Author: Stacy Horn

In a YouTube Video composer Eric Whitacre talked about singing with a choir for the first time. It was in college and the piece was the Mozart Requiem. “It was like seeing color for the first time, and I was regularly moved to tears during rehearsals, crushed by the impossible beauty of the work. I became a choral geek of the highest magnitude, I mean I lived for rehearsals and performances …”

We all feel that way. You take a breath, and masterpieces like Bach’s Mass in B Minor emerge. Sometime it’s hard not to just break down sobbing, the work is so magnificent.

Another composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, wrote, “If we neglect the amateur side of music and become a nation of mere passive listeners all the life will go out of our art … ” Given all the evidence that continues to pile up for the beneficial things music does to our brains, bodies, immune systems, and hearts—and by hearts I mean that both literally and metaphorically—it’s terrible that it’s not part of everyone’s lives. “Singing together and making music together,” Whitacre said in his YouTube video, “is a fundamental human experience.”

Yesterday Finney took the place behind my practice piano that Buddy used to take …

And then Bleecker showed up. “Can I sit here too? Can I, Can I??” Right, like we all don’t know what you really mean: “Can I jump on your back, put my paws around you like a vise, then chomp on your neck until you cry?” I’m sorry, Finney.

“Petition to light up the Empire State Building TARDIS blue on November 23rd to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who!”

“We are asking the Empire State Building to light up “TARDIS Blue” on November 23rd to celebrate 50 great years of Doctor Who. The Empire State Building regularly uses their spectacular light show to celebrate special moments in pop culture, such as sports events, the 15th anniversary of The Lion King, and Wrestlemania, as well as all the holidays and occasions it’s more known for being lit up for. As far as we know, however, they’ve never lit up to celebrate a SciFi show. What better place to start than the iconic series Doctor Who?”

These are pictures from last Halloween of the Tardis crashed into a building on Perry Street. They’ve done this two years in a row now, and I’ve never been happy with how my pictures come out. It’s so well done, it also glows and smokes.

Hopefully they will do it again this year and I’ll get yet another chance to do better.

I was just reading about a monkey who has been alone in a cage for 18 years and who is being moved to the Save the Chimps sanctuary. Poor guy. Life will get better soon.

I always have two cats at a time, just so the cat has a member of his own species to hang out with. It doesn’t always work out ideally though.

“I love you,” Bleecker’s look says. “Why must I admire you from afar?”

It’s always a competition for me. I saw an article about writers who effectively use social media and one of the writers said he’d been tweeting since 2007. He said it like this was a big deal so of course I had to go back and see how long I’ve been tweeting, sure I’d beat him. Alas, I only matched him.

My first tweet was on June 5 2007, just a couple of days after my birthday, and I conveyed the earth-shattering message of:

Goofing off, the movie The Remains of the Day is on TV in the background.

I love that movie. LOVE. I wish it would play on tv as often as The Shawshank Redemption.

The scene below took place on 14th Street. The poor woman could not tear that little boy away from the Superman statue. It was freaking adorable.

I realize people have different opinions about the Affordable Care Act, but surely everyone can agree that people who didn’t have health insurance before being able to get it now is something to celebrate. I got this in email on the first day of sign-ups. This is the message from the New York health exchange website:

“Due to overwhelming interest in the NY State of Health – including 2 million visits in the first 2 hours of the site launch – the health exchange is currently having log in issues. We encourage users who are unable to log in to come back to the site later when these issues will be resolved.”

These are details from a photograph I found in the Museum of the City of New York digital collection. The caption reads, Choral Society, group photo taken in restaurant, and it’s dated May 17, 1926. I like zeroing in on faces. That guy to the right of the conductor, for instance. He’s like Jack Torrance in The Shining. “YOU are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker.”

One more below …

This detail is just to the right of the one above. My eye goes straight to the woman in the black dress, middle right. “There are four girls between me and that evil guy behind me,” her expression says. “Yeah, I need to move over more.”