The All-New Bunrab

Saturday night when we landed in Blythe after some 550 miles of I-10, I was too tired to do a lot in the way of writing.

So where were we? Last time you saw us in any detail, we were in Van Horne. We had to turn on the heat overnight there - altitude sure makes a difference in temperature! We left Van Horn pretty much on time, stopped in El Paso for lunch - Luby's! I do miss Luby's cafeteria. And infinite refills of good unsweetened iced tea before one has to ask. And a huge bin of sliced limes for the iced tea... When we stopped for gas off of I-10 at Rt. TX-178, there were signs for the Santa Teresa Port of Entry. I-10 does run close to the border! We topped off again in Lordsburg, NM, in an attempt to not have to buy gas in AZ - you know I like lots of people who live in AZ, a Denizen or so here, a musician there, but I'm still really peeved at your state for the "Ihre Papieren, bitte!" law. Anyway, we also bought iced tea in Lordsburg, traded places in driving...

New Mexico at that latitude is not very wide, only 150 miles or so. We did note when we crossed the Continental Divide. Whee! (Look it up, people, look it up.) We weren't really going downhill much after that, though - it was still uphill, regardless of drainage basins. And that continuing uphill really started screwing with our gas mileage.

If I hadn't already mentioned this, once one is west of Fredericksburg, TX, the predominant color is tan. Sometimes it's a reddish tan, sometimes as pale as beige, sometimes distinctly taupe, but it's all shades of tan. It got steadily tanner as we went further west, too. More about that later.

Middle of nowhere: pecan orchard. A couple of *miles* of pecan orchard (we knew that was what kind of tree it was by the sign advertising "Pecans, walnuts, wine" at the side of the highway.) Desert, desert, desert, then all of a sudden this huge chunk of green trees in orderly rows. A few blocks of saplings, but quite a few blocks of trees that were a good height - not as mature as, say, Sam's trees, but probably somewhere between 10 and 20 years old, which means someone had successfully been irrigating a huge area for a long time. Then we happened to try the radio and up popped some Dixieland jazz - it turned out to be A Prairie Home Companion, from a station in Tucson, even though we were still more than an hour east of Tucson. That station stayed good reception for quite a ways west - we listened to all of PHC, then it went to classical music, and when that finally started getting fuzzy, we scanned and found a classical station in Phoenix that lasted us for another 100 miles. We also saw lots of saguaro from the highway. I <3 saguaro. (On our previous road trip almost 25 years ago, we had stopped in and taken a tour at Saguaro National Monument on our way back from San Diego to Austin.)

Some of how we amuse ourselves on long drives is making fun of signs. Certainly the signs in New Mexico warning us "Caution! Dust storms may exist." weren't terribly helpful. I mean, we already know dust storms exist; there's a lot of scientific evidence for them, almost as much as for gravity. It would be a lot more helpful to have signs that warned us where and when to expect to meet up with said storms, yes? Other signs we made fun of: AZ has something weird going on, as long after we were past any city, out in the middle of nowhere and its dog, were exits for "339th Ave" and then "411th Ave" - those numbers seem rather high for avenues, even if one were naming streets uniformly across a whole county never mind a city...

We did have to get a couple of gallons of gas in Tempe, AZ - we clearly weren't going to make it all the way across 400 miles of AZ on one tank, given the awful gas mileage we were getting due to heat and a terrific headwind. At the time, we noted that from Tempe to the CA border is about 150 miles, and then on the map, Blythe is a tiny fraction of an inch past that.

We pulled into the KOA in Blythe, CA around 10 pm Pacific, and the guy was still at the desk. Lots of oleander! We ate Connie's tamale pie for supper. Let us note that in fact, the KOA *is* a fraction of an inch past the border - one enters the CA stop-and-deny-having-fruit customs booth right on the border; the exit for the KOA is immediately past the inspection booths, and then the road curves under the highway - so that the campground itself is maybe a bit east of the customs booth, and north of it, hovering directly at the border. The GPS units - all our various phone thingies - all did not seem to sense that anything past the first few feet of Riviera Dr. existed; it took some effort to find that turn going under the highway and spot the sign for the campground!

