Rat­ing: 3.5 stars out of 5

George Ben­jamin was the San Fran­cisco Sym­phony’s composer-in-residence this month for this year’s instal­la­tion of their Project San Fran­cisco. Truth­fully, I was not famil­iar with Benjamin’s work, but it came highly rec­om­mended by many of my col­leagues, and so I looked for­ward to hear­ing it. I attended the SFS’s final con­cert with Ben­jamin on Sat­ur­day night (16 Jan 2010), where he con­ducted two of his pieces: Ringed by the Flat Hori­zon (1980), the piece that brought him to inter­na­tional atten­tion, and a more recent piece, Duet (2008; see YouTube video below). In gen­eral, while I found Benjamin’s pieces highly com­pe­tent works, I don’t think he lives up to the (per­haps unfairly) high stan­dard peo­ple attribute to him. Con­tinue read­ing “Review: George Benjamin’s <em>Duet</em> with the San Fran­cisco Symphony” »

So today I read in the Globe and Mail that sci­en­tists are increas­ingly find­ing bio­log­i­cal and genetic sup­port for the age-old adages of love (Siri Agrell, “Sluts and Ver­min”, The Globe and Mail, 26 Apr 2007, http://​www​.the​globe​and​mail​.com/​s​e​r​v​l​e​t​/​s​t​o​r​y​/​R​T​G​A​M​.​2​0​0​7​0​4​2​6​.​w​x​l​s​e​x​s​t​u​d​i​e​s​2​6​/​B​N​S​t​o​r​y​/​l​i​f​e​F​a​m​i​l​y​/​h​ome).

For exam­ple, female mice who play hard to get tend to inspire faith­ful­ness in their mates, as opposed to those who put out right away. There seems to be a bio­log­i­cal rea­son why women that are unavail­able are more desir­able, and this builds faith­ful­ness in men. Inter­est­ing. Con­tinue read­ing “Love, Free Will, and the Use­less­ness of Art” »