S.T. (orm)

I got so rained on today. It was unbelievable.

Looking through the archives, I am shocked to find that I have never yet elaborated on my admiration for a certain 'phonometrician' on this blog. Composer, pianist, and artist extraordinaire, he was notorious for the cryptic (yet, I assure you, absolutely logical in context of the music) comments he included on his manuscripts. There's probably a reason his name is one letter short of 'satire'. He was the Zappa of the late nineteenth century, giving his 'Pièces humoristiques' titles such as Embryons desséchés (a suite consisting of three short piano pieces, each named after a class of marine invertebrate; the third one finishes in a brilliant cadenza that you absolutely must hear sometime) and Sonatine bureaucratique (a parody of Muzio Clementi's style; as someone who was once forced to play that stupid clementi sonatina in C, I approve wholeheartedy). His character was also apparently in Moulin Rouge.

I speak, of course, of the great frenchman Erik Satie. Truly, the world lost a beautiful and original mind when he died in 1925. His Wikipedia article includes a poignant list of the items his friends found in his room after the funeral (no one except Satie himself had been inside for twenty-seven years). Excerpts are presented below.

• great number of umbrellas, some that had apparently never been used by Satie,
• a total of four pianos: two of which were back to back, two of which sat upside-down on top of the other two
• numerous unpublished compositions

These compositions included, of course, the outstanding work Vexations: a score of a single page, bearing the inscription, 'Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses'. Modern interpreters usually believe this to mean that the piece should be played 840 times in a row.

Inspirational fuel for all future college students.

Summer is over. And in honour of the end of an era...

...

SQUIDPUNK!

Oh come on. What did you expect?

If I don't think of a title soon I'm going to be very cross indeed because there is soup waiting

I was walking home from piano today. (Not the best opening sentence ever, but forgive me...I'm just warming up here.) My backpack was full of books, including the complete Mozart sonatas, and my sickly neurons beat their angry fists against the back of my skull. The sun shone like it had just been the subject of a bad review, and felt it needed to prove itself. ('I am afraid that Mr. Sol's brilliance has waned in the last several years. Perhaps we would do well to turn to fresh talents, rising stars in this universal field, who may be better equipped to light up our lives.) A little girl pushed a wheelbarrow, the sky was blue, leaves crunched under my feet....

Of course, that was the big event. It took me awhile to realize it, too, like something you'd expect from a cartoon character. Leaves crunching under my feet, in what I felt was still the middle of summer.

Part of me, unsurprisingly, was all 'oh man where did all that time go', but part of me was actually quietly pleased about the matter, because I love fall. And not just because I get to wear coats. I love fall in all incarnations, the beauty of october and the gloom of november (september is less interesting). In some ways, I like it better than winter, because after fall there's winter to look forward to. (And what do we have after winter? The gloopy, slushy ides of march. Also the rest of the month, which I'm always glad to get out of my system.)

Too tired to write any more.

Hot and a Cold

IF YOU FIND THIS MESSAGE

YOU ARE AFRIEND INDEED

AND YOUR ARE A SOVIOUR FROM

THE DEEPS,

-message in bottle found by the beachcombing crew that unearthed the objects currently residing in an enormous wooden cabinet in the Tate Britain, London

I'm sick. Being sick sucks. Not because I'm disgusting and spouting inconvenient fluids at every intersection, and not (entirely) because of the inevitable headache, but because I get to stay home in bed and not do anything for an entire day. When I'm healthy I can fill the minutes and forget about what I'm doing with my time, but now I'm doomed to melancholy contemplation in my room, and an aching back because I don't know how to sit in bed.

That's what I had to say. I'm sick but not dead, even though I've been a very bad blogger and my skull feels like it's been smashed about with bricks.

star-weaver