Happy birthday to Bette -- so beautiful and wonderful on this milestone date! Wishing you many more years of happiness, great to catch you in for a telephone chat this morning, sending all our thanks and love across the miles!
Some of the way locally being over the Petaluma Plain to
Marin to rendezvous with Crystal.
But where is she? Not at Crestwood or Ridgewood, with -- after a brief swing to San Anselmo for multiple financial greetings -- an empty residence parking lot as well.
Last ditch effort, back to the Open Space, where, lo, her car is now parked, so, take a gamble (only 15 minutes left to spare before the journey to Diablo Valley College for the Music Theory Exam will need to occur) and take a stroll up the trail (figure 7.5 minutes forward is all that can be spared). Magnificently, there she is with Stanley, 6 minutes into the jaunt, so we get a 9 minute chat together on the way back -- well worth it!
Onward to the final, where the faithful are mostly assembled (all 26 eventually arrive -- perhaps a record, or at least close to such -- a wonderful group all semester)!
Back to the
local area, pick up the equipment for the
Underground
Sound
multi-faceted
show (the ladders take up one side of the car interior, so Harriet has to sit in the back, but we manage nonetheless),
the reverse course making towards a
striking
sunset
and San Francisco to
Stage
Werx.
Turns out that the back wall can serve as a suitable projection screen, so we proceed apace with soundchecks along with fellow artistes
Tom Shay and Bruce Pachtman,
before the capacity audience arrives, which welcomingly includes Lucas, Marie, and a charmingly dynamic
MC. A very multicultural assemblage, and there's a bit of concern as to how this material, with its allusions to various esoterica of graduate school, will go over. But hey,
Business As Usual (the interior trilogy-of-trilogies of the trilogy rubricked as
L.A. Stoies) is also about musical nerds, drunken revels, the certainty of death, totalitarianism, academic pomposity, violence, overconfidence, futility. and land preservation (and the music doth hath its charms, too, despite or perhaps even partly because of its polished pointy-headism and rusticity) -- so it all happily goes over well. The enthusiastic auditor/spectators (there are the nine new videos, after all) are given to enthusiastic outbursts, as if in a revivalist church, and, in the intensity of
IIc. Information Wanted (after the over-the-top screaming), someone sings out with "Welcome to my world!" Yes! Marvelous response!
Tom and
Bruce also acquit themselves nicely, Senor Shay delivering his "deceptive girl encounter" song even more appealingly than in the last outing heard several months back when Stage Werx was located downtown + the duo deliver a feverishly virtuosic kinda country-rap.
Also brilliant are the incredible members of MWE, a Turkish-instrument group -- in this incarnation: zorna, two clarinets, and a souped-up bass drum that comes across authentically as a basso dumbek -- whose demonstrative drones, animated rhythms, and sheer virtuosity bring down the house. Wow! Among the confirmations: very loud can be very great!
Home thereafter for more musical insanity (pdf page 10
Street Songs, composition second sheet of
Psalm 82).
