Beff's semester finishes today, and she is due home after dark tonight. Tomorrow night we take Big Mike out for Chinese buffet
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| Oh, I have another reason these times have gone slowly. Suddenly I was deluged with requests for letters, many of them job-related, and I am usually pretty quick with those things. And the mondo-Guggenheim letter pile has yet to materialize, alas. So those letter-requesters who may be reading this: of the last 100 or so letters I've written that require me mailing something to somewhere, precisely two have had postage paid by the requesters. For those of you playing along at home, that's $41.18 of my own money spent on other peoples' packages. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's less than a bottle of 1999 Brunello.
So more with triads coming up in Fundamentals -- Roman numerals in 4-part writing, etc. -- and it's the chorale writing unit in Theory 2, which is, I fear, very tedious to teach and tediouser still to grade. Well, it was either chorale writing or species counterpoint in 3 parts, and that leads to addiction, I fear. So again -- my personal signpost for the future is Thanksgiving, Hayes, Susan. Turkey, pie, and sitting on a couch. Well, and the BMOP concert a week from Friday with Marty Boykan's violin concerto. This week's pix start with the cats -- Cammy checking out the back yard (note the former apple tree) and Sunny checking out a sleeping bag. Followed by Summer Hill viewed from the front door, foliage in the context of the gazebo top, and two shots toward the usually brown oak tree. Bye. NOVEMBER 16. Breakfast was bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches with home fries, blackberries,orange juice, and coffee. Lunch was tomato, pickle and pepperoncini sandwiches with cheese. Dinner last night was salmon with sun-dried tomato aioli, garlic mash, and asparagus. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 23.2 and 67.3. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS It's a Long Way to Tipperary. LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS BMOP ticket $52, parking $34, new sneakers $64. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: In my junior year in high school, we did a band and chorus exchange with a high school in Scarborough, Ontario. There was no choral arrangement of the Canadian national anthem available, so Mrs. Costes, the director, charged me with doing one. I had just kinda figured out secondary dominants, so I did the unthinkable near the end: for "O Canada, Glorious and Free", where the last syllable of "Canada" is sustained, I instead had the note move, mid-syllable, up a half step to fit in the secondary dominant. We actually sang it that way, and nobody hated us. And I got very slightly tingly. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: While we were raking last weekend, I tossed a small stone into a stand of pine trees so I wouldn't have to rake it, and Sunny chased after it, got excited, and ran up one of the pine trees about 13 or 14 feet. He couldn't get down, so of course, we had to get the ladder out to bring him down. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Performances. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: shimastu -- an old colloquiual expression from southern Portugal that, as far as anyone can tell, meant repeat three times and spin. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 11. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE There are always at least five different brands or kinds of dill pickles in the house. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Serial music replaces punk at clubs, and atonal composers pierce their noses de rigeur. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 12,630. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $2.09 in Maynard at Jimmy's Garage yesterday. OTHER INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE So long, fucker. Immediately, or so they say, the tent that we had been folding, spoke and revealed a truth about its inner kneecap. The twelve of us (ten, if you count in Burmese) couldn't make syrup without our spoons because they told us a stone had to be thrown toward the capital of Post-Its. Bummer. So when we tried to color in the tooth mark, the nozzle came after us and made us think of things to turn upside down. On that day, my face was red enough to turn all of Manhattan into a flower box. I'm not lying. The big news of the last two weeks, and of course the biggest news in about seven years happened during this reporting period, and I'm sure our gentle readers know that to which I refer. I voted at the appointed place and time on Election Day, having voted for a Presidential winner for the first time since 1996, the winning Massachusetts state senator (ironically also the losing last president I voted for), and I voted with the mob on the three ballot initiatives. Being a dyed-in-the-wool liberal and having been incredibly offended by the robocall and