“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, December 2, 2012

Menil Glass

So we were all wandering home from the meditation center when we came across Philip Glass doing a piano concert at the Menil. They had commissioned one of his Etudes for their twenty-fifth anniversary. The hall was packed: maybe 700 people. They had constructed a tent with very nice blue lighting in these cubes inside. You have to realize that the Menil is two blocks round the corner from where I live, and having lived in Davis California for ten years I must say it's a welcome change to live in this funky bohemian place.

The music Glass was playing reminded me of why I like him. I haven't seen him in concert since 1996, when he was doing music to accompany a Cocteau film. It's the melancholia and the swirls of mathematical patterning. It evokes samsara (he is a good Buddhist).


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