More later about the last westward leg.

and now they go past yours via Twitter:

• 23:19 somewhere in this noisy diner, someone is whistling the Moody Blues' "Tuesday Afternoon" #
• 20:18 dem ol' French horn blues done got me. #
• 20:21 First half of the Canadian Brass concert lots of Bach (and the stuff he stole from Vivaldi). #
• 20:23 a little odd to be listening to a brass ensemble when we're not surrounded by an auduence of brass players, as we have been lately #
• 20:24 now S is criticizing my typos; it's a real pain to go back and fix them, on a cell phone. #

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Evelyn Glennie performs barefoot.

Friday evening's Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concert opened with Wagner - "Brunhilde's Immolation" - yeah, it's Wagner. All the percussion toys for Glennie were already out on the stage at the beginning, so it looked odd. Then after the Wagner, the lights dimmed and we started hearing eerie noises and then Glennie comes creeping up the aisle, hunched over and playing what looks like a bird cage with a drum head on the bottom, using a violin bow on the bird cage bars. Very creepy. And, as mentioned, she's barefoot. The piece was Michael Daugherty's "UFO" consisting of five movements: Traveling Music; Unidentified; Flying; ??? [yes, that's its name, no, I don't know how it's pronounced]; and Objects. The ??? movement consists solely of Glennie and the contrabassoon. A lot of the piece was jazzy - could definitely hear hints of "Mission: Impossible" and Pink-Panther-theme type jazz in it - but a lot of it was just spacey - new agey and gimmicky, the sort of thing that reminds me that one person's "playful and joyous" is another person's "that's not music, it's sound effects!" I wouldn't want to buy the piece on CD, because a great deal of what made it interesting was watching Glennie in action - even though she was looking sort of spacey and new-agey herself - barefoot, long hair, sort of hippie-style loose calf-length dress. Anyway, over all, a success.

The second half was Holst's Planets, a piece I love love love. Mostly it went spectacularly well, although there was one teeny burble in the trumpets at one point. No matter, it is always a gorgeous piece. It also includes a contrabassoon, so the evening was definitely contra-intensive!

Continuing the outer space theme, next week is Mahler's "Titan" - well, Mahler wasn't thinking of Saturn's moon but after hearing The Planets, how could I help but make that connection?

My own apparel was mixed - I wanted to dress up for the opening weekend of the season, and bought* a turquoise sweater and brown-and-turquoise plaid skirt - and then discovered that since we haven't finished unpacking after moving in June, I had no idea where my brown shoes were. I wound up wearing brown ankle boots that looked rather silly with panty hose, but it was that or sneakers, my black and silver band concert uniform shoes, or my motorcycle boots! If I had gotten the turquoise tights to go with the sweater, I think the boots would have looked better, but I didn't. Note to self: for next weekend's concert, either find more of your clothes or more of your shoes, so that stuff matches! And definitely before niece's wedding in November, which is another occasion I intend to wear some of today's clothing purchases.

*Cindy-the-librarian and I went clothes shopping Friday afternoon, to collect some autumn clothing. We resisted more than we purchased, but some purchases were made. I do have several occasions coming up this fall to dress up. I also bought some knee socks just for fun; fadethecat, I think you would be envious of some of them, like the over-the-knee ones that would look terrific with your boots.

We are listening to Shostakovich's 5th right now - we had caught the last few bars of it when we got into the car after supper, and decided that we needed to hear the whole thing. And a most peculiar thought crossed my mind: when I hear this piece, I want to be a french horn. NO, not play a french horn, be a french horn.

That probably qualifies me as pervert of the week.

