Stacy Horn

Each chapter of my new book is going to feature a piece of music. I’ve mostly decided which pieces I’m going to do, but every now and again a piece will pop up while I’m listening to my ipod, like the Brahms motet titled Wo ist ein so herrlich Volk, and I think, I should get lost in this one for a while.

Brahms wasn’t wild about this piece, I just read. WTF? I just flashed on a scene from when I was 12 years old. A friend of mine was saying how she liked this other friend of mine. I had to tell her that this other friend didn’t like her. “Do you still like her now,” I asked. “Well,” she answered, “it’s hard to continue to like someone when you hear that they don’t like you.” It was so honest and vulnerable at a time when we were all so careful to be anything but.

This motet is from a series of three, and maybe Brahms didn’t think the other two were the best things he’s ever done, but he must have liked this sweet little jewel of a motet. I can’t find a good version to point you too. The ones I’ve found are all performed so fast and clunkily. That isn’t a word I see. Clunk-like? The beauty is lost when it’s done this way.

This picture is from fashion week. These people were waiting to get into Abercrombie & Fitch. All I could think was “bed bugs.” (They had to close down to deal with a bed bug infestation. Does everyone know we’re being over-run by bedbugs here in New York?)

These are some of the pictures I’ve sent to my friend Jackie as possible candidates to incorporate into a new banner. I like those top two, but I think when they’re shrunk to banner size they’ll be so tiny they’ll lose what I like about them. Maybe those stretching paws are the best solution (referring to an earlier post and picture).

I like Mondays. The start of a new week. Mondays feel like yet another chance to do something right, for something great to happen, like getting presents in the mail. (Come on, aren’t presents in the mail exciting??)

This week I’m working on what I’m calling the “conductor chapter” of my book. My goal is to get a lock on showing what a conductor does and to do it in a page-turner way. I also have to pick the secondary topic of the chapter. I’m pretty much certain it’s going to be the benefits and dangers of singing, and there are dangers, some pretty scary. I was getting anxiety attacks just reading about them. Seriously, I had to keep putting the Oliver Sacks book Musicophilia down. It was freaking me out.

Aha! I just got email from the conductor of our choir. His answer to a question I asked him has given me an idea how to make this chapter a page turner. Money. Money and art.

And there was yet another photo shoot on Perry Street! This time the model was a guy.

I am under strict instructions from my vet to get Finney’s weight down. I’ve got him on 300 calories a day (we’re going to go lower as we go along) AND daily exercise. He’s bored with the laser pointer, so I’ve been trying to get him to chase cat toys.

He actually likes balled up pieces of paper best, and that cardboard tube thing inside paper towel rolls which I cut up into smaller-sized tube pieces.

I’m reading a book called The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain and it’s good news for us middle-agers. I just finished a section about one of the biggest and longest studies of the brain.

“In four of the six categories tested–vocabulary, verbal memory, spatial orientation and … inductive reasoning–people performed best, on average, between the ages of forty to sixty-five.”

Of course one big one that young people did the best on, and it is a big one, was processing speed. But speed isn’t everything. Needless to say, the results are causing science to take a new look at the midlife brain. This and that study that says we start to get happier at 50.

This is a fountain you walk through. Water is cascading around that glass circle. I tried to take a shot from within, but it didn’t really convey it. It was pretty nice.