Greg's London Ramblings

A Final Post, on the occasion of the anniversary of the July 7 bombings

2006-07-08T03:57:00.000+01:00

For the past six months I've been meaning to write something here -- a final posting, something with a sense of finality, something to sum up my experience in London, and acknowledge how it changed me. Clearly, this was too hard a task. First it seemed too soon, and then it seemed too late (and I haven't exactly been displaying the ability to write anything at all recently, to tell the truth.)

The July 7 anniversary seemed like a nice, non-arbitrary occasion to take the plunge. Because July 7 really did mark a turning point for me. It marks the moment that I began to feel like a Londoner.

I mentioned in my post about the bombings that what really got me, what made me clutch myself in fear, was the image of the bus with the roof blown off. I didn't relate, though, the time I actually cried in public: it was a week later, when I saw, near Russell Square, a poster advertising the New Issue of Time Out London, a while field with large black letters: "OUR CITY." (That magazine cover is now posted behind my desk.) It was not clear at the time -- and remains a bit unclear -- why this made me cry. And, honestly, when we're dealing with an event of faces blown off and mangled limbs, it probably would have been best to just pull myself together and repeat R—'s always-relevant mantra "It's not about you".

And yet, in the very smallest of ways, it was about me, inasmuch as it was about everyone who called London home. Of course, by July of 2005 the process of coming to feel at home in London was gradually progressing. I had met R— on May 21, B— on June 11, my dinner party on June 18, and (perhaps most importantly) my first Londonist post went up June 21. (My first post was about Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's upcoming London performance, which I missed, and now she is gone, far far too soon.)

My reaction to the July bombings says something about me, but it also says something about London. A phrase that I've been using a lot to describe my feelings about the city is "genuinely cosmopolitan." Unlike many American academics who come to Britain, I have no affective bond to the England or Englishness. But I was drawn to my sense that London really was, in certain way, in certain places, among certain people, a space beyond nationality. A place that a foreigner can feel at home without a radical identity transplant.

There are many caveats to be made, and obviously cosmopolitanism is a luxury only open to the few. And yet... the sense of living "in the world" in London isn't a simple matter of interacting with immigrants on a daily basis or having the choice of a lot of different restaurants. The sense I'm trying to get out has more to do with the news media: the British newspapers and broadcasters have many, many problems, but compared to news outlets in the US... well, there is no comparison. Consider that the newspapers the people actually read in London (let's leave out the tabs and the Standard) aren't "London" papers at all. The London papers are the national papers, and the national papers are international in remit and outlook. And the global outlook in the papers filters down to a more global vocabulary in (for lack of a better term) the public sphere. (Yeah, I know, poor choice of phrase; bear with me.)

So in returning to San Francisco from London I didn't just move from a city of seven million to a city of three-quarters of a million. As much as I love the Queen City by the Bay -- and I do -- it feels so much smaller in the mind.

It's funny, all the little things that annoyed me in London when I first arrived were pretty much still bugging me when I left. Being misunderstood, having to repeat and repeat and repeat myself, the officiousness, the "Oh you're American?"... I doubt I would ever really get over this were I to live in London longer. As I think I implied in very early posts on this blog, my first impulse, in any foreign situation is not to confront and interact, but rather to become invisible.

But Philip Larkin, in the poem "The Importance of Elsewhere," observes how comfortable being a stranger can be. The poem end with his having returned home, as I have, and observing

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence

I'll be back to London one day. I need to get back to London.

This blog is now really, officially, over.

Yet More Photos!

2006-02-05T19:50:00.000Z

Algebra Grafitto
Originally uploaded by gwdexter.

Click on the picture, and get swept away in the photostream. Prepare yourself for:

• Politcally dubious Victorian buildings!
• Jil Sander white shoes!
• Waterfowl under football grafitti!
• Literary cheeseburgers!

PS - If you're wondering, I'm still homeless in SF. It's getting old.

Pictures! Pictures! Pictures!

2006-01-17T06:44:00.000Z

So, I've been meaning to post more picutres since... well, since I last did it, which was, what? 10 months ago?

When you let 10 months go by, you do tend to collect a lot of pictures. Unfortunately, flickr has a monthly upload bandwidth quota if you have a free account. And since I want to post large-sized versions of my pictures, that means I hit the quota pretty fast. (I wouldn't have hit it quite so fast, except my first batch I downloaded as super-extra-large files, which ate up more than their fair share.)

In any case, next month I'll post another batch of the remaining London photos. And, who knows, maybe some Seattle photos. Although by that point, this blog won't exist anymore.

You can click on the picture at right—not a good picture, but the text of the signs amuses me—which will take you to my "photostream." Also, you can link straight to some collections:

My House and Wood Green
My Jogging Route
Excursions

...although there also photos which aren't in any collection. (Another thing you're prevented from doing if you have a free Flickr account is create more than three collections.) If you're really pressed for time, this is the single best photograph I took in the UK.

A short list of things in Seattle which remind me of London

2006-01-07T01:09:00.000Z

[Pictures to be added later, if I get around to it, which I probably won't]

1. The Coliseum. Alas, not the home of opera in English, but rather an old movie palace, which has been converted into a very large Banana Republic.

2. The Paul Smith section of the Seattle branch of Barney's. (On an unrelated note, how is it that Seattle gets a Barney's before SF does? Isn't that a little odd?)

3. A British Affaire. Allow me to quote the website, which appears to be down at the moment: "Foods, Teas and Fine China from Great Britain For the Little Bit O'Brit in All of Us." It is in the same mall as Barney's. It sells HP sauce. And salad cream.

4. The Elephant and Castle Pub. They sell "the Welsh Burger." Are they aware of the area of London they are named after? One suspects not.

EDIT: 5. The steel and glass canopy that covers part of Pike Street by the Convention Center looks, from certain angles, like Canary Wharf DLR station.

It has happened twice now

2005-12-28T23:24:00.000Z

Okay, so my first full day here in Seattle I decide to go wandering around familiar places. And I walk into my favorite Seattle coffee house (which, incidentally, is near the school I attended when I was 14, although it didn't exist then), and what do I hear, but the voice Rachel Stevens, critically lauded British pop star, formerly of S-Club-7. This is exactly the music I thought I would never hear again -- Rachel isn't even listed as an artist in the US version of iTunes, even though if you switch to UK iTunes there are a half-dozen albums. The coffee house is just playing the whole album, while the (apparently American) barista was explaining to cashier why she was so great (which she is). A coincidence of timing, but it seemed significant.

Then today, I popped into a vintage store on Broadway (vintage stores here are so much better). And the store is playing, again as an entire album, "Different Class" by Pulp. I mean, I guess people in the US listen to this album (I know you do, BQ) -- but you certainly can't count on hearing "Disco 2000" every single time you go out in the US like you can in London.

So it goes.

Not Quite the End Yet

2005-12-28T02:46:00.000Z

I have arrived safely in the United States. This means that I am now jolted awake by Morning Edition, rather than by The Today Programme. Morning Edition is very, very different from the Today Programme. And not necessarily worse. But not exactly better either.

And thus Greg's London Ramblings begins to draw to a close. There will be a few more entries, however, with pictures, an account of my leave-taking, and final thoughts.

For those of you keeping track, I will be down in SF in the week of January 16th. At the very latest, I will be there for the Pansy Division gig on the 20th. Then I will find an apartment, then go back to Seattle to drive my stuff down and move in around February 1.

This means I desperately need an invite for something fun on New Year's Eve in Seattle. Does anyone know anyone? I have taken to messaging random strangers on Friendster. This is uncharacteristically forward of me, but then again, I have nothing to lose.

With due apologies for exceeding the strict purview of this blog, I must point out two things about my three days spent in New York:

(1) I made a special trip to Bergdorf Goodman's to see the Thom Browne collection. I've been curious about Thom Browne ever since the Fantastic Man interview, in which he seemed to say so much that exactly echoed my thoughts about men's clothes -- the need for a "uniform," the abhorrence of costume, the short-hemmed trousers. And then I read this thing in the Grauniad, in which a blue Thom Browne suit is chosen as the men's look of the year for the UK Costume Museum. And seeing the cloths in person... well, I think he may just be what we've been looking for. Certainly if I had $6000 just lying around that I wasn't doing anything with, I know what I would be wearing every day.

(2) I saw Robert Rauchenberg. At an opening at the Met. An exclusive opening. He is old, and in a wheelchair. Thanks A—!

Let's review the famous people I've seen in the past 12 months:

Robert Rauchenberg
Dawn French (at the Andreas Scholl recital)
Alexander McQueen
Simon Pegg
Vladimir Ashkenazy
Eric Hobsbawm
Paul Smith
...and I think I might have seen Dan Savage walking down the street in Seattle a few days ago, but I'm not sure.
EDIT: and also...
Andy Bell from Erasure
The food guy from Queer Eye US
The decorator guy from Queer Eye UK

Yes, I know that last one is not an actual "celebrity" in any meaningful sense.

Leaving Do

2005-12-15T17:00:00.000Z

I feel like there was a post here months and months ago in which I expressed my amusement at the phrase "leaving do" to mean "going away party." And now here I am, inviting people to my "leaving do" left and right, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. It begins in two hours.

Paris was great. I have discovered that you can make a lot more progress in the Bibliothèque Nationale if you take clandestine digital photographs of the mocrofilm reader, rather than argue with the photocopy-flunkies. It is the most useful my digital camera has ever been.

I have learned a great deal more than I knew before about Gilbert-Louis Duprez.

Since getting back, it's been one "last thing" after another. I had a list. I'm not going to make it to everything on the list. Iceskating at Somerset House and climbing to the top of The Monument will, I fear, not happen for a very, very long time. But I did go the Freud Museum.

Monday, a last night with R—. Tuesday, a swank dinner with B—. Wednesday, a night out with the housemates. Tonight, the leaving do. Tomorrow, an intimate dinner at the home of O—.

My ability to introspect seems to be dwindling to hitherto unknown levels.

I. Hate. Packing.

Oh and last night? Out with the housemates? I did a thing that I have never done before, and will never, ever do again. Don't worry - it was entirely legal and safe. But let it suffice to say that when you are leaving a country, you have very little dignity to save.

I forget to mention

2005-12-07T22:20:00.000Z

I believe I forgot to mention that I got my passport back.

And that am I now in Paris.

Ah, Paree!

I'm typing this in an art gallery, where the wireless is free.

More soon.

Turkey Day / Birthday

2005-12-01T15:58:00.000Z

My birthday (Tuesday) was great. I spent all day here, then met a few friends here, and finished by enjoying a few warm pints at a classic, brightly lit, carpeted pub. I received some wonderful gifts: socks (no really, they are awesome socks), a DVD, a CD, a really really great portrait of me, and a dozen muffins from my sister. Hooray for twenty-eight!

I am spending the morning here. It is lovely.

This afternoon I was supposed to go here, but for the life of me I can't figure out what I decided I needed to see there. The book that I was positive was only held there either (1) has disappeared since I first searched the catalogue or (2) was never there in the first place. Bad scholar!

In case you were wondering, I share my birthday with Louisa May Alcott, Busby Berkeley, C.S. Lewis, Madeline L'Engle, Gary Shandling, and Howie Mandel. From this list, you can easily see that astrology is totally true.

But I must go back to two previous days recently that were very special: Thanksgiving, and The Day of Famous People.

Thanksgiving

Like my birthday, this was also nice. I ate dinner at college classmates R—'s flat, in the building above Baker Street tube station. (That means it is a very expensive flat.) R—'r parents are British, but have been living in New Jersey for close to twenty years. So it was all suitably American. The turkey was entirely wrapped in fatty bacon before roasting, however, a delicious British touch.

On the journey home, a man took my picture on the Tube. It was unsettling: rather than making eye contact, asking for my consent implicitly or out loud, he simply got out his camera-phone and pointed it at me, while never at any point making eye contact. I tried to stare him down, and when that didn't work I tried staring directly into the lens of the camera. But he never flinched -- he never looked at me. He seemed to me to be smirking and chuckling. It was very very odd. (Question for discussion: is this the opposite of being kicked in the teeth, or its analogue?)

I shall chose to believe that he was recording my outfit for posterity. I was wearing my fuzzy red cashmere woven tie (the "sweater tie"), a white shirt and a gray cardigan, with black suit trousers, my new boots (which deserve a post of their own) and the leather jacket. It's all about contrasting textures, see?

My Day of Famous People

The following Saturday I met up with the Spaniard for Lunch. I rather randomly chose to meet at the cafe in Selfridges, since I enjoy walking around there, and it's convenient to Marble Arch, where he would be getting off the bus from Oxford. As I walked up to him in the cafe he said "look over there in the corner." I did not notice anything special. "It's Vladimir Ashkenazi!"

The Spaniard is the kind of person who would recognize people like this. (He's also the kind of person whom Angela Georghiu comes up to, on her own accord, to yell at him in a restaurant, but that's another story.) Along similar lines: Van Twee, your story about the world-famous pianist is, according to the Spaniard, everyone's story about that famous pianist. Perhaps unsurprisingly.

But if I'm not able to recognize famous conductors in random sightings, I got my own back an hour later. As we were finishing lunch, I got up to find the bathroom, who should I walk right by but Simon Pegg. Unmistakable. He had a baseball cap pulled down over his face, and is quite short, so I don't think I would have recognized him if I hadn't gotten so very close.

Then the Spaniard and I have a stroll around Mayfair. While on our way to the Dover Street Market (which, by the way, are currently selling bottles of CDG "White" perfume in bottles with adorable hand-knit sweaters which are the best things ever) I noticed a new shop that had just opened. It was revealed to be the new Paul Smith Home store. As we walked in I immediately noticed that the man standing in the middle of the store was, in fact, Paul Smith himself. Honestly, I recognized him only on the basis of his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery -- a oil painting in which he is clutching a bolt of green fabric.

But here's the thing: he was incredibly nice to us. I was wearing my scruffy anti-capitalist sneakers, and the Spaniard looked like an Oxford post-graduate student... either way is was very obvious that neither of us was about to drop £3000 on a pair of eighteenth-century chairs. Nonetheless, when he saw us looking at them, he came over completely unbidden and began good-naturedly telling us humorous stories about where he picked them up, and where they were about to be shipped. He was utterly delightful.

After a few minutes in the store, I had decided that, yes, I was going to take him picture. But when we came back into the front room he had gone out to run an errand. Oh well.

So, it's 16 days until I leave, and it looks like I WILL be going to France for five of those. So... I don't want to think about it.

Three Tableaux

2005-11-22T14:54:00.000Z

ONE

We are looking for someone to move into my room. The first day that the ad was up, some guy called to arrange a time to come by and see it. Conveniently, he agreed to come 'round while I was having people over for dinner. Before he arrived, I told the guests what the prospective renter was like on the phone. "He has a strange accent," I said. "I think he is Dutch, or Scandinavian." During the dinner, he arrived, introduced himself, and then asked to go use the toilet. Immediately one of my guest looked at me quizzically and said, "Greg, he is not Dutch. He is Irish." So much about Britain remains a mystery.

(It had been far, far too long since I've had people over for dinner. We had an warming autumnal menu of cabbage soup with fried apples, risotto with sage and roasted squash, and balsamic glazed carrots. A success.)

TWO

I was buying day tickets at the ENO, and saw a sign that said "backstage tour, today at 11am." So I returned at 11am, and joined the tour. Everyone else on the tour was quite elderly, and I suspected they were there as a group. Having followed the tour to its second stop in the auditorium, a very angry old lady confronted me, practically yelling, saying that this was a private tour (they had all come down in a bus from Ely) and that "there wasn't enough room for me." This was an obvious lie -- there were about 30 elderly people. One more would not have made a difference, and the sign clearly indicated this was a public tour. But I was so angry I just left, and spend the rest of day thinking of withering things to say to her. The best I came up with were "Well, having to live in Ely would put anyone in a bad mood" and "Bitch".

THREE

Later that same night, I was in a good mood after seeing the good Butterfly. The tube was packed, as it tends to be at 11 on a Saturday, with drunk people. Sitting across from me was a highly intoxicated Eastern European gentleman with hideous blond highlights in his hair. He looks at me threateningly and mumbled something inaudible. I leaned forward to hear him better, at which point he kicked me, pretty hard, in the teeth. I gripped my mouth, which was bleeding but not too much, at which point he mockingly gripped his mouth and made "poor baby" noises. He just wanted to start a fight, so everyone in the carriage, including me, just sat very, very still, doing and saying nothing. In fact, I'm not sure exactly who on the train saw what had happened. At the next stop I, along with two teenage girls sitting next to the Eastern European gentleman, moved to the next car. The two girls were very nice.

Information

2005-11-16T00:25:00.000Z

Achtung, Achtung.

I will be leaving London Saturday, December 17.

I will be in New York City from the afternoon of the 17th until the evening of Tuesday the 20th. New York friends: will you be around then?

I will arrive in Seattle Tuesday night.

This ticket is not-changeable and non-refundable, despite the fact that I still have no passport.

Today I went to see The Beat My Heart Skipped (vedict: mixed), but before the movie there was (as is normal here) about 30 minutes of TV commercials. On of the commercials was the Sony Bravia ad in which truckloads of bouncy-balls bounce down the hills of San Francisco. (Seriously, click the link if you haven't seen the ad. It rules.)

The images of San Francisco made me tear up. God only know what I'm feeling these days.

(Okay so I lied about the introspection. Next post: I got kicked in the teeth by a drunk stranger on the Tube.)

My New Pseudonym

2005-11-15T00:12:00.000Z

Okay I didn't really write this. But if I said I had, you might have believed me for a second or two, right?

Concert Diary

2005-11-14T23:23:00.000Z

In general, my problem right now is that I want the inexorable march of time to just stop.

Today I was supposed to go and buy a plane ticket back to the US.

Instead, I didn't leave the house.

Still no passport.

As a way of easing my way back into updates of this thing, I'll begin by listing all the music and other cultural things that I've done since October 24.

October 26: Gabrieli Consort, doing Moteverdi's Vespers of 1610, with solo voices on all the choral and orchestral parts . It was really wonderful. I went with college classmate R—.

October 28: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the stage show performed at Soho cabaret venue Too2Much. It was very good.

October 29: Debauched housewarming. The theme of the party was "myths and legends." I went to the party as "that urban legend of the guy who put his dog in the microwave." This involved carrying around a stuffed dog, which I had set fire to. It was a hit. I became very intoxicated.

October 30: I went to Brighton with the boys. I have good pictures.

November 2: Colloquium at Cambridge by RP. I missed my train, and there was bad traffic from the station, so I missed the entire talk. But it was okay, both because I'd heard the talk already when he gave it a Berkeley two years ago, and becuase RP missed my Cambridge colloquium. I had a lovely time with M— afterwards.

November 3: Londonist birthday party. I got so very drunk. Falling down drunk. I met people who knew me only from my online writing. I also ran into a sex partner from, like, eight months ago, who randomly lives with the best friend of the Londonist TV critic. It was a good party.

November 4: I heard a lecture at the Design Museum by the graphic designer of the Guardian, and then went to the Popstarz memorial event for the Popstarz founder who died. He fell down the stairs leading up to his house, and cracked his head open. The night was weird, but fun. Everyone I knew left, but I stayed until 3.

November 5: Madame Butterfly at the ENO. I bought a £5 standing ticket, and was then offered a really good ticket by a lonely man who had an extra. He's one of those men who really wants someone to talk to. I can sometimes be too nice to such men.

November 6: Opera Rara concert performance of Donizetti's Il diluvio universale. Went with M—, ran into the Spaniard and E—. The four of us, unsurprisingly, geeked out to an extraordinary degree, intimidating and slightly scaring the one other, non-musicologist companion B—.

November 8: Andreas Scholl at the Barbican. With Accademia Bizantina. Scholl=Overrated. O V E R R A T E D. Good. Fine. But not very good. The orchestra played circles around him.

This last weekend was pretty empty. Turned down an invitation to a rock show Saturday. DVD of Withnail & I at R—'s house Sunday; that's about it.

This week I might go see Salome, but I probably won't. I will definitely go to M—'s colloquium Wednesday, despite his typically self-depricating insistance that I shouldn't. Maybe a dinner party next weekend.

Next post: Introspection!

so much to tell, so much to hear

2005-11-03T16:49:00.000Z

I have to get to the funnest party of the year right now, but there is so much to write about here. Good concerts, work, people, activities, jobs, movies...

For now... if you are reading this and just got back from DC, you have to right me write me right now and tell me how it was. Unless you are a musicologist at a New York university, in which case I've already heard from you. Thanks!

Reader Mail!

2005-10-24T00:51:00.000+01:00

Today on Greg's London Ramblings, we'll be answering some persistant questions from our loyal readers.

Q: Greg, are you going to the AMS conference?

A: No. The British government still has possession of my passport, I still don't have access to my money, my hotel plans fell through, etc. etc. etc. Also, with the extent to which I've bungled job applications so far, the AMS would be the source of humiliating questions.

Q: You bungled your job applications?

A: I'll tell you about it later.

Q: Greg, when are you coming back to California?

A: Well, this partly rests in the hands of the Home Office. If they say that they won't extend my visa, it could conceivably be fairly soon. But that won't happen. If all goes well, I will be leaving the UK on December 20. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to live with my sister for while, until after the AMS 50 deadline, and the deadline for abstracts for next year's conference. So I'll be in SF around January 16.

Q: Greg, are you depressed?

A: I don't think so. Then again, I called R— last week and he asked me how I was. I told him that I was disappointed in myself because of the job thing, I was still angry about the money situation, I have some boy problems. And R— says to me, exasperated, "where is all this guilt coming from?! You know what you sound like? You sound like a Texas housewife, barefoot and pregnant!" (R— is from Texas, you see.) But I'm fine bascially.

Q: Greg, why don't you reply to my emails?

A: I don't know. Because I'm a bad friend. Also, because sometimes I don't read my email, because if I haven't read it, then I can't feel guilty about not replying. Of course, then I feel more guilt when I do read the deferred message, and realize that it was time-sensitive all along.

Q: Greg, you have so much to do, why do manage to find time to write these Londonist things?

A: Shut up. Seriously, though, they don't take me very long - usually about an hour to write, and another hour to edit and format.

