hedwig & the angry inch

I hit the Jungle Theater last night with some friends to see their production of Hedwig & The Angry Inch.

I've seen the movie a number of times and even a hastily produced live version once but this one was head and shoulders above that one. I surreptitiously grabbed this photo.

It's a 150-seat theater and any seat is great. Inane fact: the only metropolitan area in the nation that has more theaters per capita than the Twin Cities is New York City.

We hit the Herkimer Pub and Brewery afterwards for some homegrown microbrews and random, friendly dogs.

I also had a brief run-in with T.R. Knight from Grey's Anatomy who was sitting right behind us. I never put this together until today but I saw him perform at the Guthrie a few years ago when he played Mozart in Amadeus.

yearbook yourself

I just found a really great web resource: Yearbook Yourself. It's super funny. Just take an eyes-front photo of yourself and you can see what you would look like in different eras of...uh...fashion?

Here's the picture I used. This is me with identical twins Michael and Matthew Culloton (who are both, coincidentally, maverick choral conductors in Minnesota).










Some are better than others. Here are the "greatest hits" through the proverbial, photoshopped years. Check it out for yourself for a good, hearty laugh.

Joshua Shank in 1960.
















1970: having seen pictures of my father from this era this is insanely spooky and weird (minus the digitally crooked glasses, of course).

















This picture of me (from 1974) is just plain funny.

















The digital incarnation of me from 1978 isn't superficially funny by any means (or...well...maybe it is) but the fact that a quasi-coincidental web program lined up the original photo I selected this well is way cool. Seriously, I look so happy with long hair!
















1984: res ipsa loquitur.
















Ever checked out a certain mullet-devoted website? This picture from 1988 might give me a spot.

gross

I saw this in the grocery store the other day. Am I wrong or does this just sound totally gross? I think it's the "crunch" that really does it. I know it's probably a challenge to get kids to eat right but can we entertain the notion for a moment that perhaps the advertising gurus might have been wrong on this one.

Mmmm. Delicious baby seal crunch.

LeRoi Moore (1961-2008)

LeRoi Moore, one of the founding members of the Dave Matthews Band, died yesterday at the age of 46. He was an amazing player (he killed on baritone, tenor, alto and soprano saxophones as well as flute, bass clarinet and penny whistle) and a good man. Listening to their records--particularly Under the Table and Dreaming and Before These Crowded Streets--contributed directly to some of my most formative experiences as a young musician and burgeoning creator of music. I'll miss hearing that sweet sound and I'm grateful to have finally seen him in action live this past June.

You will be missed, sir.

language year

I finished the revisions for To Sing You To Sleep and have moved on to the next commission for the year in the guise of a choir/oboe piece for Flower Mound High School in Texas. After a long chat with Abbie about languages (she has set Farsi, German, Norwegian, Latin, ancient Greek, Gaelic and is currently working on a piece in Chinese) I decided to go out of my comfort zone, "broaden my palette" a little and write exclusively out of my native language this year. That's what dialogue between colleagues is supposed to do, right?

In college I had a brilliant roommate, Moid Alwy, who happened to hail from Pakistan and, not wanting to waste the resource, I found some great poetry by Mirza Ghalib that he was kind enough to pronounce into a microphone for me. When I decided to "go foreign" on the poetry these recordings were the first things I looked at and, I'm happy to say, they're great poetry.

In Dr. Mark Rohwher I'm lucky to have carte blanche in what I want to do and, frankly, it's wonderful to have a conductor tell you, "Do something that will challenge us." That being said, he didn't bat an eye when I suggested having his high school students sing in the national language of Pakistan (called Urdu). How about that!

So I've been studying Ghalib, ordering an Urdu-to-English dictionary and listening over and over to Moid speaking the texts from 6 years ago. Add to that the incredible recordings of the oboe that a friend gave me (check out Ennio Morricone's score for The Mission, the Vaughn Williams concerto for oboe and strings and Britten's Six Metamorphoses After Ovid for starters) and you've got a nerdfully good time. It's awesome and should expand my BODY of knowledge a whole bunch.










Get it?

the mediterranean sun - an essay

I was reading through some old travel journals the other day and I found an essay I wrote about travelling in the Roman summer. It's a few years old but I think it's actually kind of funny so, in the spirit of humorous essays, I'll post it (along with a few pictures from the experience) here.

