webcowgirl | Entries tagged with music

I have actually been going like mad for a week - party Saturday, movie Sunday, hard hard work Monday and Tuesday (with a trip to Anansi's Tales at Southwark Playhouse and On the Twentieth Century at the Union Theatre afterwards, even though I was nearly falling over from exhaustion), chillax at home with David Attenborough and

wechsler after the work lunch on Wednesday (Private Life of Plants molto bene), Christmas concert yesterday, and incredibly bad Original Nutcracker with Exedore tonight. I am now three behind on the number of reviews I have to write, or could write. The one show I have written up is On the Twentieth Century, which was the best of the plays but possibly not as good as the choral concert, which had music from Britten and Gorecki and nearly made me cry probably twice. I blame this on the lack of sleep this week and physical exhaustion but you all gotta know the truth, emotions run high in the holidays. Speaking of which I wanted to share this post from

mr_sadhead that I think bears rebroadcasting:

This holiday season is rucking up a lot of ugly feelings in people it seems like. A lot of the old self-hatreds and memories of mistreatments are coming back out. I'm not immune to it. People, don't let the whispering evil voices get to you this time. You are good, you are worthy, the past is dead, you can allow yourself to be happy.

Back to me: if you feel like getting down with some tears trickling down your snow covered cheeks, let it be for something beautiful, like the following, Gorecki Symphony No. 3:

Alternately take yourself on a walking tour of the snowy streets of the city of London and find the locations of Susan Philipsz's "Surround Me" sound installations. She set out to "convey a poignant sense of absence and loss in the contemporary City of London" - and based on the four I've seen, she succeeded. The exhibit is only up on weekends and there are only three more weekends when you can experience it. Go, I say, go. I will be out tomorrow with all of my layers on because I love beautiful sad things.

Man, it got cold SO FAST this week - 42 this morning and last night. It's already time to pull out the gloves - think my autumn clothes only lasted one month!

I'm working from home today, listening to "TARTINI - Locatelli Trio - Sonata in G " on the Baroque music station I like to listen to when I've got access to a fat pipe. To be honest, I've only done 5 minutes of work so far - I'm cranking up really slowly today. I've got two dull, dull documents to read and I have to do a review of myself so that it will be waiting in my boss' inbox for tomorrow. Dull, I know, but I have a good afternoon to look forward to.

Someday I am hoping I don't feel like my life is me just barely skating by financially. To think that when I bought two cases of wine this summer that six months later it would seem like an incredible extravagance to buy even one! (Which of course I am not doing.) The sadder thing is that I never had people over to polish off the wine like I hoped I would. And eventually my finances will settle down - I'm working on figuring out where my good level is and what my goals are right now. My financial "goal" right now is just to make it through the month without drawing down my savings. I realize in some ways I am lucky to have any savings but the way the buckeroonies have been rushing out of my hands I won't have any at all if things don't change. It would be sad to have to substantially give up seeing plays but I know I've lived much more slimly than I am now ... but it makes me sad that changing the circumstances of my life is basically kicking away the things that I enjoyed about the life I've got now as "unaffordable pleasures." Forget buying a house, forget new clothes, I wasn't buying them anyway, hello sitting at home.

Anyway, I should be glad I have a job, and I am, but not because I'm just happy to be employed; I'm happy I have a job I enjoy. And I ought to do it. Though possibly I should make another cup of tea first.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, "Do You Wanna Touch." Listened to this for about three hours straight after buying the 45.

I've been very actively working on keeping myself busy this summer, and as part of this program I went to Brighton this weekend to hang out with

eglantinedreams. It was really just an inexpressably perfect and relaxed weekend; I slept as late as I wanted to Saturday before heading out; we did almost nothing at her flat before going up the street to a friend of hers' house (over a pub) for a girl movie night (500 Days and, um, the roller derby one) and ate pizzas and bad food; we went downstairs to the pub at 11ish and drank and danced and bullshitted until 1:30; we slept in (slight error with the air mattress but I managed well enough on the loveseat); she played me fabulous Dilly Keane while I made breakfast (blueberry buckwheat pancakes YUM); I then tried to make sense of the mess her ex-roommate had dumped on her while singing along to the Drowsy Chaperone soundtrack; she made me a yummy lunch while I pontificated on more bullshit; we strolled down the Laines (?) via several thrift shops and arrived at Scoop and Crumb just three minutes before closing yet with just enough time for me to get a scoop of both cherry and raspberry white chocolate ice cream and take it to the beach; then she took me to a bus stop and then I was on my way to the station and home at about 7:30. I made more yummy food (the arugula/rocket & cherry tomatoes pasta thing) under her influence (lunch had lemon juice and capers in it, yum!), drank some red wine, and got thoroughly caught up in Don't Tell Alfred (Nancy Mitford). I came back home with a copy of The Death of Grass. It was a good time.

