After a few months of simply playing the Nanos that I’ve already loaded with classical music — Opera (Pink), Fave Classics (Green), Baroque (Red), and Other (Blue) — I’ve gone back to the drawing board on creating playlists.

The Fave Classics program took months to build, because I was trying to automate the iTunes playlist by assigning each work its own album name, so that lining the works up in alphabetical order would also line them up in program order. Organizing the program by means of artificial album titles also allowed me to print a playlist, which seemed important at the time.

Over time, I got to be more comfortable with iTunes playlists — and I began to get tired of my elaborately constructed programs. The Fave Classics, by its very nature, held up well. I more or less loved everything on it, and it took a week to play. But I hardly ever played the Other (Blue) Nano. It was loaded with things that I had to be in the mood for. I began to see the need for greater flexibility in creating programs.

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¶ Matins: Ms NOLA was kind enough to slip me a link to Leon Wieseltier’s magisterial call to brawn, yet another mandarin voice urging liberals to sock it to ’em. If only we knew how! — even as we digest Mr Wieseltier’s fine talk (and it is fine!) of “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” Who knew that the thickest plank in the Republican Party platform had such a fancy name?

“You remember the teleological suspension of the ethical,” Mr Wieseltier writes with absurd optimism. Happily, he does not count upon the strength of our recollections.

¶ Lauds: Although I’m not sure that I’d like to sit through The Fly — now it’s an opera, with music by Howard Shore (Silence of the Lambs) and book by David Henry Hwang (M Butterfly) — I’d sure like to hear it.

¶ Tierce: While Americans struggle to deal with a resurgent but definitely post-Soviet Russia, separatists within Russia take heart from the formal recognition of new breakaway states in the Caucasus. The interesting thing about Ellen Barry’s story is the refrain of “20 years from now.” Nobody’s talking about anything’s happening tomorrow. Instead, the talk is of death warrants and planted seeds. 

“In the long term, they could have signed their own death warrant,” said Lawrence Scott Sheets, the Caucasus program director for the International Crisis Group, an independent organization that tries to prevent and resolve global conflicts. “It’s an abstraction now, but 20 years down the road, it won’t be such an abstraction.”

Mr Sheets is speaking of Russia.

¶ Nones: If JMW Turner’s watercolor of Merton College, Oxford goes missing, I will insist that I know nothing about it. Having just paid my nth visit to the Turner show at the Museum — easily the sixth, I think — I’m beginning to fall in love with a few paintings just as they’re about to wrenched away, but I fell for the Merton watercolor the moment I saw it. Why?

¶ Compline: Thomas P Campbell, a 46 year-old curator of tapestries, will become the ninth director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the start of the New Year. As a card-carrying Old Fart, I’m happier with Mr Campbell than I would have been with Gary Tinterow, the strong and clever curator of — you have to love this tripartition — 19th Century, modern, and contemporary art.

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You should have seen Kathleen’s face when, fifteen seconds after I said it, the guy the with musical zipper announced, “It’s Mozart!”

Rapping the opening bars of Eine kleine Nachtmusik convinced her.

I guess I had to have been there.

Armed with GooToDo.com, I have been tidying up many neglected corners of my life. None of them has embarrassed me as much as a small heap of programs, from six of last season’s concerts that I never got round to writing up. As I quite often can’t remember what I did two days ago, it’s no surprise that my musical recollections of these evenings were severely motheaten by the time I could no longer put off laying them to rest. There was nothing for it but to take the opportunity to poke fun at myself. That’s what, after all — when all else fails — I’m here for.

Morning

¶ Collage: I’m not sure what made Girl Talk’s “rising profile” newsworthy today, but Robert Levine’s report, “Steal This Hook? D.J. Skirts Copyright Law,” reminded me of James Surowiecki’s Financial Page in this week’s New Yorker.

Noon

¶ YourNameHere: Take a break from the important stuff you’re doing and have a laff, courtesy of Cake Wrecks, Jen’s so-far inexhaustible stream of high-larious professional disasters (these cakes weren’t baked at home, you know).

Night

¶ Book Party: I went to a marvelous party…
 

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No sooner do the happy chords of I Puritani‘s happy ending die out than the mysterious opening mood of Macbeth insinuates itself into the apartment (music that foreshadows the Sleepwalking Scene). And we’re off! (more…)

This week’s Daily Office photos were taken last week in Carl Schurz Park, by the East River. Last week’s pictures, as I hope Friday’s would make quite clear, were taken the previous week in Santa Monica, at the Huntington Museum, and in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Morning 

¶ Weekend Reading (Babies): I had a look, yesterday, at the Times Magazine for a change, intrigued, against my better judgment, by Russell Shorto’s cover story. As a piece of journalism, the piece embodies unfortunate trends in general-interest reportage, especially the whiff of apocalyptic gunsmoke (“No more European babies! No more Europeans!”) that is inevitably dissipated by gusts of common-sense exposition later on. Editors seem to like to front-load the drama and shove the useful information to the back end, whether to spare lazy readers or to reward diligent ones it’s hard to say.

