Updated 11 Oct 2018 (notes on all four)
Author: Scott D. Strader
Back again
Over the past few weeks I’ve started playing piano again.
A few years back I started getting weird deficiencies in my right hand. Descending arpeggios started becoming odd then difficult when my 3rd finger would cross over. Degeneration increased over several months, carpal tunnel surgery was performed and completely ineffective, physical therapy was attempted, but here we are. My PT therapist did fascinating research and came up with focal hand dystonia:
in focal hand dystonia, the fingers either curl into the palm or extend outward without control
That about sums it up.
It’s depressing if I think about it so I usually don’t. I’m pretty much unable to play any of the songs I’ve written except for the more basic ones, and I never got my last rock opera in my hands at all. That’s probably the most regretful.
I got itchy recently and so picked up Shostakovich’s Prelude #5 from opus 87. It’s a nice little piece in D major-ish and distributes the themes across both hands. I’m at speed now with not too many stumbles with my 3rd and 4th fingers. Working on memory. I just started Bach’s 7th fugue in E-flat from The Well-Tempered Clavier edition that I received after donating to the Musescore Kickstarter project. Difficult (for me) four note descending arpeggios that kind of tax a very weak fourth finger. Getting stronger though. I’m still surprised with the difference in competence between the two hands.
It feels very good to get back. I hate that I’m not composing and playing my own stuff but am still enjoying and hopeful.
Where was I?
Sydney Australia from Tue 24 Jul to Tue 31 Jul. Kindof. Flight was late Tuesday and I arrived Thursday morning. Flight back was early afternoon Tuesday and we returned Tuesday night at around 7 PM. wat? It wasn’t too too weird though. The 4 and 14 hour flights via Los Angeles were much more manageable than those we took when we went to Thailand way back in 2011, and I had absolutely no jet lag.
Thu 26 Jul 2018
Lisa was in for work two weeks prior, so I had most of a day for myself pining over lost luggage, waiting for our room to become available at the Shangri-La Hotel in The Rocks neighborhood, and assaulting a docent at the Museum of Contemporary Art with my 20+ hour flight stink. She was actually very good conversation, and I got to banter with her about the nuances of nationalism in aboriginal-influenced Australian art. It was also neat seeing so many young school kids marching in line and sitting in semi-circles to join in art critique with another docent. Yay art!
This solo museum visit at the beginning of vacation repeats the one I did in Prague while waiting for Lisa and the girls to arrive from München. And correcting a mistake I’d made in that and many other museums, I took notes and pictures of most of the pieces. (Well, I thought I had taken pictures. I am now enraged that most of the art photos I took are missing from my Google Photos album. Around 10 or so are there but missing are some gems.)
Here are short notes I took and some images but not all because Google is a bitch:
Kevin Gilbert 1960s linotype made in prison Active sky, animals the same components as people
Daniel Boyd 2000s Black and White layers
Mabel Juli 2000s Black and White simple abstractions, crescent
Imants Tillers 1980s landscape on panels
Helen Johnson 2000s Huge tapestries with part flat on the ground, hidden image in the back (so much analysis with the docent, great regret over missing images)
Brian Blanchflower 1980s, messy pointillism on rough canvas
Timothy Cook, 2000s, cleaner pointillism, abstract expression, brush work, oval depth infinity
James Angus, three bicycles in one, shifted across space
Callum Morton, storefront cave vortex, flat depth, Josef Albers where depth is chromatic intensity?
Emma White, clay outlet and power strip (Untitled (useless, powerful) I, 2008)
Moya McKenna, classic Still life with slight weirdness, intense primaries to blacks, raw blacks too flat
Ricky Swallow, 2000s, colored balloons with growths, light is heavy, barnacles static, minimalist sculpture like in the Lisbon Museu Colecao Berardo modern art museum? (Caravan, 2008)
Josette Urso, 2000s, pointillism again, slightly varied by accident, ancient script, scar tattoos
Nicole Foreshew, 2000s, walking sticks with varied crystals on the top
Gordon Bennett, 2000s, diamond shape, base color painted over, red ochre overlays yellow ochre, split in two different than if they weren’t [ed. I don’t remember what I meant here], Frank Stella, painting as painting
Ian Burn, 1960s, blue reflective, you are the subject, almost no imperfections must have been difficult, opposite of abstract expressionism
Robert MacPherson, 1970s, three slides become one, last is textural, the black looks fuzzy
Mikala Dwyer, 1990s, tower of plates, more minimalism (balloons) [ed. again, very much the minimalist sculptures we saw in Lisbon], so much tension
Sally Smart, 1990s, red, pastiche, disassemble
OK, so enough of the gallery tour. Afterwards, still in 20+ hour flight clothes, I hung in the museum/waterfont area and enjoyed the sun and birds, then did a city walkabout to search for replacement clothes. No luck. Snacks of sausage and wine at the Angel Hotel (surprisingly inexpensive!) then to get a cocktail at Grain in the Four Seasons because reasons. So many suits during happy hour. And yes still in stink-wear so they were mad impressed (closing sarcasm tag without opening tag).
