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Andrew Lindemann Malone's Internet Playpen |
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Monday, April 24, 2006: In Which I Review Myself The Maryland Chorus, an ensemble composed of about half University of Maryland students and half non-student hangers-on, gave its spring concert in the Dekelboum Concert Hall of the university’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on Sunday evening. The program featured compositions from the Austrian all-stars of sacred music: Wolfgang Amadeus “Kid Dynamite” Mozart’s “Ave verum corpus,” Franz Joseph “Big Poppa” Haydn’s “Te Deum,” and Franz “The Tubercular Consumptive” Schubert’s Mass in A-Flat Major. In a departure from the Smith Center’s normal reviewer-accommodation practices, I was placed in the back row of the chorus and expected to sing bass for some reason. From this spot, we sounded pretty good. Specifically, I sounded pretty good, mostly in the Haydn, in which I do not recall having made any significant errors. (That doesn’t mean I didn’t make any. Trust me.) Anyway, the “Te Deum” sparkles with invention and joy — it’s my favorite piece on this program, by far — and student conductor Stephen Holmes drew an appropriately buoyant performance from us and the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra. On the other hand, I didn’t correctly execute the only sort-of-hard thing I had to do during the entire slow, luminous “Ave verum corpus,” which music director and conductor Edward Maclary dedicated to the memory of two Bowling Green University students he had worked with who had been killed in a plane crash. Enough of my fellow basses appeared to actually sang their penultimate notes on time such that the effect was not ruined. During the Schubert, I went off track a few times but never became seriously lost, which is a definite improvement from the early practices in which I felt as if the Schubert was a vast ocean of notes in which I could not even tread water. I also sang the words “agimus tibi” properly every time, which was touch-and-go right up to concert time. The other 80 people there besides me seemed to make a good account of themselves as well, and we had some fine contributions from the soloists, particularly soprano Christine Castillo. The concert will never be repeated! If you missed it, you’re a sucker! Though if you have access to my cerebral cortex, the concert is still running relentlessly through my head, over and over and over and over again, as I type this.
Friday, April 21, 2006: Sprawl First, some blog bizness: I’m participating in a concert on Sunday. The University of Maryland Chorus will be singing the Austrian All-Starz: Mozart (the Ave verum corpus), Haydn (the Te Deum) and Schubert (the A-flat major Mass). I will be at the back, singing bass as best I can. So you all should come hear that if you’re not otherwise occupied. More info here. If you can plausibly pretend to be a student, it's a mere eight buxx! Second, I know I said I would post a blog entry on Tuesday. I was occupied by the spring fever, which imparts unto me a kind of malevolent, whining lethargy every year. It’s a combination that makes me extraordinarily charming, doubtless. I went to Chicago over Easter and had a lot of fun. As always when I go to Chicago, in fact, I came home wondering why I don’t go live there. The plusses:
So why don’t I migrate? Well, all my stuff is here — family, friends, excessive number of jobs, barbershop, etc. But then in my malevolent whining lethargy, I think, “How much does any of that piddly stuff really matter? You could be hearing a symphony orchestra whose playing routinely reaches brilliance. Do you really need your parents to be nearby in that situation?” Or something. And I certainly wouldn’t have an excessive number of jobs if I moved to Chicago — I wouldn’t have any! For a while, at least! That would be a new and liberating experience. After all, freedom’s just another word for nothing in my bank account, right? Who knows. But I’m not going to make a decision while I’m in the malevolent, whining lethargy. After all, I have to make decisions that make sense when I’m not in such a mood, and I’m not like that most of the time. Right? Don't answer that.
Monday, April 10, 2006: You Better Duck, Duck It is springtime, the time when a young man's fancy turns to baseball, love, making fun of Yahoo! Maps (see directly below), and, in my case, hating geese. "What did geese ever do to you?" you ask, thus triggering the rest of my rant. We have a lot of geese near my office building in Riverdale, Maryland, and the recent clear-cutting of all the forest around that building has not completely driven the geese to greener pastures. Nope, they're still there, doing the very little they do all day. I have undertaken an intensive study of what exactly it is geese do, and it seems to come down to the following list, arranged in order of amount of time devoted to activity:
Yes, somehow (4) is after (3). My guess is that they actually spend spring and summer excreting whatever fecal matter they have built up during the migration, so that each journey is as exciting as the one before it. Apparently, they can get excited if you threaten their young, but since that probably will not have any effect on their defecating habits When I walk to work now and see them engaged in (1), they stare impassively, then turn their heads away. If they were human, they'd be thinking, "Sucker. He has to go to work and sit in a cube all day, while we get to sit out here and enjoy the weather. If we want to, we can move around, if that seems like a good idea, which it won't, except when I get hungry. But all my food is free anyway." "Wait," the other goose would telepathically transmit to Goose #1. (Freaking superintelligent geese!) "Maybe we should move around a bit and drop some deuces, so we can make him play Feces Two-Step on his way to the office. I believe he has a meeting with someone paid vastly more than him who deeply values first impressions, such as the impression you make when you walk into work smelling like a compost heap seasoned with dead scrod." "Bang," my Glock would say, as I busted a cap in those geese's feathered rears. Then I would stash my gun in the bushes and go to work, because geese with human intelligence would be a plague that would need to be wiped from the earth as soon as possible. Even now, when they are dumb as posts, they get a whole day to themselves and their bad habits on the blog. Of course, I actually want to be them on beautiful days like today, sitting in the grass, basking in the sun, and not doing anything taxing. But since when does envy equal empathy? Have a good week; next update coming next Tuesday.
