Nico
Muhly,

A few days ago, I posted about how difficult it was for me to get a phone up and running in England. I got some sympathetic comments and then one sort of mean thing about being middle-class. That sort of angered me, because I realized: what do you do if you’re a non-English-speaking, non-Middle Class immigrant to London? If I can’t, with my fancy Ivy League education (and whatever Juilliard is — Shochu League?) get a pay-as-u-go phone working, what is it like if you’re Chinese? The end result of the phone saga is pretty great, though. The basic outline is this: I bought, legitimately and from the Apple Store Online, an iPhone linked to an Orange Pay-As-You-Go SIM. It worked. I gave everybody the number. And then suddenly, it no longer worked. There was no message or warning; it simply ceased working. I called them from my American phone. I argued with them. I faxed them my financial details. The Fraud Team had taken over my case. The Fraud Team is not “Customer-Facing.” The Fraud Team leaves work at 4:30 and doesn’t work weekends. I spent a weekend — and $425.44, I later found out — using my American phone to conduct my affairs. I went into an Orange Store. They were embarrassed and horrified and polite and apologetic and all, themselves, immigrants who had gone through similar hoops upon arrival from Pakistan and Bulgaria. An hour later, they made contact with the Fraud Team. The Fraud Team was not helpful; the Fraud Team communicates with the store employees using a little text-only computer terminal very similar to a Minitel. The Fraud Team took off at 4:30, presumably to light kittens aflame or worship Baphomet. The next day I went to another Orange store, and an Australian man told me: your best bet is either to only top up using cash or to have an English person pay for your phone bills; that way the credit card is linked to a UK address. You know how he knew this? Because that’s how he pays his own bill. Motherfuckers. The only way to make my legitimate phone work is to commit fraud? So now I have exactly the worst, most bizarre and illegal kind of phone, whose bill is paid by my friend J—. Doesn’t that sound like some Al-Qaeda pre-paid terror organization shit to you? I’m trying to figure out a way to make Orange, be they Customer-Facing or Not, to realize the error of their ways. If you make the bureaucratic process so opaque that Middle-Class people can’t even navigate it, chances are, your system is certainly not going to work for, let’s say, a Nigerian student who turns up and has his phone cut off and has no recourse to his other phone to call your customer servants.

All of this is not to say that I’m having a bad time! On my walk back from the first of two Orange Stores, I had to pass through the small network of streets in the City, near where the Fire of London started. This area is amazing because every streetcorner offers a quick glimpse of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which looks like a giant meringue on a plinth. When the light hits just right, which, in winter is several crepuscular hours, a walk through that area is unrelentingly beautiful. With a cup of coffee & with the promise of dinner with friends, I felt like the luckiest man alive. Every time I eat at St John — a pie with Alex, an ox tongue with Sigga Sunna, a snail with Jamie — I am filled with an overpowering life-umami.

The new piece I wrote for Mark Padmore and Pekka Kuusisto and the Britten Sinfonia has been happening on tour; I went to two of the first leg of performances (in Eindhoven and Amsterdam) and am heading to Cambridge tonight to hear another. It’s a complete decadence to hear a work so many times in one’s life, to say nothing of in a single month. I’m also excited because the performance in Amsterdam contained one of the most professional trainwrecks I’ve ever witnessed. Something happened — somebody came in early, somebody mis-cued, somebody wasn’t paying attention in the back — and it came dangerously close to falling apart. I like it though: the adrenaline focuses everything that happens immediately afterwards and you end up with a shimmering, taut remainder of the piece. The same thing happened when I went to see Signal play Steve Reich’s Double Seggistett at LPR a few months ago: for one split second — maybe half a bar? — there was a brief clenching of the ostinato, and the whole thing almost broke. Brad Lubman pinched something and relaxed something else, and then everybody was right there for the rest of the piece.

I’m interested in that tautness. In chamber music, you get this almost all the time. Watch a string quartet and you see every player constantly focused, negotiating, bartering, manic. In larger ensembles, this is not always the case. In the better ones, though, you start to see it creeping in on stage: I saw James Levine conduct the BSO in a Midsummer Overture at a tempo of quarter note equals, like, seventeen thousand, and there was a lot of focus on that stage. Last night, I went to see the New York Philharmonic on their tour in London, and their first encore, Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, was like that: completely focused from the first stands of the violins to the back of the horns.

Sadly, I cannot say the same for some of the other pieces and players. That’s always what I do when I see big orchestras: I look at the back of the second violins, at the back of the violas, to see how engaged people are. It’s fascinating. Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra is a giant cauldron of textures, a sort of Szechuan hot-pot affair with little bits of things bubbling to the top covered in other things slicked with a third thing. The performance was great — don’t get me wrong — but Kind and Venerable Sir in the back of the violas: I’m watching u. And y’all phoned it in. That tremolo may not be the most important thing in the texture at that time, but you have to play it like it is — otherwise, what are we all doing with our lives?

All that said, it was great to see the Philharmonic outside of Fisher Hall, where I never go. The playing was great. The programming for the tour was, let’s say, a solid B. First night: That new Lindberg thing, followed by Prokofiev 2nd Piano Concerto which was fucking awesome. Bronfman ate that thing for dinner. Then Sibelius 2, which is always a plecz. Second night: A Haydn Symphony (bad idea), Adams’s The Wound-Dresser (more on this in a sec), Schubert Unfinished (fabulous) and Berg Three Pieces (fabulous). Then Egmont as an encore, then a Bernstein nibblet with the funniest English horn queef I have ever heard in my life. Now you look at these two days of tour programming and you think: okay, fine. It’s all fine. But in the back of my head something is screaming: more new music, more American music, more music by New Yorkers. Get that Haydn off of the stage and do a new American piece for chamber orchestra (Note: nothing’s wrong with Haydn. It’s just dopey to play on a tour and, like, yes, the trio from the minuet is hot shit and shows off the horns’ high notes, but it’s still just dopey). Do the Reich Duet for Two Violins! Commission something! Don’t do Egmont; do Short Ride in a Fast Machine. You already have one of the synthesizers for the Wound-Dresser! And all the percussion from the Berg! I know that I’m always going to back-seat program for the Phil, but I’ve said it before and I will continue saying it until I die: I want my hometown orchestra to be my home team. I want to see the season and scream, “I love my life and I love living in New York.” I don’t want to open up the LA season brochure and start looking into rental properties in Rancho Cucamonga just so I can hear Tehillim.

Anyway, whatever. They sounded great. I’m just saying. And they’re doing something of mine in a few months (for chamber-orchestra, off-venue, watch this space for more information) and I thought Alan Gilbert did a gorgeous job. There was one sort of sad moment in the Adams where Thomas Hampson (who sort of looks like Mitt Romný, has anybody else noticed this?) sings: “Poor boy, I never knew u, yet I þink I could not refuse this moment to d-i-i-ie 4 u” at which point the strings do this unspeakably gorgeous long, descending, Elgar melody, which burrows into the ground into the horns, and then gets picked up by a trumpet solo, Glory-style. It’s a beautiful, heart-breaking moment and Gilbert was doing full 360° DaWinci arcs with his arms and the violins were playing it sort of like, Mezzo-Forte Poco Espressivo Ma Non Troppo. Of course I was looking at the back of the firsts and screaming with my eyes: bitches! It’s about War! It’s about the SIDA! it’s pertinent, it’s gorgeous, it’s a huge American melody. Make me some fucking gravy out of this line, like how you’re gonna out of the Schubert in twenty minutes’ time!

