Ah. Woke up around 8:30, dreading the moment of looking at a timepiece and seeing that I’d slept 18 hours, and that the sunlight was not fresh but going stale.

No, it looks like I made it through a solid night’s sleep, rising once or twice for the baffroom but otherwise getting the job done. I don’t get it, but maybe my erratic sleeps of late are not as uncommon as I think? I don’t know, but waking at 4am and getting out of bed at 6am has been off the hook, to use an ambiguously-derived expression. I always thought “off the hook” meant that you were talking to someone on a payphone and they said something so outrageous that you threw the phone down and left it hanging there, off the hook. There might be something to that, but there appear to be multiple legitimate meanings and derivations for the expression, some which derive from fishing.

I felt fine the last two days, on little more than 3 or 4 hours sleep. But I accomplished no more than I might have, or so it seems at a glance. I got some fresh document scanning in, which I have not done much of recently. I watched a thought-provoking but ultimately depressing movie. I digitized a copy of a Lubomyr Melnyck piece I purchased from the composer after seeing him play it at (le) poisson rouge a couple of years ago. Then I scanned the scant few pages I could afford of Jacques Charpentier’s Études Karnatiques, those interesting but overpriced pieces published by Alphonse Leduc. There are 12 volumes (if you can call such thin publications “volumes”) selling at about $30 each. With shipping the set would cost about $400. Imports like this, especially of such niche interest, have never been cheap but to me that’s expensive beyond reason. The composer published them in 12 cycles but that does not mean they have to be physically published in so many separate volumes. Just ask Messiaen. No option for PDF purchase of Charpentier’s exotic Études seems to exist.

I dug out my Sorabji scores and found I also had a piano quintet, which I remember hearing played by a pianist I thought was named David Berg and others a number of years ago. Looking up that name + “sorabji” I found an ambiguous link to a page at findagrave.com, where it looks like I once contributed a photo of a burial site for someone named David Berg. I contributed a bunch of gravesite photos to that site before giving up on its fundamental tastelessness. But every one of my photos is tagged as having been contributed by “sorabji”, which has no doubt led to a lot of confusing search results over the years. That’s funny.

In fact the pianist’s name is Christopher Berg, and with that name + “sorabji” I find his profile page at the Sorabji Archive and other links. I had lunch with Chris Berg a couple of times (I think he gave me the score of Sorabji’s quintet) but I don’t think he ever mentioned to me that he studied with Robert Helps, a friend of mine from way back when. I knew of Helps from growing up in Tampa (he was the stuff of legend on staff at the University of South Florida) but never knew him personally until I was in college. I booked him to play a concert sponsored by the radio station where I was the classical programming director. Helps had to cancel after a tick bite caused one of his hands to swell up to the size of a pumpkin. But we remained friends and stayed in touch almost to the end. I was drinking wine in a motel room somewhere off I-75 when I heard from my mother that Helps had died. A few years ago I attended a memorial concert for Helps at Weill Recital Hall. Later I contributed an anecdote to what was supposed to be a website about Helps. I don’t think that site ever came to be.

Chris Berg is a nice guy, as I recall. When I knew him his day job was scanning the personal documents and paperwork of Paul McCartney. We talked about another pianist who posted a number of strange and off-topic messages to a Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji e-mail list to which we both subscribed. This person said he could play all of Sorabji’s pieces at sight, a claim no one believed. As proof he offered to send cassette tapes to anyone who asked — this was before sending around MP3s was practical. Chris Berg asked for a cassette. When we talked about this he had not yet received the cassette but I remember him saying something like “from the first note I’ll be able to tell” if this person was a real Sorabji-capable pianist. I thought that was interesting, Berg’s confidence that he could tell the real deal from a phony after hearing but one single note. Thinking of it now that sounds like a true Sorabjiista (heh) which Berg certainly is.

I posted the Sky picture to FB last night. A friend messaged suggesting it looked like a giant cotton plantation in the sky. I responded that Cotton Pickers In Heaven sounded like a Grateful Dead song. I don’t know if she got the joke. For some reason (autocomplete, I suspect) it was tagged as being at Sunswick, though I was nowhere near there. Either autocomplete or the first beers in 3 days or a combination of the two are to blame. That critical and market-moving error has been fixed.

It is a beautiful day. I am going to experience that as best I can. Time for an epic walk. Anyone want to join me?