Q: Have you been to any good museums recently?

A: Yes. The Rembrant self-portrait at Kenwood House was one of the... purest aesthetic encounters I've ever had. The Estorick Collection was patchy, but fascinating. I think the Wallace Collection is overrated.

Q: How's the weather?

A: It been getting cold, but in a good way. Tender Crisp has recently expressed the same opinion. But now it's raining. And after we set the clocks back, it will be getting dark at 5 again. Not looking forward to that.

Q: Where should I go to find out your ex-boyfriend's opinions about opera singers?

A: Right here. Go read right now.

Adventures Continue

2005-10-20T18:42:00.000+01:00

Okay, so my check got deposited. Three cheers for the Royal Mail! It only took them (in partnership with USPS, let's not forget) nineteen days to deliver a letter that they said should take four to five!

So, my problems are solved, right? Ha ha! Of course not. I believe I may have neglected to mention that my ATM card expired. I didn't receive a replacement. I called my bank. They cancelled the card they had send (in August!) and reissued a new card. Two and a half weeks went by. I called the bank again. ONLY THEN am I informed that they can't/don't send new cards overseas. I am perturbed.

Okay, so this story isn't actually that interesting. But readers of Greg's London Ramblings will be more interested to know about the reaction of the bank supervisor that I was transferred to. She was extremely apologetic. She was utterly ingratiating. She suggested possible solutions. She apologized again.

You all know where this is heading: I really can't imagine quite this reaction happening in the UK. They would apologize, sure. But with a more "shit happens" kind of affect. Recently Gweneth Paltrow has been in the news for... um... politely pointing this out.

Anyway, I should confess something about job applications. But I don't want admit to it, just now.

Siegfried was so fucking mediocre. Not even bad enough to get upset about. Just... nothing. (The exception was John Tomlinson as the Wanderer, who was perfect.)

Recently R— was talking about a substandard performance of the Goldberg Variations he had seen in Oxford. His reaction was "if you're going to do the Goldberg, you gotta bring your A game..." I knew what he meant.

I think the same is true of directing the Ring. Not to be too... reverent or anything, but seriously: the Ring has a LOT of ideas in it. And the ideas are TIGHT. If you're going to stage this, you need to bring your A game. The director at Covent Garden appeared to have no ideas whatsoever. Seriously. There was nothing. Spirals. Clouds. Ugly clothes... I throw up my hands.

Luckily, Mark Morris came to cleanse my palate of all the mediocrity. (Yes, I wrote a review, although I have a LOT of ideas about the Stravinsky piece that didn't make it in.) This was, I'm pretty sure, the fourth time I've seen V -- the first (some of you may remember?) was a "pre-premiere" performance in Berkeley a few weeks after September 11th, 2001. I'm not kidding about crying at the coda... can't exactly explain it.

Oh, perhaps you are wondering how the ATM card will be (as they say in this country) sorted? Simple: I just have to change my address to my sister's address, get the card sent to her, then change me address back. What could possibly go wrong with this simple plan?

Adventures in Academe

2005-10-15T13:35:00.000+01:00

Okay, I've been putting off and putting off writing a report here, not because I've been upset or depressed or anything, but because I've been trying to figure out how to get the tone right -- how to convey that I was, in fact, pretty upset, but that at the same time I know it's really not that big a deal.

Because, really, the talk on Tuesday went really well. Like I said, there are parts of it that I'm quite pleased with. More than that, though, there was really just one person in the audience that I really needed to impress. You know: the young opera studies professor, co-editor of a particularly important publication... that one. In my mind, he was the only person who mattered. And that particular person really, really liked the talk. Granted, he is also a really nice guy who seems to like me personally, so he might have been generally positive even if he hadn't actually enjoyed it that much. But on the basis of his questions, I'm pretty sure that he genuinely thought I had said something interesting and correct.

So far, so good. But then there was this other Oxford faculty member. The one who writes dreary essays on Bach. (Bach scholars! Why do they vex me so!) This other faculty member did not like my talk. More than that, he thought that the kind of questions I was asking were fundamentally unfit to be asked. To his credit, he did not say this publicly during the Q&A -- rather, he came up to me afterwards. He said a lot, and it hit me so fast I wasn't really able to process it all at the time. But the words used included: "misleading," "meaningless," and (most memorably) "duplicitous."

Why should I let this get under my skin at all? Normally I'm pretty impervious to this kind of thing. Then again normally I'm a little more confidant about my arguments. Here's the thing: he started out with a criticism that was completely valid. (I was, in fact, painting "twentieth-century singing" with a very broad brush -- this is exactly what I mentioned in my last posting here about the argument I wanted to equivocate around a bit more. And yet, I'd like to believe this was less a straw man I was setting up, and more a interpretive heuristic.) In any case, because he latched on to precisely the aspect of the paper I was least confident about, I was utterly unprepared to respond when he told me he thought I should do "real history" rather than airy-fairy cultural musings.

And here's where he hit another nerve, because I have, more times than I care to recall, criticized scholars (usually behind their backs) for being "not historical enough." (Often this criticism is directed at... south of Berkeley.) Was this guy actually just upset with me for making any sort of a-historical turn in the paper at all? Or had I, in fact, turned into the bad musicologist which I despise?

Of course, I have to believe that it was the former, particularly because he only criticized things that happened in the last three pages of a 30-page talk. (And I had revised the final text to erase references to any particular text, in favor of the phrase "a broadly Foucauldian reading.") In addition, his suggestion of "real history" that I should be doing was so ridiculous -- Wagner got turned on by Schröder-Devrient in drag, a piece of evidence that tells us about Wagner's psychopathology and nothing else -- that it was clear we were on completely different paths.

So... a learning experience. I have lots of ideas about how the chapter will preempt some of this criticism, added to all the ideas about how the chapter will be fleshed out that I already have scrawled down. And did I mention that the person who matters really liked it? And so did the rest of the audience? Things are good.

The rest of the week was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bit unsettled. I went to the opening at the V&A of the Diane Arbus show that originated in SF. I went to an appalling concert in the Handel House museum. I got drunk Thursday night, then stayed home Friday to work on my cover letter.

I'm mailing off job applications today. Urgh.

Still no money in the bank.

I spent a lot of money I don't have on a ticket to Siegfried next Tuesday.

Also: I live in a city will a lot more and better art than San Francisco, as well as a lot more and better buildings. So why am I so, so jealous of the new DeYoung opening? I just listened to John King's podcast. (I have a crush on John King.) I really, really wish I were there. Perhaps it is because I associate Golden Gate Park with being on drugs...

Last Night's Anxiety Dream

2005-10-10T18:26:00.000+01:00

I actually meant to write here ages ago about my most vivid anxiety dream from before the jaunt to Rome, which involved little zombie-children. I mean, six-year-olds who'd been turned into zombies, or something. And were eating people. And chasing me.

Last night's anxiety dream was much tamer -- it involved the suspicion that my bag (my little yellow man-purse, to be precise) was continually being rifled through by strangers. I would set the bag down, and then look at it a moment later to find that everything had been taken out and rearranged. At one point my baby-blanket was in the bag, and then later I found the blanket laying out in open somewhere else. And I'm all like "Hey! That's my baby-blanket! Leave it inside the bag!"

The baby-blanket represents all my ignorance of Italian opera, ignorance which I fear will be ripped out and exposed for all to see tomorrow. I have never even looked at the score of Marino Faliero. I ran out of time to even read the Bini/Commons material for Poliuto and Martyrs. Damn.

In the real world, as opposed to in my subconscious, I gave a practice run of the talk yesterday, and it went well. I'm optimistic about the talk, actually. And honestly, being forced to make the ideas presentable has forced me to think in a much more directed way about what this chapter will look like in the end, and how to go about completing it. (Looking at Marino Faliero is on the list...)

After some discussion after the pratice talk, I convinced myself that one of the main points in the paper is... well, not wrong exactly, but in need of serious qualification and equivocation. It's basically a matter of replacing "is" with "tends to be" in a few sentences. And I have, what?, almost 24 hours for final edits? No problem.

My ex-boyfriend is getting paid $1000 to fly to SF, watch Dr Atomic, and write an article about it. Fuck you, ex-boyfriend. I hate you.

Also, my high-school drama teacher just died. This is very, very sad.

Time marches on

2005-10-06T21:01:00.000+01:00

The Colloquium: It's lacking a conclusion, but has a lot of prose I like. It will be okay.

The Visa: Mailed off on Monday. There is a document that I maybe should have included that I didn't; wondering if it's worth sending under separate cover. I received a letter from the Home Office today informing me that they'd taken my money. It takes then three days to take my money, but 4-8 weeks to return my passport. Grr.

The Fellowship Check: It appears that, just like last time I tried to mail a check to my US bank, the check is lost in Royal Mail limbo. I hate the Royal Mail so, so much. I probably have enough money to allow me to eat. For now.

Londonist: I'm taking a break for obvious reasons, although I was finally able to post this, which I wrote a while ago, and which I'm actually rather pleased with. I'm thinking of taking a break from colloquium work tonight to write a quick thing about the Xenakis Festival this weekend.

Other News: I did tear myself away from work last Saturday to accept an invitation fro Dr. H to go to a gay and lesbian ballroom dancing night at the Rivoli Ballroom in Crofton Park. It was actually incredibly fun. The ballroom is beautiful beyond description. This deserves a long, long essay of its own, but... I just don't have it in me right now. Suffice it to say that it was very very fun, the steps came back to me very quick, there was hilarious line-dancing, the drinks were way cheap, I very fond of Dr. H's new boyfriend, and... some details of the night's conclusion will have to be consigned to a more discreet forum.

Tomorrow: The conclusion gets written, come hell or high water. Etc.

"But.. but..."

2005-09-27T17:35:00.000+01:00

Puffy-Faced Gatwick Immigration Officer: (in abrasive East London accent) How long will you be in the UK?
Me: My vistor visa is about to run out, but I'd like permission to stay for three months.
Puffy-Faced Gatwick Immigration Officer: WELL YOU'RE NOT GETTIN' IT FROM ME! APPLY TO THE HOME OFFICE. (violently stamps passport)
Me: *blink* *blink*
Puffy-Faced Gatwick Immigration Officer: PLEASE EXIT THROUGH THE DOOR ON YOUR LEFT.

I can sort this out, everyone. No problem.

Update

2005-09-24T12:27:00.000+01:00

Okay, so it seems I have managed to freak out pretty much every one I know with that last post, along with one charming Canadian that I don't know. Sorry about that, folks.

I considered deleting the post, but I think I'll keep it up, because it is was accurate description of my mental state. Here, though, is a slightly more reasoned account of my current situation:

I have to give a hour-long (okay, maybe 45-minute) colloquium at Oxford on October 11. I had planned on a getting a draft to MAS on September 26. I have spent, like, the past two months or more in that now all-too-familiar situation during which I manage to convince myself that I'm getting work done, while, in fact, I am getting almost nothing done at all. So after BQ's visit I finally sat down to collate the various parts of the talk that I have finished... and I suddenly realized that I have miles and miles to go before I sleep, as it were.

This is simply getting far, far too routine. when I orginally agreed to do the talk, I speficially told myself: great, a long term project, there is nothing else on my plate. I can for once get a piece of writing done at a liesurely, non-frantic pace. Then, somehow, the summer was over.

One highly-respected correspondent suggested that I cancel the talk. It is the first talk of term after all. The other bad opion is to simply read the paper I read at Cambridege. The big reason I cannot do this is, of course, my CV. My sad, neglected CV. Although the status of certain CV items has changed in the past year, the only actually new entries are, I think, the IHR talk on Garcia, and the Oxford talk. This feels like a big deal.

So, you see, my anxiety about doing a good job on the Oxford talk dovetails very neatly into my anxiety about getting a job.

Oh yeah, and also: I don't want to leave England.

So I'm going to Rome for two days. It will be good to see A—, who is always musicologically stimulating. (He needs a pseudonym: The Prostitute Expert or something? Hmm.) I need to go to Rome, because I put off making an appointment at Croydon for so long that I now can't get an date before the visa expires. And, as one reader of Greg's London Ramblings discovered, it is expensive. And the visa centers are now appointment-only. I could do it by post, but then they would have possession of my passport for a month so I couldn't go the AMS.

So I'm going to Rome for the purpose of flying back INTO the UK, to ask for an extention at passpost control in Gatwick. This really shouldn't be a problem -- I have a printout of the visa rules that state I'm entitled to an extention as long as (1) my project isn't finished, (2) I have money, and (3) I'm not working. (I think this is why I'm not in your position, H—; since you were here on a student visa and I'm here on an academic visitor visa, I have the legal right to stay until the project is finished, not just the course of study...)

Of course proving that I have money is a teensy bit difficult, because my fellowship check (orginally cut on August 20) still hasn't been deposited. Because I wasn't registered for classes then, so the couldn't do direct deposit.

Do you see how all my procrastination is self-reinforcing?

Here's a ray of sunshine: it has become undeniable that since I started running all those weeks ago, I've lost at least an inch from my waist. Go me! Except now none of my trousers fit. And isn't weight loss one of the items on the depression checklist?

Things are bad

2005-09-22T18:57:00.000+01:00

I just wrote a whole long post venting my depression and anxiety about everything's that's going wrong. Then I hit the wrong key and deleted it. Typical.

Summary:

Everything is going down the toilet.

Nothing is working out.

I can't explain to myself what exactly I've been doing for the past two months that I've let things get so out of control.

I'm going to Italy in order to take care of my visa (this is the best option, really)

Thanks to those who have sent encouraging words, but there will be dark days for a few weeks.

Paralyzed with Inertia

2005-09-15T01:15:00.000+01:00

I have been so incapable of doing anything worthwhile since BQ left. This includes of course, writing here about his wonderful visit, which involved, among other things, drinking four nights in a row, houses of parliament, an arts and crafts style pub that has to be seen to be believed, and Andy Bell of Erasure.

Other things I have been too lazy to do:

• Finish three Mundo Clásico reviews
• Finish a bitchy Londonist post about Pavarotti
• Start several other substantial L'ist posts (ROH preview, gay photographer, etc)
• Deal with my visa
• Sort out my fellowship check
• Uhh, and... write more of the paper that I will sending to MAS in, like two weeks.

Dammit.

Tomorrow everything will change.

Oh and I saw Bang on a Can with Iva Bittova in lieu of Dom Sebastián. Because I am a bad musicologist. (Thanks to all of you who offered your opinions on which I should see. That is, one of you. Hmph.) Actually the BoaC thing was pretty worthwhile. Love those David Lang "Lou Reed Songs." And Bittova is, in fact, better live.

Music-Related Things

2005-09-08T19:49:00.000+01:00

My computer is back. Anyone care to place a bet on how long logic board number FOUR(!) is going to last? Phone is still in the shop, but today they gave me a loaner phone, so I'm not quite so dead-to-the-world. Everyone has chosen this weekend as the weekend to be in London, which is good.

But this is a post about music. First of all, I need advice. If you had to choose between going to see the Bang on a Can All-Stars with a Czech lady in a really tiny church, or going to see a concert performance of Dom Sebastián with some really good singers, which would you choose? On the one hand is an ensemble I idolize and yet have never seen. On the other is a work my advisor edited (and is she getting money for this?) and which might well prove useful for the half-completed paper I'm going to be reading in Oxford in six weeks or so. Oh fatal choice!

Second, Adès's new violin concerto... that shit is weird. Like, weirder than it seems, I think. You can listen to it for the next five days here (select "Prom 69"). And you all should. Y'all remember how RT called Adès a "musical surrealist," right? Well, I wasn't entirely convinced that was the best way to understand Asyla, but it seems exactly the right word to describe what's going on in this new piece. It has to do with structure more than anything -- the way that beginnings and endings and the introduction of new musical ideas aren't just surprising, but seem to be calculated to come at exactly the wrong time. Not at a random time, but the most wrong time. I can't quite explain why. Also: The first two movements begin with what sounds to me like an evocation of Walter Fähndrich. Also: The third movement begins with a hootchy-kootchy dance. What's that about?

Third... I'm not totally satisfied with my Vienna Phil post, but it's okay. It will be obvious to many of you how RT looms larger over my life and habits of though that one might have expected. I had a wee crisis of confindence right after I posted it, and made all the L'ist kids tell me it made sense.

The Vienna Phil concert itself (on Wednesday, conducted by Zubin Mehta) was actually sort of amazing. (I'm listening to the second of their two concerts on the radio as I type this. I sort of wish I were there -- could I possibly be beginning to like Bruckner?! -- although a certain correspondant was so vicious in his hatred of Eschenbach that I don't feel too bad.) Anyway, so the big news about Wednesday's concert was the first piece, the Haydn "Drumroll" Symphony. There's this spot in the second movement with a big violin solo -- actually a little string quartet forms. The violin solo is cute and charming... AND THE CONCERTMASTER OF THE VIENNA PHILHARMONIC FUCKED IT UP ROYALLY. Oh my god it was shocking. Apparently he was thrown by the extreme technical demands of shifting into second position. It was incredible. You can listen to this. If you go to here, select "Prom 71", and wait exactly 16:00 minutes in, you will hear shockingly shoddy playing. Vergogna!

The Berg Wozzeck Fragments were nice, and Dalayman is a credible dramatic soprano. Hated her sprechstimme, though...

And then there was this Rite I swear I heard inner voices, and structural divisions, that I had never heard. I'm not sure if this was a good thing or not. It was also, I think, the noisiest Rite I've ever heard (during the "Dance of the Earth" he had the guiro doubled up). At time there was more bow noise than pitch coming from the strings. This was great. At there was this moment, just before the "Sacrificial Dance, where the orchestra builds and builds, and then there's a few beats of vamp before the dance gets going, right? Well, when they arrived at the vamp, Mehta just straight-up stopped conducting altogether, and let the orchestra blast away for several seconds without him. It was as if he was gatehring his energy, before giving a huge cue for the melody to start. I can't express how awesome this was.

I should say something about the Vienna Phil itself, but what? I mean, really, I'm not a conoisseur of orchestras and recording in the least, but I'm pretty sure no other wind section sounds like that. No other brass section sounds like that. And yet, and yet...

(Oh and can any of you tell me if it's normal that horns 5 and 6 switch to Wagner tubas at the beginning of "Procession of the Sage," or is that just a werid thing that Mehta and the players decided to do? It was... good, I think? But weird.)

Last thing: my Klinghoffer review will be up at mundoclásico.com very very soon. Calm down, the sign telling you to subscribe disappears after 10 seconds. I think it will be posted in both Spanish and English, but Mr. Smearcase and Rachel are required to read the Spanish translation and tell me how it sounds.

No Phone, No Computer, No Sense of Self

2005-09-06T17:53:00.000+01:00

So, my computer went back in for repairs, although because it had been in so recently the repair is "prioritized." Have I mentioned how much I dislike that particular usage of that word? I'd prefer to keep it meaning only "place a list of things in order of priority." But no one asks me.

Anyway, my phone is also in the shop. It works fine, except thje screen is blank. Luckily, they believed it was under warantee, even though I lost the receipt, since I had the little warante form filled out. This serves as a lesson to fill out those dumb little forms.

With no phone and no computer, it is as if I am dead. Seriously.

Anyway, the rest of Edinburgh was great. The final performance I went to, of the Bamberg Symphony doing Ligeti, Strauss and Mahler, was actually something very special. I'm not sure if most of the crowd realized how extraodinary the programming or the performance was. I'll save the details for my Mundo Clasico review.

We all took a day trip to Durham, to see the famous Cathedral, and the tombs of St Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede. It was great.

I will leave it here for now, since I'm running out of time in this dumb internet cafe, and I want to get to the Royal Albert to hear Ades's new violin concerto...

Edinburgh is okay / My computer broke again

2005-08-31T22:39:00.000+01:00

So, I'm managed to calm down quite a bit since leaving for Scotland. It's actually quite lovely, though it seems very, very small to me. And no in an "I'm so acclimated to the big city" kind of way. It really is small.

How is it that I have lived almost 28 years, and yet have not until now experienced a real youth hostel? It's not so bad -- certainly not as rowdy and filthy as I imagined it might be -- and for £12 a night I can't complain.

The performances so far have been worthwhile, if flawed. In the case of the Klinghoffer, so deeply flawed as to be almost irredemable, but that just gives me more to write about... It is too bad, though, that the production that actually brings out (rather than ignores or actively tries to surpress) all the elements and contradictions of the work remains, as far as I know, unrealized.

I had a failure of self-restraint at the vintage store. When I post about the shoes (which, yes, I will) I will also include my beautiful, beautiful new vintage swim tunks. No, I will never them. Yes, just owning them makes my life more glamorous.

In other news, my goddamn computer is borken. Same problem as before. Of course, it breaks as soon as I arrive in Edinburgh, leaving me computer-less while writing these reviews. Dammit dammit fuck fuck fuck.

I am feeling overwhelmed

2005-08-29T00:48:00.000+01:00

I am so tired right now that I can't include any detail at all, but there are various people who need to know where I'll be, or why I'm not returning phone calls, or whatever. So here it is: Wednesday A— Victorovna arrived and we had dinner and walked around and then I heard an undewhelming reading of Górecki's third late at night with the lovely B—. Thursday I spent cleaning, Friday KT arrived, and we ended up out until three at Popstarz. Saturday the inimitable Rach arrived, and we ended up out until two at Duckie. Today we went sightseeing. I got so, so tired.

Tomorrow we leave for Edinburgh, where I'm reviewing four shows for Mundo Clásico, and trying to keep up with L'ist stuff (only one post last week = I am a slacker), and oh hey maybe I should do some dissertation writing which hasn't happened in a week and a half. I hope KT and Rach don't read this, because it is completely not their fault, but I feel like this is not the right time for me to be leaving town. I haven't taken care of my visa (long story), my fellowship check, several very important work emails and several more social emails. And don't even talk to me about the job search.

I get back to London a week from today, although I may leave a day early. BQ arrives less than a week later. I am feeling overwhelmed. This is, like, the opposite of a vacation.

Vindication!

2005-08-24T15:39:00.000+01:00

So, you know how I'm always bitching about my crap bank account that doesn't do anything. It turns out that it is now official! The BBC reports that the kind of bank account I have actually does no good for anyone. There was a report on the Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning about this. Why I wasn't interviewed remains a mystery.

