Still going after all these years.
Oh hell. CNN: London rocked by explosions. CNN says that it now appears that three explosions went off in the Tube, and another ripped through a double-decker bus as it was approaching Russell Square.
Lisa and I stayed in Russell Square during our first stay in London in 1999. We felt it was one of the most peaceful places in that busy city. Sadly, not anymore.
Update: Jeff Jarvis has a growing list of links and first hand reports from London bloggers.
I have now figured out the secret of surviving a Tanglewood residency. It involves a car, a map, and an Internet connection.
To back up: I had a hazy, mystical picture of life at Tanglewood prior to arriving here, including random music clinics with the famous and artistic; brushes with genius at every turn; and the sort of breezy camaraderie that goes with all good choirs. I am in the process of recalibrating my expectations.
For one thing, most of my fellow 178 choristers seem to have made plans well in advance for every meal and don’t linger about after rehearsals, leaving us newbies to shift for ourselves. (In fact, another Tanglewood first timer to whom I gave a lift today decided that he was going to hike around, and hike back the five miles to his hotel, after we tried unsuccessfully for half an hour to find a group to join for lunch.) For another, we are early in the season, and the masters classes appear not to have started (or to not be advertised to the hoi polloi, at any rate). What to do?
Well, for me, the solution was to do a solid afternoon of work for the office, and then to strike out on my own. And if you know me, you know that means beer. In particular, thanks to a BeerAdvocate recommendation, I found my way 10 miles north up Route 7, which runs from the Mass Pike past Lenox and through Pittsfield, all the way up to Lanesboro, where I found Ye Olde Forge, which claims it has the “county’s largest selection of imported and domestic beer.”
And it just might. The draft list was about fifteen beers—numerically nothing spectacular, but when those fifteen include Belhaven Scottish Ale and Delerium Nocturnum, your writer tends to sit up and pay attention. Add to that a long (if incompletely stocked) list of bottled offerings and a pub menu that stretches from mussels to chicken fingers to etoufée, and you have a minor mecca on your hands.
(Chicken fingers? Well, Ye Olde Forge is family friendly, as evidenced by the two young kids at the table across the way from me. The younger child got off the best line I heard today when, looking at the bar TV which was showing the Tour De France, he solemnly told his mom that he didn’t ever want to go to France. “Why not?” “Because I don’t want to be run over by bicycles.”)
Anyway, I recommend Ye Olde Forge—and I recommend arriving early, particularly on a rainy summer evening when the patio isn’t open.
We were so busy over the weekend, and I was so busy the last couple of days, that I never got a chance to record our progress on the latest project—closing the walls after the first round of AC install.
As recorded previously, I opportunistically ran phone, Cat 5, and coax through the open walls where our contractor ran his electrical wires, the cooling lines from the compressor, and the drip line from the attic. I was originally planning to run speaker wires as well, but Lisa talked me out of it. We will leave audio out of the second floor for now.
We wanted to get the walls closed off, so rather than completing the coax run from the outside drop to the structured wiring box, I moved ahead to installing insulation. After reviewing the options, I reluctantly went with fiberglass — reluctantly because our house’s 2×4 exterior framing only allowed using R-13 batts, and even those were somewhat compressed by the pipes in the wall. But, as Lisa keeps pointing out, it’s better than the horsehair that was there to begin with.
After the insulation, I cut blueboard to size and installed that with drywall screws. Upstairs, I was able to drive the screws directly into studs on both sides. Downstairs the studs were hidden behind the window frame on one side of the opening, but there were still the ends of some laths visible in half the hole. I cut some 3/4″ by 3″ standoffs, nailed those into the studs whereever I had gaps, and then ran the screws through those into the studs (in a few cases, at an angle!) to support the top of the board. It was an ugly process, but it worked well enough, and after the seams and screw holes were taped and the entire thing skim-coated with two layers of veneer plaster, it was OK. (Lisa did the actual plastering, and has concluded that it is the skill most lacking by us for this whole project.)
After the plastering was done, I installed the wall plates for the media wiring outlets, which involved terminating each of the cables and snapping the plugs into the modular wall plate. Final steps were priming the plaster and then (finally!) painting the first floor office/bedroom. I took a few photos throughout the process; the one on this entry is a teaser that (with the exception of the uncovered electrical outlet) shows the final product of all the work I just described. The original wall opening ran between the two outlet plates on the wall to within a few inches of the ceiling.
So that was the work on the office this weekend. Plus of course assembling the desk we bought at Ikea. But that’s another story. So is repainting our bedroom, but that story will have to wait until we start it.
