playing badly

When I was a kid, I took piano lessons. I was probably around eight or ten. I don't remember much about them. I don't even remember why I wanted to take them in the first place. My parents were gentle and indulgent when it came to hobbies, and they encouraged my sister and me to try everything that we wanted to, as long as we liked it enough to take it seriously. I studied ballet, gymnastics, and horseback riding. I took lessons in drawing and writing. I read thick books filled with pictures of birds and commandeered my parents' bed as a base from which I could spend hours identifying various versions of the common sparrow.

I was not a musical child. My dad played the piano, so we always had a piano in the house, but he rarely touched it. We listened to music--classical music and oldies--and my mom would sometimes play the guitar and sing (my mom has a lovely voice), but my innate musical talent amounted to just about nothing. I took piano lessons for a little while, failed to become good at making music, failed to care enough to struggle through the discomfort of being bad at something, and stopped.

I used to dislike doing things I was bad at. They made me feel uncomfortable and stupid and conspicuously mortified, like a clown taking a pratfall with a whole neon world blinking in pity. I have always had a fear of looking stupid. It is one of my most annoying faults, the thing that will make me nod my head when I haven't the foggiest idea and sit glum on the sidelines while everyone else slides around in the mud.

I am bad at music. I have no talent or instinct for it. I have the dullest of ears and no sensitivity to the beautiful, mathematical landscapes of rhythm. Consciously remembering a melody is a struggle. I love music, am fascinated and moved and riled up by it, but I am, frankly, terrible at it.

In January, I started taking piano lessons. Once a week, I go to the Community Music Center in the Mission and am bad at playing the piano. It makes me incredibly happy. It is an enormous and alien pleasure to honestly take pleasure in the study of something I'm bad at. I have no real hope of becoming musical; my brain doesn't seem to be the right shape for it and my ideas don't speak music as a native language. When I want to say something, it never occurs to me to hum a tune. But, I love the way it feels to crawl toward minimal comprehension of a subject so enormously wonderful that it gets to stroll beloved through life. It reminds me of learning to read. Here, again, are the weird moments when a mark on a page becomes a recognizable object, then a symbol, then a block of symbols, then a magical, moveable strand of fluency. Here is a reminder that turning a page was once an awkward movement and not an invisible transition.

I get the dual thrills of struggling with the ideas and struggling with the fine motor control that underlie something that I adore, but have absolutely no stake in being good at. No one cares whether I become competent at making music or remain comically confused (except, maybe, my piano teacher, who is pure, delightful, Eastern European fanaticism). I am allowed the happiness of a slow motion plod toward small sparks of understanding, which somehow feel like little anvils falling on my head and bright little birds circling around, singing a stupidly cheerful tune.

bass players

bass players, 5/22/13

Last night, I went to see the San Francisco Symphony play Elliott Carter, Maurice Ravel, and George Gershwin. Really, I went to hear the Ravel and Gershwin. Really, I went to see the clarinet player just about wriggle out of his tailcoat with the excitement of the first solo of Rhapsody in Blue.

I sat in the magical, $15 seats that put you right up behind the musicians. The percussion and the brass are extremely loud there, and you have an excellent view of the luxuriously full complement of basses. My sister and I shared the long, carpeted bench with elderly Russian couples who didn't seem to mind when we pulled out our notebooks and pencils.

tunes recently enjoyed no. 4

So Am I - George Gershwin

During the entire month of January, I was completely obsessed with Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls. I listened to it on repeat, incessantly and without any real analytical thought. I wanted it to be the background to everything, for some reason, so I put it on, over and over, until they were pleasantly engraved into my brain and I caught myself enjoying the creepy sensation of listening to the memory of a tune as clearly as if it were actually playing.

This is my favorite song from the album. It makes me think of a late night, happily tipsy dance--stately gliding upset by bobbing changes of pace and unexpected leaps in altitude. Dreamy.

Andante from Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor - J. S. Bach

My sister and I recently discovered that the San Francisco Symphony offers some surprisingly cheap seats and we are now getting into the habit of taking advantage of this fact. We went to see a program organized around the talents of Alexander Barantschik, principal violinist. It was a program of old chestnuts, pieces that I (and probably everyone else in the audience) have been inescapably exposed to. They're in movies, on commercials, in cafes, in bookstores, in the vast and general cultural air... and I was completely shocked to find myself tearing up over this particular piece, eyes welling out of control over something so familiar, but so weirdly live.

