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.
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.
Sydney, Manly, and Watsons BaySites in the city we’ve seen
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!
Museum of Contemporary 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
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)
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
Gordon Bennett, Number 9, 2008
Ian Burn, 1960s, blue reflective, you are the subject, almost no imperfections must have been difficult, opposite of abstract expressionism
Ian Burn, Blue Reflex, 1966
Robert MacPherson, 1970s, three slides become one, last is textural, the black looks fuzzy
Robert MacPherson, White/black (Arago), 1975
Mikala Dwyer, 1990s, tower of plates, more minimalism (balloons) [ed. again, very much the minimalist sculptures we saw in Lisbon], so much tension
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.
Such nobility!
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.
This makes me yearn.
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.
Self-portrait in Lisa’s glasses
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.
Das Haus der Oper
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.
Not shown: regatta of around 20 or 30 sail boats and a sunken treasure ship!
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.
Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
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.
(shhhh, prehistoric)They should have sent a poet!
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!
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.
Recently meaning: in the last year, a few months after a hospitalization. I did not see heaven or hell or even get close to any brush with mortality that, justifiably, sends some to fear their mortality. I experienced a personal, existential bleakness that felt like a threatening, eternal prison. So many others have gone through very real threats of a quality that mine was very really not (cf. the Thai kids), but the experience was personal, so there you are.
Not long after the event, I–unfortunately–read the Harlan Ellison short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, in which a small group of people have been tortured for a century by a computer that was built for war and rebelled in anguish, killing the entire population but those five. In retribution for being created only as a weapon, he gave them gross physical alteration and tortured them with depravation and insanity, yet kept alive and uncertain of what punishment would be visited next. This is a story that you should not read if you’re on-or-close-to the edge.
Though much diminished, any random event can trigger the memory, but honestly it can appear without prompting. I’m tied down, in emptiness, forever. I think: “maybe that’s how it will end,” and there’s no option of a pleasant or absence of pleasant eternity, just existence. As a nearly lifelong atheist it’s a weird feeling. Is this how the non-secular feel throughout their lives? More important: is this how those with PTSD feel and, if so, I can’t imagine the grief.
I was with a large group of people recently, drinks then dinner then drinks then concert, many of whom I hadn’t met before and who were diverse in their professions, passions, and history. Impressive lives. The conversations were those of a quality that you could hardly keep up with in insight or humor. I was stressed and miserable the whole time.
But then I also looked around and at various times in the evening saw others that just maybe under the surface betrayed a hint of the same stress. That kind of cornered dog reserve. Some people just aren’t build for crowds, but it may not show.
When young, preteen to teen? I remember that reserve being mistaken as arrogance. I think maybe others experience that response growing up and it imprints a hopelessness when in a crowd. Absence of engagement can make you seem the asshole. I see it still from listening to friends/acquaintances and hearing their response to others’ reserve. Although, I often don’t know these third parties so maybe they are assholes. Do women experience this to a greater degree? The only possible personal response to such misunderstandings is ambivalence.
Cocktail parties, as with most experiences, are never like those in the movies.
I abandoned the old one after a server update and a general reorg of EXTREMELY insecure software. This one uses WordPress (oooh shiny) with a very generic canned template (less shiny) and will hopefully get a nicer design, though work and etc. will leave that task on the back-burner.
And now, inevitably, with this fresh outlet I will mentally freeze up, staring at a blank page. So maybe it’s First! and Last!
