Nico
Muhly,

Oh, awesome! The Mail in England has a headline, “Boozy Britain’s bloody New Year: A 999 call every seven seconds in alcohol-induced mayhem.” And! An amazingly strange article with genius pictures. Look at this:

Their caption is, “Officers stop and question a drunken male about his facial injuries in Newcastle.” His hair is sort of perfection, and I am really feeling his grey shirt. How great is this:

An [sic] young woman helps a friend who has almost certainly had too much to drink.

Almost Certainly. Right before Christmas, I had a piece played and sung in the Rótunda of the Guggenheim Museum: a new Christmas carol setting two texts: Senex Puerum Portabat and Hodie Christus Natus Est. A live recording (complete with coughing and a fire alarm, and too much time at the end) is below.

Vox Vocal Ensemble & the Graham Ashton Brass Ensemble, George Steel, Conductor
Live Recording 12/21/08

Text & Translation

Senex puerum portabat:
puer autem senem regebat:
quem virgo peperit,
et post partum virgo permansit:
ipsum quem genuit, adoravit.

Hodie Christus natus est:
Hodie Salvator apparuit:
Hodie in terra canunt Angeli,
laetantur Archangeli
Hodie exsultant justi, dicentes:
Gloria in excelsis Deo.
Alleluia.
*
An old man carried the child,
yet the child ruled the old man.
Him whom the virgin had borne
- after which she remained for ever a virgin -
she herself worshipped.

Today Christ is born:
Today the Savior appeared:
Today on Earth the Angels sing,
Archangels rejoice:
Today the righteous rejoice, saying:
Glory to God in the highest.
Alleluia.

My basic scheme was that the first part (Senex Puerum Portabat) was a series of pulses anchoring the texture, and then at the second part, we encounter an ecstatic brass band which then explodes into free-form speaking-in-tongues at “Gloria in Excelsis Deo.” I like Christmas music very much, although I’m somewhat saddened that a lot of the standards are Really Majestic (O Come All Ye Faithful) or Really Still (Silent Night – more on this in a second). There is an ecstatic mania about Christmas too that you get in some Sweenlinck but not really ever in audience participatory-settings. It would be unseemly, maybe, to have a whole church filled with people doing some (highly controlled!) babbling. In any event, I think Silent Night is just about the worst thing that ever happened, or, at least, singing along to it is. The worst part is:

It’s too high for people! It’s out of control! And to try to do it quietly – it’s just not gwine happen. This moment always reminds me of that moment in Angels in America where Belize says:

The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me.

Indeed. Also this is pretty amazing:

In entirely other news, Sasha Frere Jones blogpost or whatever this thing is reads like “me me me me I I I I me me me me I I I I my my my my.” I’ve decided that he reminds me of those seagulls from Finding Nemo who can only say “mine” all the time.

I want somebody to explain this poster from my neighborhood to me:

I’ve been recently somewhat addicted to renting crime TV shows off of iTunes and watching them as a sleep aid. Unfortunately, I’m a little intense about it; I have seen all sixty-five million Laws & Order and forty-five million Specials Victims Unit, so I’ve been branching out into other delights such as Without a Trace, which focuses on missing people. The plot twists are significantly less surreal than SVU (there was one SVU in particular wherein a boy was stabbed a school, and it turned out that he was attacked because he had bullied the slightly gendery daughter of two lesbians, who then themselves came under suspicion of having provided the scissors that were used to stab the boy &c &c – the wikipedia entry on it describes it as…

After young Sean Hamill is stabbed in the back at the schoolyard, detectives are led to Charlie Monaghan, the older boy who had previously gotten into trouble over Hamill, but it isn’t long before their attention turns to Monaghan’s half-sister Emma Boyd. Hamill had been torturing the little girl for months because she had two mothers. After getting a nice deal for Emma’s side, Benson and Stabler are thrown for a loop when Emma’s biological grandparents accuse Zoe, who had never legally adopted Emma, of sexually molesting the little girl, and evidence seems to support their claims

…which doesn’t seem that much simpler than the way I described it), but I am watching one in particular that has already guest-starred Kirstie Alley as the mother of a vanished girl who, for her part, had suffered from Sex Addiction and then ran away to something upstate called the “Temple of Absolution” where she was then bad-touched by the cult leader which then somehow relates to Kirstie Alley having a panic attack back at home in Hell’s Kitchen — what is better than a plot structured in little nudules such that you can gauge your awaked-nesse on whether or not you can follow along accurately? When I tried to achieve this episode this morning, at 6:30 in the departures lounge at JFK, no dice: I fell asleep with my chin on my palm. These kinds of plots remind me of Strauss tone-poems: magical, shape-shifting gestures that can imply different landscapes suddenly. What, I wonder, would the Music for 18 Musicians-equivalent TV show be? Maybe it would be an endlessly loading interactive mind-game like the one where Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (played by Ice T) interrogates one.

I am flying over the suburbs of Los Angeles: snow-capped mountains and weird, barnacly housing developments, cancerously asymmetrical.

