Category Archives: Art, Theatre, & Film

Blogger Insider

Kate sent me her Blogger Insider questions, and I actually answered them the day I got them. All but the last one, that is, which I’ve been mulling over. In true Autumn fashion, I’ve not directly answered it, but sort of answered beside it. Here you are:

1. What’s the most bizarre instrument you can play (e.g. musical saw, noseflute, etc.)?

Caveat Number One: I’m boring. Caveat Number Two: I rarely have the urge to try something unconventional. Hence, I think the most exotic instrument I play is the harp. And I certainly don’t play it often or well. It’s big, heavy, and hurts my back.

I bought a tambourine recently; that’s a bit odd. Isn’t it?

2. What’s your favorite spot in Canada?

Sigh. Prince Edward Island. It’s so tiny I thought I might be able to get away with saying the whole province, but if I have to be more specific, Cavendish Beach. But it has to be deserted. Just me, sun, red sand, waves, and a good book. Sigh once more.

3. What’s your favorite comic book and why?

Argh. Tell me to pick a favourite child, why don’t you. Currently: Promethea. Overall? Dunno. Depends on my mood.

4. Who’s your favorite fiction author and comic book author?

Why are you making me do this? Fiction. Hmm. Who do I buy instantly in hardcover? Connie Willis, Neil Gaiman, Timothy Findley. Dead people who don’t have anything new coming out but I’d buy in hardcover if they were still publishing: Robertson Davies, Charlotte Bronte.

Comic books? A tie between Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. (According to my shelf of graphic novels.)

5. What’s your favorite song in “Once More With Feeling,” the “Buffy” musical episode?

“R.I.P” stuck in my head the first time I saw it, but upon listening to it over and over, I find Xander and Anya’s song “I’ll Never Tell” is really quite well-written and performed, and is the one that keeps popping up in my brain when I’m distracted.

6. What’s your favorite opera?

Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Followed by a three-way-tie between Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment, Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and Il Barbiere di Siviglia. (The latter for its delicious mezzo-soprano role, and for the act one finale, if nothing else!)

7. If you could move anywhere in the world, where would it be?

The Borderlands, Scotland.

8. Who’s the one character you can’t stand to see when watching a “Star Wars” movie?

Old series or new series?

New series: Threepio is rapidly rising up the list in the new series. Jar-Jar, of course.
Old series: Boba Fett. Honestly. He’s so overrated. Ep2 sort of redeemed him for me, though. His dad was at least cool. (His action figure is certainly the best one. Is it just me or are the SW:Ep2 figures below standard?)

9. What are your top three totally irrational pet peeves?

Firstly, someone who shall remain nameless putting a margarine container, with the barest sheen of margarine along the bottom of it, back into the fridge. (“I didn’t finish it!”) Actually, that nameless someone putting anything back in the fridge or cupboard with only crumbs or drops left in it.

Secondly, not writing something down on the shopping list if you’ve finished it (or, all right, almost finished it). I don’t eat often, but when I do, I like to have all the fixings there. This will drive me directly to Axe-Murderer status, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Thirdly, people standing behind me. In a related vein, people reading over my shoulder. Or, people standing in front of me and conversing with sunglasses on. I hate not being able to see people, and if I can see them, I have to be able to see their eyes.

I have more, if you’d like them. Such as bad editing in a published book. Stupid spelling mistakes. (Especially in my own work, when I’ve proof-read and run a spell-check.) People adopting American short-cut spelling such as lite and donut, and believing that it’s the right way to spell something. Shall I go on?

10. If you could perform any piece of music to a large audience by yourself, what piece would it be?

Ha! Assuming I could perform it with any sort of technical capability and emotional interpretation, pretty much anything by Bach. I remind you all of Caveat Number One (I’m boring), and add the following footnote: as much as I adore performing, I prefer chamber work with a few others. Solo is so… alone. You have nothing to interact with. So actually, my dream would be playing cello in a string quartet program of Beethoven’s String Quartet opus 132 in A minor, followed by Ravel’s String Quartet in F. Rather than performing solo, I enjoy hearing how my line intertwines with a few others. I also enjoy singing quartets or trios more than I enjoy singing alone.

There you have it.

Jean, darling that she is, brought me a whole new bottle of my Secret Weapon from her trip to Plattsburg last weekend. Now I have a bottle for home, and a bottle with a few left to keep at work. No Vanilla Coke, though. She says she’ll try again next trip. Curses! Foiled!

MIA

I discovered something bad yesterday.

