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.

Why I love Berlin.

New York Times, why do you tempt me with two of my favorite aspects of Berlin, cycling and architecture, and finally clear up the question of the name of my favorite building along the Spree? I know I have a "Take me to California" shirt, but really I'd rather be enjoying all that this article reminds me of!

Is it not bizarre that CNN.com is using some pedestrianized sort of 1337?

the glory days

Observe that trams, cyclists, and pedestrians once ruled the roads of Rochester.

epodunk is worth a browse, not least of all because of its name.

And please don't forget The Refrigerator. Great collection of signs and roadside tours, including this retro pedestrian crossing sign in which the child seems to be running away and the parent is carrying a violin case or something else very long.

terug in Mechelen

I first caught glimpse of Sint-Romboutstoren set against one of the most beautiful post-storm sunsets I'd ever seen over the city. Although one wonders if it was just such lighting that gave the Maneblussers their name. In the night, Mechelen greeted me with fireworks. I could stand right under them with my ears plugged, still hearing the ooohs and aahs of the Mechelaars around me. (Oh wait, was it the national holiday?) Sint-Romboutstoren was as magnificent as ever; I was nearly overwhelmed standing at the foot of it, as I have always been. It has a monumentality in its incompleteness and white stone that even its completed sister, the OLV-Kathedraaltoren, lacks. Again the tower looked to catch fire. Is it not funny that the two cities I've occupied this year in Europe are both home to Maneblussers who tried to extinguish the conflagrations in their towers, only to find that the towers were backlit by a foggy moon? Perhaps citizens the world over who love their carillons react this way.

After shopping at the GB in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, which to my amazement now stocks rice milk, and picking up some homegrown produce by bicycle, I made some fresh pasta sauce and then took off for the Beiaardschool. It soon became clear that the iMac G4 in the archive could not be updated because it could not download any executables at all -- thanks to WatchGuard HTTP proxy, courtesy of the municipal ISP. Grrr. I was really pleased to find, however, that I did not mind practicing on the attic's Clavion practice keyboard at all--it is a Ferrari in comparison to Rochester's. This in contrast to last year, when I usually opted not to practice at all than play that maladjusted thing. Why doesn't somebody adjust it?

I was just getting to the Beethoven piano concerto transcription in preparation for my terrifying concert in Antwerp when I found myself so physically exhausted that I could hardly move. After forcing myself to play through it once, I packed my things--and realized I'd been practicing since 16:00, and it was now 20:30. Even as a full-time carillon student, four hours had been my limit, although I wasn't this exhausted afterwards. Still, it was rewarding to realize that with a decent instrument, I could practice for hours without even noticing the passage of time. Perhaps the environment also helped. There are few distractions, and the rooms are spacious (in contrast to the UR practice pod), relatively comfortable, and have windows and honest-to-god sunlight.

With the house mostly to myself, I've had great fun taking over the kitchen and in fact the entire first floor. It's almost as luxurious as occupying an entire condominium on Memorial Drive in Cambridge. And for the first time, I'm riding a hybrid that's closer to a road bike than to its mountain counterpart. The wheels are bigger than Lucky's, and the bike is quite light. In other words, I'm zipping along with ease at record speeds. Although zipping over cobblestones is more unpleasant than ever.

fast as lightning

From the River Campus to my house in 17 minutes. I like mild Sundays with no traffic. And boy do I like feeling competent at the carillon again. My last two practices have been so rewarding. I can be a musician after all, even at this dreadful practice "instrument"!

Monday is Wiretap the Internet Day.

rochesterian

I wonder why I usually blushed after eating home-cooked dinner in Belgium, but haven't done so here. Tonight it happened, although the food was hardly any good. I know precious little about baking, especially when it involves Greek orzo casseroles, and it doesn't help when the instructions read, "Bake at medium heat for about an hour."