Eventually joined with Lisa and the boss late night and hung at our hotel’s top floor bar piling up a bar tab that and-I-am-not-joking rivaled a full weekend’s sassiness. Vacation Money is Fake Money so it doesn’t matter!
Fri 27 Jul 2018
We are in the Central Business District: CBD. The goal of the day is a walk from Spit to Manly Wharf.
The Walrus touts itself as gourmet breakfast, but it was just very good breakfast food so no need for too much touting. The food touts for itself and the breakfast sandwiches are <makes smacking sound with fingers to lips>. TOUT! And it became the base of energy for us to do some heavy touristing. Walk to Hyde Park where, much like the crazy grackles we were introduced to in Austin back in 2017, we saw some Australian-specific crazy birds: the noble Australian White Ibis. Or, as it is better known: “bin chicken” or “trash turkey”. They’re apparently the pigeons of Australia but look so odd to our eyes that one man’s trash etc.
Across from the park is St. Mary’s Cathedral. Fun facts which I kinda remember: started in around 1820, burned down and rebuilt, burned/broken remnants on display, large murals representing the 14 stations of the cross (of all my art history, we still had to look up how many stations there were), constant renovations as the Australian sandstone breaks down. Beautiful church that I, oddly, would not think of Australia as having such a thing.
On to Spit!
(We took public transportation which is easy however we are not so skilled, living with a transportation system that goes nowhere, dealing with one that goes errwhere. OK, that’s unfair to Marta. We really just bonked and missed our stop and had to backtrack to arrive at the destination we had seen fly by us 20 minutes prior.)
The tour wonks recommend Manly-to-Spit, but Lisa wisely chose the reverse so that we would end at civilization and bars. After a 10k walk we would earn it. The trail went through Sydney Harbour National Park and was a nice nature walk yet, varying throughout, came close to neighborhoods and family parks. It still gave us steep ups-and-downs, cliffside views, beach walks, peaceful forest isolation. Having abandoned jogging for a while, it was a trail that made me jealous when the joggers would pass us. And yet: we still earned that breakfast sandwich. I guess we earned the drinks at the end too? A lot of earning going on and said earnings came with some people-watching on the patio at Hugo’s.
We get back to CBD and stop for beers at Harts Pub near the hotel. It looked to be converted from an old house into a neighborhood hang out and we did same while watching Australian football. Holy shit that looks rough! Americans are wimps. Back at the hotel we realized that a 10k walk plus beer plus possibly the time change catching up to me will result in a nap until 11 PM. Up and find the only place open with food that wasn’t a late night bar filled with party drunks or a guitar player belting out some 70s pop song I can’t remember but know we did not want to hear: Grain! My first night cocktail joint supplied us with decent bar pizza. Sleep again by 2 or 3 AM.
Sat 28 Jul 2018
Next day’s adventure started and ended with the Sydney Opera House for a performance of Aida. We did the walkin’ around thing (that’s what they call it in Australia, right?) and started a few blocks away at the opera house. Our hotel location was perfect.
I did something stupid and hesitated on purchasing tickets. Well, I almost did something stupid. Normally, I consider money during vacations to be basically play money (see above) and something that affects-me-not. I don’t know why but I felt beset when deciding whether we should get tickets to Aida. Old age? Nah, that can’t be it. So anyway sensibility prevailed and we got the tickets plus a sweet sweet coffee mug for fond, caffeinated memories. Always remember this if you waver: DON’T. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Pre-opera-pre-game was a trip to Watson’s Bay via ferry. There, we got our seafood on on the balcony at Doyle’s (133-years-old! “we opened Australia’s first seafood restaurant in 1885”) and strolled the beautiful Gap Bluff.
