It is sobering to look at cartoons at Gaping Void (h/t to Dhoomketu) such as this one

and reflect on this NYT article from the past week, which looks at a Pew Survey on blogging. 12 million bloggers, that too of the American variety only! Holy moly! When will Fortuna smile on this word-dump of mine?

Yesterday, when I was at the public library to borrow holy paper wafers to bookbase (from freebase) on later, I spied a book of photographs in the new arrivals rack. A bright red piano with Moskova written in Cyrillic, irresistible. So I devoured it. I have never been to Russia, unless visiting a place imaginatively though literature counts. Consequently, Andrew Moore's photographs provide another superb tunnel to Russia, Rilke's spiritual homeland. From the quite pared down minimalism of "Ice Fishing, Vologda" to the baroque excess of the famed Amber Room in Tsarskoe Selo, Moore's camera swoops and dives, to hover lovingly and unsentimentally, over the Russian landscape. In this landscape, as can be expected, the human figure and face are completely subsumed, except in glimses such as this one of a family who call an abandonded missile base home. Through this process, Moore's photographs enable the viewer, for a moment, to be the man that Rilke wrote about in "The Book of Hours", thinking of Russia's open spaces:

"Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot."

-trans by Robert Bly

Perhaps, it is also time again for me to watch "Dr. Zhivago". I was in love with Julie Christie's "Lara" for weeks after I first saw this movie on TV many years ago. Oh, trivia note: Julie Christie was born in Assam, India.

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And this talk of beautiful women nicely brings us to this Vanity Fair article on the devilish (ref: Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita") nightclub scene in the capital of, what Granta in a recent issue called "The Wild East", Moscow. A section that particularly caught my eye:

"Karina, from Volgograd, is celebrating her birthday upstairs at the V.I.P. tables ringing the main dance hall. "All these girls come to Moscow," she says, casting her eyes at the sea of women below, many of whom have traveled great distances to hunt oilmen and those who own banks. "They're looking for a guy who will buy them a car and give them $100,000." Karina flicks her blond hair and it kaleidoscopes through all available light. "Not me. I came here for $10 million." In this society, it is mainly the men who practice the commerce. The fairer sex works the angles. It is clear from talking to Karina and others that these girls are not cheap. Instead of fighting for the Western ideal of gender equality, which is not an option, they have become super-feminine, exerting all the power a brutally beautiful woman can bring to bear, which is not inconsiderable.

"I like being taken care of," says Dunia Gronina, who owns a boutique shoe-and-accessory showroom that generates $5 million a year. To a certain mind, Russian women may be laboring under the yoke of patriarchy. But there is plenty of wisdom to go around. "Our moms, they say to us, 'The man is the head of the family, and the woman is the neck,'" Gronina says. "'Where the neck turns, the head looks.'""

The question is what will "feminists" have to say to these women? Are they "morally"/"ideologically" right in deploying what are obviously their strengths to a real situation for their own advantage? Questions. Questions. Tell me what you think.

Yes, yes for the second time, he got to invited by his friend R (three cheers to R!) to see the Robert Spano led Atlanta Symphony Orchestra perform a program of all Beethoven. And the music played was

8th Symphony: not so hot compared to that fundamental of all symphonies, 5th symphony; the final movement was redeeming however.

And the Violin Concerto: the only violin concerto Beethoven wrote, and the soloist who performed was this 18 year old girl genius who blasted Banta out of his chair. At that tender young age, Banta was merely turning into "foongus" from the cream he was supposed to be (because he had just barely survived the IIT-JEE massacre), according to Prof. JNB's (his faculty advisor then) theory of students' moral degradation. But let's get back to Beethoven...

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Being a J.S. Bach man, I personally feel Beethoven is a bit less "spiritual" than Bach is. I realize this is a bit like saying Bach is a hydrogen bomb while Beethoven is an atom bomb, when in any case, in Rumi's words, you have to bend down and kiss the ground to either’s music. My friend T, who is an architect, keeps telling me that this perception of mine may be because Beethoven's music is very architectural. The final Rondo:Allegro movement in the Violin Concerto tonight finally made me see what T was saying all along. Also, two years ago I got to attend, for free, performances of the entire cycle of 16 Beethoven's String Quartets. And even then I observed that Beethoven's music for me is harder to engage with, yes only as a mere listener, than Bach's.

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Now go listen to the great Yehudi Menuhin play the entire Violin Concerto:

1. Allegro ma non troppo 2. Larghetto 3. Rondo (Allegro) with its repeating motif, which is still spinning in my head.

Now as I can't find a performance of the 8th symphony, go listen to another great, Karajan, conduct the first two movements, and the final two movements of the ever magnificent 5th, and weep. You can also compare conducting styles by listening to Toscanini conduct the fourth movement. I also recommend Bejamin Zander's superb, but considered very quirky recording of the 5th; this recording is where I first heard all of the 5th in a frenzied week, over and over, three years ago.