Sounds & Fury

Featured Past Post #15 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post is up on the right sidebar.

An Unpleasant Choice?

I received an eMail early this morning from another member of the cultural blogosphere giving me the link to this New York Times article concerning the cancellation of a Eurotrash production of Mozart's Idomeneo by the Deutsche Oper Berlin because of possible violent Islamist reprisals (the production includes a scene that depicts the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad — needless to say, neither Mozart's nor his librettist's doing, but part of the imbecile Konzept of Eurotrash vandal, director Hans Neuenfels), and remarking that he imagines my feelings about Islamofacism trump those about Eurotrash, but that the matter reported in the Times article must present me with an unpleasant choice nevertheless.

I've been reading about this latest act of unmitigated institutional cowardice in the face of Islamist terrorism for the past three days now, and held off posting about it here until all the facts were in and confirmed, and also because my outrage — and, yes, my rage — at just the thought that the matter was just what it appeared to be from first reports, was so extreme that I couldn't get my mind around the words I needed to use to comment on it.

Well, all the facts are in and confirmed now, and it's all just what it appeared to be from first reports, but by this time my outrage (as well as my rage) has cooled sufficiently to comment on it by saying merely that my eMail correspondent was right about one thing: that my feelings about the viciously barbaric and lunatic Islamist pigs absolutely trump, and in spades, my feelings about Eurotrash and Eurotrash vandals such as Herr Neuenfels. I, for one, would have actively and willingly encouraged — insisted on — the Deutsche Oper Berlin's mounting this Eurotrash production of Idomeneo if only I could be certain it would enrage the Islamist pigs while simultaneously spitting in the faces of any who might even merely have contemplated committing violence as objection to it on Islamist grounds.

While my eMail correspondent was right about that, he was wrong about the other; viz., his thinking I would find the choice presented me by this business unpleasant.

It wasn't in the least. Not if things went my way as I can't imagine Eurotrash and the work of Eurotrash vandals such as Herr Neuenfels put to better use.

Show Stealer

I just heard a taped Salzburg Festival concert in honor of Mozart's 250th that had Anna Netrebko singing ... no, that's not quite right ... possessing Elettra in her raging Act III aria from Idomeneo, and I think I now understand what I never before could: why Callas freaks became Callas freaks.

And this doesn't hurt one little bit, either:

I need to take a cold shower now, I think.

Or something.

As We Were Saying...

Apropos of this from our October 2005 post, "And Speaking of Dr. Atomic":

I confess I've a secret wish and suspicion that string theory — with its fundamental requirement of a 10-dimensional space-time universe (as opposed to our 4-dimensional one; and N.B., string theory doesn't merely predict a 10-dimensional space-time universe; it requires it), and its fundamental non-disprovability — will turn out ultimately to be the bust some few physicists think it will turn out to be. I intuitively don't like its messy, complicated, exercise-in-masturbatory-mathematics feel, in the same way I intuitively dislike the probabilistic basis of quantum mechanics. (I'm in good company vis-à-vis the latter. Einstein was unhappy with quantum mechanics for the same reason. It was what provoked his famous, "I cannot believe God plays dice with the world.") In short, from this mathophobic layman's vantage point, string theory seems but a complexly elaborate sandbox in which theoretical physicists can play about for decades without getting bored while seeming to be engaged in something on the verge of revealing the true nature of the reality underlying all the physical phenomena of the universe, and the true nature of the reality underlying the very universe itself from its birth to its ultimate death, if indeed it can be said to have either.

But perhaps when the final equations of string theory — all five(!) string theories — are finally derived, solved, collated, and experimentally confirmed under the construct called M-theory (which requires an 11-dimensional space-time universe — don't even think of asking!), those equations and what they describe will prove string theory as simple, elegant and, more importantly, as inevitable as relativity. I have my mathophobic layman's doubts, but if that day ever comes — and today the smart money in physics is betting that it's a matter of when, not if — man will truly have succeeded, in the words of Stephen Hawking, in reading the very mind of God.

we have this from The New Yorker's Jim Holt in his article, "Unstrung":