(As I write this, I am now on my way back from Cambridge, on a train that smells like tuna in the worst possible way).

This last week has gone by incredibly quickly; I’m not entirely sure how I lost track of so many days. Last Saturday, so exactly a week ago, I conducted a workshop for composers at Cambridge. This was, without a doubt, one of the most interesting experiences in my life. But I’ll start from the very beginning: rail replacement service caused me to be One and One Half Hours Late! I was so mortified. There is nothing worse, for me, than being late, and this was the worst kind: stuck on a train. Everybody involved seemed quite forgiving, though, so when I turned up 90 minutes after the start time, we got to work quickly. The format was familiar: an ensemble of student and professional players was assembled in a slightly overlit room, and six student composers had written pieces for the ensemble. It was, if I remember correctly, wind quintet, string quartet and piano, with a restriction on how many winds you could use. So you ended up with six pieces for the dreaded Mixed Ensemble.

What became immediately apparent to me is that these six composers were incredibly skilled, technically. Every gesture was really intelligently handled — quick atonal lines that whipped around corners like fancy waterslides (as opposed to not-fancy waterslides; those of you who have been on them, or have heard lesser works of Poulenc will know what I mean when I say that the corners do not Handle Well). They were especially good at the “single-note” orchestration trick where you have, say, an F, and the piano plays it loud, and a clarinet is playing it really really soft, and then a muted horn sneaks in, and then a cello plays the same note, but as a harmonic, a little bit later. It’s a good trick and these kids were ON it.

What also became clear to me, based on the reactions from my comments, was that these kids had never been explicitly praised or criticized before. It seems as if the only thing that they were comfortable hearing was a sort of middle-of-the-road platitude. The thing with music is that, yes, it’s unteachable. But there are some things that are Just Great about certain pieces, and other things that are Just Mistakes. The composer’s word, I think, is quite fallible — and I speak from experience. Oftentimes, I wish I had somebody who would just rush into my studio and say, here’s the deal with this piece: this part is awesome, and these two bars have to go. Or “those two bars are irrelevant.” I’ve written at length about this problem before; in the other Arts, both applied and otherwise, there are outside forces to temper the artist. Visual artists are restricted by the size of their canvas or the space their art will inhabit. Writers have editors! Can you imagine, composers, if you had an editor? Somebody you love & hate & trust & mistrust who has access to your music at any juncture? If you look at any novel, you see, in some back annex, the writer lavishing praise on their editors. It’s people who are Paid to Know Better than the Composer.

Anyway, we don’t have those. We have our friends, we have the musicians who play our music, and we have each other. And, of course, we have audiences, but you don’t want to be in the editing phase when you’re presenting a work to the public. So I’ve started being quite blunt with others and with myself especially about things that are working and things that are not working. And I do fantasize about what would happen if composers had editors. I know that in retrospect, somebody would have told me that a bunch of the shit I wrote between 2004-2006 was way too long. But just to be momentarily alternative-universe, do you think somebody would have told John Adams that the third act of Nixon was too long (it isn’t – it’s a dreamy reverie that is a welcome and rapturous thing) or that the end of act I of Klinghoffer is too long (it is, sort of – it’s kind of seventeen minutes of slightly similarly harmonically constructed material with obbligato solo instruments before we get the chugga-chugga-chugga Night Chorus)?

But this opens up the biggest question is: how can a composer learn to defend her work? If my editor told me, “Hey Nico, you’ve gotta cut six minutes from this piece,” and I disagreed, I’d have to access a very interesting linguistic register. It’s this thing of talking about your own art as an object distinct from your own body &/or mind. This is the thing I was trying to get the Cambridge kids to dip into: dear boy, with the beautiful atonal horn line: you’re good at that. You’re not good at pacing. Let’s work on it! Let’s talk about what you want to achieve, emotionally and intellectually, with all this beautiful counterpoint. If you have a clear agenda, it’s going to solve all your problems. Dear madam, with the gestural content to rival Boulez: let’s clean up your notation so we can talk about why you have titled your piece with Scripture. Does the scripture trickle down into the work, or does it frame the work? Why are these seven minutes of music preferable to, for instance, seven minutes of silent meditation on the same scripture?

In that spirit, we had our first rehearsal for my new piece Impossible Things — a double concerto for violinist Pekka Kuusisto and tenor Mark Padmore. Within six seconds of starting work, Mark, Pekka, and I, along with Miss Jacqueline, all agreed to change basically all of the tempo indications. I cut two bars. I confessed stupidity about a double-stop in the cellos. We rehearsed the ending, which is kind of fast. It sounded great. We took it on the road to Holland. At the pre-concert awkward pacing-around moment one of the violist confessed that one bar in the ending was “a little bit tricky.” He showed it to me: it was a fucking mess! A completely unidiomatic disaster of string crossings. What had happened is that it had been originally a violin line in a different key and when I moved things around, I forgot to check to see if the string crossings worked, which is normally a process of calling Nadia in the middle of the night while she’s at the kluh and being like, “hey, okay, so get into second position, and…” I thanked him, but then I realized, honey, tell a bitch during rehearsal! I would have fixed it right then and there!

Anyway, all of that is a very long way of saying, it’s a really good skill to have — almost as important as being able to excite a single pitch through orchestration — to be able to defend your work verbally, as well as being able to accept criticism on the teleological level, as in: why should this music exist as opposed to the same amount of silent reflection on the same themes?

From tha Þkrappbook:

an email from me to Pekka Kuusisto:

I have a few ideas about the piece — I figured out two possible cuts that I think will help with pacing. I’m wondering if you think you’ll have time to incorporate them maybe tomorrow in Tilburg?

I want to cut bars 151, 152, and 153.

I want to turn bar 331 into a 3/4 bar. So everybody just does whatever they’re doing for 3 beats and lose the last two “quavers” and crash right into 332. I think this is going to help enormously with this awkward transition.

Finally, I want to cut 517, 518, and 519, so basically, that bar at 516 happens and diminuendos right into the downbeat of 520 and your lyrical sóló

and I wrote you all these new double stops in the fast movement

a comment from an internet troll re: my last post about the inconveniences of getting a phone in London, and my response:

Grow some balls, you sound like a child. If the guy at orange wasn’t Bengali would it still be 9 out of 10 on the fraud scale? You sound pathetic. A call to arms for Londoners? From you? Yeah, the revolution starts here and boy is it middle-class. If Londoners were like you the city would be dead in ten years.

[Nico responds: Well, I think the nature of this revolution would be specifically designed for people like me and our petty, bourgeois concerns like phones and getting coffee & sandwiches quickly. I can't pretend to speak for the Subaltern in London, or anywhere for that matter — being born middle-class is so eternal, isn't it — but it sounds like you 'n' Gayatri are ready to really roll up the sleeves and get to work with the capital-R Rev! Onwards! I'll be on the sidelines with artisanal sandwiches for when you get tired. ]

an amazing Wideo of Gayatri Spivak talking about…essentially, herself, but, you know, in trajectory:

“This particular robbing of agency, as it were, had unleashed a much greater charge, and generally in the name of gender, gender as alibi….there is not enough time, we’ll try to make an end soon – in this context, I will argue……” — she is so great — she drops these little farts and then rushes away from them, never to return! I love this woman.

