first taste

and so it was, saturday dinner, my training day at rebecca's in greenwich, ct : boot camp for those virgin to the restaurant business. following ricardo from 5pm-2am. she sold out and sat eager diners at the counter. my favorite table thus far is the café table, tucked away in an intimate nook, out of sight of the rest of the guests.

i don't know if i'm cut out for this business. in fact, i have no idea. it will be a good training ground. well-oiled machine, that's for sure...i just hope that it doesn't take over my life. i can't work more than 3 nights/2 nights+lunch/week. it would wear me down.

alice very graciously went shopping with me in white plains to find white oxford shirts and khaki pants. i bought some cute black shoes (mistake). i didn't sit down once (or go to the bathroom) during my entire shift. i was on my feet the entire time. i have massive blisters from those new shoes and my legs are sore.

i sang a gig at a church in the city this morning as a favor to jp (research and writing teacher at purchase), which was a mistake. i should have just slept. my brain was too fried to rehearse with marc in the afternoon, so i took a day. played a little, burned myself with the iron trying to smooth out my new gap khakis, finished reading teacher man by frank mccourt (angela's ashes), still am in the middle of a tree grows in brooklyn, which, derek balcom was right, is a chick book. we have yet to think of an equivalent phrase to "chick flick" that applies to literature.

i saw ladysmith black mambazo perform at the PAC on friday, $5 student rush (nice). they have an exquisite sound that never really varies, velvety polyphony...they sang "homeless" and spoke a lot about peace and love as means of conflict resolution. the original guy who started the group 46 years ago still sings with them. i was so tired, i just closed my eyes and sank into the velvet.


purchase symphony orchestra's first concert is this weekend! friday night, 8pm, PAC. program: martin ballade (crystal zagarello, flute), le tombeau de couperin, debussy nocturnes and messaien oiseaux exotiques. should be sweet.

early morning blues

underslept and not yet paid, the heavy morning fog is setting a gloomy stage for a day of 3 job interviews, a haircut, and an evening in the city.

1. part-time waitstaff at rebecca's in greenwich, ct.
2. salesperson at chef central, hartsdale.
3. stockkeeping at triboro quilts, white plains.

haircut at eclipse A salon for hair, tarrytown.

evening with lisa & ed cohen at the joyce theater for funky fusion dance.

somewhere amongst all this i have to eat lunch at home and practice my new altès and jeanjean études, and patch boulez memoriale.

busy, à la paris or oberlin. hopefully my zippy little car and gps will serve me well today.

it's not you, it's me.

i'm at one of those junctures where i realize that i'm the problem. my roommate is sensitive to strong smells, i have a penchant for cooking with garlic and olive oil, but we keep similar sleep schedules and basically coinhabit the space. i am going to have to learn to actually be clean and keep clean. for some reason this was left out of my childhood, this tendency to keep things clean. maybe i resisted it. my parents are pack rats. i am cleaner than sam sharp or colin marsh, but that isn't saying much.

148 n. main was a memorable house, but not for good reasons. charmaine was a good part. so was my invite-only wine&cheese birthday party. with eben lichtman, jazz piano and supporting musicians. steve menotti showed up sheepishly to crash the party. candlelight, good people, laughter, friends. cary cody, kat cohn, there from the beginning. alice teyssier, alex conway, darcy gervasio, my girls. kevin lubrano stopped by. john shaw showed his amazing face.

here at purchase, i feel like someone stole the snow from my snowglobe. suddenly, magically, rug from under my feet, no people. not something that is cured by a late-night stiff drink.

with that, i am going to walk to the dam in these last hours of sunlight and read a little fux.
that's right, the oh-so-seductive chapter on second-species counterpoint.

found, in part.

saturday. crystal took me to a place called gonzalez y gonzalez, located in soho around the 6 bleecker st stop.

interior, gonzalez y gonzalez
625 broadway

clio and i met at grand central at 10, and took the 6 downtown. the place itself is a restaurant and bar, but they have live music starting at 11:30pm on saturdays.

salient feature: NO COVER. that's right, boys and girls, one of the salsa spots in new york city without entrance fee. the men were a little grabby (but i'm fresh, and don't have a crew), and i had to duck out at around 1 to get on the subway to get the last local train out of grand central.

cheers to david and the fearless john boland of the meeting point bookstore at tai sophia for keeping up with my musings! i miss you guys too, particularly the hip abstract art and fun philosopher finger puppets. i forgot to buy buddh-its before i left (they're probably all sold).

sooo o o o...more letter writing is in order, particularly since i think it makes me smarter. i don't know if that's actually possible, but i feel it.

my hands have been very stiff, and i'm not sure where the tension is coming from. maybe it's karmic. i'm working on boulez memoriale and the denisov, trying to play the quartertones correctly. singing along with a recording helps. sometimes also made-up fingerings for glissandi work better than fingering manuals. especially in the mid-low register. those are easier to fake, i think.

this week, doris is in california, and i can breathe. alice and i cooked tacos and fresh guacamole last night. i'm going to attempt ratatouille tonight. i'm getting nostalgic for france again. my hand hovered over a vat of nutella at the stop n' shop today. i decided that my baguette will have to be happy with raspberry jam and honey. damn, and honey from apiaries from the south of france...and amazing côte du rhône wine...

maybe i should just give it all up and be a writer. move to france, become a food critic. thoughts?

professional, ish

as i have recently made the error of placing my blog address on my shipment of business cards, i will take this opportunity to pull in the reins a bit, as it were.

projects that will soon be implemented at purchase:

