In Brief: Resting from My Labors Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• You are not likely to forget the sound of Schubert's Ave Maria with the solo part played by Austin Blackburn on the musical saw. You've heard that piece every other possible way, so why not? If you've never heard it before, the saw has a tone quality that is eerily similar to the human voice -- he even takes the melody up an octave the last time through (at 2:21). [Boing Boing]


• While we're talking about the saw, who else remembers the strange, ethereal duet of cello and saw in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's unforgettably odd 1991 film Delicatessen? [YouTube]


• Should the minstrel show and other scurrilously racist art be edited out of American (and world) history? Has political correctness, the new Gospel of academia, made certain parts of history, because they involve racist ways of thinking that are admittedly vile, not "worthy of consideration"? [Slate]


• We leave town for a few days and weird public art sponsored by the Colombian government goes up all around Washington? [greg.org]


• The first good thing of the Alan Gilbert years at the New York Philharmonic? Having Magnus Lindberg as composer in residence. [Playbill Arts]