Monday was work work work but with lots of transportation irritation to make it seem extra Monday-like (as I was working in Bracknell). After the ticket machine not producing my pre-paid ticket, missing a train due to late, I then was kicked off the train at Staines (with everyone else) as it had "a fault." The good news is that Staines station has a very nice book stand with things priced at 20 and 30 p, and I did manage to pick up five books in one fell swoop, thereby ruining my near perfect bought-to-read ratio for the year.

The evening ended on a high note with a trip to the Noel Coward theater to see Deathtrap, which I enjoyed despite it not being in the least deep (my review has no spoilers). I got quite a kick out of a murder-mystery play that was about people writing a murder-mystery play; I really wasn't expecting it to be so meta, or so funny. Also, one of the male characters is apparently in Glee, not that I would have known but he was a hottie. Oddly everyone did their normal accent, I think, mostly, as Simon Russell Beale just went for an English accent and a lot of the other actors were American (including the one who talked with the Swedish accent - I think).

Anyway, today was WFH day, which is good as I was too wound up after the show to get up at a decent hour, but I did spend the day being much too spaced out anyhow. And then I went into town for dinner with

robot_mel and

beluosus, in which their very high qualities as friends and dinner (and drinking) company was reaffirmed, and they shall be coming over for tacos before too long, oh yes they shall.

I did not get my week off to a great start by rushing home from the Nureyev Gala at the ballet only to stay up late writing my review. The event was fun, though I wish it had started on time and the interval had either ended on time or maybe even a little earlier (half an hour is a long time to stand around). I especially like that I got to meet

pimm2005, someone I'd been stalking on Twitter for a while.

I also got my review of Friday night's Macbeth by Cheek By Jowl posted. I'd finished writing it already, but the extra time to post was time I could have spent in bed.

So I started yesterday off a little tired, then proceeded to have it WHOOSH by me. We're doing personnel reviews, and I spent at least three and a half hours working very hard on writing them and talking to people about them. At one point I realized I had no one hanging over me and whipped out a quick but unnecessary overview of the Oliviers, the UK version of the Tonys. The big surprise was that The Mountaintop, a play about Martin Luther King's last night, won best play; I had enjoyed it a lot and was really pleased.

Then it was a quick trip to the gym, discussions about staffing, more reviews, my review, discussions about budget, and WHEW it was 5 PM and I had a special triage meeting for a project I said needed triage meetings. One of the guys in it was so good I went and congratulated him afterwards for skill in being tough with whiny developers. Then it was reviews and a quick visit to the presentation I'm giving today and WHEW there was my phone call from J liberating me.

Off we went to the Pho restaurant for a nice bowl of soup, perfect on the chilly, wet day Monday had somehow turned into. Then it was off to the Barbican for the Magnetic Fields. I hadn't expected that it would be a show with a zither, a cheesy electric piano, a guitar, a cello, and a ukelele, but suddenly the sound of the band made sense. And the lead singer, the man who croons to me with the deepest voice ever used for pop songs, well, he's a man probably in his late 40s who looks like a cabbie. And the music was wonderful.

But still, back home at 11, and tired again today. White Guard tonight at the National; since it's the official opening night, it's starting early. Thank God. I need the sleep.

Oh yeah. Results of three posts in 12 hours? HIGHEST HITS EVER on my theater blog. You know I'm excited about it.

I find it odd how much I've grown to enjoy Billy Joel over the last five or so years. I mean, it started with the singability of the stuff from the "Uptown Girl" album .... but now I'm listening to "Piano Man" and finding it just pathetically touching, after having previously found it pathetic ... some kind of combination of missing American culture and the evolution of his own life, I suppose, making it all so much tragic.

