Cognitive Dissonance

[substitute]

In the waiting room at a psychiatrists' office. Usually the other patients are the entertainment. Today they have both a television and a radio going. The TV shows ocean nature scenes and the radio plays classical music. The results so far:

Elephant seals bask and tussle to Mahler

Slow, ominous cellos surround a zoom shot of the ocean under a cliff. Is there a body, dead, wrapped in plastic?

More Mahler: French horns heroically sound as otters clean themselves in a kelp bed.

The choice of Mahler is great. He was quite mad, and scored a part in his unfinished 10th symphony for a flute to be made of his dead wife's thigh bone.

Comments

[substitute.livejournal.com]

Apparently the context is more complex than the simple version my dad told me. Mahler was in the process of being dumped by Alma for Gropius and had found out because the letter inviting her to dump him was somehow addressed to him (!). The Adagio to the 10th contains a story in which a minstrel finds a bone and makes a flute out of it, and is hired at a wedding. At the wedding the minstrel plays the flute and the bone's previous owner speaks out in his fluting, condemning the king for murdering him and causing the wedding to end poorly. There was apparently some indication in the marginal notes that this was Alma's thigh bone to him, or some other muddled thing.

He was special.

[substitute.livejournal.com]

And her boyfriends and/or husbands also included Kokoschka, Klimt... wow. Plus romantic/terrifying escape from Nazis, life in Hollywood, and grand dame of the arts in New York. What a life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Mahler