Now two members of the string-theory generation have come forward with exposés of what they deem to be the current mess. “The story I will tell could be read by some as a tragedy,” Lee Smolin writes in “The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next” (Houghton Mifflin; $26). Peter Woit, in “Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law” (Basic; $26.95), prefers the term “disaster.” Both Smolin and Woit were journeyman physicists when string theory became fashionable, in the early nineteen-eighties. Both are now outsiders: Smolin, a reformed string theorist (he wrote eighteen papers on the subject), has helped found a sort of Menshevik cell of physicists in Canada called the Perimeter Institute; Woit abandoned professional physics for mathematics (he is a lecturer in the mathematics department at Columbia), which gives him a cross-disciplinary perspective. Each author delivers a bill of indictment that is a mixture of science, philosophy, aesthetics, and, surprisingly, sociology. Physics, in their view, has been overtaken by a cutthroat culture that rewards technicians who work on officially sanctioned problems and discourages visionaries in the mold of Albert Einstein. Woit argues that string theory’s lack of rigor has left its practitioners unable to distinguish between a scientific hoax and a genuine contribution. Smolin adds a moral dimension to his plaint, linking string theory to the physics profession’s “blatant prejudice” against women and blacks. Pondering the cult of empty mathematical virtuosity, he asks, “How many leading theoretical physicists were once insecure, small, pimply boys who got their revenge besting the jocks (who got the girls) in the one place they could — math class?”

[...]

The gold standard for beauty in physics is Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. What makes it beautiful? First, there is its simplicity. In a single equation, it explains the force of gravity as a curving in the geometry of space-time caused by the presence of mass: mass tells space-time how to curve, space-time tells mass how to move. Then, there is its surprise: who would have imagined that this whole theory would flow from the natural assumption that all frames of reference are equal, that the laws of physics should not change when you hop on a merry-go-round? Finally, there is its aura of inevitability. Nothing about it can be modified without destroying its logical structure. The physicist Steven Weinberg has compared it to Raphael’s “Holy Family,” in which every figure on the canvas is perfectly placed and there is nothing you would have wanted the artist to do differently.

[...]

Since the late eighteenth century, no major scientific theory has been around for more than a decade without getting a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Correct theories nearly always triumph quickly. But string theory, in one form or another, has been hanging on inconclusively for more than thirty-five years. Einstein’s own pursuit of a unified theory of physics in the last three decades of his life is often cited as a case study in futility. Have a thousand string theorists done any better?

As we said last October, we suspect not.

Is This Guy For Real?

The subhead of this Guardian article reads:

Can it be true that Shakespeare often wrote with a hangover? Some experts think so. It would certainly explain why he penned some of the clumsiest lines in English literature, says [Guardian journalist] John Sutherland.

Mr. Sutherland's cited examples:

• When, for example, pondering whether to be or not to be, Hamlet fantasises about "taking arms against a sea of troubles", what does Shakespeare expect us to see in our mind's eye? Some mad idiot firing a blunderbuss into the waves from the end of Brighton pier?

• What actor, for example, can utter, without an inward shudder, King Duncan's opening line [in Macbeth]: "What bloody man is that?" One can imagine Prince Charles saying it, on glimpsing [BBC TV newscaster] Nicholas Witchell on the slopes at Klosters.

• If you were a young actor given his big chance with Macduff [in Macbeth], and you wanted to catch [British theater critic] Michael Billington's notice in the front row, would you really want to leap on stage, claymore in hand, with the line "Turn, hell-hound, turn!"?

• You will remember the great plot twist [in Macbeth]. No man "of woman born" can kill Macbeth. How does he know? The witches (is this for real?) have told him so. Lay on, Macduff. And how is the villain confounded? "Know that Macduff," our good guy says, "was from his mother's womb untimely ripped." Collapse of hell-hound. Heads on poles. Happy times for Scotland.

But what, the audience will wonder as they file out of the theatre, does "untimely ripped" actually mean? A Caesarian? Premature delivery? Was the Macduff foetus removed at the point of conception and, by the advanced technology of 15th-century alchemy, brought to term in a test tube?

It's manifestly clear to us that someone was surely writing with a hangover, and manifestly clear as well that someone was not Shakespeare.