It's a sad and stately beauty, this slow and almost plodding base with the violin singing across the top of it. It's very lovely, but not a piece that I usually go crazy for, so the efficiency with which it dragged me to the point of tears was a bit of a shock.

(the video features Yehudi Menuhin)

Serenade in D major, Serenata notturna- Mozart

This was the last piece on the aforementioned program of old chestnuts. It feels very earnest, a sunny and forthright bit of virtuosic glee. Hearing it and seeing it played live is fun. We sat in the odd bleacher-like seats perched at the back of the stage where you can peer down at the musicians and see, up close, these fascinating, alien habits and tics that slide along under the performance of the music itself. Watching excellent music played live is possibly my favorite thing in the world right now. I can't get enough of it. There's the aural pleasure of sounds with texture and distance and breath, of course, but the visual realization that those sounds are coming from human beings is somehow enormously satisfying. I like seeing how the violinists slide their bows onto shelves under their music when they're required to pluck strings with their fingers. I like seeing the principal bassist (whose name is Scott Pingle and who is extraordinary) exchange glances with the percussionist before their respective solos. I like seeing this collection of people turn into a strange and beautiful beast that makes music. It's as if all the information that comes in from my eyeballs sets my curiosity on fire so I can listen better.

Partita No. 3 in E major - J. S. Bach

I love this piece. The "Loure" in particular just wrenches my heart out because it's such a stringent stunner. It's so inarguably, intelligently ravishing, and it seems like every violinist pours themselves into it, souls pressed right out of their bodies and into the air via that flimsy box of wood. An illusion, obviously, but an irresistible one.

Gil Shaham reminded me of Dick Van Dyke. Long and off-kilter and warmly silly. I never expected to see a violinist move an entire symphony hall into a fit of giggles, but he managed it with panache.

These Arms of Mine - Otis Redding

This song is one that I imagine I will love forever, no matter where or for what it is appropriated. The way the beat goes on and on underneath a voice that's almost embarrassingly, sentimentally full of want... it gets me every time.

Ina Rae, the singer who we're working with on our current Sharp & Fine project, sang us a version of this that started out in classical, opera voice and tumbled down into something looser. It was amazing, even unfinished. I'm really hoping that it will fit into the finished piece because I think the entire audience will be left in tears.

Tow Away Zone - Sam Ospovat

Sam Ospovat, an incredible drummer, recently asked me to help him create some movement for a live performance of this improv-based composition. I listened to it a lot beforehand, at first because I felt like I should (even though I knew it would sound completely different in the show) and then because I felt like it was this weird and magical room that transformed itself every time I opened the door on it.

I used to have an enormous prejudice again contemporary improvised music. I was afraid of it, in the same way that I'm still afraid of things labeled "performance art."Afraid of boredom, confusion, and unpleasantness that you can't escape because you are at a show and good manners dictate that you shouldn't just walk out because you don't "like" something. But, having heard and seen more music like this performed live, I find myself starting to enjoy some of it. It's so interesting, so obviously full of ideas and strictures, both followed and defied, even if I can't understand most of the language it's speaking in.

tunes recently enjoyed no. 3

Arpeggione Sonata in A Minor by Franz Schubert - Mstislav Rostropovich and Benjamin Britten

Lorin Benedict, who is a very fine singer of weird and wonderful songs, recommended this particular recording to me. It's intoxicating. There's such enormous sensitivity in it, like a conversation between two creatures in the dark whose skins are entirely covered with antennae tuned precisely to each other's frequency. I don't know enough about music to talk about it with any real intelligence. I'm trapped in the world of metaphors, in saying what things are sort of like, sort of remind me of, sort of, kind of, and not what they actually are. This is just... beautiful. Pleasant and interesting on my ear. Sounds, alternating anchors and wild kites, that pull me right up to them.

