freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with pianofication

A few interesting lockdown realisations today:

1. oh dear, it is becoming rapidly apparent that, for some reason, Teams or Zoom meetings are a massive fatigue trigger for me. I am finding myself much less vocal in meetings than I usually am - generally, over the last few years, the fine careless rapture of not particularly giving a fuck about a lot of this means haven't been inclined to hang back from voicing my opinion. But I don't, in virtual meetings, I simply sit there and observe, it seems to require all my energy and focus to do that in itself, I don't volunteer input. And I'm completely blasted afterwards. The virtual is weird.

2. Having sat through four and a half hours of virtual meeting today, mostly entailing good academic brains wibbling helplessly in the face of a sudden pandemic wrecking ball to the academic calendar: oh dear, this was absolutely the worst year we could possibly have chosen to glitch admissions so we have a first year at 120% of capacity. Our volumes, and the incredible diversity of our student body, would be challenging enough under current circumstances of fuckage without the added complication that we are straining at the seams.

3. It was lovely to play the piano yesterday, I propose to do so again as soon as the current endless Zoom meeting, to the background of which I am illicitly typing this, grinds to a halt. But oh dear, I had completely forgotten how badly an hour at the piano completely stuffs with my typing, I hit the computer keyboard and try to play arpeggios rather than QWERTY. It's surprisingly discombobulating, my fingers have been tangling all day. Any typos in this post are entirely the fault of clashing paradigms.

Another unanticipated lockdown effect: apparently being stuck in the house, alone save for cats, for weeks on end is sufficient to overcome my considerable self-consciousness about playing my piano. I have barely played my piano since moving to this house. The fact that it's a semi-detached domicile puts me madly on top of my neighbours, and despite a relatively efficient practice bar muffling my efforts, I have found myself hugely hesitant to inflict my mediocre and very rusty piano skills on anyone.

The piano is up against the wall I share with my right-hand neighbours, through which I have never heard any actual noise carry unless the nice male half of the couple is drilling holes in the shared wall. (This is in sharp contradistinction to the wall I share with my left-hand neighbour, through which I can hear his TV, his washing up efforts, his music (very large overlap with mine, fortunately, he's approximately the same vintage and listens to a lot of alt and indie), and on random occasions, sex noises.) But I have still not been able to bring myself to play other than very occasionally.

Today, however, I spontaneously sat down at the piano and, its chronic lack of tune notwithstanding, spent a happy hour or so noodling around with David Bowie, causing me to rediscover, with some pain, his characteristic addiction to the key of F. I hate playing in flats. To this I added random 80s hits, Death Cab for Cutie and, for some reason, Kermit the Frog's "Rainbow connection", which has lovely chord progressions. I am horribly, awfully, horrendously out of practice, but it was fun, and I shall do it again, and the neighbours can simply deal. Next time it'll be Air Supply, who are beautifully florid to play on the piano, and Neil Diamond. Just because. Also, I must break out the guitar, which I don't think I've touched in a couple of years. Taking bets on how many tones out of tune it'll be.

I am incautiously excited for the new Star Wars movies, and open to having my heart, once more, broken if it comes to that, which it very well might given JJ. (Current favourite anecdote: John Boyega being hailed by Samuel L. Jackson at a party, with the salutation "Hey, black Jedi! you my SON!")

I also very much enjoyed having Tracy visit a few weekends back, so that her daughters might variously (a) peruse my graphic novel collection (eldest; made off with Captain America, I'll get her into Digger too, see if I don't) and (b) noodle around on my piano (youngest: is starting lessons soon, accepted guidance on practising scales). It made me realise that I miss playing my piano, and should get back into it.

By way of synthesising paragraphs (1) and (2) above, I love this very, very much.

Watch on YouTube

I shall allow it to sustain me through today, which, while being a Saturday, is also a four-hour review meeting of all the students who've been academically excluded by these exams. It does good and useful work, and is uniformly depressing.