I'm finally feeling as if I've become a part of Rochester. We had another Indian summer day, and after practicing for 3.5 hours in Schmitt Hall, I took off on my bike for Starry Nites Cafe for brunch followed by grocery shopping, which I had not managed to accomplish since Thanksgiving. (Why the stores in that area insist on improper, "hip" spellings such as "Nites" and "Essentialz" is beyond me.) As I carried my vanilla frappe into the back room, I was greeted by the sight of a young man sporting a nifty hat and typing furiously at his MacBook. Ryan had three papers to finish this week on film, photography, and heaven knows what else. But for someone under pressure, he was still good-natured and reiterated that I had to visit Aquarius Records in San Francisco. I resolved to take Ingrid and Adrien along if they hadn't already been in order to check out their best-sellers, including sculpted box record sets à la Duchamp "Box in a Valise" and symphonies of musically trained elephants. I insisted on sitting at a different table to not distract him from his work and lost another pencil in the process of trying to look busy, but I trust a worthy bohemian at the cafe found it and used it to surreptitiously sketch students working at their laptops.

I guess I also felt at home stopping into Image City Photography to see the newest exhibit, which included some extraordinary travel photos of seascapes in brilliant colors framed by decaying windows and walls in brilliant colors. It's so liberating to be involved with a place unassociated with the U of R. Speaking of which, Andrew and Doug and I ended up in a slightly sketchy little ESM-student-free dive last night to celebrate the former's 21st birthday. The irony that led us there was that I'd forgotten my ID, although I was the eldest of the group. It was a good place -- they had Stella on tap, and the bartender was lip-singing with a bottle substituting for a mic. I hadn't drunk in a townie bar with fellow cyclists since... New Haven.

Tonight I finally watched the videos Gary Hilburger had sent me of the Rochester Poets' visit. The memories overwhelmed me a little, as did the renditions of "Image No. 2" and "Een Aangename Voois," which were better than I'd imagined. Especially "Image No. 2." The carillon doesn't sound so bad at all when you're not sitting there playing it! And to see the reactions of my audience through the lens of Gary's great sense of cinematography, and the strangeness of watching my hands from a different angle... What a gift.

blackbirds

Cycling back from the River Campus along the scenic portion of the Genesee Riverway Trail, I was overtaken by a flock of black birds. They were flying in the same direction as I was going, and looking up at them, I felt pulled along almost as if I was one of them. They kept on coming, for perhaps five unbelievable minutes, more and more birds overtaking me almost until I had reached the Troup Howell Bridge.

I gave up practice for 100 minutes this evening to chat with Andrew over coffee. We found that we had stranger things in common than just cycling and The Elegant Universe, despite our disparate backgrounds and my allegiance to the bohemian hipster Java's crowd. By the time I was getting antsy about tomorrow's lesson, we had more to talk about than before and were accelerating in our haste to beat the close of the day. I excused myself in some alarm and a little bit of exhaustion to return to Bach. But what a refreshing personality. What time well spent.

hummers go green!

An algae-filled recyclable Hummer that opens like a flower to absorb sunlight is pretty funky and an attention-getting way of designing a fully recyclable car. It's a nice surprise for GM spokesmen to speak of the SUV's original intended customers as "people who worked in the outdoors, environmentalists, naturalists and outdoorsmen." But my favorite is Toyota's "electric-powered, tandem-style vehicle with wicker seats that the occupants could opt to pedal through stop-and-go Los Angeles rush-hour traffic." I'd definitely get me one of those.

The most intriguing social commentary I've seen in a while: For one analyst of popular culture, [the popularity of public apologies and rehab solutions is] a measure of the "therapeutic culture" that we live in. "It's like a huge moving conveyor belt. Once you declare yourself to be a client of our therapeutic culture, we say, 'OK great! Welcome aboard,' " says Jerry Herron, professor at Wayne State University. "Somewhere, there will be a sofa waiting for you."

The most original description of the experience of listening to a carillon that I have probably ever read.

I cycled to Naomi's tonight to negotiate her weeklong internet connection breakdown and realized that although I'd seen Corn Hill through the windows of cars and buses, it is truly gorgeous without the mediation of a window. Although I procrastinated buying tickets for the Landmark Preservation Society's Corn Hill Holiday Tour until they sold out, I've at least gotten to see one interior. Her house is splendid, and strangely enough, owned by someone fascinated by British royalty who is in Britain through December and who furthermore has a ceiling painted by the partner of one of our organ professors. I also finally got to see the elusive City Hall, where bells may still hang in the tower. Now if only I could get myself to Rundel for a library card so I can feel like a true Rochesterian.

