Category: Music

  • Zürich in winter: 2025

    Monday The first night in Zürich. The flight wasn’t bad; was thinking about small things going wrong while traveling, after reading someone who claims that such things are ruinous but one forgets them. I don’t really agree: for some people, at some times, yes, but… And, finally in my hotel room, I break a glass…

  • Bernstein

    The prospect of the new Bernstein film is dislocating me a bit, back to the late 60s and 70s….   recordings of the Rite, Sinfonia, El Salón Mexico; Stravinsky, Beethoven, Copland, Foss, many others… my record player in the room shared with my brother, between the dressers; concerts, then later playing on stage at Wolf…

  • Mood [partly reconstituted]

    [A post drafted in late November 2020; I have moved on from these things, a bit… and incidentally am now firmly of age, at 64. I apologize for the fragmentation: unfinished work, with later attempts to recapture some of the original content, and then some scraps of things I wanted to talk about – two…

  • Familiar

    The image seems clear, even obvious, to me – it could be from one of the better-written fantasies, or from a film about some medieval saga… an old man living alone in the woods; there is a shift in the wind, or the light – he looks up, creases his forehead slightly, sniffs the air…

  • Restless [Dreams]

    Dark of the year. Winter solstice, full moon, close to each other: death and life. As everything gets slower, calmer, there is a lot of time – and a lot of mental space…. All my analysands seem charged: some are very present to themselves, you might say. In many sessions for the past two weeks or…

  • Temporal

    Perhaps the problem is one of time… Yes, I am influenced by finally (i.e., at a later point in time than anticipated within the implied framework of some unspecified but apparently familiar system of planning) seeing Arrival. But also wandering through spaces of analysis, self-reflection, mild illness, trying to get some writing done. Late, of course. Time…

  • Glory, glory

    Putting aside a few things, to take the train to Sheffield tomorrow – I am only seeing my analyst live once a month, at the moment – I recall that on my last trip I was looking through all the pockets for a pair of earphones, which had somehow gotten misplaced… Look, here: tangled with older sets of earphones,…

  • Three women

    A few days after the Brexit vote, I am talking to N. over the phone: an intelligent, skilled businesswoman – in fact someone much more skilled at managing the world and its demands, laws and finances than I am (which isn't setting the bar very high, I admit). She is, however, upset, also as I am – concerned about…

  • Music, sweat, travel: appealing to the passions

    In mid-September I was in London – all too briefly; and I apologise that it took so long to write about it… I can remember some of my response in words, at least, even if the visceral immediacy of it has faded. The short form: I went down to London, merely overnight, on a day…

  • Depths… or dregs

    Continuing to go through everything in my office… preparatory to moving. Which will be delayed a few days (hallelujah) and will be to a relatively large office at the quiet far end of a corridor… hmm my luck seems to be improving. (Don't get too excited, I'm only there for two years, then they move…