[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt #011
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27 November, 2020
This is the eleventh issue of the newsletter.
They seem to keep getting later. This one is part of a chain of events in which I’m trying to make a beef stew. I hope to actually cook it overnight. But I’ve paused the process so I can put this out. Fortunately, I knew before today what I would write about, though I changed my mind on one item when I read the pope’s op-ed this morning.
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Onward (listening to Gnidrolog)!
Contents
This Week’s Posts
Friday, November 20th, 2020
A thunderclap awakens me at five minutes to five AM. Torrential rain quickly follows. Through my windows, it sounds like a wall of white noise, joined by other plonks and hisses. At five after five, just as abruptly, it stops. I go back to sleep. I wake up again a few hours later. It’s earlier than I’d like, but we’ve managed to work out a half hour slot when the meeting place outside the House of a Hundred Grandmothers is available. I can get together with my family. The weather remains uncertain. If rain starts, there’s a backup meeting place in their auditorium. We sit and talk. Some technology I’ve set up for them is working. That’s good. After the half hour, I take a bus to the mall. Inside, one take-away coffee shop is open. I haven’t had much of a breakfast. I get a muffin and coffee to eat on a bench outdoors. The muffin is messy. I get chocolate on my mask. When I go back inside, I pick up another package of masks at the pharmacy. I should keep some spares with me. Almost everything on the ground floor is closed. The top floor is dark. The escalators up to it are off, but the ones to the basement are working. Nothing that I can think of should be open there, other than the parking exit. I’m surprised to see that the computer store, appliance store, and home center are functioning. I don’t know why they’re allowed to be open. I go into each of them. I think of getting a UPS, but I wouldn’t be able to carry home both the unit and the groceries that I need. I head up to the supermarket. I look for ingredients for a beef stew. The recipe calls for tomato paste. There are signs on the shelves for it, but the containers all say tomato sauce. I finally find two packages of tomato paste. I get them. Later, my family tells me that laws have changed. Since much of what had been labeled as tomato paste has added sugar, it now has to be labeled as tomato sauce. I get what ingredients I can find. I drag them home. Once in the house, I sit down at my desk. I doze off, listening to thunder. It doesn’t rain again until after night falls.
Saturday, November 21st, 2020
The cleaner is coming this afternoon. She hasn’t been here since August. I really need help about once each month, but we’ve been delayed by the lockdowns and all that. I texted her a few days ago. I’m tempted to warn her that she might need a hazmat suit, but she might not know the word. This morning, I sleep later than I expect, get up, get breakfast, then sleep some more at my desk. I don’t get outdoors at all. Rain falls for much of the day. The sounds of rain and thunder lull me into inaction. I do a bit of cleaning on my own after I eat lunch, putting away stuff that needs a clear place to go. I run the vacuum robot, but it doesn’t work as well as it usually has. It drops some things after picking them up and acts as if it’s bumping up against things that I can’t see. Before I run it next time, I’ll have to flip it over and see if I find what’s making it do this. I have some ideas. I set up my keyboard to record another 75-minute solo, but don’t have time before the cleaner arrives. The music has to wait until later, along with my laundry and other obligations. A busy evening awaits, then on into the week.
Sunday, November 22nd, 2020
The burger joint is empty when I come in. No customers are waiting. No burgers are in progress. One worker stands at the register. Another is in the back prepping things. A third is hanging out on the patio. I step up to the counter. I haven’t seen this cashier before. He starts to take my name. He stops. “You know what? Have you earned a free meal from us yet?” I haven’t. “Ok, this one’s on us. Congratulations.” Thanks. “Let’s see, you’re ordering the cheeseburger, with no sauce and fries without salt?” No, I want the usual mushroom burger and sweet potato fries. His face falls. I’m guessing he had thought I was someone else. He recovers quickly. “OK!” It’s too late for him to rescind the free offer. He finishes typing in the order and wanders over to the grill. He pulls a breaded mushroom burger from a plastic container and slaps it down to cook. “Vegan bun?” OK. He takes a bun from another container and puts it on the moving grate of the toaster. He pours some fresh fries into a basket and lowers it into the cooker. Looking back, he sees that the bun is ready. He takes it out of the toaster, looks at it, and shakes his head. Something’s wrong. He tosses it in the trash and puts another bun on the grate. A few minutes later, everything’s ready. He puts it all together, piling the burger, sauce, and vegetables on the bun and deftly juggling the fries into a box. “Something to drink?” I had been thinking of getting a milkshake, but that might take too much advantage of the free offer. I get a diet cola. He puts it all in a bag and hands it to me over the counter. “Here you are. Congratulations. Bon appetit.” I go back outside and put on my headphones. On the pedestrian street, I see my first two snails of the season. They only come out after the rain. I say the blessing for occasional events. Their presence is an official announcement: Winter is here.
