HOT

Yes, it's hot. I know Luke likes the gaudy presentation so I would like to point out the flames coming up from Thursday and Friday. Notice that the weather people have started Twittering. I think it's kind of cool, because Pete Delkus on WFAA started Twittering and he's already great at severe weather updates. When there is bad weather he stays up all night explaining where the rotation is on the radar and checking in with the chopper and all that. But, you know, Pete's in his 50's so when I read this post from last week I thought for sure his account had been hijacked:

"what a night!! from porno to a sloppy drunk...one i won't forget anytime soon!"

I was like, whoa Pete! Get a hold of yourself! Then I read the previous post:

"the drunk guy is still outside...he is so smashed he is falling all over the place!"

and the one before that...
"we have some guy outside the studio at victory park right now that is stumbling drunk!! he just urinated on the building!!!!"

and the one before that...
"i'm getting twitter porn!!!! who's doing this?????"

So then I kind of figured out the meaning of the first post. It's just so weird hearing the weather guy be so chatty and informal, I guess because I always felt like weatherpeople had a formal persona on the news. They're like public school teachers; there's an unwritten rule that they shouldn't be getting wasted at the summer festival downtown, or going grocery shopping in goth getup. They're public figures and they're supposed to be model citizens, even when they're off the clock. There's a certain level of polite impersonal behavior that everyone agrees on.

Now with Facebook and Twitter, there is a collision of traditions. Because weatherpeople on TV are brisk, cheery, authoritative, and a bit detached. But people on Twitter are highly personal, subjective, and basically trying to find the most unique thing they can say to sort of define their personality and interpret their current situation. So weatherpeople on Twitter are... talking about Twitter porn and drunks outside urinating in public. That's OK. I just need to get used to it. It's probably really boring reporting the weather during summer in North Texas anyways: Sunny and hot.

summer update

I know I haven't really posted anything for a long time, so I thought I would post an update about everything that has been going on in my life! In no particular order, here are some things I have been thinking about, doing, looking forward to, etc:

Jenna and Joe are moving here in two months! I am beyond excited to have family here in Denton, and it's been 10 years since I lived in the same town as my sister. We have always been close, and I am looking forward to sharing lots of meals, sister time, CSA produce, bike rides, and who knows what else? I think they will really like it here in Denton, and while we may not be living here much longer than a year or two, if we get jobs elsewhere, it is going to be really fun while it lasts.

I'm going to Virginia tomorrow to visit my dad's family! I haven't been out there for three years or so, and although I have seen various relatives at weddings and such, I have been really wanting to get back out there to Virginia. I haven't even seen where my grandparents live since they moved into a retirement community, and one of my biggest regrets is that I have not gotten to know them and my aunts, uncles, and cousins better. My grandparents are getting older, and while we never know how much time we have on this earth, I know that they are probably reaching the end of theirs soon. I hope that while I only have two days there, I can make the most of it by renewing these relationships and spending some quality time with everyone.

My semester and really, my entire year was insanely busy, as I believe I mentioned in my post entitled "busy." But you don't want to hear about that. Now, I am having lots of fun crossing things off to-do lists. As an enthusiastic list-maker, I have worked out a system. I have a master to-do list that has been very neglected, and each week I have been pulling a few things off that along with other tasks for the week, and very neurotically assigning them days on which I will do the tasks. These range from "call Amy," which I have been attempting to do for weeks, to "file sheet music," which has been collecting in a pile since January, to "update vita," (those of you who know what a vita is know why I have been putting this off), to "health ins receipts," which is short for "get those receipts from prescriptions you bought for the past year and figure out if the health insurance will pay for them and then send them off to wherever they need to go." I also have a list of clarinet/career related goals for the summer which involve submitting a program to the clarinet festival in Austin next summer, creating a personal website with sound clips and all, and doing preliminary research for my dissertation. So as you can see, I have more than enough to do this summer and I'm glad to finally have some time to attempt it all. And my lists help give me direction, and it is oh so satisfying to cross things off!