There's still one thing though. I really do understand why poor people can't have credit. But the news story never explains the big question: what in the world does having a check book and a debit card have to do with credit? It seems to me that these are simply matters of convenience, and that withholding them from poor people is simply, well, punitive. Punishing them for being poor. Maybe I'm missing something...

Groovin'

2005-08-20T00:33:00.000+01:00

So I've never really done a "bloggish" thing like this, but David has passed, like a viral infection, the task of listing ten tracks I'm into right now. Other bloggercizing people I know have already done this, and (I admit) it was actually pretty interesting to read what they listed. Everyone seems to play fast and loose with the instructions, but I list them here regardless:

List ten songs that you are currently digging ... it doesn't matter what genre they are from, whether they have words, or even if they're no good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying right now. Post these instructions, the artists, and the ten songs in your blog. Then tag five other people to see what they're listening to.

1. The Chrysalid Requiem by Toby Twining. I'm only half joking when I say that I'm mad at everyone I know for not informing me of the existence of this piece three years ago when it was released. Seriously. Extended vocal techniques, weird gender stuff, catholic ritual... it's like he wrote this piece for me. Dear everyone I know: it's on iTunes. Buy it right now. The "Te decet hymnus" is worth the $9.99 on its own.

2. "I Have Had Singing" by Steven Stametz, perf. Chanticleer. See, here's where I utilize the "it doesn't matter if it's no good" clause. Because I know this isn't all that good. I woke up one morning, I think having dreamt about the first (and last) time I heard it, which was at a concert when I was in high school. I didn't even really know the title. Now I feeling like hearing it about once a day.

3. Concerto in Slendro by Lou Harrison. Sometimes you just need to listen to Concerto in Slendro. Frequently this happens on the train.

4. "Che, Tango, Che" by Astor Piazzola, sung by Milva, "Live at the Bouffes du Nord," 1984.

5. David Daniels singing "Tout Gai!" from the Ravel Chansons populaires grècques. It's sunny in London these days. When I'm in a particularly good mood, I might just start singing this in the street. Not too loudly, though.

6. Joni Mitchel, "The Last Time I Saw Richard." There was a paper about this song read at the last AMS. I didn't hear it. Could do this in karaoke, I ask myself?

7. "Father Knickerpopper," Chubby Checker.

8. "Mr. Dabada," Jean Carlos. Thanks a million, Pinkyring, for getting this stuck in my head for days and days...

9. The Leçons de ténèbres by François Couperin, as performed by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, sung by Sophie Daneman and Patricia Petibon. Eternally on heavy rotation chez Greg.

10. "Who is it," Björk.

Hmm... it seems that I am not listening to a lot of rock right now. This is a fairly recent development. I wonder why?

So, now I'm supposed to pass on the task to people. So... Tender-Flakey-Crispy-Bakey, 'Tasha-no-longer-in-Nepal, E in Jpn, Van Twee, and Rachel: y'all are it. (Well, if you want it....)

UPDATE! Jon, if you want, you should do like Pinkyring did and post 10 songs in the comments.

I have met an elderly Venezualan woman

2005-08-18T23:08:00.000+01:00

[My computer is fixed. Hooray.]

So, tonight I got a rush ticket to see the Ballet Nacionál de Cuba perform Giselle at Sadler's Wells. I've seen them once before, doing Coppélia in Zellerbach, and I remember them being... well, fairly astonishing, actually. And they continue to be. The dancing was just amazing. And they were in these incredibly naff (sorry, there really isn't a better word) costumes, on these cheap-ola sets. And even so.... I'm sort of dumbstruck.

Some of you know that I'm prone to crying at the "wrong time" at operas and movies. It's a long-term pathology that I'd rather not go into right now. In any case, at this one moment during the big pas de deux in the second act of Giselle I just lost it. Something about the lifts, and her hands.... I don't know. At this moment I notice that the elderly hispanic woman next to me is also crying. She give me a tissue.

So she walks with me back to the tube, and we talk about the performance, and ourselves. She said I seemed "sensitive." She told me about losing her husband, and how she was paralyzed with grief for three years, until she heard her husband's voice tell her that she wasn't happy, he couldn't rest in peace. She ended the story with a kind of lesson which, even if I were to type it here, and certainly if most people were to say it out loud, would sound trite and stupid. But coming out of the mouth of a happy, if clearly lonely, sixty-year-old Venezeulan woman, it was really moving.

She has my phone number. This could result in a book: Tuesdays with Señora S—.

Soon: My ten things I'm groovin' to. Pictures of my shoes. A photo essay of my running route. I have to vent about the horrible, self-righteous prommers. Maybe quick thoughts about the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir Concert? (It was good, but also bad.) And... oh has everyone seen The Power of Nightmares? No, not perfect, but essential viewing. At the very least, avoids the mile-wide pitfalls of Farenheit 911. Am I correct in saying it still hasn't been shown in the US?

Greg is perhaps rude to strangers

2005-08-12T14:06:00.000+01:00

Okay, so my dear bassoon buddy recently whipped out his inner bitch in a way that was so very satisfying to read about that it almost seems to good to be true. As much as I try to do my bit to build a more civil society, which includes, as per Social Grace, the belief that criticizing the etiquette of others is always bad etiquette, there are moments where people really need to be called out. Usually we simply fantasize about what we would have said, and so even the vicarious thrill of reading about Bassoon Buddy's verbal bitch-slap feels like scratching an out-of-reach itch.

The weird thing is, on what I think was exactly the same day, I managed to do the exact some thing, except the bitchiness was a lot quieter, and directed at total strangers who probably didn't really deserve it. Maybe this had something to do with the position of the planets or something?

Anyway, picture it: the queue for Arena day tickets at the Proms, waiting for the ill-fated Neeme Jarvi show (see L'ist for details). I am by myself. Behind me in the queue were a middle aged couple, with a college-aged boy that they didn't know very well. Their conversation, while not actually offensive, was banal and irritating. I was trying to read a novel. The woman had a piercing, high-pitched voice that was difficult to tune out.

After, say, an hour or so of their banal conversation, I realize that they are talking about me, in hushed tones. This is rude, right? The exchange that follows was in a sense, a response to the dismay of being talked about very literally behind my back. Only after I was feeling slighted in this way did I realize what it was that was drawing their attention: the buttons (or, in UK English, "badges") on my bag. That these draw undeserved attention is something that I have pointed out before. When I realize that they are pointing at my bag while muttering to each other, I turn and make eye contact, unsmiling.

BANAL WOMAN: Your badge says "Try our fresh melon."
ME: Yes, it does.
SHE: (amused) What does that mean?
ME: (not amused) I think it is from a grocery store. It encourages customers to buy the store's melons.
SHE: Do you work at a grocery store?
ME: No, I bought it at a charity shop (=thrift store)
SHE: (clearly with nothing else to say) Well... it is a conversation-starter
ME: (with as dry an affect as I can possibly muster) Alas. The conversation is a short one. (I ostentatiously put my nose back in my book.)

I am both proud and ashamed of this exchange. Probably mostly proud.

In other news: I bought shoes. I am happy about the shoes. Perhaps when I have the computer back (Monday?) I will post pictures.

Language Politics, Redux

2005-08-09T21:37:00.000+01:00

Hey, remember months ago when I bitched about this show about dialect on Radio 4? Those were some good times, right? Anyway, that thing I was complaining about was, like, an early preview of the show itself. Now the show proper has finally begun, and... it is fascinating. Thankfully, no further willful ignorance of American English is in evidence so far. But there is class politics. Oh yes. There is class politics the likes of which you've never seen, child!

Seriously, you MUST take 25 minutes out of your day and listen to episode one. This is an entire show about all the hundreds of different ways to refer to a concept for which there is no word in American English! Do it! You'll thank me! If you wanted proof that Britain is still on some fundamental level very different from the United States, this show should provide it.

The obvious comment to be made is, of course, that if the chavs really are so pervasive that every single fucking region has its own name for them, then why isn't a single one of them actually heard on a show about them? I mean, even as informants in the linguistic survey? If I were Gayatri Spivak, I'd write an article, "Can the Scally Speak?"...

I got bangs, yo!

2005-08-05T15:19:00.000+01:00

...or as the British say, "fringe."

I've been meaning to take pictures of my new haircut for a while now, but if you're curious, here are pictures from last night's L'ist meet-up, courtesy of our intrepid editor's Flickr account:

One
Two
Three
Four
Five

I need to shave, and the hair's looking a little greasy, as is my skin. But I think you get the idea...

Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!

Continuing travails

2005-08-05T14:22:00.000+01:00

First, I remembered that I forgot to tell you about the late-night Prom I went to on Wednesday. London Sinfonietta playing Weill's Kleine Dreigroschenmusik and Luciano Berio's Coro, starting at 10pm to a sadly more-than-half-empty hall. The Weill was fine, but the Berio was the meat of the evening. Random thoughts: (1) It is a work that totally depends on live performance. On record the idea of forty independant voices screaming at you would just be a mess. When you can see them, the effect is very different -- and in a way scarier. (2) It was interesting to see this immediately after visiting the Musicologist in Berlin Known to Some of You, who has thought in a more sophistoicated way about the dramaturgy and political potential of the chorus than perhaps anyone else in the world. And Berio very self-consciously wants Coro to be a disquisition on the dramaturgy (in a sense) and political potential (in several senses) of the chorus. I think Berio in the end fails to pull this off, but it raises questions... (3) The "folk song" stuff in Coro is dumb, and borderlne offensive. (4) There was one mezzo in the ensemble who knew how to do a real Berberian impersonation. She should have given lessons to the others.

Also that night I was standing by someone I'm pretty certain was someone famous. An old old man. An American who's lived in Britain for years. He looked... famous. Anyway his friend came up to him -- and I feel completely justified in eavesdropping, since his friend was practically stepping on me at the time -- and says "so we just got back from Slovenia! We were visiting our friend Vinko! You know him, right? Vinko Globokar? Yeah, he's divorcing his second wife and moving back to Paris. Well, we all knew his second marriage wasn't going to work out, ever since he left his first wife to be with her. They've always had problems." Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I am so in the know... Comme je suis dans le vent...

Okay, back in my real life, I took the laptop in to get fixed. Of course, when I showed it to the guy (that is, to the genius) the computer was just fine. It started up as normal. I looked like an idiot. I'm so, so sure that the problem is the same as it was last time this happened. But the ngihtmare scenario now is that, after 10 days, the repair people will declare that nothing is wrong and give it back to me, at which point I will have to turn right around and give it back to them.

Anyway, I've already bought a bunch of new A4 notebooks. I'm gonna be so old-school scholar for the next two weeks. Kickin' it Handschrift stylee!

Excitable Iberian teenagers are being rowdy in the internat cafe right now.

Did you all see my Stockhausen post? The Musicologist Known to Some of You said to me recently, "I've discovered a sucessful teaching strategy. When I have to teach something , rather than figure out something to say about it, I look in the Oxford History of Western Music, and just say whatever RT says. Works every time!"

Tonight: Anne Sofie von Otter.

Bad things (and silver linings)

2005-08-04T14:20:00.000+01:00

My computer is busted. Damn.

It's the exact same thing that happened a year and a half ago -- this "logic board" nonsense. It's been acting up since the day it got its new battery. What could the relationship be? To its credit, the logic board crash does look like a computer crash should look -- dramatic flashes, weird distortion, and then a slow fade to blue. Much superior to a simple freeze-up. I tried to go to the Apple Store today, but arrived too late to get an appointment. I may try again to go to Bluewater where the wait is shorter. We'll see.

It's too bad, really, because things were looking up. Most importantly, THE PICCADILLY LINE IS RUNNING AGAIN! Hallelujah.

I finished the Sonnambula note, which just needs one round of revision for it to be quite good. But it won't get that, since it's so late. And with the computer acting up, I had to send it typed into the body of an email. With no italics or diacritics. Can't you just smell the professionalism. Dammit.

I missed the Ravi Shankar concert. Daaammmit.

I got quoted in the Evening Standard, a horrible horrible right-wing populist newspaper. Here's a scan. I is so famous! (Unfortunately, they have quoted my saying the least witty thing I have ever said in my life. Seriously, I think when I ordered my coffee this morning I was actually more witty than that quotation. But we take what we can get, right? And how many people can claim that they are personally responsible for getting the phrase "butt-load" into the Evening Standard, hunh? Not many.

And so it goes. It's not so bad. I shall take this vacation from the computer to get my act together about the Wellcome library, the Royal Society thing, the next trip to France, etc etc.

Erinnerungen von Berlin

2005-08-02T16:46:00.000+01:00

Berlin is amazing. Part of my very strong positive reaction to the city is that it is, in many ways, the opposite of London. Where London is dense, Berlin is diffuse. Where London is comparatively clean, Berlin is comparatively filthy. (Yes, really.) Where London's past is continuously present and visible, much of Berlin's past is comparatively invisible, only emerging is startling moments. (I'm not sure how this architectural fact relates to Londoners' relatively unambiguous relationship to their history, and Berliners' -- obviously -- conflicted relationship with theirs.)

In any case, much of Berlin, especially the old East, has this thrift-store, jury-rigged aesthetic that I highly approve of, and which is almost completely lacking in London. Examples: an abandoned lot, with some christmas lights and a trailer, is converted into a rollicking biergarten. A bar called Wohnzimmer ("living room") is decorated entirely in dilapidated, ornate furniture and ugly 70s wallpaper. A brand new restaurant is decorated in imitation ugly 70s wallpaper and thrift-store furniture. My host points to a hideous communist office tower: "there's a big nightclub on the twelfth floor of that building. The rest of the building is offices, or empty." All of these things make me very happy, and all of them are unknown or very rare in London.

Actual things I did: lots of walking, mostly. Shopping in the old West and the old East. Berlin Alexanderplatz. Also, the Gemäldegalerie (European painting through 1800), the Hamburger-Bahnhof Galerie (art since the 60s), Libeskind's Jewish Museum (an interesting failure). No music, as it is Sauergherkinzeit ("Sour-pickle-time") when all the musical institutions are on vacation.

It was wonderful to hang out with my host, the Young Musicologist Known to Many of You. We gossiped, we argued about music and musicology, we compared notes about living abroad, he told me war stories from his job search. Significantly, though, by my "cultural" definition he is hardly gay at all -- doesn't really know or like a lot of gay men, and certainly never goes to gay bars. So the notorious Gay Berlin remains a mystery to me. But that's okay.

One eats well in Berlin. For cheap. My last night, we went to this hilariously tacky, old Thüringian restaurant, and got the mixed grill to share. Everything was pig. Sausages, bacon, gilled pork... utterly exquisite. With a plate a pickled vegetables, it came to 20 euros for the both of us. Plus an 11 euro bottle of wine. If to you things this sounds not "cheap," it would have been about twice as much in London. A German breakfast, which features a big platter of delectables (cold sausage, much cheese, etc.) to be placed on dense bread, is a life-affirming institution.

We were walking down the street, having just come out of the gigantic book and record store Dussmann, and I recognized a person walking towards us. It was the flatmate of my friend in Paris! I have never felt like so much of a Global Teen in my life. My host said that he had never run into someone, randomly on the street in Berlin -- but then two days later we were walking on the other side of town, and who should we run in to, eating in an sidewalk café, but a famous University of Chicago musicologist known to my host!

So that's Berlin. In other news: everything in my life is still late. Late, late, late!

Finally, a link for my sister (it relates to my childhood). And perhaps also gf (it relates to a recent exchange). And perhaps also bk (just 'cuz).

Written in a Hurry...

2005-07-26T01:30:00.000+01:00

Oh jeez, I keep thinking of things to say, and it's late and I haven't packed. But quickly:

I'm leaving for Berlin tomorrow. I will stay for five days. I'm staying with a certain musicologist known to many of you. I'm excited!

I went to the Proms. The Proms are fun. Selected details at my most recent L'ist post.

I saw what was essentially Kraftwerk show manquée. Exactly like the Kraftewerk tour last year, except smaller, and there was only one member of Kraftwerk singing, and we were in a movie theater. The next day, I heard the same member of Kraftwerk read a lecture about media and society. It started out badly, but then got better at the end. It was all very pessimistic though. The Q&A was bizarre.

Paycheck drama is all resolved.

I finally got a haircut. It looks damn fine. Pictures to follow.

Everything else is late. Late late late!

Oh and my Genius Bar experience was lovely. Lovely! They didn't have the battery in stock, so it's not exactly fixed, but it will be as soon as I'm back from Deutschland.

First as tragedy, then as farce

2005-07-21T15:00:00.000+01:00

Once again, I'm fine.

Except this time I was(-slash-am) stuck in central London. I had come into town to wait in line at the Apple Store Genius Bar. I was told there were no more appointments today, which I sort of expected (I'd intended to get there at 9am, but got, um, delayed.) So to console myself for not getting my damn laptop battery fixed, I decided to walk through Selfridges. I came this close (gesturing with thumb and forefinger) to buying a pair of lemon yellow Marc Jacobs trousers for £30. In any case, there was a beep over the P.A., and then the music stopped. All the music, all over the store. That was what told me that something had happened.

I heard various people on cell phones muttering something about bombs, and I saw little clutches of employees muttering among themselves. When I left the store, Oxford street was swamped -- although this isn't entirely unusual. I called J—, which whom I planned to go to this IMAX Kraftwerk thing tonight. She told me what the online newspapers were saying.

My first impulse was, of course, to get online. I started hiking the BL, where I have wireless internet access. By the time I got to Tottenham Court Road, I decided it would be better to buy airtime in my nearest Starbucks, from which I write you now. Thank you, T-Mobile Hotspot!

Why is this Starbucks coffee so bad?

More soon...

Paycheck Drama Continues

2005-07-20T21:34:00.000+01:00

Okay, so I know y'all don't actually care about this, but it does, in its way, make for a good story, and I'm still flummoxed by GF's reference to "British efficiency."

So on Monday I asked the Institute to stop payment on my check and issue me a knew one. This would take ten days, but since Royal Mail's online tracking said the envelope had been in JFK airport for more than a week, I figured we might as well get the ball rolling.

As anyone would have predicted, the very next day the check was deposited in my account. Of course. That would be twelve days after I mailed it, and seven days after the other checks that I mailed at the very same instant (with much less postage) arrived safely.

Now, mind you that Royal Mail is telling me, even today, that the envelope in still in New York. This, it seems is a lie. Who can I blame for this?

I can console myself that I wasn't actually getting charged $23 a day. I was only getting charged $23 per check -- there were only two of them, paid out on consecutive days. The thing is, I really don't know if the check was deposited before the stop-payment order came through or not. And I don't know if this makes a difference. It appears that there is a hold on the check, but this is normal for large deposits, and some of the money is available now.

Aren't you all so fascinated by my paycheck drama? Sure you are!

Tomorrow: video art by a member of Kraftwerk, projected on an IMAX screen. And I wait in line at the (sigh...) Genius Bar. The Sonnambula note will be late.

A Rather Significant Milestone

2005-07-20T18:01:00.000+01:00

The 19CM submission is really and truly sent off! The various misadventures I went through to get it sent off are fairly uninteresting, and hinted at in the comments sections of the previous post, so won't be related here. And in any case, the important thing is, it's in the mail! And I found only four typos immediately after sending it! Ha ha! For the record, the typos were entirely confined to the footnotes (I think):

• de for der (in a German title)

• Hippcrate for Hippocrate (in a French title)

• concened for concerned (in a newly-written footnote)

and most distressingly:

• Physiolgy for Physiology (in a reference to the title of my own dissertation...)

Well, it's all in the hands of Hepo now. Wish me luck, everyone.

The barbeque was less like an episode of Melrose Place, and more like... I dunno, Brideshead Revisited or something? There was a great deal of tension, but it all remained unspoken and seething beneath the surface. One member of the Bizarre Love Triangle reacted to the tension by talking very very quietly, another reacted to by trying to entertain everyone at the same time, and my friend R— reacted to by drinking himself into a stupor. Meanwhile, the two fifty-something lesbians who had been invited kept everyone on their best behavior, the crowd of twenty-year-old girls, who were friends of a friend and known to no one, just sat around looking awkward and not talking to anyone, and the Israeli attempted to smooth things over with marijuana. I'm pretty sure everyone escaped unscathed. Did I mention that R— made tasty enchilladas? Mmmm...

The weather has cooled down. I'm happy. It doesn't take much...

Foul Mood

2005-07-17T14:23:00.000+01:00

Last week, for any number of reasons, felt very very long. This week flew by. Lots has happened. The article (which is 10,000 words now, cut down from 15,000) will be really truly submitted Monday or Tuesday. I'm very, very overdrawn from my American bank account because my paycheck got lost in the mail. Yes, lost in the mail. I'm getting charged $23 a day in fees.I had made a plan to call KT's cell phone during my high school reunion, which was yesterday. And I just forgot. I had been thinking about it earlier in the day, and then I just forgot. I'm feeling retarded.

You know what? I'm in a foul mood. I'm kind of not in the mood to write here right now. Oddly, I've been not in the mood to write here all week. Shall we catalog more disappointments? The proms started, with me never having written my preview. Probably won't write that tomorrow either, what with having to laser-print the article at Kinko's, and wait in line at the Apple Store Genius (fucking) Bar since my laptop battery still wont work. Oh and the L'ist people found and read this blog, including the post in which I say "I have no qualifications or justification for writing for the Londonist," which was awkward. (You see why I use pseudonyms? If I'd just called it only the "popular London website" and left it at that, then they never would have found it. As it is, it's like the second thing that comes up if you search "Londonist Greg")

There have been some good things, including a nice night with the cool girl on my fellowship -- we went to this wonderful restaurant, and then a genderfuck cabaret in Hackney, which was okay. I got a wonderful, reassuring, invigorating letter from the Advisoress. I met the Londonist kids, and they're (as expected) very cool. I went to XXL ("the world's largest bear disco") which was fun, but maybe not as fun as I thought it would be. (Yes, that means I went home alone, but may mean more than that.) In any case, I think my tolerance for house music is actually declining.

D— and his friend were here from New York, and then they left, and now they're coming back, but I may have to ignore them, with so many other things to do. While there were here before we had a good time, but they managed to literally run me ragged -- I was destroyed physically.