Monday, November 23rd, 2020
The afternoon prayers get rolling half an hour late. It’s the birthday of one of the programmers. He’s turning sixty. He tends to work late, so he shows up close to noon. He walks among the cubes, handing out candy. To celebrate, the bosses order lunch for us, not from the usual shawarma joint but from someplace else. They specialize in roast chicken and schnitzel. Lunch shows up much later than we expect, almost at the time that the prayers usually start. The insurance agent from downstairs who tends to round us up appears on time. The boss asks him to come back in a little while. The lunch is excellent. I get the roast quarter chicken with a plateful of vegetables. Two workers stand in the small kitchen and pass the meals out to us. The birthday lunch isn’t as festive as it had been in the past. Due to the virus, we eat alone in our cubes, not together in the conference room. The agent shows up again after half an hour. He gathers us for the prayers. One former worker who has come back for a brief project joins us. He always wears the standard back and white of the ultra-orthodox. He puts on a wide-brimmed black hat. When he gets out to the hallway, he pulls a long black rope from his pocket, wraps it twice around his waist, and knots it loosely in front. We’re still short by one person. The guest sees the building manager in the atrium, three floors below us. He hollers down. The manager hollers back and heads to the elevator to join us. A cafe on that floor has opened a window into the atrium. They serve coffee and food through it to the people at the tables sitting in the open air. A soldier dozes in a plastic chair. A toddler runs back and forth between her and another child. The boss invites the programmer with the birthday to lead the prayers. He declines. Someone else takes charge. When we’re done, people give the programmer the traditional wish to live until 120. The boss says not to rush him. He’s already halfway there.
Tuesday, November 24th, 2020
The shop window at the international store in the Heart of the City is only as wide as the folding table in front of it. A doorway takes up the rest of the storefront. A wire rack at the far side of the doorway juts over to the front of the shop to its right. No one seems to mind. I need two more ingredients for my stew. I haven’t seen them elsewhere. I duck around the table and go in. The shop is much deeper than it is wide. Wooden shelves line the walls. A lower table running down the center holds bins of seeds, spices, and other things that I can’t identify. I have just enough room to squeeze down the aisles. The store is enormously popular with foreign workers and gourmets. The shelves are roughly organized by region. One set has a daunting array of types of coconut milk. Another has boxes and packets of soup mixes, labeled in various languages that I can’t read. A small freezer case sits in a corner in the back. I go completely around the inside of the shop without seeing what I want. When I get to the front, the owner asks if he can help me. I’m looking for Worcestershire sauce. He points to the end of the wall to the right and says something that I don’t catch. A small woman turns around. I had thought she was a customer. “I show you.” She goes right to it. It’s exactly what I want. “I can help you find anything else?” I ask for beef broth. She doesn’t understand. I see cubes of chicken bouillon. I pick one up. Like these, but for beef? “No, no beef. Just chicken. Sorry.” That’s not as crucial. I bring the Worcestershire sauce up to the register. She starts to ring me up, then stops. The owner comes back and completes the sale. I head out to do more shopping at the supermarket at the end of the mall. I can get my mundane groceries there.
Wednesday, November 25th, 2020
I get to the ear doctor fifteen minutes early. I wait for an hour and a half. In the lobby, half the chairs are marked with signs to keep them vacant for social distancing. Families sit together anyway. Single people sit alone. I have to wait a few minutes for a seat. Some people read. Some people watch videos on their phones. Few of them use earbuds. A young boy sprawls across his parents’ laps. A girl whose family sits across from them runs up and down the hall. Her tiny sneakers are surprisingly loud. She spots an empty chair, apart from the others, and darts over to it. She tries to jump up and sit on the chair. She succeeds after a half dozen tries. She sits upright for a moment, her feet dangling halfway to the floor, then swivels around and hangs off of it upside down. She slides off, her hands hitting the tiles, lowers herself into a clump on the ground, and laughs. An electronic voice finally calls my number. The doctor checks my ears, prescribes an ointment for when they itch, and tells me to go to the nearby hospital for a hearing test. He wants me to go tomorrow, since it’s already been close to two weeks since my initial earaches. I can’t do it. I have to do some emergency video edits before an online presentation in the afternoon. He grudgingly lets me wait until Sunday. Downstairs, a pharmacist looks at my prescription. He rattles off a long string of high-speed Hebrew. I only recognize the words “health plan.” I tell him that I don’t understand. He speaks more slowly. “All you have to understand is that it’s forty shekels.” OK. I try to swipe my debit card on the device on the counter. I get it wrong six different ways before I succeed. On the way home, I think of getting dinner at one of the many eateries nearby. I don’t. None are serving indoors, and it’s starting to rain. I pull my sweatshirt’s hood up and catch a bus home.
