Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
There once was a chick from Llangollan
whose girls got a regular boffin'
A young ingenue
whispered, "How do you do?"
To which she replied, "Well, babe, and often!"
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(5)
04:04:59 PM,Monday 2 February 2004
You guys still haven't guessed any of the dirty Greek word definitions. And the font seems to be busted in Mozilla. So fooey.
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(1)
05:18:34 AM,Monday 2 February 2004
A long time back, on Martin's Which Blogledyte are You? quiz, my entry said something along the lines of "You love to talk about music. You'd talk about music a lot more if you thought you could get away with it." I think, ever since then, there's been something in my head saying, "Well, why the hell not? Let's just see them try and stop me!" 'Cause I realize I talk about music way, way too much. It just seems like there's nothing else in my head these days. Well... not nothing else. But nothing else that's fit to print. So please accept my apologies. In the meantime, enjoy a fascinating webpage about Math! And... um... music. And, while you're at it, you ever read this one book, by Vikram Seth? It's great. Really great -- passionate, erudite, lyrical -- It's called An Equal, um...Music and...heh. They put out an album full of... music... inspired by it. Aw, fuggit. You know, I wouldn't have run into all this frikkin music stuff if it hadn't been IMPOSSIBLE to find a half-ass decent free mp3 of Allegri's Misere anywhere on the web. It's crazy. It's crazy! Like, the most famous sacred choral piece this side of Jingle Bells, and NO ONE's offering it. Looks like I gotta buy the bugger. Humph. (there's a mediocre-quality Bowdlerized version here, and a horrible-quality authentic one somewhere on Peoplesound. Ain't good enough for my purposes, nohow.)
I told my dad, "I'm glad I have kind of a foolish-looking face. It makes it so people don't overestimate me." My dad agreed.
"Yes. It's puckish, naïve -- disarming. Make the most of it. Put 'em off their guard."
This pleases me. My mom, on the other hand, thinks I look like Adam Sandler. This... does not. And then, just to torture me a little more, she offered to go with me to Amvets last night.
"Anyone can go in, can't they? As long as they know where it is?"
"No, ma," I said. "You have to have the secret password."
"Oh, I know the secret password," she says, slyly.
"Ok, then, what is it?"
"'Gay and Money!'"
Uffa mei.
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(5)
10:21:43 PM,Sunday 1 February 2004
Happy birthday, Dame Clara Butt!
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(2)
10:05:30 PM,Sunday 1 February 2004
More Early Music downloadables! Goddamn it. GODDAMNIT I miss playing so much. It was wonderful playing in the Towson Early Music Ensemble for a semester. But I wanna do something longterm. Actually perform. Not necessarily paying gigs; just... something. Be in a group. Play recorder, cornetto, shawm, curtal, baroque trumpet, crumhorn, viol, sing backup vocals... hell, I dunno. I just miss playing so bad. So damn bad. I haven't been lonely for people in all these past couple years of relative solitude. I dunno if I even have the capacity to get lonely for people. Just for playing music with people. Fuh-loooog.
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08:04:20 PM,Sunday 1 February 2004
I love the taste of Thomas in the morning.
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(1)
09:53:21 AM,Friday 30 January 2004
Cornetto fans: listen to this, from here. It will clock your cockles.
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(2)
06:48:58 PM,Thursday 29 January 2004
Why you do this to me, Dimi?
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06:34:10 PM,Thursday 29 January 2004
Does this seem like an insane amount of work to you? Could it possibly be worth it? I bought The Plug a couple days ago, and, overall, I'm pleased with the sound, but it keeps falling out of my tiny ears. Man... I dunno. Work. Blegh.
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05:11:08 PM,Thursday 29 January 2004
Goddamnit, I'm just happy. My life is good, it's been good for months and months and months and months, and I'm happy. I ain't going nowhere, but I know I will be soon. There's no hard work, there's no deprivation; everyone else's sorrows are far from my eyes. I'm the fiddling grasshopper -- except there's no ant to niggle me. Well, and I haven't actually fiddled in too too long. So there's low-key dissatisfaction with myself and my idleness, sure. But the idleness is so rich and pleasant and mellow and fun, I can't lament it right now. It just won't go on forever. It shouldn't and it won't. So what's there to kvetch about? It's wonderful. I'm happy.
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12:37:06 AM,Thursday 29 January 2004
I really am a satyr. I said it as a joke a while back and then Julia took it up, but the more I think about it, the more it just makes sense. I mean:
1. I'm horny all the time.
2. I'm pretty happy-go-lucky, in a leering sneering queering kinda way.
3. I love liquoring people up.
4. I go skipping through the woodlands (or, barring that, tromping through the concretelands) whenever I get the chance.
5. And always singing at the top of my goddamn lungs while I'm at it.
6. I play a bunch of phallic wind instruments.
7. Dude, have you seen my legs? 'Nuff said.
8. I live for pleasure, but I lust for wildness.
9. I smell like a goat. Uh... {sniff} I should probably go change that. Ok, bathing is relatively unsatyrical, unless you do it in a barrel of wine or something... but one must make concessions.
