A cultural day (Saturday the 16th)
May. 18th, 2026 04:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lauradi7dwThe first part of Saturday was the usual Tai Chi (back to the park!) and ringing. After a long lunch on the Greenway (watching the throngs of people who were out in the pleasant weather), I went to Roxbury to participate in the readathon of Malcolm X's autobiography.
https://malcolmxreadathonboston.com/
Someone at the walk for peace on Mother's Day had handed me a card publicizing it. I decided to treat a mass-produced outreach as a personal invitation. The card implied that people would read for two minutes at a time. It turned out to be more like about five minutes, and since we were in 12-reader cohorts, I ended up sitting on the dais for about an hour at one of my tired times of day. I managed not to fall asleep. The elementary school kid waiting for her turn did nap leaning against her mother. She read well, as did most of the others, but there was one guy who kept tripping over words he didn't know. One of those was "conk." All of the elderly folks with us knew it from memory, and I knew it from art. There were a couple of scenes in Spike Lee's biopic about Malcolm in which he was having it put on (originally) or later shaved off.
And there's a line in Fats Waller's "You're a viper" that mentions it in passing
After that I took the #1 bus its whole length, from Nubian Square to Harvard Square. We made surprisingly good time, only 40 minutes. I got a sandwich, didn't buy food for a person trying to get Clover to give her some for free (I'm not always a nice person), and then met a friend at Sanders Theater for a concert by the Handel and Hayden society. I had been in Memorial Hall (at Harvard) several times in the past, but never noticed the plaque for Arthur Buckminster Fuller. I thought that it couldn't be a coincidence, and it wasn't - he was the grandfather of the one who was famous in the 20th century. Also, I hadn't made the connection between Margaret Fuller and the trendy architect, but she was his great aunt.
The concert was a fairly small group of instrumentalists and four singers doing a couple of Bach cantatas, Brandenberg #6, and a nice thing by Telemann. Pretty. A lot of the texts struck me as "death death death, but it's OK because of Jesus." Maybe there was more nuance. We were in seats fairly close to the stage and I spent a lot of time watching the faces of the singers. The soprano looked pained a lot of the time. I eventually decided that the spotlight was shining directly in her eyes and she was kind of squinting. She sounded great, but that was distracting. The counter-tenor seemed to be more into the music than the other singers (all of whom were great, no shade in that regard). He was kind of vibing along when the recorder and oboe were playing in the Telemann, smiling while listening in other times. Those two are USians. The tenor and bass singers are Brits and it made me ponder on the set-up for performers of Early (ish) music. The bios of all four listed guest appearances around the US and Europe. Boston is a big place for music. Can we not have people live and perform here without flying around? I have no idea how the market for singers works. How about London? New York? Is travel really required?
Reminded again that I like theorbo better than lute, although I see the advantage of something a little more conveniently sized. That's one of the other cool things about the Boston area. One can see/here authentic instruments regularly.
https://malcolmxreadathonboston.com/
Someone at the walk for peace on Mother's Day had handed me a card publicizing it. I decided to treat a mass-produced outreach as a personal invitation. The card implied that people would read for two minutes at a time. It turned out to be more like about five minutes, and since we were in 12-reader cohorts, I ended up sitting on the dais for about an hour at one of my tired times of day. I managed not to fall asleep. The elementary school kid waiting for her turn did nap leaning against her mother. She read well, as did most of the others, but there was one guy who kept tripping over words he didn't know. One of those was "conk." All of the elderly folks with us knew it from memory, and I knew it from art. There were a couple of scenes in Spike Lee's biopic about Malcolm in which he was having it put on (originally) or later shaved off.
And there's a line in Fats Waller's "You're a viper" that mentions it in passing
After that I took the #1 bus its whole length, from Nubian Square to Harvard Square. We made surprisingly good time, only 40 minutes. I got a sandwich, didn't buy food for a person trying to get Clover to give her some for free (I'm not always a nice person), and then met a friend at Sanders Theater for a concert by the Handel and Hayden society. I had been in Memorial Hall (at Harvard) several times in the past, but never noticed the plaque for Arthur Buckminster Fuller. I thought that it couldn't be a coincidence, and it wasn't - he was the grandfather of the one who was famous in the 20th century. Also, I hadn't made the connection between Margaret Fuller and the trendy architect, but she was his great aunt.
The concert was a fairly small group of instrumentalists and four singers doing a couple of Bach cantatas, Brandenberg #6, and a nice thing by Telemann. Pretty. A lot of the texts struck me as "death death death, but it's OK because of Jesus." Maybe there was more nuance. We were in seats fairly close to the stage and I spent a lot of time watching the faces of the singers. The soprano looked pained a lot of the time. I eventually decided that the spotlight was shining directly in her eyes and she was kind of squinting. She sounded great, but that was distracting. The counter-tenor seemed to be more into the music than the other singers (all of whom were great, no shade in that regard). He was kind of vibing along when the recorder and oboe were playing in the Telemann, smiling while listening in other times. Those two are USians. The tenor and bass singers are Brits and it made me ponder on the set-up for performers of Early (ish) music. The bios of all four listed guest appearances around the US and Europe. Boston is a big place for music. Can we not have people live and perform here without flying around? I have no idea how the market for singers works. How about London? New York? Is travel really required?
Reminded again that I like theorbo better than lute, although I see the advantage of something a little more conveniently sized. That's one of the other cool things about the Boston area. One can see/here authentic instruments regularly.
