Kablammo!

Well, it certainly seems like this will be the Semester of Music. In addition to having Meeskoor every other week, I’ve got the following courseload:

• History of Jazz and Blues.
• Music Theory I.
• Introduction to Digital Audio Production.

The history and theory courses are with the same professor—a guy who (a) knows his stuff, (b) loves what he does, and (c) is articulate. So at least as far as the professor is concerned, I’ve hit the trifecta and I’ve got no excuses in that regard, even if when the courses turn into a lot of work. And doing the work for the theory course should prove helpful with this semester’s Project I Won’t Get Around To Doing, which involves computerizing the sheet music for a bunch of Meeskoor songs.

So far (after one class each of history and theory) I’ve noticed a very striking schism between the classes: in one, the focus has been squarely on things like the “harmonic principles of the common practice period” and “the structural, formal, and procedural workings of Western European tonal music”; the other focuses on a style of music that rejects quite a lot of that stuff and replaces it with decidedly non-mathematical, non-notational content. Quite interesting.

And in a few hours, I get my first taste of the production class, which will hopefully (a) motivate and (b) require me to get off my ass and record some of the songs I’ve been meaning to record for weeks/months/years. (Possibly after I use the theory course to improve them as needed.)

Song of the Moment: «Chicago» — Django Reinhardt

1. Whenever a character in a movie or TV show has to hold his breath for any reason, I feel compelled to hold my breath as well.
2. I have no compunctions about leaving dishes and silverware unwashed for long periods of time, yet I always wash the ice-cream scoop immediately after using it.
3. I really enjoy drawing pictures just like this:
4. I love salmon but can’t stand lox.
5. Having graduated from one of the most selective colleges in the United States, I am now enrolled as a student in my local community college.

Just as my stocks of Sisu ran dry and I began to despair of ever again tasting my favorite Finnish salmiakki, and just as I had given up all hope of ever finding mp3s of CMX’s new album Pedot, I got a package in the mail that made it all better.

Thanks to the three of you.

Song of the Moment: «Uusi ihmiskunta» — CMX

Not that this is news, but it’s still tremendously upsetting. And it’s official!

Q And the poverty problem?

PRESIDENT BUSH: And the poverty problem — listen, this nation is committed to dealing with poverty. First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren’t necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn’t mean you’re willing to kill. And so it’s important to understand — people are susceptible to the requirement by these extremists, but I refuse to put a — put killers into a demographic category based upon income. After all, a lot of the top al Qaeda people were comfortable middle-class citizens. And so one of the things you’ve got to do is to make sure we distinguish between hate and poverty.

Emphasis added.

Quite.

• Why in God’s name does such a thing exist? And why can’t I turn away?
• Let me tell you, it feels terrible to take a brand-new $100 DVD burner and immediately start hacking bits of plastic off of it before you can even test whether it works. Can you say “goodbye warranty”? At least it seems to function properly, damn laptops and their nonstandard faceplate/opening/crevice designs.
• The last 3 or 4 times I’ve been to Wal-Mart, I’ve purchased a $6 wristwatch while there. I think I have some kind of disease. But I also have a lot of wristwatches.

Song of the Moment: «Radio/Video» — System of a Down

Bless you, Codepage 437.

╔═════╤══╦═══╗
║ ☺ ☻ ╞══╣ ♫ ║
╟─────┼──╫───╢
╙─────┴──╨───╜

Call me crazy, but I found this slightly amusing:

In other news (incidentally, other online-purchase-related news at that), I’m extra happy that I found Dissidenten’s Sahara Elektrik on eBay for about 1/9 what people in Amazon’s marketplace are asking.

So now I’m eagerly awaiting the delivery of two things: a book on patent law, which will hopefully help me open some kind of portal to the future; and a CD of German-Moroccan tribal-rock fusion that will give me a definite link to my own past.

In yet other news, I must say that based on my (admittedly limited) use of it thus far, Rainlendar is quite a handy and useful program. Maybe if I actually use it, I won’t continue to make such a mockery of due dates in the future. Like the due date for the aruanne I need to write. Which is tonight.

Song of the Moment: «Brakes On» — Air

I was watching Law & Order earlier tonight, as was my wont. I joined an episode that was already in progress, and was both ashamed and mortified when I remembered the episode and its resolution (“Monster“; the hapless admitted pædophile they indict at first isn’t the real rapist/killer) within 30 seconds of starting to watch. Of course, I kept watching, tho’ I already knew the ending.

Soon they showed the real killer, a security guard played by Paul Calderon. As soon as I saw him on screen, my immediate reaction was, “Hey! He was the guilty mail carrier in a more recent episode!” (“Veteran’s Day“; his Vietnam-vet mail carrier murders an anti-war protester who disparages his son, slain in combat in Afghanistan) As soon as I looked this Calderon guy up on IMDb, though, I learned that he guest-starred in a third episode as well (“Sunday in the Park with Jorge“). In this one, which I believe I’ve managed to avoid watching due to some fluke, I can only assume he plays some sort of murderous dogcatcher or exterminator. Someone who wears a uniform, anyway.

In other news, I was equally mortified when something else I saw on teevee today also showed me myself in an unflattering light. I refer, of course, to the VHS tapes my mother filmed during our family trip to the ESSR back in the summer of ’87, which I watched a bit of as part of my master plan to start transferring our massive collection of VHS tapes to DVDs.

What I saw in my four-year-old self was a self-absorbed, high-pitched-voiced and clumsy little child with a bad haircut who feigned a complete lack of interest in the jumprope while all the other children were playing with it, only to run over and pathetically tangle himself up in it after everybody else abandoned it in favor of playing “Telephone” instead. The only thing different now is that (a) my voice has almost changed and (b) these days I’d probably manage to convince myself to forgo the jumprope entirely. No sense getting all worked up and excited over something so patently juvenile.

Oh, at age 4 (4 ²/₃ to be a bit more precise) I was also evidently always the last one out of bed in the morning, and I’d often pretend to be asleep despite it being clear that nobody (myself included) was buying into my ruse.

What about the other people in the videos, all the various and sundry relatives we visited? In my self-absorption, they serve only to remind me of further self-absorption. At times the screen felt like a checklist of people I didn’t visit over this past school year, when I was in Estonia and not attending classes anyway. Kind of pathetic that I saw more relatives in two hours of tape filmed over the course of two or three days than I did in the 45 weeks or so I was living there.

Of course, some of those people died in the meantime (and I visited a few of their graves), but the rest of them didn’t so that’s really no excuse. Especially considering the number of people I still haven’t called back.

Song of the Moment: «Outsiders» — Franz Ferdinandикони

From today’s Veronica Mars:

“So what are you up to?”
“Remembering why I’m a misanthrope.”

*Swoon*.

In other news, Happy Birthday. Poke poke.

Which reminds me:

I poke, poke his face
And yet he still ignores me.
Poke poke poke poke poke!

That stingray sure got a shot of Vitamin M!

In other news, cheesus this seems a bit overly complicated.

Song of the Moment: «Superweekend» — Giant Robot

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