Sunday, April 9, 2006: What's Wrong With Our Children? The Post today ran a feature filled with letters from high-schoolers who went to protest our the House of Representatives' anti-illegal immigration bill. I would link to this if I could find it on their website, but I can't. (Update: Linkage!) Anyway, here's the beginning of one young man's letter:
And in some ways, it could. For example, it could be 30 minutes, which is the quickest I have ever made it to the Capitol area from Silver Spring in years of trying. I think you can do it in 20 minutes if you are traveling at 7 am on Sunday morning and have a reserved parking space waiting for you, which circumstances rarely apply to my travel. The only universe in which you can actually get from Silver Spring to the Capitol in 20 minutes is the Yahoo! Maps universe. Yahoo! Maps also makes the incredibly stupid recommendation that travelers take US 29 (aka Georgia Avenue and 7th Street) for most of the way, which you can totally do if you want to be endlessly delayed by jaywalking liquor-store patrons. When will kids learn that you can't just research these things on the Internet — that sometimes there's just no substitute for getting out into the world and learning by doing? Anyway, in case you are wondering what I actually think about the House immigration bill, I think it is emblematic of a society whose motto is increasingly becoming "I got mine and I don't give a damn if you get yours." The rich can keep all their money in the form of tax cuts, and the poor can console themselves with the fact that they won't have competition for those sought-after jobs that illegal immigrants do. In case you are not wondering what I think about the House immigration bill, here's a review of a book I didn't like very much.
Monday, March 27, 2006: Three Times Five A review of a somewhat disappointing concert today. I love Mozart's string quintets a lot, as you can probably tell. This topis allows me to note that the official string quartet of the Spam-O-Matic, the Daedalus Quartet, is coming to D.C. to play one of the quintets with Roger Tapping, formerly of the Takacs Quartet, the ensemble whose performances first turned me on to classical music. As past reviews of the Daedalus have indicated, this should be a kickass combo. May 12! Don't sleep, y'all!
Sunday, March 26, 2006: Kicks and Giggles I do most of my humor writing in e-mail now. A bit of it ended up in the newspaper, specifically the Reliable Source, which since Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger took over has been an awesome place to imbibe a lil' bit of scurrilous (and sometimes benign) gossip. (Though I do miss the "This Day in Gossip History" feature Richard Leiby used to do.) This was the bracket I filled out. Funny, huh? When I was writing the e-mail with my picks, it was like I didn't even have to make the jokes; the jokes were finding me. Ah, hell, let's just reproduce the full pickset here:
I'm doing hellaciously better in this bracket than I am in my NCAA tournament bracket, I can tell you that. Although go GMU! (You'll note that ESPN.com's front page right now refers to GMU not being fazed by "the enormity of the moment." Hey, I thought ESPN liked sports!)
Thursday, March 23, 2006: Gushing How much do I love Our Mutual Friend? A whole heck of a lot, according to this entry in The Book I Just Read. And that's probably an accurate source.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006: Late Here's an essay on James Frey. So last month! I still think the argument is interesting.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006: A Better Review It's interesting to me how this review is better than yesterday's review, even though yesterday's review described a (slightly) better concert. I particularly like the way this sentence:
doesn't have a precisely parallel construction, at least semantically, but comes close enough that the feeling is conveyed without the form being cloying. (The positions of the nouns for the people watching the entertainment and the entertainment itself are switched.) Plus I like the modifier "ever-coarsening." Of course, the question is why I couldn't write this well for the other one. I think the virtues of that concert were substantially harder to describe, and it was beyond me. What are you going to do. One of my parents' neighbors had nothing but praise for Monday's review, so maybe I am being too hard on myself. (Wouldn't be the first time!)
Monday, March 20, 2006: A Solid Week of Updates: Day 1 Here's a review of the best concert I saw last weekend. It's also the best concert I've seen this year. I walked out at intermission saying, "Anything I could write would be trivial and pointless," meaning that the performance was driving through all the barriers we erect against aesthetic expression (admit it!) and leaving me stricken by its beauty and passion. I hope I conveyed some of that in the review, but I'll always wish I could have done better. A review of the second-best concert I saw last weekend is in the hopper for tomorrow. This week I am going to post an update every day. The fact that I will primarily be (a) linking to myself in other publications or (b) using content I wrote for free a month ago should not detract from the immensity of my impending accomplishment.
Sunday, March 5, 2006: Like Jay-Z Said, I Need Those Keys I spend last weekend doing this. It's my first feature article for the Post, drawing on my knowledge of modern music, jazz vs. classical, and the University of Maryland, which despite having a mediocre basketball team this year still has Duke completely outclassed in terms of artistic merit. I get a byline in the paper on the most-read day of the week. I am banging my head to Handel's "Royal Fireworks Music" right now. (I mean that literally: I headbang to Handel's "Royal Fireworks Music." That's how I roll. Understand this.) Now I'm off to see the Wizards, the wonderful Wizards of the Verizon Center, take on the Sacramento Kings. (Update: They won!)
Saturday, March 4, 2006: The Continuing Chronicle of People Who Have Me Outclassed, Talent-Wise Here's a review of a concert that featured Geoffrey Gallante, who is a five-year-old trumpeter. That's right, at an age when many of us were still wetting our beds occasionally, this kid has played for Wynton and appeared on the CBS Early Show and regularly sits in on local jam sessions. (Not that this guarantees that he doesn't wet his bed.) He's still quite the little kid, though, as is evidenced by the following bits of dialogue that were not included in the review:
He's probably unique among classical music performers in having uttered that sentence post-concert, unless Hilary Hahn has some kink I don't know about. (Though if you do, call me, Hils!) You may have noticed that the review ran Wednesday, and you may have further noticed that I promised to put some content up and then didn't do it. This is because I have been blitzed with paid work. But check the site tomorrow to see an Amazing Feat, hopefully.
