Cello Madness would be an example of something that sounds really nifty, but ended up not being so much.
It’s supposed to be a troop of jamming cellists. In previous sessions, there had been 5 to 8 of them, getting all kinds of cello madness on.
Last night, though, there were just 2 of them at the Make-Out Room. The one who seemed to be generally in charge of the event was quite good and did some interesting things with his cello. He made it make sounds like a strumming guitar with his bow. He unabashedly was being cool and aggressive with his playing. The other cellist was a lady who was clearly a skilled classical musician. But she was terrible at improv. Any opportunity to make up a little tune was lost by her random, atonal, double-stop, pseudo jazz. It was consistently discordant and unpleasant. And she seemed to want to try to compensate for her decided lack of coolness in her cello playing by flailing her legs around and slapping her bare feet on the floor like a nod to her recognition of rhythm.
An audience guy asked them to play some Bach. She obliged and was quite good in that arena. She played two pieces from the cello suites that I didn’t know, and I suspect they were probably quite hard.
The other guy took a stab at the familiar piece from the first suite that’s been in a dozen commercials. He did a fun little improve bit in the middle and he messed up a bit in the rest. I was caught off guard at one point and laughed out loud when he played a fast scale instead of the actual notes of the piece. Even so, he was very interesting to listen to.
I may try out Cello Madness again and hopefully, it will be better with more people. But I am skeptical and left feeling like I coulda done a lot better myself, which is dangerous thinking indeed.
A friend of mine wanted to borrow my copy of Twilight. I warned her that it was crack. Sweet, sweet, wonderful crack. But she went ahead and borrowed it. And then a few days later, she was drooling and shaking from the withdrawal, fiending at more door for the next one (who really cares what the exact title is?)
So now that I’ve done it a second time, I have to say what I should have said when I was reading these the first go round: these books are such complete and utter trash, but addictive in the most wretched sort of way. It’s a combination of trash and addiction that I would liken to the VC Andrews books. Except without the sexual tensions and incest and periods and arsenic poisoning, because the Twilight books are written by a Mormon! The raciest we get is some heavy breathing. Scoff.
So I am carrying around these 800 page tomes with me everywhere: to work every day, to the nail salon, to Tahoe. And teenage girls keep pointing out that I’ve got one and wanting to commiserate about how great they are. And I’m all, mmm hmm… yeah, they’re super. There’s a girl at work who would come in every day to see where I was, except that she was rather horrified that at the same time that I was scarfing my way through the books (for the SECOND time) that I was also hating them. The first go round, I was so caught up in just being engaged in the story that my hate was minimal. I was still skeptical and annoyed by the immediate profundity of the teenage love and just how much they wanted to DIE DIE DIE without each other. But god damn! What’s gonna happen next? What WHAT WHATTT??!!!
Another friend who read the series turned me on to this blog site: 
D & I went to the ballet last night. The last time I’d been to a ballet was a local East Carolina performance of The Nutcracker, some time in the far reaches of yore. So this was a bit of an experiment for both of us.
I didn’t mean to watch the Oscars, but I did. I meant to see more of the Oscar nominated movies, though, but I didn’t. Instead, I went to see He’s Just Not That Into You and Coraline. And I fully enjoyed both of those, dammit.
margaret edith 