Christmas with Travelin' Light - Sam Pilafian & Frank Vignola. Light jazz with a tuba soloist - need more be said? Pop and traditional favorites.
The Ventures Christmas Album. Ahh, the sixties. This is pretty funny - and they sneak in bits of their own music, too - a piece called "Scrooge," and little riffs from other pop songs sneak into the Christmas carols. Their "Jingle Bells Rock" sounds more like rock than the original did.
Christmas with the Lettermen. Traditional carols, nice harmony, a bit bland (I say that about a lot of things that don't include LOUD).
Christmas - The Players. Lots of stuff on here. Huge variety of instrumentation - you don't often hear soprano sax and cornetto on the same song, let alone both of those with button accordion and banjo.
Psallite! A Renaissance Christmas - Chanticleer. I'll bet angevin2 has this one, too. Josquin des Prez, Heironymous Praetorius, William Byrd. A must for early music fans.
Christmas Now is Drawing Near - Sneak's Noyse. Lots of English folk carols. Themed medleys. Some stuff that's not commonly heard in the US.
A Froggy Christmas. Novelty album, needless to say. A little of this goes a long way, so it's best played as part of a shuffle rather than trying to listen to it straight through. The back cover text is pretty funny (one of the performers is listed as Ribbit Goulet...)
A Toolbox Christmas. Likewise a novelty album, same caveat as above. "Your favorite carols performed on your favorite hand and power tools." Some spouses think it's funny to put Froggy Christmas and Toolbox Christmas on shuffle with each other (and nothing else). Some spouses are lucky that I am extremely tolerant.

Brave Combo - It's Christmas, Man!
It is possible to turn anything into an accordion polka if you try hard enough. Brave Combo tries very hard. There's also traditional xmas songs turned into cha-cha, ska, sambas... It's fun. The "Christmas Polka" is wonderful.
Therapy Sisters - Codependent Christmas
A Texas group, and a couple songs are slightly Texas-centric. All the songs are original, all are funny. My favorite may be "Abraham's Lament," a combination Chanukah-Christmas song, sort of.
The Brass Band of Battle Creek - Sleigh Bells and Brass, The Sounds of Christmas
It's loud, it's bright, it's brass, it's Christmas. For you concert band fans: it includes Reed's Russian Christmas Music. Good album. Loud.
Mannheim Steamroller Christmas
Yes, this is the third MS xmas album I've blogged. I don't know whether we've run out of them yet.
Dr. Demento presents The Greatest Christmas Novelty CD of All Time
It's starts with the Chipmunk Song and gets worse from there - all your favorites, such as "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" and "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas." My favorite is the Dragnet parody.
The Early Light Consort - Christmas Past. Instrumentals including some less-familiar bits of "Messiah," "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" and "Pachelbel's Canon." Instrumentation includes crumhorns, ocarina, pan flute, lute, and more. Very pretty, very peaceful.
Quink Vocal Ensemble - Carols Around the World
Lots of unfamiliar stuff on this, and some that we know in English translations are in their original language. Some of it's very nice; I don't particularly care for their version of "In the Bleak Midwinter" though - personal preference, I'll take Holst's arrangement every time.
Joan Baez - Noël
She's got a beautiful voice and I like her style. Several less-familiar carols on here, and a couple sung in German.

Since squirrel_magnet is out of town, sanada came with me to Thursday evening's Baltimore Symphony concert instead. She did not regret the absence of a tuba in the entire performance the way spouse would have. (Hey, they had a double-valve bass trombone and a contrabassoon in all three pieces, that should be enough, but no, Spouse would want tuba in everything.)

( music nerd stuff about the concert )

Re dinner: we ate dessert first!