Symphony No. 3 by Charles Ives

I started listening to Charles Ives because of Leonard Bernstein, who I am completely obsessed with right now. (The Norton lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1973 are my current companions in the land of sleeplessness.) Ives's music makes me feel like I'm at the center of a collision between epic loveliness, creepy jocularity, and patiently endured, long suffered melancholy. He goes from something that makes me think of cathedrals and underground lakes to a maddening march with no remorse. It's interesting. And I can't get enough of interesting music right now. What does that limp word even mean? I don't know. I want music that makes me desire nothing so much as listening through to the end, that my ears want to puzzle over and my brain wants to think about. Not opaque stuff that abrades, but stuff with corners to peer around, sharp objects that stab you, layers to shuffle through.

This recording is, unsurprisingly, the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Vanishing Lady - Rickard Brothers

I'm a sucker for anything that references magic shows. This song is ridiculous, swooping, and full of these amazingly maddening repeats. It spends almost three and a half minutes telling you to watch closely for this moment of vanishing, cranking you up and up for some sort of happening that never actually happens. And then it completely betrays you with a fade out. But, I like it.

I've Just Seen a Face - The Beatles

I love these lyrics. You know that absurd joy of recognition? Oh, yes! That is exactly how I feel and how I've felt. I know this. I know this! It's silly; why is it so satisfying to spot fragments of your own life in someone else's infinitely more clever, more well-turned, more piercing song?

Aside from the lyrics, this song makes me feel like running. It keeps going and going and those beautiful guitar bits come in with all these short, clipped words flying at you, and it makes me wish I could be a person with crazy parkour skills so I could leap off buildings and skitter off walls.

Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl - The Kinks

This song is so pent-up and anxious and full of absurd angst. I imagine someone locking themselves in a closet and singing this. I like how the twangy, strong sounds pound away in the basement while the voice floats above it, high and fretting. I'm not sure why that makes me like it, but the space in between those two things feels somehow both silly and perfect.

tunes recently enjoyed no. 2

"Telephone/telephone/demon/telephone" - Beep!
+
Stravinsky Violin Concerto in D, Aria #2 - Hilary Hahn

I am terrible at making mix tapes. I've never had the knack of being able to figure out what makes one tune flow satisfyingly into another. The "shuffle" option makes me happy. As long as I have a grab bag of songs I like, the order I hear them in is of negligible importance... Except, sometimes, one song falls after another in such a fantastic way completely by accident that it makes me like both more.

"Telephone/telephone/demon/telephone" is a slightly unhinged wallop of noise. Lots of weird sounds enter in weird, but impeccably placed ways. My ears want to lean right into it to try to figure out what's going on and it somehow remains a happy exploration, a pleasant confusion instead of a resentful stumble... And then the Stravinsky piece comes in, alternating piercing stringency with these smooth, fatty folds of sound... And, for some reason, my brain thought this was the most splendid, most felicitous and delightful of combinations. I had to make a playlist just so I could keep hearing the two pieces one right after another.

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Benjamin Britten

I've always thought of Britten as being full of odd sounds, and odd distances between sounds, and while I've found most of his stuff that I've heard to be interesting and full of stuff to chew on, I never really liked it in a visceral way. There's a harshness and baldness that unsettled me, a sort of bleak earnestness that made me feel uncomfortable. But this opera is a pleasure. It's beautiful and funny, and it revels in its oddity and the satisfaction of making good noise; there are bits that make me think of someone jumping up and down in a spill of paint just to see the way it splashes. The whole thing is wonderful, but I love the "on the ground, sleep sound" bit (which also happens to be the easiest thing to find on YouTube, thanks to Wes Anderson).

"It Could Happen to You" - Lorin Benedict and Sam Ospovat

This is really strange. But, it's wonderful. Trust me. A combination of intensely bizarre scatting and wild, but delicious drums, the whole Passwords album is addictive. I never thought I would say that about something like this, but it's true.

This track is my favorite. It somehow manages to parade through both pure noise and song, unmooring meaning from speech and throwing explosives at my imagination. I start filling in dialogue, then drop that in favor of images, and drop that in favor of picturing the landscape of the sound. It's like having a really awesome, impressively compressed, completely insane version of "Fantasia" attacking your brain.

Beethoven symphonies nos. 1-9

I've become a Beethoven symphony junkie. They're so grand. Immensely gorgeous. Glorious and spectacular and epic, and honestly so. They're clear-hearted and unconfused, emotionally brash and absolute. Listening to them makes me feel like I need to push the edges of my own canvas out, but they also make me want to believe harder, feel more, go galloping around in neon.