East Coast colonial and Georgian architecture still makes me slightly uncomfortable despite my aesthetic fondness for it, but Corn Hill may well be the first neighborhood I've seen that I'd be happy to inhabit longterm (surrounding neighborhoods notwithstanding). I can't quite pintpoint why yet; I'll need to do some more cycling and contemplating to figure it out.

The Genesee is quite cold relative to the rest of the city. It must be a wind tunnel.

giving creativity a wiggle

It took just 20 minutes to cycle from the River Campus back to my apartment, and yet in that short time, I saw much more than I'd seen before. Perhaps the story began earlier. Perhaps it began with my trip south, when I scolded myself for always forgetting my camera for early evening rides. The brilliant autumn-like winter day, over 50°F in late November, was not unlike that day of pain a year before (incidentally, I forgot to deliberately go cycling that day--disappointing, but a good sign that my life is so full that I can't be bothered to commemorate). For the first time, the reflection of the new apartments in Corn Hill was perfectly still in the river and glowed golden in the twilight as if to herald Christmas with its lights, and the Parisian Troup Howell Bridge did the same. I finally caught sight of my carillon tower through the tangle of riverside trees by the red light bejeweling its apex.

An open door in Spurrier led me to discover new gym-like hallways and exits that made sense, and a corridor of typical practice compartments that I'm now hoping I can steal for the practice carillon. Practice itself was nothing brilliant - I had forgotten my shoes and earplugs and had to improvise, but developed a new idiom for myself learning John Cage's "Music for Carillon, No. 3." Roy Hamlin Johnson's octotonic setting of "Wachet Auf" seemed masterwork, and the penultimate two pages of Geert D'hollander's "Een Aangename Voois" fit my hands better as I applied techniques he'd taught me for his and others' compositions to the fleeting, dancing layers of "mijn vrolijk hart dat lacht..." And then I launched off the hill for home, glad to have the Cateye headlight my parents had sent me to light the way. But it wasn't just the dark segments of the path that I could see better.

A radio tower blinked back at my Cateye at the end of the Riverway Trail, startling me with its towering likeness to the Eye of Sauron as portrayed in LoTR movie. Amused and perturbed that it should look so threatening and tall in darkness, I raced through the construction beneath the Court Street bridge skimming the bumpy dirt path to emerge into a rush of warm air. Downtown was a few degrees warmer than the River Campus and the Genesee, thanks to buildings spewing warm air from giant vents and the windbreaker effect of a densely built environment. For no particular reason, I took Woodbury Boulevard east for once and realized that the Geva Theatre was right below Washington Square Park. I cycled through rather than past the park, finally drawn to the Civil War monument at its center from the history I'd learned at the Center at High Falls. There was a time when the statue had been monumental rather than dwarfed into invisibility by highrises. Those evil highrises nevertheless looked more monumental and well-designed than before, perhaps because I understood what they contained from the Center's exhibit. They had become receptacles of light; even the fan atop one building no longer looked tastelessly 70's, but as it might have looked to admirers in the 70's. My eyes were so receptive to imagination that I was stunned by the nameless highrise across from Manhattan Square Park, which looked at its edges as if it had been sliced away or as if some building the same color as the darkness was covering the rest of it. Downtown had never looked beautiful before, and now it was nothing but.

Even small details--the play of form and complementary aesthetics between the Eastman School and the Miller Center, the patinated scalloping of the Eastman Theatre's marquee and perspective lines of its glowing show bulbs, Christmas lights encircling what seemed like baubles of nothing because the trees had lost their leaves, the glazed corner of the heretofore ugly YMCA that split a harsh concrete edge into four glowing windowed angles--leaped out at me despite my visibly worsening eyesight. I couldn't have escaped the sight of beauty if I'd tried, although these same things had disappointed me with their lack of beauty before.

I spent most of today preparing my octotonic improvisation for tomorrow. It wasn't the same kind of work; for the first time in a long time, perhaps since before I started college music theory courses, I composed not because I felt strong-armed into doing it, but because I felt compelled to do it, because ideas were escaping me into soundwaves and I wanted to record them. Perhaps this unleashing of creativity made me receptive to imaginative visual perception.

