Vilnius Guggenheim

Just came across the Geras Blogger blog which has links to the other two designs for the Guggenheim museum in Vilnius. Both I prefer to the Zaha Hadid model. M Fuksas' design is a bit of a cheap idea, linking it to the design of the Vilnius 2009 logo, and it's in startling white - which I am not sure how long it would survive in these days rather rainy Vilnius. Otherwise it's very nice. The Daniel Libeskind design is stunning - with a glass finger design pointing towards the sky and quite a lot of 'green' architecture.

But no, we'll be getting Ms Hadid's stranded hovercraft.

from this week's Arts Journal

• an article on the appointment of the first female concertmaster in the Vienna Staatsoper. A Bulgarian, Albena Danailova,got the job. Must be tough taking on that job without working her way through the ranks. Not totally convinced about the accuracy of all the statements, though; eg that the Staatsoper is the training orchestra of the Vienna Phil. The way I understand it, the Vienna Phil provides the players of the Staatsoper. And as for the Vienna Phil being all European, well, that's a lie. The Aussie twins Toby and ?? Lea, while they may have white faces and possibly European ancestry, are still not Europeans.
• Dumbing down in UK music - part of an occasional series. Though I never thought I'd say it about Nigel Kennedy....it seems he fell out with the team around the Classical Brits award ceremony at which he was supposed to perform. He wanted to do Mozart or Beethoven, but they wanted a piece of the same length as a pop song. Need I say more? More power to Kennedy's elbow.
• Another musician, Philippe Quint, left his fiddle in a cab in New York. It was a Strad, valued at 4 million USD. When the driver returned it, he got 100 USD as a reward (and he will get concert tickets, and the fiddler will perform for half an hour at the New York airport taxi stand, where probably no-one will be able to hear him). Maybe he would have preferred a little more cash?
  

We are 10,000

In the last few days this blog has crept past the 10,000 hit/readers mark! Ok, so it's taken a year and a half, and probably 7,000 of them are the same people returning for their regular fix. Do I care? Here we need a birthday candle, or, in Lithuanian style, some fireworks!

Cath, who commented on this post, lead me via her music-with-fashion blog to this rather interesting Lithuanian blog where people seem to go round photographing generally funky young people on the streets and asking them questions. Very nice - it's amazing the amount of ideas young Lithuanians have!

What's with my stats?

My reader stats have suddenly increased and doubled today compared to a couple of weeks ago. But I see no new links to my blog anywhere, apart from Wu Wei's blog last week. Not sure why this happened.

Wu Wei arrived in Tbilisi a week ago and seems to have had her head down working all the time (just now she is typing away furiously on her laptop in the hotel a couple of hundred metres down the road from me).....It's funny - we met in Vilnius 6 years ago, have been drifting all over the place since, and now are together again in Tbilisi. It's nice to have a friend around.

What she may need to learn about Tbilisi, and which we only learned a week or two ago, is that what appears to be a Government panic, requiring the consultants to do huge amounts of work and give tons of advice, often over the weekend (the EU does not allow this, thanks!) and in the evenings, is forgotten a couple of weeks later because personnel have changed. 'What is that you are talking about?' their successor asks. Sometimes it's almost good not to do anything - but of course, you don't know that in advance.

Anyway, looking at the details of my stats - I come up with some strange searches. Someone looked for 'porno sauna' which lead them to a book review; someone else looked for 'Lithuanian pussies' which lead them to a story about the miaowing kind in Istanbul. Perhaps not what he had in mind. Quite a few had an interest in 'Turkish men' (don't we all?).

And then there were the usual music-related searches, including a link recently from a blog on the Usher Hall renovation in Edinburgh which picked up on some throw-away comment I had made about the hall's atmosphere during the festival.

Ms Melancholy, on the other hand, seems to have lost some readers from her delightful, and very interesting, blog. Surely they haven't all come here?

A very small world indeed!

Reading Grannyp's blog about her school reunion.

I've only been through one of these, after 25 years. When I asked about a 30-year reunion (the person who I'd hope would organise it), she asked 'so who will organise it?'. Fair enough. I've got an easy excuse not being in the same country. Though these days with skype... The next one would be 35 years, which seems a bit daft - so it'll be 40 years, I suppose; by which time we will all be around 60.

Grannyp is right about teachers becoming people at reunions, and roles changing. Suddenly one can have a woman-to-woman conversation with a 'teacher'. Though one also realises that some teachers are pratts - not all of them, but it happens. Never left school, kind of thing. Former pupils also no longer need to suck up to teachers.... a classmate who was bad a maths had the brilliant idea of joining the music course, also taught by the maths teacher, who was very prone to having favourites. It did not work - she was not into music either. (You might think that 'favourites' and 'maths' cannot be used in the same sentence, since results should be either right or wrong. Believe me, our teacher did favourites big-style. I know because for a period I was very much the extreme disfavourite, and boy, did she go on at me.)

Grannyp mentions that pupils from her school have changed in the last 50 years. I did not find that particularly, but then we had only 25 years of development! It was interesting that at the time my child was finishing university, whereas another's child had not yet started school - but that mum had finished her education before having the child....

Reading Grannyp's entry made me think - I know that school! So I checked, and indeed, it seems she went to school with my son's godmother who she remembers very well. (Both people are very distinctive and therefore easily remembered). Amazing, or what? Since then the school has closed, though not before godmother's daughter went there, and some other people. Now godmother's granddaughter is going to my son's old school. What goes around, comes around!

Gourmets, Giggles and Golden Globes

Lotus reads has a wonderful review of Madhur Jaffrey's memoir 'Climbing the Mango Trees'; now on my building-up amazon list. En passant I notice Ms Jaffrey has brought out many more cookery books. Must stop reading Lotus read's blog!

The funniest blog entry I have read for a long while is Grannyp's fight with her wetsuit - maybe it was not a good idea? (Grannyp retired to the Canaries, or thereabouts, but seems to be dipping a lot back to the UK or other parts of Europe).

I see that Dame Helen Mirren has won a Golden Globe for her Queens, both QEI and QEII. QEI was filmed in Lithuania! (It was shown in Vilnius in September last year - I found it too long, but it turns out to have been a mini-series).

Green with envy!

Why didn't I think of that name? 'Beatroot', as in beatroot.blogspot.com, a Polish blog on Polish and European politics. It would have taken Beate right back to her roots (groan....).

Once upon a time, about a million years and several careers ago, when I just started being a gardener, I found myself hand-thinning rows and rows of beetroot, and guess what some smart-aleck said as he strolled past? 'There she's in her Beate-roots'....

Beatroot is a rather interesting blog, especially for those of us who live not that far from Poland (and who 70 years ago, without moving an inch from her desk, might have been in Poland, had they been alive), and also considering all the controversy involving Poland, Polish plumbers and folk like the British Government and the British media. Must add it to my links.

Helene's blog

You should notice a new link at the bottom of the page which links you to Helene's blog; and very interesting it is, too. Helene does energy, especially the nuclear stuff, and has been all over Russia and Ukraine, as well as the Balkans, Greece and so on. We have known each other for about 5 years and spent about two single parent Christmases together when Helene was still living in Vilnius. Does a great party, too, and has wonderful talented daughters.