Today, I'm off to a garden party at the home of the ex of the wonderful American R— (the prematurely-shacking-up one). The gay drama involving R—, his sort-of ex, the ex's new sort-of boyfriend, and the cast of thousands which are also implicated, is both impossibly complicated, and oddly tiresome. Thus, the garden party this afternoon may be some sort of Pimm's-soaked Melrose Place with accents. In which case I may have to run away.

Thoughts

2005-07-08T23:45:00.000+01:00

So it's late, and I'm tipsy, but I thought I'd write up a few notes. First of all thank you all so much for you notes and comments and everything. It feels almost selfish to say how much it meant to me, since I was never in danger in the least and had no real reason to need comforting. But, although as the story unfolded I was feeling pretty calm, at some point I really did start feeling quite scared, however irrational it was. It was really the first pictures of that bus with the roof ripped off that did it. Hearing from all of you really did mean a great deal.

The biggest thing, though, is the way Londoners reacted. "Stiff upper lip" is a pretty ridiculous term, and I guess I had believed it only existed in Hollywood parody or as an auto-exoticist costume. But no: it reflects something real and, I think, quite deep-seated. On the one hand, this could be seen on the BBC news presenters—it's not entirely fair, but just unavoidable to compare this to my memories of 9/11 American television. But more than that, it was in the demeanor of the victims interviewed—both non-hysterical, and in a way dignified. This was both incredibly moving, and quietly reassuring. Example: one woman, very calmly and articulately describe what she'd seen. The camera panned down and revealed that she was bleeding from her leg. This was pointed out to her, and she said—completely sincerely, almost urgently, but totally without a trace self-dramatization—"no, that's nothing. Really, it's nothing."

I saw similar composure and lack of self-pity "behind the scenes" with the Londonist contributors. There's, like, a forum where normally we just discuss what going on on the site. But on Thursday there was a sense of pupose, this very inspiring drive, but again without a sense of self-importance, hyteria, or drama. The Londonist entry for the day might look to you to be minimalist, but in fact it was a great resource on the day for a lot of people, and the result of some really great work on the part of the guys. I felt pretty useless. My own contribution, which I wrote up today but I decided was really too... tasteless to go up right now, will be visible Monday.

For the record, the bus blew up about two blocks away from Senate House, where the Institute for Historical Reasearch, as well as the library where I sometimes work. Russell Square Tube station, the site of the third bomb, is the tube station that I use to get to said office and library. I had been there the day before to pick up my paycheck.

Some thoughts: the housemate that just moved out... oh hey, did I forget to mention that the Welsh dancer moved out, and has been replaced by an Italian? Anyway the Welsh dancer left on Friday for Tel Aviv. When he left we were all like "be careful!" So of course he got an email from me saying, "You go to Israel, and we get the suicide bus-bomber?! What gives!?"

Dear American friend who left, J—, used to use Algate East station, one of the three affected by the first bomb, fairly frequently when he lived in Whitechapel.

New American friend had to walk to work when the buses stopped, although no one knew why at the time. He ended up walking past panicky crowds in the Liverpool St area. That's about as close as I got.

Didn't know where other Welsh housemate was in the morning. He commutes on the bombed line, but wasn't sure when he had left for work. Sent a text, sent an email. Turned out he had the day off, and was asleep in his room the whole time.

Oh yeah, and I got some day-of-disaster rumpy-pumpy.

So life goes on (this, too, is inspiring). The Piccadilly Line, the only one that services my house, is shut down from well north of my house to south of central London, so there will be a lot of bus riding for now. D— from New York, and his wacky girl-friend arrived this morning—they would not be deterred. (Personal to Dr. K: convince the other K not to cancel her trip to London! Tell her there's nothing to be afraid of!) The article revisions are almost done; I still have to write that Sonnambula program note even though the person who hired me for that job has been fired; and I'm looking forward to writing a L'ist Proms preview.

I'm Fine

2005-07-07T12:08:00.000+01:00

Okay, so seriously: I wrote that last post when we all thought that there had been some sort of mechanical failure on the Tube. At this point, we all sort of wish there had been some sort of mechanical failure, rather than what's actually happened.

Again: I'm safe, although more and more shaken up. The thing I saw yesterday was just some construction going on. I'll write more soon.

Loud Noises

2005-07-07T10:09:00.000+01:00

Okay, so yesterday morning (that is, Wednesday) I was running along my usual route, and was told to turn around by a policeman blocking the path "because there is a bomb around the corner." In fact, I think it was just an explosion as part of the construction that's going on in the park. But the police were there. And, when I was about 50 feet away, there was an explosion. Not a huge explosion, but an explosion. I was sprinkled wikth little bits of dirt from the sky.

Later in the afternoon, the news that London won the 2012 Olympics was announced, and the "Red Arrows" of the Royal Air Force flew over my house in V-formation. Seriously, if New York had won, would the Blue Angels be zipping over Queens? (Also, let's not forget that San Francisco was in the running to be the US candidate, long ago. What might have been...)

UPDATE: Jesus fucking Christ. This does not seem to be a "power surge" as originally announced. I'm fine everyone, don't worry. (There was never any chance of my being out of the house before 10 am anyway.) Incidentally, londonist.com is one of the best places to get information about what's going on, since the news websites are so clogged with traffic.

That land is my land...

2005-07-04T17:33:00.000+01:00

So, first of all, there have been distressing, unpleasant, but in the end inevitable developments in my private life. These developments are, however, unsuitable for recounting in Greg's London Ramblings. Email for details.

Gay Pride was pretty much as expected. It's too tempting to compare it to San Francisco, which isn't fair at all. But still: it was really, really small. And less quote-outrageous-unquote. London pride definitely needs to learn one lesson from SF, and alternate music with political speeches on the Main Stage. Because one political speech after another after another gets... difficult to listen to.

Duckie's Gay Shame event was fantastic. The essay contrasting the Duckie and TShack aesthetics continues to develop in my head.

Happy Fourth, everyone! I've been saying to people, in an offhand tone of voice, "On Monday I'm celebrating the liberation of my motherland from her colonial oppressors..." It gets a chuckle. I'm headed out the door right now (I'm late actually) to head to the Mayflower Pub in Rotherhithe. The pub from which the actual Mayflower set sail in 1620!

My Heroic Battle Against Jet-Lag

2005-07-01T16:43:00.000+01:00

So, one of the quirks of the Londonist style sheet is that we have to Capitalize Every Word Even A And The In The Titles Of Posts. (Actually, that should read "Capitalise"; American spellings have been causing me much strife over there.) With the exeption of l'affaire Ferneyhough, which I have stopped reading entirely, and which was the absolute last thing I ever wanted to get mixed up in online, and which (I swear to god!) was not enitrely my fault (the damn post wasn't finished!)... other than that it's going really well. I may have discarded all of my credibility with the biography I just posted on the contributors page but... fuck it.

So jet-lag has been a big, big problem. I woke up at about 9:30 Monday, which seemed okay. But then I woke up at 11 on Tuesday, and 1:30 in the afternoon Wednesday. Why am I moving in the wrong direction? I've been trying to get into bed earlier than normal, but it seems to have no effect. This means I've gotten surprisingly little done all week. Even this morning I woke up with my alarm at about 8:30, and promptly fell back asleep. I then had a dream where I was back at the academic summer camp that I attended when I was a young teenager. Oddly though, a lot of monks and protestant clergy were also students. I was beginning the musicology course. But during student orientation and meeting the teacher and everything, I just couldn't keep my eyes open. In the middle of conversation I would have that feeling where you were just being drawn into sleep and physically unable to keep your eyes open.

BUT at some point I realized that the feeling of needing to fall asleep was actually me trying to wake myself up, and when I finally did fall unconscious in the priests' musicology class, I found myself awake in my bed. I don't recall ever having a dream experience like this. (At least I wasn't, I dunno, being pursued by killer musicology priests, as I would have been a few weeks ago.)

My laptop battery refuses to charge. I have taken it out and put it back in several times. Whatever shall I do?

I have a wart(?!) on my nose(?!). How did this happen?

Basically: it's been a long week. Tomorrow: London Gay Pride festivities. My housemate is dancing on the mainstage. Whoo!

Recuerdos de Nueva York

2005-06-27T19:41:00.000+01:00

So, my trip to New York was good. However, unlike the trip to Madrid, it would be impossibly boring to write up, since it was pretty much just meeting up with friends the whole time, along with, of course, lots of just hanging out with the BF. In the strictures that I've set up for myself here, we would end up with a veritable alphabet soup! For the record, I saw, in order of first vocal appearance: the BF, Dr. K—, GF, McC, D—, GO, A—, and M&M. (Can anyone make those letters spell anything?) Basically the only actual New York sight we saw was The Cloisters (more because it was a beautiful day than anything else) and Century 21. (BF got shoes; I was tempted by a denim jacket, but resisted.)

In addition, upon arriving at Dr. K—'s (gorgeous) apartment, she said, cheerfully, "I have a surprise for you!" And guess what? The Advisoress happened to be in New York that very week. What luck! (Thank you, all of you who completely failed to warn me about this.) Although I'm fairly certain that all color drained from my face upon hearing that she would meet us after lunch, it was actually wonderful to see her. She did mention that I had promised a chapter by the end of April, but didn't blame me too much for not being in contact more (which, to be fair, is not entirely my fault). And the baby! She is so big!

I was, I think, forced into revealing the address of this blog during the afternoon. When I saw Dr. K— later in the week, she apparently had read the entire thing, and opined "I don't think [the Advisoress] should read this..." She may be right.

NOTE TO NEW READERS OF GREG'S LONDON RAMBLINGS: This isn't really me! It's, like, a literary persona! Y'know, poetic license and stuff!

Anyway, I've officially made my debut at that Famous London Website. They've also made it clear that they do NOT, in fact, expect a post every weekday. My beat is classical music, and that would be just too much. One or two posts a week will be the speed for now. And I would say for the record that a certain post on the site last week, that thankfully sort of did not have my name attached, I am rather embarrassed about. I had saved it as a draft, fully intending to tone down the polemical rhetoric, um, substantially. But then my editor went ahead and posted it while I was in New York, because it was a slow week on the site generally. I appear to have received some hate mail already, which I have so far been too scared to read... Eee!

Big News, Dinner Parties, Departures

2005-06-19T23:33:00.000+01:00

The big news: I am the newest contributor to a very popular London website. They put out a call for new writers, and, feeling manic, decided to apply. Three days later, I was hired. There's a slight problem, in that I'm supposed to be the expert about the classical and new music scene in London. But I really don't know all that much about the classical and new music scenes in London. I've done a few practice posts on annoying Covent Garden posters on the Tube, and a horrible event that is about to happen. We'll see how it shapes up.

Now I know what you're thinking: Didn't Tony S— tell you not to do anything except for musicology, and not fall in to the trap of doing other work? I know, I know. It will indeed be quite a time commitment. They want 3-5 posts a week. But here's my rationale: I have been writing so much on this weird document that seems to have no end and no beginning. And no actual readers, not even my uncommunicative adviser. So I feel like it will actually help my diss if I get a little exercise writing things that start and finish and that people read. I think it'll be good, really...

I finally threw a dinner party. Some of you know how important this is to me. The guest list included the fantastic American, the architectural historian, all three housemates, and a guy who runs a non-profit that I met on the internet but had never actually seen in person. The menu was: chilled carrot soup, spinach salad with spicy walnuts and goat cheese, roast vegetables, rice, and baked cod in lemon-thyme butter. For dessert, berries in cream (this mysterious British thing called "double cream" which is good) and baklava brought by the new acquaintance. Good gay conversation.

Then we all went to Unskinny Bop. (Again! How the months fly by...) As we were walking, we found some illegal drugs on the sidewalk. This has never happened to me. It felt like... manna from G-D... Unskinny Bop was, as usual, wonderful. Although there's this friend of the guy who originally invited me who's American, and every time he sees me, he totally shuns me. It's odd.

I'm leaving for New York tomorrow morning. I'm exited.

Anxieties: Sleeping and Waking [and also Duckie]

2005-06-13T17:46:00.000+01:00

In this morning's anxiety dream, I was an hour late to pick up my father at the airport, because I had to drop someone else off first and that had taken a lot longer that I'd planned. Somehow the fact that my father was waiting at the airport was very, very bad. I glanced at my cell phone, and saw that I had three missed calls. When the phone rang again, I expected it to be him, but instead it was an irate woman from Saudi Arabia. She informed that I was supposed to be arriving in Saudi Arabia that day, and why hadn't I left yet, and you know visas and arrangements for American academics were very complicated, and if I wasn't going to show up then I would cause a lot of trouble. I remember thinking how I never wanted to go to Saudi Arabia, but I could take care of everything just as soon as I got to the airport. At that moment I looked over and realized I was in the passenger seat and no one was driving the car, even though it was moving very fast. As the car careened off the road and began to flip over, I woke up.

Ho-hum... Could my anxiety dreams be any more obvious? Oh well. In my waking life, I attempted to get a debit card from my bank today. As I believe I explained in these pages several months ago, in this country a check book and a debit card are considered extra-special privileges—the account I have allows me to get cash out of an ATM and nothing else. How this is more convenient that putting my money under my mattress remains an open question. So anyway, when I opened this ersatz "account" I was told—nay, encouraged—to apply for an upgrade after I'd been at my current address for six months. As of June 5, it had been exactly six months since the move-in, so I duly made an appointment, showed up five minutes early, sat around for twenty-five minutes waiting for them call my name, and then had a meeting lasting approximately two minutes in which the woman (who appeared to be, in Kim's enduring phrase, "from the Isle of Officious") told me that there was no way they could upgrade my account. Guess why! Guess why! Well, I'll tell you: I do not deserve a debit card because there is not enough money coming in to my account. Well, sure! Why else!

If this makes sense to anyone, please explain. I was warned before I came here that it might not be worth my time trying to get a UK bank account, but I didn't believe it. But at this point, I really can't think of any way that having this damn account has done me any good whatsoever. I pay for everything in cash anyway, and any money I might have saved from the foreign ATM charges my US bank would charge me are more than eaten up by the ridiculously exorbitant wire transfer fees that I've incurred in order to move money from the UK to the US to pay my US bills. So my advice to anyone coming to the UK—just don't open a bank account. As a special added bonus, you won't have to deal with the absolute worst customer service I have ever experienced in any private business in any country ever. We're talkin' DMV-level service here.

I had to buy myself a tie at T.K. Max afterwards just to make myself feel better. It's Famous Labels Month at TK Max, kids! Liberty ties for eight quid!

The big news of the weekend was Duckie, a club in South London that is London's near-analogue of Trannyshack. I had been told that I had to go to Duckie even before I'd arrived in London, but had never gone because the journey home from South London on a night bus would be just that little bit more torturous. That alone kept me away for this long. In any case, it was a really great night. I went with R— (who needs a better pseudonym, since there are too many R—'s: this is the prematurely-shacking-up one, not the traveling-to-Brazil one). R— is rapidly becoming one of my most treasured friends here; he's a total sweetheart, and sharp, and fun.

I shall have to go several more times before I can evaluate with any authority how Duckie and Trannyshack actually differ. Some obvious things: The website declares that Duckie receives funding from the Nation Arts Council, and I think this is not a joke. The ol' Shack is, um, not taxpayer-supported (although I would so love to read that grant proposal). Also, Duckie is hosted by a zaftig lesbian from New Jersey in a big Shirley Temple dress and Alberta Straub glasses. Trannyshack is...not. The crowd at Duckie is slightly older than I expected, although just as hip and rowdy. Differences in the audience probably have a lot to do with its being on Saturday night at 10:30, rather than Tuesday at midnight.

The biggest difference was that there were only two acts, and this seemed more or less normal. I believe the shortest T-Shack show I ever saw had at least 5 or 6. The first number was a live song about the death of River Phoenix, sung to the tune of "American Pie." ("Bye, bye, you vegetarian guy / Took a speedball at the Viper, on the pavement you died..." etc.) Witty! The second number was a girl in a chef's outfit who lip-synched while stripping off her clothes and throwing desserts on herself. The climax came when, after exposing her breasts, she dumped a huge bowl of trifle over her head. The resonance with things that go on at Trannyshack is fairly obvious here—I'm specifically reminded of that mud-drenched "Dirt Baby" number from circus sideshow night about a year ago. It also relates to some unseemly goings-on at The Teacher's Pet's former employer.

Oh and the music was fantastic. Old stuff, weird stuff, new stuff, and Kate Bush.

Finally, one more thing for the "Greg hates being a foreigner" file: I was talking to an English acquaintance, and explaining how I'll sometimes go without rather than risk saying the wrong name for something. He asked for an example, and I said, "Well, I take my shirts in to get cleaned (an extravagance, I know, but it feels so good). In the US, they always ask you if you want starch, and if so, how much—but here they never ask. If I could, I'd like some light starch on my shirts, but this is exactly the sort of thing that would have a different name, so I'm too embarrassed to bring it up." My interlocutor was dismissive of my anxiety. He said that it's just called starch, and that I should just ask for it. Emboldened, when I took my shirts in today I said "I'd like starch please!" And then...the blank stare from hell. He looked at me as if even asking him for this non-existent substance was somehow personally inconveniencing or insulting him. "Y'know, it makes the shirts a little bit... stiff?" "You mean, ironing?" he suggested. "No. Forget it."

This was immediately before the debacle at the bank. Moral: never ask anyone for anything ever. Anything besides simply accepting what you've been explicitly offered will only end in heartbreak.

Well, that's enough of that

2005-06-10T13:50:00.000+01:00

Okay, so that was diverting, but we now return you to your regularly scheduled amusing anecdotes about my life. Let's never do that again, shall we?

Have I mentioned that I've started running? I have. Three times a week, for 20 minutes. I've now done it two weeks, that's six times total, which doesn't exactly constitute a lifetime commitment yet, but I think it's more than a one-off at this point. I have done no strenuous physical activity whatsoever since arriving in this country, and I, as much as I'm not the sort of person who goes to the gym, doing a little activity really does make things go better—you sleep sounder, more energy, more focus. I believe this.

I wonder, however, if the sudden (if marginal) increase in my activity level is making me more anxious that I would be other wise. Like, perhaps something in my reptile brain has concluded that since I'm running so much I must be in danger. Just got a pile of letters forwarded from my mailbox in the Berkeley department, and in typical fashion, I'm putting off opening everything up.

I'm having bad dreams more frequently. This morning I woke up after having a dream which started as the dismayingly common "on stage without knowing my lines" dream. Common for other people, I mean—it's not a dream I'm used to having. In any case, I had to step in at the last minute as—you guessed it—Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. I had to jump in for his final scene, the hunting party where he's stabbed in the back by Hagen. And, as these dreams usually go, it wasn't until I was on stage that I thought "I can't sing! I don't know the words!" As unlikely as it sounds, the other characters on stage tried their best to cover for me, as the orchestra played on and on. I thought "If I just die realistically, it'll be okay." So I get stabbed, and I really ham it up, and then I snuck off stage.

But as soon as I got off stage, I saw this person I went to college with. Someone I haven't seen in four or five years, and that I didn't really know that well in the first place. I shall refer to her by name on the off chance that she googles herself and finds this: it was Mary Jane Rubinstein. She is a theologian, last I heard. But just as I went over to talk to her, she slipped off of the ladder or fire escape or whatever she was on, and plunged head-first onto the highly-polished marble floor. I could hear her skull cracking. For some reason there was no one around—in the dream, it had something to do with the fact that everyone, including the backstage staff and stuff, had to be somewhere else during the Immolation Scene. So I ran and I ran thought the backstage of the theater trying to find help. I thought I could take a shortcut, but that just led me to some are with tiny, tiny hallways, and I got more and more lost, frantic to find help for Mary Jane, and then I woke up.

Pretty standard stuff, I guess. About an hour later, I got a call from the BF. He thought I sounded out of sorts. It honestly didn't occur to me at the time that this might be why.

Last night, I saw the ENO's staging of the Handel oratorio Jephtha. GF: apologies for not texting you at intermission, but I had my hands full convincing my companion, the architectural historian, not to leave halfway through. It was okay. Good sets, some good directorial decisions, some okay singing. I'm still not 100% percent convinced that staging the oratorios is really a good idea.

Tonight: R— is back from Brazil, hopefully with stories.

I have written a poem

2005-06-08T21:07:00.000+01:00

ODE TO MY FAVORITE JEANS (AFTER HORACE)

Non ille, quamquam Socraticis madet
sermonibus, te negleget horridus....

What should I call you, you who called out to me from the clearance rack at the Gap so many years ago?
You second skin,
You battle flag,
You means,
You end,
You whose scars would cost a premium if hanging on a rack, but who was plain and blue when I first saw you,
You whose back right pocket turned into a shredded mess, then into a duct-tape patch, then was professionally removed altogether,
You who rides low on my hips without sagging around the ass or entirely veiling the crotch, as if to say "boys, I want it, but not too much,"
You who appears to me, a vision, in my mirror below the eight tee shirts I just put on, one after another, each one not quite right,
Or whom I struggle into as I stumble out of bed to talk to whomever it is who's ringing the doorbell at this ungodly early hour,
Oh, MY FAVORITE JEANS, come down from your hangerly abode
Or (more likely) rise up from that indistinct, liquid mass on my floor,
Or his floor,
Or that other guy's floor,
For convention demands that I cover my legs, and the other means at my disposal have come to seem like a pale imitation of you.

Can we imagine a time before jeans?
The fashionable know, they tell us, that when we are in doubt, we are to wear jeans.
They tell us never to wash them, or, if we must, that the best way in the shower, while wearing them.
The poet tells us that we should dress to be noticed, or to be invisible, but never both.
The sociologist tells us that men's clothes became invisible, at a certain moment, for certain reasons.
Men's clothes began to trumpet the fact that they weren't trumpeting anything.
Jeans hover uniquely, precariously between theses antipodes.

And now? Are these pillars labeled "ostentatious" and "unnoticed" in the process of melting into air themselves?
Can we imagine a time after jeans?
Could we go back to britches and a waistcoat?
Could we wear skirts everyday? (which men, rationally, should have been wearing all along, right? I mean, honestly, think about it for a minute.)
How many more times can I pay to have the crotch of these old things patched?
The pockets are disintegrating again; I just felt a few pennies slide down my leg and hit the sidewalk.
There is a strange rip on the thigh that I can't explain.
The cuffs at the ankle are slowly wearing away.

