It's Friday in many time zones! If someone wants to score this playlist (+1 for each Belgian, -5 for each album purchased at a yard sale or the $1.99 bin, +3 for each album you own and haven't listened to in ages, etc.) feel free.

1. Fairport Convention - Jewel in the Crown - The Islands
2. dEUS - In a Bar, Under the Sea - Serpentine
3. 2020 - Outside Looking In - Punk-O-Rama Vol. 7
4. W.A. Mozart - Requiem KV 626 - Offertorium, Domine Jesu
5. Fairport Convention - Jewel in the Crown - Naked Highwayman
   Statistics! Pfah!
6. Ben Folds Five - Whatever & Ever Amen - Brick
7. Pixies - Doolittle - There Goes My Gun
8. Cherish the Ladies - The Girls Won't Leave the Boys Alone - The Queen of Connemara / Carraroe Jig / The Lilting Fisherman
9. Flook - Rubai - G.D.'s / Hooper's Loop
10. Gustav Holst - BBC Philharmonic, The Planets - Uranus, the Magician

Modest Mouse reminds me of the Pixies, but without any of the goodness that flows from Kim Deal. Maybe they could build a robot Kim Deal! Or call in a guy with a bass saxophone! Or Zombie Billie Holliday! Or put some duct tape over the lead singer's mouth, leaving a hole just large enough for a kazoo!

1. Why did they not have caramel apples coated in M&Ms and/or cookie crumbs and/or coconut when I was a kid? Is this a new innovation in candy, or a cultural problem with the Midwest, or what?
2. No one at Francis's is answering the question that obviously follows up a question like this:
   

   Have I also mentioned that, cussing aside, I've always been sentimental about yuletide, even when I was really too young to actually be sentimental about anything?

   So I'll bring it up here. Just how old is old enough to actually be sentimental?

3. The Posada was lovely; the incongruities of candlelight on busy stretches of Colorado Blvd. were more than balanced out by the gut-wrenching combination of Architecture! Music! Death! at the entrance to several churches. Thanks to all who donated; the organizers weren't completely on the internet ball and didn't send any notices of internet donations until Thursday evening-ish, but I know of at least $50 - way more than I was expecting! Anyone who gave and would like a cute thank-you postcard, send me your address.
4. I bought myself an album of Christmas music the other day. It claims to be chock full of authentic-esque Medieval and Renaissance yuletide hymns, and the cover features a guy in a doublet and sunglasses. Early music with the fashion sensibilities of a cheesy 80s movie! What's not to like about that, particularly when it's in the $1.99 bin?
   It doesn't quite live up to either the pre-Baroque or the 2020s, but at least the generic arrangements are of Gloucestershire Wassail rather than Here We Come A-Wassailing.
5. Happy Hanukkah, to those of you who don't remember; also to those of us who only remembered because it's on our office calendar, along with the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and Eddie Vedder's birthday.

1. Via Three-Toed Sloth via Crooked Timber, it's a cat research review.
2. Saturday night, I See Hawks in LA was live at my old dorm. I'd never heard them, or of them, before, but they were billed as "bluegrass/folk/rock" so I got all excited. Of course I forgot that these words mean different things to people not raised by an old-time string band. In the rest of the world, "bluegrass/folk/rock" means "country for a different demographic" and not "Fairport Convention but with banjos and verve".
   
   But, after getting over a deep-seated sense of righteous indignation at a world that refuses to conform to my taxonomy, I quite enjoyed the show. Lead singer Robert Waller employed that classic bluegrassy style on the calling out across a parking lot side of singing; it worked most of the time, though the slower harmonic numbers didn't get the careful blending they needed. It was a stripped-down ensemble, two guitars (dobros?) and bass, which supported the tunes (and they were fun tunes, a few quite catchy, with words and everything!) but really cried for ornamentation. Had the fiddler and drums been along - had I known there was a fiddler and drums - I probably would've snagged a CD. Maybe next time.
3. Persimmons. Yum.
4. My awesome backyard neighbor has been hinting that I should try my hand at prickly pear jelly from her prickly pears, so I could share the results. I gave it a go, and aside from having little prickles floating round the kitchen for a week, I burned my thumb on the hot jelly syrup last night. Rather than finishing the jelly anti-botulism preservation, then, I held ice on my hand for a couple hours (sugar syrup is hot). Now I've got three little jars of jelly (which really did gel!) in the fridge, rather than in the cupboard where I wanted them, and a bandaid on my thumb where I didn't want it at all.
   
   Prickly pear jelly: tasty, but not at all worth the trouble.
5. I just now cut my finger on a yogurt lid. I will not rest until all ten fingers have bandaids!

