Deceptively Simple

That explains the icy chill that went down my spine

As if my dreams hadn't been weird enough already, I had to find Inspiration, Dreams & Ash, a blog by Marian, a classically trained (I think) musician who recently discovered blues and jazz. So far, so normal. She landed on my radar by writing one of those "Woe is me, something didn't go right tonight" posts musicians occasionally lapse into. Also normal. The concert was at Orchestra Hall, apparently, and while the audience was enthusiastic, Marian felt it was average at best, and was extremely put out because she had bought box seats for her friends. Marian is apparently rather wealthy; Marian is also a vampire. And here we break with normalcy.

Piecing this together, it looks like Marian started playing jazz and blues, and later entered into some sort of vampire-centric group. A boy seems to be at the heart of the problem. (I say boy because, despite Marian buying a box of seats, she sounds like she's in college, and much of this takes place on campus.)

"To make a very long and intricate storey [sic] short, a group of people much like us got in too deep with some supernatural phenomena, and literally were trapped onto the campus. Leaving always involved an accident or something mysterious to prevent that person from leaving. They had decided to read from a book (almost like a spell) only it brought to life something seemingly evil and sentient."

We then stumble into her denial phase:

"I am dodging the lynchpin [sic!!!] of this whole insanity. I mysteriously refer to the damned and being damned, but the horror of this situation keeps me in partial denial of my new form. I can't possibly stay in denial due to the requirements of maintaining my new form, but it's easy to try and forget as I record my experiences.

Essentially, Darius not only took my heart, but my life. It could be poetically rendered as the "kiss of the death". It was a damned good kiss though."

A denial phase marked by traces of noirish writing.

She then starts to get comfortable with it, that fairly nasty business of chomping down on a jugular:

"It's been difficult already to balance my feeding to keep my personal promise to not take more than a human should have to endure, and to make it as pleasurable as I can for them, but I'm getting more of the hang of it...especially with Darius' help."

That same month, she begins playing concerts for vampires at the Discarded Image, a club I haven't heard of. (This blog is on record as supporting these sort of guerrilla outreach efforts, but really hadn't considered the essential rightness of reaching out the supernaturally inclined until now. Marketing departments, take note.)

We then find her rebelling against the leaders of her coven (or vampire group? ensemble? An exaltation?) She settles on something called the Carthian group.

"I really liked the head of Carthians, Walt Barowski. He seemed much more in touch with reality and the current world, not the ancient times of Merlin and King Arthur. I liked him enough to realise I could go Carthian except for my overwhelming interest in the secrets of the Dragons that will help me remove this Vampiric nature, or, at least tone the "needs" down to something more controllable."

The leaders of this group are Barowski, and the (mostly) lovable old lady Rowen.

This is followed by a turf war with werewolves over who controls the blues club B.L.U.E.S., who then meet to discuss their differences like the families in The Godfather, or something:

"Despite the tenseness of our meeting, I think we were all pleasantly surprised with how agreeable we actually were, including the Werewolves. Hank and I headed up the talking, since our ability to negotiate and "impress" had vastly increased with our new abilities, and I played to light up the place and put everybody in a good mood."

Of course she did. The vampires and werewolves are now in alliance with each other, which should help everyone sleep at night.

The vampires took a trip to Michigan in the middle of February to Mackinaw Island, the farthest northern point of Michigan not in the Upper Peninsula. (And this is where my friends will accuse me of an April Fool's prank, since my family used to go there for vacations, but that's a coincidence.)

Marian then wraps up with the post about playing in Orchestra Hall, and if anyone knows who she is, please let me know. There are no CSO Chorus members with the name Marian. I already checked.

(I know the timing is suspect, but I couldn't come up with this as an April Fool's joke. This woman knows way too much lingo for me to contrive it, and I've had a fear of this sort of occult stuff since I was a kid. When I was 7 or 8, I was literally too frightened to go upstairs in my Grandma's farmhouse after watching a sitcom about a possibly vampiric uncle. And C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters did a number on me. When I worked at Borders, I did just about everything I could to keep from reshelving books in the section with all those H.P. Lovecraft books.)

A.T. Curtis

How Euro can you get? While tooling around on the 'net (by which I mean Facebook), I stumbled upon this video of pianist Alexandre Tharaud's performance of Couperin's Tic Toc Choc. He's aided by two dancers, and the result is, I guess, something like Mark Morris with a little more street cred. (As I've said before, I'm not a dance critic.)

Also noteworthy is this performance on Instant Encore of Dvorak's String Quintet by students at the Curtis Institute with the president of the conservatory, violist Roberto Díaz, sitting in. (Via) This may have been the only student ensemble in the country in which every member was present for every rehearsal. It shows, too; they don't sound like students.

Barenboim, Levine, Maazel and...? (UPDATED)

 

Gustavo Dudamel picked up his violin Tuesday for a chamber-music concert with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Mark Swed's LA Times review is here, with blogosphere commentary from Roger Bourland helping to fill out the picture.