But it's only Saturday.
Tonight, let's get out of here, you and I.
With a little luck, and just the right tee shirt, we will stumble into a cab together, headed for some distant, unknown suburb, just as the sun comes up.

The Identity vs. Community Celebrity Death-Match; Or, Your Subculture Needs You!

2005-06-08T09:44:00.000+01:00

So this is just a first draft, and a fragmentary one at that. It's also rather belabored, and vague, and needs some specific examples... but bear with me, okay? When I said I wanted to spout off a little bit about my feeling against gay "identity," Van Twee responded with a frankly appalling anecdote which really does put his finger on the distinction I had been planning to make. In his words, the villain in his story "uses gay identity to trump gay culture," turning a poem that makes a grandiose philosophical claim into a very small bit of confessional auto-analysis. This cheapens the poem in question, obviously, but I want to stress the way that also cheapens homosexuality. What if the poem Whitman actually wrote was, in fact, conditioned by his experience and a lover of men? If we're going to say anything about that, then we need a radically different perspective than Prof. One-Million-Dollar-Endowment... a perspective that places homosexuality the beginning of the interpretation, rather than the end.

I don't actually mean this to be only about literary criticism. The flaws of Daniel Harris's 1995 screed The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture are many and obvious: it is dated, occasionally embarrassing, it tilts at windmills, it is blind to many new cultural developments that were well underway even in 1995. But for me the most powerful critical move he makes happens very quietly, almost understatedly: he chooses to treat gay culture just like any other subculture. That is, gay culture is not measurable as a genetically-defined statistical minority of the population, like the left-handed. Rather it is a social fact, defined by social interactions, special spaces, rituals, shared experience, language—I like to group all these things under the term "folklore."

We have a lot of models and analogues for thinking about such a social fact. (I use the word "folklore" because of a good Alan Dundes article here, which defines the term in this way, although he's certainly not thinking of the fags in the article.) The most obvious analogue for me, though, is the way we teach the concept of "Black music" in Music 26 (Music in American Cultures) at Berkeley. We give the students a long list of features that appear in various African-American genres (regarding musical structure, social organization, material culture, etc.) but then we stress over and over again that this is NOT a checklist to determine how "Black" a particular example is. Rather it functions as a set of family resemblances—a collection of traits that any given example may participate in, or not, for any number of reasons. (Then, after we've explained this many times, we write it again in big letters with a red pen, because the kids never listen to a word we say. But I digress.)

This understanding of the nature of gay culture perhaps doesn't seem that radical, or controversial, but it is deeply at odds with other ways of thinking about what constitutes the gay population: homosexuals are born that way; they are defined through sexual acts ("preferences," "orientations"). I have a term for this, which I picked up from an ex-boyfriend (the "bad" ex, for those of you familiar with him): "the MSM ideology," or occasionally "the MSM nonsense," with MSM standing for "Men who have Sex with Men"—the epidemiologists' alternative, inclusive term that doesn't "force an identity" onto anyone.

Larry Kramer, incidentally, has a name for this too: "being defined by our dicks." The phrase occurs in the rather insufferable play, The Normal Heart. (And I should add that Mr. Smearcase has recently said "when Larry Kramer starts sounding reasonable, we know we're in trouble." Indeed!) But Kramer follows his denunciation of being defined by our dicks with his alternative, a "culture" (his word) which includes the pantheon of Great Homos throughout History. (I can't be bothered to actually look at the play again, so I couldn't exactly tell who's on the list. But you can probably guess: Proust, Chaikovsky, Michaelangelo, etc.) The problem with the speech is both that it ends up being a smidgen too booster-ish about the whole thing, and (at least as far as I recall; it's been a while) doesn't actually enumerate what might be on the inventory of family resemblances that might bind gay cultural production together (and given the scope of this, he might be implicitly rejecting the idea that such a inventory is possible).

Daniel Harris is less reticent. In fact, he's fairly unflinching. His gay culture consists of not only the obvious: special slang, a unique aesthetic, humor, wit; but also things like drag, effeminacy, a particular way of thinking about sex, and particular sexual practices themselves. He even puts on the list elements like self-loathing and sexual degradation.

What do we gain by thinking of gay culture in this way? It is the same point that my ninth-grade algebra teacher made by way of justifying why one should understand algebra: not only because it is useful, and not only because it is beautiful, but because it is a human accomplishment. It is something that a group of men, living under very real oppression, created for themselves. Harris himself uses more concretely political terms, arguing that "diversity" is, in itself, a societal good—that gay culture is American culture, and when gay culture is dead and gone, transformed into a demographic that is marketed to, or a box to check on a epidemiology survey, then American culture has been diminished.

(Of course, this does not for an instant mean that any cultural product or trait is above moral or aesthetic evaluation. The passage to bear in mind is that place in the introduction to Taruskin's Defining Russia Musically where he asks us whose side we're on: the students in Tienanmen Square who ape the language and imagery of the West, or the Red Army tanks defending the special uniqueness of the Chinese experience? We can and must condemn things like historical gay culture's misogyny and self-loathing, while acknowledging their importance in the homosexuality of the past, and without allowing them to taint everything that constitutes the subculture.)

So, the point is that, for Harris, gay culture was already dead in 1995. For him, visibility and assimilation are fundamentally incompatible with a subculture's continuing vitality. He was wrong, but it's not hard to understand his pessimism, since he points to instance after instance where very public, very high-profile gays express open contempt for the actual social facts of gay subculture—in effect willing it out of existence. This includes men trumpeting how well they can ape patriarchal masculinity, couples trumpeting how well they can ape bourgeois marriage, and all the "we're just like you" propaganda of visibility. He quotes people who openly dream of a time when being gay is "just like being left handed." For anyone who actually treasures he elements and products of gay culture, this statement is frankly chilling.

The thing is, we have models and analogues for thinking about this dynamic as well. Lots and lots of subcultures have managed to will themselves out of existence by deciding that their own languages, practices, and folklore were inferior to those of some other culture. Maybe in some cases this worked out okay. In a few rather, er, high profile cases this was shown to be the most catastrophic trade-off imaginable. But, although Harris doesn't allow himself to, we can all imagine how an individual can participate in, and actively create, embody, a particular subculture without forgoing other cultural identities and practices. In fact, every human being on the planet (or at least those who live in non-totalitarian societies) has done this at one time or another. Furthermore, we can all imagine particular American minority groups who have argued for their constitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the law without having to pay for these rights in exchange for their cultural specificity. (We demand equal rights, including marriage right, because we are citizens, not because we are "just like everyone else.") I leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with specific examples for each of these cases.

If anything proves that Harris was wrong to announce the death of gay culture, it is the fact that in my recent travels it become obvious I have something in common with gay men from vastly different countries, something not essential, but rather fundamentally social. (And no, I'm not talking about the "international language" here, you filthy people. Well, not much...) I'm not saying I have everything in common with every homo everywhere, but I am saying I have something in common with almost all of them, and I have a lot in common with many of them. The other thing that proves Harris wrong is the fact of new developments within gay culture that are actually about creating something new by and for the gays, rather than "representing" ourselves to the broader public (or uncritically taking on the culture that was invented, so to speak, "for export only").

If I ever get inspired again to kill time by rambling on like this (dissertation? what dissertation?), I let you know what (and where) I think they are. But, um, does any of this make sense?

28 Names

2005-06-06T23:53:00.000+01:00

So, this morning I woke up and got to work early, so I decided to write out a list of people I need to write emails to, both work-related and friends. Pretty much just off the top of my head, I ended up with a list 28 names. Twenty-eight! The list ranges from certain people whom I still call "really good friends" when they come up in conversation, but with whom I have not communicated with whatsoever since arriving in this country, to, um, the president of the AMS (although her reply is only a week late, rather than seven months). Having made a list, I then sat down and wrote... two emails. Only twenty-six to go!

(The twenty-eight names do not even include the invitation I need to write for a dinner party I'm tentatively planning for the 18th, which would add six names or so to the total.)

So anyway: maddening musicology colloquium on Jimi Hendrix at Oxford last Tuesday. Brilliant, brilliant musicology colloquium by the famous R—M— last Wednesday. (He's doing well.) Binge drinking in Camden on Thursday. Popstarz with new friends R— (the American) and O— (the eccentric) on Friday. Mysterious Skin on Saturday. Bernstein's Mass performed by the London Symphony Orchestra on Sunday.

This last one deserves a little comment. Everyone always thinks that Mass is a big disaster, right? Hippie shit appropriated by the establishment's establishment, or something like that? Godspell rewritten by the Radical Chic? Well, it is, sure... but I'll be damned if it doesn't really, really work on stage. And there is some stunning music. And some of the embarrassing lyrics are actually rather effective. That one recording sounds so very, very earnest... but that earnestness can be (and perhaps even in 1968, was?) undercut by the cynical sneering and (self-)parody in the staging. This production (in the Barbican Theatre) decided to make absolutely no reference to the 1960s at all—and in fact a lot of the stage business was cut. (Significantly, they decided to not actually show the moment when the celebrant throws the eucharistic bread and wine on the floor, the (actually still rather shocking) climax of the entire piece.) I was worried that British singers wouldn't be able to pull of the very vernacular American English—but it turns out they used mostly American soloists. The result was remarkably fresh. I might even say "relevant." (Now more than ever...?) And the audience response was rapturous, which completely surprised me—the biggest ovation I've ever seen in Britain. Mass! Hear it again, for the first time!

R— still has my PNP New Yorker thingy...

Did I mention I'm coming to New York in, uh, two weeks? Everyone I know in New York: y'all are toward the top of the twenty-eight...

Recuerdos de Madrid

2005-05-30T17:00:00.000+01:00

[So, a while ago I said my rant was in progress, and then admitted it was a lie. Well, it really is in progress this time. I left my copy of last week's New Yorker at R—'s house, etc, etc...]

Madrid is, as you may have heard, an incredibly beautiful city. The weather during my entire stay was very warm and very dry—my skin is clearer than it's been in months, and my hair (which is longer than it's been in years, fyi) was easy, breezy, beautiful. Anyway, Madrid is lovely. I think it has a lot to do with the feel of the street life; as you walk around, you see all thee people sitting out on benches or in cafes. Sure, this has a lot to do with the weather, but even when it is nice in London, there aren't very many places to just sit, at least not in central London. The streets are also very wide, in a way that they most definitely are not in London. San Francisco, incidentally does have all those very wide post-1912 boulevards, but again, not the places to actually sit while on them. (Any benches would be taken over my the homeless, etc.) Speaking of which: how's Octavia Blvd coming along, my San Franciscan friends?

In the end I decided that the Spanish-language sources about Garcia weren't really worth my time (and they're held in the British Library anyway), so any vestige that this trip was even partly motivated by work was thrown out the window. Thursday I went to the Prado, which may indeed be the best museum in the world, as it claims to be. The Garden of Earthly Delights was bigger than I imagined it would be, the Goya Black Paintings (including Van Twee's favorite, the "Half-Buried Dog") were more disturbing than I imagined they would be, and Las Meninas in person still packs a punch despite its over-familiarity.

Thursday night my indispensable host (herein known as the Spaniard) had received press tickets the gala concert for the 40th anniversary of the Spanish Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra. For the occasion the official patrons of the orchestra were to be in attendance, Their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Asturias. As readers of Paris Match or the like will be aware, the Prince of Asturias (the heir to the thrown—the title is equivalent to Charles being called the Prince of Wales) recently married this woman, now the Princess Letizia (don't forget to lithp the "z"), who was a television news presenter and the daughter of trade union activists, and the granddaughter of a cab driver and a fishmonger. She is awesome. Anyway, the prince and princess arrived amid a hail of paparazzi flashbulbs. It felt very... grand.

The performance of Mahler 2 which followed was pretty much lackluster, despite a really lovely "Urlicht" by Jennifer Larmore. Alas, the Spaniard was not feeling well... something he ate, we guess. You know that moment in Mahler 2 where the entire orchestra falls silent, and you hear the sound of a solo horn from off-stage? Imagine that delicate moment, if you would. Now imagine that moment, accompanied by the sound of my friend running to the exit, stumbling, and vomiting on the stairs before reaching the exit. Oh yes... (And PS, I got handed the task of writing the 500-word review for mundoclasico.com that he was supposed to write... if you look on the right day (maybe Tuesday?) you can read it while it's still free.)

By the next day, he was feeling fine. We went to the Reina Sofía museum, where Guernica is. It's a beautiful museum, in a converted Army headquarters. Guernica, I have to say, was maybe something of a let-down. Much of the collection was not that interesting, but it was good to walk through with the Spaniard, because he could tell me which of the Spanish post-war artists were fascists, which weren't fascists but took fascist money, which claimed to repressed but actually weren't, etc. etc. Friday night we saw the Bernice Reagon/Robert Wilson collaboration based on Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Anthony (I think some of you saw this in Brooklyn, yes?) It was good, but not great—I'm wondering if there were more awe-inspiring stage effects and machinery in the original mounting that couldn't be toured overseas. But the music was mostly great. Bernice Reagon herself got up and sang a little during the curtain call. She rules.

Saturday we wandered around, went to the Royal Palace (which is totally lovely—somehow incredibly lavish, but on a more human scale than Versailles). The Spaniard only got one press ticket to see Pappano conduct the London Symphony Orchestra on tour (Bernstein, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov), so I took a nap before meeting up with him again to spend an evening in the gay neighborhood, Chueca. There, I randomly ran into an acquaintance from San Francisco. Yes, really. Even 5000 miles away, I cannot escape the little village that is my SF social circle. It gets weirder: the guy was in Madrid with a Spanish friend, who—you guessed it—went to college with my Spanish friend. In Santiago de Compostela. Am I more than three degrees removed from any homosexual on the planet?

Later that evening, we went to a straight hipster bar, La Via Lactea, where the Spaniard knew the bartender and could get us free drinks. The very best kind! Can I take this moment to complain about the absolute, complete worst thing about the United Kingdom? The absolute, complete worst thing about the UK is the legally-mandated 25 centiliter shot of liquor. In every bar in the country you are legally required to sell this thimbleful of alcohol as a "single." (I guess some bars give you 35 cl singles—big difference!) The point is: you can imagine my joy and delight and when I saw, in Madrid, the bartender get out the bottle of liquor and just pour it into the glass. For several seconds! Bliss!

As the Spaniards are famous for, the streets were still bustling at 4am, when we took a taxi home.

Sunday's outing was to El Escorial, Philip II's attempt to replicate the phenomenon of Versailles, keeping the nobility in check by drawing them all to a palace away from the capital. In a bizarre move that perhaps sheds light on some deep aspect of the Spanish character, the massive, massive building he built for this purpose is not a lavish pleasure-palace like Versailles, but rather it is the most depressing building I have ever seen in my life. It is absolutely monumental, and absolutely austere. Even the paintings, including some clear masterpieces, were painted in an enforced aesthetic of dark, dark sobriety. For example, the altarpiece of one of the smaller chapels is a Titian, and a really wonderful Titian at that. But it is also the single darkest Titian I have ever seen, portraying St. Lorenzo being burned alive on a grill. Did I mention that the entire castle is laid out like in the shape of gigantic grill, in order to recall the instrument of the patron saint's martyrdom? Cheery!

Oh and then there are the tombs—the only part of the castle that could be described as lavish. All the kings and queens of Spain are in single, very small oratory. It's hard to describe how creepy this is. elsewhere in the palace all the other princes and what-not are entombed all in a line. The royals who died before puberty are all placed in this big round marble thing that looks like a wedding cake. I took a picture of Don Carlos's tomb, which is, in fact, directly across from Elizabeth de Valois! [Non-opera people: ignore this shocking revelation.]

I should also mention that the Spaniard was deeply affected emotionally by all this weirdness. He said more than once, "the most powerful empire of the world memorializes its power by building... this!" In summary: El Escorial is way fucked up.

In light of a previous entry on foreign travel, you may be wondering if how I dealt in a country where I hardly spoke the language at all. The answer is: badly. I hid behind the Spaniard at all times. I tried to be discreet about this, but I probably wasn't. Why am I so afraid? And is this something I should just learn to live with about myself, or something I should actively try to fix?

Update: Trip to NYC officially scheduled. I arrive Monday June 20 and leave Sunday June 26. FYI...

Big Weekend, redux

2005-05-23T13:46:00.000+01:00

Big weekend was big. And super fun!

Friday I became completely lost trying to find Club Kali. But I eventually got there, and it defies description. Everyone there was simply having such a great time, and of course the music was absolutely fantastic. There were drag queens in saris. I got felt up, unbidden, by a Sikh.

Saturday I met up with this American, R—, before the Eurovision thing, and it was one of those moments where, fifteen minutes into the conversation, it was clear we were going to be very good friends. As a commentator of my last post pointed out cryptically, his situation in London seems to bear a superficial relationship to a regrettable episode in my own life, but you may set your mind at ease, since in fact he has is quite a different beast. I've known a few of these boys in my life, enough to form a very distinct species: the gay boy who shacked up very early. He is 23, and has been living with his boyfriend for more than four years. It's interesting, because he has, in fact, missed out on certain key elements of the "shared gay experience" (a contentious concept, I know, but a real thing nonetheless). At the same time his charmingly domestic life is almost unimaginably distant from how I lived at 23, in a way that I'm curious about. (And, as certain readers know very, very well, my current relationship to the dream of domesticity is... conflicted.)

In any case, he's great. We shall spend more time after ¡mi viaje a Madrid!

Eurovision was a complete wash, because every fucking gay bar in Soho was charging an exorbitant cover for the privilege of watching TV in their establishment. We went from bar to bar, with no luck, and so we just started drinking, and set off for Bethnal Green earlier than planned.

Unskinny Bop was so fun. I tried, and failed, to bed a bear cub. I slept on R—'s couch (thankfully sparing me from night bus hell). Sunday morning, R— and I sat in a Hackney cafe (pronounced "kaff"), ate the traditional English fry-up, read the paper, took the bus to Oxford Street, walked through shops, and saw Star Wars. After the movie, I launched into a frankly embarrassingly enthusiastic attempt to explain to R— how the structure of the movies relates to the Ring cycle. (Summary: it would be better if Return of the Jedi ended with the apocalypse.)

Coming soon: Now that Van Twee has posted a revolting cautionary tale about the hermeneutic dangers of gay essentialism, AND a lively debate was flickering on related questions chez Smearcase, AND I finally got around to reading that awful, horrible, wretched, no-good, and simply fallacious New Yorker article about how all the fags are diseased and miserable these days... I sense a rant coming on.

Big Weekend

2005-05-19T23:45:00.000+01:00

First, a bit of preparatory reading for prospective attendees of the Eurovision Brunch. Who knew that a pop song brought down the Salazar dictatorship in the 70s? And you have to admit, "Yes, Yushchenko/Yes, Yushchenko/This is our president" sounds pretty catchy, no?

I've been to the Peking Opera three nights in a row. Totally stunning. The crowds of philistines who leave each night at intermission while complaining loudly in borderline-racist terms have ceased to intrigue me, and now simply infuriate me.

H— is taking me to Club Kali Friday, which is something I think I should go to before I die. Also to do before I die: the North London Greek/Turkish gay disco night called, perhaps predictably, "Hopah!"

Saturday, Eurovision (in a gay bar on a big screen), 8-10ish, then I'm off to Bethnal Green for Unskinny Bop, which, as regular readers of Greg's London Ramblings will recall, is the mostest-funnest dive bar dance party I've been to in this country.

Sunday afternoon, I'm meeting up with a new friend, a homosexual from the internet, who is a 23-year-old artistic American ex-pat. Now, J—, you know no one could ever replace you! But... he may be, in fact, the new J—. This boy (we'll call him R— until we come up with a more descriptive pseudonym) seems to be feeling a tiny bit claustrophobic in his relationship with the boyfriend he moved to the UK to be with. I can be of service! We'll see how it goes.

Monday: no plans. Tuesday: housemate's dance performance. Wednesday: ¡Hola, Madrid!

"Bits and bobs"

2005-05-18T13:12:00.000+01:00

"Bits and bobs" is a nice little bit of British slang, don't you think? To return to a post from very long ago, my thoughts on various idiomatic expressions are hardening... I've been particularly annoyed by "mates" recently. Is this a way to avoid saying "friends"?

I bought shoes on eBay. Yes, these are the shoes that J— told A— to buy. I got carried away in the bidding, as one does on eBay, but they were still a great deal in the end, and it wasn't nearly the level of getting carried away as happened in my now-infamous shameful episode with the antique perfume bottles. (I don't want to talk about it.) Anyway, they are the most beautiful shoes I have ever owned in my life. (Yes, even more beautiful than the two-tone spectator wingtips stolen by a certain ex-boyfriend who shall remain nameless...)

If you are ever freaking out about finishing a bit project, and are looking for websites that will lull you into a stupor for a while, may I recommend the American Apparel pseudo-pornographic online catalog. I know, I know, it is very crass, cynical marketing indeed. But godDAMN those are some hot hipster-trash models. (Note that there are video clip both in "archived photo collections" and accompanying individual items inside the catalog.) I mean... a poorly-groomed beard, hairy belly, AND eyes that point in two different directions?! I'll take that in a medium, please.

Finally: this is the worst single piece of writing I've laid eyes on in weeks and weeks. (Scroll past the inoffensive Midgette thing, down to the second review.) I mean, seriously. "You must decide"?! I'm sorry, I though YOU were the reviewer, Mr. Holland. And if anyone can explain to me what this sentence even means, I'd love to hear it: "The absence of sighs and exhalations common to traditional music establishes a sense of frozen time." WHAT? This is the New York Times people! The paper of record! WHAT THE FUCK!

Yesterday I saw the National Beijing Opera Company of China. It was really fantastic. Many people left during intermission, and there's no denying that Peking Opera can be a hard sell, but seriously, it was great. I was trying to think of how I would convince these people to stay (and, in addition, to stop laughing at manifestly unfunny moments), but it's hard, because they were reacting negatively to really fundamental things about the genre—the vocal style, the melodic language. Perhaps a good thought-exercise for future music pedagogues... They're doing a different work each night for the rest of the week, and there are a lot of rush tickets, so I'm planning on going tonight and tomorrow, unless I get a better offer.

