I’m saving the best videos for the last day of the year. The third video is my favourite, suggest you start with that one first.

solo guitar 1

solo guitar 2

solo guitar 3

solo guitar 4

My friend, Sonny, has just (9 days ago, in my universe) put up a new post on the opera Carmen at his blog Opera Recordings. A place, where he writes about opera recordings up in order to archive them. In his words “You see, if I just write them down in a diary or something, then it will all just be forgotten. This way, at least someone somewhere may stumble upon my blog and gain some small information, or even pleasure, out of it.” I hope his posts will be helpful and enjoyable to someone.

Check it out here.

Here’s a teaser:

No greater contrast could there be to Victoria de los Angeles’ Carmen than Callas’. Callas manages to make Carmen a very unattractive character – cold, dour, sour. The great tragedian in Callas turns Carmen into a great tragic figure, but so turned off are you from the start that you don’t want to hear about it to the end. True, no one makes you sit up at the very first words of Carmen’s entry onto the stage the way Callas does, and no one sings the Card Song (in which Carmen realizes that her death has been foretold) with such a gripping sense of foreboding and brooding. But you just don’t buy her Habanera, about love being like a bird and so on. This Carmen has never experienced love, or passion, or even a moment’s joy anywhere in her life. This Carmen is not even interested in Don Jose, but eyes him distantly from a corner and swallows him in the course of the opera as a means to making her own pact with her destiny……

Article

Death, advertising, and binges – read the story behind this and other pictures at here.

Video 1

Video 2

The prayer war

How to bring about the relaxation response

Take time to breathe

Link via kircher society

Something similar here.

Link

Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses. This means that the longest life and the shortest amount to the same thing. For the passing minute is every man’s equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours. Our loss, therefore, is limited to that one fleeting instant, since no one can lose what is alread past, nor yet what is still to come – for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess? So two things should be borne in mind. First, that all the cycles of creation since the beginning of time exhibit the same recurring pattern, so that it can make no difference whether you watch the identical spectacle for a hundred years, or for two hundred, or for ever. Secondly, that when the longest- and the shortest-lived of us come to die, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since his is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his.

This quote from Marcus Aurelius’ Mediations (Book Two, para 14) reminds me of the culture without time.