Yes, about wishes for the new year of 2025. I am absurdly behind on my postings.
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
New Year directives
July 25, 2025Bad history
July 20, 2025A while back (7/10, to be exact), two Sacred Harp singers came by my house to pick up the printer’s plate for SH99 Gospel Trumpet in the edition we’ve been singing from for 34 years (a wonderful object that I was giving away to reduce my household belongings dramatically), and like the bright-eyed Mariner ensnaring the wedding guest trapped on his stone (who cannot choose but hear), I engaged them in an hour or so of animated chat, to relieve my loneliness, after which we sang three songs from that Sacred Harp.
In e-mail afterwards, thanking them for their friendship and forbearance, I asked them a strange question:
While you were with me, did you notice anything odd about one of my hands (my right hand, specifically)? Or about how I used my right arm?
One replied:
we both noticed several fingers were bent. I assumed this was from arthritis, so if there’s more of a story I don’t know it or I’ve forgotten.
I then told them a story that I was convinced I’d posted about, on Language Log or this blog, but apparently not, so now I’m now telling it to you too.
Maybe it’s a plant thing
July 19, 2025In my 7/14 posting “Making a mango crazy in bed”, a surprising mishearing on my part. The speaker said:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy?
But what I heard was:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a mango crazy?
The (sex-infused) mangos just dropped in from the sky, bafflingly, with no justification I could see. (Intended [mæn.go] and perceived [mæŋgo] are very close acoustically, but mango makes no sense in the context. )
Then on the 17th it was kapok. Maybe it’s a plant thing.
The printing plate
July 9, 2025A message to SF-peninsula Sacred Harp singers today, in the midst of a morning of complex life arrangements:
Some years ago I was given the printer’s plate for SH99 Gospel Trumpet in the 1991 Denson Revision (and have it on a display stand). A very touching gift from my singing community. I am now obliged to dispose of almost all my belongings, to reduce them to a small collection that will fit into a small assisted living facility apartment, saving just those things I need to continue the essays I post on my blog. This task is taking months, involving many thousands of objects; it is emotionally devastating; and it goes slowly because I am so disabled, and have become more so each day as the work damages my hands further. But, bit by bit, I am eroding the mountain of things. The plate for SH99 must go; I hope that some singer would love it as much as I have. Would come and take it.
A very few items shimmer with personal meaning for me; for them I’ve tried to find a truly suitable donor just for this one thing, and I’ve had some great successes. Now this, going to a married couple of long-time singers.
Now, for you, some of the back story, starting with a photo.
I am the rose for Sharon
June 22, 2025Yesterday, a brief and multiply allusive birthday poem for my friend Sharon (“A rose for Sharon”, on this blog here), along with the birthday gift to her of a big spathiphyllum plant, which should soon send up some of its sexy flowers. Various associations floated in my mind along with the plants and their symbolic eroticism.
Molly Bloom and her soliloquy of yes, but directed to a woman. And, overwhelmingly, the singer of the Song of Solomon 2:1, a woman who declares that she is (figuratively) the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys and goes on into (heterosexual) erotic verse from the woman’s point of view (which can of course be repurposed as directed to a woman), ending with a surprising celebration of spring (in places where winter is the rainy season), suggesting a springtime of her body as well as the season:
My beloved spake, and said unto me,
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone.
And from that I’m taken to shapenote music and to factual questions about the plant the rose of Sharon and about Sharon the place from which this plant (and the Sharons of this world) got its name.
The Pythagorean Impromptu
June 18, 2025A long (7:30 pm to 4:52 am) and pleasant (literally refreshing) sleep last night, after a long and difficult (2 am to 7:30 pm) day yesterday; I’ll put off a report on yesterday to the end of this posting, which is instead about how that sleep came to an end, in a half-waking reverie during which a sleep-final story dream morphed into the Pythagorean Impromptu, a dream in which Danny Kaye sang the Pythagorean Theorem, in the form
The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides
(which is the version the actual Danny Kaye sang in the 1958 movie Merry Andrew, and, yes, I do remember this from 1958; I can also reproduce from memory Kaye’s
The pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true
from The Court Jester of 1955, though I have trouble working the flagon with the dragon into Kaye’s final aide-memoire) — the Pythagorean Theorem, sung to the tune of Franz Schubert’s Impromptu Op. 142 No. 2, a piano piece that I happen to have played in concerts when I was a teenager, but which, more important, was actually playing (in a wonderfully warm performance by Mitsuko Uchida) on the Apple Music in my bedroom as I came out of that reverie into consciousness, when I had the sense to recognize that the words of “Pythagorean Theorem” fit reasonably well into Schubert’s melody for that Impromptu at the beginning, but that the marriage of this text and tune rapidly comes unglued, and then I was fully awake, cleaned myself up for the day, and discovered that my blood pressure had returned to excellent, after several days of anxiety-driven somewhat elevated bp, in a bounce-back that accorded with the delightful Pythagorean Impromptu dream .
