Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006), Piano Etudes (Book 1), No. 6 (Automne a Varsovie [Autumn in Warsaw]); Susanne Anatchkova (piano), live
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lagniappe
reading table
[N]othing has ever been—nor will it ever be—the way it used to be.
—Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives
*****
yesterday
Some things cannot be planned for, nor can they be explained. Such was the case this week when a friend of my son Alex—someone who was in our house, full of conversation, just a few weeks ago—killed himself. The funeral was yesterday. Before it began Alex and I talked briefly with the mother and father, whom I had never met. I told them one of the things I appreciated about their son was that he wasn’t merely polite to me, his friend’s father. He wanted to connect. A greater sorrow a parent could not know.
On July 29, 1946, Charlie Parker was arrested in Los Angeles, after starting a fire in his hotel room. Earlier that day, unable to score heroin, scratchy, drunk on whiskey, he recorded this track, which, depending on your point of view, is either one of the worst records he ever made (Parker’s view) or, despite (because of?) its raggedyness, among the greatest (Charles Mingus’s opinion). After his arrest he was confined, for six months, at Camarillo State Mental Hospital.
Charlie Parker, “Lover Man” (CP, alto saxophone; Howard McGhee, trumpet; Jimmy Bunn, piano; Bob Kesterson, bass; Roy Porter, drums), rec. 7/29/46
The cafeteria in the hospital’s basement was the saddest place in the world, with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse forboding of those who had stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.
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The next day, I set up an iPod dock and played music, not only in the willfully delusional belief that music would be good for a painful, recovering brain but also to counter the soul-crushing hospital noise: the beeping of monitors, the wheezing of respirators, the indifferent chatter of nurses in the hallway, the alarm that went off whenever a patient’s condition abruptly worsened.
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One early morning, driving to the hospital, I saw a number of able-bodied, energetic runners progressing along Fullerton Avenue toward the sunny lakefront, and I had a strong physical sensation of being in an aquarium: I could see out, the people outside could see me (if they chose to pay attention), but we were living and breathing in entirely different environments.
music clip of the day 