This is the sort of sentence that Kyle Gann says he used to fantasize inserting into his music criticism:
Don’t bother attending Nic Collins’s Roulette concert this Friday, Mercury is retrograding over his midheaven, and it’s a sure bet his equipment will malfunction.The context of the quote is that Gann, the critic and composer, recently completed work on his longest composition, The Planets. “It’s just over 70 minutes long,” he writes on his blog, artsjournal.com/postclassic, “a 346-page score, in ten movements, my own personal Turangalila.” In the post he explains his long fascination with astrology: “I never defend astrology, nor proselytize for it, nor say I ‘believe’ in it. I have no idea why astrological transits sometimes seem startlingly relevant, but, like the I Ching, it is an ancient worldview containing a wealth of psychological insight that greatly widened my understanding of human behavior.” Gann traces his interest in the I Ching back to reading John Cage as a teenager. (And OK, this isn’t quite the quote of the week — it’s dated April 20.)