My usual stages of internal monologue during classical music performances when I don't know the pieces well:
1: this is so great. Why don't I do this once a week or at LEAST once a month?
2: [ruminations on performers' technical prowess, musicality, rhythmic integrity, showmanship]
3: so sleepy
4: [fighting sleep]
5: [asleep]
6: [awake with guilty start, pay rapt attention for remaining few minutes]
7: this is so great.
8: [as applause continues for fortieth straight minute] I want to go home.

Tonight, Evgeny Kissin & the NY Phil:

Nobody breathed.

Je m'baladais sur l'avenue le coeur ouvert à l'inconnu.

Two dudes on subway platform singing "She Will Be Loved", harmonizing, and really drawing out its wistfulness and sweetness with warmth and sincerity. Was so late but had to stop and listen. I'm not ashamed of liking some Maroon 5 songs. They know what they're doing.

We run away and we don't know why.

(1) For reasons I haven't quite articulated (and probably won't bother to try; I would guess something to do with the hypocrisy of it itself being incredibly pandering/cliched and its sneering highmindedness that sounds dangerously like envy; it also feels presumptuous somehow), this article* is almost as irritating as its target. I liked this, however:

The public often has unfairly romantic expectations of artists. We expect them to create for the sake of creating, to make art for art’s sake. We like them to live out clichés we would never essay ourselves, and if any of them dare to make money in the process, we turn around and accuse them of “selling out.”

Though I don't think they're artistic masterpieces, I have at times not minded the head bop inducing Where is the Love? and Let's Get it Started, esp for working out. However, most of the rest (especially "I gotta feeling") does make me want to "claw my face off" or punch things.

*ETA fixed link.

(2) Attempting to thwart perfect's attempt to thwart good.

Mixed up and lost, you showed me love at no cost, and when nobody else cared, you were there.  Down on my luck, you helped my life get unstuck, and when the world went away, you stayed.  You fight off my enemies; you'd take a bullet for me, and you know I'd do the same for you, 'cause that's how we roll, connected at the soul, and I just want you to know how I feel.  Thank you for loving me every day. Thank you for showing me the way.  Thank you for things that I never say.  Thank you for the good times.  Thank you for your love.  Thank you for the joy you've given me.  Thank you.

I love the off-kilter emPHAses on the wrong syLLAbles, and only internal rhymes...conveys such playfulness and affection.  And a round!  I never don't twitch with happiness at those. Aural E (not that I'd know, etc.).

AUGH there's a reason I haven't listened, really listened, to the "tribute" peace on earth/walk on in public! The end... AUGH

We'll shine like stars in the summer night.  We'll shine like stars in the winter night.  One heart, one hope, one love.

gallimaufry

1. Will anyone ever again be able to say I'M ON A BOAT, even when true, without giggling? Prognosis is poor.  I'm just THINKING it right now and grinning.

2. NEWS FLASH:  MM is right-handed & likes mook

3. "I don't think he's French." W. T. F. !!!! (he wasn't a lot of other things, either)

4. I am so so so grateful and so incredibly outrageously lucky to have health insurance, let alone the coverage and care that I do. Thank you, thank you God.

5. Recently watched "Strangers on a Train." Ageless, astonishing. Overwhelming impulse to continually pause it and take notes to write a paper about it. *Every* element conspiring to make it as creepy and disturbing as can be, with zero gore etc.  Image of Walker's somehow at-once totally normal and also psycho eye-expressions still bothering me days later.  If that's not what possessed looks like, I *really* don't want to know what is.  And not one of his lines was overtly insane, but all straightforward, simple and logical... portrait of a psychopath.  Just amazing stuff.

6. As I was trying to explain to someone today why the exec education thing had been so rewarding, it finally came to me that a lot of it was having to be so fully, uncompromisingly, relentlessly, intensely ON for an extended period, in so many different ways, both in and out of class.  It took me this long to realize because at the time, as usual, I experienced it mostly as stress - at best, infrequently and passingly, as an oblique masochistic pleasure - but seeing *everything* done in that movie at such a level for some reason revealed to me, first, how much my enjoyment of various kinds of performances arises from that thrill (in all senses), vicariously, and then the thrill itself.  I hadn't had to do it in so long (and have probably never come so close to accessing the *joy* of doing things that I find difficult, and doing them well, while doing them, as I did there).  When *was* the last time, really?  Bar exams? performing?  I don't even know.  (ETA Oh! are you kidding!  CANIS LUPUS, etc.! ah...well...this explains a lot.  But that's in a very different, specific, narrow way, only sporadically that challenging, and only available a few days per year...hmmmm)  To sound like an ******* for just a moment, it's like being Secretariat and spending my day-to-day as a Central Park carriage horse and then suddenly being thrust into a race and being shocked at how much I enjoyed it.  No, you know what- I'm not apologizing for that - people around me are saying some version of this to me *all the time*.  I'm the only one who doesn't think/know/say it, and that's some bs right there. Now what I'm supposed to do with this information, I have no idea.

