Thank you, cock wipe!

An incident that happened at work made me think of one of my best friends from college. There's a convention in town, I don't know exactly what but it has to do with anime and other fetish friendly Asian cultural imports. So the saute chef from work starts asking me about it. "Why all them Orientals and Oriental-wannabes be running around town for?" Instead of being offended, I reply, "There's over 2 billion of us in the world, more than anybody else. Am I supposed to know everything we do? You think I have these motherfuckers on speed dial?" So we began trading insults and jokes. One person more than anyone allowed me to become more adept at handling these situations.

To best describe my friend, think of Don Rickles, Woody Allen, and Lenny Bruce rolled into one. He tries to offend everyone within an earshot. His insults are in horrifyingly bad taste but they are usually so brilliant that you not only cannot help laughing but you feel so guilty in doing so. He elicited strong reactions from people. Some were embarassed to be associated with him. Others loved him. Still, others, including me, quickly learned to hurl insults back at him. One time, one of these friends wanted to call him a "wop kike" and it came out as "cock wipe". We all lost it at that point and we use this as a nickname for him every once in a while.

One of my favorites was when he called me out of the blue after not hearing from him for several months. After getting married and becoming more religious, we all wondered whether he would start losing his edge. So as soon as I pick up my phone, he starts singing "Three Little Maids from School" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, only it was "Thlee Rittle Maids flom Schoor". I laughed my ass off and and immediately told him how much I miss him.

So cock wipe, I thank you for this valuable skill.

Carlos Kleiber

Whenever people asked me who the greatest conductor alive is, there was one simple answer - Carlos Kleiber. As of July 13, 2004, this question has been much more difficult to answer. Kleiber, the son of another great conductor, Erich Kleiber, passed away after a long illness. His recordings and videos reminded us why we became musicians and what we need to strive for.

The best way to describe Carlos Kleiber to nonmusicians is to compare him to Bobby Fischer. After Kleiber became the most acclaimed conductor in the world, he became a recluse. He only performed when all conditions met his approval. He was notorious for cancelling and walking out of concerts. On the rare occasions he stayed the course, the results were miraculous. If you asked his peers such as Pavarotti, Domingo, Bernstein and Karajan; they would not hesitate in telling you that Kleiber existed on a level much higher than them.

Another thing to understand is that his father was a legend, one of the greatest conductors of the 20th Century yet his son's career achieved much higher levels of acclaim. How many people can you think of accomplished a similar feat? Kublai Khan? J.S. Bach and W.A. Mozart come to mind it was the sons who first attained such a status and the parents have retrospectively benefitted in twists of historical nepotism. It's usually the sequel rule: Something's almost never better in its second incarnation. Look at our current President.

Kleiber would conduct a piece you've heard a billion times and he would remind you of why that piece is so great and more importantly, make you hear things you've never heard before. He accomplishes the seemingly impossible. His interpretations embody every positive quality imaginable, even the ones conventional wisdom considers to be mutually exclusive. Near perfect playing, beautiful sounds that bring out the long lines he created, red hot passion, and most importantly a profound and sincere spiritual, emotional and intellectual element that pervades each performance.

If you watch him conducting, you first feel that his conducting is rather eccentric. After a while, you realize that every gesture serves a grand purpose. He never does something just because he has to like beating time. Even if you aren't a musician, you see the passion he has, his balletic movements haunt you, and you get a strong sense of his command and control over every aspect of music making.

My friends would get together just to watch Kleiber videos together. We've watched them so much that we invariably end up adopting some of his gestures. One time, good friend of mine conducted for Kurt Masur. He did well but he went overboard with the Kleiber stuff. After the masterclass, I went up to him and asked, "Watching those Kleiber videos again?" "Always!" We're not mindlessly following his example - we've sat around and dissected every move and figured out its purpose in communicating musical ideas to the players. It is through this process we've become influenced by him.

