This page contains more of my musings on the various art I consume.
Reading
Test Book.
This was a good book.
Films
My Dinner with Andre (1981)
A timeless film consisting almost entirely of one scene: two characters have dinner at a restaurant and share their perspectives on the world, life, and humanity. Many subtleties, like the way the characters regard each other and the relationship between their attitudes and their arguments, make this film far deeper than the script.
Shoah (1985)
At nine-and-a-half hours long, this is far and away the longest film I have ever seen. (And yes, I watched it in one sitting, more or less.) But I can certainly appreciate the need for its expanse: in fact, by the end, it seems woefully short in comparison to the colossal scope of its subject: the Holocaust. With zero archival footage, the film focuses on interviews of survivors, bystanders, and even perpetrators (in some cases, filmed with concealed cameras) of the Holocaust, painting a chilling portrait of how such a large-scale operation of mass murder was orchestrated and executed.
Music
- Concert (28 Jan 2017): Daniel Barenboim conducts Bruckner 8 with the Staatskapelle Berlin at Carnegie Hall
- The best concert of my entire life—a truly spiritual experience and a large motivation for my analytical work on Bruckner. Though the symphony falls in the category of ‘absolute music,’ i.e., it was not conceived with specific extramusical meaning, the syntactic and dialogical elements of the music left a deep impression on me. A full review is available in the July 2017 issue of The Bruckner Journal.
- Opera (27 Oct 2016): Asher Fisch conducts Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera
- An opera (or in Wagner’s terms, a “music drama”) about the fraught turmoil of love and lust. As with most opera, the libretto and story itself is not particularly exciting, but the music (and performance of it) is what made this experience divine. Many ingenious gestures are used to tell the story without text (e.g., one chord/key subsuming another to signify the character associated chord/key gaining power), making it such that the one could perhaps understand a surprising amount of the story without reading the libretto at all.
(Visual) Art
- “Jheronimus Bosch and Venice” exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice
- An excellent exhibition comprising several of Bosch’s works, and even more commendably, an impressive collection of works in the style of Bosch by his contemporaries, imitators, and successors. An immersive virtual reality experience (with a headset) of Bosch’s visions of heaven and hell was the icing on the cake.