The meetings. New Orleans. Again. Our session this time was ‘On the Circulation of Trance: Trance in 21st century globalized society’ or something like that. One of those times when every paper led seamlessly into the next, each amplifying the concerns of the previous. Each of us, in our own way, questioning the problems of…
Category: essays
Mira and Erin writing on themes of death, dying, grief, ritual, music, listening, Kaddish, Lev Kogan’s “Kaddish,” and so on.
a kaddish on natural horn
So yesterday I decided to try appealing to the historian in Mira, by playing the whole thing on natural horn. I did today’s take on natural horn, demonstrating the origins of the stopped horn sound. I used a Seraphinoff “Halari” model natural horn with the F crook and played “Kaddish” in the usual key.
a kaddish for easy expectations
The easy expectations—the stuff we’re just sure we know—turn out to be where we’re wrong.
the tzaddik sells his daughter
Jerusalem, 1961 The tzaddik, as we know, was a great collector of Judaica: manuscripts, ceremonial artifacts, and ancient pieces of junk. For him, every single fragment was precious and worthy of preserving. Each broken piece of something had matching pieces yet to be discovered. Every object had a story that had to be uncovered. If…
birthing and deathing
Birthing was easy. Well, I mean, it wasn’t easy easy. But it was easy. Pregnancy was easy. There was a time limit to pregnancy and birthing, and it’s pretty fixed and universal. This is how the body works in that regard. Expect this. Breathe like that. Push now. Baby. And there were a million books…
on how an academic changes a musician
Mira, Where is the place that you get lost? Is it the stopped horn bit—the fourteen notes with a distant, pinched, buzzy sound, and then the normal horn tone returns? Then there’s a phrase, then a restatement of the second big line of the piece, then the climb to the ending? I’m doing musicology on…
of gummy-worms and caterpillar tales
I have two very strong images in my head from when Precious Daughter was a wild young thing of maybe two-ish. Actually, there are more images of course, but these two have been haunting me lately. They remain vivid without photographic reminders of these little moments. Scene One, which is the earlier Kodak moment of…
a kaddish for everybody i have eaten
While I was running along Skyline with Kjersten tonight, I got to thinking about how I’m actually thinking about taking a pheasant-hunting lesson in November. To kill animals for the sake of my animal. I am perplexed.
of gummy-worms and larger creatures
Michael Pollan has been eloquent in his appeal that we change our eating and growing habits. He sums it all up in seven syllables — not quite a koan, nor haiku either, but nevertheless giving off the impression of a wise and ancient teaching: eat foodnot too muchmostly plants A modest proposal from a modest…
we dying dogs
Sometimes we just slow down and stop. And that’s it. We’re done. That’s what happened today at Funston, heading back from the cliffside trail. This woman’s dogs were going just nuts as she tried to protect one between her legs who was just plain done. It was like she was paralyzed there, not paying attention…