My less-ambitious activities include beating Paper Mario (check) and Zelda: Windwaker (just started), cooking, catching up with friends, drinking, dinner parties, reading whatever I feel like reading, and hopefully going up to lake Ray Roberts a couple times with friends.

In a couple weeks we're also going to Utah for Greg's grandpa's 90th birthday celebration!

My mom and Kate came for a visit last week and it was awesome! We spent a whole day in Fort Worth, a whole day in Dallas, and time in Denton too. We even went to see Bonnie 'Prince' Billy in Dallas where the picture below was taken by the Dallas Observer and put online!



I've been playing in a band in which I wear a ridiculous wig and play amplified bass clarinet. We play classical greatest hits with a twist, and new stuff, and we're nominated for a Dallas Observer music award!



So that's pretty much it. Oh, and it's hot here. Really hot. Just how I like it.

Swine Flu FAIL

from here.

Incidentally, there is a school closed in Dallas County due to a confirmed case of the virus. Should I be scared yet?

According to this CNN article, we are in danger of being TOO scared because Twitter is causing mass hysteria. Apparently 2% of all "notes posted on the site" (tweets, no doikus) referenced the swine flu on Monday. More:

Slattery, the PC World contributor, also criticized television news stations like CNN and Fox News for hyping the story and adding to public fear.

He said he generally was excited about Twitter until recently. Now, it's changing, and he finds the site to be "an incredibly unreliable source of information."

Again, no doikus. I actually find Twitter to be a very entertaining and reliable source of mental diarrhea. Which seems to be contagious.

busy

I have been thinking a lot about the nature of being busy and how I spend my time. I really like being busy and feeling productive, but this year has just been too much.

Once, when I was in my last semester of classes at Ball State, I remember feeling overwhelmed and telling my roommate Amy: "If I ever get this busy again, please just shoot me." Since then I have had lots of times where it feels the same way, when every last minute of my life is taken up with doing stuff that has to get done. Practicing gets pushed out of the way until only what has to be practiced that day gets done, sleep becomes optional, and meals become either the one time of the day I can relax, or (worse) just one more thing to do. I began reading Love in the Time of Cholera* last night and the passage about Dr. Juvenal Urbino's daily activities really struck me:

"Once the stormy years of his early struggles were over, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had followed a set routine and achieved a respectability and prestige that had no equal in the province. He arose at the crack of dawn... He would spend an hour in his study preparing for the class in general clinical medicine that he taught at the Medical School every morning, Monday through Saturday, and eight o'clock... When he was finished in the study he did fifteen minutes of respiratory exercises in front of the open window in the bathroom, always breathing toward the side where the roosters were crowing, which was where the air was new. Then he bathed, arranged his beard and waxed his mustache in an atmosphere saturated with genuine cologne from Farina Gegenuber, and dressed in white linen, with a vest and a soft hat and cordovan boots... He breakfasted en famille... After class it was rare for him not to have an appointment related to his civic initiatives, or his Catholic service, or his artistic and social innovations.

"He almost always ate lunch at home and had a ten-minute siesta on the terrace in the patio, hearing in his sleep the songs of the servant girls under the leaves of the mango trees... Then he read his new books for an hour, above all novels and works of history, and gave lessons in French and singing to the tame parrot who had been a local attraction for years. At four o'clock, after drinking a large glass of lemonade with ice, he left to call on his patients."

Perhaps this passage was meant to imply the fastidious and productive nature of his days, but to me, it sounded so relaxing! To spend fifteen minutes just breathing! To drink lemonade and read for an hour in the afternoon! And it goes on to say that in the evenings, he played chess and watched films. It got me thinking about how an author might describe my daily activities. And how, after the semester is over, I feel good about everything I have "accomplished" but sometimes wonder what happened to my personal and creative life while all the rest was washing over me like a flood. Luckily making music is creative... but when you're grabbing an hour of practice here and there or scheduling last-minute 8AM rehearsals, it's easy to lose track of why you're doing it in the first place. School keeps us so busy that art becomes something we pump out day in and day out because that's what we're here for.

