Saturday Evening Review
It's Saturday evening, I'm kind of exhausted from a busy week, my roommate is in New York City for the evening, and I'm totally happy to kick back on the sofa and write about the several preceding days. Tomorrow's going to be active too: AM tennis with a coworker; afternoon book swap party; Steelers game up in Hamden with my Pittsburgh-native friend Andrea, a couple of her Steeler-fan friends, and Stu. Really in the mood to take it easy for a bit.
Ooh, I should put some music on.
[. . . . . Feldman, Coptic Light in the living room]
The living room's all cosy and comfortable suddenly. We had a medium-smallish shindig here last night (mostly why I'm tired out) and finally got the apartment into honest-to-god livable shape. The living room cleans up pretty good, as it turns out.
(There's still the matter of the huge, nonfunctional TV set hulking against one of the walls that we haven't found time to get rid of yet. Somewhat long, uninteresting story there, and I don't feel like telling it. Major themes include attractively cheap Craigslist purchases and the inadvisability of half-assed strategies for moving heavy objects up a flight of stairs.)
Today, 10/20 I woke up with the alarm for a 10 AM haircut, which I'm pretty happy with; God knows I needed one, after (what's it been) 3 months? Then it was off to the mall in Milford to buy a Steelers t-shirt and a drill. (This involves a 45-minute bus ride each way, since they don't run the express buses early on Saturday, but I really wanted each of these items sooner rather than later.) Lunch was a bacon cheeseburger at the popular below-street-level Irish bar Anna Liffey's. Like almost all bacon cheeseburgers, this one failed to live up to the ideal of the bacon cheeseburger you call to mind when you are very hungry.
The yearly month-long "open studio" season just started in New Haven's enthusiastic if amateur-heavy art world, so I took another bus over the bridge to West Haven around 4 to see a peripheral friend (a sometime softballer) in the studio she splits with another 10 or 11 people. She walked me through a monoprint-making demonstration, and I came away with a matched pair of jellyfish cartoons in green ink. (That's what I drew on a whim.) Rather than wait for another bus I just walked the 3 miles home, which hopefully burned off most of the bacon cheeseburger.
Currently I'm laundering the new Steelers t-shirt, the 5 new plain solid-color t-shirts I bought on heavy reduction at the same sportswear shop (hooray for unbranded clothing), and my Terrible Towel, which I'm hoping will look slightly less unused if it goes through the dryer once.
Friday, 10/19 was the "housewarming" shindig in the apartment, obviously not really "housewarming" since we've both lived here since the early summer. It was a good crowd, though, even if Charlie's people kind of showed up together in a later second wave and there wasn't a full sense of mingling. Fun, though, and the apartment feels like a real apartment in a way it didn't before. Music-wise, incidentally, I supplied 40 minutes of Thelonious Monk and told Stu to bring some other stuff, which he did. There was a Tortoise album he had that was very good party background music, though I didn't catch the title.
I'd had this idea to do hot cocoa spiked with brandy. Well, it was not cold last night and extremely humid (actually it rained buckets right after work for an hour, happily letting up after that), and after the first three people had arrived it felt like about 80 in the apartment. So that plan didn't come to fruition. I've got quite a surplus of spiked cocoa fixin's on hand now; I guess I could start bringing it to work instead of coffee in the morning.
Thursday, 10/18 Charlie and I hit up Ikea after work for some last-minute pre-shindig apartment improvements, like curtains. After that I hitched a ride down to Toad's Place with a friend for They Might Be Giants. Hadn't seen them live before! Very entertaining show. Good to have heard Birdhouse in Your Soul firsthand. I'm not enough of a fan to have heard much besides Flood, John Henry, and whatever album "Doctor Worm" is on, but they came through with the crowd-pleasers, most of them arranged in a row as glossy, high-energy set pieces at the end of the show. Their newer songs (they just released a new album) are less quirky and therefore less interesting to me, though I did like "E Eats Everything" from their album of children's music.