guilt-by-association horse manure slopped at us by the red people, I nonetheless have been conditioned to expect Democrats to lose because ... well, it's what happens. But finally good things happened, and I got caught up in the history and emotion of the moment just as much as anyone else. And now --- when I see commentators on television remarking at what a great president we currently have, I no longer feel the impulse to yell at the screen and throw spareribs at it (especially since that would mean going out and doing a shop). And that's a good thing. And I'm pleased to know for certain that Africa is a continent -- sorry Sarah, it's one of the OTHER A-continents, Australia, that is both a continent and a country. You'll get the home version of our game. Even with all that political stuff going on, strangely enough, I did my job spantorifically, and of course, in spare time, raked leaves. The week of the election featured a homework due from Fundamentals that was kind of an apotheosis of triad, key and function together, and of course that meant the process of grading it -- 50 of them -- was about as soul-sucking a task I ever get in the academic year. Chairmanship being the only thing that is more egregious in that regard. Grading became a bit like that for Theory 2 as well, but there are a lot fewer in that class. And in the spare time, yes, there was raking, whenever possible. I noticed that when both Beff and I rake and barrel and discard that it goes almost exactly twice as fast. And I hate it when I rake an area clean and it gets schmutzy with new issue so quickly -- as happened in the oak tree area in back of the garage, of course. So this (strangely mild) weekend I had mostly redundant raking to do, with far greater bits of yard to rake to get similar volume of leaves to discard, and ... yesterday, finally, we both decided the year's raking had been finished. Grand total: 116 barrels, a new record. So the "I can't come to your concert because I have to rake leaves" excuse has expired. Here I come, world! The other two EOUS's (events of unusual size) in this reporting period involved public performances, one of them also involving parking and eating out. So first with the one that was farther west. The Brandeis student theater collective (which is big enough to have "timpanium" in its name) just put on a run of the musical Gypsy -- sorry, I'm not historical musicals guy, but I did suspect the music was by Julie Styne (both names five letters) and Beff correctly placed the lyicist as Stephen Sondheim (who was hired because his name almost rhymed with Styne). Plenty of music students had roles in the production, including on stage, in tech, or in the pit band -- and I had managed to loan the students involved a train whistle, a bird whistle, and a slide whistle. It's none of your business, dear reader, why I have one of each. I had also been asked by the director to do a cameo on one show of the multi-show run of Mr. Goldstone, a booking agent who gets food thrown at him on stage and has no lines. And that I did. Scott Edmiston and the guy who works in the post office in Usdan were other specimens of Mr. Goldstone, and I was only onstage for about 3 minutes. I wore some fake coke-bottle glasses and did my best mugging, and that performance was just a few hours before this posting. So there was a Wednesday night runthrough for all the Goldstones, and today's performance. I have served. One of the interesting details was that a ping-pong ball painted orange was called a kumquat and placed in my mouth. Which means if I'm ever on Jeopardy and the answer comes up, in the "Fruit" category, "It's a song in a musical that mentions a kumquat", I'll know to say "What is 'Have an egg roll Mr. Goldstone' from Gypsy?" Granted, if I were not actually on Jeopardy, I would never ask that question out of the blue. Indeed, watch: What is "Have an egg roll Mr. Goldstone" from Gypsy? My immediate answer would be "forty-two". Another concert of great import was the season-starting concert by BMOP in Jordan Hall Friday night. It was the string concertos concert (last season began with the keyboard concertos concert, including one by me, and the only one by me, which is what I have written and what it is, too). I went in early for the dress rehearsal of Marty Boykan's violin concerto (world premiere!) with Curt Macomber as soloist (world class!), and alas because of simul-event going on at Symphony Hall (I think they call it the Boston Symphony), my usual parking venues were chock full (chalk full?). Which meant an aimless bit of driving looking for onstreet stuff, and I settled on the Church Park cylinder, next to where I lived in 1977-79. The piece sounded really good, though a little muddled because of so much low stuff and the wood stage, and afterwards I re-parked to be close -- because spots opened up. And I had a lunch at Conor Larkin's (buffalo wings and salad), did the walkin' around a lot thing, and did dinner at Pizzeria Uno (small plain pan pizza). Then was the event itself, and that even included Ken's viola concerto -- the one that starts with a scream (as every piece should) -- which did its noodling around on the partials of C in a nice way. Marty's concerto sounded much, much better from the balcony, which is why it's a good thing I was in the balcony to hear it and report to you, dear reader, that Marty's concerto sounded much, much better from the balcony. When it was finished, home I came, to find Beff, who had arrived from Maine in the interim. "Mfflmmzgp" we said to each other, and retired. To bed, that is. We're way too young (and WAY too pretty) to retire, silly. Yesterday morning I raked some edge schmutz after our breakfast, and then we went to a gathering Marty was having at his actual house in Watertown -- a rather long drive through some really dumb bottlenecks from us. But it was worth it, because I got to eat cucumbers. And bagels. And cream cheese. And tomatoes. Curt was there, along with lots of other droppable names -- Eric Chasalow, Yu-Hui, Scott Wheeler, Curt hisself, Eleanor Corey, Joel Gressel, and I must have mentioned the cucumbers. When we got back, after another interminably long drive through stupid bottlenecks, I finished the edging and raking just before the rain began, and Beff voided the house of dirt and cat hair, using her funny "vacuum" thing. Really. I am still using the much-closer-than-it-was-two-weeks-ago phenomenon called Thanksgiving as a marker, and Seunghee will be staying here that time to take care of the cats. After Thanksgiving, well, everything else is just a light. Unless it's not. Unless it is. And of course we will be staying with Hayes and Susan, and I asked what we should bring (it's usually pie), and the response: wine and cheese. So much wine and cheese is ready to go, woo hoo, and what it is, too. Other stuff coming up: Ken's colloquium Thursday followed by wings somewheres. Thanksgiving. Then just a week and a half of classes after that. The semester is passing fast again, thanks to our newly all-raked leaves. Now that's a change for the better. This week's pictures: first, the long shot of the oak tree that was bright orange in the last update, now barren -- followed by a partial shot of the leaf discard area -- that's about three feet deep there. Then we have Sunny stuck in the tree, and the cats enjoying a look at the out of doors from the downstairs half-bath. Bye. NOVEMBER 30. Breakfast was pancakes with real maple syrup, orange juice, and coffee. Lunch was a big salad with an Italian dressing mixed in with a spicy dumpling dipping sauce, and 4 slices of sorpressa sausage. Dinner last night was a big salad with an Italian dressing mixed in with a spicy dumpling dipping sauce, and lemongrass chicken dumplings with a spicy dumpling dipping sauce. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 17.1 and 51.4. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS The beginning of Rachel's musical (I am wearing the t-shirt) LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS pickles ordered online from Picklelicious.com $79. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: In my junior and senior years of high school, I took my lunch money and instead of going to lunch in my lunch period, I went to the band room and hung out. Usually, I practiced the rather challenging piano part to a Dello Joio piece for piano and chorus -- some of it was in 5/8, f'gosh sake! After much practicing, I was ready to accompany the chorus in rehearsal -- which had once read through some of it two months or so earlier. When in rehearsal the chorus obviously didn't remember anything, Mrs. Costes (choral director) decided not to go on with it. As to my lunch money, it mostly went for candy, and the Gradus theory text by Leo Kraft. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: Sunny went out this morning and when he came in he was carrying a bird. Well, okay, not cute -- troublesome. Beff and I got the bird -- and Sunny -- back out within 4 or 5 minutes. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Performances, Bio. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: crimalcigon, another ancient Castillian word having to do with soap, sand, lizards, and sticks in a combination that has been lost to history. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 9. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I and my siblings all have two middle names. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: pointy shoes are against the law, but just barely. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 12,668. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $1.85 in Maynard, $2.37 on the Merritt Parkway. SUGGESTIONS FOR A NEW FEATURE HERE things you lick, things you don't lick, funny-looking coins of the world, animals that act like humans but there's a catch! [your suggestion here]. For about an hour we looked into despair and found a lawnmower chain. It was trying to explain how its fifth leg was really its fourteenth eye when suddenly we heard the grin of an empty chair taking its time with its mojo, and of course that meant we had to vacate the spoon. When the twelfth thing happened, the chiming of the silence was deafening, so we manufactured a run by bunting, sliding, and overreaching. At that point all the punctuation was upside down, after which we rolled our eyes and defeated in every direction at once. Some people call today the cusp of December, and I think that's got way too many consecutive unvoiced consonants at the end, so I'll just say we're on the verge of December. I like silent vowels much more than unvoiced consonants. Those of you onlooking and having a sense of history may realize that my concluding regular feature of the first paragraph (can I write, or what?) has gone the way of the Passenger Pigeon and Sarah Palin's syntax, and you, dear reader, may suggest another one. I will list said suggestions up there until I latch onto one, unless I don't. As to the previous feature, apparently almost five years running, thanks to Jim Ricci, I've been able to cull a historically accurate history of my BETTER PRESIDENT features and complile it into a file -- for the next two updates and the next two updates only, you will be able to read or download that collection by clicking on the light blue "Presidential Archive" link below. In the meantime, plenty of import has happened since the last update, and I deny it all. James Conlon came to Brandeis for a day of talks and speeches, and one such thing was scheduled during my Theory 2 class -- so the whole class went. It was a 2-hour question and answer session about his personal and musical history, and the entire 2 hours were spent answering 4 questions. The logical branching was complicated, and yet it always returned home. Of even more import to the student, and to me, was losing a class, thus reducing the homework for the term by one, and reducing the homeworks for me to grade by twelve. Note to self: find more ways to do this. In Fundamentals, we moved through seventh chords and inversions back to lead sheets, more kinds of chords, more complicated chords, and making piano realizations of lead sheets -- the number of handouts related to this activity was, as they say, legion, and I really want to k now who "they" is. Isn't it fun to end a sentence "who they is"? In preparation for explaining the turnaround in pop songs and in jazz, I explained the cycle of fourths vs. the circle of fifths (or, 7 does not equal 12), explained a bit about harmonic sequence that comes out of the cycle of fourths, and for an example played "I Will Survive". The number of students who could sing along, and sing along accurately, was scandalously high. Brandeis is retro-hip, who woulda thunkit? Coming up, it's more complicated chords, jazz chords, the turnaround, and everybody's favorite, the tritone substitution. I wonder how many other liberal arts schools teach the tritone substition in the first semester of Fundamentals of Music. Needless to say, grading for Fundamentals and theory 2 -- especially now that Theory 2 is doing chorale harmonizations and I actually care how to get them to make it sound right -- has become a bit more soul-sucking than is normal. To wit, I have devised DAVY'S GRADING FACTOR (DGF), which is a variable constant currently set at 3.8. Multiply the number of hours spent grading by DGF for the number of hours it feels like you have spent grading; or, conversely, divide the number of hours you feel like you've spent grading to get the actual number of hours spent. So today, Sunday -- alas, I postponed the weekend's grading until today when I could have not done so -- it feels like I spent 8.5 hours grading. Thanks to DGFI know I spent 2.2368 "real" hours grading. It should be noted here that DGF is not a real constant -- it shifts depending on the specific grading task. Fundamentals Homework 10 gives a factor of 4.5, but species counterpoint averages around 2.5. The take-home finals for Fundamentals DGF is usually about 3, and the final analytical papers for Theory 2 DGF is, strangely, 1. Among other things, people e-mailed me and I e-mailed some of them back. I went to meetings and then came home. I accepted a commission from the California Music Teachers Association to write some intermediate level piano 4-hands music which will also involve me flying to LA in July 2010 for the premiere(s). I wrote grad school letters and a few job letters. And the Guggenheim letter pile arrived, about two weeks later than usual, but at least beginning this year I can submit those letters online rather than sign the various forms, decouple them from the project descriptions, write "see attached letter" on all the forms, and oh yes, write and print the letters. AND ... I accomplished my fifth service of the (calendar) year as an outside evaluator for an academic promotion. That last service is excruciatingly tiring, very time-consuming, and very, very much worth it. Beff's Maynard weekend was nonexistent last weekend, since UMaine sent her to Seattle for about 36 hours to make an appearance at a