opiate wave

Took me a while to figure out exactly how to work this new Twitter thing along with blogging, work, random lunches with friends, and Summer reading.  I’ve decided that my Twitter account is the perfect forum for sharing random city shots.  It’s a bit easier and quicker to upload and tweet my photos directly from the handy (that’s German for cell phone).  Plus I won’t eat up much space on my WordPress blog, which is the way I like it.

I’m looking forward to this weekend, not just for the extra day off but for the fact that it kicks off a series of fun staycation-style weekends I have planned for the month of July.  Three of my favorite musicians are coming into town and I’ve got tickets to the King Tut exhibit at the de Young on the 12th.  There’s going to be plenty of photo opportunities.  Oh, and Harry Potter releases soon!

Now, if I can only get used to the heatwave ….

I stopped taking piano lessons at age 12 when my father received his orders to move halfway across the globe for his next tour of duty.  I remember it well, the last piece I was working on at the time, because I asked my instructor to teach it to me.  Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy.  I had gotten as far as the bottom of the second page when the lessons stopped and we moved.  It took me three more years to finish learning the piece on my own.  A combination of sight reading and listening to Phillippe Entremont perform it on a vinyl album of piano classics.  The very same album that introduced me to Debussy’s work.  Funny now I play Clair de Lune like Entremont did on that recording.

Last month I watched Dustin O’Halloran perform a selection of his piano and string quartet music at the Hotel Utah in San Francisco.  It was delightful, hearing new compositions in the “classical” style.  Something fresh and simple and not over the top like a lot of big, bold film scores these days.

It also inspired me to start playing again.

I’m looking at portable digital pianos right now.  I want something that I can play at any hour of the day (or evening) without causing too much of a ruckus.  Something I can plug headphones into.  I tried a few weighted and semi-weighted models and I’m pretty amazed at how very much like my old piano these new digitals feel.  Of course, nothing compares to the sound of a perfectly tuned acoustic piano.  I just wish my place could house a baby grand in the living room along with all my other stuff!

Been drawing a whole lot these days: cityscapes, landscapes, interiors, people, still life – anything really. I’d get so into it that I would lose track of everything else except the subject and how I would translate its image onto paper. Not a day has gone by this year without me completing a sketch or two of something. I’m halfway through my first sketchbook and I just started painting. Spent the past two weekends wandering around museums and thumbing through monographs at a bookstore or library. I love the wordlessness of visual art. The complete lack of grammar and syntax. How it communicates ideas, thoughts, emotions, stories with the merest suggestion. I yearn for that efficiency and, with enough practice, I hope to obtain it.

I’m supposed to have lunch next week with a colleague and I have to ask her about the life drawing classes she had told me about a while back. I schedule these lunch meetings every now and then, mostly just for the hell of it. I miss and don’t miss talking to people. The feeling fluctuates.

I’ve got some illustrations that I’d like to eventually share.

Wind chimes wake me in low to mid tones from hollow metal tubes sounding outside my window. I sit up, groggy. One of my socks has fallen off of my feet and I dig for it, pull it back on, and then the jeans. Pull the curtains back and twist the blinds open. Outside the two wooden birds with windmill arms spin like propeller blades and the brown grass on the hill out back bend and release.  Four pines hold their ground, branches swaying like waves.

Albert waits patiently for breakfast, floating near the surface. Fanning his fins.

California sun in January. Birds strike up a tune.