I've been listening to the New York Philharmonic versions of these, directed by Leonard Bernstein, all conveniently streaming on Spotify.

Piano Concerto No. 2, Larghetto - Frederic Chopin

I've been listening to this compulsively over the past few days and every time I do, my eyes well up at about two minutes in, all harshness, all cynicism, all coolness and flippancy collapsing under the onslaught of those sweet falls of notes. I'm not actually sure what it is about it, but this piece jerks the tears right out of me. It conjures wholesome ache and longing, somewhere deep in my gut, and I find myself wishing for things like sunny days and landscapes that roll out in a carpet of green and love. I've been listening to a bunch of recordings, but this video is Arthur Rubinstein with the London Symphony Orchestra.

tunes recently enjoyed

"Lazy Afternoon" - Susannah Young

This is a song from a 1954 musical by Jerome Moross and John LaTouche that apparently takes on both the Iliad and the Odyssey and transplants them to the state of Washington at the turn of the 20th century. The Wikipedia synopsis contains the following amazing bit: "... the small town of Angel's Roost is thrown into confusion when old Menelaus' fancy-free wife, Helen, runs off with a traveling salesman named Paris. He's in town to judge an apple pie bake-off." How badly do I want to see this musical? Very badly.

The song is humid and dreamy, all long, drawn-out lines of sound that periodically tumble over the edge into crumbling trills. This version makes me think of that gorgeous, gorgeous bit at the beginning of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (for which you should watch this video of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Boston Symphony... Bernstein's face just makes me ache it has so much happiness in it) and is so much more satisfying and odd than, say, Barbra Streisand's.

Chopin's Ballade No. 4 in F Minor - Arthur Rubinstein

I love how the first half of this winds you up with a swaying, aching theme that makes measured, gentle transformations that somehow also have yawning gaps hidden between the notes that threaten to either make you fall or cut off the piece and leave you without relief. Tension, just ratcheting up so gorgeously until it feels like your chest will explode from it. And then it lets you fall and you can breathe again for a few minutes before it pushes you into a racing, insane little coda.

Listening to this absolutely flattens me. But, it's so, so good.

"Welcome to Our World" - DRMS

I went to a DRMS show a little while ago. It's one of the few shows I've gone to recently that made me feel like I had to dance. This song in particular has so many weird sounds going on in it--odd plinking, insistent beats, synth-y twanging, hiccuping pauses--all laid out under a rangy voice. It's an addictive and bizarre collage, sort of like staring up at a mobile that has spaceships dangling on one arm and prehistoric tools on the other.

"Bach Suite" - Beginners soundtrack

This just makes me want to cry. It's an arrangement of some Bach melodies for horns. I have no idea who plays it or who arranged it... the track just lists "Johann Sebastian Bach"for the artist... but, it's so earnest and so lonely; the sound seems to come up out of nowhere and bleeds off at the edges, like it's being played in a vast space with no objects or ears to absorb it.

"A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring" - Mike Preston

This song is weird. And kind of piteous. The lyrics are so heart-on-sleeve desperate that the song is almost embarrassing to listen to. But the guy's voice is smooth, simultaneously really attractive and disconcertingly controlled, with strange endings on certain words that make me imagine them evaporating up and out of his mouth. And the backup vocals are amazingly ridiculous.

"Good Thing" - Naytronix

This one makes me think of a processional, one that goes on and on and becomes progressively stranger as it goes. It's terrifically satisfying to listen to. The beat carries you along under a shifting canopy of bizarre noises that somehow also manage to be exactly the thing you need to hear at that moment. It's like walking through some abstracted animation of a jungle, all flattened out to suggestive shapes and pumped up with neon colors.

"These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)" - Thelonious Monk

Wobbly, fuzzed around the edges, pounding and trilling... it's like a drunken high wire act. I like how much space there seems to be between the shambling, repetitive lower notes and the skittering higher ones. It's like having someone mumble and sing at you at the same time, which sounds horrible, but is somehow charming. I keep waiting for it to fall over the edge into pain, but it doesn't. Mostly it doesn't.

love songs

What's a love song? 

