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:

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)

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.

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.

Damn. Also worth noting is on the Le Bernardin site, linked above, how once you click through the horrific Buddha-Bar-ass music at the beginning, you get to this wonderful section filled with the ambient noise of a busy restaurant. Click on “cuisine” and you can hear the noises of people in the kitchen, including the aboyeur shouting out the orders for Halibut and Turbot etc. – a great site.

And then slightly more serious:

So good. In other news, on Chris Cosentino’s website, a recipe for preparing a Giant Humboldt Squid. He is great because his website is basically a tribute to Offal, 1, and 2, he is from Rhode Island. Click around his site for a minute and see what’s up. His image navigation is way more complicated than could be expected; I like it. I’m happy to see that he has a recipe for Turkey Lung, which is a thing I et this one time in the old meat market of Testaccio in Rome.

Here’s some Byrd:

William Byrd O Lord, Make Thy Servant Elizabeth
The Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips

O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our Queen to rejoice in thy strength:
give her her heart’s desire, and deny not the request of her lips;
but prevent her with thine everlasting blessing,
and give her a long life, even for ever and ever. Amen.

There are a few moments in this little anthem where you have simultaneously sounding D-natural and D-flat: a delicious relic of an age when that stuff was allowed in voice-leading. It creates a sour moment that quickly passes, like a caper in a tomato sauce:

Maybe I should start a website like the Burger King one called “Caper Virgins Dot Com.” And it’ll be these pictures of me going to, like, Benighted Places of the Earthe Where They Knowe Not the Caper with a tiny butane stove, dishing out little bowls of caponata or something.

I’ve been debating – now that I’m in New York for a few weeks in a row – some deep salting and curing. In the wonderful book “Beyond Nose to Tail” by Fergus Hendersdóttir (which, I should say, has the place of a holy book in my life) there is a recipe for “Trotter Gear,” which is essentially stewed pig foot and mirepoix, which you then allow to gelatinize and use later. The last paragraph of the recipe reads: “You now have Trotter Gear, nuduals of giving, wobbly trotter captured in a splendid jelly. One can sense its potential even now.” Then, one is advised to construct a salad of Snail, Trotter, Sausage, and Chickpeas, or, Pot-Roast Bacon, Trotter, and Prune (the recipe for which calls for a large dollop of duck fat). Yes, please.

Whoa. In two other pieces of news, I got a lot of, like, dismissive and angry email about yesterday’s post in which I talked about a feeling of annoyance about an article in the Times re: surrogate mothers. Some of these comments include: “That’s the problem with blogs: too many opinions and too much prattery. Stick to your day job, Nico. G’bye.” and a kind of great one which is, “You are entirely out of your depth.” It’s interesting, this idea of An Area Where One Is Allowed to Be At and Other Areas Where One Is Out Of One’s Depth So To Be At. I guess my day job would only allow me to post music that I had written? Or maybe I’d be sufficiently above water if I posted music by other people, too? Even though I’m not a critic? Also I’m not entirely sure of what to make of somebody posting a comment on a blog saying that “that” is the problem with blogs: it’s kind of too meta for me. So, in the spirit of not getting into some whole fight here, I’m going to write about other people’s music.

It’s Advent! Here is, traditionally, the first piece of Official Advent Music you get to hear: an adaptation of Palestrina’s adaptation of Aspiciens a longe. This is such exciting music, especially if you imagine it being performed from a distance – like, behind the congregation. Very anticipatory.

I look from afar: And lo, I see the power of God coming,and a cloud covering the whole earth. Go ye out to meet him and say: Tell us, art thou he that should come to reign over thy people Israel?

High and low, rich and poor, one with another, Go ye out to meet him and say: Hear, O thou Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep, Tell us, art thou he that should come? Stir up thy strength, O Lord, and come to reign over thy people Israel.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. I look from afar: And lo, I see the power of God coming, and a cloud covering the whole earth. Go ye out to meet him and say: Tell us, art thou he that should come to reign over thy people Israel?

I Look from afar (adapted from Palestrina)
A Procession With Carols on Advent Sunday
King’s College, Cambridge

And: did everybody buy the Final Fantasy EP? Do it now! It’s so great. Here is just a wee excerpt:

Final Fantasy The Butcher from Spectrum - 14th Century

Couples often erect a barricade of privacy around the process to avoid the questions from friends and family members, and their ceaseless, useless volley of suggestions: You just need to relax. Did you try acupuncture? Soy milk makes you infertile. You’re in front of your computer too much. What’s the problem with all you career girls? Did this cycle work? Are you pregnant this time? How many shots? Where? A low whistle: Boy, you must really want a child. You must really want a child. As if that were a bad thing.

