TMcG

As linked by sleigh and fastfwd (that I've seen so far), Pearls Before Breakfast by Gene Weingarten, an interesting and very nicely written Washington Post article about an experiment setting up a virtuoso musician as a subway busker to see what kind of response there'd be from passersby. Includes video.

Because it has mildly interesting charting features and will stream recommendations I can listen to when I'm roaming with my notebook, I signed up with last.fm and plugged their Audioscrobbler into Windows Media Player. To give it the beginnings of a sense of what I listen to, I set WMP to play a shuffled playlist of the Irish traditional music I have in mp3 format. That means the albums and stray tracks I've downloaded from emusic, and a handful of CDs I ripped so that I could listen to them on my mp3 player. It took twenty-three hours to play through the entire list. Given how vastly much more Irish traditional music I have on CDs than I do in mp3 files, and given that Irish traditional is maybe an eighth of the music (LPs, cassettes, and CDs) in this house, that's a bit boggling.

Yeah, I kinda gafiated for a while there. Not sure if the gafiation is completely over, but hey, it's been spring for almost two hours now and I've been nudged, so I'm poking my head up and peering around a little.

ogre_san, I haven't forgotten that I owe you email with an attachment. :)

stevendj, I haven't forgotten that I owe you a phone call. :)

We had a fun and busy St. Patrick's Season (usually it's a week; this year we had gigs over two weeks, including all three weekends). My spring resolutions are to get my banjo repaired, get my piano moved from the place it's temporarily occupied since 1987 to the place I live now, and acquire a flute that likes me better than my last one did; a bouzouki that doesn't give me carpal-tunnelish pains to play would be nice too, but may take a little longer.

I'll be at I-Con this weekend (I'll post my programming schedule in a minute), and I'll be back in chat (finally!) on Thursday night.

Hope everyone's been well.

Been swamped with work the past ten days, but I did get in to see the Roundabout's revival of Pacific Overtures at Studio 54. (I never made it to Studio 54 in its disco heyday. The first time I was there, in the nineties, it was a strip joint. It makes a really cool Broadway theatre, cocktail tables and working bar and all.) The show was fantastic; anyone who can get there before its limited engagement ends (Jan 30) should do so. I got discount tickets through WBAI. (Which by the way is a great deal: You make a donation to the listener-supported station during David Rothenberg's show on Saturday morning, the station gets money, you get decent, affordable seats, the house gets warm bodies.)

I'd experienced Pacific Overtures only through audio recordings, and since the last time I listened to it I've become a Kurosawa devotee, learned some Japanese, and read a lot about samurai and Japanese history, so the show came alive for me on several levels. I was impressed by the pit band and by how tight the production was musically (wind/strings/synthesizer/etc. on one side with the conductor, percussion on the other side, conductor with his back to both percussion and stage). I loved the fact that Alvin Y. F. Ing had been an original cast member and reprised "Chrysanthemum Tea" for this production. "Someone in a Tree" was nearly a showstopper; at the end of it I heard grunts of awe from the people sitting around me, an inarticulate wow that applause couldn't convey. The updating was masterly, and the finale gave me chills.

The last musical I saw was an updated production of The Frogs at Lincoln Center (with stevendj), which was also terrific--and also, very consciously, politically timely. Hmm. I could get used to a steady diet of live Sondheim.

I'm off for another week, to the Catskills Irish Week this time, for flute classes and set dancing and sessions. Back next weekend sometime, depending on whether we get crash space after our bungalow rental runs out.

Rick Springfield is remarkably well preserved.

I know this because a DJ on WPLJ a couple of weeks ago played "Jesse's Girl" (which has inexplicably, unless one figures music-corporation payoffs, come back into the illusory popularity that's really the self-fulfilling hype of commercial radio stations) and said that Springfield would be making an appearance on a late-night talk show I'd never heard of (which isn't saying much). I actually made an effort to watch this--did a Web search, found out when the show was on, tuned in.

Dude. He looks great. A little too slick as an entertainer--you can see the gears working behind his eyes, give smoldering look to this camera, throw head back on this note in practiced simulation of suggested orgasm--and without quite the vocal range he had before, but still a very nice, lean package.

So, I'm outted. Still have a little crush on him, mumble mumble years after high school. Still like his music, which is mostly bubblegum (hey, I like bubblegum, in the right flavors) but sometimes delves some deeper lyric places. It took me till just a few years ago to admit that I'm a huge fan of Billy Joel, and I'm still doing penance for disavowing any knowledge of the band Foreigner when a friend claimed to be playing one of their albums for me at a party attended by people I did not want to admit my secret musical vices to (leaving her the sole recipient of the group's scorn, a profound betrayal on my part). So maybe there will be some catharsis in admitting that I have three of Springfield's albums on the CD jukebox in my office, which suggests that yes, I did actually go out and acquire them with intent aforethought. And that I think "It's Always Something," on the CD Karma, is a terrific song. Dings a nerve in me, anyway:

When I was a kid the teachers and the priests said,
Why you let him run around like that?
My father said, If the boy wants to play the guitar, I say we let him.
Through the hard years he was my rock
When I just could not win
So it goes y'know my father died
Just before my leaky ship came in....


--Rick Springfield, "It's Always Something"

Camus said "Crushing truths perish when acknowledged." (That's how I remembered the quote, anyway. Here's a different translation.) Probably doesn't apply to crushes. Guess I'll hit Post and find out.

The News and the Post both ran articles this week about Irish seisiun life around New York City, and sent photographers to Dempsey's, which used to be my regular session. The Post's Website is resisting my efforts to find a direct link that works, but here's the piece from the News: A Wee Bit o' Fun: This week everybody's Irish, and New York has the music to prove it. I'm psyched that the session, and the other ones mentioned, finally got some press in the major tabloids.

If I had a time machine, or a past viewer, I would use it to go back and see Patrick Hamilton's Angel Street at the John Golden Theatre in New York in 1941. Opening night, and then closing night, because there might have been some fun closing-night tricks. When my dad played Inspector Rough in a summer-stock production of the play, the stagehands substituted a dead fish for the brooch that is rather climactically found in a locked drawer. I'd like to have seen what he made of that. In fact, I think I'd use my time machine to go back and see all the plays my dad was in. Then I'd go see Angel Street on Broadway. And everything Alfred Drake was ever in. And Mary Martin. And all the musicals I grew up listening to the original Broadway cast albums of. And then I'd get started on Shakespeare.

I don't have a time machine or a past viewer, but I have a video of the 1940 film Gaslight. Which is the next best thing. I just reread the play, and now can watch the movie. Thanks, stevendj.

Okay, I just saw a teeth-whitening-stuff commercial in which a woman is dreaming that she's dancing in a Riverdance-like line of Irish stepdancers, all of whom are dressed in white silk, and all of whom are William Shatner.

Not even I could have hallucinated something like that.

( irrelevant musical note )