It's simple, isn't it? You're in love, and you sing a song. You're out of love, and you sing a song. It's a song about him. It's a song about her. It's song about you and the way you feel when confronted by a person who, for whatever reason, strikes a gong in your soul. It's sad. Wistful. Giddy. Obnoxious. It's the thing you play over and over when you're first in love because it makes you feel like you're drowning in something that's going to split your chest in two.

And you like it. You wish you could drown forever. You'd gulp down the ocean if it wasn't going to kill you.

It's the thing you play when your chest has split in two, over and over, because there's a wicked satisfaction in pricking a tender wound. A love song is a song about love, which is a tiny, terrifying word that, when turned inside out, explodes in every possible direction to become vast, a landscape with features both precise and smudged.

Maybe a love song can be identified like pornography. "I know it when I see it." (A handy little phrase when faced by the need to be both honest and vague... thank you, Justice Potter Stewart.)

Today, I asked friends to recommend their favorite love songs so I could build a playlist for our first rehearsal for a new Sharp & Fine project. It's a work in progress. Right now, it stands at 45 songs... Some expected, tasty old chestnuts, some ungainly oddballs. But, you know, all recognizable for what they are. 

So, I've been thinking about love songs all day, but I still haven't figured out which ones are my favorites. "Favorite" is such a dangerous word. Using it in public is like looking down the barrel of a gun. I am an indecisive chicken, and will only say that here are three love songs I like a lot:

"Quintet in C Major" - Franz Schubert

When I was 15, I danced in a piece to this music... It blew my heart to smithereens. When I first heard it, I was beside myself, I couldn't figure out how one piece of music could make me feel so many things. I was 15 and I didn't even really know what love was, but I was convinced that, somewhere inside this piece of music,  was a large collection of evidence for how it should feel. When I was 19 and freshly away from home, I carried around a walkman with a disc of the recording featuring the Cleveland Quartet and Yo-Yo Ma. The version here is the Taneyev Quartet with Mstislav Rostropovich. 

"Can't Help Falling in Love" - Elvis Presley

Listening to this song makes me feel like I should be out walking late at night, down a long, black road lined with infrequent lamps, toward a bright, golden room inhabited by the person I want to see most in the world. The tune is so simple... and then his voice spreads out over it, enormously tender, in some of the most sentimental lyrics in the world.

"Strangers" - The Kinks

When my friend, Heather, and I went to see The Darjeeling Limited, we left the movie theater and went directly to a record store where we each bought a copy of the soundtrack. It's one of my least regretted music purchases ever. I love this song. I listened to it to excess to clean my ears and heart out after dating a fellow whose tastes ran to blurry, electronic indie pop. The heavy drumbeats are addictive. 

LOVE SONGS FROM FRIENDS (so far)

Evolving Spotify playlist HERE. Incomplete, due to my inability to find everything.

Recommendation thank yous go to Hallie Hunt, Dan Wool, Amis Maldonado, Stella Stastny, Amber Hsu, Ali Trotta, Clare Mallaney, Marc Jacobs, Penelope Barcelo, Neil Gaiman, LizAnne Roman, Sarah Miller, Lauren Naturale, Mari Aizawa, Arolyn Williams, Lauren Gallagher, Kelvin Vu, Kat Howard, Rebecca Howard, Noam Rosen, Gabrielle Zucker, Heather McCalden, and Shannon Leypoldt.

you & me

I was going to write a novel this summer, because I figured, why not? (I do many things on the basis of the idea that there's no reason not to. It's not the most practical of arguments.) It (this theoretical novel) was going to be about a girl who was sort of, but not really, a werewolf.

And then summer turned out to be busier than expected and I'm going out of town (on a poorly organized, but hopefully wonderful adventure to Germany and England to visit some of the most glorious people I know), so a novel hasn't been written. But, suddenly, I've got this idea, this other idea, and it won't go away.

Yeah, I know, that was a totally enlightening thing to say. Dime a dozen. Wishes, horses. This is the part where you say, "And?"

And this is the part where I say, "well, I haven't really gotten past that, but, you know... why not?"

