Looking Forward to Watchmen Release
Author: Matthew Eilar
Just a dude with a stereo, a computer, and a brain.
New shows on my radar
1. Breaking Bad
This is a new show starring Malcolm in the Middle‘s Brian Cranston as Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher with lung cancer, a teenager with cerebral palsy and a wife with a kid in the oven that decides to use his considerable skills with chemicals to make really pure meth. It’s kind of a dark cross between Weeds and American Beauty. I have to stress that it’s very dark. After the second episode, I questioned whether I could handle the other five episodes (there have only been seven episodes so far). On a more meta level, it’s really nice to see AMC taking a risk with a new show after the success of Mad Men. They really have high quality shows coming out of their channel. It’s also nice that they are trying something that is not ripping off or trying to emulate the success of Mad Men.
It is also nice to see a cable company trying a more British approach to shows. Instead of creating a good show then flogging it to death, they seem more willing to create shows with a constrained, almost telenovela-esque arc.
2. Top Chef
I won’t even put a picture. I know how late I am to the party on this one. I’ll only say that I used to be a fan of Hell’s Kitchen, but now can never go back.
3. Summer Heights High
Summer Heights High is a really funny show out of Austrailia which has been around for a while (it has finished its second first season) but has only popped up on my radar now. It is written by and starring Chris Lilley as three characters in a suburban Austrailian public school. Chris Lilley is kind of an Austrailian Ricky Gervais, and it really got me thinking about whether we have an American equivalent. Steve Carrell is doing the same schtick with The Office, but that’s based on a British TV concept. I’d love to hear any ideas in the comments.
Tuesday’s Top Tune – Clementi Sonatina No. 3, Op. 36
The sonatina begins nice and gently, a C major arpeggiated scale over a rocking left hand accompaniment. I close my eyes, the muscle memory established almost six years ago taking over. As soon as the memories return, so did the bad habits. I open my eyes and told myself to pay more attention to the dynamic markings and observe the staccato. I remember to take my foot off the pedal, an amazing dynamic tool that recklessly when I was last taking lessons in middle school. Get off the pedal! my music teacher used to say, you’re drowning out the sound. On Baroque pieces where pedal is completely stylistically inappropriate, we would have an argument that ended up being repeated so much it could have been scripted. This music was written for pianoforte or harpsichord, she would say, they didn’t have pedals. How are you going to observe the staccato markings if the pedal is always down? But it sounds better this way, I used to respond with exaggerated exasperation. There would be a little back and forth. I always won.
I make my way through the second movement, a beautiful, short piece of music that moves at such a slow pace that although my memory is a little hazy, I am able to sight read it. That’s what surprises me most. Although I have rarely looked at piano music these last few years, I find that I am much better at sight reading. It’s part of what pushed me to restart lessons. After always thinking of myself as a piano player that sings for fun, after a few years of choral singing, voice lessons, and no piano lessons, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being more technically accomplished at my “on the side” singing than I am at what I thought of as my primary instrument.
I start in on the third movement. At once I start to feel things falling apart. After too long of only playing octave bass lines, my left hand is having a hard time playing the even and precise accompaniment. My scales in my right hand are lagging. I feel like I am just starting the scale and hoping for dear life that I can hang on. Sure enough, I screw up the Alberti bass in the left hand and get completely off the scale in my right. Fuck, I mutter to myself. I immediately play a jazzy show tune cadence. It’s a tic I’ve developed lately, probably a desperate action to persuade myself that I am not as bad at piano as my current studies make it seem. But I should be better because I’ve played this before.
Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) was an Italian composer that worked most of his life in England. He was a friend to both Mozart and Beethovan, an excellent harpsichordist and organist, and is acknowledged as the first composer of solo piano music. He wrote over 100 piano sonatas, and many more shorter works of which Op. 36, a collection of sonatinas used often as teaching pieces, is, by volume alone, his most performed work. Ironically, it is this popularity that until recently hurt his reputation as a composer. Of course, being in competition with Moz’ and the ‘Thovan is no easy business for any composer, but the popularity of his sonatinas led to Clementi being dismissed as a “children’s composer.”
And what children! As I was looking for videos of this piece on Youtube, I found about thirty videos. The oldest pianist that I saw was 16. The youngest was 4. They range from videos taken in living rooms to recitals (including one recital where they had grafted some Frankensteinian string and woodwind accompaniment. It literally made me want to vomit. They changed the chord structure and everything. No respect). The performances ranged from mechanical and robot-like to excessively rubato and, yes, too much pedal.
Probably the way that I performed it when I was thirteen. I remember the first time I played it in a recital. I had the piece completely memorized. Sigh. I used to be able to do that. Unfortunately, I hadn’t paid particular attention to the repeat symbols, and found myself trapped in a circle, playing repeats over and over again while I desperately tried to remember how the transitions worked and the piece ended. Finally, I just improvised an ending. I’m still good at that. Only my music teacher noticed.
I also remember when I was applying for a place at the private prep school I attended. My personal reccomendation from my music teacher was the crown jewel of my application, so when my interviewer invited me to play for him, I jumped at the opportunity. The sonatina was the most impressive-sounding thing I had memorized, so I played that for him. I was accepted to the school, and when that admissions officer left the school the same year that I graduated, he told me that he still remembered that performance.
