Texas sized misunderstanding

OK, for those of you who took umbrage at my comment in the previous posting that said that Texas is a pretty useless place and that we ought to just give it back to Mexico, I wonder: can you not see the sarcasm that I was trying to express? It was meant purely tongue and cheek, honestly. I've only set foot in Texas once, and that was while flying home from Florida via Houston, but the state has produced some mighty writers and artists that I respect and admire greatly. It has also produced its share of really lousy politicians, and those are the folks that I can pretty much do without. Of course, every state of the Union can be said to have produced lousy politicians, so this quality is not exclusive of Texas necessarily, but some Texans have often kind of considered themselves to be a breed apart, real Lone Star types who espouse the "my way or the highway" philosophy of life. Again, this can be said of many states and not necessarily exclusive of Texas. So please don't think I'm singling out Texas for condemnation of any kind. It's just that some of the politicians that have come to national prominence from that state have had Texas sized egos and tend to give the state a bad name as it is. The Current Occupant comes to mind, in particular. I mean, here's a guy that seems to want to run the world by cowboy rules and sees the world in purely black and white terms, the white hat sheriff and the black hat bad guy, like a bad western movie, when it's not that simple, really. He misses the subtle nuances of grey in between the black and white and as a result, misses a lot of the important facts in how things run. So as far as I am concerned, Mexico can take back Crawford, Texas, at least, and take Dubya with them, with our blessings. He's been the worst thing to happen to this country in my lifetime, far exceeding the Reagan years in mishandling things. So to those of you who want to condemn me for what I said about Texas, well, it was said purely in sarcasm. So there you have it.

COPYING BEETHOVEN

Last night I watched an interesting DVD called "Copying Beethoven", starring Ed Harris as the famed composer. The storyline is about how Beethoven is writing his famous 9th symphony and needs someone to write it down for him. He's been relying on Herr Schlemmer to do it, but he is dying of cancer, which Beethoven can't seem to accept, so Schlemmer asks for a composition student from the music conservatory in Vienna to take over for him, as his health prevents him from being of further service to Beethoven. Along comes 23 year old Anna Holtz, whose father has sacrificed a great deal to get her to conservatory. Schlemmer is horrified that she's a woman and is convinced that there has been a terrible mistake, but Anna goes to Beethoven anyway and offers to transcribe his work. After a bit of a battle, Beethoven agrees to take her on. She proves herself to be up to the task but is horrified to find Beethoven to be so ill mannered and living in such squalor. Eventually she does help write down Beethoven's work and ends up helping him to conduct it in its premier, and it turns out to be a huge hit. Beethoven wants to move on to try to change the direction of music and Anna does not understand where his music is going. Meanwhile, she wants to compose work of her own, and when she presents her music to Beethoven, he ridicules it as simplistic and she is crushed. She ends up writing a good composition that in a way, copies her mentor, Beethoven, who ends the movie by composing his "farewell" piece, "Grande Fugue" before dying. The film, while a tad far fetched in its story of a young woman who writes Beethoven's music down for him and assists in conducting the 9th Symphony, nonetheless is visually beautiful and has Beethoven's music interspersed all throughout it, and very much like "Amadeus", which tells the tale of Mozart, this movie's main star is the music itself. I'd never heard of this film until I saw it on the shelf at work, and it apparently was made in Hungary. It never showed in US movie theaters, so I was wholly unaware of its existence. If you like Beethoven's music, I think it's easy to say that you would like this movie, even if the story is fictitious.