Jesus, maybe there will be a day when I like Edith Piaf. God knows I enjoy the Carpenters now, too. There's no hope for me, really.

I decided to switch gymming this week to Thursday and Friday and went to the British Museum to try to catch the end of the American Prints exhibit at the British Museum. Well, I can make it there, but somehow I can't manage to get all the way through anything, ever. This time I managed the middle third of the exhibit, which was great.

While we were there, the weather went from sunny and mild to windy and wild, and we just barely made it in the door before the rain started dumping down. Now it's sunny and cloudy again. God, living on an island is wierd.

Note to self: buy the album on which Jordi Savall is playing the Karl Friedrich Abel "Prelude in re mineur" - they just played it on the Baroque music station on LastFM and it was great.

I'm listening to "Otto's Baroque Musick" on the generally irritating 1.FM ...

and I hear this cello playing, deep and thoughtful and ... so beautiful.

Bach's Sonata C-Dur, with Preston, Pinnock, and ... of course, Jordi Savall. Man, that man knows how to play, or he's got a monopoly on the good recording equipment.

I found a bag of Luden's honey cough drops and I'm passing them around the office. I was called an angel by one of my coworkers. It was very endearing.

Crap du jour: landlady wants to know where the rent increase that was supposed to go into effect in October has gone to and wants back rent to the tune of, oh, a few monthly travelcards. Shall attempt to postpone her until next month. Not sure why the paperwork never came to mine - I thought she'd decided against the rise since I was a good tenant! And I couldn't remember what the increase was because the "negotiations" with Foxtons was all done while I was not yet awake from a nap. Boo.

Gorgeous music (for

thewronghands): I spend all day listening to Baroque FM, as it's "music to write test cases to" (no words), and yesterday I heard something totally brilliant: Emma Kirby singing a Bach Chaconne. I took down some notes ("Tombeau de la Partita," BVW 1004) and found a reference to it online (this one more informative but this Korean one appears to have music attached to it). Now I need to get an actual recording of it ...

Current Mood: tired

Back in the day I was friends with a boy named Jeffrey who was a poet getting his MFA at Arizona State in Tempe. His apartment was on Farmer street, next to the railroad tracks, and I'd ride by it all the time on my way to my shared house on 12th Street. He had long blond hair and was good looking in a skinny boy kind of way and always had really good vibes. he seemed to have a regular stream of pretty girlfriends and the man smoked the stuff like there was no tomorrow (or his funding would never run out).

I know I used to drop in and visit him all the time, which isn't surpring in a neighborhood where people would just leave their doors open. You knew who was home. And today I found a song that I used to hear at his place all the time, on a record of really old reggae songs. I think I was there the very first time he played it.

He bounced around all excited about what a great song this was, and he's right, it is a great song, so good that twenty years later I could still hum it to my self. "He's got-a barb wire in his underpants, got-a barb war in his underpants ..." Of course, these days with all of the random metal in body parts you could about imagine this song being about something else, but we know what it's really about.

Wow, the College Republicans back home are sponsoring "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week," a creation of the Los Angeles-based David Horowitz Freedom Center, "which purportedly intended to 'confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat,' according to its Web site" (per the story in the Seattle Times). (By the way, trying to find the link between those two items is like listening to my dad rant about Persian doctors and immigrants with cell phones. I don't see the left talking about the comparative dangers of global warming VERSUS the terrorist threat. How do these connections get made, with an online "degrees of separation from Kevin Spacey" tool?)

"The Web site includes suggested campus activities such as holding sit-ins outside women's studies departments to protest 'the silence of feminists over the oppression of women in Islam' and holding a memorial service for the 'victims of Islamo-Fascist violence around the world.' "

Let's see, this neatly ignores the fact that women's studies' groups DO protest the oppression of women in Islam, as well as in every other religion, and ignores the victims of Americo-Fascist violence, such as the people America kidnaps and tortures. (Not to mention the ones we allow to be butchered in the streets of a country we're conceptually in control of.)

Anyway, the mind boggles. I mean, first, who do these people think they're kidding? And I can't believe these people are going for blatant religious bigotry. I'd be wearing a green arm band, too.

Current Mood: flabbergasted
Current Music: Scheidt's Magnificat, Dresdener Kreuzchor (great!)