Fair warning! These pages are about me. And while I obviously think they're worth reading, and hope you enjoy what you read, your mileage may vary.
Favorite music
I listen to mostly classical music, but among my very favorite popular artists, I list:- Roy Orbison
- Traveling Wilburys
- Beach Boys
- Buster Poindexter
- Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
- Era
- Andrea Bocelli. Discovered by me only recently, I can listen to this tenor for hours. I particularly like his Sogno CD.
- J. S. Bach. Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of Fugue), The Goldberg Variations, The Brandenberg Concertos, and a curious piece called Passacaglia.
- Vivaldi. L'Estro Armonico, or almost any of his concertos.
- Smetana. Ma Vlast. I am fortunate to own a recording of the performance of this work conducted by Kubelik in Prague immediately after the departure of the Russian military forces in 1990. It is perhaps my imagination, but I detect a high level of emotion coming across the CD tracks.
- Ludwig von Beethoven. Symphonic works. Wilhelm Furtwängler did magnificent work with these compositions and some recordings from the 40s and 50s still survive.
- Frédéric Chopin. Virtually anything (mazurkas, nocturnes, waltzes). I will admit to having started to listen to this composer because Ayn Rand wrote highly of his music. She was right about Chopin, and I continue to listen.
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Virtually anything. One of my favorite memories is of a concert series my wife and I attended when we lived in Jacksonville, Florida. The series was marketed with the unfortunate name "Mostly Mozart," but permitted a glorious evening of sound every few weeks. Among my very favorite Mozart works is Le Nozze di Figaro, an adaptation of which I first saw in Prague in 1992, and which I have since listened to and watched several times. Other particular favorites include Eine kleine Nachtmusik and the Jupiter symphony.
Finally, make what you want of it, I enjoy bagpipe music. Some say this liking is the result of having Scottish forebears; others, the result of a subconscious masochistic streak. I don't care. When I hear the pipes, I want to go off somewhere and do great things.
Television
There's too much other interesting stuff to do, people. I will confess, albeit, to watching The X-Files on a more or less consistent basis. (Who am I kidding? I watch every episode and own all the tapes <grin>.) And sometimes there's Rick Steves on PBS, traveling through Europe (sigh). I personally think most of the rest of what's on the air defines "lowest common denominator," but it's a free country. Your mileage may vary.
Editorial
When I hear all the hype regarding the educational capabilities of the Internet, I simply think of the morass that television has become, and shudder. The claim that "more people get their news from" any television network "than from any other source" also scares the daylights out of me.My favorite tale of television news idiocy was the night, back in 1997 when the Russian Mir space station was having a series of problems, where Dan Rather ominously announced to the American public that the crew of cosmonauts that had just arrived to replace the old crew had practiced an "abandon ship" drill that day.
Pretty scary, right?
Had CBS bothered to check, they would have found out that such a drill has been a standard procedure for new crews for the 12 or so years that Mir has been circling the Earth, kind of like the fire drill kids have during their first week of school. Then again, possibly the decision-makers at CBS knew perfectly well that the drill was routine, but needed something to keep those dials set where they were and keep ratings up. Go figure.
As far as the Internet delivering ever-higher levels of "education," even radio (before television) never really lived up to early claims of a promising educational medium. Perhaps, with the Internet, the third time'll be a charm (you need pretty hefty resources to run a radio or television broadcast station, which is not the case with, say, publishing a Web page or a mailing list). But I'm not holding my breath.
(If the above date is a hundred years or so off, your browser's Java interpreter isn't current. If the date is missing completely, your Java capability is turned off or doesn't exist.)
© 1996-2001 by Alex Lane. Send mail to: alex@galexi.com.Home | Who am I? | PalmPilot | Chess | PGP public key | Code & tips | Bookmarks