There haven't been many deaths of famous people that have affected me so profoundly. I remember when Joseph Heller died. His Catch-22, other than being fucking hilarious, portrayed a world gone mad and helped me cope with a less important crisis - the complications of being an adolescent. Pierre Bourdieu, the French socialogist and political activist, not only opened the world's eyes to the impending danger of globalism, but he also challenged the overly simple and deceptively systematic method of analysis of cultural data known as structuralism and added much needed flexibility and human sesibility to this prevailing method of analyzing data. His work greatly influenced me and how I view the world after being exposed to them in college. Carlos Kleiber is a perfect musical role model who constantly reminds me of what is attainable, both as a musician and as a human being.

Michael Moore

Does anyone else think that the father on Family Guy looks just like Michael Moore?

Well, stupid me.  It took this long to figure out how to allow viewers to add comments so bring em on!

How Growing up in America Led Me to Become a Snob

My dad announced one day that he got a promotion and we'll all be moving to America.  I said, "Ok.  Is that where Sesame Street and Land of the Lost come from?"  I don't even remember being sad about moving, losing all my friends, being away from the rest of our family.  My friends weren't sad either.  "Cool!", they all said.  Here's everything I knew about USA as a five year old in Seoul: NYC, Empire State Building, Disney, World Trade Center, Statue of Liberty, Mt. Rushmore, the arch in St. Louis, it's a big fucking country.  The only words in english I knew were yes and no.

Our family moved to America on February 26, 1982.  I started kindergarten immediately at Parkway Elementary in Paramus, which supposedly had a reputable ESL program.  I got beat up a couple of times on the bus just for being Asian.  Sometimes, I felt compeled to say something so I'd naturally say it in Korean and have an entire class laugh at me which would, of course, piss me off and make me yell at them in Korean and make them laugh even harder.  Yes, kindergarten sucked.  No wonder why I still hate New Jersey(and it sure doesn't help being the armpit of America).

The more and more I learned english, the insults diminished without ever stopping.  They generally took on subtler forms.  I quickly realized that the root of these insults was the fact that I was different.  I looked different.  I spoke to my parents in a funny language.  If there was anything different about me, it caused more alienation and derision.  I don't believe in God, I'm a Buddhist.  I actually like to read and enjoy doing well in school.  I'm a clumsy kid who sucks at sports - doesn't matter that I loved playing kickball, wiffle ball, and dodge ball - I sucked at it.  Of course these dumbfuck kids come to the conclusion that all this is because "I'm Korean."

Even with all the friends I made and all my parents' efforts in the assimilation process, I always got the sense that I was different and therefore, not wanted.  This problem would come in and out of my life and I just assumed that it was a reality in my life I just needed to accept.  Of course, my parents wanted my brother and I to be as much like everyone else in our class as possible.  My brother soon found out that he was a natural athlete and he had much less problems fitting in than I did. 

Of course, there were certain ideals and values my parents were adamant about us keeping: Our Korean identity, our language, our religion, academics receiving a high level of attention and respect.  I savored these opportunities to assert myself.  This worked out well for me as a strategy for being a Korean growing up in America until mid-high school.  Adolescent years are tough on everyone.  With all that self-doubt and self-consciousness being mixed up with hormones and stuff, all that juvenille shit I dealt with during my first few years here came crashing back.  I didn't expect it.  Nor did my previous strategy work in its entirety.

My life went through an eerily similar cycle as before.  I started to like and think things that most of my peers didn't care for.  They would eventually connect it with the fact that I'm Korean and use my ethnicity as a straw man thereby repairing their fragile egos by reasserting our differences.  I would later learn that the only way to overcome these overt and implicit attacks on my ethnicity was to find myself and that began with embracing these differences. 

This soon led me to make very deliberate choices in life.  Everything(and everyone) I become involved with must be considered very carefully.  If it's something(or someone) I want to involve myself with, I dive right in and throw as much energy as I can in pursuing it.  I really don't care about how others feel about it.  I only want to have experiences that benefit me or someone I care about.  I want experiences that have meaning.  This is how I protect myself and at the same time, assert myself.  If you don't like what I'm into, fuck you, I don't want your opinion.

I won't become friends with someone because other people like them, even if the people who like them are my best friends.  I won't go along with trends just because they are a trend.  I also won't commit the sin of reverse snobbery or follow counter culture blindly.  Those are rather superficial means of asserting someone else's idea of individuality. 

