Travel is hell

I wrote a nice long screed yesterday about the joys of traveling in and out of Logan now that the tunnels are closed. I didn’t get to post it thanks to a very long day out of Internet contact, but here are the highlights:

  1. No parking at Alewife—I wanted to avoid the nightmares at the Callahan and Sumner tunnels and take the T, but the parking garage was totally jammed at 10 am (which I should have foreseen). I drove to Harvard Square, which was the closest T location with pay parking garages that I could think of (never mind that they cost $24 a day).
  2. The Silver Line—It’s been said before, but honestly: the Silver Line is a bus and shouldn’t get equal billing with the Red, Green, Orange, etc lines. And that lack of air conditioning thing? Not nice.
  3. JetBlue—I liked this carrier, and some days I still do. Yesterday—not one of them. I don’t know if it was their fault or Logan’s that they put so much fuel in the plane yesterday that they would have exceeded their landing weight at JFK and had to idle on the tarmac for 45 minutes (after already arriving 45 minutes late) to burn it.
  4. Finally, Amtrak. I took the train back because I figured there was no way I could get back to JFK in time for my flight. But the Acela was capped at 80 MPH because of the effect of the heat on the rails. I certainly don’t want any trains to derail, but good god! Had the designers never experienced an Atlantic coast summer? Didn’t they know that things get really hot?

Bottom line: left the house at 9, back at 12:15 am when I should have been back by 9 pm. I’ll take the 3 hour shlep to the Berkshires any day.

Friday Random 10: Is it Saturday yet?

I knew that my residency in the Berkshires was no vacation, but between rehearsals, calls for work, the concert tonight, and driving home afterwards (ETA: 1:30 am), I’m gonna be dead tired. So here’s to the Friday Random 10, which is hopefully going to do its job and take my mind off the next twelve hours:

  1. Smashing Pumpkins, “Stumbleine” (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness)
  2. Nada Surf, “Concrete Bed” (The Weight is a Gift)
  3. Dead Can Dance, “Song of the Nile” (Spirit Chaser)
  4. Hank Williams, Sr., “Hey, Good Looking’”
  5. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, “Leap Frog (alt tk)” (Bird and Diz)
  6. Wynton Marsalis Septet, “Marthaniel” (Citi Movement)
  7. Wynton Marsalis Septet, “Spring Yaound&eacute” (Citi Movement)
  8. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “13 Steps Lead Down” (Brutal Youth)
  9. London Chamber Orchestra (James MacMillan, composer), “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (MacMillan: Seven Last Words)
  10. Radiohead, “Faithless the Wonder Boy” (Anyone Can Play Guitar [single])

Pictures from Tanglewood

chamber music hall, inside and out

Just posted a new set of photos from the Tanglewood grounds from the last few days of rehearsal for Gurrelieder. Hopefully it will stop raining soon and tomorrow’s will be a bit brighter.

Many of these photos were taken in the formal gardens on the Tanglewood grounds, which are well hidden near the theatre building and seem a bit forgotten (though the hedges are cleanly clipped, they’ve grown to the point of beginning to obscure some pathways).

Incidentally, the photo to the right may help provide some context for why Maestro Levine had difficulty being heard over the rain. Imagine him sitting just inside the building near the open side, with a 120-voice men’s chorus facing him; then imagine a torrential downpour on the outside.

Georgian revival

International Herald Tribune: Quirky serifs aside, Georgia fonts win on Web. The thesis of the article is that, because of its use in some fairly high profile redesigns (the New York Times website among others), the font Georgia is undergoing a comeback. A slim thread on which to hang an article, particularly when you consider that Georgia has been the font of this blog since at least its redesign in January 2004 (the original custom CSS design used Verdana or Helvetica, depending on availability, as my old stylesheet reveals).

It is sad, as Dave Shea at Mezzoblue notes, that there is practically speaking only a pool of eight or nine fonts through which we can rotate for web typography. In this vein, I have to go back and give Hakon Lie partial credit for at least trying to move the ball forward on web typography, as wrongheaded as he was about the business model implications of what he proposed.

Fighting for justice in our lifetimes

I took a course on the History of the Civil Rights Movement when I was at the University of Virginia. Taught by Julian Bond, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the course’s readings alone were enough to make any thoughtful American think long and hard about social justice, as was the opportunity to research local reactions to the movement (see my paper on Virginia’s Massive Resistance movement). One of the thoughts I had at the time was about what I would have done if I were alive in the movement years.

Now, of course, I know: I would have been performing somewhere rather than protesting. Because that’s how the quest for justice played out today: my colleagues and pastors from Old South were at the State House rallying for equal marriage while I was rehearsing the Gurrelieder at Tanglewood.

