i was feeling sad and sickened last night, whilst watching the news unfold that bin laden had been assassinated in a raid on his “hideout.” i simply find it hard to rejoice in the death of any human being. but aside from that, i found it sickening to relive the feeling of september 11, 2001, and the creeping feeling that this was the start of a lingering fear that will last for the rest of our lives. i watched the people celebrating outside the white house, noticing that most of them looked like they must have been 10 years old on 9/11. which is not to say that they can not or should not be interested, but the appearance of callowness seemed randomly inappropriate, and i could only imagine the rage it might provoke in certain places. the president’s speech was just about right, evidently long-planned, marred only by word-stumbling and the inconveniently humerous-sounding name of the town where the raid occurred. the raid sounded awesome. gutsy. the president could have just bombed the place but the always-centrist president opted instead for a surgical home invasion within a sovereign nation, at the risk of being intercepted by that country’s evidenly complacent military.
Jimmy Carter’s buttfuck attempt to rescue the american hostages in iran looks like that much more buffoonery after this triumph.
for all that, bin laden was almost irrelevant. the raid, the logisitcs and secrecy and execution, sound like a masterpiece, but the end result is the taking out of an irrelevant failure. the revival of those feelings of revulsion that arose in 2001 as the details of bin laden’s operation became known are now mostly tamped. his relevance was muted, his reputation vastly out of proportion to his significance. his marquee crime — the destruction of the twin towers — was not even intended. al qaeda itself did not expect the towers to come down, and for whatever else you could say about that group, they were right about that: the twin towers should not have come down. had they stayed standing, as they should have, then new york and america would have shrugged off the attacks. the towers would be fixed, talk of actually knocking down the towers would be considered the stuff of apocalyse-touting loonies, and bin laden would have slunk back to the bottom-feeding obscurity he deserved.
seeing the world through a nearly-blinding wine headache this day i walked over to times square at about 2:30, by which time the partiers seemed to have crashed in their dorm rooms. i went to times square after 9/11 (9/14 or 9/15), to stand at a candle-lit vigil. the press reporters and crack documentarians recording the events outnumbered actual mourners or participants by about 4:1. one asshole documentarian stuck his goddam video camera right in my fucking face, for several minutes. it angered me but i said nothing, thinking (as i would have thought then, but not now) that i was passively contributing *something* to the events by letting my feelings be used as material by someone with a video camera. thinking of that asshat now i am happy to say that i no longer waste my existence talking to the media, even PotS/MotS.
i wandered about midtown. is this town safer now? or is the risk greater today than it was last week? is all this going to be gone soon? i remembered that sense of doom on the afternoon of 9/11. i walked from 9th avenue and 34th street, through the garment district, staring back at all the tall buildings whose windows seemed like doleful eyes looking through the 100+ years of their existence, looking down at a city once again suddenly changed, and i remember thinking “is all this going to be gone soon?”
9½ years later i would say that virtually everything that was there before is still there.
i saw Jimmy’s Corner on 44th Street, a favorite place of mine which was terribly close to the site of the attempted Times Square bombing last year. i didn’t know what to make of that attempted bombing, but i sure as fuck didn’t appreciate bin Laden’s bastards getting so close to Jimmy’s Corner.
i tried to find a Madison Avenue clothing and accessories store which, on 9/11, had a hand-written sign in its window that read “due to circumstances, we are closed today.” i could not find the place, nor remember where or what it was. instead i looked south down Madison avenue and remembered bin Laden’s pillars of vulgar smoke that belched up for months from the end of the island. i think of those towers often, and i look for them.
i looked for other things today, too, but i am in a public space and this line of thought is making me sad, and i can’t be seen weeping in public.
…..
so i picked up some stuff at my 181 today. a couple of boxes of piano music scores delivered from sheetmusicplus.com. i had conspicuously avoided ordering anything from that outlet on account of its reputation within the retail music store world as an evil entity. or rather, that is the probably silly impression i got some years ago when the Internet was new to most of the public and the likes of Patelson’s and Frank Music felt they should not only poo-poo competing Internet retailers but they should make musicians feel guilty or criminal for ordering music from such places. sorry, folks, but cheap beats expensive almost any way you dice it, unless circumstances are such that i can not wait for delivery and must have something straightaway. that has happened at times, but mostly with unreliable things like hard drives and computer gear.
speaking of piano music scores, i encountered a project which puzzles me, though i am willing to accept it for the internal satisfaction it seems to bring to itself. i found a seemingly credible software called MuseScore, which has proven to be reasonably usable at first blush. i got a little lost with the “Voices” function, which does not seem to work as advertised, but i’ll figure that out. MuseScore does not puzzle me so much as a related project regarding the Goldberg Variations. using MuseScore, some folks want to “set Bach free” (I’m paraphrasing) by creating a public domain score of the Goldbergs, accompanied by a public domain recorded performance of what is arguably Johann Sebastian Bach’s greatest keyboard composition. the attraction is said to be that the score will be editable and up-markable by all (by all who use MuseScore, that is, or who edit MusicXML either raw or through GUIs).
i just don’t get it. the score itself is available in multiple versions, many public domain, all of which are freely editable by the pianist who konws how to use a pen or pencil to add fingerings and other markups to a printed score. i don’t see what advantage a digitized version of a score has in this regard, whence most of these type of fingerings and additions are done at the keyboard, not at the computer. if there is a cluster of musicians playing off of tablets and laptop screens then it would surprise me to learn that a significant quantity of them edit their scores at the piano through MuseScore or similar commercial products. no, one must edit by pen/pencil on the printed score, then return to the computer and re-enter all these fingerings and such. i cann appreciate a software editing program that makes this possible but i can’t imagine that a siginificant quantity of performers would take their vanity to such levels as to open source their idiosyncratic performance indications, fingerings, and notes-to-self.
i also do not understand the value of an open source recorded performance of the Goldberg Variations. with no particular understanding of the re-usability or usefulness of a free-to-use-and-reuse recording of an already public domain work, i question the motives of pianists who would donate their time and artistry to a project like this. i don’t know the pianists innvolved, but i would bet that there are no young Glenn Goulds in the green room of this opengoldbergs project.
setting bach free.
setting public domain music free.
it is said that you can not listen to your PDF or printed score of the Goldbergs. i guess there is something to be said for that. whilst studying a score in digital format it could be handy at times to click “Play” and hear a creditable performance of the passage in question, as opposed to the clinking MIDI sound of freeware/open source piano samples.
this scenario does not work for me. when i learn a new (to me) piece of piano music i do not listen to previous recorded perfomances of the work. if i am learning a piece of piano music then why would i want to click on a passage and hear it? that barely makes any sense, though i can concede that it *might* make sense in certain remotely-plausible circumstances.
i’m just saying, i don’t get it, but i am open to acceptance of some aspect of this that eludes me. setting a public domain work “free” sounds like an open source publicity stunt.