Wednesday, 10/17 I availed myself of the University's new arrangement with Zipcar to buy myself 3 hours of automotive time for tracking down shindig food and apartment improvements in the swath of commercial American crapulence on Route 10 in Hamden. (Yes, I'm excited about driving myself to the most boring slice of Connecticut there is. Sorry.) Zipcar seems to work out pretty well -- the price is right, and it patches over much of the remaining gap of travel I can't manage by walking, busing, or mooching rides. This makes me happy. Plus the polka show was on 88.7 for the first hour of the drive.
I haven't forgotten how to drive. It's like riding a bicycle, you never forget. I might have driven part of the way with the parking brake on. No evident harm done. Do you ever get this feeling that your Dad is invisibly yelling at you from 1996, though?
Tuesday, 10/16 involved nothing of interest, other than doing the bulk of the apartment cleanup. Although I did hear one of the student carilloneurs banging through "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid during lunch break, which made my day.
Monday, 10/15 I played clarinet after work with the wife of a coworker of mine; she's a somewhat out-of-practice but very talented pianist, and we started having chamber music sessions at their house in Wallingford (nice piano room) several Monday nights ago. Started to start, at least; this was only the second time the timing actually worked out, but we're both trying to make this a regular thing, so here's hoping.
We've read through the 2nd & 3rd movements of the Mozart concerto (which has the advantage that I know it already, and the disadvantage that the piano part isn't too pianistically satisfying, but the advantage that it's jaw-droppingly good music) and some of a set of "Five Easy Pieces" by the Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz, which I pulled off the University library shelf at random and which turn out to be a lot of fun. They're easy in the right way: technically not too difficult, but with neat interactions between the instruments and some unexpected rhythmic and harmonic stuff going on. They're very folk-ish; I forget when Bacewicz wrote them, I think the late 1940s though.
There's a good biography of Bacewicz here. I remembered her name since one of my college professors was a fan of her later atonal music. What I've found on CD (or rather the Naxos online listening library, still an essential fixture of many workdays) of her earlier works are very engaging: but warm-blooded and down-to-earth. Her Concerto for Strings is a fine piece, but I don't get the sense it surfaces in the US too often.
Yeah, see, I can't describe a week of my own life without sidetracking into a description of some obscure 20th-century Polish composer. There are so many good ones though!
Sunday 10/14 I already described.
Ooh, I should put some music on.
[. . . . . Feldman, Coptic Light in the living room]
The living room's all cosy and comfortable suddenly. We had a medium-smallish shindig here last night (mostly why I'm tired out) and finally got the apartment into honest-to-god livable shape. The living room cleans up pretty good, as it turns out.
(There's still the matter of the huge, nonfunctional TV set hulking against one of the walls that we haven't found time to get rid of yet. Somewhat long, uninteresting story there, and I don't feel like telling it. Major themes include attractively cheap Craigslist purchases and the inadvisability of half-assed strategies for moving heavy objects up a flight of stairs.)
Today, 10/20 I woke up with the alarm for a 10 AM haircut, which I'm pretty happy with; God knows I needed one, after (what's it been) 3 months? Then it was off to the mall in Milford to buy a Steelers t-shirt and a drill. (This involves a 45-minute bus ride each way, since they don't run the express buses early on Saturday, but I really wanted each of these items sooner rather than later.) Lunch was a bacon cheeseburger at the popular below-street-level Irish bar Anna Liffey's. Like almost all bacon cheeseburgers, this one failed to live up to the ideal of the bacon cheeseburger you call to mind when you are very hungry.The yearly month-long "open studio" season just started in New Haven's enthusiastic if amateur-heavy art world, so I took another bus over the bridge to West Haven around 4 to see a peripheral friend (a sometime softballer) in the studio she splits with another 10 or 11 people. She walked me through a monoprint-making demonstration, and I came away with a matched pair of jellyfish cartoons in green ink. (That's what I drew on a whim.) Rather than wait for another bus I just walked the 3 miles home, which hopefully burned off most of the bacon cheeseburger.
Currently I'm laundering the new Steelers t-shirt, the 5 new plain solid-color t-shirts I bought on heavy reduction at the same sportswear shop (hooray for unbranded clothing), and my Terrible Towel, which I'm hoping will look slightly less unused if it goes through the dryer once.
