Author Archives: Autumn

Halloween Recap

Okay, everyone else has mentioned the costumes, but for those who don’t frequent other local web logs, here you go:

I promise better photos with more detail of my costume anon, when we’ve developed our film from the Hallowe’en party. No, you can’t see the Evenstar that Ceri was so impressed with… you’ll just have to wait for a close-up full-front shot to appear somewhere. In the meantime, if you want to play around with enlarging these ones for a better look, you can check them out here. (Many thanks, Scott!) My husband and Ceri‘s husband were two of The Endless from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman universe, Destruction and Destiny; here’s Destruction’s source art:

See, we told you he was an archetype…

Kittens!

So Wednesday night at orchestra, we were working through the second movement of Mendelssohn’s first symphony, and the entire orchestra was having trouble (in different places ) with the sixteenth note legato passages. These things are evil, particularly for cellos (and clarinets, apparently, although for different reasons). Your fingers have to stretch in really bizarre patterns, and no matter how we try to work out alternate fingerings, the pattern remains bizarre (in different permutations, but bizarre nonetheless). Bizarre fingerings while attempting to sound light and smooth and soft and sort of like gentle wind on a sunny day is nigh-impossible. The third or fourth go-round of this passage left our stand-in conductor attempting to reach for encouraging words while still sounding disappointed. From the very back of the cello section came the very dry comment, barely audible, of, “Mendelssohn played the piano.”

It’s true. He was a pianist. And he was evidently thinking pianistically when he wrote these long sixteenth note passages and scattered them liberally through the Andante of his first symphony.

Wretched pianists. Check out the physics of four strings sometime, and understand why we can’t play stuff that’s a cinch on the piano, with its nice shiny black and white keys all in a line with only an inch shift forward or back to hit an accidental, in nasty key signatures with three flats.

Bitter. I know. But!

Today, it doesn’t matter any more. I take comfort knowing that this morning, our family grows.

Oh, come on. You didn’t honestly believe that after nursing kittens, especially the tiniest one who wasn’t gaining weight and worried us all for a while and required extra-special love and attention, I’d manage to get away kittenless?

I hardened my heart. I did. We argued for and against. My husband was no help at all. My parents’ acquisition of their new kitten didn’t help, either.

Nix on any more cats, indeed. You all saw this coming.

Miles To Go Before I Sleep

Note to self: if you decide to have two layers in a costume, you have to hem two layers.

Sigh.

Three days ’til the party. I’m 98% done. Just have that wretched second hem to do. Thank the gods that Ceri came over yesterday and helped by pinning the first hem in place for me. I have to practice that Handel today (yes, I know, I had all week to do it, and predictably, I did not), and I’d like to get the basic four-seams-and-I’m-done completed on my husband’s vest, too.

I went back to the sinus medication this morning. The light on-pseudoephedrine feeling is preferable to the heavy, I-can’t-even-think-let-alone-function feeling of having my sinus cavities clogged up.

Onward, ever onward…

83296210

Yawn. I need a weekend after my weekend. Not that I was rushed; I just went from appointment to appointment to appointment from Friday night all the way to this morning.

I saw my osteopath for the first time in a couple of months today. When I emerged from my warm flat to walk over to the sports clinic, the world was quite dark, and a few cars even had dustings of snow caught in the crevices between windows and frames (that dreaded S-word!). When I left again over an hour later, I could just see a line of pink through the clouds to the south-east, but wow, was I relaxed. We truly don’t understand how our bio-mechanic operating system gets off-kilter and requires more energy to run efficiently until we’ve been tuned up.

I spent Sunday in Kingston at the local COGECO cable TV station, in production meetings and rehearsals for the live True Story of Dracula broadcast the Midnight Players are doing on October 31st. I love the slogan our producer came up with: Radio As You’ve Never Seen It Before! The whole premise of the show is that we’re doing a 1930s broadcast in front of a studio audience. If you’ve ever seen the film Radioland Murders, then you know exactly what we’re trying to reproduce. Radio features used to be performed live in front of an audience: performance theatre with scripts, nominal costuming and sets. For The True Story of Dracula we’re doing the same sort of thing. I’ve done radio shows in studios, radio shows at a mike for recordings, and radio shows with no broadcast at all in front of an audience, but working with cameras and a standing mike is new for me. Watching the rehearsal rushes yesterday, I can see that there’s a whole different dynamic required; a TV camera asks that the actor make eye contact, or at least not have their eyes glued to a script, for visual interest’s sake. This means, of course, that the script has to be pretty much memorised, so you can interact. Which leads me to wonder why we’re even using scripts at all, since if you’re holding a piece of paper with words on it, even if you know those words backwards and forwards, your eyes will instinctively glance downwards and try to capture the phrase, get tangled up in all the lines, and as a result you stumble. Mankind doesn’t trust itself very much; we tend to second-guess ourselves and create more problems than we’d have had if we’d stuck with our first instincts.

