Chamber music workshop

Going to a chamber music workshop on Saturday. I got my assignment a couple weeks ago (the Brahms piano quartet in A major) and have been busy working on it in the evenings and on weekends. I decided to focus on three of the four movements and have them decently learned. It should be fun to meet with strangers and put some of this music together. We'll be led by a chamber music coach. And I'll stay positive and assume that the coach will be helpful and encouraging -- and not like this lozenge thrower.

Territory

Super starfish
Originally uploaded by Zauberwelt.

We traveled and wandered. I was proud of myself: I managed to get us to the tide pools at low tide. I told her, "If we see one single starfish or one single anemone, you are indebted to me for life!" I expected her to be disappointed; after all, her original wish was to see the Lost Coast, five or six stunning hours north of San Francisco. Expecting disappointment, I added, "One single starfish, or ten crabs." But in fact we saw no scuttling crabs and lots and lots of starfish and anemones.

These folks, these friends of a friend -- they bring out the judgmental and passive-aggressive in me. I sacrifice my own will before their awesome and awful willfulness. And then, realizing that I've let my life be pulled out from under me, I turn petty and sarcastic because I can, and because they enjoy it. We are all quite funny together, and enough of me loves M. that I can attack him. Sometimes quite seriously, but sometimes only in controlled jest:

"I have to say," Rebecca says, "that the restaurants Mike and his sister have taken me to have been kinda mediocre, kinda just OK."

"Naturally," I say, looking at Mike. "Mike and Erica are themselves solidly mediocre, 'just OK' kind of people."

"He's just kidding," Rebecca explains.

"I am?"

Of course I am; Mike and Erica are frustratingly complicated. Mike must be; no mere mortal could keep Rebecca entertained all these years. And Erica is my nemesis -- another Southerner in voluntary and permanent exile. My maleness requires that I compete with her: Who is most well established here? Who knows all the best places? Who appreciates the Bay Area the most? Who's the least Georgian? Who's the coolest? And so I piss a little beside her car, to signal my territory.

More pictures of the tide pools and Muir Woods are here.

Rachel Then and Now

Rachel's coming to visit today! The last time she was in San Francisco was early 2004, not long after I'd moved out of that house near downtown Redwood City for Stephen's cabin in the Emerald Hills. I had been dating Allen for a few weeks.

What a piece of work. I've written about him a couple times, though never in depth. I find myself thinking about him fairly regularly because I pass his street on the way to music making in Berkeley. I harbor great bitterness. Practically hate. Aside from the utter stupidity of our small relationship and the ridiculously stupid decision I made each day to continue it (and, really, 28-year-olds should be a little wiser, especially after they've recently had dating disasters with both an 18-year-old and a 38-year-old), I have never met someone so inhuman. His critical review of me and disapproval of me were so calculated and alien that I could only laugh with relief when it was over, and then laugh again when my underwear and honor's thesis arrived by mail.

That final disapproval was incredible, but the disapprovals leading up to it were also amazing. Allen was completely obsessed with the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, which can be a friendly tool that tells you about yourself. You take little tests and answer questions, and you get classified as E for extroverted or I for intraverted, N for intuitive or S for sensing, etc., until you end up as four letters that together define your one personality type (out of 16 possibilities). Allen was a member of a professional society dedicated to the inventory, and I had at least one evening with his friends that consisted solely of them reviewing all their friends and explaining their behavior in terms of their presumed personality type.

It rankled Allen that I straddled the fence between INFP and ENFP. And one of them was "compatible" with him and one wasn't. Allen also told me he couldn't believe I played the piano because it was inconsistent with my personality type. Unhealthy, actually, because we lose energies when we have to do things outside of our types. Throughout, Allen was greatly concerned about whether I truly enjoyed "theorizing," which was more indicated by one letter than another (I can't remember which) and which was extremely important to him.