Everyone of my friends in San Francisco should go to Brian McC's Eurovision Song Contest Champagne Brunch this weekend. Seriously, it is guaranteed to be super fun. Write me for details if you don't know Brian personally...

I'm still alive

2005-05-17T00:26:00.000+01:00

Dear everyone who had the bad luck to try to talk to me in the last few days: I am so very sorry you had to see me like that, all paralyzed with anxiety and obsessive thoughts of my own incompetence. I can get a little high strung when I feel I'm going to be judged. And when don't have any SF high-rollers to hit up for Klonipin. (Kidding! Just kidding!)

I should explain: I was under the impression that I had been asked to give a 20-minute talk. I realized about four days before I had to give it that I was a one-hour talk. As all of you assured me, it was, in the end, fine. In fact, certain people were very complimentary. Although, in the end, I'm not happy about what I actually produced, that was not because I said anything wrong, but rather because there's just so much basic stuff that I wanted to do to actually support my argument that I just hadn't gotten around to doing. The paper also had a introduction that set up promises that were not carried out, a conclusion the summarized yet another non-existant paper, and a three page digression in the middle from a whole 'nother project ("meanwhile, thirty years later...")

In the end, it was a good experience, both because it taught me that I can, in fact, get over my anxiety, and because the Garcia stuff now has a beginning, a middle, and an end, which means, even though I have exactly the same amount of work to do before it's finished as before, it feels a whole lot closer to being a real chapter.

Sigh

2005-05-14T13:57:00.000+01:00

My 45-minute paper at the IHR Monday will be so, so bad. I am a bad musicologist. I sit down and try to put something together, and nothing happens. The thing is, I realized with a shock that, while I had convinced myself that I just needed to cobble together various things that I have already written, in fact there is a whole lot of thinking that I have yet to do. What the hell have I been doing the last, like, four weeks? What is all this useless prose that I have cranked out?

On the positive side, no one I care about will be there.

I went to Paris, then came back. Notable moment: walking down the street with P—, we run into a friend of P—'s that I've never met. We exchange pleasantries, and, before I really have the chance to say anything at all, P— says, "Greg parle bien le français, mais il n'ose pas." I mean, it's true, but I was still annoyed at him for broadcasting it.

Meanwhile

2005-05-09T22:45:00.000+01:00

Okay, so my essay on the intractable double bind of the gay culture of totay is totally in progress, and oh boy will you enjoy it. It will be even better than my classic essay "Scooby Doo Made Me a Musicologist." You will be totally stimulated, intrigued, or enraged. Or not. But either way, not today. (It is not, actually, in progress, either...but I've been, um, thinking about it.)

On Saturday we had a fun house event—one of my housemates made dinner, then all four of us sat in the living room and watched the broadcast of the Kylie Minogue concert, recorded live in London last week. It was fascinating, mostly because all three of my housemates knew all the words to all the songs, including songs that I'm pretty sure I have never heard in my life. It is impossibly to communicate how big Kylie is here, and instructive to consider why she hasn't (and I would argue couldn't) become a huge star in the US. My thoughts on this matter are ill-formed, but it has something to do with the fact that Kylie, while a superstar, is actually not a huge personality. In a way, she is very blank as a public figure. This is not a contradiction in the UK, as I believe it would be in the US.

(Incidentally, the concert was kind of bad... sort of cheap-looking, with attempts at grand spectacle that just fell flat. There were some good dresses, though)

We all got really drunk, and we ate a few hallucinogenic mushrooms. Have I mentioned that shrooms are legal here? You can buy them in just about any store in Camden. Seriously, like, even shoe stores sell them. This is due to some legal loophole which made dried or processed mushrooms illegal, but left fresh ones unregulated. The loophole is in the process of being closed, however, so by July (or thereabouts) shrooms will be "schedule A" along with crack and heroin. People who make drug policy are so smart!

By the way, the shrooms were really weak—I got a little giggly and confused, and felt as if the sofa had become very large, but that's about it. While I was drunk, I wrote a long-ish email to a complete stranger explaining my thoughts on the fact that my constituency, historically represented by Labour, has been taken over by the cute-as-a-button LibDems. The next morning I was surprised to discover the email in question was both coherent and mostly free from spelling errors. Wonders never cease!

I'm going to Paris on Wednesday. For no good reason at all. I can't actually afford it, but I'm doing it anyway. I'm more than a little embarrassed about this. Oh and I'm coming to New York in July. And Oxford tomorrow. And I'm reading a paper at the IHR in a week. Ah, hectic-go-go-nonstop-jet-set lifestyle!

05.05.05

2005-05-05T12:19:00.000+01:00

I hear you loud and clear—there will a well-considered essay on why the gays have lost their way. There will be copious references to Daniel Harris. [Warning: extremely bad website design.] Other topics to be considered include: my dinner parties, sex with bears, and this website.

But before that, more self-indulgent personal news! I have had a platonic date with a gen-yoo-wine British Upper Class Twit! He speaks like William F. Buckley Jr! He has his own studio apartment in über-posh Kensington (where Madonna lives), which, he informed me, used to be his "father's shag pad." His father, perhaps predictably, now lives in Hong Kong. In fact, he is not at all a twit, but he is 23, and perhaps not as worldly-wise as he thinks he is. Which is sort of charming. Oh, and he's the first British person I've met personally to fulfill the British stereotype of very, very bad teeth. He's a musicologist writing a Master's thesis on Luigi Nono. (Hey kids! Let's play "find the irony"!) Updates as they occur. I believe he will be referred to herein as "The Upper Class Twit." I could grow quite fond of him.

Also, are we all aware that my Adriessen essay is up and running? There is one glaring factual error that slipped through the editorial process, and one sentence which I would like to be rephrased, so if you have any problems with it, just imagine it is one of those things, okay?

Bizarrely, within a day of it going up, I received a long (long!) email from the author of one the books under review. She was, basically, happy. Inasmuch as she didn't actually threaten bodily harm. Heh heh.

It is election day! Since the British general election was not greeted with overwhelming enthusiasm as a blog topic, I shall keep my thoughts more or less to myself. Know this, though: elections are way, way different here.

Opern auf englisch

2005-05-01T12:52:00.000+01:00

A—'s visit was absolutely wonderful. (Technically, he's still in town, but now staying with another friend.) On Thursday we ended up spending more than 4 hours in the V&A, and that included skipping quite a great deal. Friday was the most beautiful spring day, so we walked through Hyde Park, then had lunch at Harrod's. (And if you thought $20 for a cocktails was wacky, check out $20 for a pastrami sandwich...)

After having seen no opera since the BF's visit, I saw two operas in two days. In fact, since the second was a matinee, it's more like 2 operas in less than 36 hours. Both were at the ENO, and both in translation, and I have to say, after the second one, I suddenly "got" why people want to see opera English. Yes, yes.

In the end, it probably would have been better to talk A— to Twilight of the Gods rather than to Lulu. Lulu was very good, particularly the phenomenal Lisa Saffer in the title role. (She is known to me personally from my time at what G— recently aptly called "the opera company that dare not speak its name.") Other singers ranged from adequate to bad.

Sitting though the six hours of Twilight on the other hand, was pretty much like getting punched in the gut over and over again. In a good way. The idea of a modern-dress Ring seemed so tired, and the idea of Wagner in English seemed so... improbable—my expectations were very low. But the result reminded me (once again) that things like modern dress or minimalist sets or whatever are only as good the stage director makes them. And when you have a director who can actually move bodies around on stage, who can create stage pictures that instantly communicate something both direct and complicated about the drama, who can get big, powerful, physical performances out of the singers—well, let's just say that I really didn't think that you're actually supposed to be weeping uncontrollably during the immolation scene. (This amazing director, incidentally, is apparently Emma Thomson's mother.)

Also: It was closing night for the production, and so during the curtain call, the entire orchestra got up on stage with the conductor. We're talking about the orchestra for Götterdammerung here, folks. That's a lot of people. After such a thrilling afternoon/evening in the theater (3pm-9pm!) it seemed somehow very right.

Y'know, I'm getting tired of writing here only about things that actually happen to me. Sometime this week I think I'll try to do a more expository thing about life here. Potential topics include: The decoration of my room. The British general election. My current position against gay "identity" and for gay "culture." On second thought, now that I type them, all three seem rather dreary. Any preferences, folks?

Way Too Much Has Happened

2005-04-28T10:31:00.000+01:00

Um... I hardly know where to start. I gave my presentation, and afterwards, during a reception at which I drank too much cheap white wine, an imposing Early-Modern Ecclesiatical historian called it "admirably sophosticated." The most significant thing, though, was that I basically sat down Sunday morning and wrote 13 pages. I started cutting and pasting from old stuff, but by the end I had essentially created everything from scratch. 13 pages! In one day! There may be hope for me yet.

Tuesday I waited hours in Heathrow for A— to get off the planefrom NYC. Dinner with a friend of A—. A— and were drenched head to toe by a passing car going through a puddle, in a manner both of us believed happened only in cartoons.

Wednesday: galleries, architecture, Vietnamese food, drinks. Very very tired.

Today: I may blow off the second day of research presentation. There's much more to tell. Details to follow.

I Am Lazy

2005-04-24T12:35:00.000+01:00

Okay, so I'm sure you're all on the edge of your seats wondering if I got the chapter draft to the Advisoress by Friday the 22nd, as I promised myself in this blog several weeks back. Oh, don't try to act surprised that I didn't. I tried—really I did. Now I have to give a presentation to the IHR tomorrow, and I done, basically nothing at all. Well, okay, I have an outline. It's going to be a long long day. Then a long few weeks before I give the paper on the 16th.

It has in fact been a big week: I finally started working at the British Library, which deserves a long post. It is very different from the Bibliothèque National in Paris—and not entirely better. It is startlingly less efficient, and the computer system is a shambles in comparison. But you can at least do your own photocopying. More on this later. Also more later on Jenny Lind, whom I now know a lot about. (Preview: She was nuts!)

On Wednesday I went to the National Archives in Kew, which until rather recently was known as the Public Records Office Frankly, the National Archive is probably a better name, since it contains photographs and printed ephemera and other things that don't really come to mind when you think of "public records"... BUT, every time I told someone I was going to the "National Archive" I got blank stares, so I finally gave in, and started calling it "the PRO," like everyone else still does. It was a nice place to work, although my research there was a total wash. [I just typed a whole account of what I was looking, and what I didn't find, and then, realizing that this was interesting to approximately no one, deleted it.] Perhaps it's just the time of year, but there were a lot of loud, obnoxious, elderly Americans at the PRO, apparently doing genealogical research about their ancestors. As previously reported, I've really been getting over my weird discomfort over my accent and what-not, but then I hear these people yelling at each other in the reading room of a library, and I, once again, begin to get the urge to quietly mumble at people to disguise my accent.

UPDATE! GARCIA ONLY HAD I THINK ONLY SIX CHILDREN. It seems Albert is in fact his grandson, by his second-oldest son Gustave (the one who was fired from the RAM for incompetence, in the absolute best exchange of letters in the RAM minute books). I was confused because Albert is (I think) older than Manuel's youngest daughter Paula. Would it be weird to have an aunt that is younger than you? (I believe this situation exists among the children and grandchildren of Keith Richards, if I'm not mistaken? Someone like that.) In other Garcia-clan-related news, it seems Manuel lied about his age on the 1881 census. Or, at least, his age was recorded incorrectly. It says 60; he was 76. Several explanations could account for this, but I'd like to imagine that he just wanted to avoid awkward questions about how he happened to have a five-year-old daughter at the age of 76.

I continue to meet homosexuals over the internet including: A cocky medical student! A freelance architectural historian! An old opera queen who makes hats for a living! A British-Jewish lawyer for an evil multinational music corporation! Details to follow... (Please, no comments about how meeting homosexuals over the internet is preventing me from writing musicology, thank you very much.)

I went to a fun party

2005-04-17T14:10:00.000+01:00

Okay, so since the departure of J— I've felt a bit freundlos, so took the plunge and posted an online ad in order to meet new people. There is a site here, though, that bans explicitly sexual content—it screens the photos you upload and everything—but even so my expectations were not high. On my ad, I ask (using language adapted from my Friendster thingy): "Do you know of any poorly-publicized club night I should check out? Is there an out-of-the-way cafe that I'd never find on my own that you could show me? Hidden bargains on fabulous clothes? Secret menu items at cheap restaurants? Drop me a line."

In response to this, two homosexuals, who do not know each other, both independently suggested that I go to "Unskinny Bop," a poorly-publicized party in scrappy East London. I was made apprehensive by the fact that the club's description sounds like an undergraduate term paper ("There is nothing superficial about music and the enjoyment of music through the act of dance"—Where's my red pen!?), but I was encouraged by the fact that lesbians are involved. (London lesbians, as J— was the first to point out to me, are oddly invisible and oddly segregated from the gay boys.)

In any case I don't want to arrive alone, so I rope a friendly-seeming guy who'd been chatting me up online, and we head over to exotic Bethnal Green... and proceeded to have the best night out I've had in months. The space had this feeling of a Victorian front parlor, minus the furniture—the walls all at odd angles, and with beautiful crown molding—and painted in a simulacrum of 70s psychedelia, without being too... ersatz. The crowd was friendly, a little hipster-ish, but dressed down. But the music was absolutely fantastic. This utterly adorable bespectacled dyke on the decks was following old old hip hop with the Pixies with Madonna with Northern Soul with Nina Simone. Fantabulous.

Had a discussion with one of the guys who invited me about how close the party was to its inevitable decline (either abandoned by the regulars, or invaded by the riff raff, etc.). For now, the only downside for me was the absolutely torturous night bus home—almost an hour and a half, and I got home after 4. But this was perhaps a small price to pay.

I neglected to blog about Friday night's adventure with super-cool cultural-studies-scholar-with-a-bad-girl-past who is on the same fellowship as me. She is awesome. When she goes out drinking, she only drinks vodka, straight up. Hard core. I shall pass over the details of our Abendteuerabend, because it's sunny and beautiful and I want to be outside. Let it suffice to say that I've had a good weekend.

Burke's Peerage is INSANE

2005-04-16T14:37:00.000+01:00

Seriously, have any of you ever had reason to look at this book? It is an account of all the noble families of Britain, which is creepy enough, but it is written in this bizarre short-hand code where offspring are called "issue," and it's all arranged by generation, so in order to read any particular person's lineage your eyes have to jump forwards and backwards around the text. I'm not explaining this well, but just know that it is a... unique textual experience.

Why was I dipping into this? Well, technically I was not looking at Burke's Peerage, but rather Burke's Irish Family Records, because Manuel Garcia's youngest (or second-youngest?) daughter married Major-General Sir George McKenzie Franks, KCB, from a fairly old Irish family—well, only enough to merit inclusion in Burke's Irish Family Records, at least. (And for the record, I provisionally declare that Garcia had a total of seven children, four by Eugénie and three by Beata: Gustav, Manuel III, Eugénie Jr., Maria, Paula, Manuela (whom they called "Carmen"), and Albert. I believe I am the only person in the world who knows this...)

So anyway, George and Paula had three children: Raynald, Noel, and (Beata) Cynthia. Cynthia died unmarried; Noel married a man from Sweden; and Raynald, the one who contacted the RAM in the 1970s, married Anna Giulia Rowe (possibly related to Marianne Rowe, Victorian opera singer, and Garcia student?) in 1939. Anna and Raynald had one son who died at age 5, and one daughter, Phyllida, who married Timothy Pyper in 1969 and had a daughter of their own, Zoë Marianne Clara (Franks) Pyper, born in 1974. Are you following all this? All this, and much much more information (addresses, dates, etc) is packed into about one-and-a-half column inches.

The point is, somewhere, right now, this Zoë woman, Manuel Garcia Jr's great-great-granddaughter, is about to turn 31. This all does me practically no good at all in terms of actually writing my dissertation. (Someone in the family still owns, for example, the centenary liber amicorum containing 800 tributes and signatures, but it could just as likely have ended up in the possession of the descendants of one the other six children. Probate records might help here, but I'm a little afraid of dipping into that mess.) At the same time—well, at the risk of repeating a phrase I've used recently, it all feels a bit vertigeonous. I mean, I don't even know a single one of my great-great-grandparents' names.

Home Sweet Home

2005-04-13T19:21:00.000+01:00

Hey remember awhile back when I was on the news because Wood Green, my beloved neighborhood, had been the site of a rash of stabbings? If we had thought of it at the time, we perhaps could have consoled ourselves by saying, "Well, at least there's no Al-Qaeda poison factory in our village!"

This small consolation has, alas, been taken from us.

Apparently, neighbors are shocked.

Sigh.

I Saw a Crappy Movie

2005-04-13T13:22:00.000+01:00

Hey Folks. I saw Asia Argento's The Heart is Decietful Above All Things. It was crap! It was really, really crap! I guess that I, againt all rational thought, actually had high expectations. I thought it might at least be, y'know, stylish. But regardless of what anyone might have expected, this was lazy, sloppy, superficial filmmaking in the first degree. I should write a more elaborate description of its failings, but (1) I don't have time right now and (2) I'd prefer to just ignore it.

Some of you may know my minor obsession with the idea that J.T. LeRoy is a total fraud, a fake, an elaborate hoax. Well, he was in attendance, and his public appearance at the screening only confirmed my suspicions. Fake! Fake! Fake! Which would be, y'know, sort of interesting, if the reception of his books didn't rest so squarely on the implicit claim that the books reflect something that actually happened to him. This makes the fact that he turns actual human suffering and class-based injustice into an absurd cartoon that more irritating.

Yesterday it suddenly occurred to me to look up Garcia in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. And... it's riddled with errors. Hardly a paragraph of the entry goes by without some glaring factual inaccuracy. Most distressingly, it completely neglects to mention that he had a second marriage and two (or perhaps three) children by his second wife.

Yesterday I also threw Male Subjectivity on the Margins against the wall, becuase it was frustrating me.

It is Wednesday, and I am filled with hate.

(Oh and speaking of hate, our intrepid correspondent in New Haven (see link to the right) has finally started posting more regularly. Although I still have some problems with his Kosman critique, his blog is definitely worth reading. Bookmark it today!)

Photos! Photos! Photos!

2005-04-11T14:00:00.000+01:00

Cyprus Potatoes
Originally uploaded by gwdexter.

I have been meaning to make available to you, gentle readers (and especially for Miss Straub), a collection of snapshots which I occasionally take when I see something funny or odd or particularly British. But I kept putting it off and putting it off, since I always just wanted to get a few more before posting them as a group. Well, there are only 10, which is not as many as I'd like, but here they are—I shall endeavor to take and post more in the near future. In the meantime, click on the bewildering image of the "Cyprus Potato Marketing Board: North London Branch," and then proceed through the album until to you get to the last image, "Forbidden Accordion!!" Along the way, you'll get to enjoy images which I have named "The Filthiest Dentist," "Creepy Gnomes," and a woman who is thrilled to be pawning her grandma's jewels. And much, much more!

Ekaterina is Quite a Step Down from Dame Kiri; Jockeys are Hot

2005-04-09T17:17:00.000+01:00

So it was a big day in Britain today, what with the Royal Wedding (and I'm not talkin' about Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling, darlings) and the big horse race "The Grand National" in the afternoon. The Royal Wedding drove home the point, once again, that I do not understand the mentality of this country on a very profound level. I mean, really, honestly... there is NO EARTHLY REASON why these people should be famous. Really. Any of them. They have done NOTHING in their entire lives that actually matters, except get born. And yet, everyone seems to care so much. What if everyone just decided to stop paying attention to them? Just stop. Really.

On the upside: (1) Camilla's dresses get a big ol' A+ from me, especially that unidentifiable object on her head that bore a resemblance to a crown of stalks of wheat wheat—lovely. (2) The odd moment of Russian Orthodox liturgical music dropped into the procedings was really lovely, at least musically speaking. As GF astutely pointed out to me, however, the young contralto who sang it, Ekaterina Semenchuk was indeed a step down from Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, whose contribution to Charles's first attempt at the whole marriage thing lingers in the memory. We were informed that the Old Church Slavonic interlude was "a wedding present from the Mariinsky Theater, of which Prince Charles in a patron"—but it did raise certain questions. I mean, if they can incorporate a musical moment from a tradition so radically outside the Anglican tradition, why didn't they incorporate a song or reading which referenced non-Anglican traditions within the UK? You could really imagine it: A song in Gaelic, a reading in Welsh, a snippit of Qur'anic chant, a Sikh devotional song, a Methodist hymn, a gospel choir. The symbolism could have been really nice. It would have looked... um... a lot like my baccalaureate service at Williams. Oh well.

The Grand National is way cooler than the Kentucky Derby (sorry, my dear Kentuckian friend). This is because it is four and a half miles, so the horses are visibly exhausted at the finish, and because the horses have to jump over these huge-ass hurdles, the largest of which are close to seven feel tall. Thus horses falling down and jockeys getting nearly trampled are an intergral part of the whole event. Thrilling! This year, 21 of the 40 horses who started actually made it across the finish line, and we were informed that this was actually really good compared to years past. Go fig. I was reminded of something I had realized some time ago (perhaps at that Kentucky Derby party BQ would take me to)—that is, that male jockeys, in general, are really hot. They're both short and elfin, and simultaneously mean and rough-trade-lookin'. There was a moment when the BBC coverage cut to an interview inside the locker room, and I just about fainted.

I just got the Chancellor's fellowship

2005-04-07T00:07:00.000+01:00

Jesus this is a huge weight off my mind. A huge huge huge weight off my mind. Words cannot express what a weight off my mind this is.

I wrote four pages today. Things are looking up.

Vertigo

2005-04-05T21:47:00.000+01:00

Okay, I just posted, but this deserved a separate entry.

1. Click here.

2. Be sure "Satellite" and not "Map" is selected.

3. Zoom all the way in.

Can you see? Can you see that this satellite image was clearly taken on the day of the Castro Street Fair? There are white-roofed tents all the way down to Castro and 19th? And there is a great throng of people in the street, especially at Market and Castro, where you can actually make out the temporary stage on the west side of the intersection.

