Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Daily Dairy Desideratum

On the other side of the parking lot adjacent to the office there's a cute little gelato & sorbet place, which is coming in handy now that the weather has decided to get nice. The puzzle pieces that fit this one are having a couple or three like-minded coworkers also interested in sneaking out for a quarter hour around 3 pm, and having an office-side patio that warms up blissfully in the sun. Let's never go inside again.

Steve Reich was on campus a couple of weeks ago for a barely-publicized event involving a fellowship awarded by one of the university's residential colleges; he did a shortish Q&A after a fine performance of his Sextet given by the university's impressive Percussion Group. (I hadn't heard the Sextet before this, and it's a great piece, with a boppy piano part and a beautiful section where the melody is carried by bowed mallet instruments; formally it's the kind of active, scene-shifting multi-movement suite more familiar in his recent works.) I was glad to have not missed this. I was not glad to have missed an apparently similar event on Monday night where John Adams gave a talk after a student performance of Shaker Loops, which was also almost completely unpublicized to the university community. What gives?

Tuesday afternoon my coworkers & I are walking out of the gelato shop, and who's coming in the door but Adams and Ingram Marshall (another fascinating composer, who teaches here). No eye contact or anything, just that quick kind of jolting thought of "Oh! hey, he's famous." My coworker Alex, who's into minimalism and was even more disappointed to miss a brush with Shaker Loops than I was, snuck back to at least get a good look at him; if we'd been two minutes later, he noted, we'd know what kind of gelato he liked.

I'm looking for a new apartment share starting in July; I'm at least ahead of the curve this year, knowing that I'll actually be working here. I took a first look at one tonight, with a guy who seemed really nice but whose landlord-to-be (this guy moves into the place in June) forgot to show up and let us into the apartment. During the course of chatting we realized that his cousin works at the company I left last February, and that she started working there last March, and that she is in fact the person doing my old job. Funny! I met her once at an ex-coworker's barbecue last summer.

The place itself probably won't work out since the open room is a walkthrough, though the price and location are good enough I'd consider trying to get a temporary wall in there if the layout geometry accommodates it. Still: not likely to be satisficient. Onwards and upwards . . .

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Pete has all the makings for a room-dividing curtain, now hanging out in the basement, if you need it.

5/03/2007 12:59 PM  

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