Tonight I am having a hard time getting motivated, and really have a lot to do. Tomorrow I have to report bright and early to church so that I may participate in a couple of days golfing and generally goofing off. Believe me, I need it, as I'm just coming out of "post-conference burnout" and I've been really jamming at work, trying to tie up loose ends before my trip. I cleaned up my desk so my office mate doesn't have to stare at the mess while I'm gone. When I get back I'll still have a ton of stuff to do though.
So the point of this ramble is that I am warning readers of this here blog that I will probably not be able to post until this coming Saturday at the earliest. There was no radio show this week, as my car died Monday, so I wasn't even able to go on the air. The playlist from the previous one is still unfinished. I have received requests to put up more poetry and perhaps the "bad novel" from 1981 mentioned yesterday. I will try to get to these things. I don't know that I can go forward with the rest of the conference summary here, as I poured all the rest of that into the report I filed with my job. Also I don't think I will really ever get to writing anything down about the ICP Orchestra show, although it was fantastic.
The grapevine has it that Sumner Crane of Mars passed away last week of lymphoma. I have neither date nor place of death, age at death or anything else relevant to offer here, as of yet. But it is a sad event for those of who love Mars. I suspect that Sumner was about 50 when he died, perhaps a little younger, and probably died in NYC. Perhaps you can put on "The Immediate Stages of the Erotic", bow your head, say a prayer and give it a really good listen in memory of Sumner.
Jeez, I still have to pack. I guess I need to correct myself - when I said Monica Lewinsky's show was "The Bachelor" I was wrong. I was told what the title was, but I can't recall. Who cares? I was very angered that the journalists in Iraq are coming home with artworks and other booty looted from Iraq. They are saying that the artifacts which disappeared from the antiquities museum in Baghdad were removed as part of "an inside job." Coming soon to Ebay! The original cuneform tablet containing "The Epic of Gilgamesh". Say, anyone around here know how to read Sumerian?
One crazy idea I had was to compose a cantata around the Etruscan text which is written on the bandage that once covered "The Zagreb Mummy". It would be a cantata written for voice & continuo on 2 staves, and written on a continous bandage-like strip. There is, of course, one major drawback to writing musical scores on continuous scrolls. The poet/composer Emmett Williams wrote the music to his opera "The Lost Dot on the Letter I" (1963) on a continuous scroll that was unrolled onstage as part of the performance. At the premiere in Germany there was a riot, and somebody set one end of the scroll on fire with a cigarette lighter. Naturally, the whole manuscript burned from one end to the other in mere seconds - gone!
When I was in school there was a lady )a fellow student) who composed a piece on a scroll this way - the musicians who played it didn't have a chance to look at it beforehand or anything. They just played as it unfurled before their eyes. You can imagine what the resultant music sounded like - somebody SHOULD have set fire to that scroll-composition.
Anyway I'm giving away too many ideas. As Muddy Waters once said "If you've got somthing good, keep it in your pocket." I'm terrible about that. See you all in three days.
Uncle Dave Lewis