My first Tanglewood rehearsal is over. Yes, already. We had a brief piano rehearsal with James Levine, who went over a few potential trouble spots in the Mahler, complimented our tone, and wished us a good evening. Completely unlike what I had anticipated based on my past experiences with famous conductors. Where Robert Shaw always gave an impression (amplified, to be sure, by his various ailments) of desperately contained passion and fury, and Sir David Willcocks was acerbic, dramatic, and understatedly witty, Levine strikes me as brisk, unassuming, and subtle.
I came away from the first rehearsal better understanding what I had started to gather from the first few rehearsals of this piece: nearly everything that I have done for concert preparation before has been work. This is making music.
Blogging will be intermittent this week (I know myself too well to say it will be light). I am currently in Pittsfield, MA, getting ready to head over to Tanglewood for my first rehearsal there with James Levine.
More notes to come. (Ba-da-bum.)
Just updated the tagline. Courtesy Mike Doughty, nee M. Doughty of Soul Coughing, in his fine “Move On.”
I think we get confused, even on a day like today, about where we all stand. Me? I couldn’t be happier to be in a country that was born of a bunch of people standing around and talking about what was wrong with their current form of government, and then doing something about it.
Half the Sins of Mankind points to the statement of copyright that Woody Guthrie wrote for his “This Land is Your Land”:
This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.
Right on, Woody.
“Error has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper and sufficent antagonist to error.”—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion, 1776.
“The judges should always be men of learning and experience in the laws, of exemplary morals, great patience, calmness and attention; their minds should not be distracted with jarring interests.”—Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Wythe, 1776
Watching the televised Boston Pops concert tonight, it’s tempting to compare and contrast Keith Lockhart’s face and words as he winds up for the concert and conducts the first few numbers with his interview in the Sunday edition of the Boston Globef. In the paper, he sounded like a petulant boy trying to decide whether to fish or cut bait. On stage and in pre-concert interviews, he looks charming, refreshed and assured. Which is the real Pops director?
As I haven’t had the opportunity to sing under Mr. Lockhart, I can’t offer a first hand observation. I do find the difference in presentation curious, though. Why on earth would someone as apparently media-savvy as Keith Lockhart drop the shield for an interview that made him out to be such a whiner? You’d think he’d, I don’t know, go start a LiveJournal or something.
For the last few years I’ve been posting patriotica on this holiday, when we commemorate the passings of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as well as the signing of our Declaration of Independence. I may yet post some tonight. Right now, though, I’m too darn tired.
The weekend has been a blur—lots of home improvement stuff. Tonight it took its toll, as we conked out on the brink of heading downtown to watch the fireworks from a friend’s Back Bay rooftop. Instead we’re cocooning; watching the Pops on TV and catching our breath before I head out tomorrow to Tanglewood for my residency with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.
New York Times: Consumers, Long the Targets, Become the Shapers of Campaigns. Sigh. You know, I thought Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger worked this out years ago, folks. Consumer = someone who consumes, or as the Cluetrain quotes, “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.” If you really want to talk about people participating in your business, then you’re not talking about just a consumer any more, but a customer. Big difference. Do you take consumers seriously? How about customers?
To the point of this article: How would you advertise to a consumer? Buy, buy, buy. How about to a customer? Maybe you don’t advertise at all, maybe you just put out the information about your product and let them decide. Both are forms of marketing—maybe even valid forms of advertising—but only one is enlightened.
To be clear, I’m mostly complaining about Crest’s interactive advertising campaign, which has very little to do with enlightened customer-centric marketing. I see Crest asking me to vote on toothpaste and I think, You don’t respect me and you don’t respect my time. Calling Crest’s campaign, which sends “e-mail message[s] from Crest urging [customers] to vote every day” for their favorite toothpaste flavor, “marketing” is like calling that condescending lecture from your least-favorite aunt who forgets you’re more than five years old a “conversation.” (It also sounds like a good way to drive up Crest’s opt-out and unsubscribe numbers.)
But Staples’ interactive product design contest—encouraging customers to submit new product ideas—is respectful. Their process is much more like a true conversation. Maybe the difference is as much in the nature of the products as it is in the companies. After all, who needs another flavor of toothpaste?
Last point: I’m not sure how the Times can write an article about companies using interactive marketing and not ask the other partner in the equation, the customers, to comment. The only voices in this article are advertising companies and product marketers. You would think they would have asked at least one toothpaste user how he liked being asked to vote. Then maybe they would have found out something.
At the least, can we get the Times to stop writing articles that use the word consumer when they mean you and me?