I have had a very frustrating pageant of inefficiency in London today. I got an English mobile number last night — which, in itself, was a very complicated ordeal despite the fact that I only wanted a Pay-As-Þú-Go phone. (the complexity is beyond description; let me just say that it was only pharmaceuticals that kept me from eating a man’s liver on Oxford St) It worked, and I set up a whole series of interviews and social appointments on it. And then, I woke up this morning to a doomed “no service” message. Restarts, network resets, etc. I eventually called my Cervix Provider, Orange, to discover (after 30 minutes on hold, with actually kind of satisfying hold music), that my account had been suspended for Fraud. The only way, darling Yogesh from Tech Support informed me, to reättain service was to fax (?) my most recent credit card statement (?) to a certain number. Now. Let’s think about Things that Seeme Fraudulent. As far as I’m concerned, faxing my bank statement to some Bengali dude is like, Fraud level 9 out of a possible 10. Me trying to move to London and behave like a normal human being is like, 2 out of a possible 10. Anyway, I endured the Faxing Process (which, let it be said is not easy; it involved PDF’s from Citibank, reformatting from 8.5×11 to A4 sized paper, and an amazing scene of four generous women from the Roundhouse huddled around their fax machine trying to get it to work.) They had no way of confirming that it worked. I don’t know if it worked. My phone still isn’t working.

I am now convinced that England is essentially an enormous logistical game, like that thing where you tilt a surface to get a marble to fall into a specific hole. At a certain point today, after 45 minutes with Yogesh and fielding all the insane emails attendant to my failure to “answer” my “phone,” I seriously entertained the idea of just Going Home, where the streets are paved with pork belly and I can make my phone go. Tickets were investigated; fraudulent medical excuses were fabricated.

After a few hours of really horrifying logistical +44 hours, I decided to just abandon hope of leaving and repair immediately to St John, where I et: Snail, Sausage & Chickpea, and some Parsnipp Soup, with a glass of white wine. All of this set me straight: London is a place obsessed and consumed by inconvenience, with a few fortresses of awesomeness, St John being one of them. The physical space is heaven, the food is heaven, the staff is heaven, the font is heaven, the glasses are heaven.

Later that day, I went to the Roundhouse to rehearse. I adore the Roundhouse. It is one of the most beautiful spaces in the world. The bar? Was great. I sat there for an hour, from 3-4, answered emails, made some arrangements for friends, and then was informed that the bar was closing for “a changeover.” A changeover to what, I axt. “Dinner service,” was the answer. “So, can I sit here while you change over?” “No.” Now we come to a crossroads. Do I get hood with these people? Or do I just leave like how they are very politely asking? I left because I had to make a phone call, but this woman’s attitude stuck in my craw. What am I meant to say to her ass, “I’m playing here Sunday; can you please just let me keep this wee table in the corner during your changeover? can I stand up for 5 minutes while you reärrange the candles and naps-kijn?” Instead I just sort of collected my things and left.

BUT THEN. Leitur. At 6 PM, I wanted to go to the bar, with an administratrix from the orchestra, to get a glass of wine. The barmaid on duty (I reïterate: barmaid on duty) informed us that we could not achieve wine. Why? Because. The fact that there were three half-full bottles of red wine literally within my arm’s reach was immaterial 2 her. I followed the lead of my administratrix hostess and we left. But then fifteen minutes later I said to myself, you know what? Fuck these people. So I marched back up and said, what amount of money can change your mind? The barmaid was horrified. I said, what can I say or do to achieve a glass of the red wine that is half open, slowly fermenting in front of my wery eyes. She said, “oh, well, you can have a plastic glass of it without any problem. It’s just a glass that we can’t do.”

Hello. What are we dealing with here? Was she saving face? Should she have said this bit about the plastic glass 30 minutes before? Am I a crazy New Yorker? Am I petulant? Is she crazy?

I want to use this space as an urge to Londoners to Stop the Madness. Question all the times that people tell you that you cannot do a thing that you clearly should be able to do. It’s wine behind the bar; it’s £4.30 in your pocket; surely we can make something happen. It’s foreign students and workers in your city: give a bitch a cellphone without struggle. It’s people who want to express their dollars in pounds: give a bitch a bank account without all this rigmarole. I’m really over the Eichmannesque behavior of everybody up in here. It’s 10 PM, I’ve been working all day, you have to let me eat! I would love (sort of) for there to be a place besides St John that is an Acceptable Atmosphere in which to exist.

One thing I have to say, though, amidst all of this, is that the Roundhouse is an amazing, amazing place. I did an interview for their in-house radio station and on my slightly curvèd walk to the studio, I walked past what seemed like almost infinite mini-studios with Macs with Logic and ProTools rigs. All these rooms were filled with fresh-faced 21-year old musicians who in some way establish tenure in this fabulous space. What this place amounts to, in New Yorker terms, is the thing that all of us have been dreaming of for years. It’s like Zankel Hall meets Terminal 5 meets a studio meets the American Music Center. I was beyond impressed with it; I was sort of moved by my brief walk past young people using the computer and very moved by one group of two of them: a gay boy and a (?) girl, riveted by the flashings of Logic on the screen of their iMac. I want the iTunes download of whatever it is that they made that day.

So, in summary:

London people: Resist this Bullshit!

London people: Support the Roundhouse!

London people: Eat the Snails & Chickpea!

Pre-concert talks are always really funny to me. I always fear them slightly but know that it’s really important to do because concertgoers tend to really like them. I never go to them, so I have no idea what you’re meant to do to make a successful one. I got sort of blind-sided today by a series of unfortunate events (1. coffee machine malfunction at home, 2. totally weird subway situation, 3. an unexpected walk outside in the very very cold with no coat to a Methodist church filled with home-schooled children who had written a wonderful spatial set of variations on Copland’s Sextet) and ended up at a pre-concert talk at the Wigmore hall where I was disastrously hungry and over-caffeinated and was too OCD to use the toilet and was wearing one layer 2 few. So! I ended up sounding slightly manic and in my frenzy fucked up my Queens (I lumped Purcell in with Elizabeth rather than Mary) and then got totally insane when this random guy asked me My Least Favorite Question in the World.

My Least Favorite Question in the World is a question that only the English ever ask. It is a question that is not in fact a question but is just a mean comment, disguised in an observation. It goes something like this: “Isn’t it the case that in the new music scene in New York, a lot of music is being written ___*insert generality here*___”. If the generality is that the pieces are short rather than long, this is code for “Americans are superficial.” If the generality is that pieces are more for orchestra and less for small ensemble it is a coded comment about Americans being opportunistic. Today’s variation was that music in “the” “new” “york” “scene” is composed, for the most part, of music for voices and percussion ensemble. And I just thought to myself, what on earth is the question here? And instead of answering politely, I kind of lost my cool and just accused this poor dude of coded language and was very unrelenting. I was basically like, “I’m sorry that all the fun festivals at the Barbican are Reich and Adams but, like, Tehillim is a beautiful piece of music and let’s not generalize about scenes” and then I added something about the Kwakiutl and something else about Lesbians just to confound anybody who was trying to follow me logically. After the talk, I tried to find him to apologize and sort of make peace but he had vanished and I had to Majorly Correct my caffeine/sweat/hot/cold/toilet qi.