• flute+guitar with marc wolf, one of the geniuses behind the record label furious artisans;
• a renaissance vocal group, unnamed and unpersonelled as of this moment;
• hand drumming class, wednesday mornings, externalizing beats that will better me as a dancer and a human being.

i am a grad student at suny-purchase and dream of scandalizing the masses with cutting edge new music and rarely heard (in these parts) old music. education, for me, is a means by which one may open doors - cliché, but absolutely and utterly true. at some point early on i decided that, whatever the consequence, i would endeavor with a mind thirsting for knowledge. those who regret going back to school should have never been there in the first place. auditing classes is a genius idea: it enables one to learn, stress-free, with none of the stigmas or bad karma associations that come with assignments, grades, expectations, all those tethering things. maybe it is a little haze of mania talking, but i think that heading out to new york alone, knowing no one at the school, moving in with a stranger, was a way of creating newness - even now it seems a little raw - and breaking the invisible cords of what expectations oberlin had for me. premed, biochem, cum bioethics major - these labels, these things, so utterly irrelevant to the shaping of one's soul.

recent flute-related events:

• first lesson with the very clever and effervescent tara helen o'connor;
• first (not half-bad) rehearsal of messiaen's "oiseaux exotiques" - which, though cluttered, makes for very entertaining listening, if you can pick out the birdcalls and distinguish the groups of instruments through the contrapuntal muck;
• ordering of new music - new études (altès and damase, on the recommendation of tara) and a few romantesque french grande solos, which i hope won't break my bank, from carolyn nussbaum.

an aside: it is very rainy in new york at the moment, and the fog shows no signs of lifting. very "secret garden", england, moor-esque. i am reading a very nice book called blue shoe by anne lamott, taken from the popular collection at the purchase library.

the reason that i inject my reading here (for those of you that read the occasional blather) is that i find that literature - poetry, prose, plays, however you take it - is incredibly important for anyone's character. when i was in high school and was required to read a certain amount of heavy-handed stuff - to the lighthouse, black boy, 1984, lord of the flies - i lost sight of that. not that i went straight to faulkner (whom my mother worships, or did, at one stage), proust (whom darcy recently bravely tackled), or joyce (someone i know owns ulysses in several languages), but rather i have taken the opportunity to step back and consider style and form. i didn't love on beauty, for example, but i absolutely adored the center of everything. j.d. salinger turned a little sour, while f. scott fitzgerald climbed my rankings.

conclusion? i am a passionate person with a lust for music that extends to literature and dancing and traveling. the list will probably lengthen with time. i hope this has been an improvement. stay tuned.

in a small tribute to a place i called home for an hour on early friday mornings a year ago...

after

conclusions after a full day of graduate life:

• JP, or Professor Knijff (prounounced "Knife" with a hard "K"), the Research and Writing teacher, is a slight, tall, hilarious keyboard player (mostly organ and harpsichord). He hails from Holland (Titus van den Heuvel's native land?) and has many ideas for the class. Our first assignment is to brush up our bios - I feel mine is too stiff and bland. I am neither stiff nor bland.
• Brookshire terrifies me slightly. His class is ultimately going to be an exercise in my patience. I thought species counterpoint would never haunt me again in this life, but it seems that it will be a big part of what we learn in Harmony and Counterpoint class. For some reason, I don't see how emphasizing that aspect of the 16th century has any resonance with us as musicians. Da and Derek were saying yesterday when I drove them to the White Plains Metro North station that understanding species counterpoint affects the way we conceive of musical line...I'm a singer, I think that's basically bullshit. My ear has always saved me.
• Paul Dunkel rocks. He conducts the Westchester Phil and plays flute at Lincoln Center. He's working with us for the joy of it, not the money or the glory (both minimal). His tempi in Tombeau are a little sketchy at times - I hope he takes the last movement at the brisk marked 120, or at least 112 - but I think he will whip the orchestra into a fine form. I honestly think that the string players, though intonation in the violins was a little "eh" occasionally during the first rehearsal, are more committed than the Oberlin players. Maybe not in the cello section.

The picc part for "Oiseaux Exotiques" looms in my immediate future. Shopping goals: hangers, for all my jackets and sweaters and somber black clothing, ear plugs so i don't go deaf in my right ear from high fast piccolo playing, and perhaps an Indian buffet at Bengal Tiger in White Plains.

tales

lately: ghostwritten by david mitchell. i believe it was matt, who lives with kat in brooklyn, who mentioned mitchell after kat almost spilled vending machine coffee on his worn ivory leather loafers in the subway. she snuck up on him from behind.

the flute crew at purchase is small, and i hope will become tight. peter lee is a married, grounded soul who commutes from long island, and crystal reminds me a bit of anita in her friendly disposition. i expect they're all strong players, particularly alice. she seems mysterious, as if she has something up her sleeve. jaime is quiet, and adam is very worldly. i'm crossing my fingers for the picc part for messaien's "oiseaux exotiques" - which, tara and i agreed, totally kicks ass - as well as maybe 2nd on debussy's nocturnes.

class-wise, i would love to sit in on an intro creative writing class as well as a hand drumming class...

for the few of you that rose early friday mornings to catch my radio show last fall on wobc (http://www.wobc.org/guide-show.php?edition_id=1795), i had a djembe show one week and featured a track from a live album by adama dramé (above). if i can't get into any classes at djoniba in the city, i might just have to settle for soaking it up at purchase.

so...marc wolf and i are likely doing some cool flute and guitar things, denisov and bozza, perhaps a piece by francaix. we'll see if we've bitten off more than we can chew rep-wise.

i hear the train at all hours, and sleep fitfully, waking usually at dawn...