***

As a small and grumpy sidenote: I spent my entire Sunday staring at the computer screen and doing editorial work. My eyeballs feel unpleasantly sticky. I completely failed to arrange necessary transportation between two German cities and various English ones. I did not buy an outlet converter thing. I feel I must look like Quasimodo. But! I've been listening to a totally awesome song. "Boat" by The Shivers. I can't decide whether finding a love worthy song makes up for a rat-wheel sort of day. It's a toss-up.

music (in my ears)

I've had my eye out for some good music because I'm not fond of air travel, and when I climb onto an airplane in a few weeks, I want something to drown my ears in. I'm really fascinated by Dark Night of the Soul (think: David Lynch + Sparklehorse + Danger Mouse) because it's strange and because it's title makes me think, not of Catholic mystics, but of Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is one of my favorite titles, ever.

I'm also listening to Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead On Her Magical Ukulele. "High and Dry" is gorgeous. I think I missed the initial boat on the Radiohead craze, though I remember that my roommate on the first summer I went away from home alternated between bouts of Radiohead and bouts of the Smashing Pumpkins played at volumes so high that I felt like our dorm room was a shivering gondola hurtling through the city's fog.

***

It's funny. I've known so many people who have an intense memory for music. It's like the songs are a card catalogue, and on each one is written a memory, compactly and stealthily stored for future resurrection, momentary resuscitation. I find myself lacking in this particular skill of nostalgia. I don't remember the first song I danced with a boy to. I don't remember the first piece I learned on the piano. I don't have songs that dredge up kisses or birthday parties or miseries or joys. I could (theoretically) still dance for you the Bluebird Pas de Deux (the first real and glittering classical partnering piece I ever did), but hearing Tchaikovsky's score doesn't bring me back to that day when my teacher coached me into such tears that I couldn't see straight.

It's not that music leaves me cold. I love music. I love to move to it. There are some pieces that have a direct and unfairly swift line to my heart. But I don't get that visceral dislocation. I miss out on the instant of time travel that leaves people all moist around the eyes when they hear that song.

I feel like I've been cheated. Where is my nostalgic soundtrack? Where are the songs that I'll play to wallow in my life? Maybe I'll have to artificially inject them. All moments carefully scored. All significant characters allotted a fitting theme song. I should hum them when they appear.

"What? That? Oh, it's just a little song that's going to make me think of you."

***
My friend, the lovely Mlle. X, is posting some glorious photographs on her blog. Look, admire. I dare you to resist the stories that come bleeding through them.

4' 33''

Sybil's Garage asks authors to suggest a "musical accompaniment" to go with their story. For a moment, I thought about choosing 4'33'' by John Cage. Four thirty-three is a three movement score that instructs the musicians to not play their instrument for the duration of the piece.

(The Wikipedia article is actually pretty great.)

I was thinking about it as a joke, one with some seriously pretentious flavors, but then I realized that telling someone that the best accompaniment to your story is the choice of doing nothing else doesn't just taste of pretension... It positively roars with it. Of course you want your story to flood their eyes, overwhelm their nose, saturate their skin, and batter its way down their ears and throats...You want it to momentarily obliterate everything except the world it contains. But to actually imply that it does... That's just more confidence than I've got.

(If you're curious, I chose the Chaconne from the Partita no. 2 in D minor for solo violin by Mr. Awesomeness Incarnate, J. S. Bach. It's one of my favorite pieces of music in all the world, going forwards and back.)

it's not original, but sometimes it's true

I (heart) San Francisco.
These fellows set up their tables along Market Street, on the rather unpleasant block between 5th and 6th. It's completely unexpected: a crowd of men playing chess, or watching each other play chess, everyone mostly silent except for the hands that fly out to click a piece down on the board or punch the clock. They seem like they belong in a park instead of next to a busy road where the streetcars trundles past and a homeless man in a safari hat patrols the sidewalk to the sound of Christmas carols spilling from the boombox that he carries in a bag over his shoulder (honest. do you really think I could make that up?).
Ice cream sandwiches at 'wichcraft. Crumbling chocolate. Mint. Gluttonous delight.
The Great American Music Hall is a gorgeous venue. It's red and gilt and decadent with just enough tarnish and grit that it feels like an actual place and not a flimsy set. My sister and I went to see the Evelyn Evelyn show here, and while they (and their alter egos, Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley) were excellent, Sxip Shirey is the one who sneaked up and stole my music-loving heart. I mean, when someone can make wonderful music out of taped together music boxes, harmonicas, a marble in a glass bowl, bicycle bells, pennywhistles, and hand bells, how can that not be magic?

fill my ears with good

The new album by Beach House makes me want to go on a roadtrip, solely because I think it would be the perfect thing to listen to, at a volume to make the windows hum, while driving a stretch of road that goes on long enough for the sun to set while you're crossing it. It's called "Teen Dream," which makes me wince, but the music brings to mind "drenched" and "haze" and, yep, "dreamy" -- but it has an edge underneath it that makes me want to pay attention in case it slices through. Sexy, too.