1. The Benefits of Singing Christmas Carols To Yourself While Driving
   1. Nobody objects when you change keys in the middle of "O Holy Night".
   2. Similarly, nobody objects when you change languages in the middle of a carol, or tries to tell you that "wie zauber zoom om winterzheit" isn't perfect German. You may assert with perfect impunity that Greensleeves is, in fact, the child laid to rest on Mary's lap.
   3. Requests for "Gloucestershire Wassail" will never be met with a rousing rendition of "Here We Come A-Wassailing".
   4. Nobody ever gets sick of singing two-and-a-half verses of "Gloucestershire Wassail" repeated nonstop for twenty minutes and asks to do "the Twelve Days of Christmas" instead, hurrah! I am now very certain of the colors of my ale and toast.

So as a feel-good wrap-up to our careers in the illustrious instrumental music program here at Tech, the directors commissioned an arrangement of Joplin's 'A Strenuous Life' -- for all of the graduating instrumentalists.

• 5 trumpets
• 3 flutes
• 2 violins
• 1 harpsichord
• 6 hands, 1 piano
• 2 hands, no piano
• 2 clarinets
• timpani

And the arrangement ends with a horse whinny for each of the trumpeters. The horse whinny, for better or worse, is what makes or breaks a novelty trumpet player. Connaisseurs of the art will recognize the need for a strong flutter tongue and a good collection of mutes (see The Novelty Cornetist for many effective combinations of these two basic techniques) but when push comes to shove, the masses want their horsies and that's all there is to it.

My horse whinny is pretty lousy. I'm too loud at the end, when I leave the high register, and I tend to shake at the wrong frequency. I plan to compensate for this with an audience of academic city slickers. It should be good fun.

1. A giant lava lamp would probably convince me to visit eastern Washington. I just hope these people realize that building a giant lava lamp is not going to attract the sort of genteel RV drivers who visit the nearby Grand Coulee Dam...
2. If I'd known being a lesbian would get me out of gym when I was in 8th grade, I would've pretended to be one before you could say "heteronormative". But it's nice that there are people willing to sue over these sorts of things.
3. I saw a guy make music from feedback on his Powerbook mic last night. I use the word "music" in a loose way here, as his performance had slightly less structure than your average 5th grade jam session, but it was certainly a performance and damned entertaining.
   This was in the context of a grand festival of avant garde electro-acoustical nonsense, an evening full of people who sat in the dark behind their computers and pressed buttons. Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I hate going to shows where I can't see the performers (unless, possibly, there's a dance floor, but even then I can only spend so much time oscillating between dancing and gasping for breath); I wish all the trendy computer-assisted musicians would hurry up and find a good way to amplify and display their movements.
4. Did I mention that I've been back at classes for a week? I have. And there was no snow while I was home, which was absolutely heartbreaking, but that's life. At least my garden didn't die while I was gone.
5. Good night, and sweet dreams to you all, especially if it happens to be morning when you read this. I'm going to bed.

So here's how it works in the Caltech band: everyone takes turns on the high parts, so we can blow our brains out on Shostakovitch without worrying about painful, painful consequences twelve Sousa marches later. Or that's how it works in theory, and during most rehearsals. At the concert, of course, everyone just plays whatever part is in front of them, and no one admits that they're supposed to play the top part of the Sousa march.

My lip hurts.

On the other hand, the soloist brought in a contrabass saxophone. If your bandwidth is burning a hole in your pocket, it's worth taking a listen, while I head off to find a nice beer.

It's a background exhaustion you don't even notice, coupled with the throbbing stress headache of the soul that only comes from four-hour exams on which you do not do very well, that makes this time of year so special. So now, being done with all but one midterm, when I should be working on those two late homework sets I deprioritized this weekend, I'm listening to the crown jewels of Song Fight!, hoping for something mindboggling. The theory is that contestants get a song title, and have two weeks to write and record something grand. The results are mixed - I keep hoping I'll stumble upon some method for selecting only wacky, so-bad-they're-good entries rather than mundane, crap-garage-band entries, but thus far no luck.

The other great thing about exam weeks is remembering to appreciate showers - nothing feels quite so good as a shower when you're trying to procrastinate. But - and this is a huge but - the Salon Selectives sneak has struck again! I am left with neither shampoo nor conditioner and my hair is getting greasy and tangly. Those hair-care products were given to me by my mother, as a Christmas present, you cold-hearted fucknose!

So I'm really truly going to fill a decoy bottle with bleach this time. Has anyone else resorted to tricks like this? Has it worked? Do you have any advice?

[link via livingtech]

I would have been happiest not knowing that Sousa used time signatures beyond simple cut time. Knowing this, I would still have been happy had I never had to see, hear, or worse, play such a monstrosity. This piece makes me want to reach into a gigantic sack, pull out a kitten, and throw it at my stand partner. It makes me want to cover the entire brass section with a thick blanket of sad, frightened kittens.

It even ruins the March of the Cute Little Wood Sprites.