1. Maybe I *am*; how would *I* know?

2. My competitive ire is seldom raised but when it is, people had best watch it.

3. Starting the week shakin' it. We're sliding through it swiftly. niftily. Sleep deprivation ftw

The hydrangeas in Mad Sq Park are SHOUTING and waving their pom poms. It's hard to look away.

Hang of GarageBand being gotten, grudgingly. Shopping list: a pickup, replacement midi cable for keyboard, and I am guessing someone somewhere would be happy to trade me money for more tracks and more instruments. I NEED HORNS

Extremely obvious superior feature that I only just realized: does not require a lap; can be held at any crazy angle and manipulated blackberry-style, as I am doing right now. I hadn't identified this fact as such (thought it was just aesthetics mostly) but I think this is the #1 reason I do indeed to my surprise take it places I wouldn't my netbook, viz., everywhere, especially thanks to my beloved yummy Tags.

omg while trying to be tactful in an email, I just realized that English DOES use the pleonastic negative!!! Ex: "I wonder if you're not overreacting just a little". How didn't I notice this before? I always thought it was just a quaint and adorable quirk of French. I have always wanted to start a band called Pleonastic Ne, or Groovy Moppet which a friend (the one with the "so many words to say so little" State Dept job description) once called me to my unreasonable pleasure. (Burgle! It's the person we ran into at the airport on the way back from...St Maarten I think? and as we walked away you asked her ethnicity and I said Korean and you said "Well, that is the whitest person I have ever met" LOL) I quickly grew frustrated with GarageBand because it would be vastly easier to just play the real instruments (or learn in the case of drum or bass, or find someone who already does), than to try to decipher how the app has "simplified" them, which I was not finding very intuitive. The Guitar Hero problem multiplied. I really am going to learn to play the drums....that was my first choice when parents asked in third grade, request was denied, and I can't believe it hasn't occurred to me since then, til now, to learn.

I have gotten so much done today that I'm all hopped up on it.

"You ain't seen nothing like me yet." Just unbelievably good.

PANDORA IS TOTALLY FREAKING ME OUT...if I believed it could be psychic I would think that.

For what it's worth, it was worth all the while.

Today's "heard in a store" music acquisition: MoZella, "Stay". Always such a sucker for that heartbreaky nostalgic VI7b5/ii/V sequence. V of v of V! Entrancing. Gorgeous mathiness. Galaxies whirl.
So immediately taken with the other snippets that for the first time since October 31, 2000, I just bought an album.
Super-digging her r&b, throwback, gently gritty London-y vibe, and her (her producers'?) playfulness with rhythm and orchestration.

Oh!! Also heard a mind-blowing cover of "Fancy" in which "plain white trash" was replaced by "plain black girl", but can't find :( gotta start carrying around my iPad

Zooey Deschanel! I love her! You know what would be refreshing though? A "relatably" "plain" female comedy protagonist who's actually plain - like all the ordinary-looking men who always get hired to play comic leads - instead of a gorgeous woman being forced to act "adorably" zany or klutzy as a substitute for plainness/to make her less threatening to everyone. Zooey is Snow White; you gotta be kidding me. Katherine Heigl bumping into things while wearing $900 shoes at her $20,000/year entry-level "glamorous" publishing job doesn't make me exclaim "Oh, she's just like me!" All it does is insult everyone involved.

Also there are at least 2 Happy Endings people in this promo, one a HE series regular. lol wut

Will we ever say the words we're feeling, reach down underneath and tear down all the walls? Will we ever have our happy ending or will we forever only be pretending? Keeping secrets safe, every move we make seems like no one's letting go. And it's such a shame 'cause if you feel the same how am I supposed to know? - beautiful song akshully - I didn't know Finn had it in him either. (I know I know)

The roof-raiser very fine too.

TEX!!!!!!!!!!!!

EP! No matter how many times it happens it's still always a little disconcerting to see someone you know on tv. It's so weird.

What's better than a guy who can dance, really.

Coasting woozily on the pleasingly disorienting alternations of 6/4 with the occasional lone bar of 4/4 and cheeky perverse and (I'm guessing) deliberately obfuscatory enjambment across each bars-3-to-4 of aforementioned sprawl ii on repeat while roaming manhattan on this, the loveliest of all possible spring days.

trying to stay awake and remember my name

Was in Anthro and that "Sprawl" song came on. I've heard it before and was like "fine, whatever, yes, it's very good, can I go now plz", but -- maybe it was hearing it with such a good soundsystem, but the loveliness of its hypnotic shimmer was so overwhelming that I had to sit down. And that otherworldly, ecstatic voice!  The total effect is transporting.  Also enjoy the ironic contrast with the lyrics; I just did same in new song :/ not very original...oh well.  Uncategorizable, excitingly original sound - closest analog I could think of was the lush rapturous sonic waterfall / wall-of-sound of Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize?", which is always a good thing in the book of someone who first heard it 6 weeks after the death of a loved one, synchronized with visuals at points so beautiful she had to close her eyes for fear of losing consciousness, and did then and still do find in it a supernatural comfort.  In that song, however, the music and lyrics could not be more congruent.  Hey! It's still playing?  Must remember to go see it in Milwaukee.  Maybe I should just change the name of this blog to "I digress."