousness.

Can one separate the artist from the man? In my opinion, one can and one must…if the circumstances are right. They weren’t in the case of Pound because he was alive and able to enjoy the fruits of his villainy. Why give him money, as if to endorse his outrageous principles? The Prize could have been awarded to someone else who, if he was mature enough, would have accepted it with grace and not objected to this inscription: To the person judged by the Awards Committee to be the 2nd best poet in the world. In time, Pound was locked away in an asylum for the criminally insane for acts of treason. He was ruled permanently and incurably insane but even crazier people supported him to the end: Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot. For them, genius conquers all.

Like hell genius does, according to the folks in Israel. We are only a couple weeks short of Tricky Dick Wagner’s 200th birthday, his double centenary, so to speak, and rabid fans are getting ready to honor him but NOT in Israel. Unlike the case with Pound, I think honoring him is a fine idea. (1) My view is that after 200 years have passed, we should give up the hatred. Enough is enough. Endless hatred is stupid. (2) Wagner profits nothing from our playing his music. He gets no royalties if we play his compositions and his descendants, if any, get nothing either. All that happens is that by not playing his music, we deprive ourselves of some of the greatest music ever written. Yet the Israelis, pushed on by their insane “We must never forget” mantra, won’t give it up. There will be no concerts featuring Wagner music during the double centenary. His music will be taboo throughout the land. The tattooed-wrist Hebes will pretend they never heard of him.

Wagner was Hitler’s inspiration and to this I say, “Who in his right mind gives a flickendoodle?” Wagner takes no satisfaction or royalties in that. The Israelis do well to cut out the nonsense and buy some Wagner CDs. Why punish themselves? Go to some Wagner concerts. Have some fun. Even create a new award for him. Call it the BACH/BEETHOVEN PRIZE FOR UNPARALLELED GENIUS. Tricky Dick himself will not kvell with pleasure at being the first recipient.

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Eine kleine nacht musik mit Wagner:

Rienzi Overture. Once upon a time played on a clarinet by an Irish woman without a name who emerges from my bed most every morning.
Thirteen minutes of orgiastic delight. Play it loud and annoy the neighbors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9CQXMNko8Q

Ain’t nuttin’ wrong wid dis, eeder. Ten glorious minutes. If you hear anti-Semitic strains in it, reserve a place for yourself on Freud’s couch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOb2XsqYawk

But you have often heard “you ain’t heard anything yet until the fat lady sings,” and what singing this is!! Listen and don’t faint. She puts Beyonce, Whitney Houston and the rest of the gang to shame. AND YOU KNOW IT!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=RD02I6vtug-fTHc&NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=_mOA8pZ_I4M

This time, Birgit kicks up her heels and has a ball. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjZoI0WN898&list=RD02I6vtug-fTHc

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BONUS

The prima donna of all prima donnas singing in her native Romanian. She’ll be the first to admit she is the greatest singer who ever lived (or will live). The maddening this is that she may be right!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=FrgxnZbQ-nI

Here she is again, in a more serious mode. Hateful bitch! But can’t help loving her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul9OTShQ_rc

I once saw a girl named Maria. It was in the mid-1950s, and she danced. I have seen clips but, sad to say, I never saw her dance in flesh again. Enthralled though I was, I did not imagine I would never see her like again even into the 21st century. I write of MARIA TALLCHIEF, the great Maria Tallchief, the best American born and bred dancer ever. Maria was one of only two persons (to the best of my knowledge) privileged to call George Balanchine by his first name. The other being Lincoln Kirsten. When men like Mikhael Baryshnikov finally reach enough prominence they call him Mr. B – not a bad achievement.

Maria was born on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma as Marie Tall Chief in 1925. By 1942 she was America’s best and four years later she married the 42-year old legendary choreographer, Balanchine. Many of his best dances were created specifically for her and eventually she was the star of what was not yet called New York City Ballet. [In matters of art, you cannot meaningfully make measurable comparisons. How did she stack up against Margot Fonteyn, Natasha Marakova, Galina Ulanov, etc. Who knows and, realy, who cares?]

In 1980 she founded the Chicago City Ballet and 19 years later was honored with a National Medal of the Arts by the National endowment for the Arts. Her daughter says she was always very proud of her of her Osage Indian heritage.

Maria – 1925 to April, 2013.

(Died from a fall that broke her hip.) Now, then, watch her dance via this clip.

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1952 – Watch Maria and Esther Williams exchange saccharine sweet compliments. In full screen mode, please. And ladies, don’t break your back trying to imitate those steps she performs from 1.20 to 1.30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGeYK-SSy8g

The song – Carreras singing – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZPA8fwp7PE

When you read, as I just did, that the University of Louisville’s basketball team has a net WORTH of $291 million, it makes you wonder about the difference between value and worth. And if that $291 figure sounds high to you, consider, too, the money brought in recently by the sale of Francis Bacon paintings: $86.2 million, $44.8, $37, and most recently of all, $40 million. Poor Francis. Think how rich he would be if he were alive and was selling those paintings himself and for himself.

All these figures address net worth in terms of bucks but there is something called INTRINSIC VALUE, and commercial prices have nothing to do with that. In fact, commercial or otherwise, money has no bearing on intrinsic value. But it is very hard to figure the latter out. If you don’t put a price on a thing, just how valuable is it? All of us hear about the intrinsic value of human life and, not being able to get a good grip on that, we incline to say human life is infinitely precious, beyond any nonsense of financial calculation. Just how much does it take for you to be willing to kill your children?

Looked at from the perspective of “your children or your money,” – a Jack Benny-like dilemma – we see how preposterous the worth of a “thing” is. It is precisely that nonsense that made Benny’s hilarity so witty and valuable. What is a Benny-like joke worth? Yet the torturing fact is that we can put a tag on Benny’s jokes. Someone says, “In exchange for my giving you $5 million, do you agree never to hear or let anyone else ever hear, another Benny joke?” You betcha I do. Much as I appreciated the great man, $50 would buy me off and I’d settle for $500 to buy off the pleasures of the rest of the world. No one would ever be allowed to hear a Benny joke again. Mean-spirited? Grubby? I just don’t know but I think I wouldn’t be alone feeling that way. What would Rochester say?
********************
And once again, I raise the question of what Liza and Joey think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkRIbUT6u7Q

At about the halfway mark of the Civil War, Abe Lincoln takes the bold step of issuing an Emancipation Proclamation. A truly great moment in U.S. history. So it is now 150 years since that most important time. The film, LINCOLN, is about that moment. Since it stars Daniel Day-Lewis, there wasn’t, and could not possibly have been, suspense concerning who would get the Best Actor Award. ARGO, a very exciting potboiler, won Best Movie award for its false portrayal of a Middle East incident. It didn’t deserve awards, but what the hell. I saw it and liked it.

Here is a list of the best Civil War movies. Culled from over one thousand pretenders.

1. GLORY – stars Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington. Great and horrifying battle scenes. From this movie, you really learn why war is hell.

2.THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE – Everyone has read the book; now see the movie. All about courage and cowardice.

3. GONE WITH THE WIND – The epic of epics. You can’t argue with it. You might as well say you read Hamlet and didn’t like it. Visually stunning and the winner of exactly 35 trillion awards and honors. I’m a fan.

4. An OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE – It has no competition in the category of greatest very short movie ever made. A disquisition on time. A work of genius. A philosophical masterpiece. Visually stunning. You cannot say enough or too many good things about it.

5. BIRTH OF A NATION – If you feel you must make a ranking of best Civil War movies of all time, leave this one out! It is downright stupid to compare other Civil War films to this one. It is not just that it is in a class by itself but it is a serious contender for greatest movie of all time, regardless of its category. It is not a movie you watch to enjoy; in fact, it is nearly impossible to enjoy it. Viewing this film is part of your education as a human being.

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Oh, and of course, the aforementioned LINCOLN. Best movie of 2012.

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With love for Pauline Kael.

Only Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas’s pubic hair dresser know for sure but my guess is that Anita would say, “Sir, I knew King David, and you are no King David.” Such issues become intriguing in the light of the recently published, God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis. By Tom Hickman. Square Peg; 234 pages; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk.

Richard Rudgley, a British anthropologist, admitted on a television programme some years ago, that once you start noticing them, you “tend to see willies pretty much everywhere”. They are manifest in skyscrapers, depicted in art and loom large in literature. They pop up on the walls of schoolyards across the world, and on the walls of temples both modern and ancient……Yet the penis has also been shamed into hiding through the ages. One night in 415BC, Athens’s street-corner statues were dismembered en masse. Stone penises were still causing anxiety in the late 20th century, when the Victoria and Albert Museum in London pulled out of storage a stone figleaf in case a member of the royal family wanted to see its 18-foot (5.5-metre) replica of Michelangelo’s “David”.

Tom Hickman, a Sussex-based writer and journalist, tells the story of its ups and downs with enthusiasm and a mostly straight face in “God’s Doodle.” I like the theme but not enough to investigate. Like any onanist, you are on your own.

The above is the title of a book I recently found while rummaging through my philosophy library. I had forgotten this book but now I took it down from its shelf and skimmed through it. Its subtitle is “An Illustrated Anthology of Love Poetry” and the poems are selected and introduced by Kate Farrell. It is a Metropolitan Museum of Art publication and I suppose I paid $16.95 for it because that is the price listed on the dust jacket. Art & Love is worth the money and, with the exception of Elmer Sprague’s BROOKLYN PUBLIC MONUMENTS: SCULPTURE FOR CIVIC MEMORY AND CIVIC PRIDE, it is the best art book I own. You can still buy the latter, I think, from Amazon at a bargain basement price.

Art & Love is 176 pages jammed with fine color photos of great art, each photo is accompanied by an equally great poem. With so much to choose from I have decided not to try to pick the best nor even my favorites. Instead, here are two, randomly chosen for no particular reason.

1. A woodblock print titled Midnight: Mother and Sleepy Child. Kitagawa Utamoro, 1753-1806. The accompanying poem is by Nobel Laureate, Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean genius who lived from 1889 to 1957:

The sea its millions of waves
is rocking , divine,
hearing the loving seas,
I’m rocking my child.

The wandering wind in the night
is rocking the field of wheat,
hearing the loving winds,
I’m rocking my child.

God the father his thousands of worlds
is rocking without a sound
Feeling his hand in the shadows,
I’m rocking my child.

…..
…..
2. A black and white photo of the great chess player Emanuel Lasker together with his brother as they peer over chess board. Lasker lived from 1865 to 1936. The poem is by Shakespeare, 1564-1616 and is counted as Sonnet XXX.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
I summon up a remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s a waste:
Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow)
For previous friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long-since cancell’d woe,
And moan the’ expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I now pay as if not paid before,
But if the while I think on thee (dear friend)
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.

Yes, indeed, I borrowed the title for this post from the startling movie directed by Nagisa Oshima. 1977. Now available on DVD for masturbatory function. The dick-sucking scenes were NOT simulated. About the only make-believe scene in the movie is the cutting off of the cock of the film’s hero. I don’t blame him for saying “Hold it! This goes too far.” Was the film pornography or art? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter because, as is often the case, this paragraph is only a digression.

My real theme is Marcel Proust’s indisputable sensual masterpiece which has several titles, the most recent of which is In Search Of Lost Time. In my chutzpah years between ages 16 and 50, I tried to read it at least four times. I was always beaten down because, in truth I was, a pompous ass with no literary skills at all. I knew the book, as most of you do, as Remembrance of Things Past. I call it a masterpiece because I have much greater confidence in the critical judgments of the critics than in my own. In any case, I never did conclude the book was overrated. It was simply too subtle for my Brownsville, Brooklyn, Battered Brain. Joseph Epstein has read the 3000 page million words long novel twice and he wants to read it one more time before he dies. I wish him well because this is a worthwhile endeavor.

The old title, Remembrance of Things Past is lifted from the first Bill Shakespeare, not the Notre Dame superstar football player of the late 1930s called The Bard of Staten Island (his home) but the one who hung out on Avon-on-the Thames. Bill wrote,

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrances of things past
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

If you are interested in paraphrase and analysis, [I am not], try, http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/30detail.html

Who was better, Bill or Marcel? That’s a question you should answer only after you have figured out, “What’s better, oranges or apples?”

There is no more famous piece of oratory than Hamlet’s soliloquy and I guess all of us have heard it at least a dozen times. In truth, having a favorite from among these interpretations is a snobbish activity. Geniuses all. Still, it is almost irresistible fun to rank them. Somehow or other, I am going to resist. They are here presented in no particular order.

Kenneth Branagh – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjEdYsjr-0E

Richard Burton – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsrOXAY1arg

Laurence Olivier – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ks-NbCHUns

Mel Gibson – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdp6dpiK8Ko

Derek Jacobi – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMAFOZFeZ4E

John Gielgud [Skip the long lead-in and please start at the 5 minutes 50 seconds mark] – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCyjXJ9oogg

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To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,
The Oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s Contumely,
The pangs of despised Love, the Law’s delay,
The insolence of Office, and the Spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his Quietus make
With a bare Bodkin? [*] Who would Fardels [**] bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all,
And thus the Native hue of Resolution
Is sicklied o’er, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard their Currents turn awry,
And lose the name of Action. Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia? Nymph, in thy Orisons [***]
Be all my sins remembered.

