A few weeks ago, I retired the old black Nano, replacing it with an even sleeker new 16G model. All the playlists that were on the old unit were loaded onto the new one, and at that very moment the friend to whom I was thinking of giving the retired Nano — loaded with operas for her —  called me up and invited me to lunch.

Now, my friend happens to have completely sidestepped the age of the CD. She decided to stop her technological advance at cassette tapes. We all shook our heads, but there was nothing for it — she refused to take one of our extra CD players.

But she never had any time to work up a case against iPods or Nanos, so I was able to take her by surprise, with my old black number and a nice Klipsch iGroove to go with it.

We were having a glass of wine before lunch, I insisting that my friend would master the controls of the Nano in no time, she just as sure that she’d never figure it out — but quite pleased with the noise that Un Ballo in Maschera was making in the other room. Suddenly I found that I wasn’t paying attention to our conversation. “Amelia doesn’t appear in Act I, does she?” But we went on talking.

It was only when she left the room to put lunch on the table that I went to take a look at the Nano. OMG! I’d forgotten to disable the shuffle option!

That’s what both the old and new black Nanos were dedicated to: playlists of jazz, Broadway, fado, lieder, opera arias, you name it. The one thing all the lists had in common is that they were meant to be shuffled.

Not so good with, say, the Ring cycle — also on the reloaded unit.

Just trying to imagine how I would have solved this problem over the phone, hours later and still full of my good deeds, still brings a cold sweat to my brow.

¶ Matins: It’s time for Larry Summers to be deported to Australia. Somewhere! Hiring him in any capacity is to date the president’s biggest boo-boo. As Frank Rich reminds us, “Summers worked for a secretive hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, after he was pushed out of Harvard’s presidency at the bubble’s height.”

¶ Lauds: Looking for an old house with new wiring, preferably something truly Palladian? Look no farther. (via Things Magazine)

¶ Prime: Dio mio! Thomas Meglioranza will be singing in New York in June — Beethoven at Mannes. Must I wait to buy tickets at the door?

¶ Tierce: Michael Cooper reports on the stimulus perplex from Houston:

But to ensure that the money is spent quickly, the law leaves decisions of how to spend some $27.5 billion in transportation money up to the states — and quite a few are using their shares to build new and wider roads that will spur development away from their most populous centers.

¶ Sext: Today, I want to share with you a masterpiece of sixth-grade humor. N!S!F!W!

¶ Nones: France rethinks its version of colorblindness.

¶ Vespers: And, in more news from France, Benjamin Ivry reports on the inevitable dustup concerning the publication of Roland Barthes’s diaries.

¶ Compline: The personal-responsibility folks won’t see a problem with this, but Pablo Torre reports, at Sports Illustrated Vault, that “within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke. (via Morning News)

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As we were getting going this morning, the phrase, “it’s never too late”  came up, and Kathleen began singing the song of that name from The Boyfriend. “Where does vodeo-do  come from?” she asked. I had no idea, but I really wanted to hear the song.

“If they say I’m too old for you — ”
” — Then I should answer, ‘Why, sir?
One never drinks the wine that’s new;
The old wine tastes much nicer!'”

I’ve always loved this song, but I’ve never really agreed with its premise. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with sexy sexagenarians. But quant à moi, I was a natural octogenarian when I was octeen. Which means that, for me, unfortunately, sex (as distinct, of course, from love) has always been naughty.

Where does “vodeo-do” come from? I tried Google; the results were frightening.

One of my favorite musicals is Happy Hunting. This Ethel Merman vehicle bombed-big time — so big, that Merman wouldn’t let Stephen Sondheim write the music for Gypsy, because he was as unknown as Matt Dubey and Harold Karr, the two first-timers who created Happy Hunting. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Of course, if it had been up to me, Happy Hunting would be as well known as My Fair Lady.

We belong to a mutual
Admiration society
My baby and me.

