Wurtzel on The Boss

Lawyer and Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel praises the Boss, Bruce Springsteen in an introduction to a selection of his lyrics:

When I was 12 years old, for my birthday my dad gave me an Ibanez six-string acoustic guitar, and my mom bought me guitar lessons at the local YMCA. In a short time, I knew a G7 from a C minor chord, I could pluck out an arpeggio and strum a syncopated rhythm. But it was plain enough: this was not where my talent lay. I would never grow up and be a rock star like my idol, Bruce Springsteen. But soon enough I had another plan: in Blinded By the Light, the whiplash of a lyrical Möbius strip that opened Bruce's debut album he makes mention of "some hazard from Harvard". This meant the Boss had heard of that university, which gave me a new goal: I would get good grades in high school and go to Harvard, so at least I would be at a college that Springsteen was aware of. That's how much I loved Bruce Springsteen. Anything I did was good enough, so long as I could at least peripherally link it to him.

Read the whole thing HERE.

"The Juniper Tree" by "Philip Glass"

Trouped last night to Lincoln Center for the New York premiere of a Philip Glass opera, "The Juniper Tree"... or perhaps I should say a "Philip Glass opera" because it was very much a PG-branded work and event, performed by the Collegiate Chorale, conductor Robert Bass. It was, I should say here, the work by Glass I most liked-- based on a tale from the Brothers Grimm (Will never forget the gruesome refrain, repeated ad infinitum: "Mama killed me. Papa ate me"), with an accessible melody, and rear-projection of Maurice Sendak illustrations. Co-author of the music Robert Moran, the librettist Arthur Yorinks. There were Glass's signature arabesques of sound... but well I kept wondering if the catchy tunes that overlaid the swirling background came from his collaborator, but I've since read that the composers alternated scenes in this short two-act piece.

The concert's program notes reveal that Glass studied composition in Paris in the 1960s with Nadia Boulanger and made pocket money transcribing Ravi Shankar's sitar pickings. That explains everything.