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November 28, 2002
mark thomas My Thanksgiving feast consisted of leftover chicken and some plain yogurt. I decided to go out and try for a porterhouse at a nearby restaurant, and I went through the motions of ordering and eating and paying for an 18 oz. steak. But it was chewy and old and filled with gobs of fat. The leftover chicken was better. The only thing feastly about the porterhouse was the $36 I paid for it. I practiced all day, and made some new recordings of stuff. These recordings are not perfect. I'm posting them here as a snapshot of where I am in my practice of these pieces, with the expectation that some day in the not so distant future I can listen back to these and see how far I came. I don't mind the missed notes at this point. The right notes are usually the last thing I get right, assuming I get anything else right. What I should do is listen to these in the morning and take them as my starting point for the day: Scriabin: Schubert: Glass: I recognize in some of these recordings that I've worked them to a point where I need an audience. There is a certain staleness in there, which possibly only I hear, but which I know would warm up if I had a friendly audience. There is also a certain element of trying too hard, especially in the Scriabin. I guess I'm putting this stuff here to create the illusion that I have an audience. Poor me. Boo hoo. I used to invite some friends over to listen to me play. I'd get a recital program in order, make coffee and buy doughnuts, and 3 or 4 friends would come to my tiny upper east side apartment. I can't remember how many times I did that, but I've been thinking of doing it again.
In other news, a former co-worker of mine was sentenced on Monday to 4 years in prison for faking his death in an attempt to get out of passport problems and collect on insurance money in the weeks following 9/11. We worked together for a few months, but I hardly knew the guy. He drank bottles of expensive wine on the job and never said much. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only person I've ever known who did or will do real prison time. What constitutes real prison time? I don't know, but a trial followed by a formal sentence of more than a few months sounds right to me. I know plenty of people who got arrested for something minor and spent a night in the pokey. I can only think of one other person I've even met that I know did real prison time. It was a guy who owned a spy paraphernalia store, and he'd just done 4 or 5 years for selling some equipment to the Iraqis. The sale was made soon after the Gulf War ended.
I was introduced to the spy store owner by a friend named Ken. Ken said "This is Bob. He's been away for a while." I would not have thought to ask what "been away for a while" meant if Ken had not volunteered the whole Iraqi story a half hour later.
I feel it is a very thin and fragile line between being a sane person with a record clean of any aggregious crimes and being a wanted felon on the lam for the rest of your life. Sooner or later, under some circumstance, you find that you think you are smarter than everyone and that you can get away with every damn thing. When I first heard of what he'd done I reacted with disgust. I couldn't imagine seeing what happened on that day, then turning around and scheming to profit from it. I later learned his story wasn't quite that simple and that he was pretty desperate to get out of trouble that dated long before 9/11. Now I would have to say that 4 years is a pretty harsh sentence. Nevertheless, one of the many things I learned from 9/11 is that opportunism many forms. I've heard and seen reference to 9/11 used as a weapon in everything from politics to romance, with a certain stripe of individual claiming greater moral authority over the situation than other people, and another stripe of individual turning their connection to or opinions about the events of that day into a contest. And, nothing new here, I've noticed that people yell a lot. Especially when they don't have anything to say. They just start yelling. When the Milosovic trials started "ethnic cleansing" was a phrase frequently heard on television. I do not remember most of the details, but somewhere around here in a city or town council meeting a councilman proposed something which could have been interpreted as biased against blacks and Hispanics. Another councilmember responded to the proposal and, invoking the most ghastly buzzword of the hour, accused her colleague not of racial bias but of "ethnic cleansing." Whatever masterful political thinking led to her choice of that phrase, she had invoked the shock value of a genocidal murderer to compare her opponent -- an obscure and uninfluential civil servant -- to a soulless butcher of thousands. She was lambasted far and wide, but her technique is used at all levels of life.
I got tired of his stories, though. The more I listened, the more I saw that he was not simply unsympathetic toward the subjects of his stories, he was downright condescending. I've had the same reaction to Hopper paintings, though with Hopper I never felt that he went as far toward bitterness as Keillor. With Keillor I get the feeling that for his reputation as a humorist there is remarkably little actual humor. His stories expose things that are shocking or ugly, and in their exposure I sometimes laugh for lack of any other reaction. But is it really funny? Is it funny or is it "speaking the truth," which I don't classify as humor. But I guess humor is not an enduring quality of anything that passes itself off as art. I remember the first time I listened to opera buffa. I was impressed not with how funny it was but how accurate the musical settings were. I'm tired. Are you tired? Are you wheeled? « Why Don't You Want To Live My Life? • sorabji.com • Murder! Murder! »
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