today felt like one in which i could have produced something, but instead i reproduced. i mean, reproduced content, not, you know, reproduced.
scanning magazines i think i copied 2 of the most boring issues ever from that series i‘m working on. digging in to the music from those old magazines i reproduced pages after page of music written by others. spent a ocuple lof hours doing that. as part of cllosing down a web server i hauled around copies of content from place to place, reproducing that. nothing was new today. though i made a new (to me) discovery. a certain composer named Gustav Schumann, a student of Chopin whose Mazurka Op 8 appears in a 1911 (i think) issue of The Etude. itt‘‘ss not a boffo piec eof music but it‘s solid and capable. Chopin had few students of note. some say he had none but that is not true. It is interesting to find the work of one Gustav Schumann,who is no relation to the famous Robert Schumann.
the usic i travelled through today was a range of genuine and capable to mediocre to stuff that was simply embarrassing to have played with these 2 hands. i have mostly avoided the music in these magazines, on account of my belief that it is mostly schlock (and plenty of it is) but i should not be surprised to find that there are some decent little gems in there. my plan is to record many hours worth of this stuff and plug it into a shoutcast radio station. or whatever is state of the art in internet radio protocols.
so, another day bottom feeding, rummaging around the public domain, busywork for no discernible gain to myself or to the world around.
the idea of the radio station has its appeal, though. the music is not exactly the challenging stuff that i practiced 10 hours a day learning at the conservatory, but easy stuff is hard too, in its way. and the stuff isn‘t stupid easy. there are stupid easy pieces in these pages and i‘ll take a pass on those, as they are intended for youngsters. and i am no youngster. i never was.
playing other people‘s music takes time. it is time-consuming. it eats time. it consumes time. and for what. a sprig of entertainment. life is short, it seems, on days like this, life is short yet oh so long.
i need to create again. i mean, i do, most days, evacuate some text matter from my innards and onto a screen or onto a written page. but it is unstructured and directionless. i need to make an outline. a skeleton, complete with a skull and all those tiny bones and blobs of cartilege in the hands and feet. os magnum. carpal trapezium. metacarpals. mmm. i need an outline like that, on which to hang flesh and muscle. a plan. a direction. a life is, after all, reduced to nothing more than a few lines of text.
i am glad to be giving up on baseball. next season, i am free. i already am. the game, MLB at least, is too self-important for me. these players are like gods, held so high above the rest of us but on what basis? i used to appreciate the artistry of the game. not the actions of the players but the synchronicity of the team and the pinpoints of focus. there was something elegant about it. there was. i revived my interest in sports largely because my mother spent so many of her years watching the games, waiting alll day for them to start, and we talked about the games, the teams. when the Buccaneers won the Super Bowl it seemed to validate the ungainly amounts of time we had spent talking about the team, the players, the coach and the organization. all those years of clinging to each game. and fo rme it also combined with a childhood enthusiasm for the Buccaneers, a new team at the time, which had Doug Williams and other stars at thbe helm and had a few promising season, but then fell into the shithole of NFL oblivion. they are there now.the Rays, the major league baseball team that plays in a butthold stadium in St. Petersburg, was a similarly disconsolate ghetto of a team for most of its years until recently. they won the pennant and the world series (but i am skeptical of the world series as anything but a media event, I do not think the winner of the series is the best team in baseball, only the one that happened to be doing the best toward the end of an overly long season. and the outsize amounts of money being shoveled at these players is irrational. distasteful. something that will be joked about by history.
blahblahblah, sports might exit my life altogeter soon, removing that pace-setter from my days. without any place to be or to go these past 8 years i found that sports had some capacity to give my lives some structure, or at least an outline of timely reportage. and the gametime chatter with my mother was awesome.
