Sentential Links #106

This week’s linkage. Click, or an army of locusts will descend upon thee and pick thy bones clean! BWAA-HAA-HA-HA-HA!!!

:: In my dream I stop at those all-night cafes at two in the morning for pie and coffee before getting on the road again so that I can arrive at your house by dawn.

:: As an Olympic-level bullshit artist myself, I just have to give it up for a guy who created an entire make-believe field out of thin air and declared himself the leader in it. (My parents sent me to see a performance of Kreskin’s back when I was in second grade. It was a terrific magic show. Even then I somehow sensed that it was all BS, but wow, what fun BS it was!)

:: They say all good things come to an end…. but I believe that really good things are never really gone for good. (Sorry, but I’m not replicating the typeface and color effects! Looks like an essay contest is in the offing. Check it out. This is a blog I never seem to read enough.)

:: There are many who will possibly have different interpretations to each and some who will even refute that this is actually what they mean, but still it’s fun to read the stories and rumours circulating behind some of our favorite memories of oft-repeated rhymes from our childhood which we undoubtedly want to pass on to our kids. (Totally new blog to me.)

:: They rant from afar, while your quotidian Israeli has to live with his or her neighbors, however unsavory, for a helluva long time. That’s why you talk to enemies sometimes gang, cuz it’s a big, mean world out there, at least outside the fantasy world of 17th Street, where one can simply topple the Saddams and Bashars and Ahmadi-Nejad’s, hand out the Federalist Papers to the rapturously grateful masses in the main square of the capital, and swiftly move on to the next scheduled gig.

:: I don’t have much to say about this. I do want to mention that it falls into one of my favourite sub-categories of comics: Iron Man getting his ass handed to him. (Never much liked Iron Man. He struck me as a really butch version of C-3PO. [I know, Iron Man came first, but not in my world!])

:: The doors should be closed when the zombies come.

:: On the one hand, the last thing I want is to become the kind of blogger who throws a fit when commenters don’t recognize how special a snowflake the blogger is. On the other hand, the second to last thing I want is to become the kind of blogger who makes people say: “David, yeah, he’s pretty sharp and he knows a lot about a lot of stuff, but he’s got a weird bee in his bonnet about X, and when he starts going off about it you should probably just nod and smile and change the subject.” (Shit, I think I’m both of those!)

:: It an utterly epic sensation – a sense of standing on the slopes of a high mountain in Winter, the cold northern wind cutting you crosswise as you gaze intently into the wilderness valley that fills your vision below. It is a sense of warm fires, hoppy ale, and strong mirth on cool Balsam nights as one is encamped beside an old tree beneath a high forest canopy. It is that smell of earth, trees, and tobacco – each smell simultaneously commingled and distinct. It is the myriad of stars in the velvet midnight heights; it is the glowing lamps of Faërie disguised as fireflies. And it is the whisper of rain in the Verdant Seasons… (Another serendipitous blog discovery. I found it while Googling the exact wording of the brief passage at the very end of The Return of the King, when Frodo beholds “the far green country under a swift sunrise”. Now, you’re probably wondering, “Hey dummy, why didn’t you just get up and walk ten feet and look up the passage yourself in one of your two copies of the actual book?!” Well, if I did that, I wouldn’t have found this very nice-looking blog, now would I?)

:: Oh, dear Lord! You made many, many poor performers. I realize, of course, it’s no shame to flub, but it’s no great honor, either. So what would have been so terrible, if I had been given one good performance? (Ah, the bane of musicians and former musicians the world over. As one who’s been there, the thing about soldiering on past a performance flub is something that one does get better at doing, through practice. Unfortunately, the only way to practice soldiering on past a flub is to, well, flub in performance.

A personal tale here: in my junior year of college, one of the works we performed on our band tour that year was Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy [one of the great masterworks of band repertoire, and for my money, one of the great masterworks of music in general]. Well, in one of the inner movements — I think either the fourth or fifth, but I couldn’t say for sure without looking it up, which I’m too lazy to do just now — there’s a spot where the whole band builds to these massive, fortissimo chords that sound five times. Well, in performance, I once lost count of which blast of the chords we were on — and sadly, I wasn’t lucky enough to have overcounted, and thus put my trumpet down after what I thought was the last chord. No, I added an extra one, all to myself. In the middle of the brief silence that was written on the page, the glory of my own sound blazed forth. Never have I wanted to leave the stage less than I did at that moment, because I well knew what the main topic of discussion would be once the concert was over.

So if you’re going to flub, make it a big one. The calamitous mistakes are the best — and in some genres of music, no one in the audience is likely to notice.)

Well, that’s all for this week. Until then, it’s a jungle out there!

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