Holy Week Recap 2K8
I'm celebrating Easter night by kicking back in the living room with a decaf tea and Mahler 2 on the DVD player, decompressing after a lengthy session of cleaning day-old Dutch pancake batter off most of my modest collection of cooking supplies. Thought I'd recap the week, largely since I haven't blogged for a while, since my laptop was in the shop. By "in the shop" I mean with the guy who puts posters all over East Rock advertising his laptop repair service. He turned out to live in the apartment building I lived in between the summers of '06 and '07, kind of a not-really-sketchy but still not-really-that-clean and generally drugged-out-looking guy I would only very occasionally see in the staircase, and with minimal eye contact. He did successfully replace my power jack, charging a price that looks to be universally standard for the operation based on a brief Google search: that'll satisfice. And he was friendly, as his posters advertise, and when he asked about my desktop background photo I got to enthuse to him about the Hell Gate bridge in Astoria Park, so that's all good.
Mostly I just like to write this stuff down so I don't forget about it forever.
Monday I went to work and then to the weekly happy hour held by that internet social Meetup group (the one that organized the softball team I played on last year); I've been going to a couple more of these happy hours recently, after generally avoiding them, since I know some of the people better now & I can catch up with them there. (I still don't get a lot of kicks out of mingling at these.)
Enough time passed for me to nurse a totally satisfying $3 margarita, and then Stu picked me up & we went to see jazz guitarist Pat Metheny play the Shubert Theater downtown. Stu had comp tickets for this, having done some freelance audio work on Metheny's podcast the week before. Completely amazing show; I wasn't really familiar with Pat Metheny outside of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, and the little I'd heard sounded kind of Weather Channel-ish ("yeah," confirmed Stu when I expressed this, "they play him a lot on the Weather Channel"), but this was good, good stuff. One particular solo Metheny played on a MIDI guitar (with a synthy trumpetish inflection) built up all this ectastically unreleased tension for something like 3 or 4 minutes. Extremely talented drummer & bassist, too (Antonio Sanchez, Christian McBride). There's a CD release attached to the tour, though I haven't checked it out yet. Hooray for top-shelf live jazz, anyway.
Tuesday I went to work, and then nothing of interest happened, since I was completely exhausted. This actually doesn't happen all that often, I'm happy to report.
Wednesday I went to work and then footed it in the rain down to the Metro North, heading then to Stratford for wind band practice. I'm getting somewhat less enthusiastic about this, continuing to sense that the band doesn't really "rehearse" so much as read through more music than it can play well. This is a shame, since there are a fair number of really decent players there, at least for a community wind band. I sat in the band's concert a couple of weeks ago; I liked playing it; we outnumbered the audience by about 2 dozen people; the music came off more or less OK. The group on the whole doesn't strike me as remarkably sociable, either, and this is what is going to tip the scales one way or the other.
Thursday I went to work and then to a nearby coffee shop to chat with a workfriend (Elise, who also came to the jazz show Friday; see below), and then a bit later to my biweekly guitar lesson, which went pretty well (I've been managing to practice with some consistency), although "pretty well" at this stage doesn't include results that I'd be able to show off in public. It's fun being on the steep end of the learning curve again. Myron, the teacher, is an interesting guy, soft-spoken and probably 55ish, who provides a fine attention to technical detail at the right times for it and also has the genial personality that makes it possible to totally butcher, say, "Skip to My Lou" in front of him without worrying about feeling bad about it.
And yes, I still intend to find actual music to play on the guitar at some point, "Skip to My Lou" and D-major "When the Saints Go Marching In" not going to cut it aesthetically forever. I find in the meantime that I can happily (and secularly) putter around with hymns, since they have easy chords and I know a lot of the tunes, and some of them have happy associations with Charles Ives pieces. (The protestant-hymnal version of Finlandia is pretty accessible, at least if I can learn to get my fingers to b minor on the first shot; I need to find the Finnish lyrics Sibelius attached to the song, though, since the hymnal lyrics are pretty cloying.) I figure if I play hymns in the apartment, only God and I can hear them, and no bad can come of it. I don't think I can ever bust these out at a party, though, unless by "party" you mean "Christian summer camp," which you don't.
Friday I didn't go to work, since we had the day off for Good Friday. I turned 28. In the morning I went to the mall to buy a 10-inch cast iron skillet and an oven thermometer, and also some new pairs of jeans, to replace the extraordinarily comfortable but unfortunately disintegrating jeans that have graced my wardrobe since probably 2005. In the evening I went to the local jazz performance space Firehouse 12 with, essentially, the 4 people I know fairly well who hadn't left town for Easter, to hear the startlingly short (like, under 45 minutes!) first set from an all-female trio who were a good bit more classical-styled and avant-garde than I expected. (Susie Ibarra, drums; Jennifer Choi, violin; someone else whose name I didn't really note, piano.) I don't think any of my friends got into it that much, and I felt mostly cool towards it, but the parts I liked I really liked. The last couple selections finally had a nice swing and sweetness to them, straightforward sentimental charts fizzed up a bit with light melodic dissonances. Out then till fairly late for drinks at a relatively quiet bar.
Saturday I slept in, went to the gym, taught myself how to make an oven-baked Dutch pancake (with sauteed apples in it) off of an internet recipe, made then a second, better Dutch pancake, and carried off said pancake (10-inch cast iron skillet and all) to an ethnic-themed potluck my friend Michelle (who'd come to the jazz show on Friday) was having a couple blocks away. Pancake turned out OK; the other potluck food was incredible. Best I've eaten in calendar year 2008, so far. Good times. I left a bit early (conversation drifted dull; I faded) but went out after to a State Street bar for beer & complimentary peanuts with another recent friend (she'd also come to the jazz show Friday) as a kind of spontaneous proto-date, which, believe me, is a welcome phenomenon.
Sunday I heated up part of Saturday's rehearsal pancake for breakfast (with the good syrup, too: for bachelor-grade Sunday breakfast, the pancake more than hit the spot), then hopped on a bus to the Unitarian church in Hamden I checked out last week. The 11:15 service didn't have too many youngish people in it (last week the 9:15 certainly didn't), but I did run into someone from last summer's softball team (who had also basically come for Easter); she introduced me to one of her friends, who does go to the church often and says that there's not much of a youngish crowd there, but who is interested in trying to go to services together, which is good news for me in terms of cautiously trying out a church without feeling awkward about being there. (This may have to wait until after April, since I've got 3 weekends tied up with going to Beijing, and the weekend before that in Boston.) Two other youngish people offered to drive me home, which was great, since the return bus schedule doesn't fit so well & I was going to walk it. (I was walking it, in fact, when the two other youngish people drove past & turned around & offered to drive me back to New Haven. Church people = nice. What really needs to happen, though, is me finally buying a new bike.) Anyway, I consider this in the realm of really good outcomes for church attendance attempts.
Later, to the Yale Center for British Art with Michelle & another friend, Andrea (who also had come to the jazz show on Friday; hooray, having people around you can hang out with a whole lot in one weekend) to look over, primarily, an exhibit of 16th- and 17th-century European world maps, which we all found endlessly fascinating, and then to the adjacent cafe/bookstore for an early Easter dinner: black bean soup, eggplant panini. Works for me!
Mostly I just like to write this stuff down so I don't forget about it forever.
Monday I went to work and then to the weekly happy hour held by that internet social Meetup group (the one that organized the softball team I played on last year); I've been going to a couple more of these happy hours recently, after generally avoiding them, since I know some of the people better now & I can catch up with them there. (I still don't get a lot of kicks out of mingling at these.)
Enough time passed for me to nurse a totally satisfying $3 margarita, and then Stu picked me up & we went to see jazz guitarist Pat Metheny play the Shubert Theater downtown. Stu had comp tickets for this, having done some freelance audio work on Metheny's podcast the week before. Completely amazing show; I wasn't really familiar with Pat Metheny outside of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, and the little I'd heard sounded kind of Weather Channel-ish ("yeah," confirmed Stu when I expressed this, "they play him a lot on the Weather Channel"), but this was good, good stuff. One particular solo Metheny played on a MIDI guitar (with a synthy trumpetish inflection) built up all this ectastically unreleased tension for something like 3 or 4 minutes. Extremely talented drummer & bassist, too (Antonio Sanchez, Christian McBride). There's a CD release attached to the tour, though I haven't checked it out yet. Hooray for top-shelf live jazz, anyway.
Tuesday I went to work, and then nothing of interest happened, since I was completely exhausted. This actually doesn't happen all that often, I'm happy to report.
Wednesday I went to work and then footed it in the rain down to the Metro North, heading then to Stratford for wind band practice. I'm getting somewhat less enthusiastic about this, continuing to sense that the band doesn't really "rehearse" so much as read through more music than it can play well. This is a shame, since there are a fair number of really decent players there, at least for a community wind band. I sat in the band's concert a couple of weeks ago; I liked playing it; we outnumbered the audience by about 2 dozen people; the music came off more or less OK. The group on the whole doesn't strike me as remarkably sociable, either, and this is what is going to tip the scales one way or the other.
