Author: Tim Jarrett

Pärt and me

I sang Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum for the first time in rehearsal last night. It’s the first time I’ve sung a work of that scale by Pärt, but I’ve been singing his music since college.

I was talking with Shel over the weekend about music that we discovered in college. For me, I said, it was the Pixies and Tom Waits. And jazz. But I neglected to mention that I discovered choral music in college as well. Our Glee Club director, John Liepold, introduced us to a broad swath of music from the Renaissance through contemporary works by Pärt (“De Profundis”) and Tavener. I was fascinated by the way Pärt took a simple melodic plan of ascending minor melodies and constructed an achingly beautiful and powerful work.

Later I sang a few Pärt works in the Cheeselords, including “De Profundis” and “…And One of the Pharisees”, and in the Cathedral Choral Society, including “Solfeggio”, “Cantate Domine”, and the haunting “Magnificat”. Each demanded utter concentration and repaid it richly in transcendence. But the Te Deum dwarfs all these. Pivoting between D major and D minor, the work (in seventeen sections) builds throughout from an opening men’s chant through interactions between three different choirs, over orchestral obbligatos of increasing complexity, to a thundering affirmation of God. It then tapers to close with a simple “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus”: Holy, holy, holy.

I had listened to the premiere recording many times since college and knew what was coming. But as we ran through the piece, stopping and starting occasionally, I couldn’t help but get goosebumps. The Cascadian Chorale, with which I’m singing now, has the ability to perform this piece transcendentally. I’m looking forward to it.
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Better dinner at Wild Ginger; day with Shel

On a friend’s recommendation, we went back to Wild Ginger for our anniversary last night. This was a complete 180 from our last visit. We were seated promptly, the service was attentive and knowledgable, the wine steward was brilliant, and the food was exceptional.

Today our friend Shel is visiting. We’re about to go to the public market for ingredients for a vegetarian feast, after eating bread, cheese, and a salad made with greens from our garden (arugula, dandelion greens, frisée, etc.). Shel is the sort of friend who can make a drizzly Northwest day a lot of fun.
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Good news for my scripts

Apologies for not blogging sooner. Between slow network connectivity here and the generally fragile state of editthispage.com, I’ve been unable to get to my site all day.

I had some insights on the problems with my scripts on the flight back. By reviewing the Apple-published scripting list archives, I realized that others were having problems publishing via XML-RPC (and probably SOAP) any text that contained unescaped HTML tags (e.g. < instead of &lt). This explains why my iTunes2Manila script was publishing with an empty body and should be easy to fix. There were also suggestions that processing the arguments to an XML-RPC or SOAP call to use plaintext instead of Unicode (or vice versa) would result in successful RPC calls. I may have some head down time on that shortly and hope to be able to bring my scripts up to Jaguar compatibility soon.
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Back

I got in a few hours ago. It was a decent flight, except that one of the bottles of wine (red, of course) that I purchased for Lisa broke in my suitcase, staining my clothes and my hardback copy of The Secret History. Quite jetlagged. I think I’ll be going home…

Change

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Cambridge writing this. (Thank God for enlightened hotels with broadband.) I just left one of two company presentations that I’m involved with today at MIT Sloan. Got a chance to see a very high energy evangelist from my company talk about where we’re going in the mobility market. Talked to a few grad students about my experiences so far. Even though I’m operating on about three hours of sleep, it felt really good. In fact, I felt “at home” in a way that I have rarely felt since I started this job in July.

I wonder about that. More than most other people I know (or maybe they do a better job of hiding it) I really go into a shell when I go into a new experience. I could be on top of the world one day, as I sometimes felt at Sloan (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) and go into a new situation the next and totally withdraw. There have been times over the last month where I’ve just shaken with frustration over my inability to engage, to act, to do anything. It’s like a crippling fear of leaving my office.

Today all that was gone. I think there’s something about just being in the old environment where I was on top that makes it easier even to admit to myself what I just wrote. I wonder if this is something everyone goes through. I know I felt it to an extent when I started at Sloan until I got my feet under me.

The Big Dig We Must

It’s somehow comforting to realize that, after all the years of construction, heavy machinery, foundation problems, and everything, the biggest threat to the two big sections of the Big Dig opening on time is… software. Or, more precisely, software plus all the infrastructure needed to run it. (Why is it that no one thinks until it’s too late about avoiding the need for “temporary… leased phone lines or microwave” data lines?) It’s not like they didn’t know they were going to need software a long time ago…

Like I said, though, it’s comforting to know that the software is the “make or break” for the opening of the tunnel. Software, after all, can be fixed, and everyone’s software is bad.
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There’s good news…

An unexpected letter today from my friend Dan in DC. A while back when I was singing with Suscipe Quaeso Domine (aka the Suspicious Cheese Lords), we used to joke about doing a joint concert with the Mediaeval Baebes. (The Baebes were founded by Katharine Blake from Miranda Sex Garden and exemplified a female version of our attitude toward medieval music, only with sexy costumes.) Since the group was UK based, I finally, reluctantly assumed nothing would ever come of it.

Fast forward to today, when I receive a card from Dan. He writes, “Now that you’re in the West I’m not sure if you keep up-to-date on the Mediaeval Baebes. This year, they played the Maryland Renaissance Festival, and several of your old Cheeselord clan was in attendance. They managed to meet the Baebes, and they got you the enclosed signed and lipsticked token.”

Inside was a postcard announcing the new album. On the back: signatures and one lip print from the Baebes, including Ruth, Marie, Cylindra, Audrey, and Teresa, among others.

As Opus once said, “I got the best friends in all known space!!!”
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Summing up undergrad in half an hour

The recruiting panel for the University of Virginia last night was fun. Assistant Dean Shawn acquitted himself nobly. The panel discussion was good, though at one point a bit awkward (“What’s the alcohol policy? And how many students drink anyway? And what about outside the dorms?” Umm…). At the end, we were asked to sum up our first impressions and how they changed by the end. My rambling version could be condensed to this: “When I arrived I was a little in awe. I mean, Thomas Jefferson! The man was President, and he left that off his tombstone, but put on that he founded the University! But by the end I felt like the school was my family.”

I drove away feeling that my description had been inadequate. But on further reflection I realized it would have to be inadequate. How do you do justice to a place and an experience that made you an adult and a leader? that took a boy and put him on the road to manhood?
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Mario in the house

We watched Mario Batali make orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe yesterday afternoon in front of a large crowd at the Festa Italiana Seattle. He was appropriately fun and informative, explaining the rationale behind using hard semolina flour for his orecchiette, then busting a little on Emeril (he added a clove of garlic to the sauce he was cooking and said, “Bam. Now you’ll notice that’s the only ingredient that makes a noise going in…. Don’t get me wrong, I like Emeril a lot. But we have different styles. I prefer to let the food do the talking.”)

Mario also managed to set a towel on fire. He had been letting his saute pan heat over a gas burner, and as soon as he added oil flames jetted up a good two or three feet into the air. He said, “Now when this happens in our kitchen we don’t get loud or panicky. We just say, ‘Smokey, put that fire out!’” He then proceeded to try to smother the flames with a towel, which promptly caught fire. He tossed it to the stage and stomped it out into the green plastic carpet. Afterwards his dad (who runs a great salumeria in Seattle) crept onto the stage to retrieve the towel and could be heard saying, “It’s stuck…”

Afterwards we tried out some of his dad’s salumi, which were tremendous, and got an autographed copy of Babbo, Mario’s cookbook. It was a good time.
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