(It also introduced me to Pitchfork, which is a one of those rabbit hole websites that are dangerous to fall down. Endless treasures. A new She & Him music video. "Go Outside" by Cults.)

***
This American Life makes me teary eyed, angry, giggly, and full of a sinking disappointment when I've caught up on my backlog and realise that my ipod is empty of new episodes. I found episode 399: Contents Unknown particularly fascinating.

***
My sister made me listen to "Stuff You Missed In History Class." I think she offered the episode about the disastrous Burke and Wills expedition to explore the Australian continent. Apparently, one scientist drew a picture of a rat eating his foot as he died. I've now gotten to the point where I'm dredging up past episodes to put on my ipod.

***
In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg from BBC Radio 4 can be a little pretentious sometimes, but the conversational format is interesting. I remember listening to the episode about Joan of Arc while sitting on a set of stairs in San Francisco while drinking a cup of tea, waiting for a friend, and wondering what it felt like to be so intimately acquainted with someone so long dead.

can't sit still when you play that song

When a song comes on that I really love, or is something unfamiliar that I find newly delightful, the first thing I want to do is move. A gentle sway is the usual antidote, lazy curves heading down my spine, but sometimes it's not enough. The skull must nod. The arms must swing. The hips crook, feet shuffle, shoulders bunch and shrug. Moving to music is like laying on the ground while someone beats a drum, or sitting in a room while someone plays the cello and you feel hollow with all the vibrations under your skin.

Which is why I can't sit still to a good song.

The other night I went to see the Magnetic Fields at the Herbst Theater (which is very pretty) and they played an entire evening of good songs (and the particular reason I like Magnetic Fields songs is that they immediately transform me into the character I imagine living them; they open up like stories in puzzle boxes, all witty and sad and beautiful and wicked), but we were sitting in respectable chairs with cushions of red velveteen. Dancing was not to be had. I had to content myself with swaying and foot tapping when what I really, really wanted was to go swinging off the balcony like Tarzan and racing up and down the aisles in full-blown, absolute silliness.

dancing? no, but you can have a mural!

***
ahem.

In other news, Paul Berger, who was my classmate at Clarion, has a story up at Strange Horizons. It is almost a fairytale and it is appropriately unsettling and fun to read.

zebra

My sister, the lovely Shannon (aforementioned crafty genius), has started a blog. It is called "Ream of Zebras," which is a slightly geeky play on paper terms. So far, she has discussed tacky spin-off fairy tale books, the sleaze factor of American Apparel advertisements, and her current obsession: hunting down beautifully illustrated picture books (if you ask her about the newer edition of Thurber's Many Moons, you will see steam rising from her ears).

And, because it's a Sunday and Sundays call for happy music: Dr. Dog . Their album, Fate, (the only one I've explored properly) is full of folksy, blues and bluegrass-tinged, songs that make me want to run around in the sun and roll down grassy hills. (also, their website is bizarrely cute and full of things to click-click-clicky.)

amanda palmer + umbrellas

So, basically, my first concert was made of win because:

Amanda Palmer is a magnificent lady. Her voice is magnificent, her songs are magnificent, and up close she becomes even more magnificent because she's really nice. And enthusiastic, and smart, and obviously very much in love with what she does.

All concerts should have the Danger Ensemble to elevate them to magic. Especially if they are allowed to have umbrellas and do over the top, hilarious reincarnations of certain popular songs about said objects.

All concerts should be held in velvet, jewelry-box, supper clubs where people in bloomers and waistcoats and top hats look more in place than anyone else.

Songs about trout, especially new ones that are rough around the edges, are sad (a good kind of sad).

