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December 14, 2005
This is your doctor, doctor professional.... (SM.AC 1)
......you've just been diagnosed with serious problems [HR Wiki]:
It burned when I urinated. I thought it was a one-time thing! But then it happened again. Should I just hope it goes away?
Sign me,
Burnin' in Boise
Note: This is the inaugural entry of SM.AC, a series of "advice column" (AC) posts based on actual questions from actual readers, who may or may not be telling the truth, and may or may not be blatantly misrepresenting who they are and what they actually think. Send your questions here.
Okay, look. This type of thing is indicative of a very serious medical problem. You need professional advice immediately. As in, not from me.
Also, disease is never funny.
Hoewver, I can tell you some things not to do:
- Don't use a new partner as your screening test. (Hi, honey, I had fun last night...what's that? Oh, yeah, of course we can go out on Friday....hey, listen, I was just wondering, um, did you notice anything strange this morning when you....what? Oh, no, no reason, it's just that, I mean, I was just curious.....)
- Don't wait to see if it gets better. Whatever it is, it's already kicked your immune system's butt.
- If you are diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease, don't beat yourself up.
If you're a guy, remind yourself of the following situation in Office Space:
Peter: That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had a million dollars I could hook that up, cause chicks dig a dude with money.
Peter: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well the kind of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do.
In other words, why are you pretending to be surprised?
If you're a girl, remind yourself: whoever gave this to you was a huge asshole. Not that you were attracted to that very same blind self-confidence in the first place.
Readers not covered by the above explicit and implied categories, I apologize. I leave it in your own, ever capable hands to invent reasons why whatever happens to you is somebody else's fault. - Finally, DON'T write in for advice to a blog. Very, very bad idea. This can only end badly.
All the best, Burnin' in Boise. I hope all your medical and other problems are solved soon, and I wish you long life and good health.
Posted by David Richmond at 10:44 AM EST | TrackBack
December 12, 2005
An Erotics of Life (SM.RFC 1)
We access so much of our lives now -- history, thoughts, feelings, ideas -- through representation. It makes an artist's job interesting: modern life is, in itself, a work of art. What's left to say?
At a crossroads, I once wrote: "...in both music and in life I need someone, anyone, to hear what I'm trying to say, signal embedded within the noise of life" [February 2004]. What I did not know then was what Sontag has taught me now: "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." Continental philosophy (Gadamer) has moved away, I would argue, from the sort of hermeneutics Sontag means, which is why I've found Gadamer so intriguing. But the point still stands: it is not that I needed someone to hear what I was saying. It's that I needed someone to understand what I felt.
Wilde quipped that life is usually imitating art, but the need is quite real: we need an erotics for the art that is life. My past self wrote "say" and "hear," a revealing combination. Intuitively, I had given up on trying to interpret myself; I had given up on self-hermeneutics. Instead I hoped that an other could interpret me, for me. I revealed instead my own pressing need for an erotics of my own life. I needed to unlock my heart. I needed to stop worrying about what I was saying, and start worrying about what I was feeling. And I needed to stop worrying about hearing, and start worrying about listening.
Ironically, that Rosetta stone had always been there, waiting. Which is why, late at night on August 20, 2004, I sat up with a start from my bed in Aspen, Colorado, and wrote on the pad of paper I kept on the table by my bed: The ear hears, but the heart listens, thus contradicting, without conscious understanding, what I had written in February.
I am a musician because I am trying to teach myself how to feel. If society needs me -- if you need me -- in this role, it is to the extent that I, quite incidentally, show you how to feel. I believe that music can be the erotics that Sontag found so lacking in modern (or post-modern) life. And I further believe that we so often look to fulfill that erotic need -- whether we are aware of its existence or not -- in places that will never even come close.
SM.RFC (Request for Comment): Your comments, as always, are more than welcome.
Posted by David Richmond at 1:06 PM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Recent History
This New York Times article on a movie set mockup of the World Trade Center site being built for an Oliver Stone film about 9/11 (more specifically, about two rescue workers) is not actually very interesting. But this paragraph struck me:
The scene is even eerier inside the old airplane hangar, where the production team rebuilt a portion of the World Trade Center concourse - complete with period handbags in the Coach storefront, clothing in the Banana Republic windows and shoes from Johnston & Murphy.
"Period handbags." Those two words speak volumes about our historical imagination. What I remember -- what everyone remembers about that day is where they were. What they were doing, who they were with, how they knew. For New Yorkers, of course, the event means something far more intense than for anyone else. And yet the process of history -- which happens inside our collective imagination -- has already begun to create distance between our lives now and that day.
