Pieces
I started writing a post last night and then my T-shirt started grabbing on my shoulder, and my flatmate started eating loudly, and everything in the entire world started to annoy me. So I stopped.
This evening I found my lost hat which is colored the specific shade of green that me and my sister are colorblind to. I wore it walking to the hotel bar in the middle of campus, through the drizzle, listening to Haitink conducting Shostakovich 15, last mvt.
Some dudes at Georgia Tech built and performed with a marimba playing, auto-accompanying robot Jazz robot. Yes, yes and yes, kids. Realtime music analysis and processing is the future.
Tomorrow is “Slope Day” a music/drinking extravaganza in honor of the last day of classes. Campus was warned via email to a) not get alcohol poisoning to excess; b) not to uprise if the concert is canceled by thunderstorms; c) not spread too much swine flu.
Keep Away From The Pigs
Especially when they look like this:
I have a huge crush on this style of illustration. I want to teach myself to draw like this. All Medievaly (I’m pretty sure that’s the academically established term for it, amirite?). This particularly undelicious looking hunk of pork was taken from here, through which I have spent about the last 10 years browsing.
Of course, this is all in reference to the media frenzy and general panic over the potential H1N1 flu pandemic. Something which people seem not to mention when trying to sell the fear is that ordinarily there are about 36,000 deaths in the US from regular seasonal flu, every year. So it’s a little premature to get so riled up over the 20 confirmed cases in Mexico.
Ah crap, I lost my segue. It was going to be: While on the subject of ye olde stuff, here’s the last thing I heard on NPR last night, before the 1 o’ clock news forced my remote hand into the off position:
I think I either liked the version they played on NPR more, or I liked the way it sounded through pre-sleep. The latter is kind of a recurring occurrence. I remember really liking how the, errr, violini lines wrenchingly blurred and pulsed into each other, and how that and the modality made me think of more modern pieces, in places. It’s still got some of that, but without the remembered near-violent intensity. Maybe I’ll listen to some of his other stuff while (inevitably) churning out PowerPoint slides tomorrow.
I Have an Auto-Tuned Dream
OMG guys, auto-tuning *everything* is the latest internet meme of the minute:
Discovering the Sunday Composer
Last night I heard a Borodin piece for the first time. He’s one of these guys whose music didn’t manage to weave its way into the general-purpose classical music hivemind. That is, if you haven’t deliberately tried to hear his music you probably haven’t heard it at all. Or at least that’s my extrapolation from the statistically significant pool of me.
Here’s the last movement from the 1st string quartet:
I like it. It’s not sappily romantic, and he’s got some good Russian vigor going on.
Plus, it turns out Borodin’s day job was being a scientist — how can I possibly not like him after finding that out?
Advice To The Budding Chrononaut
Try not to watch movies about time travel right before bed. And if you DO decide to watch one, try not to lie in bed working out who in the movie went how far back, how many times. And if you DO lie there all analyzingwise before falling asleep, try your hardest not to spend the next six hours stressdreaming about the precise route through time you should take, in order for you and your double to synchronously appear in two precise but arbitrary locations.
IT IS NO FUN. Stress dreams (Does everyone call them that? Those partially asleep dreams where you are unsuccessfully attempt a task over and over again, and wake up exhausted?) are crappy anyway, but failing to time travel in a proper fashion is a double letdown. Not only was I unable to complete the task, but it turns out I am also unable to travel through time. Eugggh.
So what shall I listen to tonight before bed to ensure I’m not haunted by the irritating stress-dream ghost again…
No, wait. Oh bollocks.