Anyway, the short version of this story is: sorry, dude! You came to my pre-concert talk and I am super appreciative and you asked what I think was an innocent question and I unloaded a huge pile of sass on you for no reason.

But then, I sort of got to thinking (cue Carrie Bradshaw cut-away here) that questions about “scenes” in other places are always, in a sense, coded. I have written about my sense of, and my relationship to, “the” “new” “york” “scene” in this space before; I’m not even going to link to it because I was very cruel to a few people and hurt a bunch of feelings. If you want to find it, just search in the search box. But the point is, I am so committed to actively resisting these notions of scenes — I just bristle anytime anybody uses the word. But probing a little deeper into my weird hang-up about this, I realize that my music is slowly unraveling itself from being written in New York. Impossible Things, the piece that Mark Padmore and Pekka Kuusisto will premiere with the Britten SInfonia next week — not a note of it was written in America. Motion, which we’ve been touring for the last few days, was written almost entirely in Singapore and Cambodia. This giant opera I’ve been slaving over was written almost entirely in Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, with only the merest dynamics and articulations added in the 212. This big piano piece I’m writing now is going to have been entirely written in this ridiculously expensive, vaguely Saudi-banker efficiency in London. What right do I have to speak about what’s going on in New York? An English friend is instant messaging me right now saying that he’s about to see all my musician friends at a gay bar in New York — I am in my pajamas realizing figured bass and the church bells in Smithfield have just struck 3 AM; I am completely Remov’d from the Scene, pieces for voice and percussion notwithstanding. Who has a right to articulate what’s going on in a place?

So now I’ve come back around, and I feel like I was right to bristle at the question. The implication in asking about what’s going on somewhere else is, in some way, a dig. Isn’t all art in Russia this sort of ironic Stalinist self-referential portraiture? Isn’t all music in Bamako just folk music with an electric bass? Isn’t music in Paris just IRCAM algebraic jibjab? It becomes a question about your relationship with your own city: what is being made in London that’s beautiful? Who is making music that moves you, Question Dude? Is it Patrick Wolf (whose slow descent into more & more baritone pleaseth)? Is it Simon Simon Bainbridge? Is it Michael Nyman? Where Judith Weir at? What did you people do with Steve Martland, anyway?

I love London and would love to get a handle on what music is being made here that is touching people. As a foreigner, being fêted with these numerous and wonderful performances, it’s hard to get a handle on. I’m doing a workshop for young composers in Cambridge on Saturday, which I hope will give me some sense of, you know, who these people are and where they are deriving their pitch material from. But I’m not entirely sure that seven hours in Cambridge is going to necessarily give me the synecdochal overview that would be the analogue to whatever it was that Dude.co.uk was talking about with the voices and percussion thing. Did he mean the Little Match Girl Passion? Was it a dig on the Little Match Girl Passion? Tehillim? Four Proverbz? That batshit George Crumb thing that’s the most beautiful thing in the world, Unto the Hills?

I write this from London; I have finally finished one of my favorite tasks, which is Provisioning — buying those weird necessities that you never think about: band-aids, tea, shampoo, blu-tak, the proper house lotion, the proper loofah for the shower, the right kind of garbage bag. My girl Jamie came over not twelve seconds after I arrived bearing a bottle of Dubonnet and another bottle of Gin, so now I can make the drink of which the Queen Mum & the Queen herself were/are most fond. (I also got into a whole “gin and dubonnet internet wormhole featuring articles and pictures and all sorts of shit). Provisioning in London is not the easiest thing in the world because their drugstores or supermarkets don’t tend to have that genius “sundries” aisle like up in the Duane Reade. So, for instance, I just spent the better part of an hour trying to find anywhere within walking distance of my apartment that would sell me any kind of adhesive; near the end of the hour I grew so desperate I almost got all Margaret Cho’s mom and just bought some cooked rice and made a little sticky ball.

I am in London this month in residence with the Britten Sinfonia; the residence is multi-faceted and multi-media. There are three main elements to it, though. I programmed for them a lunchtime concert lasting precisely one hour, which consists of three Orlando Gibbons motets arranged by me for clarinet, piano & strang quartet. Then, they perform the Howells Rhapsodic Quintet, a new work by me (Motion) based on a Gibbons motet, and then the Copland Sextet for dessert. It’s a perfect little hour; I love that Howells so much because it is so awkward — he is a melodist, and the melodies are delicious, and he also tries to write little clarinet licks that are not so successful but there is something very beautiful about it. And the Copland is a classic! So that’s Part the First of my Residency. This lunchtime experience is happening all over the UK (and it happened in Krakow yesterday) and everybody should come because what better way to spend a lunchtime hour?

The second part is a big show — but a one-off — at the Roundhouse in London this coming Sunday. The Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Nick Collon, are doing two older works of mine (By All Means & Step Team), I am gonna play Philip Glass Mad Rush on the Pianoforte, I’ma conduct Steve Reich City Life, and Sam Amidon’s going to come and sing three songs, including a newly exploded and orchestrated version of The Only Tune. So that’s part two of the thing.

Part Three, and sort of the most involved part, is a big concert with a string orchestra, tenor Mark Padmore and violinist Pekka Kuusisto. I wrote Pekka a violin concerto and Mark a song cycle that happen to be the same piece of music, so it’s kind of a double-concerto but not really. With it, we’ve programmed Adams Shaker Loops, my favorite, Britten Les Illuminations, my favorite, and Reich Duet for Two Violins & Strangz, also my favorite. What more could you ask for? All of this kicks off in Eindhoven, NL, later this month and then arrives in the UK in the beginning of February.

One of the frustrations of my life is dealing with institutional PR imbalances. A good example is this gig at the Roundhouse. It is, by far, the most “high-profile” of all of the three shows — people are tweeting and blogging about it, half of my inbox is Roundhouse-logistics. But in terms of the actual work for me involved, it’s pretty minimal. It’s older works; I have to re-learn Mad Rush which is hard, I have to conduct City Life which is hard, during which you sort of have to think about 9/11 never 4get but! Compare that, which is a fun, fabulous, glamorous one-off, to the work of writing a thirty minute new work for violin and tenor! There are so many chores involved in doing that — you have to choose the text, in this case, newly translated Cavafy Poems. You email back and forth with the translator, you make crazy sketches, you write down the words ‘Alexandria’ and ‘Homosexual’ in nine different colors. You skype Finland. You buy every single recording Mark Padmore has ever made. You ask everybody in Christendom & the Caliphate what they think about Mark Padmore’s Voice. You sort through those emails. You buy Ian Bostridge’s thesis for six hundred dollars, high on ambien. You cut a poem. You add another. You make diagrams of the structure. You figure out that Mark Padmore has a very handsome e-flat. You fall down an internet wormhole about e-flat. You figure out that Pekka Kuusisto plays Sibelius better than anybody and avoid calling him asking him to play “that note from the second movement of the Sibelius concerto” over the phone and then doing the same to Hilary Hahn. You call the translator in Germany and ask if he means savoir or pouvoir. You fend off an email asking for programme notes before you’ve finished the third movement, a nice passacaglia. You argue with your copyists about syllables. Snippy words are exchanged. You go to Cambodia, you volunteer at the circus school, and somehow, your phone has reception and it’s people asking for more programme notes! It’s an enormous amount of work, a new piece, and there is something very relaxing about presenting a concert of older works. I’m not complaining; this is a good problem to have. But it’s complicated.