"Period handbags." That fall morning, did I walk into a period high school, wearing period jeans and a period sweatshirt, ready to play in period wind ensemble on my period bassoon on my period reed? Did I watch the period tower fall at 6:59 am Pacific time on a period television? Did I make a period call on a period telephone to my period mother? And did I write a period blog entry on a period blog using period software on a period computer on the period internet?
sidenote: one thing's for sure, I was a bad writer. Period.
In fact, I did: life was different then. Then again, I didn't: so many of those "period" elements are still here. Or, if not, there are their echoes. We are held together through the passage of time by flimsy threads of meaning. It is true that those meanings are sometimes consciously woven. It is also true that they weave themselves -- often almost imperceptibly, and always immediately. It is the relative historical immediacy that astounds me. September 11, 2001, was just over four years ago. Only four years! And how much was different then, for you?
Posted by David Richmond at 12:50 PM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 6, 2005
As if you needed any further reason to love Eliot, and the Fete....
On Tuesday 06 December 2005 03:29 pm, [a female freshman friend] wrote:
> P.P.S--DR, I heard some awesome things about the Eliot House Fete Formal
> thing that's held in the Spring, with comparisons to the extravagant parties
> in The Great Gatsby movie. So like, if you're not hooking up with someone
> by then, CAN I BE YOUR DATE? Thatisall.
This has to be a record for freshman Fete-awareness. Which means -- kudos to the House Committee and the Laurens (HoCo's social chairs last spring) -- that last year must have been especially awesome.
my response to her:
you might be lucky enough to get into Eliot yourself, you know.
you're not a freshman forever,
-- dr
--------------------------------------------------
David Richmond '06
http://symphonicman.com Eliot GZ/B-41
cell: 617.xxx.xxxx AIM: Dxxxxxxxxxxxx
Posted by David Richmond at 3:53 PM EST | TrackBack
December 5, 2005
On the Harvard Undergraduate Council Election
I've been inundated with requests* to comment on the Harvard UC race. Now, there's Cambridge Common and Team Zebra for that. So I'll just quote Greg Schmidt in Zebraville on the Votih/Gadgil ticket:
In short, Voith/Gadgil told opposite things to HRC and BGLTSA about their stance on ROTC, and both groups are now mobilizing against them. The Dems, also in response to the revelations of the past 24 hours, are stepping up their efforts for Haddock/Riley. I don't think I've ever seen a campaign have a day this bad...
Not to mention the Voith/Gadgil campaign's blatant disregard today for our no-doordrop policy, clearly disclosed by a sign on our Eliot suite's doorbox. And the shady behavior disclosed by The Crimson. I must admit to a certain amount of fascination as I watch the burning wreck / fireworks; however, I think Robert Ballard's comments on some recent Titanic discoveries are strangely apropos:
Explorer Robert Ballard found the bulk of the wreck in 1985, at a depth of 13,000 feet and about 380 miles southeast of Newfoundland. Ballard was not impressed with the expedition's find.
"They found a fragment, big deal," Ballard said. "Am I surprised? No. When you go down there, there's stuff all over the place. It hit an iceberg and it sank. Get over it."
*by which I mean, two.
Posted by David Richmond at 10:46 PM EST | TrackBack
December 3, 2005
Similarity and Difference
Themes often seem to recur in my life -- Oscar Wilde: Life imitates art far more than art imitates life -- so now that I've posted my Juilliard essay below that trades rhetorically on a distinction between similarity and difference, I wanted to recall that I've used this distinction before with reference to Stravinsky's Poetics of Music, the published version of his 1940 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. Even for my taste, his rhetorical style is a bit much. Nevertheless:
Contrast produces an immediate effect. Similarity satisfies us only in the long run. Contrast is an element of variety, but it divides our attention. Similarity is born of a striving for unity....Variety is valid only as a means of attaining similarity. Variety surrounds me on every hand. So I need not fear that I shall be lacking in it, since I am constantly confronted by it. Contrast is everywhere. One has only to take note of it. Similarity is hidden; it must be sought out, and it is found only after the most exhaustive efforts. When variety tempts me, I am uneasy about the facile solutions it offers me. Similarity, on the other hand, poses more difficult problems but also offers results that are more solid and hence more valuable to me. (page 32)
Very meta, but I think it's interesting, given the above, that my rationale for playing has shifted from a desire for difference to a desire for similarity. And, moreover, that my desires in my life have shifted from always tending to try to stand alone and apart from other people towards trying to understand and connect with other people. The latter, after all, takes actual effort. Willingness to expend energy now for further gain later is, I'm told, the definition of maturity.*
* told, that is, by the font of all wisdom in my life, my dad.
