my first community organ recital...

...could be good. Or unfortunate. I'm only irritated now because I'm again sacrificing my carillon time to do miscellaneous jobs, and the quick-n-dirty 20-minute flyer-design process turned into a 40-minute one because I accidentally flattened and saved the Photoshop file as a PDF, overwriting the original, without correcting the incorrect date. And today I get the news that there are twelve, yes, twelve works on the "Best" of ImageMovementSound concert for which I'm running the board next week with Pierzak, which means moving the concert up to 5:30 pm on Thursday, March 8. Grrrrrrrrr....

memory

I honestly barely remember designing this poster. Not too happy with the way it turned out (didn't follow my intuition on the text being too damn small), but at least it did turn out... not easy to follow your intuition at ungodly hours. Chris at MinuteMan Press threw in a free copy for me (definitely better quality than what the ESM Copy Center could do, although I'm still not happy with how Photoshop communicates with printers and wish I could learn more about what happens in between and how to control it), but unfortunately a gust of Rochester wind blew it onto the ice after I'd shielded it carefully all the way to Swan St. Figures. The postcards came out great. Yummy.

het rochesterse weer

When I awoke (late) this morning, snow was falling almost as quickly through the air as rain -- sleet. When I looked outside a moment ago, the largest glops of snow I'd ever seen were tumbling through the air. Now, a moment later, medium-sized glops are falling almost as quickly as sleet.

The endless variety of Rochester's weather. To think that yesterday was a spring day.

Hooray! I finally dug up the library's February issue of The Diapason and saw my photo in Joel Kuznik's article about the 2006 EROI Festival. I ought to make a list of the publications my photography has appeared in, because I've already lost track of who's published me so far. Not to say that I ever expect to make a cent off of the photos that get published. But there would be something badass about having a photographer's CV.

Today I sought to teach myself Adobe Illustrator. It worked out nicely. I especially enjoy the results of the "Save as PDF - Press" feature. But I will admit that my casual question to Paul, "I take it my pants have migrated elsewhere?" justly weirded Matt out and may indicate that I've had a long day, four hours of which were spent practicing in Schmitt Hall nonstop... until the ghosts of professors past started to object.

sudden dusk

It's remarkable how suddenly a white, snow-covered environment reveals and exaggerates the sudden transformation of the world to pink and purple hues just briefly before the onset of darkness. With my sheer white curtains from college up, I can keep those godawful blinds open and admire the world outside while enjoying my privacy Belgian-style. But in Belgium I hardly cared if someone would have looked in my window. In downtown Rochester it's a different matter.

All day the snow has been pouring down and blowing about as cars and snowplows battle in brief, human-length spurts with the world's patient steady gathering of feet of snow on the ground. The strength of the dusk's hues to color everything in sight reminds me of New Haven's orange skies. The only intense point of color beyond my window is the neon red sign for the "Chinese restaurant" across the street glowing hotly through the chill white flurry.

gasp for air

I will return to blogging. I swear. I just... need time to adjust to this semester's schedule. In the meantime, a photo I took over break.

And thank you for the item off my wish list. Unexpected but greatly appreciated. A good choice amongst many, and one that ultimately ties into a larger story.

To be continued...

scraps of the past

I took out my scrapbook to tape in some tickets from Europe, and decided for the first time in a long time to go back and look through the earliest pages. Flipping too far back, I discovered that the notebook had originally been one of the journals in which I was supposed to free-write at the beginning of some class during my freshman year of high school. The first entry read:

The heavens shrieked as angels fell, their power and goodness trickling into golden pools of blood until it spilled from their maimed wings. Some became human, elves, ogres, and all strove to retrieve the gold, hoarding and squabbling 'til the gods themselves were disgusted.

The sky broke open, pouring forth fury and tears. Clouds became windswept deserts and the stars dimmed and fell, setting heaven afire. The inferno raged over land and sea, neither [random God] could halt the fire's approach and destruction nor [random Goddess] cool its flames. Her ice melted, raining heartbroken shadows over the land, and for the first time Earth saw night.

I know I was a weird teenager. But this? What exactly prompted this? I'm a bit relieved to be too busy to read the rest of this notebook.

my contributions to Belgium

include being one of the over 200 million passengers who traveled by rail last year, setting a historic record, and wearing out the Brussels sewer system (only a tiny bit), which is going to take a century to replace.

an afternoon of art

I am awed. I am ashamed I'd never heard of him before. I am officially a fan of Anselm Kiefer. I caught Heaven and Earth at SFMOMA during its last weeks, and although I had to take in most of the paintings from the benches to rest my leg, the works were mostly of monumental enough size, savagery in stroke and texture, and power and yet complexity of message to reach me no matter where I was standing. Born in Germany in the final months of World War II, Kiefer fashions works that confront/question/challenge/reshape not only his country's psychological and spritual response to the war, but also raise existential questions about religion, redemption, recovery, and humanity's place in the cosmos. His massive paintings of deserted grandiose manmade spaces, apocalyptic landscapes and forests, and visions of hope and despair charge the viewing experience with emotion and questions. It is easy to ignore even brilliant art, but impossible to ignore his, tempting to believe the statement by a critic that he "melted a frozen curse on German civilization." His art is the work of a thinker and an introvert deeply philosophically involved with humanity, fascinated by the past and the future, heaven and earth, at once horrifying and beautiful.

Another unlikely memorable work was a film by British artist Phil Collins, dünya dinlemiyor ("the world won't listen"). Collins postered Istanbul calling the misfits, the disgruntled, anyone at all to perform karaoke covers of The Smiths songs for the camera. The entrance to the exhibit was plastered with these posters in all their variations, the only one in English blaring "KILL THE DJ." Watching these sincere, poignant, often painfully embarrassing performances, I had difficultly chosing a reaction -- should I feel closer to the Turkish after hearing them belt out these English songs by heart and discovering an unexpected cultural commonality, or should I be disturbed as usual by the cultural imperialism of the West?

Afterwards Doris took me out to dinner at an Indian restaurant and I took her out to dessert at the Canvas Gallery. It was wonderful to reconnect after two years and to share the turns our lives have taken. I'm starting to realize that, despite having been out of college for a year, I'm only now learning what it's like to be a graduate student, to connect and be able to talk about it, and to realize that in a sense, whether we're working in music or medicine, the challenges we face have a common thread. A study found that best friends tend to only stay best friends as long as they share similar problems. Chicken or the egg -- my friends and I continue to share problems even as those problems change. To ramble more, I'm struck by the balance my friends have found between pursuing crazy dreams around the globe and taking on serious long-term programs. So many are in doctoral programs already; everything that's happened is wonderful and puzzling and contradictory and logical.

Scanning through my Google alerts for "carillon," I got a surreal surprise from the following excerpt (having skipped over the headline, which contained important info): "They have also started advertising more in The Carillon, the U of R student newspaper. Judging by the first half of the season, it just might be working."

I wondered if at any time in the history of the universe I would have missed a student publication at the UR named after my obsession, but of course the article was about the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. Whew.