Finally, another calendar year crossed off! What happened to me in 2007? I already forget! What’s on deck for 2008? More of the same, plus one extra day! But tonight: Snow, heavy at times! Homemade super burritos, exploding Ontarian brut, stupid B&W rom-coms, double Dickels on the rocks — I never forget an Oola! Tomorrow will be 0m 44s longer! Fuck the international date line! We’ll tak a cup o kindness yet! Prosit!
December 2007
Friday piano geekery: Glenn Gould, in the last year of his life, captured on tape attempting to do a pianistic impression of Philip Glass? Weird!
This bizarre moment comes from Gould’s Brahms Ballades and Rhapsodies recording sessions in 1982; the studio tapes have been preserved in crummy monophonic audio quality (as streaming RealAudio files) on the Glenn Gould Archive’s audio page. At the end of the last tape of the Ballades sessions, Gould declares, “I think we are finished,” and then starts goofing around and playing some ebullient piano piece (I can’t identify it) in the styles of other pianists — he does Erroll Garner, Mitch Miller, and André Kostelanetz — for the entertainment of the studio tech guys. One of the engineers requests Ervin Nyiregyházi, a suggestion that Gould finds terribly funny and just laughs off. “I haven’t studied his style!” “I’ll send you a number of records.” “No no, I have them, that’s why I haven’t studied them!” (OH SNAP!)
Then the engineer says, “How about a minimalist version, à la Philip Glass?” — to which Gould lets out a hilarious nervous chuckle and stammers, “I don’t know if I can do that … that’s difficult.” He then does about twenty-five seconds of … something:
Cracks me up every time. (The RealAudio file of the whole 27:30 tape is here; the full stretch of impressions begins at 23:48; the Glass is at 25:56.)
Random connection I: Kevin Bazzana, author of the acclaimed 2004 Gould biography Wondrous Strange, came out with a biography of Ervin Nyiregyházi in 2007.
Random connection II: Gould’s Glass impression sounds (to me) oddly reminiscent of the Jean-Yves Thibaudet–performed piano piece by Dario Marianelli that opens the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie:
Sad to hear of Oscar Peterson’s death last weekend. (Terry Teachout has a good tribute to the man, his piano work, and his career.) By far my favorite jazz musician. Ardent jazz aficionado I ain’t, and my related musicianship extends only as far as the hackneyed ham-fisted jazz piano speed-noodling I played as a teenager with my high school jazz ensemble, but, at least for my middling level of jazz listenership, Peterson is the guy I most enjoy listening to, the most often. Many people consider the best Oscar Peterson Trio to be his piano/guitar/bass group, but I always went more for the piano/bass/drums setup, the one on the popular 1962 Night Train, one of my favorite recordings in any genre. The perfect organic combo sound, to my ears. No winds, no amps, no doubling up. Keys out front the whole time. A cooler sound, more rhythmic, all acoustic — a group that could perform if the power went out.
Last night when posting the La Rochefoucauld quote, up until the last minute I have late fifteenth century written down instead of late seventeenth century, making the old mistake of screwing up the offset between the year-hundreds and century ordinal. (La Roche’s Maxims were published circa 1665-1678.) This makes me think of Eddie Izzard’s idea that we ought to reset the century ordinal numbers to sync up with the centuries’ hundreds, so that once and for all we can eliminate the numbering confusion and just say sixteenth century when we want to refer to the 1600s. I like it.
La Rochefoucauld, late seventeenth century: The extreme enjoyment we find in talking about ourselves should make us fear we are not giving very much to our audience.