We went to the symphony this evening, which was performing Pictures at an Exhibition and Brahms' Violin Concerto. The violin soloist was young, and was wearing what people of my generation would call a Nehru jacket, in black, which looked quite spiffy. However, I was a little disappointed in the performance. I thought that the violin wasn't quite strong enough, that it sounded a little thin and soft. If it were brass, I'd have said he needed an instrument with a bigger bore. Anyway, there was nothing technically wrong with it, and other people didn't seem so picky. After intermission was Pictures, which I enjoyed. There were a few tiny flubs but overall it was good, and loud. I liked the alto sax interpretation, although squirrel_magnet thought it was a little bit too moderate and should have stood out more (OTOH, he liked the violinist in the concerto just fine). For "Byddlo," rather than the tuba player, the third trombonist picked up a euphonium and played the solo part. He did an excellent job, with a lovely tone. He appeared to just switch the same mouthpiece between the two, which certainly makes it easier to use two different instruments in the same performance! I've never been sure of the difference between a euphonium and a tenor tuba, myself, and I asked squirrel_magnet; his response was "Opinions vary." In other words, in a blind taste test, even experts can't actually tell the difference; it's whatever the manufacturer claims it is. (Technically, a baritone horn has a slightly less conical bore than a euphonium, but that's another one that if you put it in a lineup, you'd need a micrometer caliper to tell them apart, or else have to actually play them. With the euphonium/tenor tuba pair, even blowing into them wouldn't help.)

Afterward, we went to Sabatino's for supper. They sure have good rum cake!

Speaking of music, Netflix sent us Ice Age II: The Meltdown, which has a hysterical scene of buzzards singing "Food, Glorious Food," and also has Scrat eying the heavenly acorn to ballet music from Khatchaturian (the adagio from "Spartacus, if you're interested), even doing some jetés and spins to it.

Since we have sort of "fake" season tickets - we pick and choose some 8 concerts from among all the series during the year, and get a season ticket price for them - we don't always sit in the same place, and in fact, we deliberately vary where we sit from time to time, to try out different places in the hall. This evening we were smack in the center of the rear Orchestra (floor) level, rather than closer up but off to stage left (floor right) where we "usually" are. It turned out to be a good spot for this particular concert, as it happens, but it did bring out one particular observation that I had previously just attributed to being off on one side. And that is, that the violins, on stage right (floor left) are holding their instruments with their left arms, and so their shiny white shirt fronts show up a lot, while the violas, at stage left, their right arms not only have the black jackets on them but, when lifted, block whatever sliver of white shirt might happen to show. So stage left looks a lot darker than stage right, even though it's undoubtedly as well lighted. It seems to me that the stage techs ought to light up stage left a teensy bit brighter, just so that from the audience it appears better balanced. This isn't so much a problem in orchestras where the cellos sit on the outside, rather than the violas, but in Baltimore, the violas sit on the outside. (No telling whether once Marin is fully in charge, she might change that.)

The concert was great. This one was part of the "Explorer" series which does multimedia/artsy stuff, not just play great music. First was "Night on Bald Mountain" which I feel the guest conductor took a little bit too fast, and so the tonguing on the brass parts wasn't as crisp as it could have been. The second piece was a BSO premier of Christopher Theofanidis' "Rainbow Body." The "guest artist," if you will, was astronomer Mario Livio, from the Hubble Space Telescope Institute. What he did was narrate a series of slides, of photos from the Hubble and other space telescopes, before the piece was played, having the orchestra just play a few notes at times to illustrate a theme, a leitmotif for different kinds of novae, as it were. Then, the orchestra played the piece, with the slides going on again, but no narration. The piece was lively and loud, not at all "hearts of space" minimalist stuff, and although it was somewhat gimmicky, it was a really cool gimmick, and I enjoyed the heck out of it. We gave them a standing ovation, including the composer, who was in the audience with his wife and 10-month-old son. (Livio wore a dark business suit; Theofanidis wore a turtleneck and sports jacket.)

After intermission was Beethoven's "Pastoral" (#6), which was preceded by a very brief lecture by Livio accompanied by more slides, relating the major themes of nature that Beethoven was trying to illustrate in the Pastoral, to the birth/formation of new stars. There were no slides during the music, as Beethoven needs no gimmicks. It was an interesting idea, the birth of new starts and the renewing powers of nature.