convocation of music department chairs. I celebrated by jumping sideways, once. And staying inside because it was about 20 degrees below average. I also bought a whole bunch of firewood and used some. And then, and then ... Thanksgiving weekend is in the middle (or actually on the side) of happening, and boy did we have great plans. Beff got in Tuesday night and we had swordfish puttanesca which I made and what it is, too. Then on Wednesday morning Seunghee trained in to be the catsitter from Wednesday to Saturday, and after getting her food at Stop and Shop and 'splainin' some stuff, we drove to Bronxville (three hours, fifteen minutes, including two stops) for Thanksgiving with Hayes and Susan. We got there a little faster than planned, and Hayes was at home to let us in, and immediately we walked downtown (a 12 minute walk) for a light lunch at Haiku restaurant --where we got beer and appetizers. Or, alphabetically, appetizers and beer. And soup. And then we lounged. Susan got back from work around 5:30, we lounged, and then got takeout pizza, frolicked with Fritz and Rasia (the cats) and the next thing we knew we were asleep. Well, we weren't knowing, but there you go. For Thanksgiving day, Susan did almost all the food stuff (my only tasks were to peel the squash and make the gravy lumpy), and in late morning we walked to the Bronxville A&P for some last minute provisions -- I got myself a bunch of various olivy stuff, and it didn't suck. Thanksgiving dinner was served at a civilized time, and eat we did. We had brought wine and cheese (very expensive cheese from Whole Paycheck, I might add), and it was tremendous. To decompress we watched a DVD of Persepolis, which actually took an entire hour and twenty minutes before I exclaimed, "I am incredibly bored!". Because, you see, it was, how you say in your language ... incredibly boring. It was rescued somewhat by the network broadcast of The Incredibles, which provides me with one of my favorite taglines that I transpose to reference syncopation in tonal writing -- When Everything Is Syncopated .... NOTHING Is Syncopated! But I digress. And well I should. And the third thing we knew, we were in bed. As for Friday, HayesAndSusan had incredible goodness waiting for us. They decided we should hike in the Teatown Lake Reservation to their north about a half hour on the Sawmill, then Taconic, Parkway, followed by a free beer tasting at the Captain Lawrence Brewery in Pleasantville. I had assumed that the beer tasting would be at a brewpub, but it turns out it's just a teeny room with a tap attached to the actual brewery, so no dinner was to be had there. So ... up to the reservation we went, choosing the Hidden Valley trail. And it we huck. After which back we came and looked a little at the duck blind structure, got a few things at the gift shop, and moseyed on down to Pleasantville. I turned the GPS program on my phone on for driving directions, and they turned out to be right -- though it had a tendency once or twice not to be able to update the GPS for a mile's worth of driving. We were in Pleasantville far enough in advance of the brewery's opening (at 4) that we had lunch at the "world famous" Pleasantville Diner, of which we were hearing for the first time. The cool thing about the GPS program is that it also can search for things to do and places to eat based on your location. I keyed in "restaurants" and the first entry encountered was "Starbucks, 0.0 miles", which was synchronous with Beff saying "Hmm. Starbucks". The next entry was "Pleasantville Diner, 0.0 miles", which I read exactly as Susan said, "well, there's the Pleasantville Diner." Which made me a great burger, and Buffalo wings that registered a 2 out of 10 on DBWFS (Davy's Buffalo Wing Funkability Scale). In any case. While in the diner, we also checked the web on my phone for the Prospero Winery, which was right next door to the brewery. Susan bought a bottle of red wine there, then we had our free beer (the pale ale and spicy hefeweizen were tremendous), and back home we came. To a big salad, and some Prospero red wine. And we watched three episodes of "What Not to Wear", which meant a whole three hours before I finally up and exclaimed, "Make it stop!" Meantime, Seunghee e-mailed -- on Facebook, why? -- to let us know that Sunny had barfed once, and that she'd used up all our firelogs in the fireplace. Which is fine, since we can get more. We know where to get them, and how to pay for them, and where to pay for them. We drove back in the morning, did a buttload of laundry, did some busy work, and I made the dinner that registers above. Today it is coldish again, and a storm with snow showers changing to semi-heavy rain is starting to move through. Beff and I took a morning walk and she left for Maine early to beat the storm, and then I did my 8.5 hours of grading. And now I am typing my update, but that won't be the case by the time you read this, dear reader. Download 2.79 Mb. Share with your friends:
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