novelty never ends

Afraid I was running out of new streets to jog, I took to busy Sacramento to the strains of Béla Fleck's Throw Down Your Heart on my iPod. To my wonder, the front gardens were lush and the houses were warm, inviting, and charming in the pale pink evening light. White wooden accents turned warm shades of peach, and boarded-up driveways beckoned like doorways into other worlds. I continued to the historic plaque marking the Ohlone Trail, read up a bit on my local history, and turned back to discover a house near North Berkeley BART with great rustic fences built using the redwoods in its front yard as pillars. Strings of multicolored Christmas lights extended fancifully into one of the tree's upper reaches, and outside a hatchback van sported a life-sized wooden grizzly bear sticking out of the trunk.

I continued past Phoenix Pastifico (note to self: eat there) to find myself on the strangely otherworldly Bonar Street. Under an undifferentiated darkening blue dome, the quiet world of one-story houses seemed in the middle of nowhere, a gentler, differentiated version of D.J. Waldie's Holy Land. Knowing that the out-of-sight skyscrapers of San Francisco rose just a dozen miles away made the street miraculous; a similarly charming neighborhood actually in the middle of nowhere (I thought of Waverly, PA with a shudder) would have seemed desolate. Past warmly lit living rooms of charmingly narrow Second Empire homes and a California Mission bell marker replica I'd never noticed in the entryway of a house at McGee and Parker, and I was home.

the reenchantment of the world

I was all dressed to jog when I looked out my window and saw needles of rain slanting past. Exasperated, I undressed and watched the rest of When In Rome, feeling guiltily entertained and unproductive. Romantic comedies have never been my thing (they make me feel too girly), but what's a guilty pleasure if it isn't unpleasant and dislikeable in some way?

After the movie, golden sunlight made the slick world glow outside, and I bounded back into my workout clothes and out the door. Everyone was putting out free stuff, and just as I nearly fell over myself noticing a narrow, asymmetrical two-story boat-shaped house on McGee, I stumbled upon a curbside box with all the colors of thread I'd been wanting for months, and a seal keychain and tennis balls and poster tape. I couldn't believe how useful it all was and stashed some into my back pocket, resolving to take the rest on the way home. As usual, I deliberately chose random streets I hadn't seen before and eventually wound my way through a charming Victorian-lined lane to the Ohlone Trail, where I discovered that there were two halves to the community garden, one of which I had never noticed. I turned around at Gilman, but not before wandering into a plant nursery and realizing I could buy all the garden things I'd been wanting here and wondering at the beautiful flowering kale and dreaming of having my own garden, built from scratch, a clean doorstep, and time to cook dinner every night. Fat chance, you tenure-dreaming academic, you.

Normally I avoid wide car-dominated streets like Sacramento, but on the way back I was drawn to an outdoor tent on the sidewalk that seemed to be exploding with wooden wares I couldn't quite identify from a distance. To my amazement, it was the birdhouse tent I've often driven past. The artist Michael introduced himself and invited me into the backyard. I picked my way through his garage, which was clearly a basement performing arts venue with an elaborate upright piano and bar, and up a steep flight of stairs where I found myself beneath the shade of trees in a bewildering maze of birdhouses, each so different from the rest. It was another world, right off that busy commuter thoroughfare--a world of debris-turned-magic. Amongst the rows was the birdhouse of my dreams: a chapel with a little belltower. Save that one for me, Michael (how you remind me of Paul and his loft-turned-performing-arts-center), until I have a chance to break open the piggybank and return for the Friday music!

As if this wasn't enough, after picking up the rest of the loot on McGee and doing another double-take at the nautical house I must have passed multiple times and never noted, I stumbled upon Helly Welly's lighting store. I was walking now to cool down and the storefront, past which I had driven so many times, issued a challenge to the greying sky with golden light and musical instrument lamps. Helly led me through a wonderland of clarinet lamps and chandeliers made with transparencies she'd created in 1970s performance art events.

