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Now I've told you all the particulars of how I pass my day away
1. I cannot imagine that I will be without internet at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
schreibergasse and Grace's unless something improbable and apotropaically unnamed occurs, but that's where I'll be tomorrow; I still mind not being able to make my ungodson's birthday two weekends ago, but at least I'm not letting another year go by without actually visiting. I am now trying to decide whether I will be conscious enough to bake in the morning. Mostly I should not forget Peter's present.
2. I am currently reading Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935) and Michael Peppiatt's Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (2008), both newly scored. If I'm lucky, they'll do something to my brain.
3. I had not planned on seeing Red Riding (2009), but David Denby may have convinced me otherwise:
You don't see any of the murders, but there are shadows of death everywhere: pale corpses, brutality and cynicism, and hints of perversion and obsession—a sense of violation fouling the terrain. One writer, Tony Grisoni, did the adaptation, but each film has a different director and a different look. A few scenes in each episode—the repeated use of swans' wings as a portent, some fancy camerawork—border on the pretentious, but the dark power and the flowing organization of the material pull you into the narrative, which moves forward and backward in a single skein of visionary filmmaking. Forgoing digital effects, or any presence of the supernatural, "The Red Riding Trilogy" nevertheless achieves a terrific sense of the uncanny, an atmosphere so spooked and suggestive that it becomes oddly attractive, like an enchanted forest in a children's story. Flowers of evil are growing in the stony Yorkshire soil.
I can take or leave police procedurals, but I am always at home to the unheimlich.
4. The men's Olympic figure skating was quite good this year.
schreibergasse and Grace's unless something improbable and apotropaically unnamed occurs, but that's where I'll be tomorrow; I still mind not being able to make my ungodson's birthday two weekends ago, but at least I'm not letting another year go by without actually visiting. I am now trying to decide whether I will be conscious enough to bake in the morning. Mostly I should not forget Peter's present.2. I am currently reading Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935) and Michael Peppiatt's Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (2008), both newly scored. If I'm lucky, they'll do something to my brain.
3. I had not planned on seeing Red Riding (2009), but David Denby may have convinced me otherwise:
You don't see any of the murders, but there are shadows of death everywhere: pale corpses, brutality and cynicism, and hints of perversion and obsession—a sense of violation fouling the terrain. One writer, Tony Grisoni, did the adaptation, but each film has a different director and a different look. A few scenes in each episode—the repeated use of swans' wings as a portent, some fancy camerawork—border on the pretentious, but the dark power and the flowing organization of the material pull you into the narrative, which moves forward and backward in a single skein of visionary filmmaking. Forgoing digital effects, or any presence of the supernatural, "The Red Riding Trilogy" nevertheless achieves a terrific sense of the uncanny, an atmosphere so spooked and suggestive that it becomes oddly attractive, like an enchanted forest in a children's story. Flowers of evil are growing in the stony Yorkshire soil.
I can take or leave police procedurals, but I am always at home to the unheimlich.
4. The men's Olympic figure skating was quite good this year.
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Nine
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It was a good thing to do with a weekend.
Return with stirrings in your word brain.
If nothing else, I've got a crack recipe for oatcakes.
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It is! He should!
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I liked him for all-around, and he was one of three people on the ice who moved like a dancer, not an athlete.
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Safe journey! Have a wonderful time, all of you.
2. I am currently reading ...both newly scored.
For a second I thought you were saying that these had just had new scores written for them. I was about to ask if anyone had recorded them, since I don't read dots well enough to get any real meaning out of reading through a score.
(I was talking with Jerry O'Sullivan last night about his eighteenth century uillean pipes project--music from O'Farrell's collection, recorded with a harpsichord and a baroque cello--and that led into the question of whether any scores from the ballad operas of the period might have survived. This has probably something to do with my miscomprehension.)
4. The men's Olympic figure skating was quite good this year.
I caught a bit of it, after coming home from the session last night. I was very impressed.
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Yikes, sorry: newly scored in the sense that they are recent and fortunate acquisitions. If someone were to write an opera about Francis Bacon, however, I'd buy tickets like a shot.
(I was talking with Jerry O'Sullivan last night about his eighteenth century uillean pipes project--music from O'Farrell's collection, recorded with a harpsichord and a baroque cello--and that led into the question of whether any scores from the ballad operas of the period might have survived. This has probably something to do with my miscomprehension.)
Yeah, so? What was the answer?
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Ah, no worries. And I'd probably want to see that opera, myself. Don't know much about his life, but he was one heck of a painter.
Yeah, so? What was the answer?
Jerry doesn't know, either, but he agrees that if there are it would be really tremendous to hear one recorded, or even better to see it produced, at least so long as real effort were put into reconstructing the vocal style of the period. (But where the money would come from to do it, nobody knows--the intersection between trad, Baroque, and early Classical is a really rich and interesting place, but there doesn't seem to be much of anybody willing to pay for much of it. Jerry's had his second O'Farrell project recorded for a couple of years, but the money to put it together and release it isn't there right now.)
I've read a couple of ballad operas from facsimile--wrote about O'Keeffe's The Poor Soldier in the Federal period New York City, using a 1789 Philadelphia printing which claimed to be [paraphrase]as performed in the theatre of new york[/paraphrase]--but there were only the lyrics given, with a note about what air the song was sung to, in much the same fashion as a broadside ballad. I would have liked to have a look at a score, but the Archive of Americana didn't seem to have any dots in it, and to be honest it probably would've been only a distraction.
Crom, I need to go to sleep. I've got to get up early tomorrow morning to Skype somebody in Ireland for an interview, in order to write a preconcert piece for the paper.
Oh, now here's something interesting--I googled The Poor Soldier cos I couldn't remember the author's name, and came up with this: http://ml.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/62/1/105 Granted, the editing sounds a bit dodgy, but it is nice to know that at least some original score has survived.
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I haven't been able to watch it as it was airing, but I've been going back and watching all the videos.
Oh, how I have missed this sport.
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I'm sorry no one does Scott Hamilton's backflip anymore, but my brother thinks it might have been competition-banned.
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