Noon

¶ JVC Jazz: On Friday night, Kathleen and I went to a sold-out jazz concert at Carnegie Hall, featuring (first) Dianne Reeves and (then) Al Green.

¶ BookSaga: Down in Georgia, a fellow by the name of Perry Falwell runs an on-line bookshop. He scours the thrift shops for finds that he speeds along to interested customers. (Somebody’s got to do it, if Goodwill won’t.) His new Web log, BookSaga, is compulsively readable. I plan to stay tuned.

Night

¶ Gondry:  A few weeks ago, at brunch, a friend insisted that I rent and see Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. This evening, I got round to it. A great, great train wreck!

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Morning

¶ Chant: What is it about Gregorian Chant? Why is it one of those things that are always, it seems, being “rediscovered”?

¶ Encyclopedia: In the Telegraph, the obituary of Wilf Gregg, a personnel manager with a sideline in murder. The late Mr Gregg co-edited The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.

Noon

¶ Turner: The Turner show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hasn’t formally opened yet, but I was able to take advantage of a members’ preview this afternoon. As I always do, the first time I see a show, I breezed through the galleries. I didn’t see any of the really famous late paintings, but still…

Night

¶ Civil Pleasures: My new Web site, which will replace Portico, has been launched.
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Morning

¶ Little Black Dress: Fossil Darling is totally useless. I had to read about this in the newspaper!

Noon

¶ Oil Climbs Higher: Reading John Wilen’s report on the correlation between the rise in the price of oil and the fall of the dollar — not a matter of rocket science, since oil trades in dollars — I wonder just when Washington is going to develop some bipartisan political backbone.

Night 

¶ Free Speech: Food for thought: Adam Liptak’s survey of growing restrictions on freedom of speech in other advanced, liberal democracies.

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Does anyone out there know Terry Riley’s amazing electronic toccata, A Rainbow in Curved Air? I strongly recommend downloading this piece (for only $1.98 at Amazon), if you haven’t already got it on disc. (If you’ve got it only on LP, download. It’s time.)

Forever, practically, Rainbow has been the diagnostic with which I test a newly hooked-up stereo system. If everything’s working, the echoing bong in the bass that sounds within the first minute (at :57, to be exact) seems to bounce between the speakers like a laser frisbee. Meanwhile, two upper registers are furiously busy with what slowly emerges as a chorale. Over time, the wilder runs have come to sound the most baroque. It’s as though you were catching Dietrich Buxtehude fooling around when he thought everyone was out at the Lübeck class picnic. And those bongos at the end, man!

I had already heard this piece, which is occasionally quite hushed, on every known variety of “personal stereo,” but only the Nano does it justice. Must be something about no-moving-parts.

¶ Matins:  My idea was to mention the video that we watched this evening, after LXIV reminded us that JKM had strongly recommended it when we visited her in the place where, in the Ealing Comedy, at least, you could get a Passport to Pimlico. It’s an adorable movie, and I’ve just spent £9.95 ($100,000) on shipping to make sure that I have my very own copy of the DVD, which is not available in the U S of Movies, within the next ten minutes.

¶ Lauds: Speaking of Édouard (and this will make sense only to those of you who clicked through at Matins), I was very touched by a comment that Jérôme posted at the latest Sale Bête entry. The end of incognito?

¶ Tierce: Nice fix-it columns in the Times: Clyde Haberman on the Rockefeller Drug Laws, and Andrew Ross Sorkin on Kenneth Griffin, a hedge-fund whiz kid who thinks that Wall Street let the young ‘uns have too much fun with the car keys.

¶ Compline: Another season of  Orpheus at Carnegie ended last Saturday night. At first, I thought I wouldn’t be able to go, so I gave the tickets to LXIV. Then I could go, and he didn’t have a taker for the other ticket — and I went. But I let LXIV play host and sit in the aisle seat.