But what even spurred that after years of struggling to revive a stifled desire to write music? Part of it must have been knowledge, the knowledge I've gained of Rochester from cycling around aimlessly or purposefully and visiting the Center. Part of it must have been the break from monotonous work that I chose to take despite my plans to accomplish mountains of work this week. Part of it must have been the photography I've done intensively over the past few days, both on the road and at my computer. I've trained my photographer's eye on Rochester, and it's gotten sharp and developed an appetite for more of the city. Part of it must be the fondness I've developed for the Flour City exploring it over break. (If you can't escape Rochester, why not escape Eastman into Rochester?)

All of this has led me to reconcile myself with not being immersed in European beauty. In Europe, I lost use of the American eye that enabled me to see the beauty of this country while I developed an eye for my surroundings in Belgium. Naturally, that eye was disppointed with the offerings of America. But I knew all along I had a good eye for beauty. Now I've realized that I have two. If that makes any sense without sounding absurd.

de-koyaanisqatsied

Unintentionally missed my Schmitt practice time (due to somebody's flakiness, ahem) and set off late to the River Campus. Incidentally enjoyed one of the most beautiful rides I've done so far in Rochester. The Genesee is glorious in the late autumn evening. Ambushed Gabby in the Arts & Music Library after picking up Greetings from the Salton Sea, which Rush Rhees Library acquired for me even more quickly than the Yale Library usually did whenever I requested that they buy a book just for little ole me (and all posterity, of course).

Meant to practice the carillon for an hour, ended up practicing around 2.5 because I lost track of time and was trying to make up for lost time. Raced back as fast as my legs would pedal me through a beautiful but chill and eerie evening, passing lines of skeleton-like trees across the river towards a downtown Rochester all lit up against the night. Ah, carillonation. Now life feels back in balance.

end of the line

Thank goodness for Wiki. There's a fascinating page about Rochester's abandoned subway system.

Today did not seem like the second day of winter. It was early fall. At least I had to bike to the Memorial Art Gallery. Rochester never looked better. It seems great from a bike in the sun. Nothing is as spread out as it seems on foot, yet not as impersonally distant as it seems via car either. How anyone can love Rochester without cycling through it is beyond me.

critical mass in costume

Rode for nearly an hour in the pouring rain in my policewoman costume through crazy Rochester streets I'd never seen before. CM is smaller here, and accordingly people are more friendly, and anyone who is riding silently and sees you riding silently will roll up and introduce themselves. Unlike the New Haven townie-dominated crowd, a lot of participants are college students; the ones I met were mostly from RIT. (Is it any surprise that fewer participants come from ivory tower institutions?) The first one, whose name I now forget, is doing the RIT equivalent of American Studies, i.e. you take just about anything that interests you and roll it all up into a degree. We seem to feel the same way about the lack of variety of interests of our peers. Many of the riders were not as Rochester-entrenched in their loyalties as New Haven riders. Some of them do not ride because they love Rochester, but because it's one of the few things they've found to love about Rochester. Now I feel better about my ambivalance towards the city. One's experience can vary greatly depending on the specific role, environment, and community into which one enters. Also surprising: most riders I met today were from the midwest.

Apparently there is no post-CM party, although the movie screenings at rundown St. Joseph's are also a good idea. Sometimes a warm home and hot chocolate are really what one needs after a winter ride, though. And winter commences tomorrow, IIRC. Happy last day of fall, folks! Perhaps I'll propose a CM party as summer nears and we can keep folks partying outside.

The irony of my dressing as a police officer and riding in Critical Mass did not strike me until another rider remarked on its cleverness. Doh! I also was unaware that RIT students were told that a bearded Phanton-of-the-Opera type musician played the carillon and never allowed himself to be seen. I guess I ruined their fun. I wonder what other surprises await me as I try to figure out this place.

After irritatedly finding my way back along the pedestrian/bike-unfriendly streets, I came into the kitchen freshly out of my military boots dripping from head to toe. Donna gave me the most priceless "how can you explain yourself?" look.