I spent some hours today at the piano. That’s the first extended practice I’ve done… if practice is the word for it. Just noodling around with old friends and acquaintances.

Most of Bartok has been slow to grow on me.the Opus 1 Rhapsody is an exception. What a masterpiece. The shorter rhapsody is also quite fine.

But so much of Bartok’s music labors under the musicological portent that it studiously conveys. And the Mikrokosmos, well, they never did much for me. The ballsier stuff is the real deal, but the bulk of it seems academic in its intent.

I discovered that I’ve been wrong about the Chopin D-Flat Nocturne. All these years I thought the right hand cadenza passage was virtually impossible for all but the great virtuosi. I thought it was rhythmically complex, and a virtual double-thirds etude all in one passage. It is not that at all. The rhythmic interplay is straightforward, not the 10-against-7 type of writing I thought. It’s far from the virtuosic filigree of a typical Lisztian cadenza of that sort.

I need a new piano, but other things should probably come first. A new bed, and a new apartment. I could easily afford more, but I am lazy and feel like I should save money this year. Last year was one of austerity, with my income cut by about a third. This year bodes better so far but it’s not in my control. I guess I have cash enough for a bed and bedding, but the plan had been to pay for a piano on a payment plan. Evidently this is a way to improve your credit rating. Mine is already very good. Maybe I should go for extra credit. Extra credit credit. Credit+.

I just threw away something I never thought I’d get rid of. A film video camera someone gave me for Christmas a few years ago. It was such an exquisite gift at the time, but unfortunately the thing just didn’t work. It was an old camera found in a basement, its battery compartment sealed shut presumably on account of the batteries exploding inside. The camera did not appear to be worth much, even if it had worked. Film would probably have been impossible to find. Ebay had some Buy It Now listings for $20 with no takers. I just wish the thing had worked but it was a no-go, so into the trash it went, into the same space as the Blessed Mother that shocked me by looking up from a trash can yesterday.

I’m going to get rid of more junk this weekend. I managed to make good on a scanning job I did last year. I found a couple of high school yearbooks in a trash can, and scanned one of them. I processed and posted all the pages to sorabji.com, and I might scan the other yearbook tonight or tomorrow. Scanning is a good thing to do when exhausted or drunk, or both. I am always in search of new ways to make productive use of my time intoxicated.

I can’t discern from casual web searches if high school yearbooks are copyrighted. There is no copyright notice in either of the found yearbooks, nor is there any in the volumes from my grade and high school. Maybe such a notice (or lack thereof) is not necessary or legally meaningful. Similarly I had posted the full scans of my high school literary magazines. Is that stuff copyrighted? I guess I could look it up in the copyright registry, or whatever it’s called.

Another seemingly unanswerable question of late involves places of business. I have long felt that buildings and places of business should make it easily available to learn what places of business or individuals occupied a given address in the past. A single list compiled from Certificates of Occupancy or Department of Buildings records seems feasible in concept, but the reality of these type of documents is that they are a squalid mess of misfiled inaccuracies. NYC’s DOB filings allegedly link to Certificates of Occupancy but every building I’ve ever looked at linked to a CoO for a faraway building that had nothing to do with the building at hand. Buildings in Queens link to CoOs for buildings in the Bronx, with no apparent connection in ownership or anything else.

Whatever the case, while it may be possible in theory to produce a list of every business that occupied a given address or location the reality seems to be more fine-grained. Most of this type of information is passed on by local microhistorians, and prone to error for obvious reasons.

I saw a picture I wish I could have taken tonight. There is a church near my apartment, a church set up in what looks like a bus station, or just a nondescript room full of chairs and a PA system. It looks like a makeshift classroom but it is designated a church, so that makes it holy space. I saw a woman on one of the chairs, knealing with her chest pressed to the part of the chair where one’s back would normally be, hands clasped in genuine prostration.she might have looked appropriate in a church with pews and traditional accoutrements, but she was in a place that looked like a classroom. Maybe I can get that picture next week.