A big problem with my life was that my e-mail filter was marking as spam all emails from two very important English women who are sort of going to be coördinating my life for the next bit — Pippa Ricketts and Camilla Stagg. I lost almost a week of emails from both of them before I realized what had happened.

The big moral of the story is that I encourage all fine Englishpeople to come to all three events, as it will give you a pretty comprehensive portrait of my goings-on for the last six months. One is a lunchtime snack, another is a one-off extravaganza, and the third is a beautifully curated and, I hope, well-wrought evening of song and strings.

I am, like many people, totally addicted to Anthony Bourdain’s show No Reservations. When I was 18, my friend Liz and I went together to Bangkok kind of on a whim, and we totally were relatively chilled out about eating food off the street. No Reservations has made mainstream the idea that it’s OK to eat street food wherever. I stand by this; I ate some wild things off the street in the last two weeks in Cambodia (including a really ill-advised sun-dried clam covered in chili sauce and salt…), and the only time I got tummy trouble was off a plate of bruschetta (which, it must be said, floored me: I had to cancel two appointments which is very unlike me, but really, y’all, I was beyond Immodium). But: I want to know who’s writing the music for this show. Everytime Bourdain waxes poetic, it gets very, very, Philip Glassy, to such an extent where one wonders if an intellectual property lawyer should get involved. I know it’s hard for TV and film composers: you get footage, and usually it’s been temped with one of three things: Thomas Newman, Philip Glass, or Massage Parlor Ethnic Putumayo Potpourri, and then your job as the composer is to imitate that to the best of your ability, with two weeks to do it and a bunch of angry people screaming at you talmbout is it done yet.

Dear Editors of Film. Please stop temping films with the same shit. Call me. I will send you other things. The soundtrack to Glory was great in 1988 or whenever that was but you have to quit it now. Let’s innovate, let’s branch out.

But for reals, #thatsillegal to oscillate with minor 3rds, and flesh it out with i and VI back and forth.

Another thing I love about No Reservations is that it captures, with film, some of the insane stuff that happens when you travel alone but don’t have time to photograph. A baby monkey came into my hotel room and stole a jackfruit, no picture. A huge monkey shat on a woman on Street 240 in Phnom Penh and she grabbed a piece of tissue out of her back pocket and wiped it off and continued on her way. No picture. A man in drag screamed at me from the entryway of a bar, “Durian have Pie! Durian have Pie!” presumably meaning that drinks were half-price? No photo, or video.

As I write this, I am on the last day of a five-day cruise from New Orleans to Cozumel & Progreso and back again; inasmuch as I travel so much, I’ve never really hung out with my boyfriend’s family, so this is a sort of trial-by-fire where I willingly go aboard a boat with them for the better part of a week. Has anybody ever been on a cruise before? I had not. I had heard tell throughout childhood, and certainly everybody I mentioned it to made a very specific (and sort of French?) sudden intake of air. I read that David Foster Wallace essay which is fantastic. I took a video of a thing that happened at a port of call:

Assorted business. Somebody commented on my post a few weeks ago about tipping, claiming he was a waiter I mentioned, and said I was bad at it! Oh my god oh no; that is literally my worst nightmare. Maybe it’s not true. Maybe it’s just somebody fucking with me. Oh, the stomach is in knots. I will be better in the fjútur. That literally is like, the worst thing that’s happened to me ever, if that’s true.

However, one of the most exciting things is to review fun stuff that’s happened in 2009!

Jónsi Boy Lilikoi from Go

I’m so, so excited about this project. My girl Jónsi made an album and I arranged, played, twitched & spake in tongues all over it. I basically had qart blanche to do whatever, within the confines of the generally ecstatic nature of the music, as you can hear from the piccolo writing, above. It was also fun to work on an Icelandic project with my New York homegirls. Nadia, Alex, Pluckbró, etc. — everybody’s got their moment in the sun on this disc. Plus, I played celeste like, speed-guitar style on one of the tracks.

Some highlights of 2009 for me were working on Thomas/Doveman’s new album, The Conformist. Thomas, like Jónsi, gave me a sort of free rein, although for one song he asked me to write a classic string arrangement, like a perfectly crafted cocktail:

Doveman Angel’s Share from The Conformist

I think it worked out pretty well. My only regret is that Matt Berninger’s vocal was added after I did the arrangement, so I could have left him a little bit more room for that handsome baritone. I made a very…descanty flute and violin line about 3 minutes in; this is the reason why nobody should invite me to a mix of a song for which I’ve done arrangements because all I’d want to hear is that A-flat. Also, I am proud of the final cadence, which melts into place like nacho cheese.

Another fun project from this last year was with Sam Amidon, whose next album, I See the Sign, is coming out in March. He’s pre-released a snippet of it at Bandcamp; check it out! I wonder when indie people are going to get over “lowercase personal pronoun.” Maybe that can be a collective resolution for 2k10?

I wish I could post more audio of the project I did with Teitur, but the recording isn’t done yet, so, that’s going to have to wait. And I did a lot of work on Antony’s album, The Crying Light, which was hugely thrilling, and it seems like so long ago! 2k9 was endless!

I can’t get enough of Christmas music after Christmas starts, by the way. We have twelve days to enjoy it! One of my favorite genres/throughlines of Christmas music is the bitter return flight of Easter.

The Infant King arr. Willcocks (?)
King’s College, Cambridge

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now reclining,
Sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the Infant King.
Angels are watching, stars are shining
Over the place where he is lying:
Sing lullaby!

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now asleeping,
Sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the Infant King.
Soon will come sorrow with the morning,
Soon will come bitter grief and weeping:
Sing lullaby!

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now adozing,
Sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the Infant King.
Soon comes the cross, the nails, the piercing,
Then in the grave at last reposing:
Sing lullaby!

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby is the babe awaking?
Sing lullaby!
Hush, do not stir the Infant King.
Dreaming of Easter, gladsome, morning,
Conquering death, its bondage breaking:
Sing lullaby!

Then, finally, I’m going to re-post another Christmas-With-Easter-Roundtrip carol, and a link to what I wrote about it last year, below reprinted, which I think still holds true.

Happy New Year, Gleðilegt everything, see you on the flippsæd.

This is last year’s Xmas Music Observations:
I have been listening obsessively to Benjamin Britten’s arrangement of the traditional carol “The Holly and the Ivy”. Now, this is a very well-known tune and there are a bunch of very famous arrangements of it, but for some reason this Britten really hits the spot for me. When you get a really plummy recording from England, too, they really lean in on the last word of the chorus, that being, “choir,” and somehow compress it into a one-syllable loaf. I just adore the pagan universe described in these lyrics:

The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good
O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

This particular recording has the MOST PINCHED AND DELIGHTFUL KUMAMOTO OYSTER of a countertenor solo in the third verse, too. Check it out.

The Holly and the Ivy (Traditional, arr. Britten)
King’s College Choir, Cambridge

Curiously, I can’t seem to find a source for Britten’s lyrics. The third verse (the one the kumamoto countertenor sings) seems to go on about Tree and Setting Sinners Free and such. I love these tight little protopagan rhyme schemes! Another good example of that is one of these Rhyming Numerologygasms, called “Joys Seven.”