Among the titan conductors who also perform on an instrument these days, the names I can think of are Daniel Barenboim (piano), James Levine (piano), Lorin Maazel (violin), and now Dudamel. I must be missing someone, though I can't think of whom. Myung-Whun Chung doesn't play piano anymore, I'm pretty certain, and Gerard Schwarz doesn't even list his career as co-principal trumpet in the New York Philharmonic trumpeter in his official bio. Others?

Update: Readers have written in to say that Antonio Pappano performs on piano (love alliteration), that Alan Gilbert also plays violin (must be an under-45 thing), and that Osmo Vänskä occasionally pulls out the clarinet. I mean to open the comments earlier, and they're open now.

 

Photo: Stefano Paltera

When things get terminally weird

Not too long ago, I wrote about the low-octane writing that's so far carried the day in the coverage of the primaries, but have been overjoyed, or at least snickering quietly, to read that Sinbad has entered the news. And not just for starring in a retread of Jingle All the Way, but because he went to Bosnia with Hillary Clinton and---this fountain of pop-culture has beens just gets better---Sheryl Crow. This was back in 1996, so still a few years before I paid good, hard-earned money to see Sinbad's stand-up show in Clowes Memorial Hall in Indianapolis. I chalk that up to becoming a well-rounded observer of the culture. I vaguely remember he made some joke about sitting through algebra class.

But now---NOW!---Sinbad is saying that Bosnia wasn't all that dangerous back in 1996, or the part he, Clinton + Baby Clinton and Crow visited wasn't all that bad, and Slate's Christopher Beam, the WaPo's Mary Ann Akers, and, farcically, Sinbad himself have all weighed in on the fracas.

"Sinbad risked his neck in Kosovo.  Sinbad saved his best jokes for the troops.  Sinbad got a kick-ass haircut.  Sinbad wore his best Karl Kani shirt.  Those are just FACTS. "

Like the good doctor said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." We may be entering the beginnings of the truly melted down, truly professional phase of the primaries, and not a moment too soon.

Dude, you were so jaded last night

After one week at the Chicago Symphony, I was sitting at my desk, it was 5:45 on Friday evening, I was nowhere near finished, and I didn't know how to start half of the projects that I'd hoped to have finished by then. My head was in my hands, and it occurred to me that this was what it felt like to be part of the machine. All of your thoughts were focused on you, and not on the job of the institution, which is in the business of putting on concerts. You start thinking that it's a job, the concerts become less important, and the next thing you know, you don't care about music anymore. (I'm sure I'm skipping a few steps in here, but for argument's sake, let's pretend this is more or less accurate.)

One week before I started the new job, I was hanging out with some out-of-town friends, and someone asked why I did what I did, first as a journalist and then working on a record label. We all had musical backgrounds, and most of the group works in the field. "I love classical music, and I want people to love it nearly as much as I do," I answered. I've spent most of my life listening to it and learning about it, so I know that most people won't enjoy it as intensely as I do, just like I'll never develop a love of prog rock or free jazz. But if I can communicate some of the joy that I get from it, and someone takes a chance and downloads a movement of a Beethoven symphony or, the true jackpot, buys a ticket to a live event, then I've fulfilled a little bit of what seems to be the niche I occupy. It's not solving global warming or inner-city poverty, but it's not nothing, either.

When you work around something you enjoy, it's easy to become jaded, and that was something I initially feared going into this job. It's something I feared as a journalist, too, and I got to the point where a concert was work. I have a lot of respect for my former colleagues who've gone to concerts week in, week out, for upwards of 20 years, in some cases, and can still write about it with passion and insight. It's easy to lose sight that several hundred or thousand people have bought tickets to the event and are greatly anticipating it, while you sit there wishing you could be somewhere else. That boredom seeps into your work, if you're not careful.

It's the same thing with working in an administration. I'm surrounded by the Chicago Symphony. Everything I do there has direct bearing on the recordings we're trying to get produced. At the end of the day, the last thing you want to do after soaking your head in that barrel is stick around even longer and go to a concert, sometimes. And you end up jaded.

A couple days into the second week, I was talking with a colleague about getting  jaded. It seems important that "jaded" is an adjective, and not a verb. You can't actively get jaded; it's something that describes your state of mind, and you kind of slip into it without realizing it. "Let's jade ourselves!" Sorry, it doesn't work like that. Other staffers seem to have found their own ways around getting bored with work, some through simply working incredibly hard. Just to keep up, I now walk through the halls much faster and take the stairs two at a time.

Because I can see that future on the horizon, I vowed to continue going to CSO concerts every week, but I also started going to rehearsals. The CSO doesn't have open rehearsals, and has a rule about barring press from them, so I've never had the chance before. (A couple years ago, I knew I wasn't going to be able to go to a concert I really wanted to hear, so I called the PR office to see if I could go to the dress rehearsal. I think she PR rep laughed for five minutes straight.) You'll have to go to Michael Hovnanian's blog to get the dirt on what happens in those rehearsals, and I really can't hear, anyway, since we have to sit far back on the main floor. I get a fresh reminder in the middle of the day about what's going on that justifies my getting up and going to work every day.

And the goal isn't to end up jaded.