I packed up my cello and my music bag to go over to a friend’s house, and my music folder was missing. My beautiful, new, black leather music folder. With my favourite pencil. Oh yes, and all my music with my notes all over it.

Gone.

I had a sinking feeling that was oddly juxtaposed with rising panic. I must have closed it at that horrible rehearsal, then left it on the music stand. I remembered the wooden blocks I put under the back legs of the chair to tilt the seat (thereby reducing the stress on my lower back), which I usually almost forget, but I was so rattled that I forgot my music folder and walked out.

This is bad: I like that new music folder. It was my “I’m a serious musician” folder. Sure, I could go buy another one for 17$, but it’s the principle of the thing. I’ve lost all my music, my fingerings, my bowings, my highlighted key changes.

I do still have the originals (thank the gods!). As soon as I get new music, I photocopy it and use the copies as practice music. I cannot bring myself to scribble on originals, even in pencil. We sign out the music, and have to sign it back in at the end of the season, so it’s good that I stored them in a seperate folder. I can always make more copies, trim them, paste them back to back, and try to recreate my fingerings, and bowings� gods, I want to cry just thinking about it. There was over three months of work in those copies.

Now. We rehearse in an auditorium in a high school. There’s always a chance that someone found my folder the next day and gave it in to the teacher who also just happens to be my conductor after hours. There’s also the chance that some kid found it, kept the folder and tossed the music, or mutilated it in some way then handed it in, or just had fun destroying it all and I’ll never see it again.

The orchestra has this week off, though. I won�t know until next week if someone found it.

In the meantime, I have the originals, and I might as well devote a couple of hours to standing at the copy machines in the library down the street, staring at the wall as the harsh light rolls back and forth, and copy them all again. Which is technically against the law, I suppose, although they’re for private research/rehearsal purposes. It could also be argued that one cello part is nowhere near the full work. In fact, it�s only, what, approximately 1/12th, I think, which hardly qualifies as a major portion of a total full orchestral score.

Does life ever seem futile to you sometimes? You try and try and try, and you never seem to get anywhere?

Synchronicity

Cool! At this very moment, when I went to check my blog, Stephen’s Chirographum was in my BlogSnob box.

I love coincidence.

Now if I could only get rid of the sudden striking pain through the right side of my brain…

CURRENTLY READING:
Again, I finished the book before I could blog it: Salamander by Thomas Wharton. I have a soft spot for Canadian literature – it was my secondary focus through my BA and MA – and I enjoy trying new authors. Wharton has an interesting style. Very readable, once you get past the complete abandonment of quotation marks. The story begins in the ruins of a sacked town, as an officer rides through the streets slowly. He catches movement inside a destroyed bookshop and investigates, discovering a young woman, methodically going through the debris, and ends up talking to her about reading. She tells him a four-part tale about what stories might lie between the unopened green sealskin covers of a small book she has rescued, a wonderful technique for launching the reader into the book proper. The story is partially fairy tale, partially magical realism (think Umberto Eco crossed with… well, Umberto Eco, actually), wandering through Italy, Egypt, London, China, all over various seas and oceans, involves pirates, music, automatons, acrobats, and the secret, hidden Library of Alexandria. It revolves around a printer who is summoned to an odd mechanical castle in Europe to create the ultimate riddle book. He falls in love with the daughter of the house, then is imprisoned for almost two decades, eventually freed by his daughter, who then quests for her long-vanished mother while her father (now slightly mad) travels with her, still seeking to fulfil his mandate of creating a book which can simultaneously contain everything and nothing. I love stories like this because you get the paradox of a printed book talking about the printing of books; the text becomes the very subject examined, bringing an odd insight juxtaposed with the difficulty of seperating the book you’re reading from the book being written about.

My bus-book at the moment is a mystery called Harm None by M.R. Sellers, who has transgressed unforgivably in my opinion: he can’t use “its” and “it’s” correctly. Ever. I’m reading it because it’s an occult mystery written by a witch, and I also like to support small-press literature whenever I can. So far (a few chapters in) the story is fine, but this irritating grammatical error trips me up every time. There are others, and some bad sentence structure, and an over-reliance on description – all amateur errors, so I’m being very open-minded as I go through it. If I’d been let at this manuscript before it had been published, though, it would be different, let me tell you.

Instrument Inventory

So on Saturday morning I e-mailed Ceri and wondered if she’d like to meet me for coffee, since I’d decided at SEVEN A.M. when my husband woke me up to say good-bye (“It’s either that or not say good-bye,” he explained to me; bitter thought in return: On Saturdays, it might be worth it) that I would get outside and enjoy the sun, terrifically windy though it was, and pick myself up a tambourine.

