I'm having one of those "I lurve Internet" weeks -- I just downloaded a passle of Italian baroque cantatas in .eps, totally free of charge and in a not-unpleasant edition. Remember when the Web was going to save all our souls? Remember when Netizens needed no race or gender, and a humano-robotic, omnisexual, self-defining Self-hood was the person of the future?
I'm having one of those "I lurve the Pixies" moments. No need for explication, there.
I'm having one of those "I lurve myself" moments. These are hella rare. Where did I get this one? A whiz-bang good rehearsal on Thursday, rolling through the Carissimi cantata Suoner� l'ultima tromba for the first time senza stops (excepting the awkward pause when we realized I hadn't photocopied page 89...) It's one of those pieces which makes me want to tie my generation to a chair in a dank basement and torture them with an electric cattle prod until they appreciate it. Damn it; seventeenth-century music is too good for this earth, and it's being wasted on the old and socially-conservative. -- AK, my soprano, dropped the most adorable comment about how Early Music types are all social misfits, geeky, unco�rdinated, the delicious underbelly of classical music -- why can't the next youth culture wave be neo-baroque? Affekt and seventeen-year-old hormones go together like bagels and hummus. We can wear velour breeches and our hair long. Pretty-please? Of course, I'm getting too old to start a new youth subculture. Anyway, this paragraph was supposed to be about me: happy. Yes.
I'm having one of those "I lurve where I live moments. First, there's Captain Samuel Whittemore: in 1775, when he was well over eighty years old, he hid behind a stone wall which once stood about a block from my house and fired three potshots into Earl Percy's army -- it was retreating from the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord. He killed three soldiers before the company found him, blew his cheek off, bayonetted him a dozen times, and left him for dead. Of course, being too ornery to die, he lived on another eighteen years, not finally giving up the ghost until 1793, at age 98. Then there's *rl*ngt*n's phenomenal Gilded-Age public library, where I acquired a book on the Mannerist madrigal and a copy of Apuleius the other day. It has a reading room in High Newport Baroque, complete with gilding, marble, and those evocative brass lamps with green glass shades. I think I want to live here forever.
* * * * *
Current obsession: Pelham Humfrey, a court composer to Charles II, witty, cultured, and totally mad. Pepys called the young Humfrey, newly return'd from France, "A perfect Monsieur", and recorded how he laughed obnoxiously at everybody else's music.
Current clothing choice: blue jeans from H&M, because now are my ass's sallad days, when it is green in yumminess.
Current prognostication All the ex-Romulans of Harvard Square arguing really hard about Gesture, Rhetoric, and the execution of perfect recitativo. John Dowland is sooo emo...