All those well-known works I love
That pall for many with familiarity
I can’t get tired of Satisfaction
Those stalwart fuzzy first five notes
And lyrics that bite on consumer capitalism
If you can make them out
You don’t hear Jagger sound that note much any more once he’d gotten rich
And I Want to Hold Your Hand
Perfect from stem to stern
But I especially love George’s bay-ong
Tell you something cha cha cha bay-ong
How do they come up with that shit
I think about that all the time with Ringo
Right before the chorus in Help
Super quick unison on the snare and the floor tom
Ta ta ta ta ta ta ta
How does he come up with it

I admit that some things I thought I’d love forever do pall
I used to melt at the English horn in the New World Symphony
When I hear it now it’s kind of meh
I was so crazy about Dr Seuss
I could read it all by myself
But now it’s just been superceded its disagreeableness exposed
And Sesame Street on HBO and in big-box stores
How I loved it with my young children
Now cruelly parodies its radical beginnings
Charlie was scared of the Count
But loved Forgetful Jones whom he called Hee-Ha
But this is a case in which the work has changed
And I retain affection for the earlier avatar
Similarly the Teletubbies have declined
With their immigration to streaming

William Shakespeare firmly remains
Possibly not the most white nor even the most male
But really most sincerely dead like the witch of the east
Nobody else mingles comedy and tragedy with such aplomb
Famously in Hamlet of course and Romeo and Juliette
A great play and a mediocre one respectively
A mixture less noted perhaps but certainly evident in Henry IV Part 1
Anarchy amid rigid determinism
And really who does blank verse better
Voicing characters of impossible range
Who better dramatic poetry
Shakespeare’s very unevenness proves a strength
Upon request I’ll divulge the must-see and the skip
Ten sonnets and half a dozen plays

Jane Austen has the opposite problem
With everything she wrote of such high caliber
That nothing stands out
So you could read all six novels
Or content yourself like me with Emma
Peace friends
Pride and Prejudice is not bad or inferior by a whit
Go for both if your life is long enough
They themselves are not that long

Every decade or so the itch comes upon me
To reread The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks
Doctor Faustus and Joseph and His Brothers
I even revisited Royal Highness the other day
Though general opinion is correct that that one is slighter
And surely you can spare an afternoon for Death in Venice

Prokofiev did a good job with Romeo and Juliette
But go for the 1st Symphony

Some great artists are just too prolific
So you gravitate to more or less arbitrary favorites
And you can’t expect them to dwell in perpetual heights
How about sixty poems of William Wordsworth
Too bad he wrote six hundred
The Prelude has its moments
But don’t read all fourteen books
Or all of any one of them
What do you expect for something fragmentary over forty years
Really Tintern Abbey does the trick
But quite a few sonnets
And the Lucy poems and the Immortality Ode
Just read the first four strophes of that one
Nutting I Wandered Lonely The Solitary Reaper
Surprised by Joy achingly sad the death of a child
Westminster Bridge I learned the gimmick of a list
You can prospect all you want
Or get someone to help you find the nuggets
Surprised by Joy is buried in a collection
That treats the rituals and doctrines of the Church of England
I’m just lucky somebody told me about it
I’ve enjoyed every note of Haydn I’ve ever heard
But a hundred and four symphonies
Come on
But 94 still surprises
Bach is great what I can understand of it
The St. Matthew Passion has fits of gorgeousness
But when we enter hour three of
I’m in a coma
Give me the catchy pop tunes the Brandenburg Concertos
Nine poems by John Keats five by STC
Pope and Swift great and great
Gulliver a bit rocky in passages
But Swift’s tetrameters are justified by Celia Shits alone
Rape of the Lock and the first epistle of An Essay on Man
But you can have the Dunciad
I get bitterness but I can’t do boring
Heroic couplets hijacked the eighteenth century
But Pope did ‘em best
So skip all the rest
Gray’s Elegy is quatrains and beautiful most of it
That Paradise Lost is too long is no fresh cut
Hopping back to the seventeenth
And of course the puritanism is noisome
But Milton really was of the devil’s party
Or at least of the Italocentric Aeneaphile renaissance
I’ll ride with him any day in hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition
Which reminds me to remember that
Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Are world heritage treasures especially with their proper illuminations
The prophetic books of Blake not so much
Aphex Twin Brian Eno David Bowie
Even the redoubtable Beatles themselves
All perpetual dwellers in the heights
All too greatly productive to be digested
Or rather
I play favorites unabashedly
Always the hoariest numbers