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Although I do not yet own a Red Nano, I have already begun compiling an iTunes playlist entitled “Red Nano,” and when it gets big enough to fill 8 Gs, I’ll see to it that the name makes sense. The “Red Nano” playlist is comprised almost exclusively of instrumental works from the Baroque. I’m building it up by effectively dumping every Baroque-period CD that I own — and I own quite a few — into my new computer. In idle moments, I move things around, so that, when I’m done, I won’t be listening to two concerti grossi by Heinichen (a contemporary of Bach and Handel) in a row. Not to mention the dozens of Scarlatti sonatas that Scott Ross selected for his three-disc anthology, drawn from a colossal recording of all of them. (more…)

¶ Matins: On Saturday night, we heard the third and final concert given by Itzhak Perlman with Members of the Perlman Music Program. It was even superer than the first two.

¶ Nones: The first glass of Pineapple NuLyteley, she go down so smooth. Very faint aftertaste,  not unpleasant at all. As for the D-Minus-One Film Festival: one down, three to go. (more…)

¶ Matins: When Kathleen heard what I wrote for Compline last night, she paid me the highest compliment by asking to listen to Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music.

¶ Tierce: A little story on the Times’s Web site about losses at Motorola made me wonder what could have gone wrong at the company that gave us the RAZR phone. A little googling turned up this entry at Engadget, in which a former employee, who worked for the late Chief Marketing Officer, Geoffrey Frost (did they really work him to death?), gives an inside view.

¶ Compline: Good news! Everything fits. My glen plaid suit and my fancy new shirt, which was only half as costly as the suit. I was a bit nervous about the shirt; maybe I wouldn’t be able to close the top button. I decided not to wait until tomorrow to find out. I shall sleep better as a result.

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It took a while, but I finally loaded a selection of pop favorites onto a Nano. It’s my first Nano, the one in the picture, actually — the one called “RJK Silver Nano” (these things have names whether you want them to or not, so they might as well have names that you want).  Since I acquired it, it has held every kind of music imaginable, at one time or another (except country; we don’t do country), but now it is my Silver Nano indeed, stocked with music to suit every mood while I’m out and about. The operas of the moment are Salome and Elektra; counterpoising their “decadence” is the St John Passion of JS Bach. There’s a loose collection of classics that I’ve copied from CDs onto iTunes but not transferred to any of the other Nanos yet. And then there’s pop.

What’s my idea of pop, you ask? I’m not sure that I ought to tell you. How about Thompson Twins’ “You Take Me Up”? I listened to that a couple of times in a row. Or Giorgio Moroder’s E=mc²? The most amazing ear candy ever. It was such a beautiful day! And I had such a great time out there in the sunshine with all the other folks going about their business.

I bopped into my mens’ clothing store near Rockefeller Center, not exactly on an impulse but nearly, and bought a suit to wear to Megan’s wedding on Friday. (It will be ready on Thursday afternoon. Imagine!) I have not bought a suit in well over twenty years, and I must have given away the last of them more than fifteen years ago. But now I have a new suit. Notwithstanding the fact that it has to cover All Of Me, it’s dreamy. A pearl-grey glen plaid three-button two-piece, with very black checks and faint stripes of pink. To go with it, I bought one of the shirts that the salesman recommended, pink with dark pink stripes. And a jet-black tie dotted with tiny pink eggs. The shirt was, all inadvertently, my first Turnbull & Asser. I’d have looked at the price tag if I hadn’t been paddling in a sunny bay of music sweet. I had those happy feet!

Hell, this Friday’s only going to happen once.

If Tom Meglioranza had only recorded Marc Blitzstein’s “The New Suit,” I’d have listened to that all the way home. Mine, too, has a zipper fly.

Months and months and months after getting my first Nano (November of last year), I spent an hour or perhaps a little less today uploading a clutch of CDs that, for the most part, would have to be classified as “rock.” Examples:

Mosaic (Wang Chung)
Arc of a Diver (Steve Winwood)
Bilingual (Pet Shop Boys)
Avalon (Roxy Music)
Shake It Up (The Cars)
Speaking In Tongues (Talking Heads)

But also:

Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell)
Studio (Julien Clerc)

And for the first hour or so I was infected with a virulent case of spring fever that, were I still drinking martinis, would certainly have led to another broken neck. When my Saturday-afternoon tidying was all done — the only word for it, week after week lately, is “brilliant”; it’s as though I’ve learned to read a hitherto impenetrable language — after I was showered and dressed in clean clothes, and I’d run an errand to Gristede’s across the street, and fixed myself my cocktail of choice, diet quinine with a wedge of lime, I sat on the  balcony for the first time this season and looked out at all the jewel-like lights of buildings near and far — especially far, in Queens. The lights in Queens looked just like the lights in Queens as seen from a plane descending upon one of the airports, endless ribbons (not so particularly endless in my truncated view) of red, white, and green lights against a background of dark. I wish someone had been there to see it with me.