I made the final leg home in twilight, when all the world holds its breath in anticipation of the night. Time comes to a standstill at twilight, and it seems that time could stay stopped forever, and yet twilight is the most fleeting and rapidly changing part of the day, yielding to dusk and then to darkness. I can't love it enough. I was regretting missing Berkeley Artisans Holiday Open Studios this weekend, but the open studios found me, as they often find wanderers.

double trouble

Further proof that I need to stop thinking about Freud as soon as possible: I went to the Media Center today to watch the VHS of Die Tote Stadt I'd requested from UCSD, and saw someone at another video cubby who looked almost exactly like a friend of mine. I gave him a big smile and a wave, then realizing my mistake, apologized and hastily sequestered myself at my assigned television.

Terrifying. What's next?

Das Unheimliche

"I don't read Freud anymore," Harold Bloom wheezed at our seminar at Yale, which only Harold Bloom could entitle How to Read Poetry. "The more I read back in my student days, the more Freudian slips I made, until my conversations were full of them! So I stopped reading Freud." Hanging on his every word, I duly noted his indirect warning in my notebook.

Yet even Bloom's injunction did not finally prevent me from approaching Freud from two directions this past semester. At Gail's suggestion, I read Freud's essay on the uncanny in order to frame my discussion of belfries and musical automata and their relationship to the supernatural, extraordinary, and violent. Starting on my second writing project with Erich Wolfgang Korngold's opera Die Tote Stadt with the uncanny on the brain, I began to think more about uncanny doubles. The protagonist, Paul, meets a dancer named Marietta--the spitting image of his beloved dead wife, Marie. The same singer plays both Marietta and Marie's ghost, and many directors take the opportunity to splash a proliferation of images of Marie (Paul fetishizes her portrait) across the stage, double other roles and other props, and even double the characters themselves (e.g. Willy Decker's production, shown above).

The more time I spend grappling with the uncanny, the more uncanny doubles have started to appear in my life. It began on the day I was to present the ideas structuring my paper to the seminar. To bolster my self-confidence, I donned the sole pink article of clothing in my wardrobe, a draped, caped McQ shirt that is my pride and joy and surely utterly unique in form and color. The other half of my H&L cohort appeared wearing a multilayer draped pink shirt--one of the only pink items in her closet.

After giving my presentation, I was duly informed by two classmates that a student of Carolyn Abbate had recently given a paper on the same stagings of Die Tote Stadt and highlighted the exact same scenes. (Thankfully, his argument was of a different nature and purpose.)

And today, Bruno informs me that my Doppelgänger is marching around Brussels: a Francophone girl several years my junior. Thank goodness we established that I am surely the evil twin, and she the boring one.

Doppelgängers and das Unheimliche are closing in on me. Why didn't I listen to my sage professor? Bloom knew what would happen to me all along. He foreshadowed it when he sent identical letters of recommendation to the Lizzy for myself and another student at the same time. For which I am still entirely grateful--what a splash we made, whoever we two were!

multitasking

It's been years (if ever) since I was able to listen to music and concentrate on my work. Particularly since Eastman, I've found it virtually impossible to not focus on the music playing when I'm trying to multitask.

On the eve of my MA exam, I find myself able to do it again. What has changed? The way I work, the way I pay attention, the depth of my attention, my attitude towards music, my disgust at continuing to labor past the satiation point? As I read and take notes, for chapters at a time I don't notice the music, and its occasional intrusion into my consciousness is proof that I'm not hearing it. This seems vaguely inappropriate for a musicologist, but also a most welcome skill when my life feels entirely too narrow, musically and otherwise.

Apparently I lapse into not being a photographer if I stop wandering around just to look at things. My photographic eye then shuts down. I'm glad I took off on my bike today headed west. Artisan studios, beautiful strange additions to buildings, quaint office areas, hip yet surreally still residential developments, ironworks, artistic scrap metal yards, presses, fountains, pedestrian paths, travel libraries, dead ends overlooking water and sunset, extraordinary houses, hippie vans, gorgeous indian furniture, forgotten and newly discovered restaurants... somehow it all opened my eyes to the tree right outside my house. I think the twilight photos of it worked out well. And to think I never saw the soaring, complex tree as photogenic before.

beginning of the end of the semester

Beginning work on Davitt's manuscript "Recueil d'airs Choisis" has been intimidating, but is it not a good sign when you discover two concordances within five minutes of beginning your search for concordances?

