Matt Marks Music

A sweet story by Justin Davidson, who wrote up AWS’s performance of my Revolution 9 arrangement at The Kitchen, about his experience taking his son to the various concert he sees and reviews.

He mentions the performance:

So, for the past year, Milo has become my semi-regular escort. Before each outing he worries that he will be the only child in attendance, and sometimes he is. He has heard the Berlin Philharmonic open the Carnegie Hall season with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel make his electrifying New York debut with Beethoven’s Fifth; and tenor Juan Diego Flórez nail his nine high C’s in the Met’s new production of La fille du régiment. He suffered through an amateurish evening of Renaissance dance music in a church, and was baffled by a live orchestration of the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” by the group Alarm Will Sound. He loved South Pacific enough that he could sing most of it from memory after one performance. He will wait a year or two for the full-throated tragedies of love and fate. He has heard me remark how much his beloved J.R.R. Tolkien absorbed from Wagner’s four-opera excursion into Norse mythology, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and he’s expressed interest in seeing it. Not yet, I think. In the meantime, the Met has plenty to offer a 10-year-old: the creepy, saccharine horrors of Hansel and Gretel, the over-the-top wizardry of Julie Taymor’s Magic Flute, and the antics in The Barber of Seville. Whether all this stimulation will coalesce into affection or merge in an undifferentiated memory of sitting silently among rows of old people in red velvet chairs, I have no idea.

To be honest I would have been baffled at that age as well. In fact I’m baffled by it now.

Read the whole article though. It’s a cool description of a childhood saturated with exposure to many varieties of music. I often wish I had this type of upbringing. Had I grown up with an innate interest in cars I would have been in hog heaven, as I’m sure my brother was, who eventually joined the family business. But I was lucky enough to have parents that encouraged my fledgling interest at a young(ish) age, even though they had no experience with the performing arts. So while it may have been unexpected for me to ask my parents to take me to the ballet (unspeakable to my friends!) they totally obliged me. I often think about the education I would give my child, though. My kid’ll be programming synths at 8 years old!

Wow, after that mention in my last post about the “elusive Ponyo trailer” I did a little more sleuthing and I finally found it! Here it is, in Japanese, watch it before Studio Ghibli takes it down for unknown reasons again:

ION, my favorite NYC-area low-budget broadcast network, is showing The Neverending Story tonight at 8pm. Hell fucking yes.

K, I’ve kinda noticed that my blog has been a little overly negative in recent weeks (months? years?). I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing – where better to air your grievances than in public – but I thought it might be nice for me to do with some enforced positivity. I also had a nasty migraine yesterday, so the usually attractive idea of starting my day out with a Mafoo Blog rant doesn’t hold the same excitement as it often does. Right now thinking too hard makes my entire skull hurt.

So I thought I’d devote an entire week to things I like. Or rather, I’ll have an entire week free of things I hate. Ya know, things like… Uph! Nope, not gonna do it.

To commence my wade into the waters of happyland, here are a few recent things I like:

1. I like watching low-budget slasher movies (grindhouse films) on YouTube. I watched two last night, Pieces and Scream Bloody Murder. I’d provide the link, but I don’t want them to be found out and removed. Search YouTube for them though if you are interested, they shouldn’t be too hard to find.

2. I like the Bershire Fringe Festival. Spent the weekend there, caught a couple shows, and hung out with some good friends.

3. I like the International Music Score Library Project. This is serious shit, check it out. Worth a whole post of its own.

4. I like the Montauk Monster:

5. I might might MIGHT be softening my hatred for Wraps. I still think they are weird bastardized burritos, but I had a couple this weekend that were ok…

Huckabee has a good take on McCain, guess he’s out of the veep running…

L.A. knows what’s best for those pathetic low-income areas (sarcasm-alert!).

NYPD strikes again (short ad before the video).

Judy ain’t gonna sit around and deal with no earthquake’s bullshit.

Apparently the gunman in the Knoxville Unitarian Church mass murder was a big fan of… you guessed it: Savage, Hannity, and O’Reilly.

Jack White and Alicia Keys are recording the new Bond theme? Nice.

For the record, RNC plus humor equals awful.

That’s some good police work there Lou.

