we went to a piano recital last night. it’s the first such event i have attended in a long time. years. the names and faces of attendees are all the same. some of the people who used to attend my recitals were there, and fortunately for me they did not appear to recognize me. i suppose if i had worn my “sorabji” yankees jersey i might have turned some heads, but that was not my desire. i was on a date, and it didn’t occur ot me until i got there that the “piano mafia” would be at this event, but it neither surprised nor influenced me.
the recital was good. not great but good. a great pianist who i’ve known of for many years, but had never seen in person.
i got claustrophobic again, as i sometimes do at concert halls and theaters. during the first half of the concert, especially, i had trouble breathing, i sweated and tried not to cough. the room was musty and stuffy, but when the air conditioner kicked on i felt much better. the lights were hot, too, and the chairs uncomfortable. these were just like desk chairs, i guess, and despite the fact that the seats were only half sold the seating was tight in the row where we sat. i had trouble catching my breath. it sucked. i thought i might pass out. at the intermission i went to the mens room and threw water over my face, drinking tap water from my cupped hands. there was no water fountain that i could see. the water made me feel much better. i should plan ahead in the future and bring a water bottle to these type of events. and always try to get an aisle seat, for easy escape.
i had no troubles at all at radio city music hall back in february. that hall is well-ventilated, breezy, and thoughts of breathing troubles never entered my mind. it is not a phobia of mine. i do not fear theateror concert halls. i have no fear of theaters or concert halls, but the reactions to air quality and stuffiness are pronounced. this first occurred in february of 2009, at a lower east side movie theater. the theater was old, the air was stale and felt like it hadn’t circulated in 40 years. i didn’t last 20 minutes in that place, and i always felt bad about it because the girl i went with had free tickets she got from work. she was honestly non-plussed by it all, which was fortunate enough, but i still felt like a rube.
i had trouble catching my breath for weeks after that incident. it was really bad. whatever was in the air down there in that movie theater stayed in my system for a long time.
nowadays i have 2 giant Honeywell HEPA air filters in my apartment, and i plan to get a 3rd smaller filter soon. so if those filters do what i think they do then i guess i have above-average air quality in my daily life, which might make me more sensitive to crappy air. am i turning into a surgical-mask-wearer?
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i walked to rockefeller center and back today, probably covering 8 or miles en route. a good walk, a hearty walk, one from which i am tired as butt. i took my new camera, a coolpix p500, which i got over a month ago but have barely used until now. i like it. it is like the old coolpixes, the 5700 and the 8800, were are my favorite digital cameras i ever owned. by today’s standards those cameras are slow and recalcitrant, but i still appreciate the amazing lenses on those things, esp on the 8800. the lenses alone were worth the cost of the camera. i am getting into the swing of the p500, with its telescopic zoom lens and good handling. i am puzzled by Nikon’s claim that the battery is only good for ~250 pictures. i’ve gone way past that and the battery indicator is still at full.
tomorrow i will try to make it over to the upper west side, to see if the last phone booths of manhattan are still around, still surviving. i have been on payphone detail of late, inspired in part by some enthusiastic e-mails from folks who contemplated doing what i do with the subject, only to find that i got them covered. i have had a love-hate relationship with the subject of payphones, but lately the feeling is more stable, and even serene. it’s just a job now, for mine is the house that payphones built.
i have another plan, too, another searchable index of another fading resource. tomorrow or this weekend i will be on sql detail again. good times.
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i can not believe that i have played piano since the 3rd grade, and it has not been until the last month or 2 that i have read through all the piano music of Robert Schumann. i knew a handful of his major works, such as the great Fantaisie, op. 17, and the mighty Toccata. but the other worlds of the 3 sonatas and the suites of shorter pieces were mostly obscure to me until the last weeks.
i know that in college there were friends who said that Schumann puzzled them. to them his music sounded chaotic and wild, formless and inchoate. i think i had a fear that his insanity would rub off on me. playing the later Schumann works would send me plunging in to the Rhein, i thought. or maybe the Hillsborough River.
in high school i was in a class that made a project of the Schumann Kinderszenen. i don’t remember whiich of the pieces i played but 5 or 6 of us played the full set as a relay type of thing. i remmeber one girl played the “march” or “important event” piece (can’t think of the exact name at this moment) and she completely borked it, repeatedly, during the recital performance. she would get one or two measures into that piece before all splatter of wrong notes crashed down. she stopped, started over, rinsed/lathered/repeated, but the result was always the same. she couldn’t play it. she sat on the stage, pressing each of her index and middle fingers into her face, her thumbs symmetrically resting on the backs o fher jaw bones. silence. all eyes on her as she dove in again, a fresh cacophony of up-fucking this little Schumann piece.
my mother talked about that girl for years. the girl had an older sister who went to harvard, and throughout school she had aced everything en route to a full scholarship at that institution. this girl was not harvard-bound. i don’t know where she travelled from that disastrous recital, but my mother noted that the girl’s mother was “disappointed” in her. the girl’s mother had stickers on her car’s bumper and in the windows for the girl’s high school, and for the girl’s sister’s high school and colleges. but when the girl went to college her mother never put those stickers on her car.
the 3rd piano sonata of Schumann sounds modern to me. grave and gravelly dissonance, some of which i think might actually be typos, but others which are cruel. but the music always whirls and sings. it feels insane at times. the 3rd sonata is my current fascination.
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