Classical Convert

Helping in Haiti

If you haven’t already done so, I’m giving you a nudge toward providing cash to help people survive the fallout of one of the most devestating natural earthquakes in recorded history. To help you decide where to most effectively donate your money I recommend looking at the ratings on Charity Navigator, as well as the list on NPR. I chose Partners in Health, who have been providing healthcare services to the poor in Haiti for over 25 years, via their sister organization Zanmi Lasante.  I found they were independently recommended several times.

Something else I discovered is that you should under no circumstances send things which aren’t money. This can actually hinder the relief efforts, since it is extra boxes of stuff that aid workers have to sort through and deal with:

“Of course, the donors were only trying to help, but misplaced intentions actually worsened the suffering. Buried under care packages and out of date antibiotics labeled in Thai and Chinese were the world’s most advanced malaria medications. Meanwhile along the coast, people who had just lost homes and families writhed in malarial fever for lack of treatment.”

So just stick with the credit card…

“We don’t listen to enough Shostakovich…”

“We don’t listen to enough Shostakovich…”, G. said to me, recently, within the hour.

This was prompted by Harry Dean Stanton, who stars as the aurally challenged lead cowboy in this David Lynch shortie (“The Cowboy and the Frenchman”) we watched the other night, while putting the last few brightly colored marmosets and monkeys and minnows into a jigsaw puzzle:

(parts two, three).

Which at the time reminded me of his appearance as the owner of the Fat Trout trailer park in Fire Walk With Me:

(Which G did not remember, hence the Youtubing tonight. I don’t see how she forgot it really, it’s one of my favorites in the movie… “I’ve already been places”). Which brought us to one of the major atmospheric forces in Lynch’s movies, the soundtracks of Angelo Badalamenti. Like this piece from Blue Velvet:

Badalamenti’s soundtracks are always luscious and dissonant, in a wandering, stringy sort of way. That’s exactly why I both love the music, and think it’s perfectly appropriate as a landscape for Lynch’s movies to live in. It is also very similar to some of Shosty’s brooding melancholia, especially that last piece, which was explicitly styled after his 15th symphony:

Which is of course how we wound down to the comment up there, at the top of this meandering blog post.

Hymnus Christmas Non-music Extravaganza

It’s Christmas time. There’s a currently a lack of mistletoe and/or wine.For the last six year –, basically since I stopped spending the immediate fortnight before Christmas at my parents house — the 25th has pounced out of the end of December like a mugger. There isn’t any build-up. It’s work, work, work, BANG xmas, at gunpoint, all up in your face demanding your wallet.

In the holiday seasons of my youth there were trees and Christmas music and fires and stuff. Now I am old and bitter, and the beautiful virgin snowfall is just another incovenience to take into account for the seven hour drive on Christmas eve. My gosh this sounds Grinchy and tragic when written down!

Well TBH I’m being just a tad melodramatic. We really are doing holidayish stuff, it’s just crammed into the week right before (hence starting RIGHT NOW). In fact, I started considering all this lost scent of pine while munching on a holiday gingerbread pig that G just churned out of the piggery (oven) in our kitchen. I even added a little bit of Christmassy MP3ing to the room. Sort of. Since we don’t have a Douglas fir or tinsel out it’s probably not a huge surprise that I don’t have gigabytes of xmas music, either.

I do have this, though:

The last piece of which is the Hymnis Amoris for male and female choirs and soloists. It’s all about love and stuff, which I suppose is kinda appropriate for the “peace and goodwill to all mankind etc.” crowd.  I remember having that CD on repeat in my car last winter. Even driving around with the windshield icing up became cosy and comforting. It’s a good one. It has to be the choirs which make it so instantly Christmassy.

Although not every piece with choirs has the same effect….

Any other examples of terrifyingly anti-xmas choral music ?

Back again, again.

Well hi there.

My, how you’ve grown! It’s been such a long time since we last met, every day felt like an eternity, etc, &c, and so on. I have a pile of ideas that wanted to get conveyed, and will be, perhaps: CDs that rejected doubts about composers; meme taggings; long and wistful monologues about the symbolic use of Beethoven’s ninth in Die Hard. It’s all stacked up in the mental out-box, or to-do-box, or some other hyphenated box.

When I don’t write for a while I sort of forget how to do it. Not the actual tap-tapping of keys, but the linking of thoughts to characters. The turning of ideas into words. It feels a bit like building a flight of stairs, one at a time — balancing precariously on the last as you clumsily hammer bent nails into the next plank. I was going to continue that simile, but un-ironically spent several minutes typing and erasing and retyping a series of failed continuations.

That’s why I’m not really writing about much of substance in this post. It’s just exercise typing, a warm up. Getting the joints flexible for next time.

After all, writing-related injuries can be nasty.

Fluted Vocals

Here’s what you do if your flute playing skills exceed your vocal ones:

(For those who don’t spend hours of their leisure time shifting around ones and zeros, this chick is supposed to be singing along to the music. The game processes the notes being sung and gives you points on how well you match the melody. However, the software doesn’t care about timbre or anything fancy, it’s just looking for pitch, so really you can use anything that can produce a tone. Like a flute.)

I tried this once by whistling. It turns out I’m not so hot at holding whistled pitches either.