09Mar / 2011

One of those weeks

You know those times when you change for the better and you know it because everyone around you is happier and the world is friendly and you can feel the joy of living coursing through your veins like stormy surf and making your ears ring so that when your wife tells you she hit another car in the parking lot you say, oh that’s too bad honey and nothing more and give her a hug, and when your dentist’s assistant calls to change an appointment you say ok that’s fine and wish her a nice day and the wrong number after that gets the same treatment and you look in the mirror and don’t look tired or creepy and you wonder, how long will this last and what will it do to me?

I’m having one of those weeks. Knock on wood.

It’s hard work. The butterfly has to keep on flying or he turns back into a caterpillar.

The frog croaks and croaks, because if he stops, he turns back into that pollywog.

That’t how it works I guess.

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08Mar / 2011

Brainstorm: Names for electric cars

Time to copyright a few good names for electric cars before they are all taken. Just saw Ampera on a new car. Chevy has the Volt. There is the Tesla – who wouldn’t want to drive an electric car named after a genuine mad scientist?

Beta and I were brainstorming on the way into town yesterday.

My favorite is the Short, which Fiat should produce.

Or the Ohmster. The Chevy Static. The Charger would have been good, but Dodge used that a long time ago. Ion, is that taken?

How about the Faraday Cage?

Flux?

Farad would be good for an electric bicycle, because the German word for bicycle is Fahrrad and people would think it was a typo.

Or you could name them after scientists or inventors associated with electricity, like the Tesla. The Ford Edison?

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05Mar / 2011

Super

Beta is down from Oslo so I can fix her favorite sunglasses that I fixed once before when the frame broke over the right lens and I glued it with superglue. Also she is filling up on sunlight and doing something vague with friends in Vienna.

So last night after dinner, and after her sister Gamma had gone to a friend’s house for the night to do something vague with other 13 and 14 year old girls, and after I had driven Beta to the train station to go to Vienna, and Alpha and I had finished the bottle of Moet, I sat down at the kitchen table with the sunglasses (this time, the frame had broken over the left lens) and the superglue, which was runnier than I remembered. After a couple tries, I had successfully glued the fingers of my left hand to the glasses, and the fingers of my right hand to my left hand.

I got everything apart again. The glasses are more fixed now than when I started, but now they look less like something a movie star would wear and more like what the movie star’s crazy stalker would wear.

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04Mar / 2011

Something I just figured out about playing the saw

As you know, when you play the musical saw you bend it in an S-shape and bow the lower curve with your bow. But the exact contact point changes depending on the note you are playing. The higher the note, the higher up the saw you play. This was always hit or miss for me, until I played with my eyes closed. When I shut my eyes, I could see where the sound was coming from, and bowed the saw at that point, and it was right every time.

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03Mar / 2011

Culture, III

After my recent concert-going fiasco with Gamma (she has announced she never wants to go to another concert with me) I was relieved last night to see that 1) the bar was open again and 2)there were no bicycle wheels on stage, but rather an ondes martenot, the name of which sounds like a small animal you trap in winter and make jackets out of, but which has a beautiful sound.

I had a martini while waiting for my wife to arrive. I ordered a gin martini, because sometimes if you just order martini here, you get the vermouth rather than the drink. There is less danger of that at this particular hotel bar, but I wanted to be on the safe side. The waiter asked me if I wanted it with or without ice. I ordered it with ice. I imagined there would be a few cubes, but they were real generous with the ice. It also came with three olives, and a tray of peanuts, smoked almonds and wasabi almonds. Although I know that bar nuts are a hygenic disaster, I cannot resist them and always polish them off.

My wife had a non-alcoholic drink, and we shared a pair of frankfurters, eating them with our hands.

About the concert – I bought a program this time. The Klangforum Wien performed, I’m really liking this subscription we have and the relatively new music we are seeing, my wife less so although it varies. She liked Toru Takemitsu, for example, and many others. This time, Emilio Pomárico conducted and Marisol Montalvo, an American soprano, sang. Works by André Jolivet, Karol Szymanowski, Nikolai Obukhov and Isang Yun were performed.

Marisol Montalvo, the Klangforum Wien are always great, but Marisol Montalvo was the high point for us. Beautiful, expressive voice, great personality, wonderful. Nikolai Obukhov is a Russian composer with an interesting biography who composed impossible pieces (his main work, “le Livre de Vie” has vanished, he claimed he was robbed, the only surviving part had vocal parts that were impossible for a single person to sing and, oh yeah, called for the construction of a special cathedral to perform it in) but Montalvo managed well.

Despite the martini, I didn’t fall asleep until the final piece, “Pièce concertante” by Isang Yun, who once composed an opera on the floor of his prison cell while being tortured by South Korean intelligence, which had kidnapped him from Germany because they thought he was spying for the North.

PS Thomas Bloch rocked the ondes martenot.

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03Mar / 2011