Everlasting Enjoyments 8/18/09

We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past.

John Easton
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Shalom
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Hurry and get your note book ready because September is coming....
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Once upon a time thee was a great Russian singer named Alexander Kipnis. He was a bass who sang opera and liturgical music. The only recordings of his music were made in Russia and rarely found their way out. But one record some how got to a classical music station I was working for in New York City. It was an old, scratchy record. That was before the days when they learned how to enhance old recordings to remove the background and surface noises. One day the music director scheduled one of the Kipnis songs for my program.

The station had a new general manager, a young man from out of town. He came into the studio while the record was on the air, leaned over and looked at it as it spun around on the turntable and said "Well, we'll have to get rid of that one." I wanted to hide the record in my locker so he couldn't get his hands on it.

To throw out that rare record, with its sublime perfromance, because it was scratchy would be the same as trashing a Rembrandt painting because the surface was soiled, or tossing away the Venus De Milo because she lost her arms, or not performing Shakespeare because it's written in an arcane language that people have trouble understanding.

There are a lot of people who have that attitude. "It's a new world, Let's get rid of the old stuff." It's a good thing to toss out old, worn out ideas and theories, and adopt new ones. But some of those new ideas come from very old sources. People are still quoting Aristotle, for example, and discovering, or rediscovering new ideas.

Today we produce a massive number of things: literature, music, entertainment, inventions and designs. And let's face it, most of it is wrathless junk. It's very difficult to see the treasure from the trash. Thank heaven there are libraries, museums and memories to preserve the best of what has been in order to point the way toward the best of what can be.

DB - The Vagabond
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Put a drop of courage in the mix today.
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SUMMER QUIZ

This is not a contest.



A young man out west just took home 88 million dollars from the lottery.



Whether you play the lottery or not, if you suddenly had 88 million dollars, or the equivalent of whatever your currency is, what are the first three things you would do with it?



You have all summer to answer if you wish.

19 responses so far.



DB