In which the pond spends some quality Saturday time with a deeply stupid woman ...

Nothing's surer to get the pond's attention than disgruntled millionaires getting behind petulant Peta and positioning her for a power play ...

But wait, this is Saturday and it's time for eine kleine nachtmusick, or if you will, the deeply stupid whining, shrieking and wailing of a deeply stupid woman ...

Before starting on the journey, the pond would just like to play tribute to DJ Albo, who has been out and about lathering up a storm for Record Store Day. 

The pond suspects that it and DJ Albo's musical tastes might not entirely coincide, but if Blake could see heaven in a grain of sand, then the pond can pretty much hear it in every kind of music, be it on the Motown label or coming from Alexander Mosolov pounding away in The Iron Foundry... and whatever else might be said about DJ Albo, he clearly loves his music ...

The pond mentions Mosolov because (a) he was Russian, a composer who got done over by Stalin's mob of philistines, and (b) the piece isn't the sort of wimpy shit that dumbbells like when they talk of music as wallpaper.

The one thing guaranteed to send the pond into a frenzy is some fuckwit talking about the way they love to have classical music on as " musical wallpaper".

If you want wallpaper, wouldn't this be better suited to your taste?

What's the bet that the lesser Shanahan, the complimentary woman, would qualify for the pond's rage?

It's impossible to sum up the ineffable stupidity of that stream of nonsense ... not least the notion that a traditional time for a crucifixion has the remotest connection to real events at the time they occurred in the real world. But why is the pond surprised? After all, anyone who can swallow transubstantiation can swallow any kind of gibberish ...

Here's a sample of the sinful program for Easter Sunday ...

Unexceptional stuff really, unless you happen to be completely bigoted about matters Russian.

On any normal planet, it would be totally weird to conflate melodious Tchaikovsky and his violin concerto - the pond first came to love that piece via an LP with Ruggiero Ricci - and the likes of Borodin with pinko commie perverts, but that's what happens when Catholics disappear up their fundament.

The ABC thoughtfully preserves its programs, so that the full Sunday listing could be found here, the Good Friday listing here ...

The pond might have a quibble or two. After all, why Shostakovich's No. 7, when symphony no. 13, Babi Yar, might have reminded listeners of the persecution of the Jews?

A little talk about the forced revisions to the text might have added a piquant note.

Anything really instead of labelling Shostakovich as that "darling of the revisionist comrades."

Hopefully no one on the broadcast team would descend to that level of fuckwittery ... why, that'd be like labelling Motown as the lickspittle face of black capitalism ...

Sorry, when confronted with infinite stupidity, the pond tends to meander, especially when the gob smackingly dumb talk about others as being gob smackingly dumb ...

The point of course about Russia, is that while being one of the few outposts to keep flying the classical music flag in the twentieth century, there was also an enormous amount of tension between the artists who wrote and performed the music, and the bureaucrats and quislings, who, acting on Stalin's orders and aesthetic sense, frequently arranged for their persecution and transport to a gulag ... a fate that Shostakovich himself barely escaped ...

Exploring that dynamic is one of the more fruitful ways to organise a program, while avoiding some of the warhorses that are routinely trotted out at Easter.

It routinely escapes average fundamentalist Catholics that there's a secular audience out there, and that some are grateful for a release from the usual set, which sees the pond grovelling and pleading to avoid yet another amateur (or SSO) performance of Handel's The Messiah at Xmas time ...

Here's what 102.5 played in the same time slot as ABC FM that Sunday ...

Mendelssohn, Lehár, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Schubert and ... dammit, how did that Ruski Shostakovich get into the mix, along with the earlier more traditional play list ...? (The full program could be found here).

What's that? People just want to listen to music, instead of treating it as a form of musical wallpaper or religious indoctrination?

Forget it Jake, before the pond starts to get steamed up again, we'd better do the last gobbet of the gormless one ... especially if she happens to think treating music as aural wallpaper is some sign of being a culture vulture.

What's the bet that somehow there's a conspiracy involved? 

It's not often that the ABC gets the full sympathy of the pond, but what a relief it must be for them to know that Angela Shanahan no longer listens to ABCFM.

Sure, it's a great loss in terms of the broadcasting of musical wallpaper, but still, what a relief it must be ...

Now next Easter, the ABC might consider broadcasting some Vaughan Williams, writer of much religiously inspired music.

As Andrew Ford, himself atheist composer of a mass, once wrote - the full text can be found at Fairfax here ...

Well indeed, indeed, because for the true believer, music is that Blakeian grain of sand, with all sorts of revelations to be found in all forms, not some pathetic piece of musical wallpaper or propaganda for religion...

Can someone listen to music, in what they consider culture vulture style, and in simplistic, simpleton fashion, clearly not have the first clue?

Yep, you only have to read Shanahan to know it to be so ...

And so to someone who supposedly upholds the idea of Christianity, and Christian traditions, which apparently involve lying through your teeth and denying that you're a natural born liar ...

Fortunately Rowe takes care of that sordid business with a cartoon starring Officer Plod ... with more Rowe here ...

And for anyone who's missed Mosolov, there are a number of versions of The Iron Foundry on YouTube.

None of them the pond has heard are entirely satisfactory - this version misses pulsating brass and clang of iron on iron  - but it has nice visual wallpaper, and we all know how important that is ...

Sadly this one lacks visual wallpaper. What on earth were they thinking?