Friday, 10/19 was the "housewarming" shindig in the apartment, obviously not really "housewarming" since we've both lived here since the early summer. It was a good crowd, though, even if Charlie's people kind of showed up together in a later second wave and there wasn't a full sense of mingling. Fun, though, and the apartment feels like a real apartment in a way it didn't before. Music-wise, incidentally, I supplied 40 minutes of Thelonious Monk and told Stu to bring some other stuff, which he did. There was a Tortoise album he had that was very good party background music, though I didn't catch the title.
I'd had this idea to do hot cocoa spiked with brandy. Well, it was not cold last night and extremely humid (actually it rained buckets right after work for an hour, happily letting up after that), and after the first three people had arrived it felt like about 80 in the apartment. So that plan didn't come to fruition. I've got quite a surplus of spiked cocoa fixin's on hand now; I guess I could start bringing it to work instead of coffee in the morning.
Thursday, 10/18 Charlie and I hit up Ikea after work for some last-minute pre-shindig apartment improvements, like curtains. After that I hitched a ride down to Toad's Place with a friend for They Might Be Giants. Hadn't seen them live before! Very entertaining show. Good to have heard Birdhouse in Your Soul firsthand. I'm not enough of a fan to have heard much besides Flood, John Henry, and whatever album "Doctor Worm" is on, but they came through with the crowd-pleasers, most of them arranged in a row as glossy, high-energy set pieces at the end of the show. Their newer songs (they just released a new album) are less quirky and therefore less interesting to me, though I did like "E Eats Everything" from their album of children's music.
Wednesday, 10/17 I availed myself of the University's new arrangement with Zipcar to buy myself 3 hours of automotive time for tracking down shindig food and apartment improvements in the swath of commercial American crapulence on Route 10 in Hamden. (Yes, I'm excited about driving myself to the most boring slice of Connecticut there is. Sorry.) Zipcar seems to work out pretty well -- the price is right, and it patches over much of the remaining gap of travel I can't manage by walking, busing, or mooching rides. This makes me happy. Plus the polka show was on 88.7 for the first hour of the drive.I haven't forgotten how to drive. It's like riding a bicycle, you never forget. I might have driven part of the way with the parking brake on. No evident harm done. Do you ever get this feeling that your Dad is invisibly yelling at you from 1996, though?
Tuesday, 10/16 involved nothing of interest, other than doing the bulk of the apartment cleanup. Although I did hear one of the student carilloneurs banging through "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid during lunch break, which made my day.
Monday, 10/15 I played clarinet after work with the wife of a coworker of mine; she's a somewhat out-of-practice but very talented pianist, and we started having chamber music sessions at their house in Wallingford (nice piano room) several Monday nights ago. Started to start, at least; this was only the second time the timing actually worked out, but we're both trying to make this a regular thing, so here's hoping.
We've read through the 2nd & 3rd movements of the Mozart concerto (which has the advantage that I know it already, and the disadvantage that the piano part isn't too pianistically satisfying, but the advantage that it's jaw-droppingly good music) and some of a set of "Five Easy Pieces" by the Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz, which I pulled off the University library shelf at random and which turn out to be a lot of fun. They're easy in the right way: technically not too difficult, but with neat interactions between the instruments and some unexpected rhythmic and harmonic stuff going on. They're very folk-ish; I forget when Bacewicz wrote them, I think the late 1940s though.
There's a good biography of Bacewicz here. I remembered her name since one of my college professors was a fan of her later atonal music. What I've found on CD (or rather the Naxos online listening library, still an essential fixture of many workdays) of her earlier works are very engaging: but warm-blooded and down-to-earth. Her Concerto for Strings is a fine piece, but I don't get the sense it surfaces in the US too often.
Yeah, see, I can't describe a week of my own life without sidetracking into a description of some obscure 20th-century Polish composer. There are so many good ones though!
Sunday 10/14 I already described.
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1 Comments:
I'm sort of hoping you've tattooed this backlog of information all over yourself, Memento-style.
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