What should every man know about women?
If God made anything better than women, he kept it for himself.

(This is like an easy homework exercise for Feminist Deconstruction 101.)

What's the best way to win a fight?
I boxed in Golden Gloves at Oxford and still know how to throw a straight left jab. (I) Your weight has to be behind the punch to make it matter. Put your left foot in front of you, your right foot behind you. (II) As you punch, your shoulder and hips come around, but you don't want to cock your arm - just extend your arm straight out. (III) It's effective; I once broke a guy's nose in an alley in Germany and didn't have to throw any more punches.

Take that, you sausage-wolfin' kraut.

...Jesus Christ.

1. Obviously from boxing or your temerarious outdoor "adventures"

Now, here is how to get champ sound for under $700, not including the computer. You will need the following two devices (or the like) and speaker cables to connect them.

1. Amplifier: KingRex T20U USB. This amazing Class D (read: small in size and not powerful enough to tear a house down but producing great sound) has a decent DAC built into it, and so can be fed a digital stream via USB. They call it "Class T" because the chip (though it is not a digital amp!) is made by Tripath.

Caveat 1: Make sure the "Wave" (and on some systems, also the Main out) volume level for your computer's operating system is on the maximum when using this amp. This is based on my unseemly experience with Windows XP; maybe on one of those cloying Apple abominations it is different — I'll never know. The reason is that decreasing volume digitally amounts to reducing bitrate, thereby reducing quality. The fact that the "Wave" slider alters the digital signal is an insipient¹ feature of the plug-and-play drivers used by this amp.².

Caveat 2: This amp uses banana plugs (e.g. these).

6moons review: http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/kingrex2/u.html
Official site: http://www.kingrex.co.uk/t20u_amplifier.html
Audiomagus (store): http://www.audio-magus.com/product_p/109103.htm

2.  Speakers: JohnBlue JB3

6moons review: http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/johnblue/jb3.html
Audiomagus (store): http://www.audio-magus.com/product_p/109201.htm

1. This is not a spelling mistake.
2. What drivers? When you plug the amp in via USB, the OS adds a device named "USB speakers" or something, which you set Foobar2000 to use as output. The computer's internal soundcard is thus completely bypassed in such a setup

The Czech pianist (b. 1943) made some fantastic recordings (now out of print) before his career was tragically cut short in 1996 by an accident—he slipped on ice, mangling his left hand on broken glass.  According to the Josef Bulva Society, he (at least partly) recovered after 13 years, and gave a handful of concerts in 2009.

The same Society released a ridiculously expensive (EUR 220) 7-CD selection of his recordings, available on Amazon.de. The CDs are clumsily embedded in a huge (coffee table book size) book that won't fit into your bookshelf unless it is a gun cabinet. The book production is aptly slipshod (JPEG compression artifacts and pixelation in images, default system fonts, etc.), giving it a quaint Eastern European look and feel. Some of the recordings suffer from clipping and mediocre production (though some are decent), and the CD pressing quality is wanting. Less weight in paper and more recordings of the master of pedaling would have been better. Nevertheless, I recommend this triple-priced collection—much can be learned from this supremely meticulous musician. And If you manage to get a hold of his RCA Chopin recordings, you'll be set.

The tracklist is here. The book includes the run-of-the-mill biographical notes on the composers, two panegyrical pieces entitled "The Josef Bulva Phenomenon" (Guy Wagner) and "Aspects of Interpretation" (Ivan Parik) and an interview with Bulva (by Klaus Seidel).

Here is Bulva with Chopin's Scherzo no. 2 in from 1987 (not the Scherzo#2 recording of the aforementioned set). And here is the first movement of the 2nd Sonata, and the 3rd of Martinu's extraterrestrial Sonata. (All in mp3; here's foobar.)

Those five are lines 14-16 of ‘Kubla Khan’ (above) and the following two from Keats' ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy-lands forlorn.

Joyce opined: “‘Kubla Khan’ might have been the most beautiful poem in the English language if he had been able to finish it”. I second the superlative, though JJ was wrong to take Coleridge literally about Kubla being incomplete.

Coleridge entitled it ‘Kubla Khan’ Or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment, and added the following prefatory note:

The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits. In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external sense, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

Whatever. Even if this straight-up stoner story is asymptotically true, I believe Coleridge included it as a hint to the poem's final purport, after completing it with the second part (l.37). ‘Kubla Khan’ is by no means a fragment.

"I was gonna translate the rest of Goethe's Faust, but then I got high."

Quite possibly, the first part is an oneirological snippet from one of Coleridge's opiate siestas, but the second part is as sober as Wordsworth. The first is a fantastic description of the environs of junior Khan's seaside chillground, complete with spacious caves, a rock-rending geyser and a banshee-haunted chasm (literally the holiest of all moonlit chasms that were ever banshee-haunted, but the context implies that this condition is not merely satisfied vacuously). With its forceful imagery of natural phenomena (vaulting rocks... really?), the first part in itself would seem like a hyperbolic nature poem;  in light of the second, however, the mighty fountain and Romantic (sic!) chasm are evidently placeholders for poetic afflatus or at least such stuff as poems are made on.

The second part is an invocation of an Ethiopian muse, in yearning for a poetic resurrection of the aforesaid wonders. The dulcimer-plucking damsel would enable the poet to "build that dome in air" (l. 46), that is, conjure up Kubla's beach resort. And this aerial edifice is expected to inspire awe in his bystanders, not to mention some freaky ocular-fulguration and horripilation in him (l. 50). The berserk poet's trance is also said to benefit from weaving a manned circle around him (l. 51), which I am told was an actual superstition: the thrice-spun circle is meant to ward off intrusion. If you are wondering how you could beget such virtuoso verse with a bunch of fools dancing around you, try chasing the dragon as often as Taylor C.