Tragi-comic misunderstanding

So, Eliot Spitzer (or Client 9, at least) thought he had it worked out with his escort service when he said that the prostitutes "won't roll on [him]," thinking they understood slang for turning someone in, right? Problem is, they took him literally, and just laid there. (Rim-shot)

Neo-classicism

"Let me at least dispute the validity of the prevalent opinion that taking an older work and retouching or partly rewriting it is a useless or even injurious enterprise because it destroys the original impulse and passion. On the contrary, for me it was both a privilege and an experience to see this substance, fixed on the page for such a long time, become once again pliable, to relive this adventure I had made up in circumstances I no longer even remembered, and finally to find myself again before these romanesque events as before situations I had already lived through once. Now, however, I could explore them better, interpret them or explain them more fully, even though it was not in my power to change them. The opportunity of expressing ideas and emotions that were still mine, with improved craftsmanship and through the insights gleaned from a longer human experience, seemed to me too precious not to be accepted with joy and humility."---A Coin in Nine Hands, afterword. Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Dori Katz, 1934.

101K

While I was busy at my new job, and had taken my eye off DecSimp and the classical blogosphere, this blog recorded its 101,000th hit. I'm not sure whether that was a Google search for "Hilary Hahn boyfriend," or "Piotr Anderszewski gay," or from a regular reader who clicks over here every couple days, but it was nice to see a big round number on the stat counter. Thanks for reading.

I have never been so bored...

...as when I try to be an educated, involved citizen and follow the primaries as they follow their state-by-state path to elect our next President.* Anyone who's read Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 will know what I'm talking about. And anyone who hasn't read it should stop reading and come back when you have. In this election, so far, we've had a TV actor, a mayor of New York who's been photographed in drag, an evangelical minister who recently discovered the joys of not going barefoot, a woman who didn't leave her husband after he took a sweet, sweet present from an intern, and a black man who admitted straight up that he'd used drugs. Any one of those should've been the launching pads for journalism you couldn't look away from.**

People, there is so much rich material here, and so many crazed characters working for each of these candidates, that the writing of this campaign should've grabbed the f&^$!# jugular and never let go.  Can you imagine how Thompson would've crowed that a candidate was finally honest about drugs? Or the glee that would've gone into skewering Huckabee, or laughing at Giuliani, or maiming Fred Thompson in print for punching above his weight?

Or going after that underreported tempest when Patti Solis Doyle left Hillary Clinton's campaign. Most outlets released the canned pablum that passes for political press releases these days, barely hinting at what must have been some serious turmoil. (Yes, I'm speculating, but we cynics usually assume the worst. And we're usually right.)

Or my personal favorite example, the Nevada caucus from last January. The offbeat and the unhinged and the glamorous and the formerly glamorous all manage to find work in Las Vegas's casino industry, so there should've been some serious anthropological reporting going on, some bizarre moments that could barely have been believed. Yet the published reports, like this one from the Times, have all the color of a church social. "Men with rumpled hair, just off their bar shifts, wore their sunglasses inside." Rumpled hair! Sunglasses worn indoors! Call the hall monitor! (It's not the Times' place to provide the surreal coverage I'm looking for, I know, but this example couldn't be passed over. I also know that Rolling Stone and other papers went out of their way to provide outlets to people like Hunter Thompson. Ah, the '70s.)

You'd think that blogs would provide what I'm looking for, given that there are 500,000,000,000,000 of them today,*** but no. I go to Talking Points Memo, I go to Two Blowhards, I go to Slate's blogs, and it's the same nit-picking coverage following the dailies.

The closest thing I've found to someone following a dirty hunch is in this footnote to this article in the New York Review of Books by Michael Tomaskey. He's writing about how it seems odd that Clinton and her team only decided to count the delegates from Michigan and Florida after her candidacy learned it would need them. Instead of endorsing the decision not to count those delegates, Tomaskey writes, he thinks the Clinton campaign would've been more likely "to issue a statement of agreement that still tried to allow her future wiggle room," had she followed her and her husband's previous history of scheming and wordplay. But I had to read a bloody footnote to find this! There must be someone out there who could've described how the disappointments of the Romney campaign wore on that easily twisted candidate.

I care about counting delegates, and I really do care how seriously we take the projections of voters in southeastern Pennsylvania, but really, I just want it to be interesting. Because there are some serious weirdos out there. You wouldn't know it from the coverage so far of the campaign...but that's kind of why I had to vent today. If there is someone out there who's writing about the races with ferocity and flair and tenacity, please tell me, because my glazed eyeballs have almost lost all focus.

*What I'm asking for calls for all sorts of journalistic conflicts to be ignored. Adjust for that as you read.
**These are clearly pejorative caricatures and not what I actually would like to see the candidates reduced to.
***I made this up.

File under "Weird"

Sometimes you Google a random phrase and it actually turns up something approaching worthwhile. Googling "Funny Armenia" brought a link to this video of a vaguely Wallace and Gromit-inspired cartoon mouse singing to a frightened piece of cheese in a mousetrap. Good for a Saturday morning.