This is making my head spin.

When, exactly, was this picture taken? It had to be 2002 or earlier, because the Octavia Blvd freeway off-ramp is still standing, and that was demolished in April 2003. Could it possibly have been taken Sunday, 6 October 2002? Which was the day I went to the fair with the now long-forgotten Stephen-with-a-PH(-but-with-no-PhD), whom I had met a week earlier at the Boy Scout-themed GQB? The fair at which I was invited, later in the afternoon, to the most debauched barbecue in history? If you squint hard enough, can you see being invited to this barbecue by one half of SF's famously lecherous club-promoting power couple?

The satellite image is clearly supposed to provide an reference image, abstracted from the ravages of time! I think I might only be able to look at the "maps" section from now on... there's only so much fear and trembling before my own mortality I can take from my web-based applications.

UPDATE! FEBRUARY 2006: They've changed the picture and it no longer shows the Castro Street Fair. Oh Well. You'll have to take my word for it. It was weird.

I paid $20 for a cocktail

2005-04-05T21:12:00.000+01:00

What will I do without J—, my American friend? His visa being up, he's heading back to Californ-i-ay on Saturday (coïncidentally, the date of the royal wedding). At some point during our last night of drinking last night, he said to me, "well, now you'll have to actually make British friends." He may be right.

In any case, we had a lovely evening, beginning at a pub that serves Thai food, and ending at an impossibly upscale cocktail bar where the drinks cost a minimum of £9. I got a sazerac, served in a huge, chilled snifter rinsed in absinthe rather than pernod. Delish. For the second round I had a neat reposado tequila alongside an absurdly elaborate sangrita (containing, for example, pomegranate seeds). Is it clear in the picture on the website that there is a hippopotamus head hanging on the wall?

Let's see... other news. I saw a very good movie, along with a Williams professor. A professor that I never took a class from, but I knew nonetheless, because he is gay. (Confidential to G: this was S's mentor at Williams. You can mention this to him, if the two of you start speaking to each other again.)

I watched 50 Greatest British Comedy Sketches on Channel 4 Sunday night. Just about every weekend Channel 4 has some "50 greatest..." or "50 worst..." or "100 most embarrassing..." three- or four-hour special on. Yes, it is unconscionably lazy programming on Channel 4's part, but it remains a fantastic education for me. Like for instance, on Sunday I learned that the British have some seriously fucked up sketch comedy. Of those on the list, "Good AIDS/Bad AIDS" had my jaw on the floor, "The Slobs (Brown Baby)" had me rolling on the floor, and "Masterchef" had me doubting the sanity of the entire British race.

I've finally begun writing again, although today was a slow day. As I am consistently reminded, however, it's about consistency. It's like jogging.

It does not help one bit when I receive an email which causes me to waste about 2 hours looking at satellite images of houses I've lived in. (Gee, thanks a lot, M.) In case you're interested, which of course you are not, unless you are a blood-relative, here are:

Newport, RI (age 7-11)
Monterey, CA (age 15-17)
Whidbey Island, WA (age 1-5)
San Francisco, CA (age 25-26)

Zoom in! Scroll around seamlessly with the mouse! I love you, Google.

Bits and Pieces

2005-03-30T00:14:00.001+01:00

Davé
Originally uploaded by gwdexter.

A few things:

First, I only took three pictures in France. A picture of the Massenet memorial, which didn't really come out, a picture of the Cop Copine store in Châtelet, which is intended only for a few musicologists, and this one. It turns out Davé, the hippest bad chinese restaurant in Paris, is surpisingly close to the the old National Library on the Rue Richelieu, where the manuscripts are. Readers of the New Yorker will know why this is big deal. While many magazine articles in several languaged are posted in the window, the New Yorker piece (in which the chef is pointly accused of not caring about the food at all) is conspicuously absent.

I forgot to mention that I ran into a certain Berkeley professor on sabbatical in the music reading room of the BN. Let call him... um... Professor WorstTeacherEver. He bought me lunch—he really is a really, really nice guy. He told me that he's recently made a rather shocking musicologal discovery involving a 40-voice mass. Is this common knowledge around the department?

I meant to mention: the uniforms of the Eurostar staff are so awesome. I can't find any picture on the web, but take my word for it.

The williams.edu email address is officially dead dead dead. This makes me very sad. I could bitch but I won't. Send all mail to berkeley.edu.

I have a deadline for the next chapter: a real draft to The Advisoress by Friday April 22. Hold me to this, friends. It's time to get serious about a lot of things...

It's what ya call growing up

2005-03-29T15:04:00.000+01:00

So, what's the best way to feel better about living in a place where you feel out-of-place and foreign? Why, go to a place where you feel ever more out of place and foreign, of course! Seriously, I arrived back in London yesterday, and suddenly everything felt... familiar. Comfortable, even. I realized this with a shock.

Here's the thing: you'd think that with a childhood like mine, in which I changed schools every two years, I would feel very comfortable in unfamiliar situations, right? Well, to a certain extent this is very true—some of you know the story about my adviser saying to me, before a particularly tense dinner with famous musicologists that hated each other: "Oh Greg, you can talk to anyone..." I concede this, and I'm in fact proud of how I can ingratiate myself into so many different, seemingly incompatible circles of friends.

But from a different angle, this same ability to fit into different social situations become a rather self-defeating need to fit in. Thus I was miserable when I first got here, not just because I was homesick and all that, but also because my rather deep-seated psychological mechanisms to fit in would never work—I would always be "an American." As some of you will remember, the situation was the same in France a year ago, but ten times worse. (At least in the UK I didn't stop eating because I was too afraid to go to the grocery store...) When even a little piece of my self-presentation is taken out of my control, I think, because of my peripatetic childhood, it is more upsetting to me than to most other people. (This may also be a gay thing. Aren't there those who say that homos are over-represented in careers focusing on surface and appearance because little gay boys were forced to police their own self presentation to a greater degree than little straight boys?) Does all this sound like just a rationalization for the fact that I'm just insecure? Well, perhaps, although I normally don't think of myself as a particularly insecure person.

The point that this is all leading up to is: I'm getting better. I was actually quite comfortable in France, although god knows my French isn't much better than it used to be. I'm just learning to relax, to just accept that there will be situation where you won't fit, and that's okay. I probably should have figured this out years ago, but, particularly in San Francisco, there was never any need to, y'know? Those comments I got from a lot of people about this trip to the UK being good for me, which I always rejected in my head, might be turning out to be right, although perhaps not exactly in they way they were intended.

This whole issue was driven home by a brief email exchange with a figure from my past. Out of the blue I receive an email from a particular ex-Berkeley ex-colleague, whom some of you will remember all too well. You know, the one with the excellent German pronunciation. Let's call her "Fräulein Glockenspiel." So, while I'm in Paris, she emails me out of the blue, asking what I'm up to, and tells me that she's living in Paris for the year. "Hey," I reply, "I'm in Paris right now!" We tried to have lunch on Easter, but I lost her number. Anyway, in the email she summed up her Paris experience by saying (I paraphrase): "I find it really annoying that whenever I talk to someone I say pouvez-vous parler plus lentement s'il vous plaît, and then instead of repeating themselves more slowly like I asked, they just switch to English! Can you believe it!?"

Yes, Fräulein, I can believe it, and if you took a half a minute to put yourself in their shoes you would believe it too. This, I submit, is an example of my mirror image, a person with no concept of their own self-presentation whatsoever. (Berkeley people will recall that Fräulein Glockenspiel's experience in the UCB Music Department confirms this impression.) It was only when she said this that I consciously realized: I would never dream of asking someone to speak more slowly! It would be all but yelling out loud, "I am an outsider!" Rather, when I don't understand something in French, I simply spit out pardon? or quoi? and make a facial expression that, ever so subtly, implies that it is their fault that I didn't understand them, rather than my own. Works every time.

By the way, did I mention that the bibliothecaire who did my entrance interview for the BN assumed I was British? Also, when I went to the opera I was seated next to a rich old lady who couldn't tell I was American from my accent either. (When I told this story to P—'s flatmate, she commented, "it much have been rich, deaf, old lady..." but I choose to ignore this.) So, oddly, it is just when I relax into my role as a foreigner that my foreignness become less pronounced! Who'da thought!

There is much to report from my last few days in Paris, but it will remain mostly unblogged, I'm afraid. The opera (Prokofiev's War and Peace, in the Zambello production that some UCB folk will remember from her residency) was fantastic. It is a massive work, and I think there's something to be written about how the love scenes are so much less emotionally affecting than the patriotic scenes—I only really wept during the Act I "epilogue" chorus, and the amazing moment when general Kutuzov, having made the dreadful decision to sacrifice the capital in order to save the army, sings "Moscow! Mother of the cities of Russia! You fade before our eyes!" My friend the Spaniard would say, in his delightfully unidiomatic English, "I cried all my tears..." (By the way, are these moments tainted by Stalin? Discuss.)

Work went very well, I met P—'s new boyfriend, I got kicked out of A—'s apartment after an unexpected visitor arrived, I didn't meet up with Fräulein, I spent some time in the Grands Magasins (comme l'habitude), I saw La Vie Aquatique (thankfully subtitled, not dubbed) and really enjoyed it. More soon.

Stanley Sadie

2005-03-24T20:09:00.000Z

Am I the last to hear the news that Stanley Sadie died on Monday? This is very sad. If I were living in San Francisco, I would SO be throwing a "Stanley Sadie" memorial party, where we all go around the room reading out our favorite passages from the New Grove. I call dibs on "Mode"...

[For those for whom this is meaningless, Sadie edited the massive New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the standard musical reference work that quite literally changed musicology forever.]

Perhaps I could make it a "Stanley Sadie Hawkins" party, where the girls would have to ask the boys to read from the New Grove.

It was rainy in Paris today, but still nice.

A Nice Day

2005-03-23T19:18:00.000Z

I went in early to the library, and looked at more letters, fruitlessly. I finished around 1 pm, and I was going to go across the street to Music Department to look at some scores. But then I said to myself, "it sure is a nice day," and I went walking in the Jardins de Luxembourg instead. The chestnut trees were not, as it happened, in bloom, but they were sprouting leaves, and the weather really was beautiful.

While I was there I saw a tee shirt that amused me. Imagine a picture of a maple leaf, then below it the words "LEGALIZE CANADA." (This is funnier in a place where the word "cannabis" is used more colloquially.)

Paris is not that bad

2005-03-22T20:46:00.000Z

So, a year ago everyone in Paris was really mean and everything was a big trial, but in the intervening year, all the Parisians have become much nicer, and the whole city has become easier to negotiate!

Oh I'm just kidding! It's me that's changed, silly! Also it is springtime, rather than oppressive winter, and I'm sleeping in a charming apartment in the 10th arrondissement, rather than in a vermin-infested flophouse in the filthy ghetto-suburbs. It's the little things that make the difference, really.

And the library work is going really well, too. The entrance interview which was such a trial last time, was a breeze. And my interviewer thought I was British, which I consider an odd sort of triumph. But the big news happened in the Manuscript Department.

Some of you may remember that I wanted to go through the massive collection of correspondence belonging to Félix-Hippolyte Larrey, since my beloved Garcia cites him as a friend in a letter. So I get the letters, and there's no index, or even a table of contents, just a big jumble of about 900 letters of different sizes and colors all bound together into this one big messy volume. To find any Garcia letters, I thought I would have to just trudge through the whole thing. So I start at the beginning, and just when I realize that the letters are in fact, roughly organized alphabetically by author, a name caught my eye: Bennati. For those of you who don't know, Bennati is this totally different doctor who I am very interested in for totally different reasons. The feeling was a lot like that one time Katie took me to a party with her friends in the Mission, and I ran into this girl I went to college with. I'm all like, "What are you doing here?!"

More than his mere presence in the collection, the letter was very, very intimate. Bennati was writing to Larrey while the latter was in Flanders with the Army perfecting his battlefield amputation skills. Bennati reports that he was visiting Larrey's mother often, that his sister was doing well, that when he visits they talk constantly about "notre excellent Hippolyte." He signs the letter "a thousand kisses, and then a thousand more from your good mother -Bennati." (Also, for my purposes, the fact the Bennati provides him with a fairly detailed sketch of the recent goings-on at the Théâtre-Italien is more than a little useful...)

Remember when I wrote in these pages about the seductiveness of manuscript sources? This was the same feeling, but ten times more powerful than the Minute Books I was working with then. I mean, it's like: the letter is dated 21 October, and he says that he thinks his chances in the Montyon competition are pretty good, but he hasn't heard yet. Well, I know, from the Académie des Sciences records, that his was going to win, and that the award would be announced just ten days later, on 2 November. I want to shout back at him—don't worry! Be patient! And of course I also want to shout back at him about his early death—he's dead less than two years after writing the letter. You might want to avoid the Boulevard de Gand, monsieur...

There were no Garcia letters at all. But frankly this might be more interesting.

Safe and Sound in France

2005-03-21T09:46:00.000Z

The Eurostar was really lovely—worth every penny, I say. I'm not exactly sure how much less expensive EasyJet would have been, once you factor in the not-negligible cost of getting to and from the distant airports. Less expensive, perhaps half as expensive, but still...

I assume the following doesn't happen every time, but it made my day: My train left at noon, and after half an hour or so, I decided to go buy a sandwich in the snack bar. When I got there, the snack bar employee was happily giving out free glasses of champagne to everyone. Free glasses of champagne. Including kids who, in my world, would be called "underage." He said it was his birthday, but he said it in such a way that it may have been a joke. In any case, I got free champagne on the Eurostar. It was awesome.

A—'s apartment (obviously) has an internet connection, and a comfortable bed. He left for Barcelona about two hours after I arrived. I had dinner with P— last night, who's doing rather well, but still pessimistic about the future of German Studies in France. "But what about, y'know, the whole Europe thing..." I queried. "Exactly..." he replied in his oddly British-inflected Franco-German accent.

The library is closed until 2 pm every Monday (I dare you to ask to me to explain why), so I think I may go and, I dunno, walk along the Seine or some shit. Perhaps the chestnut trees are in bloom. It is officially spring today, after all.

Let's Go! Paris

2005-03-20T02:11:00.000Z

So I'm leaving for Paris in 10 hours, which means I'm leaving the house in about seven hours, which means I'm way screwed since I'm neither packed nor have I typed up the list of things I want to consult in the BN, which I wanted to do before I left since there's no guarantee that there will be a printer that I can use in A—'s apartment. I also haven't done the final round of changes for the Andriessen review, which I said I would send off before I left, and so I'm just going to have to hope and pray I can find free wireless somewhere to send it off while I'm there. It's the kind of thing A— would have, but I don't want to get my hopes up...

Why am I so behind? And why am I typing this instead of packing? Because I'm some sort of lazy lout, I suppose. But also because I've been hanging out with rock stars. (Notwithstanding my friend who once said to me "Drew and Martin aren't rock stars! They're... laptop stars." You know who you are.) Yes, Matmos are in town, and J— and I went out drinking with them Thursday, St Patrick's Day. Their show tonight, despite massive technical difficulties, was quite good. The venue for some inscrutable reason decided to have the two opening acts play simultaneously, in different rooms. We didn't see the xeroxed signs that announced this, and so I missed Charlemagne Palestine altogether, which is irritating. He was mentioned in passing during my orals.

Regietheather is Over. No, Really, It's Over.

2005-03-18T19:40:00.001Z

I don't think the estimable J— will mind me posting this email of his here, unless it was destined for Van Twee's inchoate blog. But really, you all have to see this.

Scroll to the bottom of this page and watch the video. Do it even it you don't speak German, although it's even funnier and more pathetic if you do. Seriously, watch it right now.

My one comment: Okay, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that Planet of the Apes was an allegory against racism—how is it that the imagery can be coöpted for an exercise that is... um, er... undisguisedly racist? Okay, well, slightly-disguisedly. But still...

[PS. Cambridge talk was good, I wore the grey. Paris crisis averted. More soon.]

T minus 5 hours

2005-03-16T11:53:00.000Z

Everything's set for the Cambridge talk, except I should read through the damn thing one more time, and I haven't decided what to wear. (Black corduroy suit? Grey wool suit? Jaunty green blazer over khakis?) The talk has been cut down to 7600 words—does that sound about right? Also, although I still think I'm actually not that stressed about this, my oral herpes outbreak would seem to suggest otherwise. But R— M— is coming, which is very comforting, and he's bringing a new lady-friend.(!!!)

In other news, have I mentioned that I'm going to Paris in four days? And yet, I have no place to stay. I mean, both my Paris friends agreed in principal to letting me stay with them, but neither are answering my emails, in which I try not to sound to frantic, even though I'm slightly terrified at this point, since my ticket is non-refundable. I'm sure they're just... um... busy. And I really, really cannot afford a hotel at the moment, thanks to my lovely quarterly paychecks.

If anyone knows anyone in Paris, let me know.

Also, remember that AMS travel grant I won? Why haven't I seen a penny of that money? I swear, life is tough.

God things, bad things

2005-03-15T10:13:00.000Z

I have approximately 30 hours to go before I give my colloquium at Cambridge, and the talk is not, exactly, "ready." So this will be brief. Sunday was lovely. The housemates all had roast meat, roast vegetables, and Yorkshire pudding all swimming in gravy in big bowls. Then we watched the rugby (and they always say "the rugby") in an Australian-themed chain bar. The crowd got rowdy; Wales did very well.

Then a quick errand in Camden, and I was about to go home to work on the talk. But I thought I'd call the housemates and see if they were still out. Of course they were, and four bars later I stumbled home. Actually, I got to sleep early, well before midnight.

There is some good news: the Turkish tailor came through for me in spades, completing a quite elaborate crotch patch. And my anti-corporate sneakers came in the mail. They have a situationist maxim stitched into the insole.

Too Much Theater (er, "Theatre")

2005-03-12T23:36:00.000Z

Hey did you all know that Schiller died in 1805? Why did I think that Don Carlos was, like, well post-French revolution at least? Okay I guess we all know the answer to that: Verdi—particularly since Don Carlos seems to fit so squarly into what I've always understood as Verdi's post-1848 framework, of Realpolitik and compromise. Why was Schiller writing a post 1848 play in 1784? (That's a joke.)

Anyway, Don Carlos was way good. Great performances all around. Unfortuately, I read in the program book (which cast £3, since you never get a program for free in this country even though the programs are still filled with diamond ads you cheap bastards) that in the orginal mounting of this production the role of Elisabeth de Valois taken by Laura Linney, and now I'm obsessed with how much better that production would have been, both because Laura Linney effortlessly communicates that mixture of imperiousness and woundedness that characterizes Elisabeth, and also because an American accent would have nicely communicated her cultural difference as the free-spirited Frenchwoman in the oppressive Spanish court.

The other thing about seeing Don Carlos for me (and for my companion at the performance, the musicologically-inclined Spaniard), was, of course, the distance between the play and the opera. These went far beyond the standard "there are more characters and subplots in the play" observation, although one plot detail, that the Grand Inquisitor had tortured the Queen's page, filled the nagging plot hole—how does Philip know where to find Carlos and Elisabeth in the last scene? I was more interested in the lack of a big public spectacle scene in the play. Even though such a scene is a conventional requirement, and even though the presence of those dumb Flemish ambassadors never really makes sense, that one big public scene serves to really "open up" the whole drama, providing a hint of the social world outside the Escorial that is only referred to in the play, which dwells entirely inside oppressive hallways and chambers.

The scene between Phillipe and Posa which ended the first half of the evening was fascinating for being basically point-for-point exactly the same in the opera, with all the twisting, flip-flopping power dynamic (that one moment where Phillipe, out of nowhere, says "what do you know of my son" was exactly as chilling when spoken). The big exception is the very last line "but beware of my inquisitor," the final flip-flop, which if I were staging the play I would just insert. There is a similar of uncanny correspondance situation late in the play, when Eboli confesses her misdeeds to the Queen, who first forgives everything, until Eboli discloses the king's infidelity, at which point the Queen kicks her out of the palace. Again the drama proceeds in the order I was familiar with. But in the opera, of course, as soon as Eboli is kicked out, she launches into "O don fatale," in which she curses her own beauty, which has brought her nothing but misery. In the play, she is kicked out... and the scene ends. Verdi and his librettists... they really knew what they were doing, y'know?

Anyway, it was good. And, I think, relevant in the way I expected it to be, especially when compared to the second play of the day. Yes, after seeing no West End theatRE for four months, I see two plays in one day. H—, whom I haven't seen in weeks, had suggested we do "something," a concert or performance or movie, when we arranged to meet up. When we actually did meet up, he surprised me with ticket to Festen, a play based on that actually-pretty-good-but-tainted-by-its association-with-other-Dogme-movies film, Celebration. It was good, and quite convincingly theatrical, but after Don Carlos, the whole thing seemed so... small. It was a small play. Lots of yelling, lots of rolling and the floor and running around, but no big ideas. No philosophy.

I'm not explaining this well. Festen was a good play. It also felt emotionally "true." I guess there what I'm reacting to was the lack of what we might call "the social," or perhaps "the polis." As big as the emotions in Festen got, they could ever only be as big as the oikos. Does that make sense? I guess if I actually followed this line of reasoning, I'd end up sounding like Tom Wolfe arguing for a retour à Zola. Well, I don't know...

Anyway, today I'm having brunch with the housemates, maybe watching rugby(?!). and running an errand in Camden market. And then, hopefully, practicing the Cambridge colloquium. Which I have not practiced. Because I am a lazy excuse for a musicologist.

Sinfonietta Insta-review

2005-03-12T00:38:00.000Z

So, I just got home from the London Sinfonietta concert on the South Bank, and man was it good. Wait, actually that's not true. Actually the Michael Gordon/Bill Morrison collaboration Gotham was so, so good that it made up for an uninspiring and in fact someone dispiriting first half. I was warned in advance that the London Sinfonietta players think that they are, in a sense, too good for anything that seems minimalist -- and their reading of Reich's City Life confirmed this rumor. There is only one word for how they played the opening section—sloppy. It's not easy music; maybe it was just under-rehearsed. But there was no bite, no attack, and the interlocking entries are so exposed that the timidity was glaringly obvious. This despite the fact that they were one of the commissioning ensembles! (I exempt the percussionists from this accusation, by the way.) The new-ish piece by Mark Anthony Turnage was... well, it was good. It was fine. It was extremely well orchestrated. It was a kind of music that I used to like—the Young British Good-Orchestration School. Now, I'm sorry, it bores me. The piece was called Crying Out Loud—so, um, why did the whole thing seem so affectless? So lacking in either rigorous form or compelling content?