I can’t speak of literature in translation
Though I make an exception for Thomas Mann
Similarly I love Indian music
But Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan figure inordinately
I know just enough French to appreciate Baudelaire
But Rimbaud leaves me cold
And Mallarmé is over my head
Ditto almost all of Goethe
And Voltaire and Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust are much too much
You have to admit at least The Metamorphosis and the Hunger Artist
And you can’t exclude The Trial
A taste of opera in Italian is okay
A little Verdi a little Pucchini
Bohème not Butterfly
Afro-cuban I’ll eat up all day
But I can’t identify the greats

Literally a warhorse is a mount tough enough to survive a battle
In figurative terms a warhorse is a cultural artifact
That survives irrespective of its possibly modest quality
The word suggests that the piece
Should likely be put out to pasture
And I grew up in the age of the Top 40
At least 37 of which were inevitably dreck
Although the Cracker Jack prize might be number 39 at the bottom of the box
And you never heard anything that wasn’t already a hit
In some consequential market
So on any given week three or four entries seemed to my jejune consciousness
Pretty good
Even memorable
I could never visit the Louvre
But picture books enshrined the Great Masters
My mother and I enjoyed the Jacksonville Symphony
Not among the world’s most prestigious
But one time we heard Copland conduct the Lincoln Portrait
With John Caradeen reading
And at Christmas once Great Melodies of Classical Music appeared
To be played on a kiddie phonograph
Of course the concept is worthy of critique
But I call Great that which induces joy
A received opinion in most cases I admit
But on occasion a celebrated piece will disappoint
While something elaborately discarded will please
And collective creativity always comes up with a new synthesis
And Newsweek and Life featured the current sensation
Jackson Pollock or deathless Picasso
The New Rock emerging from the Summer of Love
So hell yeah I like me some Jefferson Airplane
Some Big Brother and the Holding Company
Some Andy Warhol some Hogarth and Cruikshank
Get Offa My Cloud Paperback Writer Light My Fire
Ooh Break on Through to the Other Side
The Temps and the Tops
Junior Strauss and the Peer Gynt Suite

I am well aware of the arrogance of one
Who presumes to recommend and disparage
When I say it appeals or not
I tell you more about myself than about the work
And you shouldn’t care about me I don’t suppose
But I will say that when I recommend
I have discovered there
And probably it’s been discovered many times before
Some value that others are likely to see if they give a try
And in rare cases though not unprecedented
I diagnose some heinous flaw that disqualifies a work
From sympathetic consideration
But generally I recognize that life is short
Oscar Wilde wrote four famous comedies all worthy of a glance
Wilde never fails to entertain
Even in the put-on decadence of tragic Salome
Or is Herod really the tragic one
But there’s a reason The Importance of Being Earnest
Is performed around the world
By troupes that do not muster the accents of English patricians
Most of the world of life art and physics I do not comprehend
The slender sliver that I feel confident to grasp
Was vouchsafed to me in my youth my childhood
There obtains more gap than presence in the current essay
There is a difference however between deficiency and defect
I do not scorn what I do not know
And many rightly know and love that of which I am oblivious
And with art you must cultivate a partiality for pleasure
The Mikado makes light of truly nasty beliefs
But come now
Tit Willow
Three Little Maids

