Yearly Archives 2018

With his back against the San Francisco traffic
On the bridge’s side that faces towards the jail
Setting out to join a demographic
He hoists his first leg up over the rail

With those first four lines of plaintive scene setting just above a simple piano riff, songwriter Taylor Goldsmith of the folk/rock/indie band Dawes places listeners right there behind yet another Golden Gate Bridge would-be suicide jumper, perhaps reflexively reaching their arms out or emitting an involuntary and horrified, “NooooooDON’T DO IT!”

Talk about the power of words to imagine, to relate, to respond.

I am indebted to reader and friend Randall Chet for bringing “A Little Bit of Everything” to my attention in the Comments section of the inaugural entry in this “Brilliant Songs” series. I had never heard of Dawes nor this song, but I have found it staying with and accompanying me on my walks, my garden-tending, ...

Program selection is an art in itself among symphony conductors, quite apart from everything they do at the podium. But some program choices come easy, which appeared to be the case this past weekend in Santa Rosa Symphony Conductor Bruno Ferrandis’s farewell concert after a robust 12-year tenure.

For his final concert weekend, the last performance of which I was privileged to see and hear on Monday night, he zeroed in on Gustav Mahler’s epic Ninth Symphony, long in duration (80+ minutes, depending on who’s conducting) and large as only an ambitious symphony can be in emotional force.

Mahler’s Ninth, quite uncoincidentally, is about endings, leave-takings, death, a subject it explores on a grand scale before it finally, ever so delicately, like the tiniest moth landing on a slowly swaying blade of grass, comes to rest and silence in a final movement wholly unlike any other in the repertoire.

Ferra...

I’ve been luxuriating, which is to say, “reading slowly,” through a lovely book of letters on the subject of “longing.” The type that one human being has for another, sometimes reciprocated and sometimes, tragically, not. The editor, Eleanor Bass, an academic from King’s College London, has compiled quite the lineup of literary and cultural all-stars here, most of them at their abject, somewhat-miserable-and-desperate but florid selves, with which anyone who has ever hurtled over a cliff of wild desire for another’s acknowledgement, presence, breath, word, smell, arched eyebrow, anything, can surely sympathize.

Charlotte Bronte, Winston Churchill, Henry the VIII, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Piaf, Graham Greene, Marie Curie—all here, plus quite a few more. That includes Richard Burton writing to that woman Liz who so tormented him, then her writing back, joining all the others who...

My tattered, second-hand copy of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” on my shelf now nearly half a century, shows a cover price of 95 cents. One might be tempted to view that as emblematic and perfect for a now hoary mid-20th century period piece, almost quaint in its portrayal of desperate lives crushed by the weight of an outmoded American dream.

But the play is a period piece only in the way that “Othello” and “The Cherry Orchard” are, which is to say, the “period” it encompasses spans pretty much all of human existence, or at least that in which people have wrestled with matters of conscience and communication, purpose, honesty and authenticity.

Of particular note for our own era is its devastating portrayal of the wages of deception.

Willy Loman, the beleaguered salesman of the title, lives nearly his entire life as a matter of expediency...

How much is income inequality baked into human existence as a hard-wired legacy of the Darwinian struggle for survival and its associated desires for security, comfort and joy? Even in modern democratic societies with supposedly flourishing economies and a stated intent to seek justice and the common good, is there any true escape from the radical wealth disparities that persist right in front of us whenever we open our laptops or take a walk beyond our front door?

One of the many conundrums facing those of us in the 1-, 10-, 25-  or even 50% of the population that lives in relative comfort is that however motivated we may feel to be generous and compassionate toward our fellow suffering humans, the plain truth is that all of us have to make hard and often discomfiting decisions in how much of our own comforts—in housing, food, drink, entertainment, future security and other aspects of the good life—we are...