Saturday, February 25, 2006: Métaboles! I was really, really happy that I was going to get to see Henri Dutilleux's "Métaboles" at the Baltimore Symphony concert on Thursday night, and they did me well with their outstanding performance, which I was happy to recognize in this review. In fact, the performance was so good that the Spam-O-Matic's Man in B-More, John Henderson, pronounced it the most accessible piece on the program for relative novices such as he. I just really enjoy Dutilleux's music (I'm not feeling as eloquent as I was when I wrote the review), and I wish I got to hear it live more. Hearing things live is so much better than hearing them on record that it's not even funny. Here are some other composers I would like to hear live more:
More on the last one in a week or so.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006: Reeding is Fundamental Here's a review of a wind concert at my alma mater. Besides getting all the best material, and playing best, Sue Heineman is kinda hot. This hotness unfortunately does not seem to translate to the photographic evidence available on the Internet, but there is something undeniably compelling about watching a woman gracefully master an instrument that has to be at least three-quarters as tall as she is. Plus, as the gentleman who accompanied me noted, she gets extra points for rolling her eyes and smiling when stupid little diversions were taking place. I celebrated Discount Candy Day at the traditional spot (Rite-Aid), enduring the traditional molasses-slow lines and clueless cashiers ("Yes, this heart candy with hearts all over the packaging came from the shelf that's marked '50% Off'") to get 64 freaking ounces of half-price heart-shaped red hots. Plus a big Reese's heart. Yeeeeeeeeeah. No new blog entries until next Wednesday, but by then I hope to have some actual content.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006: Get What You Got Today is best known in my household as Discount Candy Eve, the climax of all my anticipation to Discount Candy Day, Feb. 15. As you may know, on Feb. 15, all manner of candy is available at supermarkets and drugstores for half-price or even cheaper. For some reason, most of this candy is either covered in red foil or heart-shaped, but this does not change the taste of the candy at all. Every year on Discount Candy Eve, I plot out what store I shall go to in an attempt to purchase discount candy, and what discount candy I shall purchase. Last year, I went a few days after Discount Candy Day, and the rush on discount candy meant that the stores had sold out all of my top choices — gigantic heart-shaped globs of Reese’s Peanut Butter (covered in chocolate, natch) and heart-shaped red hots, which I use to make awesome cookies. I will not make that mistake this year. I will celebrate Discount Candy Day to the fullest. Discount Candy Day comes more than once a year (other notable occurrences are Nov. 1 and Dec. 26, plus a floating day sometime in March or April), but the February Discount Candy Day is the only one that features red hots (again, which are heart-shaped for some reason), and I do so love my red-hot cookies. Not romantically, though. That would be gross.
Monday, February 13, 2006: Czech Baby Czech Baby One Two Three Four (Five Six Seven Eight Nine) Wow! A Public Enemy reference embedded in a Wreckx-N-Effect reference! We’re leading the march to subliteracy here! The spur for this is a review of the Czech Nonet at the Library of Congress, which was a lot of fun as a concert. Calling to mind the dulcet sounds of “Rump Shaker” a bit more readily than normal is the fact that, throughout the concert, I was crushing on cellist Simona Hecova. Yes, that’s a lady, a very Eastern European-looking lady with aristocratic cheekbones and a no-nonsense manner softened by a lock of hair left strategically swinging from an otherwise pulled-back do. The effect was super-fetching. Since the ensemble was so good, it was hard to pick her sound out more than a little bit, but it was more fun to watch her than...I don’t know...the other eight of them. Rest assured I do try to separate my various physiological responses when I attend a concert, and only report on the ones that can be universally appreciated. Not that anyone necessarily agrees with me. The Mozart oboe quartet was the middle piece on the program. A couple of the non-oboe wind players took this opportunity to set up a table from which they vended their group’s recordings at intermission. I thought this was a skillful maximization of the opportunity afforded to them. I didn’t buy any of their CDs, though I probably would have picked up the Brahms serenade if I’d known how good their performance was going to be. I still have a chance.
Wednesday, 2/1/06: Various I wrote a review of the Washington Performing Arts Society’s fine gospel choirs and the exciting piece by Sweet Honey in the Rock that they premiered on Sunday. You can read it here. I’ve also been linked to by the new blog of Marc Fisher, the Post’s amazing metro-area reporter. He uses my piece on Silver Spring restaurants as the jumping-off point for a general post on preserving diversity in retail and in retail ownership. You can read the post here. If you’re new to this site from Marc’s blog: Yes! I do represent Silver Spring to the fullest! Haven’t updated this blog recently, and probably won’t do much of that for a while; I’m thinking about what kinds of stuff I want to put on the site. I will still provide you with amazing quotes, like the one Spam-O-Maticker Matt heard at an Annapolis (aka Naptown) bowling alley, from a skinny man with just a few teeth and just a few straggles of hair left, wearing a sleeveless t-shirt: "I'd rather be lucky than good. But goddamn it's good to be both." As Young Jeezy would say, "Yeeeeeeeeah."
Monday, 1/16/06: Overheard At 20th and Pennsylvania (GW country), three young men, one carrying a 12-pack of Miller Lite, one a 12-pack of Miller High Life, one unencumbered:
Spotted on the Metro post-Wizards game: A yard-high Brendan Haywood bobblehead, with a smile certain to inspire many sleepless nights for the kid who won it, if he lets it anywhere near his room. The dad was carrying it on his lap, which given the tricks that the seatbacks play meant that it looked like a shrunken Brendan Haywood rather than a doll, which was consistently disorienting. Today I tried to go to the Dr. King documentary at the AFI Silver, but all the tickets had been distributed (at no charge; a "limit of 7 tickets per guest") 20 minutes after the box office opened, which was when I arrived looking for my ticket. I guess that's good in general, but I really wanted to see it.
Friday, 1/13/06: Acculturation Yesterday, at my gummint job, I used the word "sunset" as a verb in a meeting. Part of my cerebral cortex screamed, and I spent the next minute or so not really listening to the proceedings of the meeting and instead scolding myself for that awesomely unlovely usage. Of course, I also used "nadir" and "asymptotically" in that meeting, to the bewilderment of most present. Maybe that was my cerebral cortex with the get-back. I must not allow the government to kill my prose. Also, GO SKINS! again. We have Seattle right where we want them.