The jazz greats are consistently and exuberantly unreservedly great
So much so you feel guilty for every tune you’ve missed
Louis Armstrong of course
Duke Ellington duh
Prez and Diz and Lady Day
Bird and ‘Trane and Monk the ineffable Sphere and bad bad Miles Davis
Basey Django Wayne Shorter Cannonball Herbie Hancock Ella Fitzgerald Jimmy Smith
Joe Zawinul Jan Hammer Tony Williams Lenny White Chick Correa Billy Cobham
Ron Carter Ray Brown Major Holley Charles Mingus
Jack DeJohnette Philly Joe Jones Gene Krupa Steve Gadd Art Blakey
Airto Moreira Milt Jackson
Roy Eldridge Woody Shaw Fats Navarro
Cootie Williams Artie Shaw Johnny Dodds
I know that a multitude have eluded my scrutiny or my recognition here
And that I limited in my understanding have given them short shrift
Oscar Peterson who owed a lot to Art Tatum
Sarah Vaughan remember her
And now I feel guilty for starting a list I can never hope to finish
I guess I’ll make a lame disclaimer
A portion of infinity
Sidney Bechet the tensest quickest most righteous vibrato
Charlie Christian Joe Pass John McLaughlin
And blues and funk and sweet soul music
As if there were a boundary line in the spacetime continuum
Mothership Connection Got My Mojo Working Cold Sweat
Anything by Al Green
Gah they crowd upon me with their importunities
The Godfather of Soul the Hardest Working Man in Show Business
Sonny Boy Wolf Muddy John Lee Hooker Booker T and Cropper
Tina Turner was an immensely exciting performer
All around singing and dancing
I loved her superfit backup singers
What Tina did with the microphone in Gimme Shelter excited me
Aretha The Supremes all of Stax and Motown and Atlantic
Smokey Robinson Marvin Gaye Michael Jackson Quincy Jones
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles
Wicked Pickett and Lonesome Otis
Mood Indigo Potato Head Blues The Thrill Is Gone Caravan
Dust My Broom Rollin’ and Tumblin’ If the River Was Whiskey
Stones in My Passway Hellhound on My Trail
Ma Rainey Bessie Smith Big Mama Thornton Etta James
Rufus and Kool and the Gang and The Ohio Players and The Gap Band
Mississippi Fred and Mississippi John and Memphis Gus and Memphis Minnie
Memphis Slim and Slim Harpo
Professor Longhair and Dr John the Gris Gris Man Alain Toussaint The Meters
Luke Jordan Cocaine Blues
And Dick Justice’s cover is a bit of all right
Along with his rendering of Henry Lee
And almost everything else in the Harry Smith Anthology
The Carter Family Buell Kazee Uncle Dave Macon
Sliding a bit off topic now
The continuum is slippery
But many of the immortals listed herein
Appear in that Folkways noble compilation
The Masked Marvel Cannon’s Jug Stompers
I say almost so full disclosure
Nelstone’s Hawaiians sound winsome indeed
But they’re virulent racists sad to say
It’s a shame when assholes contaminate our fun
So let’s quickly give a cleansing listen to
Blind Willie McTell Blind Lemon Jefferson Blind Arthur Blake
Ray Charles
Robert Johnson in a hotel in Dallas
And the Moses and Elijah Charlie Patton
And seven or eight other hundred dozen
The little nightclub in Anytown USA
The ensemble at the college before the basketball game
And I just want to express my boundless gratitude
Beam me up Scotty I’m in a hell of heaven

I don’t care for show tunes
But Singing in the Rain The Wizard of Oz 42nd Street
So blessedly clever
The film score to Lawrence of Arabia
And the film itself is pretty great too though not without its flaws
Would it have killed you David Lean to put a woman in there
The ululating multitude don’t really tick the box
I guess he tried to make amends with Zhivago and his sappy Lara
Imagine Vertigo Psycho or Taxi Driver without Bernard Herrmann
Bugs Bunny without Carl Stalling

