Sound of Mucus: Haydn Missa in angustiis Hob. XXII:11 "Nelsonmesse" from the INCROYABLE John Eliot Gardiner series out on Philips right now. He has done the six late masses, in sets of two masses at two CDs for the price of one. Absolutely stunning; a summa of Gardiner's work so far: consummate elegance, total command of the repertoire, and a solid ensemble (comments have been made, not by me, about the individual qualities of the soloists, as if that were the measure by which an inherently COLLECTIVE music is to be judged!). Haydn's masses are Enlightenment Christianity in a nutshell, particularly in (if you will) their profound sentimentality, by which I mean that their faith is too shaken by the possibility of an empty deist universe for baroque-style depths to be plumbed. So they take a rosy view of Nobodaddy; if they are sturm-u.-drangy, it is because it is late August and they fear the coming cold. Through it all Haydn manages, miraculously, to be both urbane and childlike.
WB is in town this weekend on a mission of escape from Connecticut. It's a video game that an extraordinary number of my friends are playing. We went to M*nR*y last night and pretended it was the eighties again (it wasn't hard; it keeps getting easier, in ways that make me consider the irrational trade-off of turning in my New Order albums if the cold wars and social retrenchment would just go away.) To the young gentleman with the nice biceps who danced up against me during Tainted Love, "I'll be coming for you anyway..."
To the person who googled "kiehl's" last week and waded through 181 hits only to reach my diary... bravo. Whoops, I mean K**hl's. Sorry: don't know what I was thinking. Today I got a hit for "elegaic couplets", which makes me happier than English words can express. I tell you, if D**r*l*nd were a gay disco, I would be be copping off every fucking night with people almost guaranteed to be literate and shy.
MR's friend P introduced me to a cut-throat anagrams game played with Scrabble tiles tonight. You get to steal other people's words as long as you can make new words with them. No simple suffixes or morphological changes (adding an s, e.g.); one has to change the meaning of the word. Fun. Then ED, KH, SLB, E-and-K's boy-friend L and I all played Bohnanza. Bohnanza is an immoral game. Savonarola would have considered the fire too good for it. It corrupts your mind. your heart, your crotch. You become faithless and arch when you play it. It's worse if you're listening to Zopilote Machine at the time. In fact, you might as well just pack it in for your plans to go to heaven. It's all lost, all irremediably lost. 'Cause the sunlight makes me strong and I know about you...
HOW DID I GET LIKE THIS? Like what?
O. I see.