Joys Seven (arr. Cleobury)
Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge

This arrangement is perfectly English: efficient and sentimental without being too outrageous. There is, however, a completely over-the-top descant at the end that performs a little trick. The organ rises up the scale, and the trebles sing aah aah aah on the top four notes of an A^b-major scale. Then, when they repeat it immediately afterwards, the G is flatted, followed by the F, and then a G-natural: it’s very subtle, but it lines up perfectly with the text below “…to see her own son Jesus Christ to wear the crown…” — what you expect is, of course, the crown of thorns, but the word that you get is “heav’n” (to rhyme with Seven). That little turn in the trebles is precisely the Tart Joy of Christmas: you have to make sure that you advance the clock to Good Friday, looming just a few months later. See:

There are several little galling moments, specifically in the sixth cycle, at the words:

The next good joy our Mary had,
It was the joy of six;
To see her own son Jesus Christ
Upon the Crucifix.
Upon the crucifix, good man: And blessed may he be,
Both Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
To all eternity.

Mmm. This is one of my favorite lyrics EVER, because a little digging reveals some alternate words. Check out the first verse the way it’s sung these days:

The first good joy our Mary had,
It was the joy of one:
To see the blessed Jesus Christ
When he was first her son.
When he was first her son, good man…

and now an alternate:

The first good joy our Mary had,
It was the joy of one;
To see her own Son Jesus
To suck at her breast bone;
To suck at her breast bone,
Good man, and blessed may he be…

Ooh, see, isn’t that so much better? Then, dig deeper:

þe forte joye wt out in good fay,
was upon halewÿ þursda,
he stey to hevene in ryche aray,
wt fadr and sone and holy gost.

þe fyfte joye wt outÿ dene,
in hevene he crownyd his modr clene,
þt was wol wil þe eyr a sene,
wt fadr and sone and holy gost.

Now we’re talking! Mm, crownyd his modr clene. I wonder if this is an error (Queene is prolly what is meant, here) or if really we’re talking about “clene” in its Middle English use as a noun, meaning, “(a) Guiltless or excellent person; also, purity; (b) = clene Lenten; (c) clear path,” in which case, she, as a Pure Virgin or whatever, can properly join the “sene,” (here, from the root that brings us Synod – sort of a holy gathering) of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Inneresting.

My wonderful guide to the temples of Angkor, “Yokohama,” a nickname whose origins he explained to me but which I can’t repeat here for fear of missing one of the many insane and Khmer Rouge-related details, was quite mistress of taking me to places at times when the giant tour buses of Koreans and Japanese would be gone.

Is it retro to say Japanese? Should I say Japanese People? When was it decided that Chinaman was no longer permitted? My grandmother, when she found out where I was staying in Paris and I asked her about food, she said: Je connais un chinois which I would have to translate as “I know a Chinaman…” and in fact, Philip Glass, who is about the most politically correct & Buddhist and Compassionate person I know, used the word “chinaman” in my presence. Can somebody fill me in on contemporary politically correct demonyms?

However, the street systems of Siem Reap almost guaranteed that most temple entrances would be working streets for commuters and schoolchildren. Yokohama would occasionally say to me, wait, wait before you take a picture until this car passes, or this bike passes, as if to preserve the 11th century nature of the place. But I always defied him: there is something so exquisite about antiquity coëxisting with modern life: for me, the cars driving around the Coliseum are as interesting as the Coliseum itself. The palimpsestic nature of ancient cities is thrilling to me; but even “palimpsestic” implies that the contemporary world is actively inscribing itself on the old; this isn’t always the case.

An example: in Rome, my walk to school took me directly along a Roman wall; sometimes, at 7:30 in the morning, there would be tourists taking pictures of it, with tour guides excitedly explaining Pope Urban VIII systems and tongue-and-groove construction (of course, in typical Italian fashion, there is no way to even find a picture of Le mura gianicolensi, whatever, someday they’ll get the google truck); my friends and I were walking by, terrified about the presentation we’d have to give in forty-five minutes about linguistic unification after Garibaldi. On the walk home, I’d skirt the other side of the Roman (ancient) wall, and stop by the Roman (modern) stationery store to buy a pad of graph paper to do my geometry homework in. I wasn’t thinking about the wall and its importance as an example of Roman design, but I wasn’t unaware of it. Similarly, in Siem Reap, it’s great to see schoolkids in their navy skirts and shorts bicycling quickly underneath the Victory Gate to Angkor Thom: one of the Angkorian marvels, boasting four of the most delicious carved faces in the Kingdom; these kids don’t give a shit about the enigmatic smile: they’ve got a quiz on French subject-verb agreement. That’s part of the picture, for me, both of the country and the picture I take with the camera.

I like to think about my relationship to early music in the same way. Byrd and Gibbons, to me, are like the walls you walk next to, that guide the journey. The music I write is quite literally framed by their emotional agenda (Bow Thine Ear (or Civitas Sancti Tui if you’re feeling Papist, the Byrd anthem, is emotional ground-zero for me) but I don’t think about it too actively. It’s a gate through which more modern musics pass, or a wall against which you lean to tie your shoes.

An arrangement I made of Bow Thine Ear for the Aurora Orchestra, Nick Collon, conductor

Last night, I had one of the most spectacular & serendipitous food experiences of my life. It went down like this. I have been staying at an Āman hotel, which is essentially a temple to the most extremest of luxuries. I’d heard tell about these places for years, and so when I was planning out this trip a few months ago, started secretly saving enough for a three-day stay. Anyway, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend emailed me saying that his friend was having a staff party and would I like to join them. Sounds fun: I have made it a habit to crash other people’s staff parties this year. (Weirdly, and slightly awkwardly, I was meant to have a meeting with the music director of the English National Opera, and he gave me a time and a place to meet him, and that time and that place turned out to be the retirement party for a Belovèd Administratrix at the Opera; so what I had thought would be a slightly informal but still business-based rendez-vous with a conductor turned into a somewhat sloppy +44 affair involving weepy toasts, chilled rosé, and a lot of in-jokes about stage managers).

Why did the Cambodians keep the Khmer script while Vietnam ended up with their wild diacritix? Why did the French do such a weird job transliterating the language? Why does everybody get up at 5:30 in the morning here? Why, in a city with a monkeys in it, do there seem to be, comparatively speaking, so few? (compare to, like, Rishikesh where it’s monkeys all the way down) After de-collectivization, who decided how much land each family could own? Why did half the people I talked to hate the Chinese so much? Why is really really expensive wine at home really really cheap here?

In any event, last night, a driver (who was later described to me as my host’s “Majordomo”) met me at the gates of the minimalist citadel, and I hopped into his car (all vehicles capable of transporting foreigners here appear to be Toyotas Camry; I have no idea how this came to pass; this is one of my many Logistical Questions about Cambodia (see sidebar)) and we drove off, over a bumpy red-dirt road (not unlike the one that leads to the insanely out-of-place Le Creuset outlet in Gomorrah, South Carolina) and pulled up at what I immediately recognized to be a Gay Household! Yay! Great lighting and beautiful tile. (What’s the line from The Opposite of Seggis: “Gay houses usually sell real quickly…because of the recessed lighting and the good faucets. ….”) — in any case, it turned out to be the farewell party for a young, smartly dressed graphic designer (who starts a new job in Phnom Penh on 1 Janaury), and he had requested that his friends all pitch in and organize a veal roast!