Short tangent: why do I need a tambourine? Because I don’t have one. Tangent over; back to your regular blog experience.

She called me and said yes, not only would coffee be neat, but had I eaten breakfast yet? Of course I hadn’t. (Breakfast is a week-day thing for me.) So I hopped a bus to the metro with my trusty current bus-book (Lathe of Heaven) in tow, and had read half of it by the time I’d hit her place. (Read the rest on the way home. I am now paranoid.) We had breakfast with Scott, and then puttered about music stores all afternoon. After trying out every single noisemaker in the first shop (I work retail, and occasionally have the urge to go dish it out gleefully to other poor wage-slaves) I picked up my tambourine, squinted at the price of the music stands, then watched Ceri sigh over the saxophones. I proposed another music store (heh heh heh) and she got all perky and excited. Scott left us at this point, and off we went to sigh over more saxes. Ceri was feeling so bereft of her rental sax of last year that she even went so far as to have the salesgirl calculate out how much paying off a new Yamaha alto sax within one year would come to by monthly payment.

I freely admit, I did this whole temptation thing intentionally. Why should I be the only one with a pile of instruments I don’t devote enough attention to? “But I have lots of tin whistles! And a bodhran! And I don’t play any of them!” Ceri wailed. So? If you don’t have a sax to ignore, you also don’t have a sax to pick up and play when you’d like to, is my reasoning.

My list of instruments (in order of acquisition):

Voice (ha! You thought I’d not include it?)
Flute
Cello
Viola
Harp
Tambourine (yay!)

The husband has a chanter and a bodhran as well. We have a piano in someone’s basement that will be there until we can afford to get it moved by official trained piano movers. (“Do not try this at home” takes on a whole new meaning when it involves an upright piano and basement stairs.)

Why do I have a household of musical instruments? I had to think long and hard about this the other day. I’ve concluded that it’s due to the potential that rests in all of them. I can sit in a patch of sun in the living room with my harp against my left shoulder (mildly heretical, but I bat left-handed too, maybe that has something to do with it), lean my cheek against the soundbox, and just feel all the music inside it. Call me crazy, but I can do that for an hour, then just touch the strings gently here and there, and then put it away again. It’s not about releasing the music, or liberating it, or whatever you like to call it; it’s about connecting with the instrument, feeling it inside you, releasing something in your own spirit that’s in harmony with it.

(Ed. note: It’s raining! Woo-hoo! I will put on my CD of Vivaldi double concertoes in celebration.)

Sure, accomplishing a terrifically hard run on the cello is satisfying too, but in a completely different way. Producing coherent and recognisable sound is work, which isn’t the same as pleasure for me at all. So why did you join an orchestra, I hear some of you asking in a snarky tone. Well, because when I was playing cello quartets a few years ago, I dicovered that I loved hearing the interaction between the different lines. I adore Bach, for example, four or more careful musical lines all dancing with one another, often produced by only two hands on a keyboard (I also adore Glenn Gould, so there). When I sing in a group, I love hearing the tenors sing against the altos; hearing certain musical lines in unusual juxtaposition thrills me for some reason. Working in orchestra satisfies me in a similar fashion: I can work through all the different lines and hear them come together to hear a richly textured tapestry of sound, and I’m right in the middle. I often wonder how the audience can ever approach the experience I’m having, simply because I’ve been studying these works performed in-depth along with thirty other people. (Not that I’m diminishing the audience’s experience in any way; as a writer and performer I am a firm believer in the audience-co-creates-experience theory.)

Where was I? Oh yes. Ceri and her saxophone. So I say, heck, yes! Own that sax! Hold it; press the keys gently; watch the complex mechanism move; lose yourself in the dance of sunlight on the brass. Blow a couple of notes here and there. Above all else, love it, and love the potential that lies within it, that lies within you. If no one ever hears you, so what? Music is about you and your experience. It’s pure emotion. It’s about raising your spirit. Technical brilliance is never a measure of that. If you enjoy working musical challenges through, hey, great; otherwise, life’s too short to say, “Oh, I’ll never be able to devote the time I should to it.”

Do it.

Meh

Laptop modem still not working.

My back is going “crunch” in the middle.

Still haven’t heard about an interview for those teaching posts.

Got my copy of my tax forms back from the tax guy (finally – he had the wrong phone number) and I owe $2.23 to the federal government, and am owed $43 from the provincial. No, I don’t understand either.