It’s going to be a blast, I know. While I’ve worked with cameras before, on films and interviews and such, I’ve never been involved with live broadcasts. I’ve done eighteen years of live theatre, though, so to see the two blended will be fascinating. JDH took some digital photos of the first rehearsal, so when we get those up I’ll link them so you can get an idea of what was happening (now that I’ve figured out my Sympatico storage space!). You’ll just have to imagine the set and costumes that will be there on the 31st. (JDH, by the way, filmed a fantastic mocumentary section on the life and times of our ol’ pal Vlad, looking slightly scruffy and professor-like as he told creepy stories in the basement of a chilly old deserted school. Complete with rather large millipedes and slamming doors, none of which were faked.)

And before the 31st, I have that Hallowe’en party that I need to finish my costume for. Ceri is coming over on Tuesday to help me hem metres and metres of fabric (bless her), and I have an hour of quick stitching for my husband’s costume (which he developed all on his own, and he’s doing the bulk of the work; I swore I’d not do anyone else’s costume again for years, but an hour of donated time on my part is fair, I think); then — ’tis done! I’m going to get even more wear out of it than I expected — I have another party to attend at the beginning of November, which is just fine with me: the more mileage, the better!

Just Ten More

I promised myself I would work for two hours this morning. Ideally, four would have been nice, but I told myself after the first quarter-hour that two would be the limit. You see…

My back is hurting again. A lot of this has to do with computer work, and two seven-hour drives in the past weekend; I haven’t been back to my osteopath in two months due to this not-working thing (and besides, I felt so much better… so like any other human being I stopped the (admittedly expensive) treatment.) My eyes hurt, and my back hurts, and I have the attention span of a flea. I know I have to get a couple of hours of cello work in this afternoon as well, since we’re doing sectional rehearsals tonight and I’m going to be horribly embarrassed, as I always am, since there are some quite nasty passages that come out of nowhere in the Mendelssohn, and the Handel is a nightmare. I’m seriously considering skipping it, except that we only have seven rehearsals before our December memorial concert. Deliberately missing a rehearsal would be, well, irresponsible. Even though my eyes and my back hurt, and rehearsal will only make them worse.

Ten more minutes to go. Just ten more minutes. Then I’ll stop.

I just feel all grumbly. I want to curl up with a book and a cat, and some Bach. I want to have a heating pad on my back, and a teapot beside me. I want the world to go away.

Snap

The only mishap I discovered that had occurred in our absence this weekend was cello-related. My D string had snapped.

This is incredibly frustrating for several reasons. These strings are brand-new, and I love the feel and the sound of them (even though the constant re-tuning is getting to me, as is the fact that I can’t use my fine-tuners; no, it’s stand up and crank that peg at the top of the neck, every twenty minutes); whenever anything new breaks, I feel a perfectly justifiable flare of anger. New stuff should be good for a few years. Of course, the temperature dropped to zero-ish celsius this weekend, and the heat went on for the first time this season; as these are gut strings and are peculiarly sensitive to temperature and humidity they reacted badly, and I ought to be thankful I didn’t lose more than one, I suppose.

No, it comes down to an even baser reason: I can’t afford to replace it at the moment. I kept my old strings as back-ups in case of disaster, so I’ll restring it today, but the balance will be off harmonically. (Old strings, new strings; mixing two sets… well, it’s a string player thing, I guess.)

Next week, then, I’ll be off to the luthier, and now I come back to the same old problem I had before, only slightly different: what brand do I get to replace it? I love the sound of the Eudoxas, but tuning constantly is wearing on me, and if they’re going to break that easily, I might want to try the Pirastro synthetic equivalent to the gut strings, the Obligatos. (For those who have misplaced the information I supplied a month or so ago: gut gives a warm, dark, mellow sound; synthetic cores are a gut alternative that produce a slightly more focused, brighter sound; and metal cores give the most brilliant projected sound you can get.) The Obligatos are comparable to my Eudoxas in price, they’ll be more stable, and they won’t need to be tuned so much. Knowing that my A string is the one that’s really touchy on my cello, I might stay with the gut A, since the sound is so lovely and mellow, and turn to the synthetics for the others as they need replacing. It might be worth it if I only have to tune one string constantly, even if it is the one with the peg that slips badly.

