Wednesday Links
- What’s the first thing you need to do when starting your own country? Create a national anthem of course. Yotam Haber has a crash course in anthem writing at the New Music Box. Here’s a hint: don’t copy Italy.
- Prospect has published a list of the top 100 public intellectuals. It appears that qualifying for the list requires more than just being intellectual in public. Denouncing God is helpful as is telling the world what it’s like to get a sanga wax.
- Countless hours and likely billions of dollars have been poured into efforts to close the gender gap. In some fields, like hard science, it doesn’t seem to be working.Perhaps girls just aren’t interested.
- Why are so many musicians excellent cooks?
- It is one thing to love a person’s music – quite another to try and physically resemble that person while watching them perform in concert. Chuck Klosterman on the uber-fans
thepilatesbiz on 
Aforpeace on 
Yvonne on 
Re musicians, cooking and the feast served to Dubravka Tomsic, things have come a long way from the days on the community concert circuit when visiting artists, ravenous after a performance, had to brace themselves for the sort of dish immortalized by William Bolcom in a song he wrote for Joan Morris: “Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise”.
I laughed and laughed when I read Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise as it reminded me of the horrible salad waiting to pollute my potatoes at childhood Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. My cousins and I got very good at arranging the food so that there was a barrier between the two to increase th chances that the potatoes stayed white throughout the meal. Every so often, either due to careless eating or an unforseen incident, the salad would creep across the plate and make the potatoes turn green.
Bolcom’s hilarious reminiscence of those post-concert receptions is included in his and Morris’ Lime Jello: An American Cabaret on RCA, though it’s a bit hard to find. As I mentioned before, things have improved an awful lot, but I suspect there are still pockets where this sort of torture is inflicted. Playing that song for people, especially of more advanced years, who have done a stint on the community circuit guarantees hoots of recognition.