A Thousand Times No

These just in, from the Office of Odd Geographic Coincidences:

• Today some of my friends (and their bouncing baby girl) are moving into their new condo in Hoboken…where they will live kitty-corner from the one friend I have who lives in Hoboken as well.
• I just learned that my sweet comic Valentine, who lives in Chicago, was once engaged to a young woman while he lived in Washington, DC…and she lived down the block from me in Philadelphia.

“The world, she is small,” wrote one of my friends when I told him of the latter happenstance.

That, and Cupid needs a better bloomin’ GPS already.  Aí, querido…

Several weeks ago, I used Orbitz to reserve a rental car for use this past Sunday, planning to visit friends who live about 30 miles away to take in the Oscars with them and with another mutual friend from the city. When booking the reservation, I opted for a small car with a pickup location that was a reasonable walk from my city home. Everything was simple and straightforward, just as it had always been every time I rented a car through Orbitz.

On Sunday morning, when I arrived at the address indicated in the confirmation email, there was no car rental lot to be seen for blocks in any direction. I circled about on foot for a while, and spoke with the attendant in a nearby private parking garage. “Nope, no rental car lots anywhere around here,” he said, shaking his head. What the…?

Already running late, I called Orbitz. Apparently, there was fine print at the bottom of my confirmation: I was supposed to call for a pick-up from the mystery street corner in order to be transported to an undisclosed location. Oddly, instructions for performing the secret handshake when I arrived were not included. (”Wait, is this car rental lot like that mythical kingdom that appears through the mist only once every number of years?” my friend asked when I called her to report my wheel woes.)

Meanwhile, the weather forecast for the day continued to sound nasty: The dreaded “wintry mix” of snow, ice, and sleet that had paralyzed portions of Pennsylvania’s interstate highway system less than two weeks earlier. (Note: This is not to be confused with the “frothy mix” that had frozen out huge swaths of the state’s electorate for twelve years.) Miles away from my actual rental car, with time running down before a fixed appointment, I canceled the rental reservation and booked a car share Prius just for the afternoon, opting out of sledding down the road in a mystery subcompact after the midnight hour.

I was sorry to miss the group-ogle (groogle?) of Hollywood’s big night, and the chance to see my friends’ bouncing baby boy, but it simply didn’t seem to be in the car(d)s. Here’s hoping we won’t need to wait another hundred years for the chance to get together.

 

 InTheNo 5: Conductor Donald Nally [59:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

~ Click the triangle above to hear this interview ~

Donald Nally left his job as a music professor to found an all-professional chamber choir; despite overwhelming critical acclaim, the group was forced to disband within two years. Nearly a decade later, as Nally prepares to become the Chorus Master of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, he and his singers have renewed their commitment to the performance of new and modern choral music as The Crossing. Nally speaks about his experiences, as well as sound, breath, emotion, release, and connection through the human voice.

We touch on numerous topics during this show, including:

Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia
Spoleto Music Festival — Italy, United States
Gian Carlo Menotti, Amahl and the Night Visitors
Westminster Choir College
Joseph Flummerfelt
The Chicago “L”
Arvo Pärt
Sir John Tavener
Ton de Leeuw
Gerald Finzi Intimations of Immortality
Chorus America and the Margaret Hillis Award
Margaret Hillis
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Welsh National Opera
West Chester University
Philadelphia Inquirer, music critic David Patrick Stearns
Chestnut Hill Local, music critic Michael Caruso
Contemporary composers Thomas Adès, Jonathan Harvey, Judith Weir, David Shapiro, Robert Convery, Robert Maggio, Sharon Hershey, Jake Heggie, Kaija Saariaho
Josquin des Prez
Mark Rothko
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Tosca by Giacomo Puccini
The Crossing

Several live performance excerpts are heard during this episode, all conducted by Maestro Nally:

• “Lamentio Super Morte Josquin de Pres” by Hieronymus Vinders,
  performed by the Bridge Ensemble (0:00)
  
• “Te Deum” by James MacMillan,
  performed by The Crossing (1:35)
  
• “O Leave Your Sheep” arranged by Kenneth Leighton,
  performed by The Crossing (11:52)
• “trees” by Lars Johan Werle,
  performed by the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia,
  solo by Levi Hernandez (18:19)
  
• “Gloria Tibi Domine” from The Saint of Bleeker Street
  by Gian Carlo Menotti,
  performed by the Spoleto Festival Choir (26:04)
  
• “O Notte” by Bruno Bettinelli,
  performed by The Crossing (31:00)
  
• “Now, While The Birds Thus Sing A Joyous Song”
  from Intimations of Immortality by Gerald Finzi,
  performed by the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia
  and the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra (33:50)
  
• “Christmas Daybreak” by Robert Convery,
  commissioned and performed by the Bridge Ensemble (38:58)
  
• “Gallant Weaver” by James MacMillan,
  performed by The Crossing (48:16)
  
• “I Thirst” from Seven Last Words from the Cross
  by James MacMillan,
  performed by the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia
  and the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra (53:40)
  
• “Lagrime D’amante Al Sepolcro Dell’Amata” by Claudio Monteverdi,
  performed by the Bridge Ensemble (57:12)

Come listen, and learn more about what lives in the space between the notes.