A Virgin No Longer

This blog has been online for a few years now, and last April we bemoaned the fact that, unlike the reports of many other blogs in the cultural blogosphere, not once have we had occasion to report even so much as a single inapposite or weird or humorous keyword or keyword combination specified as the search criteria for search engine accesses to this site. It's all been a rather dreary affair here on that front, and we were feeling, as we said, just a smidge deprived.

Well, we're a virgin on the weird keyword front no longer. Herewith our very first nifty search engine keyword combination:

chicken balls schlingensief

It was worth the wait.

Ave Atque Vale, Thomas

The gifted Wagnerian bass-baritone, Thomas Stewart, died late Sunday at age 78. A fine obituary by The Washington Post's Tim Page can be read here.

Ave atque vale, Thomas. Atque in perpetuum.

Featured Past Post #14 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post is up on the right sidebar; a past post of especially timely relevance in the wake of the Eurotrash staging of the Canadian Opera Company's new production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Why Am I Not Surprised

It seems that music critic and journalist Greg Sandow, of whose notions and writings on music regular readers of this blog know I've a less than, um, respectful view, teaches a graduate(!) course on music criticism at Julliard, and has recently posted on the Web this semester's course schedule and reading assignments. On that assigned reading list are writings by Mr. Sandow himself, of course, as well as writings by (in the order they appear in the schedule) Nick Hornby, Jack Kerouac (yes, that Jack Kerouac), Tom Johnson, George Bernard Shaw, Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson, Olin Downes, Ellen Willis (whomever she might be), and Stanley Crouch.

And that's it. The whole enchilada. Nowhere does one find assigned the writings of any of the most eloquent and most erudite mainstream press music critics writing today. Not a single one. Nothing by Martin Bernheimer. Nothing by Bernard Holland. Nothing by Andrew Porter. And most egregious of all, nothing by perhaps the most eloquent and erudite mainstream press music critic writing today, The New Yorker's Alex Ross.

Why am I not surprised.

It May Not Be NPR, But...

Sirius Satellite Radio may not be NPR, but it ain't chopped liver either.

Sirius Satellite Radio and the Metropolitan Opera plan to announce Wednesday that they will launch a new channel to broadcast four performances a week during the company's 32-week season, part of the company's vast media expansion under new general manager Peter Gelb.

Metropolitan Opera Radio will debut with Monday's opening-night gala of a new production of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly." When not broadcasting live performances, the channel will air operas from the Met's archive of 1,500 radio broadcasts that date to 1931.

[...]

"The Met right now is the talk of the opera world, I would say, because of all these new initiatives," Gelb said. "All of these initiatives have one common purpose, which is to improve the Met's position by educating audiences and increasing the box office."

RTWT here.

Website Redesign

This really sucks. Big time. We can only hope, with fingers crossed, that this shameful (or perhaps we should say shameless) bit of prole-pandering is no harbinger concerning more substantive areas where things really count.

The Canadian Way

All last week I read and listened to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's coverage and live streaming audio webcast (on CBC Radio Two) of Canada's first complete cycle of Wagner's epic, Der Ring des Nibelungen, which inaugurated Canada's first opera house, Toronto's spanking new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Both events were clearly and justifiably a source of enormous pride for Canadians, and it would be nothing less than surly of me to serve up any critical comment here concerning the performances themselves and so I won't except to say that all involved in the Canadian Opera Company production acquitted themselves admirably if not notably (although some few things were in fact decidedly notable, but I'm speaking here generally only), and produced nothing to be ashamed of in any way, musically and dramatically speaking.

(The staging is another matter, and from the production photos I've seen, the Konzepts of the four directors, one for each of the music-dramas, are all just about what one might expect from the Konzept approach to the staging of the Ring, and regular readers of this blog know exactly and in gruesome detail just how I feel about that pernicious breed of Ring staging. Here are some photos from the Götterdämmerung production that will give you a taste of what went on in that department for this Ring cycle.)

What I do want to comment on, however, is the extraordinary coverage and the extraordinary special programming* given this week-long double event by the CBC. And my calling them extraordinary doesn't even begin to do them justice.