Posted by David Richmond at 5:58 PM EST | TrackBack
Juilliard Essay
Between thesis, papers, and conservatory applications, I've been doing a lot of writing, so I haven't had any energy to blog. Nevertheless, my desk is now clear (in preparation for the next wave of work) and I thought I would post my Juilliard essay, which is about the path I took in deciding that I want to play the bassoon professionally.
Classical music was my teenage rebellion.
My parents put me in keyboard class when I was three, but I never found myself particularly drawn to the piano. I played too loudly and too percussively. I didn't actually listen to much music at all. But my piano abilities were still good enough to differentiate me from my schoolmates, and for a young sixth grader, that was enough for me to want to sign up for beginning band. I started with the clarinet.
I wasn't very good. Worse still, everyone and anyone seemed to play the clarinet. I wanted to stand out. I wanted to be different, because, just like every other middle schooler, I felt different. Misunderstood. When my parents and band director suggested the bassoon, I had to ask: what's a bassoon? But an instrument was obtained and I found the strangeness of it appealing and fascinating. Then I heard the bassoon section of the Oregon Symphony, calling themselves the "Bassoon Brothers," play in concert. I think I had been playing for six weeks, at most. But they were having more fun on stage than I had ever seen anyone ever have, and certainly more than I had ever had in my entire life. I was intrigued.
The funny thing about being a bassoonist is that, early on, doors open for you just because nobody else wants to go through them. When I applied to the Interlochen Arts Camp on bassoon after the eighth grade, I wasn't a very good bassoonist. I wasn't a very good musician, either. But I got in anyway. I had never played in an orchestra. Truth be told, I had never really listened to an orchestra. The camp was fun. I had a good time. I made good friends. I was happy that summer.
Towards the end of my first four week session at Interlochen, in the waning twilight of a warm Sunday in August, I heard the World Youth Symphony Orchestra, the top student group, play the Eleventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich. And sitting quite far away from the right side of the stage, I felt something stir inside me that I had never felt before. Emotion and passion gripped me like the Revolution the Eleventh Symphony ostensibly depicts. At that moment, I became irrevocably addicted to anything beautiful. Especially beautiful music.
When I got home, I started high school. And I began to listen to the most passionate music I could find. Barber. Mahler. Tchaikovsky. I could put this music on my stereo and lie back on my bed and let myself feel all the confusing things you feel when you're fifteen. My parents listened to Tchaikovsky and liked it a lot, or even loved it. But I knew - in the self-sure way that only a teenager can know - they didn't feel the way I did when I listened to it. The music became a secret refuge for me, like a secret code. A Rosetta stone for my adolescence.
If life were a script, what should have happened next is that I found that same intensity and power through my own playing. But life's not a script. I had some amazing and powerful moments on stage playing with orchestras in high school. And I was driven to seek those moments wherever I could. But any real artist will tell you that passion is not sufficient to succeed in music, or any art. It has to become a craft. And I was never very good at crafts. School came easily. The bassoon, too, came easily, at least when measured against other high schoolers. I never really worked at anything.
Here too, then, I should have followed a script. I went to Harvard because I had made the painful and difficult decision that bassoon could not be a craft for me. And so I should have outgrown my teenage rebellion, became an amateur performer and auditory connoisseur, and gone and studied something else. But a funny thing happened on the way to "something else": music caught my intellectual imagination as nothing else ever had. As I began thinking about music and not just "feeling" it, a basic, self-reflective question occupied my thoughts: why do I love this music so much?
This essay is part of the answer to these questions. So is much of my academic work here at Harvard. I have asked my professors, my colleagues, and myself this questions, directly and indirectly. I have probed and searched for a better definition of what, exactly, "this music" that I love actually is. Does it have to be passionate? Does it have to seem to consider itself art? Does it have to be "classical"?
In the process I have learned that I cannot answer those questions without a bassoon in my hands. Partly this is because, in playing, I explore that which I love from the inside out. It is also because of the defiance implied by the subject I in the question, "why do I love this music so much?" The implication: does everyone love this music? If not, why not?
What began as a way to differentiate myself has become, now that I am older, a process of searching for similarity instead. If I feel something on stage when I am playing, I want the audience to feel the same thing. If the audience doesn't get it, I want to learn to do better, to communicate more effectively with my audience. I want to make an audience feel what I feel, love what I love, and sing what I sing.
Bassoon, in other words, has become, quite unexpectedly, my craft.
That is why I am applying to Juilliard. I want to hone my craft, so that I can say the things I want to say, and feel the things I want to feel. And so that I can perform them for others, so that they, too, might be moved to ask that very same question, the answer to which I will be seeking for the rest of my life. I want them to wonder: "Why do I love this music so much?"
Posted by David Richmond at 5:45 PM EST | Comments (1) | TrackBack