For what it’s worth, TV shows have gotten pretty intense in terms of being able to create severe imagery. Check out these two stills from the end of the episode – this is a 9th grader in high school hanging himself in his crush’s backyard (this only after she and her equestrienne friends tied him up naked in a horse stall in Westchester):

Hanging! I guess we all saw those Saddam hanging videos and stills a few months ago:

That one, above, is one of the more grisly ones that wasn’t ever in any mainstream media outlets but circulated around the net like kudzu. I had forgotten one detail:

Maybe I’m crazy, but is it not a little bit weird that his executioners are wearing, like, khakis and ill-fitted leather jackets? You’d think at least a little epaulet or something; meanwhile Saddam is wearing what looks like a somewhat elegant black overcoat. My homegirl Carrie Weber has a really wonderful book about Marie Antoinette and her relationship to clothes; the most beautiful and poetic chapter in that book is about what she wore to her own execution:

She had better WERQ IT OUT with that beauty lighting.

I’m excited because tonight I am taking a car ride with a friend who has never heard CocoRosie before; they are some of my favorite favorites.

CocoRosie Turn Me On (Kevin Lyttle Cover)

How come the New York times sticks all the accents and circonflexes everywhere when they write about France? Look:

In Paris, however, the bûche is another opportunity for creativity, commerce, competition and consumption. Every bakery has bûches, large and small, but the big houses like Dalloyau and Lenôtre, and the artisan pastry and chocolate shops, like Jean-Paul Hévin and Pierre Hermé, all produce special bûches every year.

And then when they write about Iceland, they can’t get a little ö to happen:

Audur Capital, a venture capital firm in Reykjavik, Iceland, has started its second fund, named Bjork, with 100 million Icelandic kronur (about $816,330) from Bjork and the firm. They are raising more money now, with the goal of closing the fund in March. The Bjork fund will invest in early-stage businesses concentrating on green technology, with the goal of helping fuel a recovery of Iceland’s economy, which was devastated by a financial crisis this fall.

Now, this is actually really, really interesting. Audur Capital (or, Auður Capital, rather) claims, on their hömepāge: “Our company is founded by women with a vision to incorporate feminine values into the world of finance.”

Does anybody remember how a few months ago, there was an article in the Guardian (and a little comment here) that read:

Women in Iceland, as elsewhere, are generally more practical than men, they have their feet more squarely on the ground and they study the consequences of the risks they take with greater diligence, says Tomasdottir, who on the week I was in Reykjavik gave a speech on the subject that was received with almost evangelical excitement by the 100 influential women present. Among them was Oddny Sturludottir, a Reykjavik city councillor, who emerged from the meeting eyes blazing.

‘We are all furious in Iceland but women especially so,’ she said. ‘We trusted the men at the helm and now we feel fooled, and totally convinced that if it had been women in charge we wouldn’t be owing all these billions right now. They talk about the Viking model! What is the Viking model? Rapists and robbers! That’s no model for the 21st century.’

So, this is great! Halla & Kristín are getting it going. Somebody needs to write to the Times, though, and get them to organize some ö and á. If they’re going to run around talking about bûche this and bûche that, it’s only fair.

So, I am just back from a few days in Los Angeles where I was promoting The Reader – all of this is very new to me, the idea of sub-promoting a specific element of a movie (the score), but it was, for the most part, good fun, and very “other” to my normal experience of padding around my apartment in slippers. On Sunday, I gave (?) a Question and Answer session for the Society of Composers and Lyricists, which was totally fascinating. Some of the questions were really specific, and others were kind of antagonistic; one boy, who seemed like he was probably my age, got up and said, “Congratulations on your achievement” and then as an aside, added, “not really.” Wow! That’s like from fifth grade when you’d say, “I like your new haircut. NOT!” He then followed it with a totally respectable question, so who knows if he was just trying to be funny.

A few things. I had a meeting at an office where everybody was encouraged to bring their dogs in. Mmm, there is nothing better than this; it makes me feel so productive, to have the snuffling of little noses around my feet. It feels very modern in a way, especially given the juxtaposition of a million computers at eye level and a bunch of sturdy dogs underfoot. If I thought for a minute that I could get away with it, I’d totally have a dog. I did see something sort of depressing, though, which was at a mall in Beverly Hills, a pet store selling very expensive puppies in small cages:

A little grim. I participated in Make Thine Owne Cobb Salad:

I had an amazing lunch at a sushi bar; the sushi chef was kind of a randy old coot who was very actively hitting on the lady sitting next to me; their conversation was something like this:

Sushi Dude: [presents Lady with a plate of sashimi] Here you go.
Lady: ooh, it’s beautiful!
Sushi Dude: No, you’re beautiful!
Lady: oh, no, the plate is beautiful!
Sushi Dude: it’s only beautiful because it’s for you!

Wasn’t that the same shit from Estar Wars?

Anakin: You are so…beautiful.
Padme: It’s only because I’m so in love.
Anakin: No. No, it’s because I’m so in love with you.
Padme: Then love has blinded you?
Anakin: Well…that’s not exactly what I meant.
Padme: But it’s probably true.

Moral of the story: the sushi was beautiful:

I went to Mozza, the Batali joint in LA, and had, appropriately, a mozzarella tasting:

The other thing I et which was really good but didn’t photograph well was a calf’s brain ravioli in a sage butter. Gorgeous texture.

Also, I would be remiss not to point out that the movie I wrote the score for, The Reader, opens in limited release this week. The soundtrack, however, is currently available for digital download via the iTunes store. Everybody should try to see the movie if at all possible – it is really wonderful.