Thursday, November 26th, 2020
Someone whistles a Sousa march as we wait for the afternoon prayers. I don’t know which one it is. I can’t remember their names. I know that the Monty Python theme is the Liberty Bell March, since I heard a band play it when I saw Yitzhak Rabin across from Independence Hall. My father used to sing the one I’m hearing now as “Be Kind to Your Web-Footed Friends.” I think my mother’s orchestra has played it. My socks are slipping on the hallway’s tile floor. I have to walk carefully. I have left my shoes at my desk. They are still soggy after the morning’s rain. So are my jeans. I wore my rain jacket today, but it only keeps me dry down to my waist. The street where I pick up my packages had flooded, higher than the curbs. The only way ahead was to walk through it. It’s been a morning of frantic video editing. The boss looks at what I’ve done and makes some requests. Some I’m able to do easily. Some I have already done, but a little later in the video. When he gives the presentation in the afternoon, it all works out. Afterward, he tells me “Your work today gets not just a ten, but a ten of tens.” I’m pleased. More people come together in the hallway. A woman walks through with a lace facemask. It’s lovely, but utterly useless. A dozen men finally show up for the prayers. We seem louder than usual. The hard surfaces amplify the sound. We often open some of the windows over the atrium for ventilation, but we don’t want it to rain in. The floor is slippery enough already. We snare my direct boss as he tries to leave early. He ends up leading the prayers, then, picking his umbrella and briefcase up off the floor, heads home.
On writing as if in dreams
I keep trying to make these posts shorter. I’ve set a rule for myself that they should be between two hundred and five hundred words. By my rough estimate, they’re landing, on the average, right in the middle of that, in the mid-three hundreds. Still I would like to make them more concise.
One challenge is that so much happens during a completely average day. And the events have a lot of detail. Even in the posts that jump among events, I tend to whittle away many of the sentences before they go up.
I worry about repeating myself. When I post about a girl hanging upside down from a chair, I ask myself if that has happened before. If it has, is it redundant, or do the two events reflect on one another? And when I notice that she lands on her hands, while a boy in a post several days earlier had also done so, but in a different context, is that repetitive or worth noting?
There probably aren’t any solid answers to these questions. But I still think about them.
Things of Possible Interest
One thing I’m watching
The Opéra Nice Côte d’Azur has uploaded the full video of their new production of the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten. It’s a beautiful piece of theater and television. Due to the pandemic, the director, Lucinda Childs, couldn’t be there in person. She directed it via video link from home, and appears in it, in a speaking role, projected on a scrim. (At the end, stagehands roll a large monitor onstage so she can participate in the curtain call.)
Childs is a well known American dancer and choreographer who has worked with Glass for more than fifty years. You may know her voice from recordings of Einstein on the Beach. That’s her, speaking the opening “Will it get some wind for the sailboat” and “I was in a prematurely air-conditioned supermarket.” She danced in the premiere, and has choreographed the later productions.
While the other productions of Akhnaten that I’ve seen are grand and intentionally distanced, this one is intimate. I saw a show from the US premiere run in Brooklyn. (I somehow ended up so close to the stage that I could look at the score over the conductor’s shoulder.) All that I remember from it were figures in a vague circle around the stage throughout the whole thing, some of whom tossed straw in the air with a rake at arbitrary intervals. The Met’s production from a few years ago was more abstract, with multiple levels and large structures on stage. In this production, the stage is mostly clear, except for the single set piece that remains throughout the performance.
Both productions played on the historical character’s unusual physique. Akhnaten himself was apparently quite androgynous, and the costuming focused on that. In the Met production, the character is naked in his first appearance before getting clothed in his kingly robes. The character is sung by a countertenor, the high voice also bringing this out. There are some wonderful trios with the character’s wife and mother, in which it’s hard to tell who is singing what. This production does not focus on that, though the character remains a countertenor. He is bearded and dressed in conventional robes throughout. Fabrice Di Falco brings warmth and joy to the role, especially as Akhnaten sings with his family.
The set is also quite simple. A raised circular platform occupies the center of the stage, turning and tilting as needed. At some points, it shines with a golden light, befitting Akhnaten’s worship of the sun.
A chorus appears in many of the scenes. Unlike many opera productions, the camera frequently lingers on closeups of individual members of the chorus, bringing them out as people rather than as fungible pawns. The video also frequently shows members of the orchestra, often taking the unusual step of showing them outside of the overtures, at times when you would expect to see the people on stage. One flautist, in particular, almost becomes a character in the opera herself, as you see her working on the sometimes tricky and repetitive instrumental parts.
Scrims in front and in back of the stage show black and white video projections, created by Étienne Guiol. These show a wide variety of materials, including glitching hieroglyphics, abstract computer-generated shapes, Lucinda Childs speaking her role, and dancing, which interacts with the live movement on stage. The separate elements merge well.
