oh boy

I ordered a used copy of Apollo 13 from amazon.com and it seems the seller thought I should be more acquainted with the TV series Quantum Leap. Nestled in the DVD case were the discs I ordered along with one from the fifth season of the Leap. It's hard to imagine someone not liking Apollo 13 enough to keep it around but owning at least one entire season of QL. (Of course, it's probably a safe assumption that since I got only one disc from the fifth season this Urkel more than likely owns at least the first four seasons, right?)

So...now I have Quantum Leap in the apartment. I'm not really sure what to think about that. I've only been able to bring myself to watch one episode so far.

Behold! The Bakula in all his glory!













Jeez. I need to write some music in a hurry. This blog is floating dangerously close to "Nerd Lock."

close-up

I love blogs with pictures on them and, in the last couple of weeks, I've made it a point to mess around with my camera as much as I can. I've had it for over 2 years and I still don't know everything it can do. One thing I'm getting better at is setting up close-up shots.

How about a glass of water?













Some sake.













Restaurant accouterment.













Black pepper













Condiments













Cell













Two things that go together like peanut butter and jelly: moist toweletts and Sweet 'N Low

Ceramic piggy bank

Alternative Control

new scores

It's a slow blog day but, on the bright side, Santa Barbara sent me the scores for two new pieces, Sleeping Out: Full Moon and A Christmas Carol, in the mail yesterday. Daniel Hughes (the amazing conductor of The Choral Project) was kind enough to put them in his choral series.













Commissioned by the Young New Yorker's Chorus and the Mesa High School A Cappella Choir respectively they are both for choir and piano. A Christmas Carol was my first stab at setting prose (it's on an excerpt from Dickens' book of the same name) after listening to a ton of Dominick Argento's work and Sleeping Out: Full Moon was my first experience with the poetry of Englishman Rupert Brooke. If you don't know his work you should definitely check it out. I posted the Young New Yorker's Chorus performance of Sleeping Out: Full Moon on my MySpace page if you'd like to listen.

way to go Betinis!

Friend and fellow composer (and sometimes blog participant) Abbie Betinis just got some incredibly good ink. She was featured as a young artist "on the verge" by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. And, if that wasn't enough, Minnesota Public Radio highlighted the article on their website. The Twin Cities love this girl! And rightfully so. She is brilliant as they come.

In the spirit of a some friendly ribbing, here she is singing for none other than her fellow Grecian, Yanni. She described the experience as "me making up Greek words over some weird electronic music while Yanni sat and listened." I would like to think that she was employing a complex compositional technique known as "improvisation" (or is it "deception"...hmm, I don't know).












Way to go, Betinis! Yanni-in-leather-pants-playing-like-a-million-keyboards say you are number one! (By the way, my crude internet approximation of a funny Greek accent was to leave the 's' off of "says".)

since i'm done with that...

Here's a bit of YouTube fun. If you think the costume is the only bad part and you're in for one of those whoever-thought-of-this-in-the-first-place-must-have-been-high-on-something-but-at-least-she-pulls-it-off-in-the-end clips then...well...BOY are you wrong. It's a cornucopia of awful goodness that should make your hairs stand on end first and then make you crap your pants laughing as it just won't stop.

It's really too bad, though. You'd think that someone who at least knew (what I'm assuming are) the correct fingerings for the notes she was supposed to be hitting would have known that her trumpet was so out of tune that a baby could have figured out to wave her off before she even hit the stage. Someone really failed Stacey Hedger when they kept on pushing her through the various stages of musical instruction.

In fact, maybe this video should serve as an indictment to all those music teachers out there who don't know a trumpet from a hole in the ground. Shame on you! Look what you did to poor Miss Douglas!

In other news, Steve finally updated his blog with this hilarious entry on the tree brain. It's no Beggin' Lettuce and Tomato sandwich but it's nice to see him back. Head to the bottom of the page to find out why this guy knows that a fungus growing out of his tree tastes like "lemony chicken".

Here's a superfluous picture from my writing space. It's from Jack Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.

color madrigals DONE!

Yeah, dude! I am totally, utterly, completely done with the Color Madrigals. I normally don't get done with pieces so quickly but, in the case of the last two madrigals, they just flowed out. Each is less than 3 minutes of music so it's sort of no surprise. I'm not sure yet what order they're all going to go in yet but, as it stands, I have a six-movement choral work. Listed in the order they were written they would be:

A Grass-Green Pillow
Serpents in Red Roses Hissing
Purple-Stained Mouth
Yellow Brooms and Cold Mushrooms
Orange-Mounts of More Soft Ascent
Blue! 'Tis the Life of Heaven

This little idea that started a year ago and progressed slower than anything I've ever written (because it was premiered in parts over that entire year) is FINISHED! I put the last notes into Finale a couple of days ago and went to Kinko's yesterday to pick up the final product. Holding the finished, bound score in my hands is one of my favorite parts of the whole process. It feels legitimizing.

In other news, my building has been getting re-sided (if that's a word). It's been interesting to watch the workers chew down the building over the past few weeks. I tried to take a nap one day and one of them laddered up to within a few feet of my head and started hammering the crap out of my outside wall. Needless to say, I didn't sleep much.

Since I don't have a "before" picture you'll have to settle for what it looked like out my living room window after they tore off all the original wood siding. Pretty harsh, right?

A couple of days later, my building turned black and got the measles.

And, the finished product. I'm guessing they still have to give it a scrub.