For some reason, I felt it necessary to prove that I wasn't stupid (he was a successful student and I worked at a video store, and I knew he thought it would be just "too cute" if were were both "Berkeley Boys"), so I let him borrow my honor's thesis. Back in 1998 I was still an optimistic academic elitist, so the thesis went by the long title of Sex in Venice: A Foucauldian Analysis of Thomas Mann's Novella and Benjamin Britten's Opera Death in Venice. This was a labor of love that stretched through three years of college, on and off, inspired and encouraged by that capital-C-shaped sprite of a man, Ward B. Lewis. The heart of the paper was only thirty pages, but background chapters about Foucault and the sex lives of Mann and Britten brought the thesis to around 100 pages. The University of Georgia bound it, and I keep it with me and remember time spent smoking at Jittery Joe's and Espresso Royale Cafe and memory stretches way back through that tiny room in Mammaw's house where I read Thomas Mann to the card catalog in the Peachtree City library, where I first researched homosexuality.

Allen called me to talk about the thesis.

"So, it says here in the introduction that when you first encountered Death in Venice, it was 'full of the most flowery, complicated, inaccessible prose,'" he said.

"Yes," I said.

"So you don't like complicated prose?" he asked.

"I was 14," I said.

"But you don't like complicated prose?"

I was a little confused; it seemed obvious to me that I had written a hundred pages about that complicated prose. And my reaction to that complicated prose was explained in the three pages of the introduction. I decided not to defend myself. He thought of some other areas where I was deficient: "It seems like you always look back, while I always look forward." I said very little.

And then, in a few more words we reached the end of our relationship. "Well," he said, "it certainly has been interesting."

Get some more Death in Venice dished up with a tangy Zauberwelt sauce here.

New York photos

Photos from New York available here!

NYC Vacation

A quick outline of my trip to New York:

Monday

- Arrived at JFK. Got lost and confused trying to make my way to Manhattan. A friendly woman with her luggage unzipped in half-dozen places advised me to take the E line from D Station. Or something like that. An unfriendly woman screamed, "He just ran over my foot with his luggage and just kept on going!"

- Met B. at the hotel, then took the subway down to meet D. around Houston. Got lost trying to find her, but eventually zeroed in. We were unchanged in many ways after these dozen years. Ate at a very cozy Thai restaurant and then had beautiful drinks at Death & Co. She had a strawberry-jalapeno drink, B. had a hot toddy. Alcohol too strong for us but the cinnamon and lemon were tasty.

Tuesday

- B. and I had lunch at Vynl (Cobb salad sandwich wrap) with a friend and associate of his. Then we ventured south by foot, and the tall tower of the Empire State Building called us. The ropes for the queue to ride to the top were strangely empty, so we wandered into the building and decided to pay the big bucks to see out the top. It was a beautiful, warm, clear day. There is no California majesty of landforms, but the spread of metal and concrete has its own intoxications.

- B., D., and I went to the Metropolitan Opera. This was partly a wonderful experience: a grand building, a beautiful theatre, steeply raked seats with a rail of subtitles right in front of you. And partly grueling: The four hours of Giulio Cesare were practically unbearable: a little fine singing, mediocre sets and ridiculous costumes, an embarrassing mezzo warble, and terrible staging. As someone pointed out, "We've been doing this opera for hundreds of years, and this is the best we can come up with?"

Wednesday

- Something about the time change, something about vacation, meant that I woke up perfectly refreshed . . . at 10:30 am.

- B. went off to a rehearsal, and I strolled down to the Ed Sullivan Theater to see about my David Letterman ticket. There was a bit of rigmarole, but I got the ticket in time to walk down to TKTS to look for tickets to a musical later that night. Got 2 for Angela Lansbury in the play Deuce. Went back to Ed Sullivan and stood with a crowd awaiting the arrival of . . . Dave? Nicholas Cage? Paul Shaffer? Didn't matter.

- More rigmarole as the studio audience inched closer and closer to Dave. The taping was extraordinary. I was on the aisle in seat E1. Dave's three minutes of improv before the actual taping were glorious. I could watch the show every night.