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No doubt about it, podcasters are passionate about their gear. Partisans of different digital recorders and audio editing applications wax lyrical about their setups, and sometimes resort to hurling insults at those of a different persuasion. The bitterest invective, however, is reserved for cases of unrequited love: “I brought you home and gave you my heart, O Cruel Betrayer, and you have made a mockery of my ardor. Nay, you have brought me to my knees, and forced me to reformat my hard drive!”

Currently, the Number Two result in a Google search for the phrase “Cupertino Kool-Aid” lands squarely on this website, so it should come as no surprise that I’ve been using Apple’s Garage Band to edit my podcast episodes. I first began working with non-linear editing in Final Cut Pro a number of years ago, and I loved how relatively shallow that made the Garage Band learning curve for me. Paradoxically, this recovering maximizer happily satisficed on something fast enough, cheap enough, and good enough to get my podcasts out the door.

Everything was great, until Garage Band decided it was ready to treat me like…ahem…Number Two.

Today I imported an audio file containing a single take that lasted more than 60 minutes. Whenever I began trying to split the track to remove extraneous gaps, the back half of the track segment would abruptly vanish from the editing deck. I took several steps to try to bring everything back into working order: defragging, resampling, resetting, finger-crossing, head-banging, all to no avail. The remaining portion of the split track mocked me like the proverbial half-worm in a bitten piece of fruit.

I was saved by those who had gone before. A search under “Garage Band split track disappear” restored my sanity when I learned that I was not alone: “[D]estroying my region when I split it is not a missing feature, it is a bug,” wrote a frustrated Ian Eure. The Mac OSX Hints forums served up an explanation, plus a workaround: I had exceeded the maximum number of measures permitted in Garage Band (999 for version 2.0, 1999 for version 3.0). Extending the length of each measure by decreasing the master tempo successfully brought my imported audio file in under the wire.

Dearest Cupertino, Apple of my eye, am I so round with you as you with me, that like a football you do spurn me thus?

O, it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

~~ “Measure for Measure,” Act II, Scene II

 

 Paul and Storm: "Your Love Is" [3:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

~~

A few things to make you smile on this holiday. First, “Your Love Is,” a deadpan ditty with an immortal closing line, from those talented singing persons, Paul and Storm. (You can hear more clips from Paul and Storm’s December 2006 MilkBoy Coffeehouse show by listening to the Skullcrusher Pirate Hotdish, and you can purchase a studio version of this song from their website at www.paulandstorm.com.)

Next, something hilarious from Chicago-based multimedia artist Michael Hightower: A video for “Baby Got Back — Gilbert and Sullivan Style.” When I watched his side-splitting, throwback rendition of the deliciously lurid old vaudeville saw, “The Aristocrats,” I felt the very sting of Cupid’s dart, as if my tender ticker had been “inscribed by the maharajah himself.” There was no way around it: I simply had to ask Hightower to be my Valentine.

I’m not at liberty to say exactly what transpired next, only that it led him to remark, “…but now I feel guilty.” As Woody Allen would tell you, that must mean we’re doing something right. Happy Valentine’s Day, all!

Today has been a good day for me, mostly due to the kindness of strangers.

Snow began falling early this morning, a half day earlier than all of yesterday’s forecasts predicted, promising to bring the region to a standstill within the next day. I stopped by Trader Joe’s on the way to work to pick up some emergency storm supplies — you know, dark chocolate with hazelnuts, that sort of thing. On my way out, the cashier let me select a rose from a bucket full of cut flowers, the fresh-faced survivors of “irregular” bouquets that couldn’t be put out for sale.

When I arrived at work, I looked for the signs I had posted yesterday in search of my lost glove:

The signs were nowhere to be seen. As I walked to the reception desk, the woman working behind the desk smiled broadly. “Look!” she cried, reaching over to an area outside the reception booth. “One of the Facilities people saw the sign, and brought your glove here.” Yesterday at the supermarket, I had bought a fancy caramel apple covered with nuts and chocolate, hoping that I would be able to give it away as a reward for the safe return of my left glove. Once again, the hidden power of chocolate had come to my rescue.

But there was something even better awaiting me when I walked upstairs to my office. Propped against my office door was a small package from Italy. Shelley of At Home In Rome, co-organizer of World Nutella Day, was sweet enough to take pity on my Euro-Nutella-craving soul and send me some of the single-serving packets shown in photos on her website. Now I am faced with the happy dilemma of deciding which occasions are “Nutella-worthy.”

Today’s events made me think of the much-repeated poem by Sheenagh Pugh:

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

Even if the sun fails to melt everything that falls from the sky tonight, there’s still an upside — that would make tomorrow this winter’s first snow day.