Anyways, I guess I have decided that I need to be more protective of my time, because being busy is one thing, but spending an entire semester looking forward to when it all ends is no way to live your life. Maybe these are just "the stormy years of my early struggles." Maybe someday I can get into a routine that allows ample practice time and some exercise each day, and a little time for cooking and personal hygiene. And maybe some lemonade and reading on the patio, too.


* I finally broke down and decided to read it in English, after many years of convincing myself I would try to read it in Spanish first.

The Wisdom of Bruce Springsteen

"You try to find a show, that you haven't done before, that both sort of contains the history that you share with your audience, contains new music that you've written, and contains some way to capture the moment that's occurring out in the world right now."

-Bruce Springsteen to Jon Stewart in a Daily Show interview

I found this statement really interesting because it summarizes what I think of as the role of any performer today. Sure, playing with a rock band, you have to play the hits that the crowd wants to hear (shared history), but you also want to get your new stuff out there, and then you have to make it all relevant. That will be a good show.

As a classical performer, I believe in learning and performing the shared history of clarinet music - the Brahms sonatas, the Mozart works, the orchestral repertoire. But to me, that's not enough (although it is for some). I also feel the need to perform new music, because otherwise the performance turns into some kind of museum piece. Like a rock band reuniting and playing their top hits from the 70's without anything new. And then on top of it all, there is a need to "capture the moment that is occurring right now." That is the challenge of making all of this music relevant - even if it's a mixture of music that's 200 years old and music that was written last year.

One way NOT to do this is to walk out onstage like a diva, play a bunch of music, bow, and walk off, no program notes, no nothing. This is how some classically trained musicians think it should go. But more and more, you see conductors give a few words between pieces, or well-written program notes, or chamber groups that introduce each piece like a rock band might.

While we shouldn't "need" our audience to like or understand everything we do, it is our job as performers to make that effort. I performed a piece for solo clarinet for a group of elderly donors to the library last year, in a little space called the "Rare Book Room." The work was written in the past few years, was very intense and abstract, and had some really loud high notes. But it was also written by one of the best living American composers. After some baroque choral music and a classical wind quintet, it was my turn to play (talk about extreme contrast!). The work was given a lengthy introduction by one of our musicology faculty members, and then I performed it, thinking "wait till these old folks get a load of this! oh well, here goes..."

It turns out I should have given them more credit. They loved it! Little old lady after little old lady came up to me afterward saying how much they enjoyed the piece. And these were non-musicians, for the most part. I was stunned at how much I had underestimated my audience. I now believe that nearly any work, no matter how avant-garde or extreme, can be enjoyed and understood by any audience - as long as they have some point of entry to the work (introduction, program notes) and it is given a dedicated performance by a well-prepared performer.

True, it's a fine line between making yourself relevant, and programming "symphony" concerts with American Idol has-beens (ahem, Dallas Symphony). And it's okay with me if composers subscribe to the "who cares if you listen?" school of thought, because it's not really their job to get caught up in trying to anticipate what audiences will and won't like. But as performers, it is our job to make an honest effort to understand who is sitting in those seats or who is buying those CDs, and how we can make the experience most meaningful to them. It's our job to think about what is going on in the world right now and how that might affect our choice of programming. That will be a good show.

tornado dream

Had another tornado dream last night. I heard a tornado siren, ran outside, and it was right outside our house (different house), just a little one, swirling around with some leaves and stuff but still terrifying. The thing was, our house was all made of windows, and we were running all around with the wind pulling at us, trying to find somewhere safe, but each time we turned a corner all we saw was more windows. Finally we pulled a couch upside down and squished underneath it so if the glass broke we would be okay.

I love Texas.