i just concocted that phrase. sycophantic bureaucracy. a term to describe lawyered-up micromanagement, including but not limited to the NYC Sanitary Grade system, which gives dining establishments grades of A, B, or C, depending on the whims of city inspectors. i liked the expression. i have never heard it before. sycophantic bureaucracy. hooray for acerbic wit.
this is funny. i am at a pub, where the bartender is a friend of mine, and we are both baffled to find that the women outnumber the men by 10:1. where the hell am i? Gurlz!
today’s amazon.com order arrived. toilet paper for the end times. 36 rolls of jumbo sized Charmin. i did the math and found that pay about 37cents per roll, versus… well, versus a lot more than that for the same thing at a normal store. mostly, though, the order was boring. a hard drive, some hard drive enclosures, a 32gb memory card, a couple of books i’ll probably never read, a usb hub, printer ink, and a new GPS gadget to replace the always-annoying but nevertheless passably functional Sony GPS gadget that finally reached the limits of my patience for doofy gadgets.
the newer GPS gadgets are, evidently, scary accurate.
i played through a marvelous piano piece that has been on my shelves for years, unplayed by me. an arrangement of a Bach aria, by German piaist Walter Rummel. i should look for the story i read in a piano magazine, which described Rummel as an interesting talent whose reputation went to shit when he embraced Naziism. i don’t remember the details offhand, but he evidently turned into quite the pig during WWII. some o fhis arrangements of Bach are pretty decent, though. i knew the D Minor Concerto arrangement long ago. when i played it my mother said it sounded “angry”. that always made me laugh, whether it was intended to or not. the opening theme does sound Shostakovichian in its way, and could be interpreted as militaristic or Janizary, but who other than my mother would have described it as “angry”? or naybe she was describing my “interpretation” and my “approach” to that well-established Bach score.
now that i think of it, though, i can not hear that d monor concerto in my head as anything but an angry tune. haha. i feel the same about the a minor fugue from book I of the well-tempered clavier. biting and acidic, like a sycophantic bureaucracy.
sympathetic bureaucracy.
apathetic bureaucracy.
jizzmatic
asthmatic
icelandic
numismatic
stratospheric
atmospheric
bionic
lots of ways to concoct and counter-concoct a bureaucracy (sure hope i’m spelling that right).