Veal roast! Y’all! This is everything I ever wanted. A very slight, incredibly soft-spoken man explained to me that he had beheaded the calf that morning, and that they had been roasting it over coals all afternoon. He and his colleagues then gutted the creature, and filled its insides with a chaotic jungle of lemongrass and holy basil, and impaled it on a huge bamboo pole. These are graphic designers, all of them, FYI. A piece of fresh bamboo (or was it a perversely large leek?) served as a basting brush for a marinade of fish sauce, garlic, ginger, and chili:

The skin, somehow, achieved suckling pig crispiness, but the flesh was a combination of perfectly rare & pink, and at other times, gelatinously fatty, wobbly and condensed-milk off-white. Just underneath the carcass, resting on a plinth of bricks and coals was a giant cauldron filled with drippings, the head, the hooves, and other baseball-sized chunks. A man wearing a New York Knicks hat was skimming the pot every few minutes, getting up only to refill his plastic cup of Angkor beer from the keg. To the side of the roasting area (which was essentially two piles of bricks outlining a heap of coals) was a table of plastic colanders and trays filled with thinly sliced onions, green tomatoes, and then a pile of cut-up assorted lettuces, basils and mints and what was described to me as cumfrey (although I’m not sure of this translation; all of this was happening in very manic French by those who spoke it; I was the only non-Khmer person in attendance, and while everybody was really eager to converse, an enormous amount got lost in translation and the general drunken atmosphere).

So, it was a giant, communal affair, very politely conducted, until such a time as the head of the calf was removed from the cauldron:

At that moment, everybody gathered close and started making what I can only describe the Anticipatory Clucking of Sucking Meat off of something’s Face. A Khmer-language Akon cover came on the hifi and a man in a striped polo shirt got out a huge cleaver and started hacking the head into small bits: the eye socket, the cheeks, la nuque, which translates to the “nape” but I think of it more as the place where the hoses connected to u in the Matrix, or something, and, a first for me, the soft palate (?) above the jaw but underneath the brain. Another man took the trimmings, organized them, and cut them with a smaller cleaver into bits, and the rest of us hungrily grabbed the bite-sized pieces, and dipped them immediately into a dish of prahoc and, then some soy and chili, black pepper, and tossed them right into the mouth, exhaling like Darth Vader to cool off the steaming meat. The ears came off; they were sliced diagonally into crispy parentheses with a layer of fat making a halo upp-around. The tongue was quickly skinned with a paring knife, and cut into candy-corn sized chunks, and picked up with a lettuce leaf, dipped in the fish sauce, chili, pepper, into the mouth. A metal soup spoon helped scoop out the off-puttingly grey eyeballs; I tried to grab one but an elderly woman beat me to it and I nearly got my hand cut off by a cleaver swipe aimed at a stray piece of jawbone. Then, with a giant, quite disturbing crack, the brains were revealed:

These had been boiled inside the head, in a stock made from the feet of the same animal. By this point, my Khmer hosts seemed suitably impressed with my enthusiasm about this food (which was beyond delicious; it was the intersection of the Communal and the Offal and the Akon that is, essentially, the guiding force behind my entire life) and the butcher casually elbowed some grandmother aside so that I could have first dibs on a lobe of the brain. On his advice, I held a piece of lettuce in my hand, and with chopsticks, placed the brains on the lettuce. Then, I threw a leaf of basil on it and a leaf of torn mint, let it sit for two seconds to allow them to wilt, and then folded the parcel into a loose triangle, dipped it in fish sauce, popped it into the mouth. It was fantastic:

I was so absorbed in this process that I didn’t notice a woman behind me furiously chiffonading more herbs, throwing them in a waiting coral reef of soup bowls, and ladling the veal stock into the bowls along with a sprinkle of chili. Broth! The whole thing felt hysterical and babylonian and, for me, made the whole trip worthwhile. I went back and sat in my plunge pool and looked at Orion’s belt and was Most Satisfied.

(That having been said, I think it’s the combination of rural backyard pig roast and staying at this absurdly fabulous hotel that does it for me; I’ve learned about myself the various forms of roughing it that I still enjoy, and also the various forms of luxury that sooth and oppress — being waited on oppresses; luxury for me is being left alone in a space where one can Help Oneself, as in the Honesty Bar at Hazlitt’s Hotel in London — I never quite know how to behave at, say, a Mandarin Oriental or even a Raffle where it’s inappropriately obsequious Vixens d’Asie hiding around every corner asking if you want another Þingapore Þling or some kind of paraffin wax treatment applied to your person; this Āman business hit the note just right, where the result of service (stuff getting done) was completely shielded from the rituals & social mechanics of same (asking if you need anything, the constant بخشش (baksheesh) performance) — the trade-off, of course, is that you pay handsomely, but one hopes (and takes especial care inasmuch as one can) that the employees are compensated equally handsomely, although I wish there were a way to make sure that’s how the money is working — I’d like to think that opulent, Maharajah-style hotels & restaurants are hideously greedy & medieval about their employees and that minimalist, subtly lemongrass-scented places are effortlessly fair-minded and that each cleaning woman receives, you know, a Le Corbusier-designed concrete box filled with Remuneration.)

Just writing this blog post has made me ravenously hungry, but I am unfortunately in the departures lounge at Siem Reap Airport, domestic terminal, which only has Western food, whose interpretation here is one lonesome looking tunafish ciabatta on a plate in a fridge wrapped in plastic; the “local” food options appear to be only an Oodle of Noodle-like styrofoam goblet. I’m going to wait for Phnom Penh and some kind of Airport Fritter. [Important update: since writing that last sentence, I have arrived in Phnom Penh and have eaten a streetside shrimp fritter.]

Last night I made the mistake of having Asian Dessert; readers of this blog know that I will put most things in my mouth, but Asian Desserts from India up to China and over to Japan all freak me out in a major way; I half-drunkenly tweeted (@nicomuhly; follow me!) that they all seem to be composed of the holy troika of design elements: Squid, Semen, & Jell-o Jigglers and, really, I stand by it. Sometimes there will be a notable exception like gulab-jamun which is merely suspended in semen and can be quite delicious, but really, at the end of the day, come on:

It feels absurd to try to write anything coherent about what I’ve been up to in Cambodia these last few weeks, and I’m not sure if it makes more sense to divide it up by little thoughts or grander gestures or what. So, instead, it’s going to be a series of freeform observations.

My basic itinerary was to spend a few days in Phnom Penh writing, then go to the north, to Battambang, to teach at Phare, and then back to Phnom Penh, and then to Siem Reap for an actual vacation (which, in my universe, means only writing music for three hours a day rather than six), and then back to Phnom Penh, and then “home,” which is a loose appelation for a procedure that takes the better part of 36 hours.

Knowing in advance that Battambang would be sort of Humble Digs, I planned a Fabulous stay in Phnom Penh at the Raffles (which is attractive to me not only because of its colonial history but also because they have a Handsome “FFL” ligature in their logo) and then a Ridiculous, Absurd, Next-Level Fabulous Stay in Siem Reap, because it seemed like the thing to do.

