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November 28, 2001
Sunday night, after Andre went
Sunday night, after Andre went to bed, Jim and I started watching a program on PBS called Howard Goodall's Big Bangs. It is about the evolution of music. The episode we were watching talked about the invention and development of notating music. This sparked an interesting conversation about what music is and whether or not it can truly be notated effectively. I remarked that music is the perfect medium because it is the complete integration between art and math. I think this is largely true. Jim, while not disagreeing with that idea, was certainly critical of it. He thought that our conventional notation of music limits our ability to create it within those very narrow rules. He mentioned our perception of notes as high or low. Maybe they are left or right (...or even green and purple or something else.)
The whole conversation got me thinking. When we sing,we shouldn't try to reach high or aim low...that most likely produces a forced and unpleasing sound and that is not fun at all, either for the singer or the listener. I have a very unconventional voice. It is probably "lower" than most women and that is so frustrating for me. I spend a lot of time and energy trying to fall withing the conventional realms of what music is. Maybe it is time to change that.
I suppose in the end we are both right. Music is a wonderful meeting of art and logic but I think that is only the beginning. I have heard so many musicians that were sub par because, although they got all the notes correct; hit all the marks perfectly, their performance and their music was inevitably listless and uninspired. By the same token, artistic souls that don't understand the logic of music often sound just as dull. Maybe music,within the framework of math, holds secret a wealth of possibilities; of unknown quantum theories and undiscovered multi-dimensional models that we just aren't trying to find because we are so afraid of breaking out of the box of conventional wisdom. Maybe we don't even realize there is anything outside of the box. Well it's something to think about at least.
Posted by mermu at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)
Sunday night I spent the
Sunday night I spent the evening at Andre and Jim's apartment. I also took John, who shares an apartment with Ben one floor down, a French Pecan Pie made from my Grandma Karl's recipe. It was the third pie I made for the Thanksgiving holidays. All pies were tasty and well received. The French Pecan recipe offers a nice twist on a staple Thanksgiving dessert if one is of a mind to be a bit twisted. People are as opinionated about Pecan Pies as they are about real vs. canned cranberry sauce and white-bread vs. corn bread dressing so I try not to anticipate too much excitement over a French Pecan pie. On the whole though, everyone loved 'em. Thanks Grandma.
Okay, the truth is John's pie was actually the fourth one I made. The intended third got a bit of egg yolk in it and though still tasty was unpresentable. There. You have it.
Posted by mermu at 02:04 PM | Comments (1)
November 25, 2001
Okay, well that was all
Okay, well that was all the super exciting festivies. I spent Friday and Saturday chilling out with the cats of whom I am growing more and more fond. I have discovered that Red likes to use your head as a pillow when sleeping. So at night, I am tip to toe cats and that is strangely comfy. I went for a jog and a walk in the village and tried to soak up as much as I could while I was there. I bought a tea ball and leaves to start making tea without the bag. It tastes soooo good! Oh dear! I hope I am not becoming a yuppie.
I am now back at my apartment getting back into the swing of things. I have to start thinking about Christmas and making the gifts I want to make for everybody. Tonight I am going to hang out at Jim and Andre's before I go back to "the factory" on Monday.
Posted by mermu at 03:04 PM | Comments (2)
Thursday was Thanksgiving. I watched
Thursday was Thanksgiving. I watched a little of the Parade, saw my hairdresser perform in front of Macy's, and decided to make a cranberry sauce for Maia's party in addition to the French Pecan pie. I have never made one...cranberry sauce was always that yucky stuff out of the can for us at home and that never looked or tasted good to me. Mom and Jenny loved it though. I didn't have too much of a difficult time finding an open grocery store. Gristedes, the second one I went to, was just a few blocks up. On my way to the first one, I passed Janeane Garofalo walking her dog and chatting with a friend. She reminds of my sister Jenny. My Cranberry sauce turned out pretty tasty but following the recipe made it much too sweet. I think next time I will try it with half the sugar and brown sugar and see how that goes.
I treated myself to cab rides to and from the few places I went; one on East 96th and the other on W 54th. I ended up spending about $30! But hey, it was Thanksgiving and I am very thankful I can afford to be so frivolous sometimes. The potato dish I made was really good too..but pretty rich. The meal at Jim and Andre's, true to form, was amazing. Everybody brought a little something. But with this crowd a little something is Cranberry Souffle, Homemade Green Goddess Dressing, Brazilian potato salad, and Pumpkin Brulee etc etc. I didn't get to enjoy Grandma's famous white bread stuffing this year. While I did long for a taste of it, I settled quite well for Jim's dried fruit stuffing. Thanksgiving should definitely come more than once a year...but alas if it did I would most likely be as big as the girl in the book I am reading, She's Come Undone.
