Week 31: April 27

This week I found out how birds know which way to fly in the spring.

Then I walked through Franklin Square and found a well-camo'd cache.

Franklin Square

Perfect

On Thursday my quartet performed in a chamber concert. We played the complete Hindemith op. 10 no. 2 quartet in f minor. It was very tiring, but a lot of fun, and the audience responded really well - I heard a loud whoop when we finished the last note, and a bunch of people stood up. I'll post a link to the recording on here when it comes, if anyone's interested - it's a fine piece, and not well-known.

Maddy and I wanted to do something nice for Paul, and we decided to make him a carrot cake with cream cheese icing. On Friday night we stayed up really late baking it, and this was the result.....

It says "U" instead of "you" because we ran out of chocolate sauce

We burned the edges and had to cut off some substantial margins, but it turned out for the best because otherwise the cake wouldn't have fit on the plate. We had enough trouble with holes in the thing, and great chunks of it sticking to the pan, and trying to patch it together with icing. Yes we know it looks like a fail, but it tasted good.

Yesterday the three of us hauled the cake up to Marin City again. Paul picked us up and we went out for lunch at a little restaurant among the green hills, and then we all went hiking on Mt Tamalpais. We found out that Paul is actually 73 (not that you could tell, from the way he plays viola and hikes really energetically....)

This is the first time I have been to Marin County. I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

Serpentine green

Air force base up there

Through the leafy tunnel

The giantest pinecone

The Greek Theatre

I was so exhausted by the end that I went straight to bed at 8pm.


- Antisocial Violinist

Week 30: April 21

This week Maddy and I tried to do a Wherigo, starting at Embarcadero. Wherigos combine the best attributes of scavenger hunts and video games, and we were really excited about this one, but our battery died halfway through so that was fairly anticlimactic.

We found a cool statue anyway

Both my parental units came down this week to spend Easter with me at my little church. We had a great time together and they got to meet some of my friends and teachers. They also attended the baroque ensemble concert on Saturday night.

Ok, I need a new paragraph to talk about baroque. I have been preparing for this concert since Christmas break. There were four concerti on the program: Telemann concerto for two violettas, C.P.E Bach A-Major cello concerto, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (HA) concerto for double bass, and Antonio Vivaldi's "Il Grosso Mogul" concerto for violin. This was my first EVER solo with a baroque orchestra, on period instruments with gut strings (the baroque violin I'm using really is from the 18th century)!!

Il Grosso Mogul is one of a set of four "country" concerti that Vivaldi wrote. There was an England concerto, a France concerto, a Spain concerto, and an India concerto. The England, France and Spain concerti have sadly all been lost, but we still have the India one, with an amazing gypsy-style slow movement in which all the ornamentations were written out by Vivaldi himself, and that's the one I performed on Saturday. I fell in love with this piece at first hearing, and I have worked really hard on it and have had help from many different people (I was shocked that it is almost as hard as any modern concerto, in a different way).

The concerto is a fountain of white-hot sparks - a blinding curtain of sheer violin glory. Corey said at our last rehearsal that it was "going to bring the house down" - and he was right! I was so happy afterwards that I could have cried. I get so excited when people actually respond to you: "They LIKED it, they really LIKED it!!" This is why we perform; this is why we slave away to get everything perfect! Because people LIKE it! REALLY!!! I had more fun on that stage, grappling with violin fire, than I've had in a long time. Makes my whole life worth it!

They recorded the concert, and I ordered a copy. I'll post a link on this blog when it comes.

Colleagues and I after the concert. We all look exhausted because we are.

Easter Sunday at Nativity was lovely. I played Panis Angelicus with a vocal colleague from school and there was ample food after Mass, mostly homemade Croatian and Slovenian delicacies.

Croatian Easter basket

Parental unit, friend, self, Slovenian choir guys

After church I took the parental units to Golden Gate Park. I thought we could spend a nice afternoon walking in the beautiful gardens and looking for caches, which we did, but we were somewhat-unpleasantly surprised by the fact that almost everyone in the park seemed to smell of weed, and half of them were sporting weed shirts/socks/necklaces/other clothing items. When I got back to dorm, someone informed me that 4-20 is the police code for illegal drugs, which apparently makes April 20th Weed Day. That explains everything.

Stow Lake

OOOH that looks fun

Duckie

Duckie reaching for bread

A creek runs through it

This could be a field of triffids.

Stepping-stone foam

The PUs left for home today...but, oh my goodness, only three more blog posts left! I'm gonna come home, y'all, I'm comin' HOME! After all, what's the point of going out to seek your fortune if you don't return home covered in glory?