To get a sense of it all (all of it commercial-free, by the way), first take a look at this special section set up by the CBC on its website to promote the week-long double event. Then take a look at this special-for-the-occasion CBC programming schedule for the entire week. Can you imagine national coverage and special programming of that sort and scale dealing with something having to do with the arts, much less something having to do with so esoteric and "elitist" an event as the opening of a new opera house and the presentation of a new production of Wagner's epic tetralogy, produced by any national broadcaster in this country? I certainly can't. In this country, the Second Coming has a greater probability of coming to pass before Americans would ever experience such coverage and programming via our national broadcast media.

One might argue that Canada's state-funded way of doing such things is inimical to our market-driven, private-capital model which controls how we Americans go about handling such matters, and so the comparison is unfair.

Bullshit. We're overwhelmingly the richest country in the world, and all that's lacking here is the will, not the cash — petty cash at that as expenditures of tax dollars go.

We Americans are in the habit of poking good-natured fun at our Canadian neighbors generally, but we've much to learn from them, and rather than casting good-natured gibes their way we would do better — lots better — in this domain at least, to pay them close and earnest attention. In this domain they make us, collectively, appear to be not much more enlightened and cosmopolitan than a just-off-the-turnip-truck yokel.

PBS, NPR, and their Congressional federal funds allocators take serious note.

* A sidebar personal plea concerning programming to the Met's new general manager, Peter Gelb: I hear tell that you can be a ruthless son of a bitch when the occasion calls for it. Well, engage that son-of-a-bitch mode if you must, but by any and all means necessary steal from the CBC one Stuart Hamilton to be quizmaster for the Met's weekly broadcast Opera Quiz. The man's the natural and perfect successor to the late and sorely-missed Edward Downes, and we need him. Badly.

The Mind Reels At The Possibilities

For regular readers of this blog, the following comment will come as something of a shock, but in the music section of this Sunday's New York Times Arts & Leisure section, chief music critic Anthony Tommasini has a first-rate piece on Mozart with much of which I find myself in complete agreement. To wit:

[L]ike Mozart lovers everywhere, I’ve been hearing a lot of his music in this Mozart year, the 250th anniversary of his birth, and two trends in the later works, two paths Mozart seemed to be exploring, jump out at me.

One suggests where Mozart was heading as an opera composer. By the time of “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Così Fan Tutte,” the three masterpieces he wrote with his librettist sidekick Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart had become a master of the theater. Among other achievements, in these works he transformed the comic-opera genre into a vehicle for sublime, complex and profound dramas. That Mozart so deftly balanced comic and tragic elements in these works is wondrous enough. What stands out more is the emotional ambiguity that comes through in scene after scene, thanks to Mozart’s uncannily elusive music.

[...]

The other compositional trend in Mozart’s late works is harder to grasp and difficult to describe. It involves his increasing preoccupation with motifs and the technique usually called motivic development.

Motivic development, which reached a zenith in Viennese Classicism, allows a composer to generate an entire score from a small pool of motifs, the little components that make up a theme or a phrase. These components can be a cell of pitches, a snippet of a melody, a short rhythmic figure.

[...]

Composing music this way did not come naturally to Mozart. He had an intuitive gift for melody, a keen ear for searching harmony and a hard-won but complete mastery of contrapuntal writing that allowed him to tuck intricate, multivoice passages into his operas, even in the midst of some bustling comic ensemble. Yet he was by nature a man of the theater. His piano concertos come across like operas for instruments, as do many of his piano sonatas. Generating a string quartet or a symphony through the technique of motivic development took a special sort of focus and effort.

[...]

[I]n the summer of 1788, Mozart worked simultaneously on his last three symphonies: No. 39 in E flat, No. 40 in G minor and No. 41 in C (“Jupiter”). [...] Why did he undertake them? ... [M]y guess is that he wanted finally to come to terms with this matter of motivic development.

His work paid off. Almost every bit of the G minor Symphony, for example, can be heard as emanating from the motifs that make up the first phrases of the first movement....

These matters are difficult to describe in words. The point is that for all its tumultuous shifts, this symphony sounds inexorable and of a piece from beginning to end. Mozart worked long and hard to make it so.

I think I can imagine where Mozart was heading as a theater composer. But with this business of motivic development and the symphony he was just getting started. What a loss. Forget reaching his sister’s age. If only he had made it to 50.

