Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
"Damn! You as ugly as E.T.A. Hoffmann!"
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(2)
11:10:21 PM,Sunday 26 October 2003
I DO not WANT to DO my HOMEWORK.
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(4)
05:46:01 PM,Sunday 26 October 2003
Where do those Jerries get off capitalizing all their nouns like that? It's so undignified.
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(1)
02:17:23 PM,Sunday 26 October 2003
V whfg jnag vg gb or 11:00 fb V pna chg ba zl yrngure cnagf, tb qbja gb gur one, naq trg ynvq.
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(14)
05:18:06 PM,Saturday 25 October 2003
Further on the subject of music (see, all my posts recently have been about music 'cause it's one of the two subjects incessantly banging around in my brain to the exclusion of pretty much everything else lately, and the other subject is, um, hardly couth, so the music's all I got that's fit to print), I wish I knew Finnish, 'cause I'm trying to find information about Bach's apparently autistic son, Gottfried Heinrich, and since I've totally forgotten how to do research in actual, y'know, libraries (not that the Missoula Public or UM Library are likely to have anything useful), I've just been bumming around on the net for it. I'm getting frustrated. So far just timelines and a couple short quotes: "Bach used to take Heinrich with him to Sunday services at St. Thomas's Church in Leipzig. As his father carried out the music, Heinrich would rock in the pew." ""A great genius who remained a child." "Bach, a simple-minded creature ignorant of all musical technique, improvised on the clavier strange profound and melancholy poems which brought tears to the eyes." Maybe that's all that's really extant, though. But if there's more, I'm pretty interested in reading it.
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04:17:20 PM,Saturday 25 October 2003
Ooh ooh ooh! Susan Graham in Ariodante today on NPR World of Opera! {does a little dance}
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(1)
11:23:38 AM,Saturday 25 October 2003
"Go to sleep, little baby...
Go to sleep, little baby...
You and me and the devil makes three,
don't need no other lovin' baby..."
My mother sings this to me all the time, especially when it's 5:30 pm and I can't seem to slip the shackles of freakin' goddamn consciousness. It's not much good as a lullaby, though, 'cause whenever it does make me fall asleep, it gives me nightmares.
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(4)
07:26:36 PM,Friday 24 October 2003
Got my final St. John's transcript back today (only took a year and a half of girding my loins up tight enough to ask for it, heh). Did a little better than I expected. Whaddaya know.
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(1)
03:11:19 PM,Friday 24 October 2003
Writing my long rambly blather about whether it was inevitable that we decided to start listening to music not composed in our lifetimes (I'm still not convinced that it was; my instincts say it would have happened sooner or later whether the Romantics had come along or not, and possibly it was the Death of Classical Music what done it for good and all anyhow, but it's always worth trying to defend an argument just to see if you can pull it off, eh?) got me thinking more about the 'Pop' Vs. 'Classical' issue I tried to hash out ages ago. Also watching MTV at work (the guy I work with keeps it on, and mostly I drown it out with my own music cranked up high, but sometimes I don't. It can be interesting, up to a point, to take up the snootier-than-thou mantle and analyze the poor stuff to death while you're gearing yourself up to go give people showers.) -- I think, hey, these melodies are getting easier and easier to sing. They're staying within a narrow range and most of them include a sort of hypnotic repetitive pattern of a few notes sung over and over for the chorus. The chord progressions are very simple. It's not really taking much advantage of the complications of tonal music. So I wonder... when the simplicity, for all its ease and charm, starts getting boring, will they decide to spice it up by going modal? Seriously, hear me out: virtually all music is diatonic, except for the mostly unlistenable "high-brow" stuff of the 20th century. But Western music has, for the last four hundred years or so, had its ass firmly planted on one of only two modes at any given time, the Aeolian or the Ionian. Before that, and in other times and places, people used nearly all of the diatonic modes except the Locrian, and had a finely tuned sense of 'em. Your melodies could be simple and easily sung, but they were saved from monotony by this lovely variety of flavors. This is all first-week-of-Sophomore-Music stuff, so I don't wanna belabor the point. All I'm saying is, wouldn't it be cool if someone in pop music stumbled across the idea of using a mode besides "major" and "minor" -- maybe they watched the Simpsons too much, or really liked "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles -- and started a fad in pop songwriting? If it caught on well enough, our ears would be able to get back that sense of the specific emotional pull of each mode, and that'd be something well worth having. I honestly don't think it's that impossible to get to from where things are at.
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(24)
09:58:31 AM,Friday 24 October 2003
I'll sail upon the Dog Star.
I'll sail upon the Dog Star and then pursue the morning,
and then pursue, and then pursue the morning.
I'll chase the moon 'til it be noon.
I'll chase the moon 'til it be noon,
but I'll make, I'll make her leave her horning.
I'll climb the frosty mountain,
I'll climb the frosty mountain,
and there I'll coin the weather.
I'll tear the rainbow from the sky,
I'll tear the rainbow from the sky
and tie, and tie, and tie both ends together.
The stars pluck from their orbs, too,
the stars pluck from their orbs, too,
and crowd them in my budget.
And whether I'm a roaring boy,
a roaring boy, let all...
let all the nations judge it!
