Ruth's Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant

We had several great meals in Florence. First was a traditional Bistecca alla Fiorentina and the second was just around the corner from the synagogue (above) at Ruth's Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant.  The former because of the enormity both in mass and taste and the second because the owner regaled us with stories of his days in Prague in the bad old days of the Soviet repression: how he hung out with Vaclav Havel (he had a book of photos of the two of them and various other hippie types), about the Plastic People of the Universe (including where they all are now), about the Velvet Underground (and how the Velvet Revolution was named after them), about the importance of Frank Zappa to their culture, about how they carried copies of the White Album with a label peeled off a Smetana LP, and how the best Milos Forman film is Taking Off.  

Torture of the damned

Mother Jones published an interesting object, seen below.  It purports to be the music of the twist and the  screw: our tax dollars payed out for the most genteel of purposes. It reminded me of Gavin Bryars explanation for self-publishing, to keep control over his works so they wouldn't be performed in the then-pariah state of apartheid South Africa.  I can't imagine Rage Against the Machine - especially - being too happy about their inclusion on this list. Music, like any other form of torture, should be applied only to those who request it of you. Even though I, like most right-minded™ folks, believe that information wants to be free, I do think it is a somewhat naive misunderstanding of the value of author's rights, even moral rights, to think that it is all about BitTorrent-ing the latest episode of Project Runway. In fact, the greatest threat could be your government or the big bad corporations stealing your artistic handiwork to use for nefarious purposes, from the selling to unthinking consumers the means of their own destruction to the hired scourgers of our various Ministries of Justice, Peace and Defense using it to destroy some poor schmuck who happened to piss off the wrong tribal elder when the company fellows started doling out greenbacks for information. And I have some fear for my friend Frieder, whose performance previous to my opera this spring will be in Pakistan. Will his Pakistani visa's presence on his Old Europe passport land him a lengthy stay in a Navy brig, with cold iron manacles and cold iron door that even his most earnest magic cannot pass through, listening to the Barney Theme Song until he confesses to a host of misdeeds?