Zapf, Zagat, and Zimmerman
June 16, 2025The morning names of 6/14, all Z names — well, I’m a Z-person, and I notice — all of which were in my mind from recent mentions on Facebook
of Zapf dingbats (named for the typeface designer Hermann Zapf)
of the Zagat restaurant guides (now taken over by Google)
and of the singer-songwriter Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing MN (who became famous as a very young man in NYC under the name Bob Dylan and is more or less constantly in the news)
Morning has broken
June 7, 2025Praise for the singing!
Praise for the morning!
— “Morning Has Broken”
Today, Saturday, awaking officially at 4:52, but lying for maybe 20 minutes in that wonderful half-waking state, with genuinely useful ideas chasing around my head, while an Istomin / Stern / Rose recording of the Brahms trios for piano. violin, and cello (for some reason, in reverse order, ending with No. 1) played on my Apple Music — fabulously passionate, exuberant in bursts, and musically complex. The Brahms is Morning A.
One thing that I worked on in my head was a kvetch from Michael Newman (on Facebook on 6/1, with a response from me) that I didn’t get to post on yesterday, because yesterday was largely a great trial, following on the events reported in my 6/5 posting “An indescribable day”. But now I will introduce Michael and show our exchange; that’s Morning B. Which comes with the promise of a future posting celebrating Michael, singing his praises.
Then, after morning cleanup, I went to my worktable, to turn off the Apple Music, check my vital signs (good), and turn on the tv to MSNBC, which immediately presented me with this panel:
Harvard University Professor Maya Jasanoff and Ankush Khardori join The Weekend to discuss why President Tr**p keeps losing in his war against the nation’s oldest college
In which I was once again impressed with Khardori, who came across as extraordinarily bright, incisive, tough and down-to-earth, and surprisingly charming. Also, to my famously queer eye, definitely sexy; he’s Morning C.
After him, Bob Eckstein’s newsletter The Bob popped up, in a special French edition yesterday, to cap things off with a wonderfully silly cartoon — Morning D.
Morning was then broken, and the day shambled on, with variously astonishing, distressing, and alarming news breaking in one wave after another.
Instruments of death
May 23, 2025Today’s Bizarro brings us the percussion section of a marching band, a section composed entirely of Grim Reapers — yes, Reaper percussion, portmanteaued to Reapercussion:
Wayno’s title: “Halftime Dirge” — since they’re marching on a (US) football field (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Morning Italian jobs
May 20, 2025(This will, somewhat surprisingly, eventually veer into men’s bodies and some man-on-man sex, recounted in street language, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest; I’m sorry, but not even the best of Verdi opera and Italian tennis can quite counterbalance naked guys going at it with one another)
Today’s morning names were Rigoletto and Sinner, and for a change I knew exactly why they were in my head: Rigoletto is the name of an opera by Verdi (from which the magnificent quartet Bella figli dell’amore was playing on my music feed during my 2 am whizz break); and Sinner is the surname of someone who turns out to be an astoundingly famous Italian tennis player but was known to me only from a Sergio Scalise Facebook posting yesterday in which this Sinner was identified as a great champion who does commercials for De Cecco, Lavazza, and La Roche — I am, famously, deeply ignorant of sports; and also, despite Sergio’s occasional attempts at educating me, neglectfully ignorant of matters social, cultural, and political in today’s Italy (I’m not merely not au courant, but actually inert). This is Jannik Sinner; I had never laid eyes on him until this morning (I’ve been entertained by a recent Lavazza commercial, but it’s one for the American audience and doesn’t have Jannik Sinner in it). I go on at such length about JS because my readers from or connected to Italy will find it impossible to believe that I had no idea who Sinner — that athletic and cultural phenom — is.
Now, the coming program: about Rigoletto, briefly; about Jannik Sinner, at greater length, with a note about Lavazza coffee commercials; a side note about Google searches; and then a raunchy digression on the Italian jobs of the title.