Culture | The Gad About Town

One Thousand Years from Now

Posted on January 1, 2017 by Mark Aldrich

Five hundred years from now, Jem Finer’s Longplayer project will have recently passed the half-way point in its 1000-year-long performance. Mr. Finer is seen in the installation in the photo at top.

Longplayer is a musical composition that is calculated to take precisely 1000 years to perform from beginning to end and has been in performance in England continuously since midnight on December 31, 1999. This means it has been going nonstop for seventeen years and a day as of today. You can tune in at any hour and listen. It will begin its second cycle as the clock ticks the last moment of December 31, 2999.

In my limited understanding, the composition is six pieces of music that are interlinked, with each one serving as a trigger to start some of the others at set intervals. They overlap. They trigger each other. The calculation provides that these intervals will allow for the first-ever repetition of music, a second-ever thousand-year cycle, to start at midnight on December 31, 2999. The composition is programmed to not repeat itself until then.
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‘A Renewal’

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

To have love, one must give love; to give love, one must have it to give. That may be life’s deepest catch-22—any of those logical situations whose suppositions exist only to support the logic that requires them. Love is illogical, or at least it has its own logic.

The moment love is not pursued, there it is; advice to a young lover often follows that logic. “When you stop looking for it or needing it, you will find love.” (It only took about three decades of hearing that for it to sink in for me.)
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‘Well, So That Is That’

Posted on December 26, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

The concluding sections of W.H. Auden’s Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, continue his blend of the contemporary and everyday with the mysterious and eternal. All of modern philosophy is briefly made to vanish in a blur of the mundane world:

But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays.

The fact of faith—not what one has faith in, but that faith exists, is a reality itself—that is the miracle of the day, is what Christmas is about: