ceci n’est pas un rêve passant

32 days until the vernal equinox

I saw Madison and she remembered me but I said that I do this so much that I don’t immediately remember everyone I draw. She asked me about long-form art like paintings and I showed her a few of them and I said I’d like to get back into it someday, but it’s obviously easier to just bring a sketchbook and some pens than to bring a canvas and entire sets of paint or colored pencils. And I’m also blaming the death of Deviantart and the fact that the modern day interbutt is AI and Elon turning a dial that says “RACISM” on it now. Madison has two dogs. I believe one is named Melody and I forget the other one's name but I think it's a human name. I said that in New York, there were little you-are-here lights on the train maps and I think that we need them.

I had fish masala curry (made with white fish, tamarind, green chilies, and tamarind) along with some garlic naan and a can of coke. It’s a two on Mumbai Spice's spicy scale, which means it has a kick to it but it won’t turn you into Trogdor the Burninator.

Ben was talking about the time he heard the opera Pelléas et Mélisande but it was two pianos instead of the orchestra.

I’d rather have the 23rd because Death of Stalin but whatevs. This is (a) one of 2 concertos in a minor key and (b) as close as Don Giovanni as he’d get. It really speaks for itself. The second movement is a romance, the third is virtuosic.

The encore was Mozart's Allemande which reminded me of Bach and not just because Bach also wrote an allemande for keyboard.

I know I’ve heard a Bruckner but I have no idea what it was (A search of my notes and a trip to the Internet Archive tells me it was the 8th. As for the 9th, he dedicated it to God, has a cup of tea, worked it on it, and then croaked). But it isn’t seven because the last performance was 12 years ago, the last BSO performance was 15 years ago, and the last BPO performance was 14 years before that.

Symphony Hall is by far the best space for Bruckner, along with many others. He spent his life in the church, which has long reverberations, thouh it was conceived for the concert hall. Make a good decision.
Here's what the critics said:
“antimusical ravings of a halfwit” - Hans von Bülow
“interminable stretches of darkness, leaden boredom, and feverish overexcitement” “- Eduard Hanslick, a much-feared critic in Vienna.
“a symphonic boa constrictor” - Brahms.
However, in modern times, there are people coming in from Denmark to hear this. Denmark!
On the subject of Denmark, if there's a silver lining to Trump's Greenland fiasco, it's that Europe's far rightist like Jonatan Palessen are rueing that it's hurting far right European parties.
It opens with a tremolo, giving a sense of anticipation and wonder. A shimmer of sound. The cellos backed up by the low horns. They start a melody, joined by the violas and it goes on for 25 bars. Not too slow that it can not be free. And then repeated with everybody, in E-major.
The B theme moves in step motion on the clarinet and oboe. It goes up in one long line and then hesitates. The horns are going ba-ba-ba-ba stifling freedom.
There’s a counterpoint from the orchestra and a gigantic climax with a pedal note that sounds like the full might of an organ.
The 3rd theme repeats three times and then changes. The minimalists would understand.
He played fiddle in dance bands and this is a dance theme.
2 oboes play the second theme upside down, like they’re in Australia and not Austria (fun fact: Australia comes from the Latin word for south but Austria comes from the German word for east)
The second violins take on the main melody but in C minor while the first play a heartbreaking melody.
The dance then builds to a gigantic climax.

The second movement is when you see the tuba player walk over to the other side of the stage to join the Wagner tubas, which was comissioned by Wagner when he wrote the Ring Cycle to bridge the gap between a tuba and a French horn. Wagner himself just called them tubas. Anyways.
When he started writing this, Wagner’s health had declined. Wagner died on Feb 13, which was not a Friday and a guy in the audience wondered if that was a deliberate choice.

I don’t know what it is about Wagner that Viennese society objected to but it sure as hell wasn’t his politics.

The contrasting theme is a lilting Viennese melody. The coda is unimaginable radiance.
It was played by German radio when losing the Battle of Stalingrad and on the death of Hitler so in Poland associated with just desserts (listen, I was making a Final Fantasy VII reference and I know it's actually just deserts and the meaning of desert in that context is lost and really only exists in that phrase), payback, and victory.

The first movement is 20 minutes long and the adagio is 25 minutes.

The third movement is a scherzo with a fierce rhythm and trumpet fanfare, then a tender trio, and then back to the trumpet.

The final movement brings back the tremolo and has three themes.

I feel like this always happens. Lavish attention on the first and second movements but run out of steam and time for the later movements.


It's about 70 minutes in total and I didn't get out until 10:30 and this is why Bruckner doesn't get performed that much. It's too short to be put on its own but it's hard to pair it with things because otherwise it goes on too long.

Jason was the name of one of the T Ambassadors and I thought he is the last name I’d want to encounter on that day. Maybe Pamela.
Emma has long fake eyelashes.
Reese, or however you spell her name, has beet red dyed hair and eyebrow piercings and works with clay and is extra-impressed that I drew the frog on her bag as well.
On the ride home, the train kept stopping for a few minutes at each stop and someone sang “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” and she told her friend that Beck had much better songs. That’s how I feel about Jane’s Addiction. Jane Says and Been Caught Stealing are nowhere as good as say, Hypersonic.

burning question: who the hell thought it was a good idea to play Kanye West’s Hitler song? Did they think it was a satire like Springtime For Hitler or Der Führer’s Face?

66 days until the vernal equinox


That’s not a confidence builder.


Warlock is a movie, not to be confused with the 1959 western with that name or Project Warlock or anything else. It’s no masterpiece or anything but it does have some fun gore effects. You know, a perfect choice for the family friendly Nintendo console.


The sun aligns with the moon more than once a millennium. it’s called an eclipse. Yeah, it feels like every millennium in New England only it’s more like every ten thousand to fifty thousand years but they do happen in places like the Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula, and Patagonia.


Massachusetts readers, you’re going to have to wait until 2079.


The game’s based loosely on the sequel Warlock: The Armageddon, which is kind of like the first one, only with even more blood, gore, and explosions. And in 1999 came Warlock III: The End of Innocence, which is direct to video trash. Doesn’t even have Julian Sands.


Note that this game is rated K-A, which was basically E for Everyone. Also note that this game came out in the SNES era, before Nintendo was known for shovelware and borderline pr0nz0rz.


There’s a Genesis version with some differences but I won’t be playing them both. Once is enough, thank you very much.

( click )

burning question: and in the end, aren’t fun gore effects what count for horror?

75 days until the vernal equinox


Or Bad Omen if you’re in Japan.
It’s a Breakout or Arkanoid clone with a couple of twists.

( Clickity )

burning question: why the hell is the AI overview for this game talking about a giant rotten cheesecake?

77 days until the Vernal Equinox


While this game is Japanese, it only got released in the United States for whatever reason. There are prototypes out there and there are a lot of changes.


In Japan, Mark’s name was Hiroshi and the opening was a bit more complex because Japanese can cram more into the same amount of space, and the monster’s name was Varyu and not Bert.

( clickity )

burning question: Why does Bert need Mark's help, anyway?

79 days until the vernal equinox


This is not, as you’d expect, a game about the Astyanax from Greek mythology, it’s a game about an ordinary high school student who is named after the Astyanax from Greek mythology.
Even if he was born in August, he’s rather old for a high school freshman. Somebody explained it as “Japan’s high school is only three years and starts at our equivalent of 10th grade,” and whoever translated it didn’t understand that.


Or is it?

I’d have to play it to find out.

But probably not because the Greek myth Astyanax was thrown off the walls of Troy as an infant because the Greeks were like “if this guy lives, he might avenge his father and rebuild Troy.”
I don’t know if it was intentional but the Greeks were assholes.

the game is called The Lord of King or maybe the Road of King in Japan. For what it’s worth, Astyanax translates to Lord of the City in Ancient Greek.


( clickity )

burning question: Don’t you think you really want to say “July” over the snow? Isn’t that the fun of it? I think it’s so nice that–that you see a snow-covered field and say “every July peas grow there.” We’re talking about them growing and she’s picked them.

81 days until the Vernal Equinox

I took over 700 screenshots and even though I giffed a lot of them, I'm still amazed this posted. And the result is this: a walkthrough of Maniac Mansion that may not be the most comprehensive out there but it does show off a hell of a lot.


Back before they were called LucasArts.


There was a tv show. I actually knew about the tv show before I knew about the game and when I saw the game, I was like “hey, is that based on the tv show I never watched.” I want to say it was on the same station as the Super Mario Bros Super Show but I can’t say for sure when it’s been this long.


And by loosely, I mean “there’s a Dr. Fred and he lives in a mansion and there’s a seckrit lab powered by a meteor that may or may not be purple but it’s very definitely non-sentient and isn’t turning Dr. Fred evil.” but everyone else is different. The children are Tina, Ike, and Turner.
They don’t even have the tentacles. I mean, it’s a Canadian sitcom and they probably don’t have the budget for that kind of stuff.

( Click )

that’s how it could have happened
( but how about this? )

( but here’s what really happened )

( odds and sods )

burning question: what do you think the arcade games played like? In my headcanon, Meteor Mess is an Asteroids clone and Tuna Diver plays like Jaws for NES.

83 days until the vernal equinox


there’s a pirate cart of this game called Flash Batman in which I guess Flash and Batman team up to fight evil.


I hope there’s a storyline to that hack and if there is, I hope the plot is that the Joker built a shrink ray.


and since Batman and the Flash have the same powers in that game, the Joker also built a ray that takes away the Flash’s superpowers. Also the ray had the side effect of swapping red and blue so maybe he had Dr. Doofenshmirtz’s help on the shrinkinator. Or maybe he stole Doofenshmirtz’s Inator-inator, which randomly generates -inators and the inator he got was an inator that swaps red and blue and he’s like “well, it would make Campbell’s soup cans confusing. That’s evil, right?”


This game was on Nick Arcade a few times. I watched and the kid who was playing was really timid about attacking enemies and didn’t actually achieve the quite resaonable score.

( clickity )

burning question: How did John Boyne see that list of ingredients for red dyes and not realize that something was amiss? Thistle and nightshade? Ok. Keese wings, swift violet, and silent princess plant? Fine, maybe they’re some real life plants he’s never heard of. So far, so what?. There are 380,000 plant species out there, after all. But did he not bother to look up what octoroks and lizalfos even were? Peppers, which were confined to the Americas at the time this novel was set? Sapphires?!?!

85 days until the vernal equinox

Krissy brought up the version of Blue Christmas that is sung by Porky Pig and Emma told us about how, twelve or so years ago, her brother called up Kiss 108 asking them to play it and they’re like “we don’t have that record” and he was heartbroken.
That’s a thing I’m familiar with but haven’t heard in over twenty years.
Also, I recently learned because the guy died that Driving Home For Christmas is not only older than I thought it was, it’s more British than I thought it was. I seriously thought it was from 2005 or so because fetishization of rural white southern culture and American because we’re the ones obsessed with living a hundred miles from anything.

Krissy brought this movie up, featuring the voice talent of Mark Hammill and Nancy Cartwright of all things. Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa. Eesh, this is worse than Dire Straits and their video is from the 80s. I’m genuinely surprised Video Brinquedo isn’t responsible for this atrocity.

Emily had physical copies of Calvin annd Hobbes but ruined them by looking at them in the bath.
Lou was once in a rock version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
On Elf, Sam says no pianist wants someone singing in their ear like that. She’d be on the other side of the piano. Or else.
I called Polar Express “Uncanny Valley: The Movie.” Emily says that the music is good but the animation is terrible because they tried and failed to have it look like the book and they couldn’t do it with the technology at the time. Maybe the animators of The Wild Robot could pull it off.

Kiki once took a bite out of Sam’s birthday cake. Jiji took raw chicken and ran around with it. Julia’s cats would grab things like the skewers for Chinese food. Drake gobbled up half a cheese sandwich that some kid dropped in three bites and he stole a tuna sandwich.

Emily forbids Sam from giving Jiji bunny-shaped toys. So he has a squirrel shaped toy instead.

Sam appreciates the Andor signs from the Boston protest. Geez, that feels like forever ago.

Sam brought up the 1970s Scrooge musical and FUCK YES to that.

burning question: who actually played Mouse Trap instead of just setting up the Rube Goldberg machine and setting it off?

I took the Commuter Rail in because busing. I had to take the bus back home but it wasn't that bad because it was at night and it was also only between North Quincy and Braintree.

I got a bowl at Cava.
The people behind me were asking each other “would you rather” questions, like would you rather give up dip or sauce and they collectively came to the conclusion that hummus is not a sauce but tzatziki is. One of them asked if they’d rather have hands for feet and all I can say is that having feet for hands would suck and one of them said that he’d bei doing a handstand all the time if he had hands for feet and one said that if she flipped the table over does the leg become an arm and I think that even if your feet are hands, the anatomy of your leg would remain the same. They all agree that there's nothing wrong with being gay but even if there was, it would still beat having feet for hands.

I bought the book A Cautious Traevller's Guide to the Wastelands at Beacon Hill Books.

As you can no doubt tell by the title, these works are all based around the concept of home, as nebulous as it may be. Before it was a movie about dogs, it was a song by Paul Simon.
Franz Schubert, Auf dem Strom (On the River) for soprano, French horn & piano, D. 943, Op. 119
This was written to commemorate the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death. Well, the date of a concert of his music coincided with that day, so he wrote this. There are quotes
He was hailed as the next Beethoven, but on november 19 of that year, he died. So much for that. He knew his health was going to shit by then. It was either syphilis or mercury poisoning that did him in. Or maybe he just died with those conditions. He wrote a lot lot lot of music in that brief time. Most of them leider, along with an unfinished symphony, a bunch of finished symphonies, and the world’s only sonata for arpeggione and piano (at least, until someone else decided they’d also do one). The Harvard radio station did a Schubert-a-thon one year and it got kind of tedious after a while. Maybe Debussy or Mahler or Ravel or even Britten would have been a better choice.

Stacy Garrop, Postcards from Wyoming for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano & percussion
High Plains Prairie: Mostly the marimba playing the overtones of the piano. Some gong.
Call of the Wild: is a dies irae in which the violin and cello evoke the buzzing of insects. A lot of drumming.
The Solitude of Stars: is sparse notes played on the piano and the flute, which was lower in register and bent like the handle of umbrella and played to sound like a Native American end-blown flute. They’d call it “tâhpeno” in the Tsėhésenėstsestȯtse language but that doesn’t matter. Despite the capital being Cheyenne, they mostly speak soni' ta̲i̲kwappe or Hinónoʼeitíít there.
at the end they all audibly exhale.
The crotales are the things you scrape with a bow. During the intermission, I walked in on Matt explaining them to someone else and asekd the same exact thing. And then Matt explained them to someone else.

Charles Ives, The Housatonic at Stockbridge and other songs for soprano & piano
There were eight songs: Berceuse, A Night Song, There is a Lane, In The Alley, The Side Show, the Housatonic at Stockbridge, nn Street, They are There. All picked for a sense of home.
i don’t think anyone expected Deborah to waltz on stage playing the fife for They Are There. The lyrics call out totalitarians for starting wars that everyday people fight and die in and so I thought this had to do with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, but the collection was published in 1922 and therefore it’s calling out Kaiser Wilhelm II, Nicholas II, and Franz Joseph I.

Ernest John Moeran, Fantasy Quartet for oboe & strings (1946)
He can assure you that his head is flesh, bone, brain, and that crude metal plate he got in France. He fared better than Ernest Farrar.
Anyway, the wound caused instability, mood disorders, and alcoholism and he lost the ability to compose for a while. The fantasy quartet was composed near the end of his life, as recollections of his childhood home, integrating Norfolk folk songs.

Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quintet in C Major, Op. 29, “Storm”
It starts out with classicism and then becomes the titular storm of early Romanticism. Also, there was a bit of a tempest in a teapot regarding the publication rights. The publisher Artaria had the right to seek damages but didn’t because they didn’t want to piss of Beethoven too much.


There were artworks. All of them are by David Lloyd Brown and most of them don’t have titles but they’re all part of a Primordial Soup series. They’re all inspired by paisley, Persian carpets, William Morris, climate change, and how the fins of sarcopterygii became the legs of amphibians.

( Clickity )

A passenger had hair of radioactive green, yellow-gold, and violet.
Madison and friends were discussing the relative merits of the seats on the new train (they’re cleaner) vs the seats on the old trains (they’re cushioned)

burning question: how does one stretch out 74 minutes of music into over 2 hours? Okay, I said 74 but maybe it was more like 85, since the website only mentioned one song by Ives and there were seven others but some were short and some were really short.

A passenger on the way in looked like Yuki (this means nothing to you but I’ll say that she’s Japanese and Italian and if she has tattoos, I am unaware of them) and had a Moomin tattooed on her ankle.

