August 25, 1999
9:46 p.m.
i'm about to listen to shostakovich's preludes & fugues, op. 87, having listened to them throughout the day at work.
i go through phases with shostakovich (whose name a college professor pronounced like it was a kind of sandwich ...
"shoo-STOCK-uh-witch").
phases, yes, but without fail the music comes through as terribly sad. or disappointed. perfect for me.
a co-worker and i have a new running joke. he said yesterday that he was not feeling well.
as i usually do when someone tells me they feel sick, i said "Maybe it's cancer." he chuckled and said
"That'd be great." and i said "This miserable charade we call life will be over for you sooner than
the rest of us sorry assholes." And he laughed and laughed and laughed and then answered his phone.
now we joke about this "miserable charade."
this is the keith jarrett recording of these shostakovich pieces. is there another recording of Opus 87?
i borrowed the CDs from the Donnell library across the street from the
Museum of Modern Art. i know it sounds corny, but any time i go into a public library i can't help thinking
"do they really let anybody come in here and take this stuff home?" it just seems too good to be true,
but it virtually never is. i know that in the 1920's even the communist empire was in awe of the american public
library system.
i maintain the same sense of reverance toward the internet. it's hard to believe that the thing works at all,
much less that virtually no one is in charge here.
i miss card catalogues and reading hand-written notes on those cards, and learning about the guitar composer
Ferdinand Sor while looking for music of Sorabji. you don't get that flow of stream-of-consciousness
knowledge from precision-tuned digital catalogues.
11:38 a.m.
i've had repeated dreams the last few nights about dana plato winning a marathon and throwing her shirt off in celebration.
at work i am watching (as in watching it go past on the screen) "The Great Dictator," a 1940 Charlie Chaplin movie that i
don't think i've ever seen.
a co-worker of mine lives in the house that Chaplin bought for his wife.
i have not watched a lot of chaplin since college, when my interest in his films was a by-product of my interest in his
activities as a composer of orchestral music (though i'm told he was more of a ghost-composer). i was putting together
a recital program and wanted to include music of chaplin, leo tolstoy, richard nixon, and adolf hitler among others.
the hitler idea actually made me nauseous when i sobered up, but the rest remain of interest.
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