(How else to explain Fossil Darling?) The musical is a conceit built on the framework of the royal wedding of Princess Grace &c. It is possibly even preppier than Mame. Except for the parts with Fernando Lamas — but maybe even then, for, in the Fifties, Spanish was very preppy (think Franco!). Lamentation à l’Américaine:

We’re
Up to here
With the wedding
Of the year
Up to here
With the wedding
Of the year.

“Give me a nice juicy messy divorce!” Mind you, I was about ten years old when I got my paws on this LP, which one of my parents — I’ve never figured out which — bought after or perhaps even before seeing the show. Original Cast Recordings had a way of materializing in our sweet Bronxville home (16 miles north of Times Square!). And I would listen to anything. Even Gerald McBoing Boing. Just imagine what I made of the following:

Even during our honeymoon
He continued to be polite,
Just as proper as he could be —
Then a year from our wedding night,  
Came a little tap
Tiny rap
On the door of my bedroom
“Mr Linvingston, I presume.”

Imagine Ethel Merman not knowing who might be walking into her bridal suite.

A simple mnemonic (I just made it up): Turandot loves Camelot; she’d never show in Tuckahoe. (more…)

¶ Matins: Between this and this: I just had one of my big ideas: Libraries in France are bookstores. (Bibliothèques are libraries, but never mind.) What if we altered the English definition, and publicly funded small bookshops?

¶ Lauds: The world’s “largest concert“: the Hamburg State Orchestra plays Brahms — all over Hamburg.

¶ Prime: It took me forever to realize what Formenwandlungen der &-Zeichen means. “&-Zeichen” is the (rather klutzy) German term for “ampersand.”

¶ Tierce: The good news is also the bad news: Orient-Express Hotels wants to back out of a deal with the New York Public Library that may leave the Donnell Library building standing.

¶ Sext:  Keith McNally, owner of Balthasar and other eateries, would like to swat the bloggers who are swarming around his latest venture (which doesn’t open until next week), Minetta Tavern. Buzz, buzz!  

¶ Nones: Amazing news: “Arrest warrant issued for Sudan leader.”

¶ Vespers: Maud Newton reconnects with Katherine Anne Porter, who has just appeared in the Library of America.

¶ Compline: This is a joke, right? The United Transportation Union objects to surveillance cameras in railroad engine cabs; recommends staffing same with two people.

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¶ Matins: Although I haven’t parsed President Obama’s joint-session speech, I hail his fundamental premise:

Now is the time to act boldly and wisely — to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity. Now is the time to jumpstart job creation, re-start lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down. That is what my economic agenda is designed to do, and that is what I’d like to talk to you about tonight.

It’s an agenda that begins with jobs.

¶ Lauds: Having heard Sondra Radvanovsky sing “D’amor sull’ali rosee” tonight, “I can die,” as Wagner said after writing Tannhäuser. Spinning miraculous pianissimi may not be the singer’s strongest suit — hey, she’s not bad at it, by any means — but her legato is some kind of national treasure, seamlessly winding through a bewitchment of tones and registers in a perfect marriage of judgment and control. 

¶ Prime: Scout captures an installation on West 23rd. Man jumps from ledge!

¶ Tierce: The L train, which connects Chelsea with Canarsie in the only way imaginable — literally — will be operated by computer from now on. Whatever that means.

¶ Sext: It’s interesting that Farhad Manjoo looks back specifically at 1996 in his “Jurassic Web” piece at Slate. That’s when I logged on.

¶ Nones: How about abandoning the War on Drugs and diverting those resources to a War on Weapons. We might even be able to make a difference. How many Monzer al-Kassars can there be?

¶ Vespers: Michiko Kakutani hates Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

Indeed, the nearly 1,000-page-long novel reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade…

¶ Compline: Watch for Dating For (Broke) Dummies. “Market for Romance Goes From Bullish to Sheepish.”

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¶ Matins: For what it’s worth, I support the mortgage bailout that President Obama is expected to unveil in Phoenix later today. Helping those who can’t afford to pay their mortgages is the right thing to do. Helping homeowners whose mortgages are simply “underwater” — worth more than the home’s likely sales price — is a different problem that ought to be addressed in some other way, and not right now.