As commentators like to point out, the mention of milk and honey in the closing lines is likely a reference to Plato's Ion, where Socrates, in one of his most egregious argumentative triumphs,  inveigles a freshly-accoladed rhapsode into accepting that, though he is a great artist, he has no talent. (He is merely a privileged mouthpiece of the muses.) Thus, ‘Kubla Khan’ is a two-part poem about the eruptive power and fragility of poetic inspiration.

01    In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
02    A stately pleasure-dome decree:
03    Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
04    Through caverns measureless to man
05             Down to a sunless sea.
06    So twice five miles of fertile ground
07    With walls and towers were girdled round:
08    And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
09    Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
10    And here were forests ancient as the hills,
11    Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
12    But oh! that deep Romantic chasm which slanted
13    Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
14    A savage place! as holy and enchanted
15    As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
16    By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
17    And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
18    As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
19    A mighty fountain momently was forced:
20    Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
21    Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
22    Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
23    And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
24    It flung up momently the sacred river.
25    Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
26    Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
27    Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
28    And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
29    And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
30    Ancestral voices prophesying war!
31            The shadow of the dome of pleasure
32            Floated midway on the waves;
33            Where was heard the mingled measure
34            From the fountain and the caves.
35    It was a miracle of rare device,
36    A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
37            A damsel with a dulcimer
38            In a vision once I saw:
39            It was an Abyssinian maid,
40            And on her dulcimer she played,
41            Singing of Mount Abora.
42            Could I revive within me
43            Her symphony and song,
44            To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
45    That with music loud and long,
46    I would build that dome in air,
47    That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
48    And all who heard should see them there,
49    And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
50    His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
51    Weave a circle round him thrice,
52    And close your eyes with holy dread,
53    For he on honey-dew hath fed,
54    And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Stuff you can actually click on:

Coleridge's (selective) translation of Faust; out of copyright (DJVU):
http://ifile.it/5w7xcl1 (Why not PDF? Because PDF sucks balls.)

WinDJVU:
http://windjview.sourceforge.net

Ridiculously overpriced scholarly edition of this:
http://www.amazon.com/Faustus-German-Goethe-Translated-Coleridge/dp/0199229686

Errata for the latter:
1. "eves" instead of "eyes" in "tears fill her eyes"
2. line 3325 is missing the word "Aye"

He does not perform with orchestras anymore, as he was never satisfied with the result. None of his collaborative concerts and only a handful of solo recordings were committed to plastic. The nonesuch from Petersburg, however, performed Rachmaninov's 3rd, rigged, at least thrice: with Ollila (SRSO), Gergiev ('89 Mariinsky), and Tortelier ('99 BBC SO), according to Lykhin. These recordings, like many of his recorded but unreleased concerts, circulate the net in under-bitrated MP3s . I would cough up some serious sovereigns to obtain a decent, non-mp3, version of the EPIC Tortelier recording, and I can barely afford a happy meal. (At least I was told this is the Tortelier one; I am referring to the recording with the audience unrestrainedly applauding after the first movement).  In any event, here it is: Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto No. 3 with Grigory Sokolov, Tortelier/BBC SO. (Click "request download ticket", then "download".)

It is a silhouette by Otto Böhler, taken from Werner Wolff's Anton Bruckner Rustic Genius. To print this, download this TIF, open it in Photoshop/GIMP/whatever, and use the TIF to create a layer with a silhouette of Bruckner & Wagner in your own choice of color. The background can be white if you intend to print using an iron-press. Note that if the shirt itself is not white, the color in the PSD should be lighter than the desired result. The color will be a composite of the printed-ink and the shirt's dye.

From the Preface:

While I was studying law at the University of Berlin and pursuing music under the instruction of Engelbert Humperdinck, I heard the first performance of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony under the direction of Arthur Nikisch. I wrote in my diary: "I am overwhelmed. It makes me suffer. It works in me and on me with the power of a catastrophe of nature. The rhythm of the clarinets at the end of the First Movement over the inexorable organ point on D will never cease haunting me."

Inexorable indeed:

[...]

And here is Bashmet/Muntian with the Viola Sonata.

From the Grove (in 'Posthumous reputation'):

Unlike that of many composers, Shostakovich's reputation with the musical public has grown steadily since his death, fuelled by post-glasnost' revelations about the society in which he lived. By most conceivable measurements, he has become the most popular composer of serious art music in the middle years of the 20th century.

[...] The doctrinaire rump of the Western avant garde never became reconciled to Shostakovich's importance, although some who started in that camp have at least come to recognize the multi-faceted complexity of his music. On the other hand, natural conservatives in Russia, Scandinavia, Britain and the United States acknowledged the influence but generally failed to grasp the underlying complexities of tone. Those complexities could only have taken the shape they did under the unique coercions of Stalin's Russia. As the most talented Soviet composer of his cursed generation Shostakovich was uniquely equipped to transcend those pressures, and as such his achievement is unrivalled.

Also, interesting is the summation in Prokofiev's entry:

A large number of the works that are free from political professions have a firm place in the international repertory, and he is rightly counted one of the major composers of the 20th century. He was not a great influence on younger generations of composers, unlike Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, Stravinsky, Bartók and Messiaen – except in the Soviet Union, where Soviet-trained musicians of a whole generation took their guidelines from either Shostakovich or Prokofiev, raising the achievement of one or the other to the status of a philosophy of life, and passed on their stylistic features to those who followed.

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