August 23, 2007

• (1)  the american string quartet (the ensemble) rocks.  last night, i saw them play the beethoven op. 130 quartet (with the grosse fugue as the finale).  incredible.  btw, late beethoven is wonderfully fucked up music.  i mean, the grosse fugue is basically 16 minutes of complete, unapologetic insanity.  it still sounds like modern music to me, even 180 years after it was written.

  (2)  in a related note, i think string quartet is probably the highest form of chamber music with the best overall acoustic effect.  piano trios can be entertaining, but the sound is often thin and the piano can dominate a bit too much.  (although the piano trios of mendelssoh, smetena, and shostakovich show this can be a very effective grouping at times.)  piano quintets are entertaining, but there's this inevitable separateness between the piano and the strings that is disconcerting to me.  by contrast, all four players in a string quartet truly inhabit each other's sound in a way that no other combination of instruments can pull off.  maybe one day i'll stop being lazy and do some more in-depth reviews of the pieces i've been watching at this festival, because i'm developing a lot of opinions as i watch stuff.  (schubert trout quintet, kind of a turd.  why so popular?  schubert death and the maiden quartet, one of the crowing achievements of the 19th century.)

  (3)  i bought these wonderfully comfortable boxer briefs and wore them for the first time the other day.  they're wonderful, except that there's no fly on the front.  like, none at all.  this i did not notice until i walked up to the urinal and spent a couple minutes clawing at myself trying to find the opening.  and there was someone who walked up to the adjacent urinal and observed the second half of this, then saw me give up, go into a stall and pee sitting down like an animal.  awk-ward.  i mean, WHY would you make men's underwear with no fly?  i didn't know there was such a thing.

  (4)  i have a mixture of incredibly low self-esteem and an incredibly inflated sense of how great i am.  like, if i were someone that i'd several extended conversations with and clicked with, i would call me back.  so it's just kind of appalling when someone else would not do so.  i mean, i hear all these stories about people going on dates and never getting called back.  i never thought i would be in a comparable position.  i mean, LOOK at me.

  • 3:31 am
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