Nico
Muhly,

Yesterday was crazy! My friend Christian Lane, an organist, was going to be premiering a piece of mine, a chorale prelude on Lasst Uns Erfreuen. So, I trotted up there, and heard the first half of the concert, which was excellent. A dutch boy called Hank Heijink played the theorbo. Then, I had to go sound-check for the Works and Process series at the Guggenheim that I was speaking at. I turned up about two hours too early. So then I was on the Upper East Side alone with two hours to kill. I wandered around and decided that I should probably eat; my experience of “functions” on the Upper East Side usually ends with my drinking too much white wine out of sheer loneliness and despair; a little hand roll will offset that, I reasoned. So I ambled over to a place called Ooki Sushi, which sounds simultaneously pornographic and cute, a particular hallmark of my understanding of the Japanese tongue. I ordered a so-called “Out-of-control” roll (I am not making it up) and resumed reading Dr. Miklós Nyiszli’s Auschwitz””A doctor’s eyewitness account, which is a really amazingly strange documentation of Nyizli’s (a Hungarian Jewish prisoner) own work in the dissection laboratory under Dr. Mengele. I can’t say that I “recommend” it specifically.

Back to the Goog! Dancers were nice to me. Everybody was nice to me. I started speaking. I think I was coherent. And then I looked out into the audience and whom did I see sitting on the balcony? Darlin’ Charles Wuorinen! You may remember him from either this post or other fabulous rumor-bloggz. I saw him milling around the reception afterwards and I thought about introducing myself (there is a 10 in 10 chance that he totally loathed my music), and then I also thought about having my very very tall (and straight) plus-one try to make out with him while I’d clap my hands and chant, “Hodie in terra canunt angeli; Lætantur archangeli”. But then he vanished back into the sea of people and I lost my nerve. Next time, though, girl, it is ON. We should have a walk-off or something. Or at least our cats should.

I was happy, also, because I told my Icelandic Houseguests that they should eat at Il Buco, a great Italian restaurant in NoHo, and they enjoyed it; is there a worse thing in the world than recommending a place to somebody and then they go there and it’s all about poison guacamole and inattentive service? Il Buco famously has a pig roast at the end of the summer; I finally managed to go this year (it’s always some completely random time in the middle of the week) ““ click on the picture of the pig on Bond street for a close-upp. I went to a friend’s birthday party at that bar “Heather’s,” which my friend had taken over for the evening and was serving a delicious concoction of wild boar with pomegranate seeds and wild rice.