2013 — 27 August: Tuesday
I don't know about anyone else, but I certainly enjoyed much of the BBC's Pink Floyd celebratory stuff on last night's radio and hope to fit in the Tom Stoppard play "real soon now". Though how it can be 40 years since "Dark Side" first came out on vinyl (and I bought my first CD of it in September 1984, followed by the 20th anniversary edition [it seems] just a short time ago) profoundly puzzles me. It was (inevitably) also the first PF album I ever played to an even more awesome Christa Becker1 in the vicarage in Old Windsor, in 1974.
She had excellent taste :-)
Meanwhile, that replacement...
... Herbert Klein book is already on its way. I assume there was no Bank Holiday in Atlanta yesterday. Time for some breakfast on this fine, but cool, sunny morning.
I wholeheartedly recommend this 5-minute spoof video to anyone who enjoyed the recent "remake" of House of Cards as much as I did.
I blame Rob Cowan
After all, if he hadn't played Stravinsky's "Symphony of Psalms" with Simon Preston conducting the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, then there's a good chance I wouldn't have toddled over to my precarious stack of classical CDs. There to (not) find the LSO variant, conducted by Bernstein, that my (clearly lying) database assures me I have (alongside three other performances on cassette, but that's a different story). I'm not letting the matter rest there, of course, and have temporarily cracked open the 22-CD box set I mentioned recently.
But where's my Bernstein? Please don't tell me there's an overlooked carton (or two) of CDs still up in the loft! [Pause] Mystery solved, but only after browsing the third of four pages of Amazon listings of performances. My (at the time) cheap and cheerful "Catulli Carmina"...
... has the Bernstein tucked away on it as a filler. And had, of course, therefore been physically placed among the Carl Orff CDs rather than the Stravinsky stack. Good result. There are two used copies currently on offer at 1p less than £20 by the way. If you only know Orff's "Carmina Burana" do yourself a favour! Mind you, the English translation of Act III Scene 9 renders 'door' oddly in the accompanying notes... I doubt that
Let no one bar the dood today
is quite what the poet had in mind when describing the upcoming tryst. It could have been "dude", I suppose. Though that's a stretch.
Given...
... the current (hot) forecast, it's looking like a walk on Thursday. Still, that gives me time to post a letter (my first in yonks), and grab some supplies, which is No Bad Thing. Man cannot walk on bread alone.
The Bard...
... meets Dr Seuss? I'm not quite sure what my Shakespeare-enthusiast chum would have to say about this... although I know he's fully aware of both authors. But it made me laugh. (Link.)
Having just — eventually — refreshed the level of one of my music players (WinAmp) I'm now able to deduce that "Win8 improvements" in this case means, "won't install unless you run as Administrator". They could have mentioned that a bit sooner.