so,

angst and hope, it snowed last night, i read that french peasants used to practically hibernate for 7 months of the year, sleeping next to their pigs. etymonline.com says hibernate is like gheima or zima, winter, also hima, sanskrit for snow as in himalaya. i say there's a bear in there. berlin is suppose to be named for bears.

anyway, i finally found a pianist for the hanging gardens cycle. he's very sweet and only every so slightly condescending, but i can deal because he's in it for, get this, the greatness of the work. boy you academics are scarce outside the gates of eden, and it sure is good to meet one of you!

by the way in the real estate office in park slope where i work hangs a framed newsweek cover, from like, 1994 or something, showing these two figleaf beclothed people running over the brooklyn bridge beneath a stormy sky and a big hand pointing toward what must have been at the time cheaper real estate.

so i've been having more discussions with my friends in and out of universities about the role of the intellectual. i finished das kapital, volume I, i'm taking a class on it at cuny sponsored by the brecht forum. only $75. my one friend, j, current student of composition on the west coast, likes to argue that music is a totally viable career choice, and you can, if you try, make a decent living at it. for me the problem is what "trying" involves. it's not necessarily bad: getting your work written down and organized so it's available to people, forging relationships with potential performers, going to conferences, keeping up with the academic debates. okay. but there are strings attached to all those things. plus you have to represent western culture to the untutored masses of your undergraduates as this monolithic great benificent complicated system of rules and order, when really it was developed by a bunch of people who didn't always take it that seriously, who certainly do not represent all the musicians who ever played, even in europe, who borrowed tons of stuff from people we never talk about, like countless anonymous wedding singers, gypsies, jews, turks, folk musicians, and others, and who learned much of what they knew simply by playing, not by studying. i guess if anyone was to teach in a deeper way, it would be my friend.

i say music is not a viable career choice because everyone should have the time and opportunity to make music as well as they want, given our current level of prosperity. we should have none of these crap 9-5 jobs that are really 8-7 by the time you stay late and commute home. none of this insecurity about whether you're going to lose your place in the ladder of employment if you work part time. and there are plenty of resources to allow us all to play music together. there must be a lot more people who want to play music than who can under the current system. and there must be a lot of musicians who wouldn't mind doing something else part of the time but who have to be "professional" so they have to work 80 hours a week whether in grad school or out, making music into a "viable career".

i don't want to work 80 hours a week at anything. i want to spend some time digging holes with a shovel and changing lightbulbs, some time solving problems that don't have to do with music, a little time teaching, and some time practising and performing. and if our american system can give me that within the framework of capitalism, along with healthcare, then maybe i will reevaluate my current critique.

also i was feeling really depressed about singing opera because i was watching these women on youtube and thinking, there's no way i can care enough about opera to be able to do it "for real" with an orchestra and with other good singers. and then i was watching keyshia cole videos, thinking boy she's a great singer but why does she only get to sing about love, and why do all these singers have to be so pretty? i'm sure there are 10 singers who are unattractive for every attractive one. and then i looked up bob dylan's "a hard rain's gonna fall" the one where he's younger. and i thought you know, this is my vernacular. this touches me deep, i'm singing opera to help me with this. i've been writing songs for a few years and one day i hope they're like this. and this genre allows a level of social critique that i've never seen in opera or indian classical music or most pop music that gets on the radio. and damn he looks sincere.