Saturday Morning Minutiae

[talktooloose]

As more and more of my brain cells are devoted to drawing comics, my understanding of music repeatedly rears its head as if to remind me that it is waiting there whenever I am ready to ride in its saddle again.

Yesterday during a massage (during which I can usually zone out of world completely) I was being driven alternately to distraction and to giggles by ridiculously literal renderings of Gershwin songs on a piped CD. This morning, lying in bed and reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, Snake was playing Hungarian pop over my head. The passage through carpet, wood and duct made the bass sound exactly a semi-tone sharp, creating the woozy effect my brother used to acheive by playing piano pieces with each hand in a different key.

I am ill, though not completely lost in a world of phlegm. Clearly I need to lie low today. There are comforts: the novel I'm reading, the fact that I've finished pencilling my four-page comic and Best Brand Lanolin, my favourite winter moisturizer. I had thought I would never find it again but Honest Ed's miraculously had four jars in their low-rent packaging that hasn't changed since the 70s or the Cretaceous era or something.

Ed's also had my favourite cockroach traps which, apparently have been recently outlawed as bad for humans. I grabbed several.

I remember a Best Brand cream from my youth that sat above the toilet at our former family cottage. It was right at eye-height for peeing men and all the men in the family could recite the French translation which had clearly been typeset from a scribbled note by someone who didn't know French: "Pour les mains rude, gercé et siche..."

Have a good day all, Chinese buns in the Viennese manner are on the breakfast table.

Comments

[a-trick-mind.livejournal.com]

Feel better soon!

Playing a piano piece with each hand in a different key? I am still trying to wrap my ear around that one. LOL Rick will have to play something for me that way when he calls next time.

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'm feeling extraordinarily muzzy at the moment. I'm reading, falling asleep, reading, falling asleep, but I may venture into the beautiful sunshine for a brief walk later.

My brother is the great music genius of the family. He had perfect pitch by the age of five and can improvise any arrangement in any key at the piano instantly. On my way up to the bimah at my bar-mitzvah, I got him to quickly sing me a "G". He composed until his wife wouldn't let him anymore. If you detect any bitterness in that, you're so right. Of course, he's as much to blame as she. The last thing he wrote was a piece for a holocaust memorial ceremony. We found out about it only when a friend of my mother's told her, "I heard your son's piece yesterday."

He's a strange, sad man and I'm increasingly estranged from him and there's not a thing I can do about it.

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition

I rather liked that book. Gibson's an underrated author--I think he'll last. And against a background of Hungarian pop music (what exactly does it sound like?), well.

Hope you get better quickly. Phlegm's never fun.