bleeding and leeching

So this is exactly what makes us go all spikey about health care reform, especially when we're talking to people who have lived their entire lives in stable jobs with benefits and can't wrap their heads around the concept of The Working Poor. 

the things you get to keep

When I used to stand around in the record store, trying to decide between Klemperer Conducts Wagner and Plastic Surgery Disasters, my long-suffering mother would roll her eyes and say "Live a little!". (She did that a lot, and she was buying.) Then she would patiently explain that music is something you will always have, so money spent on it is never wasted.

So to prove Ma's thesis in a way she may not have imagined, here's an article from the Guardian on the issue of music and dementia, and here's an interesting project in the US which gives people something useful to do with their old iPods that's way better than packing them off to a landfill in West Africa.

Whatever they find to put on mine, they are going to need the 160G one...

lenten entertainments

The next free audio webcast from the Met is Monday's L'Elisir d'amore, with Damrau, Florez, Kwiecien and Corbelli, 7:30pm ET at the usual place.

The grapevine also says that Violetta Urmana is out for Saturday's Met Aida, so sub Latonia Moore will be making her Met debut. Read Anthony Tommasini's review of her in the 2000 Met Council Auditions concert here. (Not that she hasn't done other stuff since then.)

  

Last Saturday, while the rest of the world was distracted with the Ernani HDcast, Renée Fleming was testing out her Ariadne in the provinces (Baden-Baden), with Sophie Koch as the Komponist, Jane Archibald as Zerbinetta, and Robert Dean Smith, who survived Bacchus pretty well.  Up on medici.tv for free another month or so, I b'lieve.

The next fun thing up on medici.tv will be the Harmonic Convergence, or Match Made in Hell, or both, of Robert Wilson and Pelléas et Mélisande on March 16th at 1:30pm ET. It's likely I'll be on some fabulous painkillers that day, which can only enhance the experience.

Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report

Anthony Tommasini in the NYT thinks Jonathan Miller's CDC-approved Traviata at neo-NYCO shows some signs of life. James Jorden in the NY Post thinks it should get its affairs in order.

http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/details.asp?pid=8438

Es war einmal...

As the Humanities are further marginalized in our increasingly market-driven semblance of a culture, and as defenses of what remains continue to be anæmic and dismissable by the Powers That Be, it's heartening to have occasional things like this published where people not in the choir can see them. 

Then there's this, which I find fantastically intriguing after having tangled for six months with the Medical Industrial Complex and its inability to understand that the practice of medicine is fundamentally narrative-driven. Needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this.  Or, in the common parlance, Duh.

And just look at all the George Eliot on that reading list. What, you mean women actually wrote about domestic violence and substance abuse before 1970? There's a shock. Next week: joblessness, poverty and heroin addiction with Mrs. Gaskell.