Things Which Feel Odd:

Climbing back into your driver's seat after picking the car up from the car wash. Someone else has driven it. The seat and the rear-view mirror are in the wrong place, and it inevitably takes me about three traffic lights to adjust them so they feel right. But the whole car has a strange air of the indefinably alien. Something's different, but you can't tell what it is. It isn't your space any more. (Although it's certainly cleaner).
Spending a happy half hour noodling around on the piano (currently I'm trying to play Arcade Fire, a project doomed to failure owing to their texture fetish, which means you actually need six hands, twelve people and a violin to have any stab at reproducing the sound) and then trying to type. I both type and play with some facility, fast, and without looking at my hands, and apparently cross-wiring happens. My fingers keep trying to do arpeggios instead of QWERTY. I have to consciously rein them in for a bit before all the right circuits click in. Very odd feeling.
Christmas in July. Particularly when we're even more disorganised than usual, and it was actually Christmas in July in August in September in October. That is, last night. Roast chicken and ham and all the trimmings and Jo did barszcz and uszka for starters (garlicky Polish beet soup with mushroom dumplings, for both of which I have an unholy passion) and I made chocolate berry trifle (because Christmas pudding is of the divvil), and we ate and drank too much and pulled crackers and exchanged ridiculous presents in large quantities, and listened to Annie Lennox sing English Christmas carols. It feels odd and wrong, though, because it's all the good bits of Christmas, and none of its socially-mandated unpleasant ones. No enormous awkward obligatory extended family jamborees with added fighting and guilt trips, or expensive present expectations which entail battling the consumerist hordes through acres of tinsel and product-pushing. Although I did go forth and buy myself an actual Blu-Ray home theatre system this morning, to replace our almost-defunct hi-fi, which was a conscious decision to spend my November bonus early and thus was almost Christmas-shoppy. Except for me, not other people. Feels odd.

Subject line from Arcade Fire's "Wasted Hours", which is for the most part not actually thematically appropriate at all but was on my mind and is a gentle, wistful, beautiful thing. Also, I think googling how to spell "barszcz" has infected me, I keep trying to blockquote this paragraph by typing "blokqvote".

Much as I enjoy noodling around on the piano reproducing pop tunes as my wayward fancy takes me, it's all too often that I encounter Actual Pianists who rub my nose inescapably in the fact that it would be extreme hubris to even think of myself as a two-bit hack. This is another Youtube discovery not entirely unrelated to yesterday's Piano Guys. Apart from being a rather fun piano piece all on its lonesome, as a distillation of a full orchestra it's quite something. (It's also reminding me of quite how much of the Skyrim music is ripped off from this, or from LotR). His Harry Potter version is also lovely, but I rather like the ending on this one.

Watch on YouTube

It's also obscurely comforting to discover that the guy's a professional who does this sort of score-creation for Yamaha. I'm able to vaguely think "ah, corporate shill" and go my merry way with the inferiority complex marginally mitigated.

Apropos of nothing at all, a random concatenation of ideas has just reminded me of last night's Salty Cracker (La Boheme in Sea Point, lovely food) at which the usual wayward puppy conversation suddenly reminded me of a dream I had the other night. I dreamed I seduced C.S. Lewis at a garden party, more or less directly as a result of feeling horribly embarrassed. I'd just spent twenty minutes declaiming to this amiable bespectacled gent about fantasy novels, finishing up with a condescending supposition that he'd probably never heard of C.S. Lewis's Ransom trilogy, but they're very interesting books despite their overly heavy Christian bit, at which point I suddenly realised I was talking to the author himself. (I plead in mitigation that he's been dead for a while, I wasn't to know). Shamed and irritated, I seduced him, presumably as a form of distraction (or possibly a subversive attack on the overly heavy Christian bit). Memo to self: do not recount this one to therapist, I'm not entirely sure I want to know what it means.

Words cannot express how grateful I am that it's Friday. My exhaustion levels form an interestingly steeply-pitched graph that starts at "manageable" on Monday and then wantonly climbs to the weekend.

Current Mood: ded
Current Music: Pirates piano solo