Saturday, 1/7/06: Two Quotes From a man sitting in front of me on the Metro last night, to someone on the other end of his cell phone conversation, after a huge thunk against the side of the car startled its passengers:
From Robert Novak, in a Post article about the plans of Redskins luminaries to watch the game this afternoon. Novak says he could have gotten tickets if he had wanted to:
Yeah, we know you have sources, Bob. Happy New Year and GO SKINS!
Saturday, 12/24/05: Last Review of the Year is of the Master Chorale of Washington. Last year I wrote something about how belligerently demanding that everyone acknowledge Christmas was not really in the spirit of celebrating Christ's birth. This year, everybody's writing about it! I am still right. Have a merry Christmas or a happy Hanukah, depending on which way you swing. I will probably be Audi 5000 until the second day of 2006.
Thursday, 12/22/05: Baby Love My local Giant Food store has a sloping sidewalk on which it stores its shopping carts. Today, as I walked up to the front door, a woman had a cart in hand and was trying to put her baby into the baby shelf (aka the produce shelf when I'm using it), but every time she tried to put the baby's legs into the designated holes, the baby was slightly askew, meaning that the cart skittered out of position, so she then had to grab the cart, pull it back in, and try once again to put the baby in. I saw what was going on and, when I finally came close to her, grabbed the other end of the cart to keep it stable. She looked up. "Thank you," she said, smiling. She managed to get the baby onto its shelf, then looked up again, smiling even more broadly. "Thank you very much." "You're welcome," I said, smiling too now. I guess it was worthwhile to get out of bed today.
Tuesday, 12/20/05: Reviews I Am Linking To Out of a Perhaps Unnecessary Desire for Completeness, Vol. 3 Here's a review of the Washington Men's Camerata Christmas concert that came out yesterday. For some reason, the page cuts off my byline and puts it on page 2, but the second one on that link is mine. Again, there is no interesting marginalia associated with it. I believe there will be one more volume in this series, unless something interesting happens Wednesday night.
Friday, 12/16/05: Notes While Baking, Round 2 A day off work to bake! I must have taken all my vacations this year using credit hours and comp time to have such a storehouse of annual leave! Oh yeah, that's what happened. Today's first recipe is based on one I found on the back of a Craisins bag for oatmeal cranberry white chocolate chip cookies. The problems with the recipe are that the dough is incredibly bland (no vanilla or anything) and you could go a whole bite without tasting either cranberry or white chocolate. I solved the problems by adding the juice and zest of a lime, dried blueberries in addition to the cranberries, and way more white chocolate chips than called for. Since "Blueberry-Cranberry-Lime-White Chocolate Chip-Oatmeal Cookies" is a mouthful, I've decided to name them "Lime-Berry Explosions." A little cutesy, but good enough. They're coming out well, I'd say an 85%. There's something else I need to do to the recipe, but I can't figure out what. Second comes the toffee-chocolate chip cookies from last night. This was the first recipe I made up by modifying another recipe, adding the title ingredients to my family's "icebox cookies" recipe. I have since determined that you can put any damn thing into the icebox cookie recipe and make it taste good, but this is the best. The recipe gets extra points since just after I figured it out, I called up a girl on whom I had one of those seems-eternal crushes and got her on the phone and had a fun conversation; it seemed natural after making those cookies. The cookies have given me more pleasure than the crush did. I am coasting every time I make these, but it's a good, satisfying coast, and my peoples like them too. 100% for these. Then I ate lunch. Third in terms of making dough were the snickerdoodles, although they were last to be baked because the dough has to be chilled for a little bit before baking. The recipe is a family recipe that can also be found in any number of cookbooks; I don't know exactly when or how it came into the family. I chilled the dough too much, so they were not as light and fluffy as they should be, so I give myself a 70%. They still taste fine. Snickerdoodles with cream of tartar > snickerdoodles without. One of my co-workers presents himself (I think for humorous purposes) as being completely obsessed with my snickerdoodles, although he had 95% snickerdoodles and not these lousy seventies. Last in the dough queue were the oatmeal-raisin cookies. The recipe is from this book and features insane measurements like 8 1/2 T of butter (really) and 7 T of granulated sugar. But it also has molasses, which makes it superior to almost every other oatmeal-raisin cookie recipe that I've tried, with a wonderful rich undertone that just don't quit, so I deal with the oddness of the recipe. I also forgot that because I make the cookies smaller than the cookbook says to, I have to reduce the time for which they are baked, so I give myself a 75%. Overall grade: 83%, B. I'll take it. (Well, I have to, since I gave it to myself.) Playlist today: Bach Orchestral Suites 3 & 4 (a different compilation of these performances), Rare Essence PA from the Tradewinds (10/5/04) (the one with the awesome "Pieces of Me" cover), Coltrane's My Favorite Things, I let iTunes do its thing for an hour, then a Christmas organ album, then some Jay-Z. • Here is what my kitchen looked like, partially cleaned up:
Yes, in addition to a scanner, I now own a digital camera. Look out, useful content! Shiny pictures are coming to take your place!
Thursday, 12/15/05: Notes While Baking Today and tomorrow will be the time of my annual cookie-baking marathon, so that I can send fresh delights to my relatives and friends in far-off cities. I will post notes from this activity as I think of them. So far I have made the dough for my toffee-chocolate chip cookies (it's a refrigerator dough, chillin' overnight) and actually made mint-chocolate cookies, an adaptation of a recipe that was formerly rather fudgy but has been made both chocolatey and minty with the addition of Guittard mint chips and peppermint extract. I am judging this an 85% success - I need to figure out a better way to mitigate the slight texture-distorting effect of adding 1 1/4 tsp of peppermint extract to a recipe where none was before. A dusting of flour didn't really do it. But they taste just how I wanted them to. Other notes:
Wednesday, 12/1/4/05: For Completeness' Sake Here's a review of the Cantate Chamber Singers' holiday concert that ran yesterday. It was a fun concert, and it is a professional-style review. I'm getting a little tired of linking to myself.
