Month: February 2013

I’m slapping up a couple a cat shots. This was my Valentine’s Day. I was without a boyfriend. AGAIN. So it was me and the furballs. We had a lovely evening of guilty-pleasure tv and food treats for everyone. Finney doesn’t love Bleeck any more than usual, but he seems to have accepted the situation. He doesn’t appear to be miserable all the time, but …

He does assume this face a lot, which to me says: The minute you leave the room I’m killing him.

I noticed I’ve had a lot of “in my day” type posts lately. Is there a reason I’ve been feeling nostalgic? Maybe because I watched this video of spiders in Brazil and I know some day I’m going to look back and long for the day when spiders weren’t our overlords. Jesus. There used to be a spider code. It was understood that once in a while one would sneak up on us, rappelling down to get a good scream here and there, but this?? Not cool spiders, not cool.

This sweet dog was sitting so still my friends and I honestly thought someone had taken their beloved pet to the taxidermist. His longing was so intense and focused he barely moved. Such a sweetie pie.

I was watching the Fashion Police wrap-up of the recent Grammy Awards, and I kept hearing them say “on trend.” Being on trend is good, and if you’re not on trend that’s unacceptable, it seems. When did this happen?

I grew when being trendy was considered a negative thing. It meant you didn’t have a mind of your own, and you were unoriginal and boring, just going about looking like anyone else. There were exceptions of course. Some trends are great. But they were followed because they were great, not because they were the current trend, and even then people tried to put them together in a unique way. Trendy was an insult. When I hear someone say “on trend” I have to stop and adjust my thinking and register the fact that they just gave someone a compliment.

Also, their most hated dress was my favorite. It was a lovely fantasy worn by Kimbra (not sure who she is, I am clearly not on trend music-wise).

I’m enjoying the new AT&T “It’s not Complicated” commercials. I would love to think that the boy who suggested “tape a cheetah to her back?” in one of them came up with that on the fly. It’s just such a perfect kid-type solution to a problem.

But there’s a moment that makes me cringe in the one that asks “What’s better, doing two things at once or just one?” While a boy demonstrates waving his arms and shaking his head at the same time, the girl next to him tries to show the adult in the commercial something she can do. The guy immediately shuts her down and you can see the hurt in her face and body language. She quickly recovers her composure and turns her attention to the boy and smiles graciously. My heart just goes out for her. You can see the moment here.

It also pains me to see this—and I’m not saying this is what is happening here, although it could be—because it reminds me of my entire childhood, when I was continually shut down, practically on a daily basis, because whatever the boys where saying and doing was more important. (I grew up mostly in the 60’s.) Boys were called on more in class, encouraged to do more things, try more things, and so on. If people thought we were too young to be aware of the routine slights and discrimination they were wrong, just as you can see the flicker of pain in this girl’s response.

And yet more proof I am a wuss—I saw these spikey things on this building and at first I thought it was to prevent people from breaking in, but then I realized it was to stop pigeons from sitting there. I can appreciate wanting to keep the front of the building clean, but I just felt sorry for the pigeons, the underdog bird of the bird kingdom. Wait a minute. Queendom. (Once a feminist, always a feminist.)

Jameson Marvin is the former Director of Choral Activities and Senior Lecturer on Music at Harvard University, (1978 – 2010) and he is also one of John Maclay’s mentors. (John Maclay is the director of the Choral Society of Grace Church.) Marvin currently directs the Jameson Singers in Boston, and last night he came down to New York to show us a thing or two.

Jim Marvin was a big help to me with my book. In particular, I couldn’t have written what is my favorite chapter without him. I wanted to compare what I felt singing a piece by one of my favorite composers, Tomás Luis de Victoria, to what the first people who sang it may have felt. (That would have been back in 1576.) The whole proposition is, admittedly, a flight of fancy, but I found a lot of scientific research to back up my imaginings.

Jim Marvin is, among other things, a scholar of Renaissance music, and his contributions to that chapter made the chapter. It would have been a complete fantasy without everything I learned from him about music written during that period. (He also shows up again in another section about rhythm.) Thank you, Jim!