The Mediterranean Sun
is a Cruel Mistress
(An Essay: Summer 2006)
By Joshua Shank

After a brief, requisite flirtation with Old Spice as a teenager, I took up Degree as my anti-perspirant of choice. Their motto reads like a battle cry: “Degree turns up the heat.”

What the advertising geniuses are hinting at here is possibly the best slogan of any deodorant/anti-perspirant out there. Instead of claiming that their product’s power is “strong enough for a man but pH-balanced for a woman” or insinuating that its scent is a magic, sexy charm for the opposite sex, the people at Degree have gotten down to brass tacks and claimed and hinted at the fact that their product is simply more powerful than the thing it was designed to beat. It appeals to our love of winning with sheer brute force—no fancy chemicals and formulas here—it’ll just overpower and kill whatever scent you, the consumer, decide to pit it against…it turns up the heat.
















That being said, I think I found a climate where Degree would metaphorically behave like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming Mack truck. It would have 2 choices:

1. Stand its ground and try to face down this 18-wheeler-of-a-climate rolling towards it in a hi-beamed frenzy. Ultimately, of course, it would be blown to bits by the force of the collision.
   
2. Run away from the 3-headed Cerberus that is this heat and pray to the gods above that it won’t ever have to again face down the kind of temperatures that surely guard the gates of Hell.

I have simply never sweated so much in my entire life. Nor have I ever been around so many sweaty people. I might as well not be wearing any anti-perspirant at all. It’s a rolling sweat that keeps it comin’ and should really be commended for its consistency of performance throughout the day as well as overall body coverage. The sun that beats down never lets up either and it’s become painfully obvious that this freckled Irishman-of-a-white-boy wasn’t built for this climate. My blood is simply too thick and I’ve burned through most of my sunscreen like some sort of SPF junkie. It’s getting to be ridiculous.

And, through it all, there is the public subway. We stepped into a car today packed to bursting in the middle of rush hour at one of the busiest stops and, as all of the people wearing tank tops seemed to be steadying themselves by gripping something above them, it was an olfactory nightmare that few could imagine and none should experience. I would imagine that death by mustard gas probably smells like this: humid and sticky to the point where you can taste it.

As I said in the beginning of this little diatribe: "the Mediterranean Sun is a cruel mistress." She makes sure that you work for what you see in Rome. If it were easy to endure then too many people would take it for granted. Perhaps that’s what makes it all worthwhile in the end.

i love this note

A good friend wisely gave me a copy of Leonard Cohen's Book of Longing last year and I've been on the fringes of curiosity about him for a while now. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that everyone and their mother discovered his haunting Hallelujah on the soundtrack to Shrek. Leonard harnesses the primordial nature of that word in Western society and it somehow transcends religion totally and completely. It was performed by Rufus Wainwright (and therefore not Leonard, himself) but the power is just there.

[Sidebar:] If you have a chance, the Jeff Buckley version is even better. Do yourself a favor and take 6 minutes and 34 seconds out of your day to listen to it if you haven't heard it before. He drowned tragically at the age of 30 and it brings the immensity of that loss into clear focus. Listen. The album version is even better. He even performs Britten's Corpus Christi Carol. How many rock singers do that? [Sidebar over]

All that being said, we're talking about Leonard Cohen here, right? Netflix just sent the DVD celebration of his music, Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. It's a richly deserved homage with a bunch of different artists (Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, U2) and LC interspersed between the concert footage reading poems, telling anecdotes, waxing philosophical, etc. He talks about having his cult hit book, Beautiful Losers, translated into Chinese and how they asked him to write a preface. He reads it out loud and it really struck me as an interesting mini-treatise on the impermanence of art.

"A Note to the Chinese Reader"
By Leonard Cohen

Dear Reader,

Thank you for coming to this book. It is an honor and a surprise to have the frenzied thoughts of my youth expressed in Chinese characters. I sincerely appreciate the efforts of the translator and the publishers in bringing this curious work to your attention. I hope you will find it useful or amusing.

When I was young my friends and I read and admired the old Chinese poets. Our ideas of love and friendship, of wine and distance, of poetry itself were much affected by those ancient songs. So you can understand, dear Reader, how privileged I feel to be able to graze, even for a moment and with such meager credentials, on the outskirts of your tradition.

This is a difficult book even in English if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don't like. Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage or even a page that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.