Saturday, 12/10/05: Get, Get, Get It Poppin' Here's a review of the National Symphony Orchestra's holiday pops program. Basically, it was good if you like that sort of thing, which I do. I don't have any good marginalia, so I'm not going to force it. I do, however, have notes from what I hope is my final winter holiday shopping trip today:
Sunday, 12/4/05: Happy Belated I had two reviews in the paper on Friday. This one is primarily notable for the fact that I got the word "Frenchified" into it, a feat of which I am very proud. This one was my very first overnight review for the Post, in which the concert got out at 9:15 in the evening, I got to the Post at 9:45, and the review was done by 10:30. That review is also much longer than anything I've written for the Post before, and truth be told, I think it's outstanding work. For me, this review marks a time I accepted a challenge, stepped up to the plate, saw the pitch coming in as if it was in slow motion, and hit the ball 500 feet to center field. It's hard to say without sounding conceited, and I'm sure I have not succeeded in that attempt, but there are few enough times like that in all our lives, and I'm sure I'll hold onto this one.
Monday, 11/28/05: Cranking the Thermostat Here's a review with seasonal weather metaphors (second one down). Marginalia:
Sunday, 11/27/05: The New Mantra Every Sunday that I am home, I run six miles in Sligo Creek Park. One of the great pleasures I take in my running is that I can see up close a patch of barely-maintained nature (after a big storm, it was a few weeks before all the fallen trees were cleared from the trail) and how it changes from week to week. This spring, I became a good enough runner that I could actually concentrate on the scenery and not my aching calves (at least some of the time). I reveled in the beauty of the tall trees forming a nearly unbroken canopy over the trail at certain points; when the sun was shining brightly, it turned any canopy a million shades of green, and twinkled through at a few points, and cast yellow splotches on the underbrush. I began referring to these spots mentally as “cathedrals,” because the beauty of these spots took me far away from any awareness of my body for the brief periods (four or five minutes) during which I traversed them. Today, I went running and saw that the cathedrals were no more: a recent cold snap broke all the leaves off the trees, so that now their trunks stick up bare into the sky. To make matters worse, the sky was that indifferent milky shade of gray often associated with the gloomiest winter days, so that looking up to the tops of the trees showed silhouettes rather than any actual visual information about the trees. I kept myself going by mentally reciting go-go lyrics that I have modified to relate to me and my ability to keep running, but it was a bit of a shock — not an unexpected one, but a shock nonetheless. On my way back, though, I considered further: The reason the trees were bare was because their leaves had all fallen onto the forest floor (and onto the trail, making for a few tricky patches. But I digress). With rain and time, the leaves would become food for the very trees that had shed them. And the spring would be more brilliant for the fall. Lately, I have been considering various changes that I could make in my life, most of which are driven by impulses that fade as soon as I consider what it would be like to actually make those changes. Probably, some of those changes should be made anyway. But I have just gone through a long period in which I took a lot of risks and rose to a lot of challenges, and as I pondered the leaves on the ground, it occurred to me that maybe right now is not the time to be taking on anything new. Maybe I could just wait for the leaves to turn into fuel, as it were, and see what grows with a little patience. After returning home from the run, I became aware that this thought is extremely banal, and that metaphors about the changing seasons are basic to the human way of understanding the world, and that this was not some brilliantissimo thought I had just had. But immediately after that realization, I began singing a little mantra to myself, and my affection for this heartfelt mantra is probably what has inspired this entire post: “If I have to be banal for a while, I don’t mind, baby, I don’t mind…”
Saturday, 11/26/05: Deez Nats In case I didn't post it earlier, I am trying to get a Washington Nationals forum up and running. (Free registration, but you have to pay to post more than 10 times a day. I like the uncluttered design of the forums.) I need others to help me provide content and opinions during the winter doldrums. If your interests incline towards D.C.'s team, please come by and say hello.
Thursday, 11/24/05: Propsgiving Things for which I am thankful (warning, this is a long list):
Wednesday, 11/23/05: Let's Take the Public Out of Public Transit I was supposed to have a review of this concert (warning: PDF) in the paper on Tuesday, but the Post cut it because (unbeknownst to anyone) we had previously reviewed these people doing the exact same program a few months ago. The review was not particularly good, so I'm not going to put it up here. However, I am going to put up a transit rant that would have been marginalia for the concert review, since the experiences that inspired it occurred on the way to the concert: Public transit can be fun, mostly because people riding public transit can be fun. For example, from one of a group of three young men on the platform at Silver Spring came the following song:
I laughed, then immediately thought, "That works better as 'Yeah, she's a triflin' phone indeed.'" But I've resorted to such tactics to compose impromptu parodies before, and his original formulation worked well enough. But transit users are not all benighted souls who pour out their hearts in the form of Kanye West parodies. One of the things I notice about people who are unaccustomed to riding public transit is that they never seem cognizant of how much room they are taking up. Sunday afternoon, a whole crush of inexperienced Metro riders occupied as much space as they could possibly have occupied after the end of the Lipizzaner stallion show at the MCI Center, pouring into the Gallery Place-Chinatown station just as I was attempting to exit. They spread out all the way across the train platform, forcing me and a few other people to knife our way through sideways; they only grudgingly made way for us when it became impossible for us to proceed, earning both my silent calumny and the profane calumny of a man who was struggling to tote four Safeway bags full of groceries. ("Simple asses!" was probably the least offensive thing he said to them.) Because all the escalators were stopped for some insane Metro reason, the crowd decided to use both as down escalators, including a woman walking with a cane; I had to walk up a couple steps, stand unmoving, and wait for someone (like the woman's son) to realize that I wasn't moving and get onto the other side of the escalator, to allow at least one lane of upward passage. And the crowd swept around the curve from the turnstiles to the escalators in a cattle-drive-esque stampede that gave no quarter to any who would stand in its way, as I learned when a passing gentleman totally clipped my shoulder with his. (He got the worst of it. I am a big guy.) As cities get more crowded (and traffic gets worse), offenses of this type increase; as I have become more stressed in general, I have begun to take more offense at them. I don't like either trend, but the only one I can do anything about is the second one, and so that's the one I'm working on. But I do wish people would be more aware of themselves and others when they make their way around. If we can't pay each other the simple courtesy of getting out of each others' way, how are we going to do when we have more complex issues to tackle? Still, it's more fun than driving. • Tomorrow: Things I'm thankful for. Sneak preview: I'm thankful that I won't be riding the Metro tomorrow!