The whole season is things that end in triumph or at least a possibility of hope. Mahler 3, Bruckner 7. This is a difficult time for the country and we all need it right now.
An “All Mahler” program would just be one symphony. An all-Brahms program is the typical symphony and a concerto.

Brahms was the most indecisive composer ever. He wanted to write a symphony. It took him years to overcome his feelings of being in Beethoven’s shadow. He also played piano in a brothel, had a late puberty at 24, and had a high voice that embarrassed him.
At the age of 20, he went to visit Robert Schumann and he had Clara listen to him play the piano.
Schuman threw himself in the river Rhine while suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations and spent the rest of his life in an asylum.
Brahms lived with Clara and her seven children (she had 8 but one died in infancy). She was 35, he was 22. He also felt a bit of an infatuation that never amounted to anything more than an intense friendship. The second movement of the concerto is a portrait of her.
The first movement has a intense ferocity that is heard nowhere else. Begins with a roar of the timpani, a B♭ major theme. Then F major. Then brooding passion. Here, the orchestra and the piano are once again equals. This work began life as a symphony, after all, and they meet in symphonic proportions. And then a piano duet. Sonata form, of course. A horn call from the mysterious wildlands (when I do these, I’m furiously scrawling down these things and if I slow down to make my writing legible, I’d miss too much. So I’m not actually sure what word I used there. Wildlands? Woodlands?). In those days, people’d usually clap at the end of each movement but nobody clapped to this when it premiered. In fact, they hissed at the end.
The second movement is a hymn in C major and if you don’t believe things can be sad in a major key, you’re wrong. You can hear Schumann’s death here. The final cadenza doesn’t show off but reaches into the soul.
The third movement is a Hungarian Romany dance, a thing Brahms was obsessed with, in a 6/4 meter, which is tricky because it can be 1-2 1-2 1-2 or 1-2-3 1-2-3 or 1-2-3-4-5-6 or in this case, all of the above. The third symphony has 6/4 meter so it’d be too much to pair those things.
And then a fugue because Brahms was going through a Bach phase that transmuted into a Bach-with-a-side-of-Mozart-and-Palestrina phase when he wrote the fugue, and I was thinking of somehing Caiti said about her father going through a Bach phase in college and then Caiti herself going through a Bach phase that was really more a Tchaikovsky-with-a-little-Bach-on-the-side phase with a bit of Schubert and she thought about going through future phases with Chopin and Debussy and Handel and Vivaldi and Rimsky-Korsakov.
The last ten years for me have been an extended John Adams phase and I went through a Henry Cowell phase a decade ago and my college classical phase was Gustav Mahler in that summer everything fell apart and Ralph Vaughan Williams in the Caitlin days, which was mixed in with Flying Saucer Attack and Airiel and Cocteau Twins and Future Sound of London. Now is a Gerald Finzi phase. Berlioz as well because autumn is for French Romantics.

The encores were a Chopin prelude and a rather stately Chopin mazurka that I thought was a polonaise neither of which I know which specific ones they are.

At 29, Brahms decided he’d write a symphony. For real this time. He finished it at age 43.
At the start, the symphony is going boom boom boom and the wind players are coming down and the cellos and the vilins are going up converging on each other. And sometimes the timpani plays too loud. There’s the sound of fate knocking at the door. He just can’t escape. There’s a repeated section that is usually excised because it goes nowhere and adds nothing.
It ends in C major but that’s lost in the audience coughing.
The second and third movements are brief intermezzos. Warm, sunny E major, with various solos. And then Romany music.
The fourth movement sounds best in Symphony Hall and we’re not just saying that because it’s in Boston. A two part overture in a tragically distorted theme. A storm. A roar from the timpani, and the clouds breaks and we get this outpouring from the French horn and the trombones enter for the first time in this entire symphony. There’s a chorale and structurally, it's very similar to Beethoven's Ode to Joy minus the chorus, and it ends in C major and in a scream for joy.

This symphony has been referred to as Beethoven’s 10th but Brahms disliked that implication of plaigarism rather than the homage it was.

I drew Francesca and Marina and Abby though I’m not entirely sure who’s who and there were two of them whose names I didn’t get.

burning question: why would Republican provocateurs even need to show up when they can just fake it with AI and their base of terminally online 70-year-olds and terminally online 20-year-olds would eat it up?