- Left the dreamy sounds and lights of the Late Show, met B., and we had a quick bite to eat before Deuce. Our tickets -- under $50 each -- were in the 7th row. The play began, and there was our favorite grandmother-sleuth and meat-pie baker. Lansbury and costar Marian Seldes were bewitching. The play itself was a mess -- no movement, no conflict, no direction, and the seriousness of the characters' past relationship was deeply wounded by the farcical sports announcers and heavy-handed narrator/fan.

Thursday

- B. met some old gurlfriends for lunch and gurltalk, so I strolled across the park and wandered through the Metropolitan Museum for several hours. I bought a notebook at the museum store and took notes on the artworks that struck me. Warhol doesn't usually excite, but the hugeness of Mao . . .

- Strolled back across the park to get dressed for the Chanticleer premiere, then took the subway back to the Met Museum. An hour before, there was already a sizable crowd lined up. Once inside the Temple of Dendur, I found a seat close to the front and right next to a seat marked "RESERVED - New York Times." The mass was beautiful -- criticized by the NYT for being a little to cohesive, given that five different contemporary composers composed its movements, its cohesion came as a delightful surprise to em. I had expected that it would sound like five composers trying to outdo the others -- not quite appropriate for a mass.

- Went to a restaurant afterward and sat a table away from Richard Kind.

Friday

- B. had to leave in the morning, so we got a little breakfast (passing Kevin Bacon on the way) and then I headed over to D.'s, who had left for Canada on Wednesday and graciously offered her apartment to me. Her apartment was so extraordinary -- filled with so many beautiful and complex objects, and truly looking like the home of a complex and healthy person (so unlike my own) -- that I had a fantasy of writing a series of poems based on all the pulsating objects (many of them her own creations). In my little notebook I wrote, "Apologia. I do not have eyes to see or mind to comprehend, but the home of a friend has poems and stories. A plate of jewels." That's as far as I got with my plan.

- I dropped off my things and headed way down south to a different TKTS, where I got tickets to Grey Gardens for that night. Took the subway to Brooklyn to meet S., and got a turkey and cream-cheese croissant and coffee for $2.50. Possibly the best deal of my entire life. He showed me his apartment and neighborhood, and we took an above-ground train back into Manhattan. He took me to a Korean restaurant, where I tried kimchee for the first time, and then we went to the musical.

- Grey Gardens was great. Truly great. These were professional and super-talented performers, an innovative set, great music, and a remarkable adaptation of the original documentary, including an entirely made-up first act of the Beale's in their heyday.

Saturday

- Got some breakfast at a cafe and talked to my mom on the phone for an hour or so while I walked through the park. Got a $20 standing room ticket for the Met's matinee of Il trittico. I've referred to the experience as torture. Four hours of standing. The first two operas of the triptych were particularly painful -- a dumb old adultery cliche followed by a convent piece, where I'm supposed to be moved by a suicidal nun who dies of course with her arms flung out in a patch of cross-shaped lighting (and then her dead son reaches his arms out to her and then spreads them wide so he can be Jesus, too!). Stephanie Blythe's rich, un-put-on voice kept me there.

- Walked around a bit before an 8 o'clock performance of three Balanchine ballets -- Apollo, Agon, and Symphony in C -- at NYCB. A splendid seat, and I got a little choked up as the lights went down, and then was shocked to see Apollo there on stage. His jaw moved as the Stravinsky began and -- no, surely he's not chewing gum? And then his jaw moved again -- chewing gum?!? I'm not sure, but I was thrown out of that emotional place and didn't return until Agon.

- Headed back to the Upper East Side and was surprised to have a voicemail from D., who had returned to the city, a little surprised to find my stuff still strewn about her apartment. We were happy to have some more time to visit and stayed up quite late chatting.

Sunday

- D. and I went to the Guggenheim, exploring all its little curves and crannies. Fantastic pseudo-Impressionist pieces by Italian painters. We talked about the artworks and our lives, then went for brunch at a nearby diner. Said our goodbyes, and I headed off for the airport.

His Dark Materials

Is this my daemon?