I return to the first movement, but the mistakes in the third have made me nervous, and so I decide to step out and have a drink of water. As I walk down the stairs, I can hear everybody in the building practicing. It used to be the residence of the president of the college, and there was no soundproofing done when the house was converted. I can hear a piano student practicing a Brahms sonata. A bassoonist is practicing arpeggios. A clarinet is wailing and squeaking out the opening solo from Rhapsody in Blue. All seem to be taunting me. I get a cup of cold water and step outside. It feels so humiliating, to be showing my piano skills in college to a new teacher with the same piece that I started high school with. That I started learning in middle school. I feel so much older and mature than I was then, but it seems like some things haven’t grown along with everything else.
Of course, I still played piano. But without formal lessons, the repertoire that I had built up languished and was finally forgotten. No new technical skills were gained. I started singing, and used the piano to accompany myself, and gradually found a fairly unique gospel influenced piano style that I could use to play anything. The performances I gave in high school sparked a fire that I hope are never extinguished. And yet, as I try and reorient myself as an academic musician, I realized that my stagnating formal piano skills were going to become a liability.
I go back inside, and check my cell phone. It’s getting late. The building technically closes at midnight, but I’ve never been kicked out. I practice for a while longer, finally getting the piece to where I am confident that I won’t embarrass myself. My new teacher is a specialist in historical pianoforte and harpsichord performance, and I worry that she will look down on my crude approximation of a Classical piano piece. At any rate, it’s too late to do anything about it now, the lesson is tomorrow and I have class before the lesson. I go back to sleep, grateful that my dreams appear to be largo, not vivace.
I exhale, hands trembling. I am never nervous about performing for others, but I have so little confidence in myself as a classical pianist that I am as jittery as an abused cat. I start to play, but immediately have to restart; the shakes in my hand caused me to not press hard enough on the keys, giving a weak, inconsistent tone. I start again, playing fine through the first repeat, getting ready for the scales ahead-
“You can stop now. I’ve heard all I need to hear,” she interrupts
I stop, trying to reorient myself, still mentally rehearsing the phrases to come. Belatedly, I start to process her words. I don’t know her very well, is this good or bad?
“You play very well, and very easily and smoothly.”
Good.
I may have been humiliated to open lessons with that piece, but recently old Muzio and I have come to an understanding. Now that I will never have to play it again, I can accept it as a beautiful piece. At the very least, I have a debt of honor to the piece, considering how it has helped me at various stages in my life. Now that lessons have again become a part of my weekly routine, the old feeling that I am going somewhere with my music comes back. Who knows? Maybe the sonatina will be a part of my music if I can progress to a professional level. If it is at all in my power, however, it will be just as an encore.
MP3’s feat. Monical Alianello courtesy of http://pianosociety.com/cms/index.php
Classy Moment of the Day
I think it’s well worth it to check out George Orwell’s diaries. Apparently, he kept regular and complete diaries of the years between 1939-1942 and the George Orwell Foundation has them up in the form of daily blog posts. It’s really amazing how well they work as blog posts, full of nuggets of history, surprising whimsy, and as you will read, chicken eggs.
'Meh'st Week Ever – Feb. 22, 2009
This week has been blissfully busy, so as life often goes, I spent far less time on the internet this week than usual. Some of these items will be from my secret stash of meh-fu.
1. Dimetri Martin’s 224 word palindrome.
2. Kitty, the transsexual Sicilian mobster.
This is Kitty. What you may not know is that Kitty was once Ugo Gabriele. Or that Kitty was a mafia ‘capo’ or godfather who masterminded a drug dealing and prostitution racket in Naples for the Scissionisti clan of the Camorra.
3. Audio illusions:
Listen to this with stereo headphones.
4. Michel Gondry’s favorite music videos.
All of these are worth checking out, but two of my favorites are:
*now that I write this, I can’t remember if those two are on the list, but it doesn’t really matter, both are super good.
5. Zadie Smith
For those of us who have not overdosed on Barack Obama, here‘s a really interesting article from Zadie Smith on Barack Obama’s voice.
For Obama, having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not solely a burden—it is also a gift. And the gift is of an interesting kind, not well served by that dull publishing-house title Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance with its suggestion of a simple linear inheritance, of paternal dreams and aspirations passed down to a son, and fulfilled. Dreams from My Father would have been a fine title for John McCain’s book Faith of My Fathers, which concerns exactly this kind of linear masculine inheritance, in his case from soldier to soldier. For Obama’s book, though, it’s wrong, lopsided. He corrects its misperception early on, in the first chapter, while discussing the failure of his parents’ relationship, characterized by their only son as the end of a dream. “Even as that spell was broken,” he writes, “and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.”
To occupy a dream, to exist in a dreamed space (conjured by both father and mother), is surely a quite different thing from simply inheriting a dream. It’s more interesting. What did Pauline Kael call Cary Grant? ” The Man from Dream City.” When Bristolian Archibald Leach became suave Cary Grant, the transformation happened in his voice, which he subjected to a strange, indefinable manipulation, resulting in that heavenly sui generis accent, neither west country nor posh, American nor English. It came from nowhere, he came from nowhere. Grant seemed the product of a collective dream, dreamed up by moviegoers in hard times, as it sometimes feels voters have dreamed up Obama in hard times. Both men have a strange reflective quality, typical of the self-created man—we see in them whatever we want to see. ” Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” said Cary Grant. ” Even I want to be Cary Grant.” It’s not hard to imagine Obama having that same thought, backstage at Grant Park, hearing his own name chanted by the hopeful multitude. Everyone wants to be Barack Obama. Even I want to be Barack Obama.
hammer & jack 