Today's performance

Well this is not a daily thing, it seems. Nonetheless, today's item to listen to is "Der Rosenkavalier", a very popular comic opera based on a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and composed by Richard Strauss in 1911.

Also, this performance features Kiri Te Kanawa as Marschallin.

The Rest is Noise

I have begun reading Alex Ross's "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century", about which it is written:

'“The Rest Is Noise” is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music.'

Now, although Alex Ross has added pages of sound files to accompany the text (here), I'd like to do it myself. Every day (hopefully), I will add a piece that is mentioned in the text, in linear order of course, and try to add what Alex Ross wrote.

Today we'll start with Salome, by Richard Strauss, which opens the first chapter of the book.

Update: Salome Leitmotif - 

...which becomes

...towards the end.

Twitter

These days I post mostly on Twitter, so it's quiet here for now. I will say that Twitter does not lend itself to long discussions, however.

The balcony this week

The tomatoes have exploded. There is no other word for it. Now drinking a gallon of water a day, they create a cupful of suckers every day that need to be snipped or plucked off to put plant energy into food production and not leaves. Next time it'll be just one plant in a 14-gallon tote. Or I'll just go with more cucumbers, which have been producing roughly 4 cucumbers every two weeks. At that rate, four cucumber plants would suffice (extra for redundancy) to supply cucumbers for the spring, making me for the first time truly self-sufficient in one product at least.

It's a jungle out there

The cucumbers are growing nicely up the twine trellis. The fruit in the lower right, a bit dark, doubles every day. I'll probably harvest it in a week.

Growin' to the sky

 Maybe there should be a small cage around the edges so that toads and lizards can be put in to live in and among the plants. How about a fountain, eh? A pond? I'm already planning to suspend vinyl fence posts from the railing to expand the growing space, in an ebb-and-flow system. We'll see how that goes. There definitely will be another system to grow Ichiban eggplants soon too. If they take up too much space the mint's going to have to be suspended from the railing as well. Future plans include terracing pots or a stepped hydroponic system down the stairs, cuz I need more space (!). Onward.

Cucumber

Fresh from a coworker. It's an Asian variety called "Green Dragon". Nothing like store-bought cucumbers - the skin is soft and not bitter. It will go into tzatziki tomorrow.