¶ Lauds: The whole town’s talking — or so it seems — about Trovatore at the Metropolitan Opera, with the one (1) singer who has ever given me pleasure in an opera house, Sondra Radvanovsky. Steve Smith gave the show such an enthusiastic review that I had to get a ticket. 

¶ Prime:  No Sh*t, Please; We’re British: R*tard Rids Reptile Researcher’s Reserves of Reclusive Retrosaur’s Refuse. Okay, I made up “retrosaur.” But it’s pretty cool as neologisms go, don’t you think? In case you’re wondering what it means, a “retrosaur” is a lizard that everyone thought was extinct — which is what this exceedingly English story is all about.  (via Brainiac)

¶ Tierce: More good news from Washington: stepped-up merger scrutiny, and this time with brains. Rob Cox reports.

But there is a growing movement in the antitrust community to challenge this rational choice theory of neoclassical economics in favor of behavioral economics. Under this school of thought — loudly espoused by Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers — economists examine how real people actually make decisions.

Applying behavioral economics to antitrust “risks expanding the scope of agency review to transactions that were previously unassailable,” two lawyers with Skadden Arps, Neal R. Stoll and Shepard Goldfein, wrote in The New York Law Journal last month. It would, among other changes, require the retention of psychologists alongside the economists, marketers and industry experts currently reviewing deals.

¶ Sext: Does anyone remember Lady Fanny of Omaha? (The great Barbara Harris, in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.) Now we have Robert Allen Stanford, Texan financier and alleged swindler, dubbed Sir Allen by the government of Antigua in gratitude for his benefactions, which ranged from cleaning up the state balance sheets to sponsoring a cricket league.  

In Texas, Robert Allen Stanford was just another wealthy financier.

But in the breezy money haven of Antigua, he was lord of an influential financial fief, decorated with a knighthood, courted by government officials and basking in the spotlight of sports and charity events on which he generously showered his fortune.

I know that it’s silly, but I already think of him as “Sir Allen of Obama.”

¶ Nones: The crucifix crisis has flared up in Italy again. A teacher has been sacked for removing the (non-compulsory) crucifix from his classroom, and the supreme court has let stand the conviction of  Jewish judge who refused to serve in a courtroom adorned with a cross.

¶ Vespers: In a classic case of the deadly short-circuiting that can occur when book publishers have other interests — as, being components in media empires these days, they all do — Brian, at Survival of the Book, comments on Barry Ritholtz’s problems with McGraw-Hill, which didn’t like what he had to say about Standard & Poor’s, a McGraw-Hill property.

It’s also interesting to note yet another example of an author going right online with his case, and with a whole lot of material, to prove his innocence. On this post, he includes revised versions of pieces of the manuscript and footnotes, all of which he has every right to post. He’s making the case the he himself did not expose this story to the media but now that it’s out there, he can explain himself and his position as an author at a massive corporate publisher. As more such cases emerge and more authors speak out and get attention for it, perhaps publishers will work more in partnership with authors rather than seeing them as disposable manufacturers churning out products they depend on. As authors are expected to do more marketing, more publicity, more leg work all around on behalf of their books, then publishers must also know that they are armed with tools to broadcast their complaints.

¶ Compline: Now, this is fun: in a new Pew poll, respondents were asked if they were happy where they lived or if they’d like to move.

Seven-in-ten rural men are content where they are, compared with just half of rural women.

Hmmm . . . how mysterious! (via Snarkmarket)

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¶ Matins: So manypeople still don’t get it: the important thing right now is to do something, and then, maybe, something else. Waiting to get it right is the only guarantee of disaster. The Obama/Geithner plan faces a “brutally negative” response.

¶ Lauds: I read it at Classical Convert first: Muzak has declared bankruptcy.

¶ Prime: So, you’re going through the attic, convinced that it’s full of treasures. Sadly, you’re probably in the The Trough of No Value. Saving those “collectibles” always requires more patience than you think it will. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Now that the Obama Administration is re-directing American focus to Afghanistan, the sub-sovereign creation of British mapmakers is metastatsizing from a sorry mess to the new Vietnam. Uh-oh!