Thursday, 11/16/05: Mozart, the Way I Would Tolerate An Entire Season of Concerts Devoted to Celebrating The Anniversary of His Birth Here's a review of one of the best concerts I've seen in the last few years: Mitsuko Uchida, a piano, 1900 people watching, and Mozart. I know you can't see it on the Internet, but I got a two-line headline and a color photo for this one. Phatness! Marginalia:
Tuesday, 11/8/05: So Just Chill, 'Til the Next Episode In a major upset, I actually finished the "thesis-free, meandering, overly personal essay" I referred to on Saturday. It lives up to its advertisement! Titled "My Stalking Episode," it's sure to bring a smile to the face of anyone who doesn't live in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
Monday, 11/7/05: Stringers Found on Amazon: Hilary Hahn's List of Music You Should Hear. An interesting variety of stuff from the renowned violinist that is actually mostly pop (though no hip-hop, which means she lost me). She writes quite well and engagingly about her selections as well. Makes me wish she would come to Washington and play in a hall that seats fewer than 1500 people, though that is an unfulfillable hope. Maybe I'll go to this anyway. By contrast, most of the other classical musicians in this section on Amazon are boring-o. Picking on Emanuel Ax is unfair, but I'm going to do it anyway: perfunctory comments that don't really give you an idea of what grabs him about the music.
Sunday, 11/6/05: T.R.O.Y. Today there was a memorial service for my man Chet Cooper at the Cosmos Club. It was an unostentatious service that gave people whose relationships with Chet ran long and deep with an opportunity to remember and appreciate his life. My relationship with Chet was pretty much limited to helping him write his memoirs, In the Shadows of History, for the past four years ending in June or so. Even so, I was able to get a glimpse of a man who did great things for our country and our world, and was driven to do these great things not by personal ambition but by a deep sense of responsibility to his fellow humans and to those generations to come. Yet none of this made him self-righteous or pompous; rather, he was one of the more joyfully down-to-earth people I've known, a man who liked few things better than a long lunch, a good-sized drink and a lively conversation. I was on the periphery of his life, all things considered, but I'll miss him, and so will his family, his friends, and all the people he took the time to help in ways large and small. If you want to get to know him a bit, read the memoirs, which will give a decent impression of what it was like to actually talk to Chet. I don't stand to gain anything financially by pointing you to the book; I just think it is good.
Saturday, 11/5/05: A Day in the Concert-Going Life Here's a review published in the Post today of a concert I saw on Thursday at the Library of Congress. (I was just as nice as I could be about the first two pieces. The performances were ten kinds of awful. I can't put that phrase in the paper, though.) I have stories from before, during, and after the concert. Before and during are below; after grew too long for the front page and is in the process of becoming an essay. A thesis-free, meandering, overly personal essay. It'll be up when it's done.
Tuesday, 11/1/05: Day of Wrath? Nah, Let It Slide In a review of the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra and Chorus's performance of Verdi's Requiem on Sunday, my man Tim Page displayed his typical insight, writing skillz, and vast knowledge of and enthusiasm for the repertory. The only thing he missed was how my mom was totally carrying the other 200 or so folks in the chorus. As I repeatedly said to her after the first performance of this work on Friday night, "Good job, Mom!" I would have thought Tim would figure it out too, but he probably couldn't pick my mom out of the crowd like I can.
Monday, 10/31/05: The Horror! The Horror! I have nothing much substantial to add to this review, but I would like to expand on it in an unenlightening way: The Brubeck piece has a lot more problems than I was able to fit in the review. Why have a jazz quartet out there for only two of the six variations? Why don't you trust them to interact with the orchestra over anything more complicated than an eight-chord chart with the words "Bow down" over and over again the chorus? (I mean, you're a freaking jazz pianist — you should know what you can do! Or is that all? I hope not.) Why just flat-out ignore many of the words, treating them only as means to a musical end? It's frustrating because overall, this work is a good idea, and if he'd taken a few more risks and not written such clotted orchestration it would have been really, really good with these performers. Today is Halloween. The Spam-O-Matic hopes this holiday of evil beings and foul terror finds you well. I have bought so little candy that I am sure to be swamped with young ones in cute costumes demanding sweets. A fine occasion to play Bach organ music really loud, this is. I wish I had a big knife to carry around, like when I used to mind the door at my parents' house. In fact, one year, I carried an axe. Then when the kids would stand there wondering what that was about, I would say, "You want to AXE me for some candy?" Now that's quality. Tomorrow I begin a new project at work in which I will get up in front of people for three hours a week for the next two months and try to get them to agree to how to do something. It will involve a lot of explaining and questioning and cajoling from me. The most prominent topic on my mind was how many jokes to tell. Because in the government, people don't tell jokes, but I have to tell jokes in order to do stuff like that. I am going to bring cookies also. Cajole, cajole, cajole.
Thursday, 10/27/05: Cartographed Have you ever wanted to see where you live in geographical relation to other people who read this website? Now you can! Just go here and add your zip code, your name (or a pseudonym...probably preferably a pseudonym), and a shout-out to all your peeps. I centered the map on the DC area 'cause that's where I rep, but it will accommodate those of you who pimp all over the world. Give it a try and help populate this Spam nation with little red upside-down teardrops.