I could name a hundred one-hit wonders
And one-hit wonders are great
And as Joseph says in one of Mann’s best novels
Often dismissed as too lengthy
Once you’ve been acquainted with the Most High
Why bother with lesser gods
Who needs a second record from Shocking Blue or even the Box Tops
? and the Mysterians is only one song but that a good one
You can flip back and forth between the Trashmen and the Rivingtons
Misirlou Dick probably had other hits
But this one is perfect starts fast and speeds up
Some artists should have quit while they were ahead
Sequels suck as a rigorous rule
Woolly Bully way better than Little Red Riding Hood
Time of the Season pretty great but no She’s Not There

Mystery Train would be a classic even if Elvis hadn’t sung it
But with Scotty Moore and the boys at Sun it’s hard to beat

Within You Without You is an extraordinary case
The dialogue between the massive London Symphony and a little Indian band
A little girl and her neighbor Totoro

Those better informed than I have denounced Bitches Brew
But I was ready to be transformed in 1970

I must leave myself time and space and thou Dear Reader
For those just short of the pinnacle of greatness
And need I remind you what a majestic height that is
The Doors the Kinks The New York Dolls Jefferson Airplane
The Hollies The Byrds The Who Pink Floyd The Pixies
The Björk-PJ Harvey-Nick Cave wrinkle
The J Geils band were so fresh when
They were slicked-back nasty lads from Boston
Kurt Weill Claude Debussy
The charming sardonic and enigmatic Satie
The German Requiem but really just one section well the opening’s also great
Dark Side might nudge Floyd into the first rank
Outstanding musicianship studio technique lyrical excellence
Jeff Beck belongs here too
At his best with Jan Hammer or George Martin
But Over Under Sideways Down sounds like a shehnai
Played through a Telecaster
And the Bolero is pretty great penned by Jimmy Page
But John Paul Jones was the only genius in Led Zep
And how many groups have even one
Go for Four Sticks
He composer of the strings in She’s a Rainbow
The Velvet Underground let truth be told
And the early works of Andy Warhol
Especially his images of naked death
Transformer is a classic
Collaboration of Reed Bowie and Ronson
Brian Wilson is pretty great
But all I want is Don’t Worry Baby
Daft Punk paid homage to Wilson
But all I want is Around the World

It’s always a disillusionment to discover
For the umpteenth time that a great artist is human
All too human
Take Nietzsche for example
A lyrical philosopher if such a thing is possible
But not a model of coherence
Indeed madness peeps through the curtains of his greatest works
Yeats’s attraction to the overman
Led him to wish for a fascist aristocracy
And his politics were not his sole eccentricity
Best poetic diction though in modern times
And you could fill a hall of fame with the busts
Of great minds ravaged by syphilis
Schubert Manet Baudelaire
Perhaps even the miraculous Oscar Wilde
Who gave his genius to his life and his life for his genius
Of whom bee tee dubs just read The Importance of Being Earnest
We can accept that artists are on the verge
Many of them of cracking up or past the verge
With their drugs alcohol and garden variety crazies
Like everybody else really
Nevermind is a monument of magnificence
And Lithium best of all early specific for clinical depression
But you don’t have to do like Bird to play like Bird
‘Cause you can never play like Bird
And Kubla Khan occurred despite and not because of the laudanum
Gene Vincent burnt to a cinder
Poor diamond Syd giggling in the hall
Sly Stone had a problem showing up
Hemingway Fitzgerald Dorothy Parker
The standard bearers of generations lost beat or grunge
The suicides the abusers and the abused
Ike Turner was a hell of a blues guitar player
It’s a shame though when the author’s defects
Make up the theme of the work
I love me some Wagner
But ever were works of such towering grandeur
Devised by such a shithead