• When my two favorite bands broke up(Jane's Addiction and Living Colour), I gave up on popular music and devoted my attention to classical, jazz, and world music. 
• I read music critics state that Herbert von Karajan is the greatest musician to have ever graced the earth.  I won't listen to them.  I know that HvK sucks and developed this mystique only through PR. 
• I wear the clothes I wear because I never want to look back at myself and laugh,realizing that I owed such lapses in judgement to yielding mindlessly to the whims of fashion that day.  That is against everything I stand for.
• I have the friends that I have because their intelligence, compassion and integrity that demands my respect.
• My strong interest in wines and gastronomy challenges me on a sensual, intellectual, and spiritual level.
• I am a practicing Buddhist who takes spirituality with a healthy helping of gravity that it deserves not only because it has been instrumental in coming to these and other valuable conclusions about life, but because it also has kept me on that path.
• I am a conductor because it is the one profession that I found that demands honest and personal expressions of self every time I engage in it.

I don't view myself as a snob.  Some of the things I'm into kind of puts me into that stereotype.  I am very careful what kinds of influences I allow myself to encounter and engage in.  At first, this was an effective means to combat fallout from racism that I experience daily as a Korean living in America but eventually, it became a way to find myself and as a way of living fruitfully.

 

Fear of Getting Dumber

For the past five years I've had this growing fear of becoming dumber as the years go by.  I feel that I burn out faster, my memory isn't as reliable, I can't write as well as I used to and I suck more and more at puzzles and such.  I've noticed more pronounced deterioration of intelligence in a lot of my friends once we graduated from college and my greatest fear was that this might happen to me too.  My best friend has the same fear.  And he even has a theory:  He believes that most of us get jobs that are not as intellectually demanding as the courses we took in college so that certain abilities fell victim to atrophy.  He also has a job that isn't too taxing on the brain so he combats this trend by reading as much as possible and engaging in mind games, puzzles and riddles as much as he can.

My language skills have been deteriorating.  I used to have an auditory memory and a pretty-close-to photographic memory.  As a parlor trick in college, my friends would have me go around the room at a party, point out when and where I met each person, what they were wearing, and what we talked about.  30-50 people, no problem.  I used to memorize music in 1-2 sittings.  My concentration has been wavering more and more. 

I am about to go into the most mentally demanding pursuit to date(conducting) and I need these skills more than ever.  More importantly, my self esteem sure takes a beating just thinking about this.  I've relied on my intelligence more than anything else in my life.  Physically, I've never been very strong and have had a slew of minor ailments throughout life.  My EQ is not very good, to say the least.  For this reason, I've avoided activities where one needs to relie heavily on both intelligence and emotional acuity such as gambling and playing the stock market.  Within a group of people, I am usually one of the smarter people in that group and when I'm not, I really push myself in order to keep up with peers with superior abilities and usually fare pretty well without any concern of being an inferior.  It is a bit scary knowing that your strongest trait is gradually diminishing.

New Rule
 
I will no longer become close to or even worse, become involved with a girl whose closest friends annoy the shit out of me and garner no respect from me.

Mahler's Ninth Symphony

I've been playing a musical instrument for 23 years now. Even before then, music has always been a part of my life. Something happened nine years ago that helped solidify my love for music and redefined my passion for it, ultimately leading me to pursue music as a career. This, apparently, happens to everyone who has a more than casual interest in Western art music - You get the Mahler bug. Gustav Mahler wrote these grandiose symphonies and song cycles that eloquently expresses every imaginable human emotion and feeling, especially those on the extreme end of the spectrum. The Mahler work that really did it for me was his Symphony #9.

After my freshman year in college, I spent the summer in Israel working as an archaeologist. This trip became a major watershed moment in my life. I became more religious. I started to take clarinet much more seriously and although I did not know it at the time, I slowly began to turn away from pursuing archaeology as a career. Something happened when I got back to school and I had lost all the confidence I thought I had gained from my trip. I became a little introverted and to make a long story short, the friends chose to spend the majority of my social time with reflected the state that I was in and only exacerbated it.

