August 26, 1999
6:38 p.m.
note to self: no more haircuts from people whose language you don't speak.
you're not very good at drawing patterns on your head or using 1-syllable words.
12:00 p.m.
i stayed home today. which sounds like a good thing. subways apparently are fukt all over.
practicing through some Liszt pieces that i've putzed around with for a few months.
boiling a couple of hot dogs and thinking of getting a shower.
fascinating, don't you think?
the announcer on WNYC just apologized for this day. the weather.
i was planning a trip to arlington, VA, today or tomorrow, but decided to wait. i must have missed something
along the way because i don't know when Amtrak trips became so damn expensive.
nothing new to report here, though. practicing for 2 hours straight doesn't leave one with
much to talk about. except maybe the knotty piano writing of Albeniz. or the breadth of Liszt's writing.
the thing about late beethoven piano music is that throughout college that music was abused and
exploited by seemingly every piano student in sight. not everyone has business playing that stuff
(i know i don't, at least not now), but play the notes we did. it was not until recently,
when i heard an Ernst Levy recording of opus 111, that the music did not strike me as a ritual or,
for that matter, a joke. from there all of beethoven has been re-opened to me.
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