I practiced my cello last week (yeah, I’m pretty stunned myself) and got to the point where I could play Beethoven’s first symphony all the way through at half speed. Good thing I practiced, because we three cellos had to play through some very embarrassing bits alone over and over. I was mortified, although I shudder to think what I would have sounded like if I hadn’t practised.

I still have one more day to go before my weekend. It will be a long one.

CURRENTLY READING:
A limited edition hardcover collection of two decades of Charles de Lint’s Christmas chapbooks, all gathered into one volume “in a moment of weakness” as the inside flap says. Very good. Very, very good. Uneven, yes, as they were never intended for true publication, only Christmas gifts for his wife and then a small circle of friends. It’s called Triskell Tales: 22 Years of Chapbooks. The early stuff that I’m still in is about two of his recurrign short story characters called Cerin Songweaver, a harper, and his oak-spirit wife Meran.

I recently reread The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis too. Small print. Periods were difficult to see. Yes, I was wearing my glasses. I remember it being a lighter read than it actually was, less suspenseful, less historical. Odd, that. Then again, I read it over ten years ago. I think I prefer To Say Nothing of the Dog and Passage.

I also read A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott which is about an innocent young lady whose guardian loses custody of her in a gard game and marries her off to a dashing genleman who turns out to already have an estranged wife. When our heroine discovers this she flees in the night and he pursues her through various cities and false identities. Nice and not-brain-bending for a Monday afternoon in the sun. The word “challenging” certainly would never come up in relation to this book, but it was fun.

This weekend Ursula K Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven is up, as my book club is doing it on Tuesday night.

Birthday List

Things I want for my birthday:

– A good music stand. One with a solid table so when I go to write something on my music it doesn’t bend and slip off. It still needs to be relatively portable, though, so nothing that weighs a ton.
– A new cello bag. Preferable one with backpack straps as well as handles. It’ll need to be waterproof, and have at least 10 or 15 mm of padding. They’re about $100. The bag I have has been well-used for eight years by me and who knows how long before that, and is wearing through. I don’t want it to rip when it shouldn’t (like when I’m carrying it on a bus).

I’ve made an interesting discovery. A few years ago when I replaced the bow that originally came with my cello, I found that it was a 3/4 size. Looking at all the bags that other people use for their cellos at orchestra, I think my bag is a 3/4 size as well, because it barely fits my 4/4 instrument, and a full-size bow won’t fit in the bow pocket and still allow the top flap to fold over.

Just thinking, that’s all.

Editor’s note: No, you haven’t missed her birthday. She’s simply giving you a couple of months advance warning. Isn’t she sweet?

Joy!

Well, well, well.

I remember this feeling. I think it’s called “having fun in life”.

MLG not only (a) handed me a laptop with the words “Happy Birthday” on Saturday, he also (b) reminded me that I have a finished novel tucked away somewhere, and (c) by complete dumb luck managed to link some dreams I’ve been having recently with some short stories and scenes I’d scribbled down a few years ago. I spent most of yesterday loading the chapters of my book onto the new laptop, re-reading some old short fiction, and generally being impressed with myself. It takes a lot to impress me with my own work; I’m a really tough critic.

So I have all this creative writing, some ideas ready to be worked on, and a laptop. Hmm. One plus one plus one equals…

He also pointed out to me that sitting down to practice the cello is just a matter of self-discipline. Now, I’ve already been working on the self-discipline thing, doing meditation and devotions in the mornings which take up about forty minutes. That plus washing up, dressing, and breakfast (yes, I know, what a novel concept) pretty much cover my two hours of being up before I leave, but maybe I can squeeze in half an hour of practice on one particular bit of music, like the irritating staccato runs in the opening movement of Beethoven’s first symphony.

Friends like this are good to have. They prove to you that you’ve accomplished some pretty terrific stuff in your lifetime, that you’re not as much of a loser as you thought you were, and that life is pretty good.

In addition, I’ve made a pact with a friend: when our tax returns come in, we’ll buy inexpensive bows to begin some archery exercise with. Once or twice a week, nice and early in the morning, we’ll meet down at the football field and work on shooting straight. Maybe by the end of the summer we can think about using targets.

Fun stuff. Not just work. Work was pretty much taking up all the important time I had. Now, what with this application for the teaching positions (no, nothing yet), I’m starting to shift focus to other things. Things that make me happy, as opposed to taking up my time because they have to. And I refuse to obsess about scheduling. Scheduling fun time defeats the purpose.