Bennigans slowly dies, much like my soul the last time I ate a Bennigans monte cristo.

I’m sorry, but this just looks retarded. From what I’ve seen and read about it, it just seems like the standard “Bush is an idiot” crap that you get from much of the left. Stone bought the best actors he could buy, shoved them into the roles of the top players in Bush’s family and cabinet, and pushed it through the production process as fast as he could.

Look. Yes, Bush is a dreadfully incompetent president, probably one of the worst ever. I know it, Stone knows it, half of the country knows it, and this is a movie for that half of the country.This movie will not change anyone’s mind, it is just candy to make people who hate Bush feel good about themselves. Fuck that. I don’t want to see that. I want to see something that challenges my beliefs and ideas, not affirms them. Propaganda does not make good art, I don’t care how much I agree with it. And this looks like a pile of crap.

I’m way over Oliver Stone, btw. He’s a fucking 90s director. He’s like Ron Howard with a chip on his shoulder. He makes romantic, idealistic films – especially his biopics – that fictionalize his characters into neat little dramatic packages. He started the trend of romanticized biopics that create superficial deities of his subjects, whether good or evil. But you can tell that he still thinks of himself as this maverick film maker. Yuck.

Anyway, the problem with this film is that it gives fodder to the critics on the right who tend to portray people on the left as sour, elitist, and mean-spirited. You’ll never persuade someone with insults, no matter how good it makes you feel or how justified you feel. All you will do is perpetuate the fight.

Wow, fuck you NYPD:

7 Funniest Green LOLCats:

Sigh…

Ya know, this whole Carin’-for-the-Environment craze is getting old.

What? Huh??

Yeah, sorry. It’s a fad. It’s temporary. Give it another year or so and we’ll be back to our old wasteful selves again. People are simply too selfish to endure minor inconveniences on a mass scale in order to help Save The Earth.

Don’t think so?

Hey. Remember the 90s? After the excesses of the 80s, the early-mid 90s was a time of unusual social consciousness. I remember being taught recycling in schools, Earth Day was a hit, Captain Planet was chillin with the Planeteers, and people were cutting their plastic soda can holder thingys so fish and birds wouldn’t get caught in ’em. Yeah, that whole thing went away a few years later when the economy started doing better ( music follows this trend as well: top band in 1992 – Nirvana; 1998 – Backstreet Boys ).

The economy sucks right now. The country is fucked because of Bush. It makes perfect sense that people will start caring about causes (that they will not be caring about in about 5 years). I just don’t wanna sit through it.

Still not convinced that this whole carin’ ’bout da environment/global warming-worrying thang is merely a fad?

Then here you go:

Two symbols of decendence, excess, and waste teaching us we ought to learn to restrain ourselves and be more conscientious about the impact of our actions. Yeah. Really. It’s a show. Don’t miss it.

Cuz nobody will care in a few years.

Run for the hills!!

Ok seriously, here is an article in the Canadian Times Colonist about my condition, HHT. The article is oddly titled, The Nosebleed Disease. Umm, kinda catchy I guess. Definitely better than Osler-Weber-Rendu:

Rating 2T [HHT] is characterized by the presence of arteriovenous (artery-vein) malformations (AVMs) that involve direct connections between arteries and veins without the usual intervening capillaries. These AVMs can vary in size from a pinhead to a pea. The tiniest AVMs are called telangiectases. Telangiectases that are close to the surface of the skin and mucous membranes in areas like the nose are very fragile and tend to rupture easily and bleed.
…
For the most part, people with HHT have a normal lifespan, Vethanayagam says. But large AVMs can bleed in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, brain, spine, lung, liver and other sites and create major, sometimes life-threatening, incidents such as a stroke or brain abscess.

Jerome, who needs a blood transfusion every six months, counts himself lucky that he doesn’t need a transfusion every five weeks, like his dad, who also had internal bleeding.

He dismisses his disease “as an inconvenience” because he says he doesn’t want to come across as a whiner and because he is a private person. He’s only talking about HHT because he thinks it may help people who haven’t yet been diagnosed to notice similarities with their own situation.”

I have an HHT Google Alert set up and it’s surprising how rare it actually makes the news. But know you know about it. And knowing’s half the battle.

With Knol.