Yet another non-candidate diary...

Being a true Yankee, with a proudly contrarian pedigree almost four centuries old, loathe am I to admit that anything concerning that metropolis of urban chaos and sheer iniquity called The Big Apple is any more welcome in my life than ten inches of heavy wet snow on the one hundred ten feet of my driveway when the left wheel on the snowblower is flat. Yet here I am warmly recommending to all the performance of the New York Philharmonic from North Korea, Maestro Loren Maazel conducting.

More beneath the fold...

We all have our phases. At the age of sixteen, I was a devotee of a modest Errol Flynn revival. (Ok, I was a callow youth—you have to admit it could have been a lot worse.) However, that night my friends and I were doing what callow young men did in those days: we rode around in a car together and honked the horn at groups of girls while dialing up and down the FM dial looking for music to blow the car's speaker. (Yes, just one speaker. The explosion in the market for car stereos was ten years yet to come.)

Well. Right there in the middle of the dial was WCRB, which I later came to learn was the finest classical music radio station in America. I didn't know what it was they were playing, but it sounded lots like the stirring music behind a scene in a Flynn classic, They Died With Their Boots On. In my mind's eye, I saw a Civil War rail yard with row upon row of cannon waiting for shipment to Lincoln's army. (It was one of those, "might of the Union—in just cause," moments. Or meant to be, anyways.)

But, forgive me, I digress.

Anyways, I shouted, "hold on! Leave that!" Which is how I later learned that it was From the New World, Opus 95, by Anton Dvorak:

Bored by speaker-blowing three-chord rock, what began that night grew into a lifelong love of classical music, and for years after, I woke to the sound of Robert J. Lurtsema's Morning Pro Musica. The photo above was taken by a somewhat aged votary (me) in Slavin, the cemetary reserved for Czech artists, in Vysehrad, Prague, Czech Republic. (I was in the neighborhood, and well, I just had to go see him to voice my thanks.)

So I've had some history with Dvorak's ninth. I don't know how many versions of it I've heard over the years. Dozens certainly. Like Senator Clinton, then, I can plausibly plead, "experience." And I'm hear to tell you that I've never heard this piece played with as much grace as I heard it tonight. The Philharmonic and Maazel really, really nailed it.

Evidently, the best we have went to perform in Pyongyang.

Mark this day. You've just witnessed a Bostonian publically complimenting something New Yorkish.

But if I can do this, there's hope along the Korean DMZ, in Gaza, Northern Ireland, Beirut, Afghanistan, Iraq, and in our own Democratic Party.

Whoever wins the nomination.