lazy saturday

There are several things I should be doing right now, like showering and practicing Schubert 7 (the "chiropractor" symphony because it's long and has lots of playing), but instead I'm drinking too much coffee and reading people's blog comments and occasionally leaving misspelled comments of my own. My nose seems to be permanently stuffed despite the allergy medication I took at 2 this morning because I couldn't sleep because I was stuffy, but I don't know why. It's rainy and cold again, and my bike is stranded in Roscoe Village until it clears up enough to ride it back.
That's all. I suppose I'll get going soon enough.

think pink

This is an article my friend Jessie sent me about fashion and the city he's currently in, Jaipur. I know architectural fashion probably isn't any new thing (in fact, I'm pretty positive it isn't), but I still like it. I tend to like conceptual mishmashes, like the cello concerto I played recently by Ligeti where the cello soloist was specifically ordered by the composer to play under the rest of the orchestra, and so mostly goes completely unheard. It's supposed to say something about oppressed voices: this person, screaming but being covered by others, who eventually breaks free but is so tired that they just fade away. The piece ended with a cadenza that was nearly inaudible, ending with the soloist just tapping her fingers on the fingerboard and trailing off into complete silence that we were sometimes able to convince the audience to hold for probably up to a minute at times.
Anyway, so I like conceptually cool things, even if they don't always come out in the wash (somebody mentioned that a concerto where you can't hear the soloist seemed pretty anticlimactic, and who am I to say?). And I like when one art form draws inspiration from another, like a piece I heard by Debussy that had a movement based on a poetic form called a pantoum, with repeated lines of text replaced by repeated musical phrases. This fashion article reminded me of that. Plus I like the idea of a pink city :) People nearly threw a fit when the latest el line here was christened the pink line, with all these mid-twenties guys (at least in the articles I read it was mostly mid-twenties guys quoted in opposition) saying disparaging things about girly colors. Grow up, Chicago.

clarity of intent

Sometimes I forget what a genius Mozart was. I don't get to play much of his music, frankly; we spend a lot more time with later composers like Shostakovitch and Tchaikovsky and Debussy, wonderful composers who happened to write music that's bound to get your heart pounding with joy or anger or righteous indignation regardless of how much you know about classical music. When I took music theory in college, I was always incredibly impressed at the remarkable amount of structure that composers have within their pieces. A truly great piece of music often has intricate details, chords that mean certain things or cadences that only resolve once in an entire piece or what have you, that are mostly lost on modern listeners. Hell, I don't hear this stuff, or at least not frequently or consciously. But it's like writing, there are threads reaching out all over connection parts of the piece that give it cohesion.
Anyway, it tends to be easier to hear this in later composers, maybe because they started assuming we all didn't know shit, I'm not sure. I mean, it's pretty easy for most people to hear a melody and connect it with an image (like Berlioz's idee fixe or Strauss's tone poems) as long as they've read their program notes and are paying attention. But do we really hear it anymore when Beethoven throws a "wrong" chord in at the end of a cadence in one of his symphonies? Because when he wrote it, that pissed people off. The man was a rebel with all that wrong-chord shit. And Haydn wrote tons of music jokes into his pieces that make me giggle when I listen to them, but all most people remember is the Surprise Symphony.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic. I like playing older music, like Handel and Mozart, partially because it's so tightly structured that when they do something different it's fabulous, like a victorian lady musician suddenly starting to do a striptease on her piano (one of the only instruments ladies were allowed to play in that era because it placed them in profile to the audience instead of face-on). It's unexpected, and I have to chuckle and say "Damn, Haydn, way to rock the boat!". But right now I'm playing Mozart's 41st Symphony with a not-incredible orchestra and just relishing all the little details. Mostly it's just fun and games until the last movement, when he suddenly starts bringing everybody in with the same melodic figure but at all kinds of different parts in the measure. And damn if it doesn't work out. And then, in the fabulous coda, every theme from the whole symphony comes back all at once, all played together and you suddenly realize that they all fit together. And all I can think is my god, Mozart was a genius, he was planning this all along! And I wish everybody in the audience could feel the way that makes my heart pound.

bleh

I don't have much to say today, just that the other main hit on my blog tends to be for the term "defloration," which just makes me think of people looking up porn. Why can't I get more hits for Dorothy Allison or drag kings or something?

kittylove

This is not my favorite poem from Marge Piercy's The Moon is Always Female, but it's cute and I'm in love with my cats, so it seems at least nominally fitting. Plus I like the id comparison.

Cho-Cho

At the Animal Disposal League
you reached through the bars
avid to live. Discarded offspring
of Persian splendor and tuxedo
alley cat, your hunger saved
you, fuzzy and fist-sized.

Now you are sunny, opaque,
utterly beyond words, alien
as the dreams of a pine tree.
Sometimes when I look at you
you purr as if stroked.
Outside you turn your head
pretending not to see me
off on business, a rabbit
in the marshgrass, rendezvous
in the briars. In the house
you're a sponge for love,
a recirculating fountain.

Angry, you sulk way under
a bed till dragged out whining,
you permit yourself to be
captured and saved. You blink
then your goldengreen eyes
purr and collapse on your back
with paws up and your snowy
white belly exposed all curls
to the plume of your tail.
Ravish me, you say, with kisses
and tunafish because I know
how to accept pleasure. I am
your happy longhaired
id, taking the moment as I
do your finger in my mouth
without breaking its skin,
or eviscerating it instantly
like a mouse.

???

So what the hell is "still life patch"? Most of the hits I get on here are for google searches for that phrase (in the US, I'm the third thing that comes up, and it's a whiny post that doesn't even mean anything to people who don't know me). I get these hits from all over the world, and I wish they were bringing up something interesting or at least well-written.

thanks a lot, Chicago

Everybody here has been crazy for spring to arrive lately. (This has manifested itself a lot at work, actually. People come into a flower store in March and act like crazy people and have creepy intense conversations about how much they need these tulips so they can pretend it's spring NOW.) We can feel it hovering around the edges of winter (a little humidity, more birdcalls than I've heard in months, sunny days that don't mean I'm going to freeze my ass right off) with occasional days that are all spring, warm and wonderful. But today, which is finally technically spring, it's snowing quite hard and feels like 20 outside. I'd downgraded to my jacket (my old "winter coat" from AZ) but today I'm going to have to backtrack and put on my long underwear, too.
Last week I played a gig that was just awful. I'm not going to go into details, but there was a lot of physical and mental discomfort involved and a lot of driving and no time to relax ever for about nine days. In the middle of this, I was coming home from rehearsal, loaded down with groceries I'd picked up at the store near the rehearsal space (I wasn't otherwise going to have time to get any food for about another week and it was getting critical here), zoned out and staring out the window practically drooling and just completely exhausted and depressed. There was this girl on the train, green hair and big boots and leather jacket with the horned smiley face on the back, and as the doors opened to let her off she runs over and gives me a piece of folded paper and dashes out the door.
The woman across from me smirked, and I thought I'd just received some stranger's email and or phone number and it would be a good story. Actually, it was an unsigned note, kind of cheesy and all about how everybody is important and you just really have to take what you have and grab onto it and make the most of it, and really lots of people love me even if it feels like not, etc. So yes, cheesy, but actually it made me feel much better. The content didn't matter, but the humor of the situation and the kind of naive goodwill that could prompt something like that did. I won't say my day got entirely better, but at least for a while I was appreciating the sun and the sensation of going home in a much better frame of mind.