Arriving at a meeting this afternoon, I discovered that I had somehow dropped a glove on my way out of my office. Later in the afternoon, I checked with the front desk security staff at my building. Had they found a black leather glove?

“Somebody found it, but we don’t have it,” they told me apologetically. “The Office of Risk Management told us we can no longer accept any lost-and-found items. So we set it over there on the security turnstile.” I searched around the entire turnstile area. No sign of the glove. Someone had decided to let their fingers walk off with it.

Or maybe the glove just ran away to join the circus…

I’ve had a lifelong weakness for widgets and gizmos. When friends see me mesmerized by a shiny new contraption, they gleefully launch into a new take on that old ABBA hook, crooning: “You are the Gadget Queen…” I can only laugh: at every level, resistance is futile.

Last week I brought home several new items, two of which are notable for their sheer pulchritude. First, I picked up a new backup hard drive, a sleek LaCie 250GB FireWire model with a case designed by the Porsche Design Group. Wie schön! So dang purty, with the most attractive back end of any hard drive I’ve ever seen. (Oddly, you will only see a perfunctory close-up of the port lineup in the official product photography, which doesn’t capture the clever design gestalt.) This drive is so sexy, I can scarcely fathom why it doesn’t come encased in a plain brown wrapper.

My other major acquisition was a gorgeous, handcrafted opal ring. The luminous central stone is simply humongous — in the unlikely event of an air traffic crisis, I think it could double as a signaling device to bring in planes for emergency landings. Yet it was still affordable, ringing in at the same price as the hard drive and passing the all-important means test for shiny trinkets.

Who needs a diamond as big as the Ritz (or, for that matter, any diamond at all) when you can have an opal the size of Rhode Island?

What do Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Izzard, and George Michael have in common with each other — and with me?

The boys and I, we’ve had shoulder problems. The most widespread medical term for our shared shoulder condition is “adhesive capsulitis,” more commonly known as “frozen shoulder.” As the folks at the Mayo Clinic note, frozen shoulder is characterized by stiffness, pain, and limited motion in the shoulder joint.

In everyday terms, reaching behind your own back to fasten anything just plain hurts. (This has been a major pain-in-the-clasp for me; I’m sure it was a total buzz-kill for anyone as sartorially broad as Izzard.)

Since Sacha, Eddie and George happen to hail from the same island, they all went to one particular person to for help: British osteopath Simeon Niel-Asher, who has developed a non-invasive physiotherapy program for treating frozen shoulder. When I read that Niel-Asher’s method yielded promising results in a randomized, placebo-controlled trial at Addenbrooke’s, the teaching hospital of Cambridge University, I decided to give it a try.

Though few people in the States are certified practitioners of the Niel-Asher technique, one of them does happen to work in Philadelphia. I called and inquired about her rates, and whether she could accept my health insurance plan. Nope. “The problem is that the insurance plans don’t accept me,” she said, “because I’m not affiliated with an on-site MD.” Considering that full treatment would involve at least a half-dozen sessions at $100 per session, I faced the prospect of trading one type of pain for another when reaching into my back pocket for my wallet.

Fortunately, there are plenty of training materials to be found at Niel-Asher’s website. I opted for the CD-ROM, which recently arrived in the mail. It includes videos, diagrams, and everything necessary to begin a course of self-treatment. Except, of course, the all-important second person you need to knead your tender shoulder back to life.

I am lucky to have among my many talented and generous friends one who has just the right elbow for the job. Now that he has begun systematically working on my shoulder, I’m looking forward to being pain-free by spring, encouraged by Izzard’s testimonial: “My shoulder had been painful for many years! Now I can do semaphore with flags. Finally ships understand me.”

Hey, Eddie? Thanks for the ray of hope. And oh, by the way:

You may not know this (it’s a terrible, well-kept secret), but American Nutella is not — Ahimè! — the same as Italian Nutella.

It’s because I love Nutella so much that I know this. American Nutella is made from a different recipe, a fact confirmed by Ferrero USA when I contacted them several years ago. There’s more chocolate, more sugar, less hazelnut. It’s certainly not bad, but it’s…different. I asked Ferrero if there was somewhere in Philadelphia where I could find imported Nutella, like the kind I fell in love with in France. This would seem easy, since Philly has an entire neighborhood known as the Italian Market. But no, there was not a single place anywhere in the area where genuine European Nutella could be found.

Then I stumbled across a man who actually used the word “Nutella” as part of his online dating handle. Since he was from France, he felt my pain. The first time we met in person, he presented me with a jar of imported Nutella he had located in Hoboken, of all places. Sweets from the land of Sinatra — how could I not fall for this man?

Let me tell you, I rationed out that jar for eons. (It ended up having far better shelf life than Monsieur French Guy!) May those of you who live in the realm of the One True Nutella count your blessings. On your fingers. After dipping them in the Nutella jar, one at a time. Mmmmmmmm.

Happy World Nutella Day 2007!