The attacks in the capital underlined the severity of the challenge facing American policy-makers who have declared the war in Afghanistan a high priority for the new administration in Washington and who plan to almost double American troop levels with the deployment of some 30,000 additional soldiers.

¶ Sext: What happened at The New School? Put it another way: why does Bob Kerrey stay on as President when he is so massively unpopular with the faculty? What is he thinking?

¶ Nones: Trouble in Paradise Azerbaijan. For the first time since 1994, a “high-ranking” Azerbaijani military officer, Air Force leader Lt-Gen Rail Rzayev has been shot dead.

¶ Vespers: Steven Moore reviews Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of Donald Barthelme, whose student Daugherty was in the Eighties: Hiding Man. (via Emdashes) 

¶ Compline: Something very interesting and beautiful to look at before you go to bed: Scintillation, a short film by Xavier Chassaing (at Snarkmarket).

(more…)

Tim Blanning’s The Triumph of Music is a history about music. No theory required — none on offer! Rather, a social history of music in the West. And a very readable history it is!

I learned almost nothing from this book in the way of facts, but the facts that I know where provocatively rearranged and presented from the other end, as it were, of the telescope.

By the way, Mr Blanning’s title is not, you will note, The Triumph of Good Music.

¶ Matins: Despite everything, Wall Street bonuses for 2008 totaled $18.4 billion — thank goodness!

¶ Lauds: Ian McDiarmid’s adaptation of Andrew O’Hagen’s novel, Be Near Me, opens at the Donmar Warehouse to warm if cautious praise from Charles Spencer.

¶ Prime: The site has a few strange navigational problems, but the Curated David Foster Wallace Dictionary might be just what you’re looking for in the Word-For-the-Day line. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Can anyone tell me the bottom line on the Blackwater story in today’s Times? The headline, “Iraq Won’t Grant Blackwater a License,” must mean that Blackwater will not be allowed to provide security services within Iraq, right? Not if you keep reading.

¶ Sext: Here’s a project for Google Maps: mowing the lawn.

¶ Nones: The best part of this story — “Putin’s Grasp of Energy Drives Russian Agenda“  — comes at the end.

As far back as 1997, while serving as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Mr. Putin earned a graduate degree in economics, writing his thesis on the economics of natural resources.

But —

¶ Vespers: Is Allen Bennett the new John Updike? He’s, er, two years younger. And quite as fluently prolific, if as a man of the theatre rather than as a novelist. Razia Iqbal talks about meeting him, but the interview is nowhere to be found.

¶ Compline: We were neither of us in the mood — at all. But we had to go, in that grown-up way that has nothing to do with obligation. So we got dressed and went. And of course the evening was unforgettable: Steve Ross at the Oak Room.

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One of the first playlists that I created was effectively a dump of all the baroque music that I had in my CD library. I avoided some of the greatest hits — the Water Music, the Brandenburg Concertos — and I excluded vocal music as well. Without scraping every corner of the apartment for miscellaneous discs, I was able to amass a list that would play for 2.8 days. That’s a lot of wallpaper.

Very carefully, I moved the music around. I didn’t want to listen to all twelve of Corelli’s Concerti Grossi in a row, followed by the three discs of Scott Ross’s Scarlatti Anthology. It took forever, and I didn’t do a very good job. But the result was — not tedious. Did I mention the six-CD set of Handel’s chamber music? There are only so many consecutive flute sonatas that I can listen to without going barkers.

Being the proselytizer for pleasure that I am, I persuaded LXIV to permit me to lend him the Nano with the baroque music on it, together with the Logitech dock/speaker set that I bought for travel. I have to upgrade it, because it conks out if the music is too quiet. The problem never arises with baroque music, all of which sounds just as loud as everything else, but Ravel’s Bolero stops it every time. Ten minutes go by, and I’m wondering why the music stopped. What now? Oh, that.

