Something cool you might have missed: This recording of Schelomo

The tightest knit and closest-in-the-sense-of-physical-space pretend trio of all-time!

It must be nice to be considered a “legendary treasure.” I always dreamed that someday I would be a legendary treasure, but at my current rate the only way I’ll actually achieve such a status would be to:

1. Work extended hours at my job
2. Save enough money to have my body surgically encased in 24-karat gold
3. Drown in the Atlantic Ocean
4. Be discovered 200 years later as the only human dipshit to encase himself in 24-karat gold

Yehudi Menuhin and Pablo Casals needed to do no such thing. They were both supreme bad asses whose careers were as distinguished as can be. But there’s a third guy here, and while he may not have the lofty pedigree of the two giants with which he shares this fairly awkward and cheap-looking CD cover, he proves to be the standout on this disc, both musically and hair-stylistically.

Leonard Bernstein and the price of transcendence

1000 words

Depending on what day you ask me, I’m equally as fanatic about sports as I am about music. One of my favorite writers in any subject is Bill Simmons, who writes for ESPN about a variety of things, but if we are to believe his 800-page book on the subject, basketball is his area of greatest expertise. It is in said 800-page book that Simmons discusses the careers of the best players in the history of the game. There are many great observations and anecdotes throughout, but some of the best material is about the great Bill Walton.

Bill Walton was probably the 6th or 7th best center in the history of the NBA (certainly behind Russell, Abdul-Jabbar, Chamberlain, Olajuwon, O’Neal), but that is almost entirely due to problems with his feet that still plague him to this day. When he was healthy, though, Walton was one of the most gifted players in history, and it is Simmons’ contention that Walton would have been one of the elite players of all-time had his feet not betrayed him (the reasons for this hypothesis are essentially the point of the entire book, which I would encourage anyone who has even a passing interest in basketball to read).

In one of the discussions about Walton, Simmons debates the merits of transcendence versus stable excellence, asking if one would prefer Walton’s incredibly brief peak as an unparalleled dominant force compared to David Robinson’s long-term excellence (Robinson was a talented player, but he never won a title as the main guy on his team, and in fact got utterly crushed by Hakeem Olajuwon during his prime). This, of course, got me thinking about music, although not in quite the same way.