Thursday I went to work and then to a nearby coffee shop to chat with a workfriend (Elise, who also came to the jazz show Friday; see below), and then a bit later to my biweekly guitar lesson, which went pretty well (I've been managing to practice with some consistency), although "pretty well" at this stage doesn't include results that I'd be able to show off in public. It's fun being on the steep end of the learning curve again. Myron, the teacher, is an interesting guy, soft-spoken and probably 55ish, who provides a fine attention to technical detail at the right times for it and also has the genial personality that makes it possible to totally butcher, say, "Skip to My Lou" in front of him without worrying about feeling bad about it.
And yes, I still intend to find actual music to play on the guitar at some point, "Skip to My Lou" and D-major "When the Saints Go Marching In" not going to cut it aesthetically forever. I find in the meantime that I can happily (and secularly) putter around with hymns, since they have easy chords and I know a lot of the tunes, and some of them have happy associations with Charles Ives pieces. (The protestant-hymnal version of Finlandia is pretty accessible, at least if I can learn to get my fingers to b minor on the first shot; I need to find the Finnish lyrics Sibelius attached to the song, though, since the hymnal lyrics are pretty cloying.) I figure if I play hymns in the apartment, only God and I can hear them, and no bad can come of it. I don't think I can ever bust these out at a party, though, unless by "party" you mean "Christian summer camp," which you don't.
Friday I didn't go to work, since we had the day off for Good Friday. I turned 28. In the morning I went to the mall to buy a 10-inch cast iron skillet and an oven thermometer, and also some new pairs of jeans, to replace the extraordinarily comfortable but unfortunately disintegrating jeans that have graced my wardrobe since probably 2005. In the evening I went to the local jazz performance space Firehouse 12 with, essentially, the 4 people I know fairly well who hadn't left town for Easter, to hear the startlingly short (like, under 45 minutes!) first set from an all-female trio who were a good bit more classical-styled and avant-garde than I expected. (Susie Ibarra, drums; Jennifer Choi, violin; someone else whose name I didn't really note, piano.) I don't think any of my friends got into it that much, and I felt mostly cool towards it, but the parts I liked I really liked. The last couple selections finally had a nice swing and sweetness to them, straightforward sentimental charts fizzed up a bit with light melodic dissonances. Out then till fairly late for drinks at a relatively quiet bar.
Saturday I slept in, went to the gym, taught myself how to make an oven-baked Dutch pancake (with sauteed apples in it) off of an internet recipe, made then a second, better Dutch pancake, and carried off said pancake (10-inch cast iron skillet and all) to an ethnic-themed potluck my friend Michelle (who'd come to the jazz show on Friday) was having a couple blocks away. Pancake turned out OK; the other potluck food was incredible. Best I've eaten in calendar year 2008, so far. Good times. I left a bit early (conversation drifted dull; I faded) but went out after to a State Street bar for beer & complimentary peanuts with another recent friend (she'd also come to the jazz show Friday) as a kind of spontaneous proto-date, which, believe me, is a welcome phenomenon.
Sunday I heated up part of Saturday's rehearsal pancake for breakfast (with the good syrup, too: for bachelor-grade Sunday breakfast, the pancake more than hit the spot), then hopped on a bus to the Unitarian church in Hamden I checked out last week. The 11:15 service didn't have too many youngish people in it (last week the 9:15 certainly didn't), but I did run into someone from last summer's softball team (who had also basically come for Easter); she introduced me to one of her friends, who does go to the church often and says that there's not much of a youngish crowd there, but who is interested in trying to go to services together, which is good news for me in terms of cautiously trying out a church without feeling awkward about being there. (This may have to wait until after April, since I've got 3 weekends tied up with going to Beijing, and the weekend before that in Boston.) Two other youngish people offered to drive me home, which was great, since the return bus schedule doesn't fit so well & I was going to walk it. (I was walking it, in fact, when the two other youngish people drove past & turned around & offered to drive me back to New Haven. Church people = nice. What really needs to happen, though, is me finally buying a new bike.) Anyway, I consider this in the realm of really good outcomes for church attendance attempts.
Later, to the Yale Center for British Art with Michelle & another friend, Andrea (who also had come to the jazz show on Friday; hooray, having people around you can hang out with a whole lot in one weekend) to look over, primarily, an exhibit of 16th- and 17th-century European world maps, which we all found endlessly fascinating, and then to the adjacent cafe/bookstore for an early Easter dinner: black bean soup, eggplant panini. Works for me!
2 Comments:
Hooray for bachelor-grade breakfast.
I pretty quickly abandoned the community wind band in Vienna, VA that I briefly sat in on a couple of years ago for more or less the reasons you describe (neither very social nor committed to improving their play). I guess I should start looking again out here though.
WOOOOOOOOO!!! Holy Week!
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