Studying the MS tired me out today however. I was so desperate for a break that I even deigned to walk into American Apparel (the thought of walking in had never occurred to me) and Wet Seal. I should really go window shopping at University Press Books or the Musical Offering, but that involves reading and thinking (about academics)... I need to find more hobbies that involve neither.

At 10 pm...
Bam. Thirteen concordances/sources or leads. Mostly cross-eyed, and very behind on the rest of my work. The pros and cons of OCD...

rochacha

Easy as it is to dismiss my former hometown, there are definitely things I miss about it. Not about living there, but the delightful parts of living there. Most of these aspects of Rochester have their corollaries here, but to my surprise that doesn't make them replaceable. Most of all, of course, I miss the organ culture. That can hardly be replaced anywhere.

walking the tightrope

In the closing scne of the film Still Life, the protagonist and he alone notices a tightrope walker crossing from one ramshackle building to another in a town being "deconstructed" for the filling of the Three Gorges in China. I am starting to realize that I can understand my own path into music as a tightrope walk.

While at Eastman, I struggled to retain a sense of purpose and meaning as I made music without having the opportunity to contemplate what music meant or its place in society. Without reference to a context, music-making began to seem purposeless. As a musicology student, I now struggle with the meaning of music and its place in society on a daily basis. And yet I have not been satisfied over the past weeks because this struggle has left little time for performance. No longer an onerous chore, sitting down to learn new repertoire has become as mind-clearing and salutary as a long bike ride.

So musicology loses its meaning without performance and vice versa. And yet it's a tremendous challenge to excel at both. I'm giving myself ample time to learn the walk, but I have to find a balance before I stumble.

Biking to the Berkeley Bowl at noon, I was struck by what a Californian day it was and how Californian my surroundings were, as both are aspects of life here I no longer take for granted. The dry heat, the open sky, the rolling golden hills framing it all -- I found myself experiencing the state as one thinks of it beyond the borders of that peculiar entity of San Francisco. Sitting in the garden each day eating lunch in the warm sun is perhaps the very best part of it.

goodbye cody's

The Berkeley air was choking with the smoke of wildfires blowing in from all around NorCal. Perhaps some particles of San Bruno Mountain gorse even reached the Campanile -- who can know?

What would you bring with you if you had to abandon your house to an approaching wildfire? Photos? Stuffed animals? Jewelry? Other monetarily worthless things that can never be replaced? My things are still all in boxes, awaiting their Berkeley home. I would have run out with little more than my passport, Social Security card, and laptop in hand, frozen by the choices between all the rest of those worthless, precious things. Perhaps my bike would have come with me. And my carillon sheet music, if I had the presence of mind.

Berkeley's iconic Cody's Books closed on June 20. I stood reading and rereading the tabloid-sized notices posted on the wall-to-wall windows, stricken. Passersby, perhaps noticing my expression, stopped to glance at the notice, but nobody lingered. Perhaps it was old news to them. Perhaps it was meaningless news to them.

Moments earlier I'd been in a wonderfully thought-provoking bookstore on Bancroft, picking up "The Book is Dead: Long Live The Book" and then setting it back down again with revulsion, unwilling to believe its warning, determined to believe that it was just the sort of book it warned against, a sensationalist product designed only to sell. But the fact is that I neither read it nor bought it. Perhaps the book is dead unless we change something fast. We buy our books from giants like amazon to save a few bucks. And here is the evidence, in these tabloid-size letters. I never suspected that my last visit to Cody's was unrepeatable. And my last visit four years ago to the 4th Street store. And the visit to the Union Square shop that never happened. How Cody's has been shuffling around. To what end?

The end, I suppose. Just as I was starting to take up the slack on the reading list I've been growing but otherwise ignoring since high school. And just as I've stopped moving house often enough to want to actually own my books.

Incidentally, the newest item on my travel itinerary: Shipton's Arch, known for ages by locals, revealed to the West in the 1950's, lost, and found again by National Geographic in 2000.

the cottage life

Thai dinner in Berkeley with Adrien, Devon, Sol, and Ingrid. Adrien and Devon have the coziest woodsy cottages right in the heart of the city, and fed me homemade carrot cake and mouthwatering toffee. This is the world I wanted! Why am I so far away and the friends from Yale who aren't from the Bay Area here? I should have gone into plant bio or chem. That's gotta be the only answer.