10. Meh-ehh-eehh-ehhh-eh!
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(3)
11:06:49 AM,Wednesday 28 January 2004
Speaking of which... um, I totally wasn't looking to discover Goldberg Magazine with that post there... but ten minutes ago, Head-Fi happened to link me to a site that linked me to it, so... serendipity. It looks awesome, and I think I want it bad, especially since my free Opera News subscription is expiring any day now and, sexy as their full-color spreads of Ewa Podles are, I ain't shelling no money out to them types. Not to say that I won't miss it. But Goldberg looks even better. I don't know why I love Early Music so much, but, goddamnit, I do. I mean, I can definitely appreciate and enjoy the genius of Beethoven and Schubert, and I have a grudging kind of... respect-in-lieu-of-pleasure for guys like Mahler and Brahms who I keep trying to listen to but always pull back wincing. And then you get into Chopin and Mendelssohn and Lizst and on up through Debussy and Sibelius and Saint-Saens and Ravel and I'm sorry but I'm practically gagging by this point. I just don't like 'em. I just don't. I'm still planning on giving Wagner a chance, when I get a moment to actually pay some concerted attention to him, and the extent to which I love Strauss continues to baffle me, but... gluuurgh. It's always an effort. Even when there's plenty there, even when it's undeniably beautiful, it's still a matter of gritting my ears and taking it. I mean, give me credit -- I do it with Webern and Berg, I do it with Britten, I even graduated to the grand level of liking a single Puccini aria as of last summer -- so it's not just a matter of closing off my head. But, at the same time, it's not easy.
The Baroque is easy. Whether it's on period instruments, modern behemoth orchestras, polite conservative style or rabid-ass-monkey Il Giardino Armonico style, I don't care -- I'll groove to it without thinking. Even the freaking slapdash Vivaldi stuff that I've heard a million gazillion times... I mean, yeah, I'm sick of it, but I'll still took-a-too along to it if it comes on the radio. Baroque music is just so rock-outable, even when it's fluff. And so often it's not. Fugues. Fugues are figs and honey. Classical (Classical-era, I mean... so confusing to try and distinguish between classical vs. pop and Classical vs. other epochs or whatever. How about I capitalize the second one but not the first?) music sometimes bores me and sometimes just kicks me sideways down the stairs, depending on whether it's meant to be good, or whether it was just filler for some Duke's garden party. But it doesn't gall me the way all the music written after the Classical era does, no matter how fantastic and deep and rich. It goes down easy, whether it's stirring me up or just passing through. Renaissance, too, I can get enormous pleasure out of, though it takes more attention. A lot of the Renaissance secular music is as monotonous (though damn fun, if you're dancing) as pop music these days, and its sacred music, because it's uniformly unbombastic, because its cadences are prescribed, and because it doesn't cotton to toe-tapping sequential riffs like post-polyphonic music does, won't give you the same kind of musical rush at all. It's like a whole different chemical. But I'll take it, no matter what it is, over that 19th or 20th century stuff (Hey, PF, I still am gonna answer your question about those composer guys you linked to, honest. I've been thinking about it for weeks now, and listening to their stuff, and I've just about scraped up something to say. Pretty soon. I swear.)
Medieval music, to me, though I'd like to hear more of it, is pretty much in the same category as "world" or "folk" or "ethnic" or whatever the hell that genre is. It's so alien, it's hard to connect the lineage together. Classical (oh goddamnit... beginning of a sentence. Ok, here I mean "classical") music doesn't seem to follow from it, when I hear all those bagpipes and cymbals and bizarre descant lines. But it did lead to it, and it's fascinating to try and trace it through. So those three, anyway, are what people talk about when they say "Early Music" (and I know that people play Mozart and even Beethoven on period instruments sometimes, but that's not enough to count, I don't think) -- though maybe it's actually five: sacred Medieval (elaborations on plainchant; Hildegard von Bingeny stuff), secular Medieval (the crazy tabor and drone stuff), sacred Renaissance (polyphony; Lassus, Palestrina, and them cats), secular Renaissance (loud bands, dance music, troubador stuff), and Baroque (sacred and secular both pretty much in the same idiom, at that point). Now, do these have enough in common to be all put together in one category, besides their all taking lots of musicological research to do properly? And that they can't be played on the instruments in your average symphony? And that so much of it is obscure and kickass and aching for rediscovery? And that there's less in the way of virtuosity (until you get to the high Baroque, anyway) than "mainstream classical", and more that you can just pick up and go to town with even if you're an amateur? That it's not so... rehashed and gentrified, the way so much classical is?
I dunno. Whatever it is, I like it, and I align myself with its camp. Early Music. It just sounds so mysterious and vast and full of treasure.
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(3)
10:27:14 AM,Wednesday 28 January 2004
What about Goldberg? When did he sleep?
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(2)
11:52:44 PM,Tuesday 27 January 2004
When seminar gets tedious...
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(2)
10:16:41 PM,Monday 26 January 2004
My tetracycline-stained baby, yeah...
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(1)
07:37:53 PM,Monday 26 January 2004
Yay! Little Nephew's coming home! Damn, I missed him more than I thought I would. And he left his damn Trogdor shirt in my room. I get to pick him up in... two hours! Yay!
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06:44:59 PM,Monday 26 January 2004
On further reviewing, I can find only one flaw in the book. One single flaw: she uses the word "spitblack" rather too often, to the point of self-indulgence. But, past that... it really is perfect. It really is frikking perfect.
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(4)
07:58:32 AM,Monday 26 January 2004
I am ballin' like Stalin, and it feels gooood. Just made a righteous purge of my hard drive (7 gigs gone in two swoops), and now I'm starting on my Jukebox. Tremble, mediocrity! Tremble!!
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(6)
11:28:32 PM,Sunday 25 January 2004
I get the feeling that William Gibson shares my thing for girls in camouflage.
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(2)
11:24:35 AM,Sunday 25 January 2004