I am relatively cavalier about eating street food because I get Tummy Trouble if I go to London, all it takes is one fucked up dairy smudge to end it all, and here, it’s all hot wok and lime and salted fish and what can go wrong?

I ate a chicken buttflap from a guy in the market. This was the part of the chicken that you peel out of the bottom of the still-warm cast-iron pan when everybody else is admiring the view out of the windows and you are ostensibly tidying up the kitchen, preparing one dishwasher load before you repair to the kluh. It’s a secret, private, chicken bit, here formalized, dunked in a peppery sauce, and served with some kind of palm wine that made me fully high for three hours. I was so out of it, in fact, that I fell asleep in a hammock during an after-dinner drink with some French NGOers (NGEauxers?); as their parting gift to me they partially covered my body with a length of terrycloth. The uncovered bits are now covered with mosquito bites.

I had an amazing linguistic experience speaking French with the kids in Battambang. Their French is a combination of vestigial, appendix-like colonial French (costume de bain) and sassy argot taken from karaoke and T-shirt slogans. My french is a combination of grandma french (costume de bain) and academic, conservatoire solfège & déchiffrage French; all of us were struggling. But I

Things I have eaten in Phnom Penh:
A bowl of noodles off of the street; shredded chicken (?), rice noodles, hot peppers, fish sauce, lime, pressed fish ball, lettuce, fried Noodles with beef and basil, A wonderful curry, unclear contents, undercooked rice, Another street soup, this time with pork, some kind of yellow noodles.

finally, after many years, felt myself settle into a certain fluency with it, emboldened by the fact that I could let a vowel go flaccid without the kids looking at me sideways. Dealing with Parisian ballet people in French is like playing with a kitten: it’s all great and fluffy until you do one weird thing and all of a sudden the claws are out, ripping the angora and drawing blood.

I loved hanging out with NGO people: they have such a cool, inflected English. I had dinner with a bunch of French people and an Italian; English was the language of conversation but it was so peppered with phrases in six or seven different languages (one of the French girls and the Italian man had both spent years in Thailand; Thai injokes skittered across the table) that the whole thing had this delirious channel-surfing feel. Two phrases about Khmer youth violence led to a conversation in Half-Spanish about somebody’s landlady in Tijuana; the Southern French accent of the administrator of the French school in Phnom Penh led to me and the Italian guy mocking Neopolitan accents; the Khmer-speaking French duo talked about the Battambang accent. Very bouncy, decadent language. I et that shit up, too, and envied the wild variety of the Italian man’s fluencies: two years each in Romania, Thailand, Cambodia, Mexico, LA, and Egypt gave him a fierce, streetwise fluency in the languages as well as between them.

Organizing my photos is hard because some of them are very plainly “Things I Saw in Singapore One Afternoon” and others are very plainly me taking pictures of lesbians’ haircuts at the transfers desk at Heathrow. Can’t there be a slightly embarrassing “quick snaps” department, and then a more formal “pictures I’ll send my mom?” I have an entire series entitled “Blond Guys in their 20’s in Airports” that needs to be cross-referenced. I think I need to hire some kind of former Assistant wit Annie Leibowitz or something to come sort through this shit.

iPhoto now has this insane face recognition software, which is kind of amazing — it does a very good job with anybody white. All my black friends it immediately thinks are either each other or, literally, faces on the wall of the Underground Railroad museum in Cincinnati. I am not kidding you. I took a picture of Thomas (who is white) in front of this mural depicting a line of about a hundred freed slaves, and now iPhoto is all, “oh, is THIS your homegirl? is THAT your homegirl?” In other news, it thinks I look like my boyfriend #thatsracist #thatshomophobic.

One of the interesting things about this kind of mixed-purpose travel (as in, half decadent vacationey thing, some volunteer teaching) is the relationship of One to One’s Hosts. In Battambang, my host was a handsome, central-casting French dancer (as in, pouty lips, six foot two, graceful hands) who moved to Cambodia two years ago to administrate this wonderful performing arts organization. An observation. Sometimes it’s nice to navigate cultural differences all by oneself. I loved how the first time I went to Iceland, nobody coached me on the various degrees of mandatory nudity required to perform the pool ritual. As much as I wished for a native informant, I figured it out. I loved how the first time I went to school in Italy, I basically was cast into my first day without preamble; my mother walked me there, we met the teacher, and off I went. I like the strange new rituals of a new place: figuring out where to boil the water for the toothpaste, knowing to get an Oyster™ card in advance of rush hour, etc. That shit is hard, but it pays off in the end. Now. One thing I wish I had a little more coaching about is vis. Crazy Toilet Situations in Cambodia. I can deal with a simple squat toilet, I’ve dealt with the lota/lotah pot situation in India. (An aside: get into Lotah Stories, link here, it’s insanely fascinating, and I realize that I don’t keep medicine in my bathroom for a similar reason, anyway, moving on ) Even my school in Italy had squatty places! French toilets sometimes have the Hoses of Mysterie. But beloveds. The toilets in rural Cambodia confused your girl. Basically, you walk in, and there’s a giant concrete sarcophagus filled with water, with a pail floating in it, with a handle on the pail. And then there’s a hole in the ground, some distance from the sarcophagus. So the idea I guess is that you (not to put too fine a point on it) poo in the hole, and then use the pail to wash not only the hole, but also your Own Self. Or perhaps you were meant to have brought Turlet Peipur? None of this was made even remotely clear to me. Also the size of the sarcophagus was confusing because it implied a Great Volume of potential users? So I arrived in the room, with the sarcophagus and the hole and the bucket, and being an neurotic, my head started doing the wolf, sheep, and cabbage game tripletime. Help us navigate this. It’s not that I’m too proud to poo in a hole, but I’d love to know the Proper Way to Do It before y’all start banging on the door talmbout **loudly shouted khmer invective**.

More to come, including pictures, tomorrow. I have been on an extreme Angkor Temple Binge; I think a blog is not really the place to post iPhone pictures of antiquity but it might happen.

I’m writing this from a hotel in Phnom Penh; I’m taking a few weeks here alone in order to recharge after six weeks of touring, and six months of basically exclusively collaborative projects. In the spirit of speedy recharge blogpost (with the promise of more detailed observations to come):

1. Everybody download Jónsi’s first single from Go, his upcoming solo project, on which I was a hardcore collaborator arranger conductor. It’s a lot of piccolo.

2. I love that even in the Far East I can’t escape reading about, and being obsessed with, Alice Tully Hall.

3. I spent an afternoon in Singapore last week and am obsessed with Hawker Centers! It’s like food courts from heaven. I ate chicken rice, which is poached chicken, chicken-scented rice, and assorted hots-sauces.

4. In Providence, where I went to high school, it was a lot of Cambodian and Hmong immigrants. I’m freaking out here because the flavor of the fermented fish paste is something you can’t get in New York (or maybe you can but it’s not the same as Vietnamese fish sauce) and it’s everywhere and delicious.

5. Somebody needs to overhaul Khmer transliteration. It’s not tonal, like Vietnamese, but just in the ten minute cab ride from the airport I realized that final consonants are total fabrications (French ones?) even on the word Khmer — listen to just this basic dialogue and you’ll see that words end with Vowelled Glissandi rather than consonants, anyway, I’m going to get 2 tha bottom of it.