In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer. An interest which indicates to my thinking a rather reckless, though very touching generosity on your part.

Beautiful Losers was written outside on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies behind my house on Idhra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book. Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time.

Hell yes, Leonard! Good good good art/music/poetry/drama is created from a monastic sense of humility. If you become a "star" then--at least on some level--you could buy into said adulation and gain a sense of importance. If art is "important" at its birth then it isn't spontaneous. Well, whatever...

Sorry for the thesis. You should really rent this DVD. You might not like all the performers but to hear LC actually read that out loud is really something. He is just one of those people that transfixes you when he speaks.

Picture time! As LC initially became famous as a writer of poetry, here's a photo I took of poet Ryan Newstrom in the Imperial Palace in Rome a few summers ago.

work day

Well...it finally happened. Opera writing is essentially (and maybe officially) over for the foreseeable future as I've started in earnest on next season's commissions. Today it's working on finishing up the piece for The Singers: Minnesota Choral Artists. It's a fairly extensive revision of an older work for men's chorus called To Sing You To Sleep. It uses a text by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke and I'm glad to be giving it some TLC. It's always been a favorite of mine and I'm sure I'll post more on that piece as the January premiere gets closer.

I've also started jotting down some ideas for my choir and oboe piece for Flower Mound High School in Texas. I wrote when god decided to invent for them a few years ago and had my face blown off at the premiere. They are soooo good. The challenge now lies in the fact that I know exactly what director Mark Rohwer can inspire these students to do.

Here's a random picture of a kid I met in Coniston, England a few years ago.

3 hour tour

One of my favorite aspects of Minnesota life is the lake/cabin culture during the summer (not the winter). If you haven't sat on a boat with a beverage or fishing rod in your hand then you're not an official resident of the Land of 10,000 Lakes. It's just that simple.

I am, by no means, an outdoorsman but that certainly doesn't mean I can't enjoy tooling around Lake Mazaska on a pontoon. I tricked Dave into letting me pilot for a while. It made the drive south completely worth it.

last day in beantown

Hold on, folks. There's a ton of pictures in this post so give it some time to load. We packed in the touristy landmarks on our last day in Boston. Here's the Old North Church that the revolutionaries used to signal the movements of the British troops with lanterns. You know the drill: "One if by land, two if by sea."





















Here's a view of Paul Revere's house in Boston. It's not much to look at now but, back then, an accomplished silversmith probably had one of the best places in town.
















Where everybody knows your name. This is the outer facade of the Bull & Finch Pub on Beacon Street. It served as the inspiration for Cheers.
















They've got a free Shakespeare festival in Boston Commons. Here's the stage for their production of As You Like It.
















The memorial to the victims of the Boston Massacre.





















Then it was up to the memorial to the Battle of Bunker Hill.





















Looking straight up.





















It's 294 steps to the top of the monument. The first 50 were okay but, by the time I got to the top, my heart was about to jump out of my chest. Luckily the view is worth it.























William Prescott commanded the revolutionary forces at the battle. In order to get his soldiers to conserve ammunition he famously said, "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes." It's amazing how much of this stuff gets into your unconscious. Is it just me or does this not look at all masculine and commanding? I'm just saying...





















From there it was down to the wharf to see the USS Constitution. I remember reading about "Old Ironsides" (although her sides have no metal in them...just a sailor's nickname) in 7th grade Social Studies class and it was way cool to see her up close. I guess the Constitution is the oldest warship still afloat. She's arguably the most famous vessel in American naval history.















Let's run down some stats:
**Oldest fully commissioned vessel afloat in the world. The honor of "oldest commissioned" goes to the HMS Victory which, although older, is in permanent drydock.
**1 of only 6 presently commissioned vessels in the US Navy to have sunk an enemy vessel.
**The only surviving member of the six original frigates commissioned by Congress in 1794.

Do you suppose they had these back in 1790s? The sailor that served as our tour guide told us that they still take her out a few dozen times a year.
















The officers' quarters were each no bigger than a closet. But they were by far...















...better than the privacy afforded the enlisted men.
















Each of the guns had a name and I can't remember a single one. I think the guy said they fired a 24-pound shot up to 1,400 yards or something like that.
















My week out east was a lot of fun and, should Emma decide to go to college out here, it will be nice to have a good excuse to get back out this direction. Here are some final pictures from the trip. It was a wicked pissah.