Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Quotes from The Composers- Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky




Today, as promised, we are featuring quotes from legendary Russian composers and today we quip Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) who the Romanitc era composer who composed symphonies, operas and chamber music. But, he is arguably best known for his ballets, which include "The Nutcracker" and "Swan Lake."

Since "The Black Swan" is in cinemas now, and we FINALLY saw it last week (I was actually going to post an entry called The Curse of the Black Swan because every time I wanted to see the film something went wrong; it is definitely one of the best films from 2010), the image of an actual black swan seemed nifty. At least, it did to Javier the intern*. The image (according to Javier) is from Perth, Australia.

Natalie Portman also won a Golden Globe Award for her cinematic performance as a ballet dancer in "Black Swan." But, since we were not able to watch the broadcast (though I saw on Twitter that foul-mouthed comedian Sarah Silverman did!), we could not see if Portman was wearing her trademark vegan sandals.

But, getting back to Tchaikovsky, here is today's quote from the Russian master:

"Truly there would be more reason to go mad were it not for music."

SIDEBAR: As we have mentioned before, there is a sequel to the hit book "Stuff White People Like" based on the ever-popular blog of the same name (they get thousands more hits than we do even though there are only periodic entries?!). The new book by Christian Lander is called "Whiter Shades of Pale." He will be promoting it at Book Cellar in Chicago on Thursday.

According to the blog's last entry from December, these days white people seem to enjoy Christopher Guest films on dvd (like "Waiting for Guffman"), cd compilations of Bolivian music (he has me there!) and single-malt scotch.

*-Javier is a fictional person!

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