Mesocosm

Dancing Girl, Paul Klee, 1940
Image (c) Barnaby Thieme

I’ve got some really terrific stuff for you on this week’s link roundup. Are you excited?!? I am.

First off, I’m thrilled to have learned about the stupendous blog 5:4, which covers new classical music. Its proprietor Simon Cummings is himself a composer. The site hosts loads of free downloads by some favorites of mine (Thomas Adès, Steve Reich, Conlon Nancarrow) and some brand new favorites. I am over the moon for Julieta Szewach’s Dikyrion and Unsuk Chin’s violin concerto (Total Immersion). Really terrific stuff.

I think you should probably watch this short excerpt of Francis Alÿs’s Nightwatch, which features a fox on the loose in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

As long as we’re all multi-media, you might be interested to know that the San Francisco Symphony has a podcast.

You can download some wonderful radio plays by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre here. The War of the Worlds really is terrific, but so far my favorite is the short “Life with Father,” which surprisingly outshines the “Heart of Darkness” adaptation it’s paired with.

Here is a handy webpage that makes it extremely easy to request any files that various intelligence agencies may be keeping on you — NSA, FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and a couple of other ones. I submitted a bunch of requests today out of curiosity, and will let you know if they have anything on yours truly.

My friend Hugh Behm-Steinberg over at Eleven Eleven sent me a link to this excerpt (chapter 12) from a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita by Gavin Flood and Charles Martin.