Violins are irresistible.

music wars

When you walk into a bookshop, the ambient music probably isn't the first thing that enters your mind. It probably straggles in much later, after, "where is that book that I desperately want and must have in my hands in this exact moment?" or, "what direction shall I wander in first?" or maybe even, "what are those strange things that sort of look like Rubik's cubes, but aren't?"... But then, after a little while, the music seeps in. And then, after several hours, even with all those lovely books crowded around you, the music is suddenly pounding through your head and you wonder why everyone hasn't either burst into spontaneous dance, or run away with their hands pressed to their ears.

At the bookshop, we have music wars. The combatants are:

The company sanctioned, nice at first, but easily tiresome CDs that we sell. These have French songs, Spanish songs, "world beats", and other such globally inclusive tasters.

A strange amalgamation of things that reminds me of a fake honky tonk bar. Or, possibly, the parts of the 70s that I'm glad I missed.

Classical music. Mozart, Bach, and all the usual suspects. I'm extremely fond of classical music, so it makes me unreasonably happy when, say, a Bach CD makes it's way into the stereo.

Once, I think someone brought in some French accordian music, the cheerful oom pah pah kind. In small doses, it's actually quite infectious. I felt like doing jigs up and down between the shelves.

Sadly (or maybe fortunately), nobody wins for long. It's all just skirmishes and sometimes your ears bleed and sometimes they don't.
***
I've just started reading Dali & I by Stan Lauryssens. I have high hopes for this one. Even higher now that I've read the author's bio, which says that he spent time in prison for selling fake Dalis, then "turned to writing crime fiction". This is possibly the most exciting thing I've read on a book flap in a long time.

on reflection...

This sign is from the airport, international terminal. Something--probably the pictures of the Olafur Eliasson exhibit I'd just seen in the MOMA store--made me think of a room with a giant, still pond in it, fathoms deep and smooth as glass. Or a room panelled in mirrors with different colored lights reflecting in all directions. Unfortunately, I think it's actually a politically reworked word standing in for "chapel" or somesuch. But since I didn't actually go and check, I can pretend that through a little corridor and up some stairs is a magnificent Room of Reflections whose beauty will make you fall on your knees, like that little person icon there, in wonder.

Am tired of writing today. I've done perhaps 1500 words and things were humming along nicely, but I'm at one of those getting from here to there moments and I just want to skip over it and go on to the next bit which is going to involve bright lights and nightmares. It's the pyrotechnic bit of the chapter. There are just all these details that need setting up and they're feeling a bit sluggish and dull. However, I've found out what a ghost machine does and more about Agatha, so that's good.

I watched the "Utopia" and "The Sound of Drums" episodes of Doctor Who and was happily astonished by how fantastic Derek Jacobi and John Simms are. There's a moment when Jacobi just looks into the camera and goes from being an affable professor to a very dangerous maniac. It's chilling and wonderful. There are moments of sci-fi apocalypse that seem a bit ridiculous (though still much enjoyable), but having a character who is quite like the Doctor yet so horrible, driven mad by the same powers that make the Doctor wonderful, is brilliant. Typical archetype stuff, I guess, but really solid nonetheless.

Bought three new cds: Muswell Hillbillies by the Kinks, End of History by Regan Fionn, and Hilary Hahn's Bach Partitas for Solo Violin. Self-indulgent, I know. I went in planning to get the Bach because I think the partitas are glorious, but then I wandered into the music section and was lost for an hour or so. How could I resist an album with songs titled "Hey Rabbit" and "Abacus" (the Fionn)? Or one called "Muswell Hillbillies"? There's a song on that album called "Have A Cuppa Tea," which made me laugh because I went into a coffee shop the other day and said, "may I have a cuppa tea?" and the girl behind the counter said, "huh?" Hopefully the music will live up to my enjoyment of the titles, and if not, at least I have the Bach to console myself with.

Obviously, I haven't been working too hard if I've had time to watch Doctor Who and buy music and take pictures in airports, but I still haven't found the stamina for writing again. It's odd, because I don't know the details, sometimes even the big obvious chunks of "what happens next?" until I'm writing them, but once I do see them in my head, I get impatient about turning them into words and just want to dump them out and carry on to the next bit. Lazy.