Posted by mermu at 02:55 PM | Comments (1)
wwI was off work on
wwI was off work on Wednesday so I went to my VoiceOver Coach then started cooking a bit for T-Day. I made a French Pecan pie for Maia and her Bulgarian friends' dinner and a scalloped potato dish for Jim and Andre's. I am so taken with these three cats I am sitting. I think Tex may be my favorite-and not just because he is named Tex. He seems to be the most affectionate. Tilly and Red have an extensive medication regimen. I have to give them pills with this blue thing that ejects the pills into their throats in a way that they don't spit them out....most of the time. I am not very good at this and I think it pisses Tilly, in particular, off.
Wednesday night Kambri, her beau Marc and his friend from Vegas, Andrew, met me at the SVA(swanky village apartment) and we then went to dinner at Strip House on 12th street. The meal was incredible and definitely not on my diet! Great atmosphere too. The interior is done in burlesque red and the walls are an homage to nude women in the 30's and 40's. After our amazing meal, we went to see a friend of mine, Marcus ,play at Cornelia Street Cafe. Then we went back to the SVA for a glass of wine and a view from that amazing deck. Aside from all of the interesting places we went, I had such a good time hanging out with Kambri, Mark, Andrew, and later, Aaron. What a fun group!
Posted by mermu at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)
Okay, well I thought I
Okay, well I thought I could force the dates on this so I could catch up on my journal writing and make it look like I was doing it day-to-day but I can't. So I am busted. I didn't start writing about this week until today. Blasted Blogger. This week has been pretty fun and exciting. On Tuesday I started my one-day-a-week bookkeeping job that will last until Christmas. I get such a kick out of the idea that I enjoy paying bills. I work at a documentary film company called Pangolin Pictures. Tuesday night I started pet sitting for these 3 adorable cats (Tex, Tilly, and Red) at this really amazing Village apartment with a deck as big as my friends' one bedroom apartment on 54th street. There is a view of the Empire State Building from the deck, the bedroom, and the living room. Ahhh...I could get used to this!
Posted by mermu at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)
Well I was going to
Well I was going to try to keep it a secret until I got home for Christmas but I can't. My 4:30 appointment was to go get my haircut at my friend Jim's house. We have a friend who is a hairdresser but who is currently working in a hit broadway musical. She came to the house and cut my hair and cut and colored Jim's in the kitchen. It was great fun. I couldn't help but feel like a true New Yorker. There I was with my own private hairdresser in the privacy of my friend's home. Apparently, this kind of arrangement is very common with the broadway crowd and their friends and somewhat illegal. Alot of actors are out of work stylists when they are in-work actors but they supplement their meager Broadway salaries with a little extra sidework and are pretty generous with helping out their friends. Plus, if you have ever had a stylist you really like, you don't want to start going to some stranger just because your favorite stylist has a job within her vocation.
Posted by mermu at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)
November 18, 2001
I have an appointment at
I have an appointment at 4:30 so this will be a quickie. I have posted my first picture in the photos section of this site. I can't believe how involved the whole thing was. Using Blogger makes this journal so easy. I am using Netscape Composer as a web editor and they don't have a way to publish the page so I had do download this really cool free thing called SmartFTP. So I am getting an education in webbuilding. Fortunately, this present comes with excellent technical support. Thanks, Stepan!
Posted by mermu at 03:17 PM | Comments (0)
November 15, 2001
Last night I participated in
Last night I participated in my first ever reading of a screenplay in front of an audience. I must say as far as firsts go it was fabulous. The play written by Donna Tsufura is called MacKenzie's Cafe. It's about a young American Asian woman who has a dream to open a cafe in her small town. I got to play 3 roles, an Australian best friend named Annie, the Southern wife of an affluent man (read by Richard Masur, and a ditzy cafe waitress named BJ. I had a great time with the reading. But a personal highlight was shaking hands with Ang Lee. His son Mason (who you may know from a short film called Chosen for BMW films) was also participating in the reading and Mr. Lee graciously took time to meet all of the actors before the reading began. He didn't actually stay for the reading, but he will have access to the reference video taken of the performance/reading. So while I haven't actually been in a movie since I have been up here, I am at least hobknobbing with Oscar winners, er--- an Oscar winner.
Posted by mermu at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)
November 09, 2001
I am so excited..I just
I am so excited..I just put my first hyperlinks in my journal and even used some HTML code for the italics...yeehaw! I am learning to develop websites!!!