If only, indeed. It's long been a deeply held and cherished conceit of mine that had Mozart lived to reach his sister's age at death before death too overtook him, he would have made Wagner entirely unnecessary as an operatic innovator having long before Wagner began writing his two theoretical treatises on opera — Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future) of 1849, and Oper und Drama of 1851 — already firmly established music-drama as opera's new form and ultimate realization.

A Mozart music-drama — a music-drama as Wagner ultimately conceived music-drama. The mind reels at just the thought of the transcendent possibilities.

Featured Past Post #13 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post is up on the right sidebar.

The Real Deal

Now this is a clear example of a genuine cultural blogosphere meme, not one of those manifold manufactured ones that make their appearance from time to time in the cultural blogosphere, and which are nothing other than thinly-veiled versions or variations of the weary, terminally annoying, look-how-cultured-but-cool-and-with-it-I-am Desert Island List.

My posting here, was a reprint of my posting very early this morning on the Classical Music & Opera Forum here, which was made independently of Steve Smith's posting here, and Alex Ross' posting here.

Love it!

Devastating

Lord knows I'm no fan of Jon Vickers, especially in his roles in Wagner's mature works. But in this scene from a non-Wagner work he's, to put it quite simply, devastating.

Not for the faint of heart.

A Plea

I've no doubt this plea will not only go unheeded, but will offend almost everyone who reads it. I make it, however, that notwithstanding.

If you're thinking of engaging in, or in any way being a part of, some public memorialization or commemoration of that dreadful day five years ago today, please think again, and don't. By such public memorialization or commemoration you dishonor those thousands of murdered innocents who lost their lives on that day by unwittingly handing to the murderous Islamist pigs and their supporters and sympathizers confirmation of their victory in accomplishing everything they set out to accomplish by those murderous acts. The time for memorialization or commemoration is far in the future; a future where every murderous Islamist pig and his supporters and sympathizers has either been slaughtered outright, or rendered impotent and moribund beyond possibility of saving or redemption. It's only then that we do honor to our murdered dead by publicly memorializing their deaths, while at the same time commemorating our ultimate victory over their murderers and those who either openly or covertly supported or cheered their murderous deeds.

Offensive as you may find the above plea, please rest assured it's a plea made with all due humility.

Peter Nicholson On Richard Wagner And Our Cultural Confusion

In an essay excerpted from a talk originally given at the Goethe Institut in Sydney on 18 April 1999 and subsequently published in London by the Wagner Society of the United Kingdom in 2001, entitled, "Orpheus Ascending", posted in three parts over as many months on the blog, 3 Quarks Daily, Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson examines and comments on what he calls "our present cultural confusion" concerning Richard Wagner the man and artist.

Orpheus is ascending: And maybe we are learning to look at the face of Wagner with not only our love but with compassion too, the same compassion Wagner expressed so nobly in his music. The world must be an alien place for those who can only criticise what has been brought by civilisation to their back door. How strange it is that Wagner should have achieved something so gigantic in one lifetime. We do no honour to Wagner by turning those achievements into a cult and praise, as in a Nuremberg war rally, the outer-garments, the actual detritus of biography and performing tradition left behind after the life has been consigned to history. A real love of Wagner means putting aside all the biographical apparatus and listening to the music he composed and the words his characters sing. What we do with that intensity and exaltation is our own affair, but I should say that the experience is a civilising one.

[...]

I said at the outset that Wagner's pre-destined end was the classical imperium we reserve for only a handful of mighty creative spirits. He is still removed from that imperium, but the distance is narrowing. Much still needs to be written about and thought over, and that will only be possible once we have cast to one side our present cultural confusion.

[...]

It may seem outrageous to claim that we have not yet discovered Wagner. What with the outpouring of critical works written and a performing tradition that is 'rich and strange', perhaps it might be objected that we understand Wagner only too well. I would argue that we are now only just preparing ourselves intellectually and emotionally to confront the reach of the Wagnerian enterprise.

[...]