Why is my life fraught with such difficulty? I feel the need to go lie down again in the face of such a deep and consequence-laden decision…

Visual Pun Alert

Weather
————
Me

Okay, it’s lame. I really am feeling under the weather, though. Yesterday I didn’t pay much attention to my body, mostly because my husband stumbled in around noon with a migraine and went to bed with a cup of tea. I was more concerned about him. By the evening, though, I had horrible stomach pain, and thank all the gods that my co-professor agreed to take our Monday night class, because I, too, began developing a migraine. By the time I arrived in the classroom all I could think about were the evil twin stabs of pain in abdomen and eyes. I went home to a bath and bed and was asleep by eight. Bless you, Scarlet. You are a goddess.

I’m still unhappy this morning, but at least the headache is gone. Bed is my friend. So is laptop. Good bed. Good laptop.

I finally developed some film that had been sitting in our camera for an unknown amount of time, and discovered about fourteen photos from last Hallowe’en. If it had been Hallowe’en costumes it would have been more interesting, but it’s all store decor: bales of hay, gourds, corn stalks and so forth. They’re terrific, but not what I was expecting. I had no idea what I was expecting, but hay was definitely not it. Ironically, the remaining four or five photos from the roll are of this year’s Hallowe’en costume, that precious record I absolutely had to have should the next step fail, in order to prove to future generations that yes, it was lovely before I tempted fate by taking it apart again.

The very last photo is of me, playing my cello. As far as I know, a single photo exists of me playing my cello, taken at my only public recital at McGill about five years ago. There are three other cellists with me, playing an ensemble piece as the finale. Yes, there have been orchestra photos taken from our last two concerts in which my head is visible, but you can’t see me playing the instrument. There does exist a sketch, done by my ex-fiance as I played Handel for hours in an empty church with a flutist, and I love it, but it isn’t a full-length sketch; just the upper third. I’ve always wanted to see what I really look like with my cello, from the floor all the way up. This photograph does just that, and I love it too. I’m going to slip it behind all my music on my music stand so I can peek at it when I get discouraged.

The fact that it’s taken a year to finish a twenty-four exposure roll says to me that we’ve moved beyond the need to capture certain visual moments on film. We knew we were losing interest in photographing things when we realised that we were taking our camera on all our trips, but leaving it in the suitcase when we went out. Taking it along simply didn’t occur to us. Then, of course, the battery died, and it’s taken about six months to replace it – more proof we don’t think of the camera that often. I believe that we’ve reached a point where if we see something beautiful, we’ll pause to appreciate it, and then carry the memory of it in our hearts. Photos are a pale, pale reproduction of something that had colour and life, and I’ve been so disappointed by pictures I’ve taken that don’t look at all like the beauty I beheld with my own eyes. In addition to the disappointment, I find that if I carry a camera around, I look at my environment in a very different fashion. With a camera in your hands, you instinctively look for pictures and evaluate what you see in terms of a snap, and end up not enjoying where you are or what you’re doing as much as you could without it. Now, if you’re a photojournalist, that’s fine, or if you go somewhere with the express intention to photograph, then sure, that’s different too. I also understand the anonymity granted by a camera, as something to occupy your mind and hands.

However, for me, cameras have a time and a place. As a record of some sort, of what people were in attendance at an event, or what people were wearing (I’m a costume junkie, remember?), or the layout of a objects or a building… all those I can understand. Pictures jog the memory. There are excellent photographers, too, who have mastered the art of using eyes and camera simultaneously, who I’m sure don’t feel any loss to the experience for seeing it through a lens. I, on the other hand, can’t do it. I also understand photography as an artistic act. The camera can be used with the intent of creating art, being a tool like a pencil or a paintbrush. Again, though, it’s not for me, although I dearly love looking at the artistic photography produced by friends like Rob and Hobbes.

For me, a camera gets in the way of the experience. Glass and metal and light-sensitive film serving as the communication device between my heart and life? I’ll pass.