Gotham, however, was a different story. Man. Man oh man. Jesus. It was... I'm sorry to say it, but it was transcendent. One movement based entirely on scales, eternally climbing and falling in different temporal levels. Another movement based on angry repeated chords, and glissandi borrowed from Decasia. A last movement which begins with frantic figuration, which led me to fully expect the material to move in a direction toward frantic unison writing for the whole ensemble. Rather, the filigree multiplied itself, until the counterpoint was so rapid, and so dense, that it crossed an invisible line and ceased being heard as counterpoint at all, just one teeming mass of sound. The movement reached its punch-line when the material—which once seemed to move, but had finally achieved stasis—was itself manipulated as a now unitary object, turned on and off like a light switch. The whole work was so assured, so visceral, so clear in its small-scale gestures and large scale forms.

I should mention that I was blown away despite the fact that the film portion of the work was completely fucked up or invisible for most of the first movement, and we were seated directly in front of a speaker that had blown out and was making hideous crackling noises. If the piece had been anything less than enthralling, I would have been irritated beyond belief.

I should quickly mention my date for the evening, a fascinating graduate student in communications and media studies, who is also on the same fellowship as me. Let's call her J—. She grew up in rural Wisconsin, and is now writing a dissertation at McGill on information excess and digital waste. We've been meaning to hang out ever since meeting each other at that reception four months ago.

The best moment of the entire evening was toward the start, when we were having a glass of wine before the show began. "How's your work going?" I asked. "I've never been more unproductive in my life," she replied. I am not alone! This was validating, if not exactly comforting....

Tomorrow: Schiller! Derek Jacobi! Absolutely no Canzone del velo. Or is that Chanson de voile? Either way, it won't be there. Tant pis.

Apologies, Performances, and Trousers

2005-03-09T13:52:00.000Z

I'm climbing out of the funk I've been in, slowly. I've even made some progress writing emails to people! Please note, however, that if I have not yet replied to an email of yours, this is in no way an indication that you are somehow lower down on my list of priorities to write to. I've just been writing to people who, if you can believe it, I've been out of contact with for even longer.

So, I finally have a big big deadline looming: the 45-minute colloquium I'm giving in Cambridge in exactly one week. Oddly, while in Seattle what I was most worried about was the Q&A, this time I'm not worried about that at all. I suppose I have fewer people to impress in the Cambridge audience. The biggest worry, is, I guess, that RP will realize how little work I've accomplished since I got here. Pathetic, really.

So what do I do now that I finally have something big and high-stakes to prepare for? Well, finally start going to plays and concerts, of course! Friday I have tickets for the London Sinfonietta, playing Michael Gordon's Gotham (probably won't be as good as Decasia, but that would be asking a lot), Mark-Anthony Turnage's Crying Out Loud (World premiere, I believe, and it's probably too much to hope for that it somehow involves the Peter Allen song), and finally Reich's City Life (Now!! With Extra Added Post-9/11 Resonance!!).

The next day I'm catching a matinee of Schiller's Don Carlos, starring Derek Jacobi, which I am approximately 90% sure I will enjoy less than the last time I saw Verdi's Don Carlos, but which I'm looking forward to nonetheless. The Schiller centenary or something is going on, so there's more Schiller drama available that one has any right to expect in any non-German-speaking country. I'm kicking myself for missing his Mary Stuart in one of the fringe theaters a few weekends ago. Although this is a little odd, I have a sense that the big big Romantic/historical epics by Schiller and Victor Hugo and, I dunno, Goethe and the like might be due for a revival. There's something about the seriousness and sweep that seems, I dunno, somehow right just now.

Soon the world will be ready for my long-fantasized staging of Hugo's Cromwell, performed uncut, with little physical movement, and very slow, uninflected line readings. Someday...

These are, in fact, the first instrumental music concert and the first spoken drama that I have seen in London (no, the organ recital does NOT count). Isn't that pathetic?

Some of you have been forced to hear me wax lyrical about the Marc Newsom for G-Star Raw collection. Well, I went and tried them on... and they are so beautiful. You may not be able to see in the pictures on the G-Star website that the white rubbery outlining of the back pocket elegantly flows into the hammer-loop, from which no hammer will ever hang. Details, darlings, details! Anyway, when I tried them on, I half expected to maybe splurge and pay something ridiculous for them. Only after I had put them on did I discover that they were not around £100, as I was casually expecting, but rather two hundred and forty-five pounds. That is, almost $500. That is, almost as much as a month's rent in my first apartment in Oakland. Then again, I suppose pants last a lot longer than a month. And these pants would bring me much more joy that 1849 6th Ave #4 ever did. And £245 is only about 2.5 weeks rent in my current situation.

Anyway, after trying on the Thing of Beauty by Marc Newsom, I took my favorite favorite jeans in the whole world to the Turkish tailor to get a rip in the crotch patched. Yes, again. (These are the pants that, last time I was paying to get them repaired, prompted the fashion-conscious A— to remark "why, exactly, are these jeans so great?") Dropping them off, the guy said "Do you want us to clean them, too? Because if they see them like this, they won't touch 'em."

Well, £8 and some humiliation is still cheaper than a new pair of jeans.

um... well...

2005-03-06T13:42:00.000Z

Okay so I haven't posted in a while. This reflects the fact that I also haven't done any work in a while, I haven't responded to anyone's emails in a while, I haven't read anything except magazines recently, I haven't actually cooked for myself in a week, etc. In other news, I have been watching Grey Gardens over and over.

Okay this sounds worse than it is. I bought a chair on eBay! That's productive! My sister suggests I post pictures of my room—my big orange room. There's still no folding screen, but beyond that, it's in pretty good shape. I also should return in these pages to wacky observations about London, the British, and their quaint customs and mores. Oh... who can be bothered? [Little Edie voice:] "I think I have the saddest life..."

A Full Weekend

2005-03-01T13:06:00.000Z

Lordy, but I've been busy. I've sent The BF out sightseeing by himself for the afternoon, so that I can write a review of the Zauberflöte that we saw on Saturday (writing the review being the condition of getting the free tickets and all). So I should be doing that rather than this, but it's been a while. There has been shopping, museums, heavy drinking, laughter, tears, etc. The BF: quite a guy.

In other news, Williams email has been hacked and is down... again. Why do I put up with this? The answer, of course, is that I just love reading email in pine. Pine! Is that such a sin? Why must I suffer so?

In the meanwhile, send email to the Berkeley address, k?

"A Place for Music"

2005-02-21T23:00:00.000Z

Hey guess what guys guess what guess what? I just actually saw a really good musicology paper. Really! I was beginning to forget what they looked like—well-researched, but also with a point, revisionist, but also thoughtfully argued, well-written and entertainingly delivered. The dreary IHR seminar series has now surpassed everything I've seen at Oxford or Cambridge, although it will take a lot to make up for the painful IHR paper of two weeks ago (see also: vomit).

Someone recently said my blog was "cryptic." I suppose I shall endeavor to refrain from in-jokes for a while.

Anyway, after the paper, I went up to the speaker and complimented her, and she said, "and what's you name?" I told her. "Oh! G—B—! I've heard about you!" It totally felt like I was famous.

In other news, I'm looking forward to the arrival, on Thursday, of the conveniently-initialed "BF" more than I can say. (Oops, that was cryptic again wasn't it? Sorry.)

All meinen Unmut geb ich preis...

2005-02-19T11:30:00.000Z

... Aus meinem sonnumrahmten Fenster

That's a propos of nothing except that it is sunny today. And I've been worried about how to an external observer, I'm afraid I appear to be depressed. I mean, I find it very hard get out of bed, I pad around the house in my pajamas, I avoid human contact, I eat at odd hours. I'm not depressed. But I might look like it.

I finally got my banking figured out, after a fashion—I can put my money into the bank, and then withdraw £200 per day. But I have been deemed not worthy of a check book, or a debit card. How, you ask, is this different from keeping my money in a sock under the mattress? Well, if I had my money under a mattress, I could withdraw as much as wanted. Grr.

To celebrate my paycheck finally clearing, I went on a shopping spree. But it's okay, because it was at T.J. Max. Did you know they have T.J. Max in the UK? Well, they do, except, mysteriously it is called T.K. Max. Why, oh why?

I bought a denim jacket, one which can very easily be labeled "chav fashion." I'm not sure if I've written here about the whole chav phenomenon in this country, but it is, in fact, fascinating. Not the existence of the chavs themselves—although there are things to be discussed there—but rather the extreme cultural anxiety that so obvious lurks just below the constant barrage of chav jokes that permeate various media. The chavs, they are disruptive to certain reassuring class categories.

I'm not up to explaining this all right now. Do some googling if you're interested; I may post my thoughts later. For now, the point is that I'm engaging with the chavs by wearing a denim jacket with the word "SUPERIOR" embroidered in Olde English lettering in a semicircle across the belly. Oh yes...

In other news, the revisions for the Andriessen review are done. Last night I went to see a really, really good movie. Seriously, if you get a chance to see it, run don't walk—it's been released with the English title Head On. It's... the kind of movie I really, really like. Oh and I had an experience I'm pretty sure I've never had before—I saw the movie, alone, with no one else in the theater...

Kiki and Herb

2005-02-16T12:34:00.000Z

So I saw Kiki and Herb. And here's the thing: why has no one has ever explained to me that Kiki is just one big Bambi Lake impersonator? The act should be called "Bambi-esque" or "Night of a Thousand Bambis" or some such. The mannerisms, the tweaker gestures, the distinctive style of racontage—even the signing voice was basically just lifted straight from Bambers. Except when Bambi does it, it's not a joke.

During intermission, I tried to explain this to my companions—and then I was validated in the second half of the show, during which Kiki spent, like, 20 minutes actually just doing an avowed Bambi Lake impression, reënacting a phone call from Bambi describing her recent arrest after calling in a bomb threat to the "Backflip" [sic; recte "Bambuddha Lounge"] when the Rolling Stones were having a party there. (Can anyone tell me if this actually happened? I must admit, it rang true.) Anyway, the point is that the whole thing looked to me like a Bambi Lake show manquée, just missing the one element that makes Bambi transfixing: her absolute, utter conviction, her (dare I say it?) authenticity.

So, yeah, it kinda made me uncomfortable. Not least because I couldn't shake the feeling that if Bambi HAD seen herself impersonated in this way, and described in such unflattering (if perhaps honest) terms, then SOMEBODY would be getting a stiletto heel through the eye-socket right about now...

Over dinner afterwards I tried to recall as many memories of Bambi as I could, and I realized that she is, against all odds, implicated in a number of my most treasured memories of the City. This includes even moments when, at the time, I wished I could've been somewhere else...

Tonight: Colloquium at Cambridge! Which is sort of like drag cabaret, but different!

Recent Obsessions

2005-02-15T01:46:00.000Z

I spent a very lovely evening with the very lovely R, an old Williams classmate (well, two years older than me) who is now a scientist. We talked and talked and talked. It was lovely. The subject of Valentines was not raised at any point.

For the first time in many years I received a Valentine. (That is to say, in addition to one from my mom.) He sent me a poem, as if he knew that, for a stretch of years in my youth, I received a poem every year on Valentine's Day from... well, some of you know the story. Oddly though, this year I received renaissance French verse, while my Valentine years ago tended to involve 20th-century Americans along the lines of O'Hara and Koch. This is only odd because my first love is currently living in sin with a boy who spends much of his intellectual life in the world of renaissance verse. What to make of all this?

And what does it matter, when we now learn that Michael Jackson tried to get Corey Feldman "in the mood" by showing him some sort of venereal disease textbook! I swore I would not get interested in the Jackson trial—swore—but come on! They're gonna subpoena Emmanuel Lewis!

Did I mention there was some sort of venereal disease textbook? [Only a few musicologist will get that last link... private joke; don't worry about it.]

Anyway, I've been doing less work since I discovered The 80s TV Theme SuperSite. Super indeed! After losing several hours of my life to this site, I've now settled into a comforting routine of just listening to THIS over and over and over again.

Do not resist. Just click it again.

Tomorrow: Kiki and Herb.

$63.62

2005-02-11T10:50:00.000Z

Well, I can add another notch in my "adulthood" belt—I've now dealt with an aggressive collection agency! The details of my problem are somewhat involved, and I won't go into it here, but let it suffice to say that I'm not happy with Cingular Wireless right now. In order to get $63.62 out of me, the collection agency called my parents, then threatened me, lied to me, and were generally unpleasant. The collection agency is staffed entirely by angry black people in Texas. It appears that all the men at the collection agency say that their name is "Jameson." I suspect that this name was chosen to give alcoholic debtors a warm, comfortable feeling. ("Mmmm.... Jameson....") The best part about dealing with the collection agency: when I called a second time to pay the money, the exchange was quiet, civil, and polite—but in the background I could hear this woman absolutely screaming to some other poor person: "WHY DO YOU THINK I'M CALLING YOU, THEN? YOU EXPLAIN TO ME WHY I'M CALLING YOU! HUNH!"

I would like to imagine she was screaming at a lonely elderly woman who got behind on her payments for her Craftmatic adjustable bed because of the high cost of her heart medication. I have caught a furtive glimpse at the dark underbelly of American capitalism, folks.

English Food

2005-02-09T13:06:00.000Z

Oh, I forgot to mention: after missing the Oxford colloquium, I went to dinner in the dining hall of St. Catherine's College. The meal was as follows:

1) potato skins, filled with scrambled eggs(!)
2) beef lasagna
3) green salad with no dressing
4) french fries
5) peach cobbler with custard

Lasagna with french fries! I'm sayin'!

Oxford; Self-Doubt

2005-02-09T11:42:00.000Z

So I went to Oxford again, and again arrived late. In fact, I missed the entire colloquium, although this was partly due to the fact that I was locked out of the building. But regardless, this means that I have never, in my life, arrived in Oxford on time. The Spaniard has no reason to believe that I have ever arrived anywhere on time. We were making plans to travel to see Tess Knighton's talk on Spanish musical historiography in Cambridge next week, and he suddenly got all serious—"Let me plan everything. If you are on time, we go together, if not, I go alone." And he wouldn't have even known about this talk if I hadn't invited him!

So what's wrong with me? The obvious answer is that I have essentially no schedule for anything in my life now. When I gave my Royal Academy presentation, it was the first time I'd left the house before 9am since... well, since I arrived in the UK, I think. As we all know, productivity grows out of structure, and so, while I do feel busy all the time, I'm not actually producing much to show for it.

Have we all looked at the new AMS Newsletter that just came out? In Jan LaRue's obit, we read:

His time on Okinawa led to one of the earliest American Ph.D. dissertations on an ethnomusicological subject.... He catalogued, identified, and classified virtually the entire body of eighteenth-century instrumental ensemble music, bringing together detailed information on manuscripts and prints in libraries from Bremen to Bombay. [...] Concerned not with description but with explanation, Jan transformed the way we talk about musical style. His influence in this regard was not limited to the Classical period, but spread across the entire discipline of musicology. LaRue’s work on watermark identification and papyrology is the cornerstone of all such work in the discipline....

So, not to make someone's death all about me or anything, but how can I compete with this? I mean, seriously! Even my own adviser... The Stolz article and the Frezzolini articles alone, at my current rate, would seem to have taken me about two years each. And nobody even reads the Frezzolini article, since it's in such a crap publication!

Self-doubt... it's the new self-confidence!

Stone-Cold Sober Adventures

2005-02-08T13:54:00.000Z

Much has happened since the last entry—too much, in fact for one entry. This should teach me to post more often, I suppose. Anyway, if I had been posting as much as I should have, there would have been posts with the following titles: (1) I Went to A House of Ill Repute, and Slept in Hackney; (2) I Had Brunch; (3) The Archivist Hates Me, I Think; (3) I Had Dinner with Elderly Musicologists, And Then Violently Vomited.

But wait, you say, isn't this "Stone-Cold Sober Adventures"? Yes, it is. Let's just say that if you've ever at a cheap-looking Scicilian restaurant off Tottenham Court Road, just don't order the ravioli, okay?

Since my sister reads this, it's probably best that I don't go into too many details about the House of Ill Repute. (The much-missed Bean Tails blog was brought down for lack of discretion on similar matters.) Let it suffice to say that it was pretty fantastic, with the normal provisos. Brunch was likewise good, if less scandalous.

When I arrived at the archive yesterday, I apologized for being a little late, and she said "Well, I know you don't keep very strict hours..." Her voice sort of trailed off at the end, as if she realized halfway through the sentence that she was saying something she shouldn't be. This comes after her earlier implication that I had not washed my hands as prescribed in the Readers' Guidelines, and her accusation that I was using a pen too close to documents. I though that she might think I was less of a doofus if she came and listened to my presentation to the Royal Academy seminar. (Did I forget to write about that here? It went well.) So yesterday, after having been accused of being an incompetent flake, I say, "I wanted to thank you again for attending my presentation." And she replied, "Well, since you were using some archive materials, I had to be there..." All I could think of to say was, "Well, thank you for not reading the newspaper during my talk?" She hates me.

After all day in the archive, I went to the Music and Society seminar that I skipped out on two weeks ago. It was not horrible, but the presenter needed to find a point in a bad way. I again talked too much during q-and-a. During dinner I may have been flirting with another seminar attendee (who was not elderly, like most of them). Then again, perhaps I was not. It was not entirely clear.

Then I got home and vomited. Today, I am feeling out of sorts. If I'm feeling better by three, then I'll go to Oxford for colloquium.

Decomposing Remains of Dissertation Subjects

2005-02-03T20:31:00.000Z

Garcia Grave
Originally uploaded by gwdexter.

Well, I was considering not doing it, but now I've done it. At least I didn't bring flowers. Perhaps I will on the anniversary of his death, on July 1. The inscription reads, below the dates, "HIS WORKS DO FOLLOW HIM" — Whether this is or is not a musical reference to the Brahms Requiem, it seems to speak to the role that his works are beginning to play in my life. Rest in peace, Señor... you've done enough to keep me busy for a while.

America is on the Verge of a Complete Cultural Meltdown

2005-02-01T22:13:00.000Z

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

I'm tempted to make witty commentary, but I'll leave it at this: I sure as hell do not want my children exposed to Mormonism.

PS - Went to a colloquium at Oxford. It was okay.

Drunken Adventures, part II

2005-01-31T17:47:00.000Z

Okay, this will have to be brief, but I'll try to hit the main points.

• Saturday my sister and I were shown around Oxford by the Spaniard. Dinner with Oxford musicology grad students was pleasantly international (Finnish, Greek, Israeli, etc.), and pleasantly bitchy. Much wine was consumed. During dinner we learned that the Spaniard was recruited to join Opus Dei in High School, which was creepy. After dinner I told the Spaniard that I wanted to just be friends, which was both more and less awkward than expected. Got to sleep at 3:00.

• Sunday my sister and I had dim sum, which made me extravagantly happy, once again. Then to Camden market, where a bought a tiny plate. Then we prepared dinner for the house (soup; salad; casserole). This dinner turned into a crazy reality show episode. Picture it: my still rather conservative sister surrounded by six, count 'em, six gay men, with the conversation veering towards places that I would just as soon not go. The table included one housemate's Israeli ex-boyfriend, who was oddly mean to me all night, and another housemate's ex-boyfriend with whom he had just "broken up with" a week earlier, and yet, oddly, they had just spent the previous night in the same bed. Much much much wine is consumed. My sister is shown what poppers are. The various ex-boyfriends snipe.

Then the prospective subletter (a gay Pole) arrives several hours after he says he will. I, without my sister, retire to the local tragic gay bar with a housemate and the prospective subletter. Did I mention that the subletter is a guy the housemate had hooked up with in a bar, immediately after the "break-up" a week ago? When I returned the ex was storming out, upset and drunk. In the morning, the Pole was sleeping on the couch, and all the ex-boyfriends were sleeping in beds together. My sister, I believe, is getting something of an education in the ways of the mysterious, delicate creatures called gay men.

Still haven't written a lesson plan for my guest lecture at the Royal Academy of Music on Wednesday. I'll wing it, I guess...

Drunken Adventures

2005-01-28T13:37:00.000Z

Okay, so the title of this post was just to get the attention a certain Berkeley library staff member who requested less quotidian slice of life entries and more sloppy drunken adventure entries. Jeez, he was an flight attendant; he was leaving for Melbourne in the morning; I had injested four cans of Red Stripe and some shots... what more do you need to know? You can make up the details for youself.

In any case, this was a week of blowing things off. Last Friday, my visit to the RAF Club to hear Morty's wacky "observational humor" meant that I blew off a musicology symposium at the RAM called "Verdi in the Victorian Parlour" lead by Roberta Marvin, which I was a little upset about, but not much. Then this last Tuesday I missed the self-same professor Marvin give a talk at Royal Holloway in Egham, because I was so worried about getting my goddam book review finished. I had already decided to blow off the Oxford musicolgy colloquium that Tuesday, so now the blown-off musicology colloquia were piling up. Oh and Monday I decided to blow off the IHR seminar (topic: Muzio "I could care less" Clementi), most because the next time I go I promised the convenors that I would go to dinner with them, and, while this will not be horrible, I'd just as soon put it off. That evening I went to dinner (Belgian mussels and fries) with new friend, literature post-doc "R." Wednesday the review still hadn't been submitted, and I had to spend the morning in the archive, so that night I blew off the Cambridge musicology coloquium. That's a total of five (5) musicology talks which I have not heard this week. And no drunken adventures.

My sister arrived yesterday. She is sleeping now. She just woke up and asked why I hadn't woken her up. I had no answer to this question.

But the review got submitted, under the wire I think, although the editor hasn't actually confirmed that. The question for the readers of Greg's London Ramblings for the day is this: I am about to publish an essay in which I call a famous, living composer a "sexist." (In fact, I believe him to be a misogynist, although I do not use that word.) This essay will be published on the web. Should I be concerned?