Old and New Music, on Dying to Give Birth
“The Death of Queen Jane” refers to Jane Seymour, a wife of Henry VIII. She died in October 1537, at less than 30 years of age, days after delivering a male heir.
Reading and Hearing ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’
This slim 1956 novel by Mark Harris, oddly elegant in its tenderness and guyish language, resonates today.
On Sheryl Crow’s Report that She Has a Meningioma, and Singing Loud
Fortunately the LATimes and People magazine got the story right. Their headlines, and text, emphasize the benign nature of Crow’s newly-diagnosed condition, a meningioma.
New Music from an Orchestra of Radioactive Isotopes
For the weekend – A tweet led me to a fantastically inventive kind of music. The Radioactive Orchestra comprises 3175 radioisotopes. From the website: “Melodies are created by simulating what happens in the atomic nucleus when it decays from its excited nuclear state…Every isotope has a unique set of possible excited states and decay patterns…” The project, […]
iPod Therapy – Why Not Prescribe It?
Yours truly, the author of Medical Lessons, is listening to music while she writes. A live version of the Stones’ “Silver Train” has just come on, and she’s happily reminded of something that happened 30 years ago. Distracting? Yes. Calming? Yes. Paradoxically helps to keep me on track? Yes. My iPod keeps my mind from […]
Thoughts on the Death of Amy Winehouse
I feel compelled to write at least a short note on Amy Winehouse, a young woman who was found dead in her London apartment a few days ago. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but the truth is I was never a big fan of her music. I wasn’t fond of her […]
Gregg Allman Stars in Hepatitis C Awareness Campaign, with Merck
This weekend I learned that Gregg Allman, of the Allman Brothers, has hepatitis C. Not just that; he underwent a liver transplant last year for treatment of liver cancer. This information came my way via CNN, in a clip narrated by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. The cable TV crew filmed the old rocker in Macon, Georgia, […]
No Quick Fix
“If it’s chafed, put some lotion on it.”
– some practical advice, offered by the character portraying Andrew Jackson, speaking toward the audience in the last scene of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a play written and directed by Alex Timbers
The Music of H.I.V.
Pajak, a graduate student at the University of Georgia, merges art and science in a novel way: she composed a new work, the Sounds of HIV, based on the virus’s genetic sequence.