tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79952978812690117792024-11-01T16:04:42.108+05:30Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-82749432751370266982010-09-25T04:01:00.004+05:302012-08-29T02:46:38.617+05:30

To appreciate Michael Jackson’s artistry in THIS IS IT , you only need to compare and contrast it with the “classic” Michael Jackson on earlier tours. With each tour it seems to me his body projects a certain attribute of the elements: water, air, earth, fire.Bad TourOn the Bad Tour, it’s as if he’s walking on water, smooth and fluid. Here’s the famous circle-sliding on BJ from Yokohama 1987 at 5

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-49015847996718902072008-03-26T12:45:00.004+05:302008-03-26T13:11:51.856+05:30

What Fritz Busch said of Strauss is most apt. There is a cheerful hedonism about the man, an invincible materialism. A will to discovery, unabashed curiosity, all texture and sensuousness, totally amoral, totally satiating.Strauss is no Mahler.What can be said of the music has also been said of the man. Strauss was amoral, apolitical, materialistic; all he wanted was that the Nazis leave him

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-21970446826522810242007-12-05T14:46:00.001+05:302008-03-26T13:42:58.387+05:30

Augustine was a great poet of grief. Here's a famous passage from the Confessions:At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death. My native country was a torment to me, and my father's house a strange unhappiness; and whatever I had shared with him, wanting him, became a distracting torture. Mine eyes soughwhat to ant him every where but he was not granted them; and

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-22296724888729090502007-11-30T17:19:00.000+05:302007-12-05T15:27:38.361+05:30

Be absolute for death; either death or lifeShall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:If I do lose thee, I do lose a thingThat none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,Servile to all the skyey influences,That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shunAnd yet runn'st toward him still. Thou art not

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-81696524930573199802007-11-23T12:14:00.000+05:302007-11-27T12:24:13.011+05:30

Flaubert once wrote that he disliked Uncle Tom's Cabin because the author was constantly preaching against slavery."Does one have to make observations about slavery? Depict it; that's enough... An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."Here's an interesting personal essay on Madame

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-49128181931127811052007-11-22T20:42:00.000+05:302007-11-30T17:35:55.994+05:30

"I'm in the mood when I'm so conscious of the frailty of everything earthy,deep down in my heart,how we can hold nothing,how we can hug nothing,how everything slips through our fingers,everything we grasp for dissolves,everything fades like mist or a dream..."

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-17992694113645782362007-11-22T13:56:00.000+05:302007-11-22T14:14:21.571+05:30

The Nicomachean Ethics is a classic. Aristotle tackles the problems of ethics with coherence, elegance, and loads of sprezzatura. Here's a distillation of some important ideas:<!--[if !supportLists]-->1. <!--[endif]-->Ethics is to the good as metaphysics is to being. <!--[if !supportLists]-->2. <!--[endif]-->The good is determined by the end. <!--[if !supportLists]-->3. <!--[

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-72261295722713423782007-11-21T17:55:00.001+05:302007-11-22T14:33:08.821+05:30

It was--by all accounts--a blood bath. And it is--by all accounts--the most stunning battle ever fought.And it was slow slaughter. Little by little, they were drawn into a death trap, an impossible and impotent formation so that they could barely use their arms; slowly squeezed in on all sides by the Spanish, the Numidians, and the Carthaganians, they found, to their horror, the crescent closing

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-79169101597040315372007-11-16T14:20:00.001+05:302007-11-22T14:22:13.181+05:30

T.S. Eliot might have become as famous as a philosopher as he did as a poet. (If you enjoy his poetry, you'd know it really is a kind of sensuous philosophy, especially the Four Quartets.) His first--and I think true--conversion was from philosophy to poetry. His doctoral dissertation, which was never presented, is a testament to that. These ideas are the soil from which much of Eliot’s poetry

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-31472076213221655182007-11-15T17:20:00.000+05:302007-11-30T17:34:48.890+05:30

There is a signature dream-like quality about Sergei Rachmaninoff's works. Take this passage from Ayn Rand, who adored Rachmaninoff:A young photographer … noticed Howard Roark standing alone across the street, at the parapet of the river. He was leaning back, his hands closed over the parapet, hatless, looking up at the building. It was an accidental, unconscious moment. The young photographer

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-47612706997953720462007-11-14T18:17:00.000+05:302007-11-22T14:41:00.504+05:30

It's been called the most famous smoking pic in the world, courtesy of the Best Smoking Sites blog (where you'll find more gorgeous pics of women smoking).In “Put the Blame on Mame”, Rita Hayworth glows like black tungsten. And a consuming gloom pervades her performance, telling a truth rarely told—sexuality is most resonant when tinged with a tone of despair.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-89339305186547335222007-11-12T14:05:00.000+05:302007-11-30T17:30:39.822+05:30

I never was attached to that great sectWhose doctrine is that each one should selectOut of the crowd a mistress or a friendAnd all the rest, though fair and wise, commendTo cold oblivion, though it is in the codeOf modern morals, and the beaten roadWhich these poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,Who travel to their home among the deadBy the broad highway of the world, and soWith one chained

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-75516147435806857432007-11-11T20:38:00.000+05:302007-11-30T17:33:49.165+05:30

“His habitual, frustrated melancholy arose, in part, from the fact that his misfortunes were not serious enough to match his tragic view of life; and he sought relief in intensive historical research, choosing subjects in which divine drama, lacking in his own life, seemed most evident.” (Britannica)

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-56163690938676002822007-11-11T00:06:00.001+05:302007-12-05T15:46:44.087+05:30

In Nancy Milford’s biography, “we watch a life unfold, a life that is specially moving because it is … a representative American version of youth’s touching confidence that it can get away with anything and middle-age’s too-late discovery that it has got away with nothing." (TIME)

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7995297881269011779.post-21070981741166087172007-11-10T23:56:00.000+05:302007-11-22T14:57:00.603+05:30

Dostoyevsky's dreamscapes before Svidrigailov’s suicide in Crime and Punishment are remarkable. First there is the nightmare of the girl of 14:The coffin was covered with white silk and edged with a thick white frill; wreaths of flowers surrounded it on all sides. Among the flowers lay a girl in a white muslin dress, with her arms crossed and pressed on her bosom, as though carved out of marble.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2