Lovely things

Last night I saw Nico's ballet (well, really it's Benjamin Millepied's ballet, Nico's score--appropriate choreographer's name, eh?) last night and it is absolutely lovely, like the sea in the best possible way... Nico's music has an unusual quality of being at once remarkably stimulating in a more or less intellectual fashion and also quite aesthetically lovely and accessible, it is among my small number of absolutely favorite things (like Faberge eggs--only on a much bigger scale!).

(He had an interesting post here on a late-stage chord change and why one might want "a big pile of notes.")

(The other two ballets on the program were both interesting and enjoyable in various respects, only my vote is that ballet seems to have way too high a proportion of intermission and clapping and bowing to actual performance! I felt understimulated, I do not really think it appropriate to take out a book and read during intermission or applause, not if one is with a theatre-going companion, but I was very tempted!)

And afterwards, the most sublime fish stew I think I have ever tasted, at Osteria del Circo. Really the only words that came to mind for it were things like "divine" and "heavenly," it was pretty much the pinnacle of all possible food. It made you feel like you were reading a King James Bible incarnation of some passage from the Creation in Genesis, it so strongly filled you with a sense of the riches of the sea--mussels and clams and squid and the most tender octopus imaginable, monkfish and tomatoey broth--quite divine, like listening to Handel's Messiah...