- Antisocial Violinist

Week 29: April 13

For the past two weeks, the concert hall has been closed to regular rehearsals because the spring opera production required an intense set, which took two days and a whole team of set builders/electricians to put in. The production was "Postcard from Morocco" by David Argento, and I went to see it on Thursday. It was a very interesting show - I encourage you to look it up. It is set in a train station, in which seven strangers meet and find out about each other while waiting for their departure. There is not really a plot - it is more like a patchwork of different-sized vignettes. The last performance was today, and I was on crew for the strike. I got to walk around the set and fool with the props and some of the percussion "toys" (bike horn, acme siren, and some vibrating metal instrument with mallets and a tongue by which you could bend the pitch and I can't find a picture of it and no one knew what it was called. Oh well.)

My journal for this week seems to be mostly taken up with Ian stories, which are not very transcribable as so much of what makes him funny and wonderful and insane and scintillatingly brilliant is in the delivery. I'll just say that on Tuesday I had three lessons and two of them were in the copy room. Most intense lessons I've had all year. Reminded me of the time he gave me a lesson in the MRU stairwell.

I will also say that our most recent studio class was the first time I have seen someone "foaming at the mouth" in real life.

Here is Ian talking and teaching.

Here is Ian talking and playing

These videos are public, but they're just the tip of the iceberg. If I wanted to be really nasty I could post a few of the in-house videos my colleagues have made of our studio classes, but if I posted those on a public website, Ian might get deported to a mental asylum, and then we wouldn't be able to study with him anymore, and that would be the greatest tragedy of my life so far.

Usually I try not to gush on this blog because I know it's not interesting.....but I am going to make a statement now (feel free to skip): Our studio class here at SFCM is the luckiest violin class in the world. Every day, every class, every lesson, I can't believe how lucky I am to a) be studying at this school at all and b) to be studying sweet violin with the single most unique person I have ever met in my life (not to mention one of the kindest, most humble, most creative, most self-sacrificing, most bizarre people I've ever known). 

On Saturday I had a great adventure. Maddy, Nick and I took our instruments and caught the bus up to Marin City, which meant we drove over the GGB for only the second time in my life. I apologize for the bad pictures I took out the bus window - I was trying to capture the rich green rolling hills of Marin County.

I can't find any better stock photos online, so these will have to do. Paul Hersh, our coach, picked us up and we drove out into the boonies where Mark Sokol lives, for a quartet coaching. He lives in a beautiful rustic house on a big property with a bridge over a little stream to the studio. I really wanted to get some pictures but I felt weird about taking pictures of people's private property. I'll just say that we had a fantastic coaching and a glorious drive home through the emerald-velvet hills.

Today I performed in a colleague's recital (on baroque viola!!), watched a violin recital with Stefan Jackiw (wonderful - look him up), struck the opera set, saw a bulldog skateboarding, had a conversation with a Native American homeless dude who had plenty to say on a lot of subjects, tried to get a cache but failed because it was too high up in the tree, and went to the CalTrain station for a virtual.

Time capsule

- Antisocial Violinist

Week 28: April 6

During the week Maddy and I did a mini-expedition downtown. Our mission was to pass through the Bamboo Alley and locate a treasure. Treasure had gone missing, but we found some cool stuff anyway.

These circle-thingies REVOLVED.

We don't know the purpose of this, but it was still fun

Bamboo Alley

The Pixel People

Maddy climbed inside......

So of course I had to climb inside too.

Matching faces #1

Matching faces #2

HAHAHA

Had an unintended group lesson on Friday. Maddy had her lesson for the first hour, then Maddy and I had my lesson for the second hour, then Maddy, me and Noori had Noori's lesson for the third hour. I really like group lessons. It's high-energy, and we can help each other a lot.

Went to the Embarcadero and Bayview on Saturday. There was a sort of mini farmer's market set up at Pier 1 (I mean the market was miniature, not the farmers) and I found this oddly shaped lemon.

Then I continued into Bayview, and as I walked south, had the unusual experience of being the only white person as far as I could see in every direction. I enjoy this. It turns the paradigms around. Now I know what black people feel like in YYC.

Found a train bridge with a tunnel that looked like it could have come out of a book if it weren't for the litter and graffiti.

There are a lot of things in the works at the moment - work I am doing which will produce awesome results eventually, which I will tell you about, but which isn't interesting enough in itself to warrant notation.

I should be practicing my violin more so everybody please text/email/call me and yell at me until I do some work. I feel such shame that I'm going to truncate my signature because I feel that I don't quite deserve it.

- Antisocial