Tuesday, 10/25/05: Urbane Renewal Here's a review that omits a lot of marginalia indeed:
Saturday, 10/22/05: Squashing It I am now closely regarding, for maybe the sixth time since I received it, a PakTite Compressed T-Shirt, which is evidently a T-shirt somehow massaged and mashed into a 4 inch by 2 inch by 2 inch solid and held in place by that tense kind of clear plastic you can also find on packaged peppers and the like. I say “evidently” because I am surprisingly reluctant to actually open the package. I received it coming out of Metro Center one gray morning, from a man promoting Chevy Chase’s new ATMs inside various Metro stations. “Interested in opening an account with Chevy Chase?” he said in exactly the same boundlessly cheery tone he had used to address three people who had passed him by before in my earshot. “I already have one,” I said, and reached out and took what he had in his hand. (They have an ATM everywhere I go, and using them is free. What more do you want?) “That’s great!” he said, surprising me a bit by departing from what I had taken to be his script. I waved at him with the hand he had filled with this white cube and ascended the escalator. When I stopped at a corner to wait for the light to change, I discovered that it was in fact a Compressed T-Shirt. I shoved it in my backpack for later retrieval. Taking it out of the backpack at home that night, I marveled at the minor engineering miracle it had no doubt taken to get an entire T-shirt into that little cube. The text on the package explained (inconsistent punctuation and capitalization sic): “Full Size T-Shirt Inside. This unique package contains a full size t-shirt that has been compressed under 50 tons of pressure. When opened, this t-shirt will be wrinkled.” Sounds plausible! “After one washing some wrinkles will remain, but additional washings will return it to a normal washed t-shirt look.” I wanted to take it out of its package and see an actual T-shirt emerge, like a really plain butterfly emerging from a ludicrously small chrysalis. But then I thought: Once I remove this T-shirt from this package, it ceases entirely to be special (except in the wrinkle department). Only in its present useless state and during the actual unfolding is this T-shirt anything more than another logo-bearing rag for the workout pile. Right now, the Compressed T-Shirt has a minor fascination for me; satisfying my curiosity also means giving up the object of the fascination, relegating it to what will no doubt be a very unexciting memory. And that seems to be a sad and inevitable way for the Compressed T-Shirt to wind up its days. And so I sit here regarding it and contemplating the situation I find myself in: a possession with no use, just a kind of potential energy of interest that could be realized in a flash of kinetic expansion and then thermodynamically drift away. I think I will save the cube for a time when I am feeling low, and the jolt of interest will do me good. Even if I got this thing for free, I want to get my money’s worth out of it.
Thursday, 10/20/05: Likes - Violinists; Dislikes - Signal Watches Because this concert was really cool and featured people who are largely unheralded on these shores, I got to go into full everyone-hail-the-conquering-musicians mode in this review. Fun! And I got a headline and everything too. Marginalia:
Monday, 10/17/05: Amused I had a great time in Vermont, where I went on my vacation. Everyone at work today agreed that I needed a relaxing vacation. That's probably because I had been one step from biting all their heads off for the previous two weeks. Anyway, I spent most of my time running hills, reading, listening to music, eating good food, and enjoying the society of friends. All in all, a nice way to forget about my water-damaged parquet floor and the rest of the dumb crap going on back here. Today I decided that a poem called "Delivery" was done, and thus posted it, although there's something there I'm not getting right. If I figure out how to get it right, I will of course provide an update.
Friday, 10/7/05: Going, Going I was going to post a real blog entry today, but now I don't feel like it. And I'm going on vacation tomorrow, so then you won't get any blog entries at all for a while. Enjoy alternative content somewhere else on the Web. Just search on "non-Andrew content." Leave SafeSearch off. • Okay, here's something content-like: a scan of the first draft of the Capitol Wind Quintet review, written on a bench at the Friendship Heights Metro Station waiting for the 1 bus to Silver Spring:
I find it fun to look at this stuff. And you can bet I didn't pay money for the Ronald Reagan paper, boyee. I got more Ronald Reagan paper than Bob Barr got misguided ideas about naming other things after our fortieth president.
Wednesday, 10/5/05: Pluralists Do It Many Different Ways, With Equal Proficiency Yesterday I forgot to wish my Jewish peeps a happy 5766. Hope this year is full of hamentaschen, brisket, and quality deli meats. Also, to my Muslim peeps, today is the day when I wish you a Ramadan full of steadfast prayer and devotion. (Sorry, I don't know any Muslim cuisine. But I barely know any Jewish cuisine, so it's all good.)
