The Eastside View

“ O N ONE THING , however, all [in Europe at the end of World War II] were agreed—resisters and politicians alike: ' planning '. ...

“ A BOVE ALL, VIOLENCE became part of daily life. The ultimate authority of the modern state has always rested in extremis on its monop...

M Y LOVELY QUEEN , that is: we saw Benoît Jacquot's film Les adieux à la reine yesterday, a very beautiful and quite intelligent film b...

“ T HE ATTRACTION of the notion that the ethical resides in the individual is that it reduces it to a decision-making process or a set of e...

“ A COMPOSER'S IDIOM is his own manner of speaking as creative thinker, original as the sound of his own voice. His content is his esth...

“ Q UENEAU'S MOST QUOTED REMARK is probably his declaration, in the 1937 novel Odile , that the true artist is never inspired—he is alw...

W ONDERFUL, GETTING OLD ; There to the left is Igor Stravinsky at twenty-eight, about the time of Firebird; here I am a few days from seven...

O UR SKINS ISOLATE our bodies from the matter surrounding them, but provide sacks for the uncountable millions of organisms whose unknowabl...

Eastside Road, August 9, 2012— (minor corrections August 10, 2012) R ECENTLY I WROTE about the degree of comfort the producing team has wit...

Mozart: La finta giardiniera (The pretend gardener), K. 196 (1774) Nardo: Gordon Bintner Sandrina: Jennifer Cherest Podestà: Casey Candebat ...

Ashland, Oregon, July 26, 2012— R OMANCE; TRAGEDY; HISTORY ; three of the four major categories of the Shakespeare canon, seen within thirty...

I F YOU'VE VISITED this blog before you're no doubt aware of my long-running infatuation with La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibatai...

Last month I read the massive, discursive, utterly fascinating Thinking the Twentieth Century , an extended conversation in which Timothy Si...

T O THE THEATER three times last week, with results pondered ever since. First of all, were we really at the theater. In fact we were at th...

I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED eccentric violin concertos, by which I mean those somehow standing aside from the standard repertory. Mozart's, of ...

T HE POST OFFICE BUILDING is for sale. The sentence seems absurd, ungrammatical. How could a post office building, ordained and constructed...

W HEN WE BOUGHT our place here on Eastside Road, hence the name of this blog, we found twenty-eight acres, a horse, three sheep, a blue two...

Ojai North at UC Berkeley, June 13, 2012: Janáček: String Quartet 2, "Intimate Letters" Reinbert de Leeuw: Im wunderschönen Monat ...