Vladimir Horowitz Plays Mozart Back in the USSR


Vladimir Horowitz, one of the great pianists of the 20th cen­tu­ry, left Rus­sia to set­tle in the Unit­ed States in 1939. But, once the Cold War thawed, he famous­ly returned home and played before rapt audi­ences. What we have here, I believe, is Horowitz play­ing Mozart’s Sonata in C Major dur­ing a 1986 recital Moscow. A beau­ti­ful piece. For good mea­sure, I’ve also added Horowitz play­ing Chopin’s 2nd Piano Sonata at the White House. Both clips have been added to our YouTube favorites.

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Two Gentlemen of Lebowski

Take the Coen Broth­ers’ 1998 cult film, The Big Lebows­ki, and put it in Shake­speare­an verse, and what do you get? Two Gen­tle­men of Lebowski as writ­ten by Adam Bertoc­ci. It begins:

In wayfarer’s worlds out west was once a man,
A man I come not to bury, but to praise.
His name was Geof­frey Lebows­ki called, yet
Not called, except­ing by his kin.
That which we call a knave by any oth­er name
Might bowl just as sweet. Lebows­ki, then,
Did call him­self ‘the Knave’, a name that I,
Your hum­ble cho­rus, would not self-apply
In home­lands mine; but, then, this Knave was one
From whom sense was a bur­den to extract,
And of the arid vale in which he dwelt,
Also dis­like in sen­si­bil­i­ty;
May­hap the very search for sense reveals
The rea­son that it striketh me as most
Int’resting, yea, inspir­ing me to odes.

The Wall Street Jour­nal has more on this cre­ative bit that has gone viral dur­ing the past week, and will be soon per­formed on stage in NYC. See Kottke.org for more on that.

The Neurons That Shaped Civilization

TED recent­ly took its show to India, and one of the more inter­est­ing pre­sen­ta­tions fea­tured neu­ro­sci­en­tist Vilaya­nur Ramachan­dran (UCSD) explain­ing how mir­ror neu­rons, a recent­ly dis­cov­ered sys­tem in the brain, “allow us to learn com­plex social behav­iors, some of which formed the foun­da­tions of human civ­i­liza­tion,” and also helped us evolve as a species. Good stuff. You can find more TED India Talks here.

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