Category Archives: Music

Never Be the Same Again

Posted on Wednesday 8 June 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Best song from the elusive Darren Hayes album WE ARE SMUG…, released online back in 2009, but not available on CD until last year, and which I finally caught up with via Amazon last month. I am not generally a … Continue reading →

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On Seeing The Nutcracker ballet

Posted on Sunday 20 December 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

As I mentioned on Facebook yesterday, we saw a production of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet at the San Francisco Ballet (click link for a 1-minute video sample), on Saturday 12/19, and had the good luck to snag first row seats, with … Continue reading →

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Philip Glass: Naqoyqatsi: Religion

Posted on Sunday 25 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Best, most thrilling track from the 2002 score by Philip Glass of Godfrey Reggio’s film Naqoyqatsi, with cello by Yo-Yo Ma. Keep listening. It really kicks in around 5:00 — the contrast between those rising arpeggios, rhythmically erratic — one … Continue reading →

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Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony

Posted on Thursday 2 July 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

This was the third collection, published in 1983, of Lewis Thomas’s elegant, mostly short, essays, following The Lives of a Cell (which I blogged about last week) and The Medusa and the Snail. I read (or reread, I’m not sure) … Continue reading →

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Once Again: Turn Away

Posted on Tuesday 17 February 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Via AZ Lyrics, the last verse [updated per comment below] Turn, turn away From the weight of your own words It’s magic for the devil And betray the lack of change Once you have spoken Turn away [Update 18feb15: listening … Continue reading →

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Hero (Boyhood)

Posted on Friday 16 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly
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John Legend: Save the Night

Posted on Sunday 4 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Current ear-worm. I listened to this half a dozen times on the CD before I looked it up on YouTube. I thought for sure, listening to it, that the recurrent lyric transitioned from “save the night” to “stay the night”… … Continue reading →

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Scientific fidelity vs narrative; anti-gay bigotry and socialism; the ecology of faith; Valerie Tarico on religion; Hans Zimmer and conceptual breakthrough

Posted on Tuesday 18 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s one of several articles in the past week or so about why we should not nitpick the science in Interstellar: Slate: Back Off, Scientists: Don’t be so nitpicky about the technical details of sci-fi movies like Interstellar I have … Continue reading →

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Hans Zimmer and Interstellar, again

Posted on Thursday 13 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Very happy to see this post on Slate by J. Bryan Lowder: Music of the Spheres: In Interstellar, Hans Zimmer scores the universe. This is to follow up my earlier post, Interstellar…Music, which concerned complaints that the music overwhelmed to … Continue reading →

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And the moon rose over an open field

Posted on Tuesday 11 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s one of Paul Simon’s best songs, “America”, from Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 album Bookends; a song that is recently getting play on a certain TV commercial… Has Simon sold out? Well, the TV commercial is about patronizing local, small-town … Continue reading →

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