black beans + jeff buckley + congratulations

I'm busily trying to keep myself from any work whatsoever. What all this boils down to is sipping some iced coffee in my neighborhood's amazing coffee shop, Uncommon Grounds. It's a late 1800s Victorian house situated in the middle of Uptown (it seriously sticks out like a sore thumb) that is pretty much the most unique place to have coffee in the Cities. I guess Rachel Ray featured it in her magazine (whatever that is) recently and, frankly, for good measure. It's totally cool.
















Anyone ever heard of Jeff Buckley? He's the mid-90s singer/songwriter that made Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" famous (before Rufus Wainwright kicked it firmly into pop culture on the Shrek soundtrack) but died in a tragic drowning accident at the age of 30. His voice is absolutely singular and haunting and sinewy and seemingly limitless in the upper range. I'm listening to his Live At Sin-é album from a 1993 performance in a New York City cafe. It's just him and a Fender Telecaster and it is incredible. I highly suggest you listen to it if you're into this kind of stuff. At one point he does an exhilarating cover of a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song called "Yeh Jo Halka Saroor Hae" completely in Urdu. Holy eff, who does that!

My home cooked meal this week was a kickass vegan black bean soup. It's ridiculously easy to make (if you discount chopping an entire damn onion) but really good to eat. Garnish with sour cream (which, come to think of it, probably means it isn't vegan) and a few green onions and you've got a pretty good meal.

I also finally finished the Andrew Jackson biography, American Lion, I started reading way back in July. It took me so long because of the massive intellectual investment I had to make every time I cracked it open. Don't get me wrong, it was great...just a lot to chew through. Here's another daguerreotype of Jackson I found. Isn't that weird that it's the guy on the 20 dollar bill? That's an actual photograph of him. That just blows my mind.

The writing isn't purely "academic" but has the weird flavor of a novel at times and, though I almost never read historical non-fiction, it's easy to see why it won the Pulitzer. That being said, I think I'm going to follow it up with the Harlequin romance novel that a friend gave me this summer as a joke. It's called Blaze and, if the first two paragraphs are any indication, it's going to be hilarious.

On a slightly different note, I read an article somewhere (can't remember where, exactly) that talked about how some composers "digest" tons of different things that somehow end up in their music--food, art, other people's music, theater, television, cinema, etc. This blog entry is probably pretty good evidence of the varied interests of its rambunctious proprietor but I'm not really sure that any of this will actually end up in my music. In the John Adams (the composer, not the president) autobiography that I read this summer he talked about the two different kinds of composers:

• the ones who trust--almost implicitly--their intuition and initial compositional choices
• the ones who go back over and over and over and revise and revise and revise until it's just right

I am most certainly the first type but I'm not sure that I fit anywhere into what that mystery article talked about with regards to the absorption of other things. Maybe it isn't something that has to overtly be in my music.

Ah, who knows? I write it here so I am forced to stew on it. In fact, I should probably get back to work. These three French pieces are not going to write themselves. Quelle surprise!

Oh, and a massive congratulations goes out to friend-and-fellow-blogger Peter Hoesing for snagging a Fulbright to go study in Africa for the umpteenth time. He's brilliant and I'm lucky to know him. Here's a co-opted photo of him drumming with some guy from his blog.

Congratulations, sir.

You. Are. The. Man.