Sunday, January 11, 2009

Excuse me, madam. Did you forget something?

So after that last vaguely apologetic post, blog topics (and time) are falling into my lap. let's see how long this lasts....
Last night, NYChoirgirl and I went to the Lincoln Center for a New York Philharmonic concert. We have a subscription, and didn't want to waste the tickets, but the snow that was still falling was making us waver. We decided to toss a coin. I like to think of coin tosses as an opportunity for the universe to weigh in. Last night, the universe told us to go. So we went.
The concert was up and down. I was baffled by the decision to program a Mozart Piano Concerto between the premier of a (1980) work by Tristan Murail and Messiaen's Exotic Bird Song composition, and the pianist's making a complete hash of the Mozart didn't help (his tempos and phrasings were eratic and his finger work was downright inaccurate!). But the Debussy, as ever, was sublime!
But it was on the way home, I'm convinced, that the universes motivation for sending us out into the snow was revealed. On the N train from Times Square, we encountered five people participating in the annual pantsless subway ride. At 10:30 at night. On the way to Queens. In the snow. It was utterly surreal.

Friday, January 09, 2009

Hiatus

This blog has been in a kind of a hiatus for the last few months, mainly because the semester, and all that goes with it, has gotten a bit on top of me. I don't know whether it will improve in the coming semester, but for now I don't really feel much like writing. Perhaps I'm a little burned out. Anyway, soon enough I'll be in serious writing mode (the proposal really must be finished by the end of this semester, and then it's on to the dissertation) and perhaps I'll begin posting again then. In the mean time, I'm going to enjoy the rest of my holiday, and the casual reading and copious crocheting and knitting that goes with it.