As I thought, LXIV was pleased to have the cornucopia of baroque music add a congenial note to the atmosphere of his flat. “It’s playing when I go to sleep,” he said, “and it’s still playing when I wake up.” (Now, for my part, I cannot fall asleep if music is playing.) So far so good. The thing was, the baroque music was loaded onto the one Nano that I’d bought directly from Apple. It was fire-engine red, and it had my initials stamped on the back. I thought I’d just load the playlist onto another Nano — the pink one, say — and exchange it with LXIV.

That’s when I discovered that I had done all my careful massaging of the baroque playlist on the red Nano itself. Guess what? You can’t download a playlist from a Nano. Not even if your hard drive contains all the same MP3 files! Are we stupid yet? (Why people extol Apple as they do, I’ll never understand.)

LXIV lived with the pink Nano for about a week. He never complained, but he didn’t have to. I was haunted by guilt. Having printed the playlist ( you can do that, at least), I exchanged the Nanos once again. And I am still, about a month later, reconstructing the baroque playlist, this time on a hard drive. Unfortunately, my standards have gone up dramatically, so the going is very slow. And of course there are the inevitable improvements…

It occurred to me that one of these improvements ought to be the overture, as it were; the first piece of music on the playlist. And what ought that to be? What else but Mouret’s famous Rondeau? Famous, that is, from years and years and years of use by Masterpiece Theatre.

As I don’t have a CD with the Mouret on it, I went to Amazon, where I was quickly seduced into downloading the item for the proverbial $0.99. There’s a first time for everything, and my first time with Amazon downloads included losing the Mouret somewhere in my computer. It certainly wasn’t appearing in iTunes! I was so exasperated that I had to do three other technical things before I could come back and thimk [sic!]about what to. Using ancient techniques learned in the days of Windows File Manager, I unearthed the file and put it where it belonged.

And, boy, does it sound cheesy! I couldn’t like it more.

Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Wolfgang Amadé Mozart to you), 27 January 1756 — 5 December 1791.

¶ Matins: Setting aside, for the nonce, dreams of Camelot restored, let us peer deeper into history, with Russell Baker as our guide.

The blooming of literature about the Hundred Days probably has a lot to do with Barack Obama’s assuming the presidency at a moment of economic breakdown just as Roosevelt did seventy-six years ago. Parallels like this are hard for historians and journalists to resist. Could history be repeating itself? It never does, of course. Still, there are similarities too interesting to be discarded without a glance.

¶ Lauds: Carnegie Hall announces its first “recessional” season.
The Kronos Quartet, China, Papa Haydn, Louis Andriessen, and a Polish double bill: the Chopin bicentennial and a Szymanowski festival. Interesting!

¶ Prime: A young man who used to live in Chinatown — I knew him then — has relocated to a great university in the West, where the ghosts of Mmes Child and Fisher have inspired him (apparently) to take up cooking. I shall refer to him as “Deipnosophistos” — the Learned Banqueter — in honor of his new Web log, which demonstrates that classics scholars may indeed know more about leftovers than the rest of us. We’ll call him “Deep” for short.

¶ Tierce: Will Richard Parsons be as good for Citigroup as he was for TimeWarner? Let’s hope so. For starters, he looks like the best possible choice.

¶ Sext: Alexander Chee’s extensive quotation from the Goncourt diaries at Koreanish today makes me resolve to be a better person by remembering who the hell Princesse Mathilde was!

¶ Nones: Inevitable, I suppose: In the wake of the success of Slumdog Millionaire, an organization called Realty Tours & Travel offers 4½ hour, £12 tours of Dharavi, “the biggest slum in Asia,” on the north side of Mumbai. Nigel Richardson reports in the Telegraph.  

¶ Vespers: Yet another story about changes in publishing, this one, augustly, from Time.

¶ Compline: Can you believe it? They’re still arguing about textbook evolution in Texas.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Let’s hear it for the Sexiest Couple Alive. Are. They. Not?

¶ Lauds: Have you heard/heard of George Li yet? He’s the eleven year-old piano virtuoso whom regular reader JKM heard play the Saint-Saëns Second Piano Concerto just the other day.

¶ Prime: George Snyder poses the question that has enchained Americans since the assasination of JFK: Where Were You?

¶ Tierce: I have never envied the great and the good who are expected to sit outside in the January freeze to observe the a new president’s swearing-in. They’re paying the price of being the great and the good.

At least their amenities are seen to, the comforts that make civil life civil. Not so the man in the street who shows up for the ceremony — or, in the case of yesterday’s Inauguration, the millions in the mall. David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti report: “For Some in Crowd, a Day of Cold and Confusion.”

¶ Sext: The cutups at Macmillan’s Digital Marketing department — let’s hope that they’ve all still got jobs — prepared a tongue-in-cheek video clip to show you how books come into being in the modern world.

¶ Nones: President Obama’s Inauguration Speech was partly edited in China.

China Central Television, or CCTV, the main state-run network, broadcast the speech live until the moment President Obama mentioned “communism” in a line about the defeat of ideologies considered anathema to Americans. After the off-screen translator said “communism” in Chinese, the audio faded out even as Mr. Obama’s lips continued to move.

¶ Vespers: I’ve just joined Library Thing, paid lifetime membership and all! How hard can it be to convert my ReaderWare data to Library Thing? I’m not asking yet!

¶ Compline: Food for Thought: How to attract more women into Geek Science. They’re asking Obama to take care of this? If you ask me, Natalie Angier’s piece is looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Among the phrases that we’re going to retire for at least a few years, alongside “personal responsibility,” let’s hope that “ownership society” finds a place. It was nothing but code for the enrichment of mortgagebaggers.

Who, like the viruses that they so closely resemble, have found a new line of weakness.

¶ Lauds: At dinner tonight, Kathleen asked me if I’d known about Peanuts and the Beethoven scores. Well, er, yes! But so what? I was never a Peanuts fan. Especially when I was a kid.

¶ Prime: Here is a blog — The Art of Manliness — that I came across during the recent Weblog beauty pageant. I agree with almost everything it says, until author Brett McKay assumes that I know what to do with duct tape. Which, in all fairness, I must confess that he doesn’t. (He might try to teach me, though.)

¶ Tierce: Here’s a story that took a while to appear, at least on my radar screen: How much did she know, when did she know it, and how much is hers? The Ruth Madoff Story. (Part 1/1000)

¶ Sext: Gail Collins says it all in a few words:

I think I speak for the entire nation when I say that the way this transition has been dragging on, even yesterday does not seem like yesterday. And the last time George W. Bush did not factor into our lives feels like around 1066.

¶ Nones: Can this really be happening (Good News Department!)? A clip from BBC World News: three-ton T-walls are coming down in Iraq, no longer needed.

¶ Vespers: No sooner do I begin to digest the news that a new Kate Christensen novel is on the way than I open Harper’s and find a story by Joseph O’Neill!

¶ Compline: Here’s hoping that the pilots and crew of US Air Flight 1549, captained by C B “Sully” Sullenberger, will be able to honor the city with a tickertape parade.

(more…)

I’ve been meaning to write about my Nano, but I couldn’t settle on an image for Nano Notes. Everything is marketing these days; until you have the branding, you might as well just stay in bed. Once I gave the matter some thought, I realized that I did not want to take pictures of actual Nanos. Screenshots of my iTunes interface would be far more communicative.

By “my Nano,” of course, I mean: the way that my Nano(s), iTunes and a set of three Klipsch RoomGrooves have restored my Music Listening settings to about 1976, when there was always music playing. And the music was always different. In 1976, I was still in my twenties, and I thought nothing of getting off my duff to put a new LP on the turntable. (Not to mention getting off my duff to turn the LP over.)