Some artists attain a consistently impossibly high standard
But one title will stand apart
Disraeli Gears Fear of Music Kid A
Hendrix worked the opposite trick
Three out of four titles he more or less completed kill outright
He did have a little sophomore slump though
But jaysus what can you say about Hendrix
The octaves on Third Stone the pathos of Wind Cries Mary
The orchestral expansion of Dylan’s Watchtower the apocalyptic sorrow
Psychedelic music generally expresses exquisite melancholy
Hear the sadness in Strawberry Fields
Which might have made Sgt. Pepper exceed a single disc
Double albums were all the rage for a while
Generally not worth the bulk
But preeminent exceptions obtain
The White Album a bit sad four solo albums some rather slim
Not innocent of longueurs
But Electric Ladyland Exile on Main St
Both highest points of highest points
The Stones created five unchallenged classic albums
Under the tutelage of Jimmy Miller
Add classics after
Some Girls
And before
Their Satanic Majesties Request denigrated at first
But justified by 2000 Light Years from Home alone
Add twenty or twenty-five songs from before albums became a thing and after
What To Do in every category guitar backing vocals lyrics drums
Charley I’m speechless and demolished with grief months years later
We Love You Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows Please Go Home
Jumping Jack Flash Honky Tonk Women warhorses par excellence
Stu and Nicky Hopkins and sweet crazy Brian
Bill Wyman underrated but 19th Nervous Breakdown
And the bass in Satisfaction yet another of its glories
Mick Taylor’s solo on Winter slide on You Got To Move and all over Exile
The coda jam to end all jams of Can You Hear Me Knocking
Sway badass in every respect
Bobby Keys stately Texas maniac
Merry Clayton got one shot and scored
Billy Preston I Got the Blues indisputably the best organ solo
Who saved Let It Be
Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone but it isn’t
Don’t be put off by the lumbering behemoth of the Stones onstage today
Keith can still shake you with a touch
The opening act in 1972 Stevie Wonder and Superstitious
So Talking Book that’s the one
Innervisions that’s the one
Fulfillingness’ First Finale that’s the one
I’ve had a good life and can die happy
Luxuriating in such plenitude
That’s what great art does for you
And if you can have only one Beatles album
Go with Abbey Road
But then Revolver

I can take a homeopathic dose of Grateful Dead
Especially if we’re in 1967 or 1969 or 1973

Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard had far better bands
Than most of the rock acts I’ve commended here

I lie awake at night fantasizing
That Jimi Hendrix has joined Parliament Funkadelic

Ann Carson I can’t even tell you what she’s doing
David Melnick was there ever a more sweet-tempered pcoet

I love when one great
Pays tribute to another
Mahavishnu Miles

Two pictures by Titian two or three by Turner
Leonardo Michelangelo Raphael are chelonianly impressive
But how lovable are they really
Admiring them feels like a duty
Velazquez tailor-made for the Foucauldian taste
But as usual the artist far outstrips the commentator
Hard to find a Rembrandt that doesn’t knock you out
Hans and Franz Holbein and Hals
Vermeer perhaps a little more praiseworthy than moving
Constable the healing power of nature in art
Francis Bacon had quite a few but Three Figures stands apart
Duchamp but primarily as groundwork for Jasper Johns consistently great
The latter a kind of Jane Austen of twentieth-century painting
As is John Ashbery of twentieth-century poetry
Who made it strong well into the twenty-first
Another sweet-tempered giant
Dip in anywhere
And his disciple James Tate
Browse leisurely his Selected
Bob Dylan has his ups and downs
Like way way down for a decade or two
But oh lord way way up
Desolation Row and all of Highway 61
Mississippi and about forty others that you tend to forget about
Oh yeah he wrote that and everybody either covered or copied
Jeez I mean Flatt and Scruggs did I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
A big tipoff when the songs in the Top 40 started mentioning clowns
Mozart always irresistible but six late symphonies
Three or four of the operas
All you need
Well you need the Requiem and whoever finished it did a fine job
And you can’t be a decent human being
If a Little Night Music doesn’t make you smile
Magical Vivaldi always a feast of melody
But stick to the concertos for mandolin
Odd-numbered symphonies of Beethoven plus the sixth minus the first
But here the warhorse theory shows its weakness
String quartets piano trios sonatas which of them do you plan to lose
And how about Schubert and his six hundred songs
If a tenth of them are as good as Der Lindenbaum or Erlkönig
And go to the Tate in London and try to decide what’s smokable

