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Interleaved
May. 9th, 2026 10:38 amI forgot to mention the crappy things I had to talk about in my last post. The first is that when we got in the car to go to The Rite of Spring, we see that the crack in the windshield (gotten on the New Orleans trip in December and that we had "repaired" at the time but they seemed to have just made it worse) grew overnight from just a few inches to almost two feet. Anyway, so yesterday during the day I'm on the phone with insurance and the glass place trying to get it taken care of. It wasn't as bad as I'd expected. Have an appointment on Monday. (Made sure not to get them to have us go back to fuckin' Safelite who did the shitty job in the first place.)
Anyway, after work Mary Beth and I did another short-ish walk around the neighborhood. Then in the evening we went out to GPAC for a performance from Iris Collective. It was interesting 'cuz they set up tables like it was lounge on the stage itself, along with a mini-sub-stage on the stage (it is a big stage). The first half of it was solo performances from this violinist Vijay Gupta (in spite of my previous ignorance of him, he seems to be a pretty big deal in the sphere of classical violinists, having won a MacArthur genius grant some years ago, and he's based in LA). So the first thing he did was a bit of a collage, alternating sections from Bach's Partita 3 with selections from György Kurtág's Signs, Games, and Messages. I'd never heard of Kurtág before, but his stuff was a nice surprise for this, very modernist and halting and often dissonant. You could hear the communication with the Bach he'd just play, like there's the nice Bach, and then here's an echo of that being deconstructed. Later some of the people around us were like "that was different." Anyway, I enjoyed the Bach a lot and I enjoyed the Kurtág and I enjoyed the way they played against each other. Now I need to look up Kurtág and try to check out about more of his work. He apparently just turned 100 and is still alive! Then Gupta played one more solo piece, Reena Esmail's Darshan—Bihag. It's based on raga and involved lots of really interesting bowing techniques. After the intermission he was joined by some Iris Collective musicians for Beethoven's Septet. It's one of his lighter (if not lightest) pieces, but there's still some (capital B) Beethoven sprinkled about within. They kinda present it as two trios playing off each other: the strings: violin, viola, cello; and the winds: clarinet, bassoon, and horn; with the bass in between gluing them together. It was enjoyable. It was a good night. Two nights in a row of awesome "classical" music!
The other crappy thing I'd intended to mention in my last post but forgot is Memphis just now being gerrymandered out of a congressional seat. That was always the representational bright spot or consolation for living where we do in this shitty state of Tennessee. At least we'd always had a decent House representative. I guess I hadn't even realized it was our majority black population and the protection of the Voting Rights Act that had kept us in tact, since the state had already done the same thing years ago gerrymandering the hell out of the other bigger cities, especially Nashville. And the very fucking instant scotus destroyed the VRA, the state of course swooped in to do what they'd been salivating wanting to do to us too for years and years. It's no secret that Tennessee hates Memphis, but it's no secret either that Memphis hates Tennessee, so fuck you you racist fucking state.
Anyway, after work Mary Beth and I did another short-ish walk around the neighborhood. Then in the evening we went out to GPAC for a performance from Iris Collective. It was interesting 'cuz they set up tables like it was lounge on the stage itself, along with a mini-sub-stage on the stage (it is a big stage). The first half of it was solo performances from this violinist Vijay Gupta (in spite of my previous ignorance of him, he seems to be a pretty big deal in the sphere of classical violinists, having won a MacArthur genius grant some years ago, and he's based in LA). So the first thing he did was a bit of a collage, alternating sections from Bach's Partita 3 with selections from György Kurtág's Signs, Games, and Messages. I'd never heard of Kurtág before, but his stuff was a nice surprise for this, very modernist and halting and often dissonant. You could hear the communication with the Bach he'd just play, like there's the nice Bach, and then here's an echo of that being deconstructed. Later some of the people around us were like "that was different." Anyway, I enjoyed the Bach a lot and I enjoyed the Kurtág and I enjoyed the way they played against each other. Now I need to look up Kurtág and try to check out about more of his work. He apparently just turned 100 and is still alive! Then Gupta played one more solo piece, Reena Esmail's Darshan—Bihag. It's based on raga and involved lots of really interesting bowing techniques. After the intermission he was joined by some Iris Collective musicians for Beethoven's Septet. It's one of his lighter (if not lightest) pieces, but there's still some (capital B) Beethoven sprinkled about within. They kinda present it as two trios playing off each other: the strings: violin, viola, cello; and the winds: clarinet, bassoon, and horn; with the bass in between gluing them together. It was enjoyable. It was a good night. Two nights in a row of awesome "classical" music!
The other crappy thing I'd intended to mention in my last post but forgot is Memphis just now being gerrymandered out of a congressional seat. That was always the representational bright spot or consolation for living where we do in this shitty state of Tennessee. At least we'd always had a decent House representative. I guess I hadn't even realized it was our majority black population and the protection of the Voting Rights Act that had kept us in tact, since the state had already done the same thing years ago gerrymandering the hell out of the other bigger cities, especially Nashville. And the very fucking instant scotus destroyed the VRA, the state of course swooped in to do what they'd been salivating wanting to do to us too for years and years. It's no secret that Tennessee hates Memphis, but it's no secret either that Memphis hates Tennessee, so fuck you you racist fucking state.