Tuesday, 10/4/05: The Double-Post Move Today I had a review published in the Post. I really like this Capitol Wind Quintet a lot — they deliver the goods without fail. Yesterday the Daedalus Quartet, which can boast of having Jessi Thompson, an actual Spam-O-Maticker, playing the viola, had a review of their concert on Friday night published in the Post. Joe Banno, the best of us freelance reviewers (his opera reviews in the City Paper are written at great length and tasty down to the last comma), basically said the Daedalus rocked his socks off. They rocked mine off as well, but the press o' business means we'll have to wait until later for an excessively detailed review. (And I regret not having publicized the concert on this blog, which is not normally shy about publicizing the exploits of others — I just plumb forgot. I'll be sure to let you know next time they're coming to this fair metropolitan region.) I did do something contructive today besides read my own prose: I helped rescue a stray dog. I was walking from the Metro station to my office building this morning when I heard footsteps behind me, but they sounded awfully soft, and syncopated. Turned around and there was a beagle following me at a respectful distance. I looked around and saw no other humans, looked at his neck and saw a collar but no tags, and decided to continue to the building, where presumably someone would have a better idea what to do than the blank I was coming up with. This worked fine for as long as the dog was following me, but then he darted out into the road, which caused me to dart out and try to protect him from the nonexistent traffic. (Convincing him that the grassy median strip was not a wonderland full of fascinating odors but, rather, someplace he didn't want to be was a bit difficult.) Safely on the other side, I called my lovely and talented sister on my cell to get the number for Prince George's County Animal Control, and as I was leaving a voice mail there, he darted out into the road again. This time there was a car, and it slowed very casually for the extremely stupid dog, after which the realization seemed to dawn that the road posed certain difficulties. He followed me the rest of the way to the building, with me nervously glancing back over my shoulder every five seconds or so. The security guard was not too keen on bringing him in the building, but with the help of some sympathetic facilities people, we eventually managed to get some rope and tie him to a post outside. He obviously had fleas, scratching himself like the dickens every time he sat, and he had a couple sores on his legs, but he was well-fed, sweet-tempered, and naive enough that he had to be from someone's home. I went in to work and found that the site I spent the last nine months working on had crashed. Then I came back out and found that a co-worker had taken him home pending actual showing-up by PG Animal Control. So: happy ending. I'm having trouble shaking his sad little face from my mind now, though: For some reason, he didn't like me getting near him — I had a devil of a time getting close enough to him to check and make absolutely sure he didn't have tags — but he followed me (mostly) dutifully through a ten-minute walk. He loved affection, like all dogs, but he was obviously in some not-inconsiderable physical discomfort. I hope his owners find him, or that he goes to a good home. My site is back up, also. I may write more about it later.
Wednesday, 9/28/05: Simulacrum of the Real Today Zadie Smith, one of my favorite authors, is appearing at the downtown Olsson's. I am not there. I came home from work with time enough to make dinner and scuffle on down, but convinced myself that I didn't want to go. It would be yet another event I would be attending alone, and excited chatter would surround me at every non-Zadie moment. Everyone there would be more liberal than I am, and there would probably be a lot of vicious anti-war talk of the kind that makes me cringe. I wouldn't want to stand in the line to get the book signed, because it would be incredibly long, because Zadie writes so well. And I still can't figure out where in that store a crowd congregates. But it has undoubtedly congregated, and here I sit at home, reading Zadie Smith's new book instead of seeing her in person and maybe getting my copy autographed. I think there is a level on which this is my life.
Monday, 9/26/05: "But You Can Also Be Quiet and Calm, Perhaps Contemplating More Violence" Got this link from Alex Ross: It's the "What major work of Alban Berg are you?" quiz. I myself am the String Quartet, Op. 3, which indicates further than I am a "prick." It's as unscientific as the belief that the twelve-tone system is the natural end of musical development, but a lot more fun.
Tuesday, 9/20/05: WU HAN!! Got You All in Check Here's a review of my man Evan's former bosses, David Finckel and Wu Han, ripping it up at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, which I helped inaugurate during my U-Md. days. Marginalia:
Thursday, 9/8/05: 3 x 3 x 3 Today is my birthday; I'm now 27 years old. This means that my age has an integer cube root (3, duh), which nicely complements the cube root of the date of my birthday (2). I won't have another birthday on which I turn an age with an integer cube root for 37 years, and by the time I'm 64 blogs will have been replaced entirely by semi-telepathic feeds, so I better enjoy this one while I can. (I can already see curmudgeon me: "When I was a boy, I used one of those old Macintosh computers to write blog entries and post them on the Internet, and dammit, that was all I needed. We didn't feel the need to project our every thought and feeling over the Intercerebral Teraflop Network to everyone who subscribed to our specific Patriot Universal ID number-designated neural impulse stream! Now go fetch Grandpa some bourbon.") Every year, I say this, and every year it's true: The fact that you're reading these words, and especially the fact that you may read some of the less self-centered words elsewhere on this site, is the best present anyone could give me, and I thank you for it. We writers gotta have eyeballs (or, when I'm 64, cerebral cortexes). I plan to spend the upcoming months studying the non-anti-Semitic writings of Louis Farrakhan to help me figure out what's special about the number 28, so I'm not caught with my numerological pants down a year from now. UPDATE: Spam-O-Maticker Mark Knoblauch points out that I probably only need to spend the upcoming seconds if I am to undertake a study of Louis Farrakhan's non-anti-Semitic writings.
Monday, 9/5/05: Special Bonus Classical Music Review! Nationals games this season have not in general been preceded by terribly compelling renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but Placido Domingo brought the average way up on Monday afternoon. The artistic director of the Washington National Opera took the mike in back of home plate wearing tux and shirt but without a tie, which for him qualified as casual dress on a gorgeous Labor Day afternoon. As a veteran of the Three Tenors, he knows how to fill a stadium, leaving strategic pauses to let the echoes die away, and that voice still sounded as buttery and richly flavored as a top-dollar filet mignon. True, some of the vowel pronunciations reminded one that English isn’t Domingo’s first language, and the person I was with aptly compared his insanely long extension of the final vowel in “And the rockets’ red glare” to a basketball player hanging on the rim. Still, you don’t mind if Michael Jordan is doing it, and he earned his ovation. During the seventh-inning stretch, the tenor conducted some of the members of the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program of the Washington Opera in a rendition of “God Bless America,” which was sabotaged by an overly fussy arrangement and what appeared to be some sound-system balance problems. The artists all sounded much more relaxed and engaging when leading the crowd in “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” immediately afterward. The most compelling performance of the afternoon, though, came from Livan Hernandez, who shut out the Marlins for eight innings and drove in a run on a dying-quail single to right in the bottom of the eighth (even though your reviewer said Frank Robinson was crazy for letting him bat for himself) in a 5-2 Nationals win. Marlon Byrd, who made a beautiful over-the-shoulder catch of a twisting line drive in left and clobbered a triple and a double about as deep as you can hit the ball in RFK without actually sending it over the fence, comes in a close second, as the double followed Livan's hit and provided the eventual margin of victory.
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