Well, sugar lumps, you can always just adopt one, like, how hell of gay people aren’t even allowed to do now in Arkansas. In her article, the idea of adoption only comes up as something other people do. Adoptive mothers, as it happens, were the most supportive of her when she was feeling things like: “Would I really be his mother? Was the key to motherhood carrying the baby?” Now, if I were an adoptive mother and this lady called me up talking about, “Would my child grow up and shout, ‘You can’t tell me what to do — you didn’t even give birth to me!’?” I’m sure I would have cussed her out before God, AT&T, and everybody. I was directed to read Dan Savage’s article, in which he writes about Arkansas:

That state’s Proposed Initiative Act No. 1, approved by nearly 57 percent of voters last week, bans people who are “cohabitating outside a valid marriage” from serving as foster parents or adopting children. While the measure bans both gay and straight members of cohabitating couples as foster or adoptive parents, the Arkansas Family Council wrote it expressly to thwart “the gay agenda.” Right now, there are 3,700 other children across Arkansas in state custody; 1,000 of them are available for adoption. The overwhelming majority of these children have been abused, neglected or abandoned by their heterosexual parents.

See, this is where I feel a huge cultural disconnect between these people (Arkansas people + Surrogate Mother People) and me. If there are 3,700 (!) kids in state custody in Arkansas alone, why would you even begin the process of thinking about going through 11 cycles of I.V.F. and dealing with a surrogate and paying her ass $60,000!? It’s a total scam. Then the idea that this whole state is saying, right, well, a child would be better with married parents than with a single parent, OR with unmarried couples both straight and gay? Obviously it’s code for “no gay adoption,” but it’s actually much more sinister than that when you think about it for longer than ten seconds. What is the vision of the world that these people are espousing? If they’re so upstanding, where are the 3,700 wholesome, non-toothless, married couples in Arkansas? Is 2009 going to be like supermarket sweep, with families adopting these Arkönsubörn at high speeds? Good luck with that. Anyway, the thing in the times is pretty wild and well worth reading. I read it once and wasn’t bothered too much, and then the second time started freaking out at paragraphs like:

The bigger Cathy was, the more I realized that I was glad — practically euphoric — I was not pregnant. I was in a daze of anticipation, but I was also secretly, curiously, perpetually relieved, unburdened from the sheer physicality of pregnancy. If I could have carried a child to term, I would have. But I carried my 10-pound dog in a BabyBjörn-like harness on hikes, and after an hour my back ached.

Beg pardon? What 10-pound dog? What hikes? Or how about:

After the second-month checkup, we walked home to my apartment for lunch. We talked about how she had played on her college tennis team. She was an accompanist for a children’s choir and brought her piano sheet music so she could practice. She played our Steinway while I got lunch.

There’s something about that sentence: “She played our Steinway while I got lunch” that reads like Gertrude Stein, first of all, but then when I realized that their little lunch date wasn’t going to descend into an afternoon of foxy boxing and tribadism, I started shouting at the laptop in my mind: “I still don’t know what dog you’re talking about” and “I bet you can’t even PLAY that piano!” and of course, roe and behold:

I stood outside the living room, holding a tray of tuna sandwiches and listening. I was numb. I can hardly play the piano. I never played on my college tennis team. Back in those days, I was smoking and dyeing my hair black. For Pete’s sake, I thought, this woman can do all those things — and have my baby.

And again, it’s like, she can have your baby because her womb goeth, whereas yours goeth not. Shudder. Go to Arkansas and grab one of those babies and write a travel journal. In the department of writing about childbirth, while reading this Alex K. article I couldn’t stop thinking about Daniel Raeburn’s article from a couple of years ago in the New Yorker talking about his stillborn daughter, which contains some of the most heartbreaking and intense writing:

Someone once said that William Carlos Williams was sitting by the bed of one of his patients when she died. He turned to look out the window and saw a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside white chickens. I saw a salt-stained sidewalk under the funnel of a street lamp, a beige plastic armrest beside a blue blanket, my left foot in a black boot slipping in my wife’s red blood. Irene was in the breech position and she came forth rump first. Our midwife said, “Push,” and Rebekah pushed, and pushed again, pushed so mightily that at the apex of her effort the red hole in the center of Irene’s exposed butt opened and a black turd slithered out. Rebekah expelled Irene in a final burst, and I watched the prunelike baby, embalmed in gore and ichor, flop into the hands of the midwife. The nurse snipped the bobbing umbilical cord and whisked the body out of sight. The nurse who’d induced Rebekah had tried to warn me. “The tone,” she’d said. “After they’ve been dead for a few days, they don’t have the tone. The tone is missing.” What she meant was that my girl would feel lifeless. She had no blood pressure and so her face splayed flat in my hand, like a deliquescent tomato. I placed my thumbs above Irene’s eyelids and eased them upward, intending to look into her eyes, but the milky, unfathomable slivers awed me and I stopped. The unknitted plates of her skull grated and clicked as I cupped my palm and rounded her face to its likeness, which I recognized. It was not like looking into a mirror. Facing a mirror you see merely your own countenance; facing your child you finally understand how everyone else has seen you.

Gah. I remember exactly where I was when I read that, too.

I am right now in Iceland, happily working away on a mini-vacation in Snæfellsness. It’s only three hours away from Reykjavík but it feels like a whole universe away. I am really feeling the severity here: