Day of Freedom

I think I have a minamalism obession. Currently I have been listening to Tehillim nonstop...ever since I stole the Steve Reich 10 CD set from the library (well...not stole, just borrowed). Actually, the recording of Tehillim I am listening to (right now) is the recording made by Ossia, right here at Eastman. It is regarded as the best recording of the piece available! After a bit of research I determined that approxamitly 197 songs on my ipod are minamalist. That is about 12% of the 1596 songs on my ipod. This must increase. On my first day of freedom (no more double rotation) I really did nothing. I skipped rep class because I had slept very strangely and my neck almost could not be moved. Ouch. It was a weak excuse and I ended up sleeping kind of late, mainly becuase I didn't want to deal with the pain of getting out of my bed (even though I knew it would be fine after a while). This seems to happen to me a lot...the pain will probably be gone in as little as two days, or as much as a week. Does anybody have a cure for this? Maybe I should invest in one of those fancy pillows? Met with Jairo and ironed out the last bits of our proposal for the Howard Hanson Student Commisioning Grant...I am not holding my breath, since we threw it together at the last minute, but Jairo has gotten money from them before, so maybe again? Picked up the music for the next Musica Nova concert...featuring Phlegra by Xenakis...and I must say it is one of the most ridiculous things I have seen. The first page is a cello solo consisting entirely of sixteenth-notes with glisses to grace notes...almost every one having some kind of quarter tone marking...that should be interesting. By the end of the piece it is dectouple 32nd notes with a treble clef and bass clef alternating on almost every note...what exactly have I gotten myself into? Musica Nov was frustrating as usual today. Maybe we wouldn't be having so many problems if we had rehearsed at some point? Nuff said bout that... Rather than practicing this afternoon, like I should have, I used my neck excuse and lazed around the apartment. Made myself a porkchop for dinner, which turned out quite well! And the rest of my day was spent watching two entire movies! Went with Kimberly to see Willenbrock at the Dryden. The driector was there, and I belive this was the American primere, but I could be wrong about that. It was very interesting hearing the director speak before the film, he told a story about he and his girlfriend almost getting robbed while on vacation, and then while chasing after the robber, realizing that he was completly naked. Of course, there was a corresponding scene in the movie. However, the movie was not terribly interesting. Of course there were some great scenes, like the one mentioned above as well as some amazing cinematography moments (the opening scene of a car driving down the highway while the camera is looking directly down on it...the camera zooming straight up from a couple embracing in a snowing parking lot...can we say Fargo?). From what I hear of the director's other movies, they sound much more interesting. I would not really recommend this movie...Willenbrock...81% The other movie that I watched, before and after Willenbrock, was the somewhat spectaclalr Sin City. While the concept of the movie is nothing entirely new, the way it is executed just works. Mainly in black and white, the movie depicts a series of crime capers, sometimes bordering on gorefest, starring a huge cast of big names that are all used so little they almost all fucntion as cameos. Probably the most amazing thing about it, is the use of color. While mainly being in black and white, our attention is brought to various things, most often blood, as they appear in their correct color. Occasionly a blue eye is scene, and most notably a man that is completly yellow (weird). Definitly worth checking out (it tops my list of films released this year, so far) especially if you are into huge, romantic, noir, epic, crime stories...Sin City...93%