Month: January 2011

If I forget to mention it over the coming months, the Ralph Vaughan Williams piece I’m working on, A Sea Symphony? It’s Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis all over again. This thing moves like a freaking bat out of hell, and in this case the bat is also on meth and being chased by much scarier bats. Not only is it impossibly fast, the time signature changes constantly. 3/2, no, 4/2, no 3/2, okay, I’m just messing with you, it’s really 4/2. No, 3/2! He’s like Lucy with a time signature football.

I need … puppies! Here boys! In truth, the combination of this lush, exciting Ralph Vaughan Williams music and text from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is thrilling. Robert Shaw called it “the most beautiful piece of choral music written in the 20th century.”

I’m planning a day off for next week and I want to include a movie and there are no movies out there that I’m just dying to see. I remember I used to go to everything, regardless of how good it might be, I just loved going to the movies so much it was worth it even for mediocre films. Three times a week I’d go. Now, I want something … special.

What should I see?

Behold! An orange Christmas tree! Okay, that rhymes, not on purpose, and the rhythm is off.

Another day at the dentist. I still spare you the details. I was thinking I’d treat myself to a trip to the Municipal Archives to find this photograph that has been haunting me for years.

It was a picture of a man in a shack, taken around 1915, and he was clearly living the most wretched existence, everything about it said pain, misery, screwed-over by life. I swear I saw it over ten years ago and I still think about it from time to time. How everyone gets a certain amount of luck, and varying degrees of intelligence, talent, looks, love, friends, wealth, and so on, but he didn’t get any. He was living at the bottom of the barrel on every level. I know it’s bizarre that I would consider this a treat but I want to confront this photograph. I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind.

That reminds me. There was a picture of a baby standing up in a hallway in a tenement in Part Three of Ric Burns’s New York Documentary. I think it was a Jacob Riis photograph. I immediately wondered if Mark Helprin saw this photograph and if it was the inspiration for a child in his novel Winter’s Tale. (Love that book.)

I took this while walking to the dentist yesterday. It’s like nature tried to save me and did everything it could to prevent me and my dentist from getting to the office.

Just back from the dentist. TORTURE. She introduced the idea of getting an implant vs flap surgery. I thought an implant was the very very very last resort? She was saying that flap surgery is a short-term solution and that an implant was less invasive than flap surgery. Any opinions? Christ. Just typing these words gives me an anxiety attack.

Here is a fancy birdhouse in fancy Gramercy Park.

But I’ve been working my way through the Ric Burns documentary New York and this is what I’ve taken away from it so far: No one dies in the same New York they grew up in.

The city keeps changing, and that fast. Although there are exceptions! As soon as the snow melts I’m going to do a “then and now” on a building two doors down from me that hasn’t changed.

This is from a series I took my roof a few months ago actually. What can I say, I still love it.