This is quite tearful music. Best heard in a dark or semi-dark room. Alone.

Istvan Marta - Doom. A Sigh (Kronos Quartet)

Montaigne as "best blogger that never was"?

Pepys is already there:

http://www.pepysdiary.com/

Great way to start the day.

And Boswell as "best chat show host that never was" (thankfully)

> But Concert FM has an amazingly narrow and specific view of culture.

I've never been convinced by this one. Concert plays music from 1000 years ago to stuff written last week. Its geographical spread is world wide in terms of playlist and that's without the World/Jazz etc. I would suggest Concert's "view of culture" is the widest you will find on any radio station in NZ. To write it off as "classical" indicates an almost wilful ignorance both of what the station does and what so-called "classical music" is (or was, or might be)
Spare me the "dead white male' slightly pongy from old age and overuse red herring.

Oh, thanks Trevor - you got there already!

Geoff L.
The commercial classical station that ran in Auckland 1991-93 was called "Fine Music" The frequency was sold to the Rock in the end due the station not making its management brain-numbing heaps of money REALLY FAST. The only thing that interests private radio.
As one who worked at Fine Music, I know of the suffering I speak of.
Full length lamentations and a few jeremaids re this topic free on application.

Great fun!
Here's an easy local video: a series of screengrabs of comments/assorted drivel from the likes of kiwiblog, whaleoil, NZ conservative, no minister etc.
Hmm, too easy really. Fish and barrels.
Still, the song is a useful mental soundtrack when delving into the NZ blog sewersphere.

Blunt 4 letter words are all very well to describe the likes of Whaleoil and Laws but I rather think we have lost something. This passage often crosses my mind when faced with them and their ilk:

"The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them most outrageously,calling them prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets ..."

Rabelais, "Gargantua and Pantegruel", Bk. 1, ch. xxv. (Everyman's ed., London, 1949, p.61. (Urquhart translation, 1653)

While it's a friday music thing, here's a little gem that may amuse fans of the Portsmouth Sinfonia.
The New Zealand Friendly Orchestra (NZFO) made its debut at Auckland's St Matthew's last saturday night.
We tried our best to play the notes but some of us hadn't touched the violin (or whatever instrument) for 30 years and many were APO players picking up entirely new instruments. And then doing their best.
We did raise over $1000 for charity. Yay.
And had a lot of fun.
Here is the opening piece of the concert: Also Sprach Zarathustra by R. Strauss (2001: A Space Odyssey theme)

Warning: Musically sensitive auditors may be disturbed.