I like the hardboiled popular stuff
George Smiley Bernie Gunther
Starting to like Jackson Lamb
The works of Dashiell Hammett always
But Raymond Chandler doesn’t do it for me
The Godfather the French Connection the car chase in Bullitt
Apocalypse Now but not Heart of Darkness or well maybe
Aguirre the Wrath of God
Most of Scorcese
Most of the Coens
Thank goodness for Marge Gunderson
Or absolutely everybody would be a dope
Who’s not a hapless victim
A Clockwork Orange if that doesn’t stretch the point
A wicked score by Wendy Carlos
Assisted by Purcell and Elgar and Rossini and Ludwig Van
The movie not the book or well maybe
Try to refrain from the glossary

Aristotle despite his stout reputation is a wimp
Plato despite resistance has a lot going for him
And a lot harder than people think
Socrates is the greatest ever but you have to go through Plato
I read Euthyphro and the Apology every few months or mean to

I can listen to contemporary classical music if it has a pulse
Like Nixon in China
Atonality I just don’t get
Unless maybe you’re just supposed to go with it and don’t worry about the method
I can appreciate but my understanding is limited
But with artworks as with persons those I love I love indeed
A line I cribbed from Coleridge whom you just want to mother
Ghosts of Versailles mixes in some tonality and some Turkish
The undeniable beauty of a golden bird
Way back to Stravinsky three great ballets
A few delicate piano pieces
But then he turned serial
Back further to Tchaikovsky best in the pathetic mood
But please
No cannon in the concert hall
No imperial anthems
The tunes in the Nutcracker but really they really are really very familiar
The nineteenth century was the age of the giants
Berlioz with his innumerable timpani
Novels you didn’t get many of to the pound
People praise Middlemarch but give me Silas Marner any day
David Copperfield is the one you want from Dickens
Tale of Two Cities is shorter but Dickens shouldn’t do historical
It doesn’t matter where you open Whitman
It’s going to be lovely and we need Whitman’s loveliness
It doesn’t matter where you open Dickinson among her what thousand-and-a-half
It’s going to be shocking and buddy we need her kind of shock
Poe’s tales but not the poems
Okay Annabel Lee’s okay but stay away from the bird on the bust
Moby Dick is great on any page but damn they add up fast
Bartleby is much more to the point
And Byronic heroes stink up the joint
Heathcliff Rochester Ahab Byron himself
Just act like grownups will you guys
But Byron rhymed bodices and Odysseys so that’s okay
Too bad it was on like page ten of the longest poem ever
And Jane Eyre is awesome regardless
And the first half of Wuthering Heights
And Frankenstein in the early version
War and Peace is solid but go for Anna and her sister Emma Bovary
One novel each and you know which one
By Morrison Pynchon Bellow Baldwin Vonnegut Heller Woolf Rushdie Nabokov
Ulysses is great if you can get Richard Ellmann to teach it to you

And speaking of the Odyssey
Don’t read the Iliad
And the story of Dido is okay but it’s a straight shot to fascism
Pious Aeneas virility the pathway to submissive virtue
Doesn’t matter who you screw so long as you do your duty
And Oedipus is amazing but a lot like the Eden story
We’re congenitally fucked
Well wait a minute
The scene where Priam comes to to Achilles’ tent should move you
You cold-hearted bastard
And Hector’s parting from Andromache
And we know what’s going to happen to the kid
The Divine Comedy is just gross sorry
An impressive achievement
Like making Westminster Abbey out of pretzels
But with more juicy skull chewing for all eternity
Italian lit of the renaissance is okay but see literature in translation above
You can read the Canterbury Tales in Middle English
If you ignore the great vowel shift
But don’t bother with anything except
The General Prologue and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
And the sweet story of Chanticleer and Pertelote

Does the fact that I like popular stuff make me a bad person
The Waltz King was more a collaborator in the Vichy sense
Than a servant to the insanely wealthy Viennese
A well-compensated enabler
Ah but Tales of the Vienna Wood
Vibrato on the zither