Mark Likes Music

If Gary Webb were writing this post , that's the title he'd come up with. But he's not, so I'll just say that this awesome song is what the Vancouver Canucks are using to start their games :   Fans of the team picked the song by online poll. For some horrible reason Nickelback was in the mix: I think comparing these two songs really tells you everything about why Nickelback sucks.

It's hard to get just how famous Van Cliburn was back in the years after he won the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow (he got a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan, and his first album went platinum)--and what it meant to go into the heart of Soviet territory and show them how to play a signature work by their own legendary composer. His win was Paul Henderson's goal in the 1972 Summit Series, Rocky's pounding of Drago, Reagan's "tear down this wall." I wrote about his performance of Tchaikovsky's first concerto a few years back, and the best obituary I've seen today has been NPR's. Take some time and listen .

Back on February 21, Rochester's  Democrat and Chronicle published this letter to the editor by Gary Webb of Victor: A fine moment in Rochester Americans hockey history took place in the ’70s, when ownership ties were severed with the Vancouver Canucks. As a native Canadian, I am greatly offended by the use of the term “Canuck.” Forget about the Washington Redskins (Feb. 17 editorial, “Retire offensive sports mascots”); after all these years, why hasn’t Vancouver been required to change its extremely disrespectful, dehumanizing name? If I didn't know better, I'd say someone on the editorial staff really doesn't like Gary Webb. The hyperbolic tone and false equivalence (there's no way canuck is as offensive as redskins ), the revisionist historical nugget (did the Americans really break it off with its NHL parent in a fit of righteous indignation?), the vague self-identification as a "native Canadian" (born there or First Nations?), the accusatory rheto...

As recounted by Richard Ben Cramer in What it Takes , his book on the '88 presidential election, it was in the early morning hours of February 9, after a speech at the University of Rochester followed by four hours of questions, that Joe Biden collapsed in his hotel room out by the airport. Miraculously, he survived the night and made it out of Flour City; back in Wilmington, doctors found evidence of a brain aneurysm and rushed him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to operate . In May 1988, Biden was operated on for a second aneurysm . Check out this timeline from The New York Times for more.

In 1977, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer recorded their own, nine-minute blues-jam version of what is probably Aaron Copland's single most famous piece. The cover was a big hit--perhaps also the nadir of art rock--and CBS used it as the opening theme for its Saturday-afternoon sports show, CBS Sports Spectacular , a low-rent version of Wide World of Sports : Outside of the concert hall, this is how most people (at least those of a certain baby-boomer age) have come to know  Fanfare for the Common Man ; that's a shame, because inside of the concert hall, its distinctive, sweeping opening always exhorts goosebumps. Copland wrote the piece on commission in 1942 from Eugene Goosens, who at the time was the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Goosens contacted 18 composers to write fanfares that would be "stirring and significant contributions to the war effort" (this was only shortly after Pearl Harbor). He ended up using nine of them for Cincinnati's ...

In honor of Kurt Cobain's 46th birthday, Gothamist ran some pictures of the Nirvana frontman through some aging software . Here's one set: Based on this, I'd say not only that Cobain would have looked pretty good, but also that I look like hell as a 40-year-old. Seeing Billy Corgan wrestle helps take the sting out of this.

Billy Corgan wrestles; Jeff Ament plays basketball:

I was going to write about Aaron Copland tonight, but instead I'm posting this : Furniture, professional wrestling, Smashing Pumpkins: three things from my (sort of) youth to which I am distinctly ambivalent. They all together quite nicely here. Resistance Pro Wrestling is but one of the many (sort of) business ventures Billy Corgan's been involved with lately. I'm not seeing any tour events posted on  Resistance Pro Wrestling's  site, but there are  a bunch of videos , if you're interested. Here's  an article on its founding and Corgan's involvement . Walter E. Smith is a Chicago-area furniture store that clearly takes pride in its commercials, including this piece of Star Wars promotional fan fiction : Troops , it ain't:

According to an article on the Poverty Reference Bureau website based on the work of William O'Hare, rural poverty is more prevalent than urban poverty; just under 24% of children in rural areas live in poverty (as of 2007), compared with around 18% in urban areas. Rural poverty is also tenacious: ... while many people move in and out of poverty as their circumstances change, spells of poverty last longer for rural children. They are the "forgotten fifth" of poor children because most programs and policies to help the poor are focused on urban areas.  Appalachian Spring , listening to "Flyover State," that farmer ad on the Super Bowl : all help us feel a little bit better about the reality of this situation. They tell us that it's OK, that the grit and ingenuity of these (white, they mostly are white) people will carry the day, that they'll lift themselves out of the rut, carry themselves through hard times.

I started watching Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring tonight: It's every bit a stylized, essentialized view of rural life as this: Or this:  

Right now, Medici.tv is streaming Philip Glass 's brand new The Perfect American live from Teatro Real in Madrid: Medici.tv keeps the recording up for a while, so if you don't see it tonight, you can come back to it later.

On Monday, the Royal Canadian Mint stopped making pennies , and today we find out that we will no longer be able to slide an iron around the Monopoly board. The game piece has been replaced by a cat  (LOL). With its duck dollars, polar bear-emblazoned toonies, and flammable bills , Canada has been messing around with its currency for decades, so the decision on the penny is no real surprise ( it's been planned for a while ). But it's harder to understand the decision to axe the iron. Monopoly's been around forever; the references to real places or things are now lost on players; the game is, in essence, a closed system. Messing with it upsets the balance, destroys the illusion of its timelessness, the sense that when you play, you are in a world all its own: Monopolyland. And to put a cat in there, well that's just stupid.

In 1969, as he was leaving the Boston Symphony Orchestra as its music director, Erich Leinsdorf sat down with Jordan Whitelaw of WGBH for a very long interview. One of the highlights: Leinsdorf's comments on TV and music. Check out part II .

Supercilious and exacting, Erich Leinsdorf had a reputation for being a difficult conductor. He believed that there was an ideal interpretation out there for every piece, and the only way to realize it was to follow the score with exacting precision. The quixotic approach didn't win him many friends. It's partly because of his prickly reputation that this clip of Leinsdorf announcing to a Boston Symphony audience that John F. Kennedy had died is so poignant: WQXR recounted the concert in an article commemorating Leinsdorf's birthday; yesterday, he would have been 100. His tenure at the BSO from 1962-1969 made Leinsdorf famous to US audiences, but he also spent eight seasons with the Rochester Philharmonic. No fan of Smugtown, Leinsdorf nonetheless led them in a handful of recordings on Columbia, including Beethoven's "Eroica," whose funeral march Leinsdorf and the BSO performed on that fateful day in 1963. Random Classics has a transfer of the RPO ver...