It’s said that the insomniac Count Hermann von Keyserling, an ambassador from Russia to the royal court of Saxony, commissioned the work by Johann Sebastian Bach we know now as the Goldberg Variations as a sonic sleep aid to be played for him by one of the court’s musicians, Johann Goldberg. Although this monumental set of variations was out of the cultural mainstream for … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: March 17-18
Film: Love, Simon is a fairly conventional coming-of-age story about a high school senior, except that he is unapologetically gay and – once he comes out to them – his friends and family are uniformly supportive of his sexual orientation. That makes for a lack of dramatic conflict, but still the film is surely a first by a major studio (Fox 2000). The only pushback comes from a … [Read more...]