Article on Dirt

I liked this article in Salon quite a bit. The article has two interesting facets: a historical treatment of cleanliness in Europe from Roman times, and the problem with our current obsession with being clean. Writing about 17th century France, the author tells:

They must have smelled terrible. But the ocean in which they swam was the odor of rank sweat, or fresh sweat. So I think they were quite used to it. In the Middle Ages, St. Bernard said, "We all stink. No one smells." I think that sums up their tolerance for it.

We had an enormous tolerance for cigarette smoke 20 years ago. Every indoor space was filled with it. I never smoked, but I never noticed it particularly. Now, I actually checked into a hotel room on a smoking floor by mistake last week in Montreal, and I thought it was the worst thing ever. But 20 years ago, I wouldn't have even noticed it.

Read the whole thing here.

(By the way we can't wait for January, when smoking will be phased out in all restaurants in Germany!)

Some great music

I'm a huge fan of the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast, and wanted to advertise it a little bit here.



Very lively music, all for free, so easily downloaded with iTunes. Go check it out!

Article on 20th century music

Some people knew me in the context of music, because after I was a diehard rock guitar player I was a diehard lover of 20th century music. Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok (still a favorite), Legeti, Crumb, etc. It's neat to see a new article about these guys. One of my first awakenings into this world took place at UCLA, where I posed as a student in the Schoenberg Music Library. He had immigrated there from Austria in the 1940s:

In one of my favorite anecdotes in the book, Ross relates a story from Schoenberg's son, Ronald, about the end of the composer's life. In the 1940s, the Schoenbergs lived in upscale Brentwood, Calif., near Shirley Temple. Ronald admits his father, the scourge of the bourgeois, the enfant terrible of the 20th century, felt discouraged that Hollywood tourist buses never pointed out his house. "But another time," Ronald says, "we stopped at a juice bar out on Highway 1, and the radio was playing 'Verklarte Nacht,' and I never saw him so happy."

Read the full article here.