Return trip and walk (vacations are nothing if not walking) to the stylish Bangaroo neighborhood. So many cool buildings! And possibly too cool for us. Drinks and people watchin’ at the Bangaroo House Bar.
Home, prepare for the opera–for which I was wardrobely unprepared and had to purchase some khakis at a discount shop which fit well but look somewhat shabby (but the price was right, again I fretted over cost?)–and drinks at the open-air opera bar beforehand. I had never seen Aida before and this introduction had a sense of the modern and classic. The stage contained a forest full of full-height LCD screens depicting various Egypt-influenced, flowing computer graphics. The wardrobe was historic opera and waaaaay over-the-top opulent. Perfect modern introduction to an opera classic. (Throughout the trip, I tried and failed to get a pic of one of the stylish Aida banners displayed across the city. Regerts.)
Difficult search for dinner afterwards but we finally found Restaurant Hubert–stylish, fin de siècle, and late night. Portobello and au poivre, fried gruyere, drinks. However, after an exhausting day we shamefully left the rarity of a cool late-nite joint and only stayed till 12:30. Ollllld people.
Sun 29 Jul 2018
Ahh, the Blue Mountains and their Aussie naturalness without containing deadly fish or animals or bugs or plants. Day trip with a small group and with our Fearless Leader Tom out of Sydney–whose metropolitan area is ridiculously large–west and north and increasing a bit in elevation. They are very much like north GA mountains of similar name. Tom was great and greatly gregarious there and back, but it took all my self-control not to correct his explanation of the blue-ness of the mountains not as eucalyptus-derived but actually an example of the optics of atmospheric perspective (art degree, yo). Still, he bequeathed us with his secret for a good marinade: Coke and soy sauce.
Places visited in the nearby town of [ed. find the town we visited] were: Lyrebird, Conservation Hut Cafe, Leura Cellars (where Lisa scored a bottle of Bloody Shiraz gin from Four Pillars), and the Featherdale Wildlife Park. So many animals at the park! Kangaroos… Tasmanian devils… birds of many types… dingos!! And, of course, trash turkeys errwere.
Drive and boat back to the City of Sydney for drinks at The Push where a singer-songwriter played Tracy Chapman with Britney Spears lyrics (re: our New Years par-tay with her in Vegas) threaded in. Chill. Off to Pony in our hood, The Rocks, for some kangaroo carpaccio and cod dinner. Then we somehow found a Sydney’s version of a classic Irish pub (?) downstairs at a low-ceilinged bar called The Doss House. Australian folk music with guitar+flute(?)+singers standing around a table and just folk-riffing. I spotted the larger-than-life owner with the musicians and as we were leaving he wished us well. Neat!
Mon 30 Jul 2018
Lastdayquicknow!
Queen Victoria Building and a French coffee shop where Lisa got The World’s Largest Croissant and we puzzled over a clock with ships circling it.
The Sydney Tower Eye observation deck to be the masters of all we surveyed and get a sense of just what an awesome city Sydney is.
The Mojo Record Bar (bar closed, record shoppe open) to resist purchasing the rare first Chicano Batman album (Lisa) and the GitS soundtrack (me).
Bar Luca for really delicious burgers before our bridge walk.
Bridge. Mother. Fucking. Climb. I have no pictures but it was impressive. Here’s the deal: start at the base of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, hook up to safety cables, walk up, uP, UP the suspended arch, and hang out for dusk. View! Starting the walk on the beams over the harbour I gots the nerves, but then when we came down from a height 2x that of the Sydney Opera House the original, lower height felt… mundane. Not unappreciative as such, but the gots-ing of nerves were put into perspective.
And, finally, the NOLA Smokehouse and Bar. How in the hell did Lisa find a Louisiana bar in Sydney? Whatever. Perfect food and perfect atmosphere and they suffered us as the late hangers about but there was way too much good food for the night before our flight back.
People I now dislike that I once felt the opposite, making me kind of a hypocrite
Richard Dawkins has gone from anti-religious to obliviously prejudiced. I know I know, he’s always been dismissive of religion, and I still agree with much of his attitude, but after this tweet:
Listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals. So much nicer than the aggressive-sounding “Allahu Akhbar.” Or is that just my cultural upbringing? pic.twitter.com/TpCkq9EGpw
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 16, 2018
He leaves me with a certain ickyness. And you can’t ignore the seemingly clueless ending question. His response to criticism of that tweet contained further cluelessness:
The call to prayer can be hauntingly beautiful, especially if the muezzin has a musical voice. My point is that “Allahu Akhbar” is anything but beautiful when it is heard just before a suicide bomb goes off. That is when Islam is tragically hijacked by violence.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 18, 2018
Sam Harris has always been problematic for me. I liked some of his writing at the time of the New (Angry) Atheist movement that came into being 5-or-so years ago, but even then he had–like Dawkins–a little too specific an anger for Islam as opposed to Islam’s cruelly manic adherents. And I unfortunately was introduced to his podcast via his Jordan Peterson interview [ed. blech]. Needless to say etc., it didn’t hook me.
