Nova Ahead 10
Look, I’ve been writing these things for awhile now and in some ways it feels like I started almost yesterday. Sometimes I have no idea what I’m going to write about; is this the week that I incorporate not knowing what to write about into what I’m actually going to write about? Fuchsia (all star pal / viola player / home renovation enthusiast) believes that this method is particularly lazy and can cite the lackluster television episodes to prove it. Her memory is unassailable, except in regard to her own invention of long-running inside jokes, to which she often has to ask, “did I come up with that?” The answer is often yes, because beneath the thorough and learned veneer, she is also a comedy genius. I am unsure as to how she will feel about me using her as a device to escape the ‘not knowing what I’m going to write about’ trope.
That was good though, got the old brain working again; it’s often early when I write and I regularly have to shake off dreams. Also, with dry radiator heat, I wake up feeling like a potato chip, and a single cough can start me spiraling into a Covid anxiety attack. I usually read the Times, which has just as good a chance of sustaining my nervousness as it does of allaying it. This morning though, it has cooled me out; still there’s a lot about the Capitol attack, but that actually makes me feel hopeful that the investigation will uncover the connections that we all know are there, and that we can finally start confronting white supremacy on a national level. It seems like it is finally dawning on more people, what some have been on alert about for decades: this country is breeding monsters. The really weird thing is that some of these monsters believe that the country is being run by a cabal of cannibal pedophile lizard people (I want to apologize if you haven’t heard about this yet, I’m not being hyperbolic here; this is actually what they think).
Alright, here’s a transition for you. I really wanted to include an aside at the end there about feeling pretty sure that I saw a little snakey tongue flick out of Stephen Miller’s mouth, and then I thought, well what about weird lizard eyes? So I looked up lizard eyes, and did you know that lizards (and also sharks and frogs and salamanders) have something called a parietal eye? It’s essentially a third eye that is often hidden and is part of the epithalamus, and uses a biochemical method of detecting light which differs from the way rods and cones work in the eyeball. It seems that while the parietal eye is not present in mammals, it was in their extinct relatives, the therapsids, which, if you will allow me a very unscientific summation, are basically a weird link between dinosaurs and mammals. What can a person do when confronted, through no real fault of their own, by such a melange of bizarre and unsettling news events and google results? The answer my friends is music, art, and creativity in general; we’ve got to listen, read, and make our way out of this hellscape. And also, drink water (see: the aforementioned dryness).
I got my first copy of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto no. 1 in B flat minor from the Rindge dump when I was a kid. It was the RCA Victor recording of Van Cliburn at Carnegie Hall, and I imagined him as a stately Russian aristocrat, trained since birth to channel these twisting emotive mechanics. Any time that I listened to it, grace was added to my life; it really classed up the joint. Of course now I know that Van Cliburn was a skinny teenager from Texas, and I was confusing this record with another performance that was live from Moscow in 1962. Either way, I can see how someone might feel like the strings are a little schmaltzy perhaps, but I can breathe better when it’s on. Maybe this is another example of finding comfort in something from my youth, and now that I think about it, it’s possible that there is some kind of Loony Toon element going on that I would also equate with comfort and safety. It could be the sound of the piano; it achieves this awesome old Hollywood kind of sound at times, which I’m sure is the likely similar recording style. Back when I first heard it, my research would likely have only yielded static images, photographs of performances, but watching old video now, the same tenderness is present in Cliburn’s furrowed brow, fully riding the depth of the piece, going back and forth with the orchestra, letting the conductor subtly lean on the rudder here and there.
On Friday, our livestream series is going to feature Fitchburg dignitary Jentri Jollimore, and I’ll be doing a set as well, proceeds will be going to the Southwestern Community Services’ Senior Energy Assistance Program. I am imagining some older folks getting help keeping their heat on, wrapping up in a blanket and dropping the needle on this great concerto, dozing off with Van Cliburn guiding them to sleep, and maybe they’ll feel even a little warmer underneath those careening lilting melodies (though a quick non-lizardpeople aside: this piece also actually gets pretty aggressive at times, chomping all over the register; perhaps some Debussy for actual sleepytime).