The opera is slightly abridged. I missed two of my favorite sections of the piece: the choral “Ma Rabu Ma’asecha” that usually follow’s Akhnaten’s “Hymn to the Sun,” and the epilogue, in while modern-day tourists visit the ruins of the Eqyptian city in which the opera takes place. But the rest of it seems intact, and the performance by the singers and orchestra is stunning without being showy.
It’s worth reading up on the opera before seeing it. You don’t have a lot to go on, storywise, in the production. But even if you don’t know what’s going on, it’s a warm and beautiful show, worth seeing as an example of what’s possible in modern opera.
One thing I’m hearing
I’m listening, as I write this, to the yggdrasil-soli by Ulrich Krieger. At least I think I am.
The piece consists of eight pieces for solo instruments. Krieger invited several friends to compose and record them, with the constraint that they must be exactly thirty minutes long and may be played back simultaneously with any or all of the others. The final tracks consist of the complete set, superimposed.
Each piece is extremely quiet, with a lot of silence. Each seems to consist of widely separated plinks, thumps, and drones.
I’ve written and performed music like this. (My piece “mouth. midnight.” was on the first lowercase anthology in 2000.) And I’m working on a score in which four instruments play independently for the length of the film and then are superimposed. Ideally that will be for four different players, but as a first version, I’m playing them all myself, waiting a week between them, each in a different octave on the piano.
Hearing it now, I wonder about the appropriate way to listen to it. In almost any situation, environmental sound will interact with it, more clearly than in more present music. As I hear it now, I’m also hearing the hums, whirs, and whooshes of my hard drives, refrigerator, heater, and toaster oven, as well as the intermittent rain outdoors. I have my stereo at an appropriate volume, set so that I can listen to denser music clearly without disturbing the landlord upstairs.
I don’t know if a properly silent environment exists. Even outside of urban areas, there’s a lot of sound. (I recall a night I spent on the outskirts of Wimberley, Texas, at the home of a friend who kept telling me how quiet it was there. The racket of the winds and critters kept me awake.) Listening, I have to take this into account, especially since it’s hard to tell what’s in the recording and what’s in the environment. If I had a better sense of harmony, my ears might interpret everything as being in the key of Refrigerator Hum.
I’m enjoying this, as I like listening to other such music. The final track, where it all comes together, is especially attractive. But I wonder about the relationship between what I’m hearing and the creators’ intent.
One thing I’m reading
And now for a word from the Pope.
He has an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times (paywalled, but reprinted here) discussing our responsibilities to one another in the age of Covid-19. He sees this through a personal lens, from his experiences as a young man (similar, as I understand it, to experiences within my own family) with severe lung disease.
> How will we deal with the hidden pandemics of this world, the pandemics of hunger and violence and climate change? … This is a moment to dream big, to rethink our priorities — what we value, what we want, what we seek — and to commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of … We cannot return to the false securities of the political and economic systems we had before the crisis. We need economies that give to all access to the fruits of creation, to the basic needs of life: to land, lodging and labor. We need a politics that can integrate and dialogue with the poor, the excluded and the vulnerable, that gives people a say in the decisions that affect their lives. We need to slow down, take stock and design better ways of living together on this earth.
The whole article is worthwhile, even if you don’t agree with some of his stances. It’s drawn from his new book, coming out next week. I look forward to reading the whole volume.
One more thing
I’m starting to dream of hardware. A lot of new stuff is coming out, surprisingly inexpensively, which looks amazing. The new Mac Mini looks like an amazingly powerful system at a good price ($699 in the States). There’s a new version of the video editing software that I use, DaVinci Resolve, that is designed specifically for it. It appears drool-worthy.
The makers of DaVinci Resolve, Blackmagic Design, have put out a small editing controller that, along with a keyboard, appears to make handling some of the fidgetier aspects of the software a breeze.
The new version of Resolve itself, still in beta, has some amazing capabilities, such as automatically distinguishing faces or bodies from what surrounds them. That makes it a lot easier to process or replace the figure or background on its own. The software itself remains free, though there’s an advanced version with more capabilities for a single payment of less than the recurring subscription rate of its competitors. The free version on its own is powerful enough, though. It’s not quite a “you get what you pay for” situation here. Blackmagic makes its money by selling expensive, high-end hardware to its customers who can afford them. That subsidizes the software and low-end hardware. I suppose that they hope that people will get used to their ways and remember them when it’s time to spend the big money.
I don’t really need any of this. My current Mac, while ten years old, is quite stable and powerful. And I’m editing OK with what I have now, as I work very gradually on my current feature-length project.
But it’s nice to dream.
Colophon
(Unchanged from last week, except for this line.)
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