The Eastside View

I NTO HEALDSBURG THIS MORNING for a little last-minute shopping. A book at Levin & Co., a fine local bookshop. Rolls at the Downtown Ba...

W ITH ONE DAY LEFT in a dying year, I re-read notes in the margin of Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Penguin Books, 20...

A T THE END OF THE YEAR I look back over the books read, the theater seen, the meals eaten, the travels made in the last twelve months. The...

T O FINISH THIS LONG LOOK at Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise : Part Three: 1945-2000 The Rest is Noise is formally symmetrical: the third an...

A PARTICULARLY MOVING ACCOUNT of the funeral of Karlheinz Stockhausen by the Chicago-born, francophone, Lithuanian-allied painter, poet,...

C ONTINUING A LOOK at Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise : Part Two: 1933-1945 Ross centers his survey of the music of the 20th century on three...

DANIEL WOLF, over at his blog Renewable Music , had a recent post on the lack of consensus as to what is essential to know about musical st...

Mary Isaak transplanting fraises des bois F OR YEARS WE USED TO VISIT Mary Isaak every week during strawberry season. She was a colorful wo...

S OME TIME AGO , in 1992, I reviewed a number of books that had then recently appeared on the always vexing subject of the German composer K...

F OR A NUMBER OF YEARS I've been reading the books of Raymond Queneau , the French writer -- "novelist" and "poet"...

L. THINKS THE RECIPE came originally from Elizabeth David, perhaps The Mediterranean Cookbook . I don't know: we've made this for ...

H AVING RECENTLY MOVED TO A FASTER computer — iMac, 2 gHz — I've decided to start retooling my website . And having re-read, a couple ...

K ARLHEINZ S TOCKHAUSEN DIED a few days ago, December 5; a memorial booklet on his website includes the composer's own summary of his...

J ON CARROLL gets it wrong, I think, when he writes (here) about the use of GPS devices on the road. I suppose he's funny; but he'...

W HAT BAD MUSIC DO YOU LISTEN TO? Driving down to Glendale that was the question: What bad music do you like to listen to? It's a provoc...

B ACK HOME AGAIN from a quick trip to Portland, there to eat turkey, and another to Glendale, there to see plays. A Noise Within , the Glen...

S O, THEN, NOTHING COMPLICATED : A can of sardines; a nice red onion quartered and sliced thin, a little olive oil on the bread, then the fi...

I ' VE WRITTEN HERE about the books of Geert Mak, a Dutch journalist-historian who's produced an important sequence of studies of s...

B OOKS RECENTLY READ , and awaiting notes here: Geert Mak: In Europe: travels through the twentieth century Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise: li...

T O S AN F RANCISCO THE OTHER NIGHT , there to see, for the first time in just short of fifty years, Tennessee Williams's play Camin...