My brain doesn’t work this week. The Y pool is closed for a week and a half for its annual draining and deep-cleaning, thus no morning lap-swim, thus I don’t get my usual weekday pre-work endorphin re-up or whatever it is, thus I am stuck with a sort of sodden cotton wad where my gray matter should be, and an Xmas-food-flabbed physique turning slowly into solid cookie dough, etc., sitting here in dry-dock until the damn downtown ghetto-ass natatorium opens the fuck back up and I can go back to exhausting my mind and body back into usefulness before oh-nine-hundred like usual. What it is is every day now feels like Wednesday. Wednesday. Wednesday is my Bye day — the normal regimen is I try to swim Mon, Tue, Thu, and Fri, with Wed as my mid-week break day, the day I voluntarily opt to feel cotton-wadded and cookie-doughed all day for the sake of letting my pathetic musculatures take a breather. I already did like two and a half weeks of Wednesdays a few weeks ago, when I fell ill the week after Yanksgiving and then the instant I got better the pool blew a pump and took an unscheduled week-long shutdown, during which of course no draining or deep-cleaning could be bothered with. Did I always feel this bad before I started swimming? Will I always when I don’t? Does everyone who doesn’t work out in the mornings feel like this? Woe to the whole god damned human race if so.
Matthea Harvey: The swallows formed subtitles for the clouds.
Guillermo del Toro might direct the Hobbit films for Peter Jackson?! From Entertainment Weekly’s Hollywood Insider yesterday:
MISSY SCHWARTZ The idea of you and Peter Jackson working together is enough to make every geek’s head explode.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO It would make my head explode!
Reader advisory: The aforementioned graphic novel The Arrival is not to be confused with the execrable 1996 sci-fi flick The Arrival, in which a straight-faced Charlie Sheen utters the mystifying, deathless line: I look like a can of smashed assholes.
I find I must add my voice to the choruses of acclaim for Shaun Tan’s wordless graphic novel The Arrival, which I buy in October on the strength of New York magazine’s eight-page preview of it. A great book. Masterful art and design work, these surreal and otherworldly scenes illustrated in monochromatic soft pencil (reminding me of Chris Van Allsburg plus M.C. Escher plus La Jetée plus the Codex Seraphinianus). And I’m moved by the story, in which a youngish father immigrates to a bustling foreign land to begin a new life for himself and his waiting family, all the while being bewildered and awed by his strange surroundings (making me wonder what similar things my various great-grandparents must’ve experienced when immigrating to the U.S. from their less hospitable points of origin). But of course what also impresses me is that the book is fantastic weather-writing! Excellent weather. Tan even lets the weather take center stage to do some of the narrative work. In the photos above and below (no way am I flattening this book open on the scanner): one big cloud, sixty small clouds, and the seasons in twenty-four steps.
More at Tan’s website, and at selfdivider. Also: I love the veiled incredulity (or perhaps indignation?) in the headline Book without words wins Premier’s literary prize.
Film-geek/lit-geek awesomeness: Slate’s movie critic Dana Stevens writes her review of Beowulf in Old-English-style alliterative verse. (Albeit sans caesurae, mostly.)
Lo! Let this humble scribe unlock her word-hoard
To tell of great Zemeckis, he of Gump
And Contact, Back to th’ Future, Cast Away.
He, stone-romancer, framer of Roger Rabbit,
Hollywood myth-molder, box-office bard.
In the antepenultimate stanza she refers to Beowulf as “The ’Wulf”. Great minds!
Also: I like that she quotes Ogden Nash while discussing Daniel Craig naked:
… Daniel Craig’s body is truly something to behold. He’s ripped without being the least bit muscle-bound and possessed of a coiled, catlike grace that’s atypical for an action star. Like Uma Thurman, he’s somehow athletic and delicate at the same time. Craig’s naked body, which is partly, if not fully, on view in virtually every movie he’s made, puts me in mind of a great couplet from Ogden Nash: “Should you behold a panther crouch/ Prepare to say ouch.”
Out to dinner a few nights ago, our jovial, batty, materteral waitress seems to confuse me with a previous customer and keeps jokingly calling me The Future Prime Minister of Canada. We smile sportingly along with her, but we have no idea what she means. Don’t you have to have been born in Canada? I’m not even a citizen here. Is she making fun of my overcoat? Do I look like a protester-choker?
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Jack Frost nipping at your nose
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
And folks dressed up like Axl Rose
