I have a daily routine.<\/p>\n
After exercising, drinking a whole pot of coffee, reading the front page and op-ed pages of the Times, I spend too much time on Twitter. But my Twitter affair is self-limiting because after a while I start to get hungry.<\/p>\n
And hunger prompts the next part of my daily routine: turning on music, taking a shower, getting dressed, making oatmeal, walking up five and one half flights of stairs, descending and eating the oatmeal while reading the Daily News on line.<\/p>\n
(Now that I write this, I’m looking better to myself — more active, less obsessed with gathering facts to ward off the nightmare, etc.)<\/p>\n
Let’s go back to the “turning on music” item. Rather than pull out a CD I’d like to listen to, I turn on my TV where, thanks to a cable installation guy, I learned there were music stations. Right now channel 1948 gives me what they call “classical music.” (I call it “serious music,” but what the hell.)<\/p>\n
So before the shower I turn on the TV and get music. I never know what will come up and that can be exciting or irritating. Without giving you a list of the composers who bore or annoy me, I’ll tell you that one I can’t tolerate is Bruckner.<\/p>\n
Whenever I think of Bruckner, I think of Nazis. Up pops a vision of thousands of people with glowing faces doing the salute as Hitler rants at them. Since we’re all confronted far too often nowadays with Nazis, I don’t need a sound track to that contemporary reality.<\/p>\n
When I turned the TV on today, Bruckner’s 4th was playing. I said, “Oh no!” and began thinking about which of my CD’s I was going to put on instead.<\/p>\n
But then, fact-based as I am, I thought, What are Bruckner’s dates, anyway? I was fairly sure he died before Hitler and therefore wasn’t entirely clear about why I thought “Nazis!” whenever I heard Bruckner. I wanted clarification.<\/p>\n
I stood in the middle of my living room considering where I was going to go for Bruckner’s dates. I have choices — quite a few music books, encyclopedias and the like. But almost instantly I realized the quickest way of getting those dates was…Google.<\/p>\n
I Googled. Got the dates — he died in 1896 — but then I saw this article from The Guardian and…<\/a><\/p>\n Oh do look at it. Aside from writing music to irritate me in the extreme, Bruckner was one weird, sick dude.<\/p>\n I say no more.<\/p>\n Now I’m going to grab maybe a Beethoven CD (he was an oddball, too, but not a pervert) and wash that man Bruckner right out of my hair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a daily routine. After exercising, drinking a whole pot of coffee, reading the front page and op-ed pages of the Times, I spend too much time on Twitter. But my Twitter affair is self-limiting because after a while … Continue reading