In 'The Critic as Artist' Oscar Wilde writes in his amusing way, 'A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal'. Well, perhaps never in the whole history of art was an artist more sincere than Wagner. Maybe it is that sincerity we find so unsettling. We now live in a culture that will pay millions of dollars for a baseball and that espouses the celebrity interview as a via media of significance. In contrast, we have Wagner to show us, in his life and work, what the upper limit for significance can be in this world. The great achievement of democracy gives us a personal freedom to fulfil our humanity to the best of our capacity. Wagner shows both the glories and limitations of this enigmatic human enterprise. His work also stands defiantly as a challenge to all that is unachieved or too-easily achieved in art and culture. Once in five thousand years it succeeds? No, certainly not. But it did succeed gigantically, once. Against all the odds, the poetic ideal became a reality. Wagner ascended the terrain we have yet to traverse, step-by-painful step, and he is waiting for us now.

Inarguably true, to my way of thinking, although I suspect and fear his wait will prove a protracted one indeed.

Part 1 of this richly rewarding essay may be read here; Part 2, here; and Part 3, here.

Music For A Sunday Breakfast

So, I was sort of puttering around my kitchen throwing together for breakfast some yummy scraps of foodstuffs I'd rescued from the fridge just in time to prevent their being condemned as too meager in proportion to be worth keeping and consigned to the garbage pail, when I heard the strains of what sounded vaguely like the opening movement of Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 5 waft in from the stereo speakers in the living room. I couldn't be quite sure as kitchen noises obscured much of it, and I was only half listening in any case, but I stopped doing what I was doing for a few seconds just to have a more focused listen, and, yes, it was indeed what I thought it to be.

Nice Sunday breakfast music, thought I, and went back to the business to hand.

By the time I sat myself down at table in the dining area adjoining the living room the symphony was well underway, and it was unmistakably Mendelssohn No. 5, but what a strange No. 5 it was. I don't think I've ever heard that music sound so bloodless, even watery-shapeless, and the brass, woodwinds, and strings were making some rather rude, limp-wristed, un-brass-, un-woodwind- and un-string-like sounds. Just dreadful it was, and I thought sure the FM reception must be at fault, or perhaps something at the source end had gone amiss.

And then it hit me: a HIP reading, complete with "authentic" period instruments played in the "authentic" period manner.

To paraphrase Joyce describing a moment in the life of his hero, Bloom, I soon felt my gorge rise, and that, I'm afraid, was the end of what had promised to be a lovely Sunday breakfast.

In the same way one cannot turn one's eyes away when coming upon some gruesome highway accident but must take in all the horrid detail before one is satisfied one's seen enough, I sat through the whole of the symphony to the bitter end, and then got the confirmation I knew for certain I was bound to get.

The orchestra was the Stuttgart Radio Symphony (or rather, from the sound of it, a reduced percentage thereof).

And the conductor?

Why, Roger Norrington, of course.

The man's a proper bloody menace, and someone really should do something to stop him before it's too bloody late.

Advisory (Administrative Note)

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 8:14 AM Eastern on 10 Sep. See below.]

If you keep track of new postings to Sounds & Fury via Bloglines and our main (Atom) feed, be advised that Bloglines, for reasons known only to them, have neither crawled nor reported that feed since 3 September, and have not responded to an eMail notifying them of the problem.

To better keep track of new postings on Sounds & Fury, best to check in regularly at Blognoggle (linked via icon on our right sidebar and on our About & Contact page) that hourly reports new postings to the "Top 100 Classical Music Blogs", to quote their tag line, or most accurate and up-to-date of all, simply check Sounds & Fury regularly for new postings.

We don't know what the story is with Bloglines, but whatever it is, we refuse to make it our problem. In terms of timely and accurate information, Bloglines is fast becoming almost as big a joke as Technorati.

---

Update (8:14 AM Eastern on 10 Sep): We've just added a method by which you can be alerted directly whenever a new post(s) goes up on Sounds & Fury. It's called, Windows Live Alerts, a free service provided by Microsoft. Once you've signed up for the service, every time a new post goes up on Sounds & Fury you'll be notified directly via a means of your choice. Subscribing is 1-2-3 easy, and can be accomplished by simply clicking on the Windows Live Alerts button on our right sidebar, or on our About & Contact page.