Right now I'm at The Living Room. It is a gorgeous day in Portland. Mt. Hood was showing her stuff off all day long. Tomorrow is supposed to be even prettier. So after work I went home and made it to the Living Room in time for their happy hour that has cheap food and half off a glass of wine. Awesome. And Monday is Music Night because I was planning to see the Parker Posey movie, Broken English, but instead I decided (encouraged by the lovely and talented Megan on the phone from Michigan) to go hear a lecture about music. I'm glad I did.
So I went to Powell's Books to see Alex Ross speak.
I heard he was recently on Fresh Air. He writes about music for The New Yorker and just released a book called "The Rest is Noise" about music in the 20th Century. The place was packed with classical musicians and those who love them. i went because I don't like classical music very much at all and was hoping to learn something that would help me like it. Rebecca is a symphony fan so we go a fair amount and I'm always wishing I had a flask and a gameboy to help me get through it. And listening to him, I'm not sure I'll be rushing out the door for a Shostakovich CD, but it is great to hear a very passionate and knowledgable (has to be both) person talk about their maven-hood and use all the perfect incisive language to talk about it. He blended a lot of talk about historical events of the 20th century against what has been happening in modern composition (romanticism, the nazi thing, cinema, cold war modern, minimalism, now) and now I know just a little more stuff. Monday is also music night because there's music for you, which isn't classical:
M.I.A. - Paper Planes
The Velvet Underground - What Goes On
The Long Blondes - Once and Never Again
The opposite of classical music, by the way, is a pop song about a hockey-playing monkey:
The Zambonis- Hockey Monkey
The Mountain Goats - Cubs in Five
Deerhoof - 81+
1 comment:
Don't worry babe - I already have the Shostakovich in my part of our family's music library. But you still don't have to listen to it if you don't want to.
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