I got older and lazier, but I kept on buying CDs. Many of them have been listened to only once, if at all. How often can anyone but a music professional be expected to be seized by the desire (and desire is very important with music, as everyone outside the world of classical music is well aware) to hear a string quartet by Ernst von Dohnanyi? It ain’t gonna happen! “My Nano” allows me to decide ahead of the time that, whether or not I’m in the mood, I’d better hear some Dohnanyi. Because music is like broccoli only when it’s unknown. Listen to something a few times, and you’ll either get to like it or you’ll hate it. Listen to things that you hate a few more times, and you’ll get fond of hating them.

The great cognitive tickle is that I’m actually surprised when the sound of Dohnanyi (or whomever) suddenly fills the room.* By the time I listen to one of my twelve-hour playliststs, a day or so may have gone by. I don’t think that senility has hit yet, but I’m enjoying finding uses for my “ability” to forget things. There is so much information in my life that I can’t remember what I did yesterday. (Well, there’s so much more important information.)

Bemused readers may wonder why, if I don’t really know the music of Dohnanyi (aside from the great “Nursery” Variations), I’m bothering to copy Dohnanyi CDs onto iTunes, as one must in order to play the recordings in one’s library on one’s Nano. The answer is that I recently went on a Dohnanyi spree at Amazon. That’s how my music collection grows, in spurts of blind enthusiasm. In 1976, I’d have listened over and over to the five or six new LPs that some little birdie told me to buy. Latterly, however, their CD successors been piling up unopened. But not any more! Now new acquisitions go straight to iTunes, where they find their way onto playlists.  

I am nothing less than breathtaken by the beauty of the system.

* So to speak. The RoomGrooves are not set to play loudly.

¶ Matins: Here’s hoping that no regular readers of The Daily Blague were under the illusion that the Cold War was “won” — and by US! Andrew Kramer reports on the cold Cold War.

¶ Lauds: The year in music: Steve Smith sums up 2008.

¶ Prime: The last thing you need is yet another blog to check out, but I’m afraid that you’ll have to make room on your list for Scouting New York — at least if you have any interest whatsoever in this burg of ours. The site is kept by a professional location scout — what a dream job! (There are no dream jobs, but we don’t have to know that.

¶ Tierce: A story that I’m afraid I was expecting to see: “State’s Unemployment System Buckles Under Surging Demand.” That the outage was repaired later the same day is not the point.

¶ Sext: Will nonbelievers spend eternity at the back of a bus? 800 London buses will begin bearing “atheist” messages, such as “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Sarah Lyall reports.

¶ Nones: Oops! Another I-Lied accounting story, this one involving Satyam, the outsourcing firm that provides back-office services to “more than a third of the Fortune 500 companies.” Heather Timmons reports, with Bettina Wassner.

¶ Vespers: Don’t ask what has taken me so long, but I’ve gotten round at last to adding Koreanish to the blog roster. It is kept by novelist Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh. Yesterday, he posted an entry from this years MLA convention in San Francisco.

¶ Compline: Stanley Fish lists his favorite American movies of all time. Of the ten, only Vertigo makes my list. I don’t begin to understand the appeal of John Wayne, and I could never omit Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, or Fred Astaire, not to mention Preston Sturgis.

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The big picture adorning Anthony Tommasini’s glowing review speaks more loudly than words: the Godly Gatekeepers have decided that Jeremy Denk is a hot-stuff pianist. May my favorite music blogger be deluged with concert dates! Because he’s also one of my favorite pianists. In fact, he is my favorite pianist.

(All right, I’m crazy about Angela Hewitt, too.)

Who else could conjure a brilliant yet engaging recital out of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata and Beethoven’s equally uncorsetted Hammerklavier?

¶ Lauds: Michael Jackson’s Thriller is being reissued — not something that you would expect to read about here. But LXIV sent me the link to a story from Soul Tracks that’s full of interesting numbers. In 1984, Thriller sold 27 million “units” (LPs, tapes, and perhaps even a few CDs). The most recent big-seller sold only 4. The pop market has fractured into splinters.  

What this means for classical music recordings…

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The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is making music at Carnegie Hall again, speeding along without training wheels. The season’s opener featured a program that turned out to sound a lot more interesting than it looked.