Jack Hues, of Wang Chung (née 黄钟), really stands up as a gifted singer. To think that I fell in love with “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” on MTV! As I recall, there a suitcase with legs, no? What a brief golden age that was.

¶ Matins: Kathleen’s off to Flah-dah in the morning. She’s staying at 100 Chopin Plaza.

¶ Prime: I was so busy over the weekend that I still haven’t read the paper. I had to come across a link to this at kottke.org. In the Times, the article is entitled “A Guide to the French. Handle With Care.” My own title: When Seven out of Eight of the Following Propositions Hold True Here, New York Will Finally Be More Civilized Than Anglophone.”

¶ Tierce: Didn’t you love The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini? No? Meg Wolitzer may be able to tell you why.

¶ Sext: Father Tony agonizes over apostrophes. Is the plural of “CD” CD’s or CDs? I’m resolutely for the latter, but it makes my friend uncomfortable. He has found a link to “the rule,” which is correct so far as it goes.

¶ Nones: The Hong Kong of the Hudson? You’re joking! This is Gotham City, surely! Be sure to click through Gothamist to the Big Apple list of no fewer than ninety-eight nicknames for Old Nieuw Amsterdam. What’s this? “The Frog and Toe“?

¶ Vespers: The reviews appeared side-by-side in the Arts section of yesterday’s Times; how curious it was to have been to both evenings of chamber music. To give some idea of how different they were, in their wonderful ways, I’ve written them up together.  

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In beautiful downtown Niantic, the splendid Morton Hotel.

¶ Matins: It was great to get out of town, and I really must get out more often — especially to New England. On Friday night, though, I was very glad to be in town. Listening to the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

¶ Tierce: So, there’s a Gold’s Gym in Haiti. It’s not for everyone, though. Why does this example of global free-market capitalism seem so totally unprogressive?

¶ Sext: Rah! Rah! Rah! My prep school’s latest claim to fame! Go Cecil! (Blair’s development office must be thrilled by this — development.)

¶ Vespers: How cool is that: your cell phone is your boarding pass! (The airline sends you a message containing a two-dimensional bar code that’s very hard to counterfeit.)

¶ Compline: Souvenir of the Weekend Past: a song that I had never heard in my life. I even thought that Riann was making it up. But Kathleen sang it lustily when I asked her about it last night. In her day, “boppin'” was replaced by “bashin’.”

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At Houston and Broadway

Last week, the third RoomGroove arrived. It took about two minutes to unwrap and plug in. Presto! Music in the living room. The same music that hitherto could only be heard in the bedroom and the blue room. As it was a weeknight, the Black Nano was playing the nearly six hundred “songs” that I’ve uploaded onto it. Although there’s still plenty of empty space on the Black Nano, it takes more than five days (barring the hours of sleep) for it to plow through the “Classics” playlist — which is the only playlist on that device.*

Meanwhile, I’ve uploaded nearly forty CDs onto the Grey Nano. There are two playlists, “Jazz” and “Standards,” the difference being that all the vocals have been shunted into the latter. Here’s the mystery: it’s as though the Black Nano and the Grey Nano were two completely different types of music source, instead of exactly the same. During the week, the pleasant round of Handel, Mozart, Schubert und so weiter creates one kind of apartment. Then, on the weekends, the place gets a paint job. When the Grey Nano shuffles its way through Keith Jarrett, Benny Goodman, Dexter Gordon and so on, we’re not in quite the same house.

Is it just the music? Of course not. It’s the flow of music, its endless, effortless unspooling. It’s as miraculous to me as water running from a tap must have been to the children of pioneers. And rather more atmospherically potent. Listen, I’d only just gotten used to not having to turn the record* over!

* You might then ask, “Why have a playlist at all?” Ah, so did I, at first.

* LP. We knew it was vaguely illiterate to call LPs (and 45s and — for those of us whose parents hadn’t thrown away theirs — 78s) “records.” But the usage did not die until the format did.

On 57th Street

¶ Matins: I’ve got my physical at 9:30 this morning. I remember when a “physical” was something that you got when you were drafted.

¶ Prime: This just in: The Earth is round, and, also, by the way, putting a television set in your child’s bedroom is not a great idea. (They might pick up the wrong values from Real Housewives of New York City.) 

¶ Nones: Today, on Ew! Factor: Koran Flushing. What’s with the community service? They ought to throw the bum out of school!

¶ Vespers: A few words about Tom Meglioranza’s cabaret recital at Weill Recital Hall last week.

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