Hamlet speaks this on his entry to Act 3 scene 1 (known as the ‘nunnery scene’ because of the Hamlet/Ophelia dialogue after the speech) which is when Polonius and Claudius put into effect their plan, hatched in Act 2 scene 2, to watch Hamlet with Ophelia to determine whether, as Polonius thinks, his ‘madness’ springs from “neglected love”. They have planted her where it is his habit to walk and think and concealed themselves to observe the encounter. Until he notices Ophelia at the end of the speech Hamlet thinks he is alone.

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In the first edition of Hamlet in print, the First Quarto, the speech appears as follows (spelling corrected as before):

To be, or not to be, aye there’s the point,
To Die, to sleep, is that all? Aye all:
No, to sleep, to dream, aye marry there it goes,
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damned.
But for this, the joyful hope of this,
Who’d bear the scorns and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor?
The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged,
The taste of hunger, or a tyrant’s reign,
And thousand more calamities besides,
To grunt and sweat under this weary life,
When that he may his full Quietus make,
With a bare bodkin, who would this endure,
But for a hope of something after death?
Which puzzles the brain, and doth confound the sense,
Which makes us rather bear those evils we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Aye that, O this conscience makes cowards of us all,
Lady in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered.

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* Bodkin – a blunt, thick needle with a large eye used esp. for drawing tape or cord through a hem;
a small pointed instrument used to pierce cloth or leather.

ORIGIN Middle English: perhaps of Celtic origin and related to Irish bod,Welsh bidog,Scottish Gaelic biodag ‘dagger.’

** Fardels – archaic
a bundle: a fardel of stories, personages, emotions.

ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French, diminutive of fard, from Arabic farda ‘piece, pack.’

*** Orisons –
archaic; a prayer.

ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French oreison, from Latin oratio(n-) ‘speech’ (see oration) .

Over the last two years or so, three persons (I think) have asked me, “What’s this blog about, Gendin?” To each of them I said words to this effect: “You are a flickendoodle idiot.” In truth, I don’t know what it is about. I like writing it. That’s as close as I can get.

Still, a few shallow, meaningless, hollow, casual, worthless, trivial, frivolous comments may please some of you. The categories show you that I wander wherever and whenever. Of course, my first love is literature. Music is not terribly far behind. As recently as fifteen years ago, philosophy had pride of first place. I don’t know where it ranks today; however, it is still up there. Just behind watching TV. Politics is ridiculous and those who practice it are crass, stupid, and arrogant. Those who are only interested in it are also stupid. That pretty much describes me, too. Even more so. Nothing much I can do about that other than to confess it.

That doesn’t stop me from putting forth my quarter-baked opinions. Go somewhere else if that makes you furious. Why put up with me?

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For the best of reasons – in other words, for no reason at all – yesterday, I began a “literary blog” (I think.) If you missed it, go back. It is a complete “A Modest Proposal”, including an audio version of a guy that only crass, stupid and arrogant people would think of as having less intelligence than the Kenyan. [And stop telling me to quit calling him that. DAMN IT! I know as well as anybody does, he never got closer to Kenya than the south side of Chicago. As for your "threats" to quit reading my junk if I continue annoying you, know once and for all, they are not threats but promises.]

Today, I add a “musical blog.” Lots of great music, so don’t go away. What better than to begin with the first truly indisputably great piece of music? Neither John Denver, Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney can match this. Here we go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPlhKP0nZII&feature=g-vrec
My god, how that WOLFIE could compose!

For those of you who thrive on this sort of trash, here are the names of the different sections:
I. Introitus: Requiem aeternam (choir with soprano solo)
II. Kyrie (choir)
III. Sequentia:
- Dies irae (choir)
- Tuba mirum (solo quartet)
- Rex tremendae majestatis (choir)
- Recordare, Jesu pie (solo quartet)
- Confutatis maledictis (choir)
- Lacrimosa dies illa (choir)
IV. Offertorium:
- Domine Jesu Christe (choir with solo quartet)
- Versus: Hostias et preces (choir)
V. Sanctus & Benedictus:
- Sanctus (choir)
- Benedictus (solo quartet and choir)
VI. Agnus Dei (choir)
VII. Communio:
- Lux aeterna (soprano solo and choir)