Kablammo!

I kept a promise today: I went to meeskoor practice. I showed up half in the bag (thanks, Paul; thanks, XII), but that didn’t seem to really affect things. I mean, the whiskey I sipped throughout might even have helped my voice a bit. I was the youngest person there by at least 30 years, but that didn’t really seem to affect things.

(Did Neil Young just name-drop Chris Rock in “No Wonder”? Shit, I think he did.)

I mean, I’m obviously not some kind of saviour of meeskoor or anything, but everybody seemed legitimately happy to get some fresh blood. They certainly knew their craft, though. Some of them have been coming to practice for over 50 years, and it shows. When you’re the newcomer and you haven’t read music or sung in a choir since 8th grade, it really helps to be able to sit next to a guy who seems to know every song by heart. I’m not ashamed to admit I was essentially cheating off the guy next to me.

(I’m only 4 tracks into the new Neil Young album at this point, and I have to say that so far it feels every bit as good as Harvest. And I don’t say that lightly.)

Anyway, I’d forgotten how good it feels to sing as part of an ensemble. The previous sentence is a complete lie, since I’ve recently been thrilled to harmonize at such events as people’s 70th birthday bashes, or Connecticut suvepäevad, but I had forgotten how good it feels to sing as part of an ensemble where you have four-voice harmony that’s actually composed beforehand, as opposed to being ad-libbed on the fly. Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter, of course.

• I need to practice reading music again.
• I also need to start learning how to play the harmonica I bought over the weekend.
• I was never particularly good even remotely skilled at playing the violin, so that means it should be trivial to get myself back to my previous level of proficiency, right?

Anyway, I saw the following on a sign in K-Town and decided to put it in my blog:

カラオケ

(Humour me.)

Of course, I fucked up immediately after keeping that promise. I’m simply thrilled that I left the book I borrowed (the NYEM 30.a. Aastaraamat) on the train. I said I was going to look over it, and instead I called somebody, hung up on her in the middle of the conversation for no reason, and started working on the Sudoku (数独?) and crossword puzzles in the New York Post, which so absorbed me that I left the book on the seat. Splendid.

Song of the Moment: «The Painter» — Neil Young