Glenn Greenwald’s interviews with Snowden and release of documents outlining the craaaazy overreach of our intelligence agencies’ molesting of citizen’s rights were and are to be praised. The “liberated” documents most likely weakened our intelligence community’s power and even safety around the world, but that result must be viewed against the level of their abuses against privacy. Extreme, unchecked power may need a certain lawlessness to be corrected.
Still, his recent whataboutism towards anything America is erratically out-of-balance with reality. His argument that Trump’s position against Germany getting oil from Russia exonerates Trump from any collusion-adjacent crimes is… batshit.
One of Putin’s highest priorities – one of Russia’s most vital projects – is a new gas pipeline between it and Germany under the Baltic Sea. Trump is vehemently opposed to it & is bashing it mercilessly. Is this relevant to any of the theories being aired? https://t.co/yjeGxfgeus pic.twitter.com/YPcCxaWohg
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 11, 2018
Julian Assange. I had defended him, to a point, when the sexual assault allegations came out. There were many facts around the case that suggested innocence as much as guilt. I haven’t revisited that since and really don’t have the intellectual energy to care. I respect his founding of Wikileaks and, like Snowden’s document leak, believe there’s a need for such David/Goliath levelings of playing fields. Now, both he and Wikileaks are likely being manipulated by Russia to serve their ends. Are there truths in the releases? Certainly. Was there manipulation before? Most likely. And yet today the releases are used to attack considerably lesser evils with a laser-guided adherence to the media cycle and in support of a barbarous regime. To a certain degree, David has become Goliath.
Still, I’m a little bit hypocritical.
Alt
The 1st anniversary of the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, VA was last weekend. Best take was by Wonkette reminding us that it was “[the] time when [Nazis] marched and then killed a young woman with a car.” No need to mince about.
There have been several retrospectives of white supremacist beliefs in the news (because we don’t already know or understand what they believe in?). The most egregious was NPR’s interview with the organizer of the Unite the Right’s racist remembrance–presented as a spurious “both sides” segment–followed by the Black Lives’ spokesman responding. The former’s statement that “Ashkenazi Jews rate the highest in intelligence, then Asians, then white people, then Hispanic people and black people” is not one that can be presented on equal footing to anything. As The Washington Post opinion piece points out, succinctly: “Black Lives Matter [is not] the ideological counterpart to white supremacists.” Flat Earthers take note: you are as respected as centuries of science. Fuck you NPR. You did the same thing prior to W’s Iraq invasion–uncritically parrot the party line–and you deserve the worst that can happen to you because of these.
A recent study by the Institute for Family Studies analyzed data from the 2016 American National Election Survey to determine, as best as possible, what drives white supremacists. This research summary deserves to be read a few times. The data was based on the respondents’ answers to three questions regarding white racial identity, racial solidarity, and feelings of discrimination. The short answer is that white supremacists are more likely to be low income, low education, unemployed, and either Independent or Republican. The longer answer includes interesting contradictions to several assumptions: the researchers found no-or-little connection to the individual’s feelings on changing gender and family norms, no connection to rising secularism in society, and no prevalence in any one age group. So even though there are, surprisingly, young supremacists to replace the older generation, their beliefs are still in the minority. Cold comfort.
Looking at this group’s influence, an editorial in The Atlantic cautions that no matter how fringe this group remains, the blessings on them by the president along with tacit support by most Republicans gives their minority beliefs a majority of power. Last weekend’s Unite the Right 2 rally had 30-at-the-most supporters and, hearteningly, thousands of counter-protesters. Another Atlantic article closed with the observation that “[after] the protesters were ushered away quietly by their police escort, the counterprotesters didn’t even notice they had left.” And at least we can laugh at the Unite the Right’s 34-year-old organizer living at home and being berated by his father during a live stream while he praises Nazis and denounces “orthodox Israelis”. How long before this shit passes?