-- Purcell/D'Urfey
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(1)
10:02:26 AM,Wednesday 22 October 2003
I HATE THE ALL-PERVADING SICKLY MEPHITIC STENCH OF GIRLY PERFUME.
It offends about seventeen of my most cherished sensibilities simultaneously. It's vile, vile, vile. It should be stopped. Ugh, my nose. Ugh, my duodenum. Ugh, my brainpan.
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(5)
09:42:57 AM,Wednesday 22 October 2003
Utterly adorable abecedarian pornography. Via vintage_sex.
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07:13:29 PM,Tuesday 21 October 2003
Had my Peace Corps interview this morning, got my fingers printed and my hair cut this afternoon, and am going to see David Sedaris this evening. What a lovely day.
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(10)
06:39:37 PM,Tuesday 21 October 2003
Real quick like: I haven't delved into iTunes too deeply yet, 'cause I want to burn my latest batch of CDs (using Windows Media Player) first before I start mucking around with my file system, badly though it needs mucking. I'm currently downloading a track from iTunes, though, the Dance of the Furies from Gluck's Orfeo. I've glanced through the iTunes store a bit, and it was pretty much like I expected.
Classical music's just got a different system, and it doesn't fit in all that well with the pop system unless you really work at it. And it's not worth their while to work at it; it's a niche market. The main problem is that their selection's pretty scanty, which might improve sometime later but I'm not holding my breath. Well, no, the two main problems are that I have a butt-ass slow dial-up connection and that whatever I did download I couldn't transfer to my Jukebox, which makes it kind of useless for me.
Actually, even if iTunes itself turns out too be the bee's knees, it won't make that much of a difference to me; my hard drive is 20 gig. My music collection is fast approaching 40 gig. This means that the only reason I keep a limited selection of tracks on my computer is so I can keep a backup of the tracks I don't have in the original (though I should really get around to backing those up on data CDs), and so I can burn CDs. So I swap out music all the time. I have to delete huge swathes of it in order to be able to get the next batch on in time for burning. And I only have a dinky little laptop with a lame sound system anyway, so it doesn't really matter that I can't use it for an all-purpose music organizer. My jukebox does all that for me, and it hooks up directly to my amplifier and speakers, so. Anyhow.
They don't deserve the blame for any of these problems. I mean, they could put in a provision for Jukebox support, and that would be extremely nice and fair-handed, but it would go against their perfectly understandable iPod hook, so, seriously, I don't resent 'em for it at all. No, just talking about the store itself -- it shares all the problems of every online music store that sells classical except for Arkiv. You can't get a listing of each performer, you can't search by instrument or sub-genre, the composers' names are spelled inconsistently... I didn't expect better, and it's ok. {sigh}
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(4)
09:38:41 AM,Tuesday 21 October 2003
Comapoint Countertose.
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08:33:47 PM,Monday 20 October 2003
My nephew wants to know "every story/fable/myth about string/twine/thread/tapestries etc." for a role-playing game he's in. He's got the general idea of most of the famous ones (Theseus, Penelope, Arachne, etc.), but he wants more obscure ones, the full stories with juicy details. And "anything blood/death/vamp related is good".
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(1)
07:21:28 PM,Monday 20 October 2003
I need to burn CDs. I need to get dressed. I need to do homework. I need to find my Mandt certificate so I can go to Kinko's and photocopy it. I need to go to work at 1:00 today to pick up my paycheck and eat free food. I need to buy MacDonald's fries for to land me some free electronics. I need to wait for the sun to come up so my mother will wake up so I can start making noise. I need to go back to bed and finish the rest of Orfeo ed Euridice which I can barely hear because it's turned down so low and way on the other end of the room. I need to beat all the levels in Yoshi's Island with 100 points apiece so I can unlock the secret levels. I need to learn about the connection between brucellosis and depression. I need to read more fairy tales. I need to watch the Russian movie my dad brought up called "Freaks and Men", because he says it's "very far out". I need to stop feeling like there's an anvil on my shoulders every time something's expected out of me. I need to stop hating homework. If I stop hating it, then I'll do it, and then I'll be free. But I think it's the not being free that I hate, and that's what's keeping me from doing it. Which is ridiculous. I need to clean my room again. That makes noise. My mom needs to get up. I need to wrest myself out of limbo.
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(2)
09:29:17 AM,Monday 20 October 2003
On waking up from a dream:
I wish I really was going out in the middle of the night in the middle of winter all alone to the woods to find someone who got lost. I'd take six pairs of gloves and those little paper hand-warmers and my metal canteen and my 32-foot scarf, just like in the dream. I woke up and I was disappointed.
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06:33:28 AM,Monday 20 October 2003
Glorify your maker!
Approbation's mete.
Mortify your baker;
Money hath his feet.
Order up your supper:
Nettles, figs, and sand.
Flagellate the tupper,
Ordure in his hand.
Rory-tory passions
Mortify and quell.
Alabaster fashions:
Marbled, feckless, fell.
Many are the wicked!
Ordinate the blessed.
Never mind the rest.
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(6)
10:35:44 AM,Sunday 19 October 2003
Sometimes I feel like my life's purpose is to reduplicate all my dad's sins, but somehow contrive it so that they don't do any of the damage.
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(1)
09:50:30 AM,Sunday 19 October 2003