The Eastside View

THERE ARE PLACES we have visited on various travels that have seemed very special, from a "medicine wheel" at 10,000 feet in Wyomi...

T HE EARLIEST PIECES of mine that I still like to think of, Three Pieces for Piano , were written in October and November, 1963, and Februa...

F ROM THE CODGER in Corvallis comes today an envelope with a number of clippings. He pretends it's his way of cleaning off his desk; I ...

D AMN IT ALL , Richard, you’ve finally got me to read through D.H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy , and finally I see what you see in him — t...

Christmas surprised me with a copy of Death in Spring , a poetic novel by the Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, a writer I'd not heard of ...

B HISHMA'S RECLUSIVE ACQUAINTANCE up in Oregon recently recommended to me James Michener’s novel Caravans , published in 1962 but set i...

W ELL, YES , I seem to have left a few things hanging. I'll try to be concise, and catch them up in turn, starting tonight with comments...

T WO CONCERTS HEARD last Saturday in the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, have given me much to t...

W E DO LIKE TO GO to the theater, Lindsey and I. We see all the plays in Ashland at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival ; we see nearly all the...

I'M THINKING ALOUD, or rather my fingers are, mulling over what on earth I'm going to say for half an hour this evening about my Duc...

HERE WE ARE again, revisiting old work instead of doing new work. I think it's one of the great drawbacks of technological improvements:...

I WROTE ABOUT last Saturday's Futurist Banquet over at Eating Every Day , but find I have more to say about it; and comments more gene...

A MONG THE BLOGS I follow, using Google Reader, one of my favorites — once past the truly wonderful blogs my daughter and granddaughters ma...

T HE TIMES ARE NOT good. The nice Greengrocer in the nearby town of Windsor is closing at the end of the month. It was too good to make it...

I think there's something to be said for the idea that Modernism stands at the beginning of the third of three great ages of human exist...

J UST FOR THE hell of it, and because Marcel Duchamp's final work Given: 1st the waterfall; 2nd the illuminating gas is in the news th...

In 1971 I wrote a piece of music called Handler of Gravity as the centerpiece of a concert of instrumental music from an opera, then in pro...

Kate Walbert: A Short History of Women . New York: Scribner, 2009 A novel about five generations of women, from Dorothy Trevor (married name...

MICHAEL STEINBERG 1929-2009 Michael Steinberg, music critic and musicologist, died yesterday, peacefully a mutual friend tells me, in hospic...

I T IS VERY SAD to hear about the death of Merce Cunningham, surely one of the most remarkable men I ever had the pleasure to meet. What I ...