I heard my most memorable account of Joseph Stalin while sitting in the pews of a Presbyterian church. I was near late adolescence, young enough to be bored by a church service but old enough to take intermittent interest.
For better and worse, travel has an emotional component. We see better when we do it, until fatigue and familiarity roll in like fog.
Her early life was a blur, with all those moves—fleeing to safety, getting bombed, getting evacuated, being forced to Berlin, touring, Paris, New York. Her music was the home she carried with her.
Today’s pianist, Daniel Adam Maltz, is performing not on a big glossy piano but on the instrument Mozart wrote for: the elegant little Viennese fortepiano.
Rebellious eccentrics, these artists were brave in their art and, once they had to be, brave in reality. Had they been able to stay, safe and adored, in Paris, they would have remained remote to us, wrapped in mystique. In exile, they were vulnerable.
Roadkill resides at the end of the spectrum where our adoration for animals ends and nuisance begins.
We forget to ask what our own words are bringing into existence.
Alas, it is not the music that is the relic but Wenner himself.
All religions should make room for the grown-ups to move toward a more open, meditative, inclusive, deconstructed experience. Maybe we could even hold on to what is best about religion if each denomination stopped insisting it possessed the only truth.
The deeper problem is not the predatory trickery of planned obsolescence or the high cost of labor in the United States. and the low cost of manufacturing overseas. It is not the closure of that sweet, fusty shop or the stubbornly slow pace of the honey-do list. It is my own impatience, my terror of taking something apart and finding that this half-hour task will take me two weeks.