—Someone with less of an axe to grind than mine, by the way, should look at the signs on both sides of the street from today’s protest and learn what can be learned from them about the protesters. The thing that struck me—and again, I’m biased—is the preponderance of identical “Let the People Vote” signs, professionally made (by VoteOnMarriage.org, who don’t merit a link but who also apparently trucked in cases of water), on the anti-equal-marriage side, and how the few off-message signs that appear on that side of the street are incoherent and threatening, while just about every sign on the pro-equal-marriage side is handmade and many of them are funny or thoughtful. I especially like this rebuttal to the specious “let the people vote” argument.

Fortunately there are others out there who are more proactive than me, including the Tin Man, who has decided to take advantage of his current between-positions status to try to make a new career in gay-rights law.

For more context on the constitutional convention today—and the protesters—check out Bay Windows’ liveblog. To take a look at what the other side is saying, see VoteOnMarriage.org’s “Arguments for Marriage” page, which is a fine collection of strawmen.

Après moi, le déluge

It’s not a promising start when you’re standing in the second row of singers and you can barely hear James Levine’s comments over the pounding rain.

To back up: I’m at Tanglewood this week, and we’re up to our eyeballs in water as we prepare for the Gurrelieder performance on Friday. So far it’s playing out weatherwise like a replay of last year, though I feel much more part of the group this time around. (It helps that I already know the music too.)

Hopefully it will dry off soon. Then I can relax and enjoy myself a little.

Remembering Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

Boston.com: Obituary: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; her luminous voice lifted Boston Symphony Orchestra, transported listener. I had the rare privilege of singing in the chorus behind Ms. Hunt Lieberson during the Gurrelieder this spring. She stole the show, quietly stepping on stage during the tenor’s penultimate aria in the first half to announce the downfall of his love and set the stage for the rest of the action.

I got word this weekend that our performance of the Gurrelieder on Friday at Tanglewood will be prefaced by the fourth movement from the Brahms Requiem, “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen” (known in many churches by its English title, “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place”). We rehearsed it last night on stage and chills went up my spine. I can’t think of a more appropriate tribute for an artist who moved so many lives with her voice.

Follow-up: Italy and Boston

I got a bemused comment after yesterday’s post asking about the Italian presence in Boston. Thankfully for some of my remote readers, Universal Hub has a post that gathers blog posts from people celebrating Italy’s victory in the North End of Boston. I particularly like this individual’s pictures of the crowd.

It’s worth remembering that summer, with its endless festas, is the best time to see Italian-American pride in Boston anyway… the festas call for a post all their own some time.

Gli Azzurri, World Champions

It’s official, Italy beats France for the 2006 World Cup. And the fans are going nuts. In Berlin, in Rome, in Boston.

In Boston?

Yep. City Hall Plaza is packed with fans watching the final game—and going nuts, as aerial shots on the broadcast have shown repeatedly throughout the game.

Of course, you couldn’t prove it by Boston.com, whose blog includes no local interest information about this global sport.

Friday Random 10: Tanglewood Kickoff

Lisa and I took today off and we’re heading out in a little while to see the new, improved James Levine leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the opening concert at Tanglewood. Should be fun. In his honor, I’m bending the rules a little and doing a shuffle of all-classical tracks—not that they’ll be all-orchestral, given how my collection goes.

  1. Dieter Goldmann (Frederic Chopin, composer), “Nocturnes Op. 27/2 Des-Dur” (Masters’ Classic: Chopin #2)
  2. Hilliard Ensemble (William Byrd, composer), “Mass for Four Voices: V. Agnus Dei” (Masses for 3, 4 & 5 Voices)
  3. The Sixteen (François Poulenc, composer), “Un soir de neige, II” (Chansons francaises)
  4. Peter Schickele and the New York Pick-Up Ensemble (P.D.Q. Bach, composer), “II. Andante alighieri” (Concerto for Two Pianos vs. Orchestra, S. 2) (Two Pianos are Better Than One)
  5. Gewandhausorchester Leipzig (Franz Liszt, composer), “Les Préludes, S 637” (Liszt: Les Préludes, Hungarian Rhapsody)
  6. Hilliard Ensemble (Carlo Gesualdo, composer), “In II Nocturno, Responsorium 2” (Gesualdo: Tenebrae)
  7. Hilliard Ensemble, “Three songs of St. Godric: Crist and Sainte Marie“ (Sumer is icumen in (Chants médiévaux anglais))
  8. Steven Drury (John Cage, composer), “Suite for Toy Piano” (In a Landscape)
  9. Les Violons du Roy (J. S. Bach, composer), “Sinfonia” from the Peasant Cantata, BWV 212 (Bach: Secular Cantatas)
  10. Theatre of Voices/Paul Hillier, “Sangilio (Organ Solo)” (Hoquetus)

Who says college kids are getting dumber?

WSJ: Free, Legal and Ignored. The subhead says it all: Colleges Offer Music Downloads, But Their Students Just Say No; Too Many Strings Attached. The article is about the unsurprising-to-anyone-except-Napster miserable failure of subscription based music services to take hold in universities. Compared to the complicated barrage of restrictions on the music offered by Napster, the students come across as models of common sense:

  • While Cornell’s online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. “After I read that, I decided I didn’t want to even try it,” says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall…
  • Purdue University officials say that lower-than-expected demand among its students stems in part from all the frustrating restrictions that accompany legal downloading. Students at the West Lafayette, Ind., school can play songs free on their laptops but have to pay to burn songs onto CDs or load them onto a digital music device.
  • “People still want to have a music collection. Music listeners like owning their music, not renting,” says Bill Goodwin, 21, who graduated in May from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. USC decided last year that it was finished with Napster after fewer than 500 students signed up…

There’s also a telling quotation from the director of the Campus Computing Project, who says, “The RIAA’s push to buy into these services strikes me as protection money. Buy in and we’ll protect you from our lawsuits,” which is one of the kinder descriptions of the unfriendliness of the industry that I’ve read lately.

I’m still waiting for someone in the industry to wake up and understand that their path to profitability lies in supporting good music and making their rich back catalogs available, not in fighting the fans of music tooth and nail. Today, three years after the birth of the iTunes Music Store, there are still many albums and tracks that can’t be found anywhere online—some by major artists (just try tracking down any non-album Sting tracks from before the late 90s), some by minor artists on major labels (Annabouboula, anyone?), and some by great cultural figures (I’d gladly pay through the nose for access to e.e. cummings’s Six Nonlectures as digital files, or even on CD). Instead we get American Idol and Rock Star. What, no one ever told these guys that a steady diet of candy can kill you?

BTW, for a good counterexample, check out Verve’s deep catalog—including a bunch of rare Impulse! recordings—though they don’t quite get it right; they support both iTunes and Windows Media, but no DRM-free offerings. But at least they’re opening up their catalog.

The taking of sea clams

the taking of sea clams is prohibited

It should be a book title, but “The Taking of Sea Clams” is followed by the prosaic “prohibited because of red tide per order Board of Selectmen, Ipswich, MA.” Still, one imagines the agony and the ecstacy of the clam as it is pulled from its sea bed, pried open, and unceremoniously shucked, breaded and fried. Perhaps a sequel, The Taking of Sea Clams One Two Three?

Anyway, the photos are from two trips to beaches around Ipswich on the first and third of July, during which time I was bitten by green headed flies, lightly broiled, cooled in the 58° water, and well sanded, and loved it. Enjoy.

Oops—almost forgot to mention the gull. Those photos aren’t zoomed. We probably could have reached out and touched him.

The Aerosmith orchestra

Years ago, in college, a few Virginia Glee Club colleagues and I sat around in the Glee Club House, drinking beer and watching a recent Aerosmith concert on cable. As the string section behind the band appeared on screen, our director, John Liepold, told us that one of his friends had been tapped as the touring cellist for the band, and said, “Imagine that career. No matter what else happens to her, she’ll be able to say ‘I was in the Aerosmith orchestra.’”

Well, tonight, that sentence can be spoken by everyone in the Boston Pops. What a weird night, with the decay of Steven Tyler’s vocal chords on full display. And Keith Lockhart hitting the gong at the end of an abbreviated “Dream On”?

But no matter how weird, it’s still not as weird as last year. Big and Rich with the Boston Pops? Dream on, I guess.

Update: Waitaminnit. “Walk This Way” with the Boston Pops? Now it’s weirder than anything I’ve ever seen in this town.

230 years young, and still controversial

In the echo of the Supreme Court’s resounding affirmation last week of the rights of individuals to a fair trial, of the limits of the power of the executive, and of a system of checks and balances—in other words, the principles on which our country was founded, ill-defined war or no—this 230th anniversary of the independence of our country seems especially dear. So I like to turn back to the source of much of that dearness, as well as to look around for some other words of inspiration. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the last letter of his life, ten days before his death:

May it [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

The emphasis, of course, is mine.

A day off

…is worth a lot. After the six months or so I’ve had, spending Saturday and this morning at the beach relaxed me enough to more than make up for the lawn mowing, Ikea shopping, and other odds and ends that consumed the rest of the weekend.

I’ll post some photos later, but the other information I thought I’d post today will go up later at some point.