Posted by mermu at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)
Well everyone from out of
Well everyone from out of town is gone and I am left to try to get back to norm. I had such a good time with everyone. My birthday I was surrounded by many close friends... some from my past and some from my present and, I hope, my future. My friend Duwayne came to visit as a surprise from Houston. I have been telling him to move up here for a year now. At first, I admit, I wanted him here as another friendly face in the crowd of a very large and unknown city. But as the crowd becomes more familiar and the city becomes more beloved, I just want Duwayne to move here because I think he is meant to live here. Karma seemed to be on my side as well. Duwayne just happened to get a call from the NY City Opera at a time when he just happened to be in NYC where he could schedule an audition the next day. For those of you on the edge of your seats for news, I finally got in touch and Duwayne had a good audition. But as most performers know, you try to let yourself get lost in the audition as you are auditioning and then you let it go as soon as you walk out the door. Since I am not the auditionee, I will gladly light a candle and keep my fingers crossed.
For the record: Tea at The Plaza sucked! That isn't totally true...the actual tea was really good and the scones were fabulous. But the other pastries and finger sandwiches were sub par. In fact, I think I have had a tastier morsel at sub-WAY. Rich people are such suckers....and I guess I am too for that matter. The Plaza is a lovely place but their High Tea only provides a glimpse of the beauty and relaxing ritual of taking tea. I think I will follow my coworker Anthony's suggestion and try it at Tea and Sympathy in Greenwich Village sometime. As for the Marathon, hitting Ground Zero on Sunday and watching the Cowboys play...well that was 86'd not soon after we walked out of the house for the first time at about 2:30pm that Sunday.
Posted by mermu at 04:18 PM | Comments (2)
November 04, 2001
I feel like I am
I feel like I am being a great tour guide while Mom and Jen are here. So far we have gone to a Sample Sale (a very Insider New York thing to do) of wedding dresses whose proceeds go to the Twin Towers Orphan Fund, been to see an off-broadway show, seen three famous people in and around NYC (Harvey Keitel at The Shape of Things, Matthew Broderick and Edward Norton at Jo-Allens), and been to a cabaret bar where the singers are the bartenders, waiters and anybody who wants to get up and do a little ditty. It is such a load off that they saw famous people. Today we missed mass (we got home at 5AM) but we are planning to go see the NY Marathon, Ground Zero, High Tea at the Plaza, and maybe catch a bit of the Cowboy/Giants game at a bar.
Posted by mermu at 10:58 AM | Comments (1)
Stepan asked me in the
Stepan asked me in the comments if I had visited my page before it was set up. While my first answer is "no, I am just a fan of the enigmatic Miss Emma and her rules of marital bliss" the truth is that yes I had been here probably about 2 or 3 weeks ago. I was so pissed (American pissed...not English) that some weirdo named Miss Emma encroached on my name! In the last few months I would periodically check on my intended domain name to see if it was still available thinking that one day in the near future I would register it and try to figure out how to set it up. I thought that the BIG MACHINE had recorded my interest in the site and Miss Emma purchased it with the intention of trying to re-sell it to me or some other poor schmo. The thought had also crossed my mind that Stepan and Jenn might have got it for me (they are the only ones I know with the capability to do something like this) but I quickly dissmissed that hair-brained idea because Stepan would never think of, much less write something so clandestine and subversively BandD as "Miss Emma's Rules of Marital Bliss". Hmm....there are things I don't know about my future brother-in-law.
Posted by mermu at 10:50 AM | Comments (1)
November 03, 2001
I love it!!!!! I am
I love it!!!!! I am so glad this doesn't belong to Miss Emma and her Rules of Marital Bliss.
Posted by mermu at 11:11 AM | Comments (1)
I HATE Netscape Navigator. This
I HATE Netscape Navigator. This whole site looks in it like crap and it crashes when it tries to display the calendar table on the left (both on the Mac and on Win2k)
If it works in Netscape 6.2, I may just ignore it.
Posted by mermu at 10:51 AM | Comments (2)
Stepan is doing a marvelous
Stepan is doing a marvelous job with this web site - Meredith is going to love it!!!
Posted by mermu at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)
This is a test post
This is a test post (Stepan logged in as Meredith).
Posted by mermu at 02:50 AM | Comments (0)
Homer was sleeping under the
Homer was sleeping under the table. Then he released a silent-but-deadly fart and moved away into the halway (where the air is fresh).
I wish I had that luxury!
Posted by mermu at 12:42 AM | Comments (1)
So it's past Meredith's birthday
So it's past Meredith's birthday and I'm desparately trying to finsih her web site.
Posted by mermu at 12:41 AM | Comments (4)