In November, I was at a low point. Screw Your Roommate, my college's twist on the semi-formal was coming up. I had no desire to go. Several friends had set me up but I insisted in staying in and trying to sort out my life. I even went as far as to say, "Even if you set me up with Claudia Schiffer and guarenteed me action, I still won't go!" Even on the night of, a friend came by my room pleading me to go with him - date and all. I didn't go of course. I sat in my room with the live broadcast of the Boston Symphony about to come on. I read in the Boston Globe that Bernard Haitink, one of the greatest Mahler conductors, was to lead the BSO in Mahler's 9th, a work I heard so much about up to that point. The reviewer called the Thursday night concert to be one of the greatest in the orchestra's history. Something inside me told me to tape the concert.

The symphony is about death and a person's struggle and reconciliation with its concept. Depressing stuff, right? No. It's some of the most beautiful music ever written partly because it's so truthful and doesn't sugarcoat anything. Mahler demands that truth and beauty be found in life as it is. I've been learning about this stuff through my growing religious studies but this symphony made me experience this truth viscerally for the first time. As I said above, one can find just about everything that is wonderful and terrible about humankind in this 90 minute work and yet it's all beautiful. This revelation could not have come at a better time. This symphony is rather autobiographical - it was Mahler's last completed work - he basically knew that he was dying and his life was going to shit. I realized that Mahler's life was much more shitty than mine yet he came to terms with everything, including death looming over the horizon.

This symphony helped shape the way I live my life and ultimately led me to pursue music as a means to live a better life. It's interesting how this work became an integral part of my life. One example sticks out. Within a few months of being introduced to this piece, I fell in love with someone for the first time. Meeting her was very much like listening to the Mahler for the first time - a very intense experience that forever changed my perspective on things. It was an intense friendship wrought with the tension inherent in such a relationship that could not become anything more than what it was despite our mutual yearning for one that would allow more overt manifestations of our affection for the other. Different parts of the symphony became leitmotives for her, my feelings for her and my unwillingness to act on those feelings, and eventually, for love itself.  Just as the 9th symphony will always be in the back of my mind whenever I hear a work I've never heard before, she remains to a standard I hold people to. 

The parallels end with the idea of resolution.  The music resolves quietly after all the drama, thus signifying Mahler's coming to terms with his life and eventual death.  I haven't quite reconciled everything.  I've had three girlfriends since then, each of them wonderful in their own respects, yet the very idea of her comes back every once in a while.  I am still striving internally to find a cadence for these feelings.

My New Favorite Piece

What caused me to write about the Mahler symphony was the fact that after nine years, I now have a new favorite piece, something that moves me just as much.  I've been looking for a good recording of Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht and I found one with one of my favorite conductors, Jascha Horenstein.  I've been listening to it every day - it's become a ritual.  The only other piece I have ever listened with such a degree of devotion was the Mahler.  At that point, I realized that I now have a new favorite piece.  I can't tell you exactly why.  It's a hauntingly beautiful work.  It's a musical setting of a poem that is ultimately about redemption and the despair that preceded it.

Tea

Being a Korean Buddhist, drinking tea has always been part of my life.  Tap water in Korea wasn't drinkable but the easiest way to make it drinkable was making a barley tea call boricha.   It's not surprising that we drank this stuff everyday in Korea.  We continued to do so several years into living in America.  Our family always had a love for oolong tea, especially the top grade, hand picked stuff from Lake Tung Ting.  On sick days, my mom would brew pot after pot of this amazing stuff which would do wonders in both making me feel better physically from the medicinal properties of the tea and spiritually as I savored every drop of this stuff.  Because this tea was expensive, we would only drink it when we were sick or when we had guests over.

The prototypical nice gift for Buddhists are nice tea sets and premium grade teas, some costing as much as $150/pound.  Ten years ago, when my mom became more religious and therefore, more active at our temple, she naturally started receiving a lot of tea as gifts.  We started drinking it on a regular basis. 

When I moved to Maryland, I had a craving for oolong so I went to a Korean grocery store, Lotte Plaza(This was pre-Han Ah Reum).  I picked out a box of bagged Korean oolong.  I told my mom about it and she was horrified that I was drinking such crap.  She said that she would bring some good tea for me to have the next time she visited.  Lo and behold, she brought two kinds of Taiwanese oolong, including one from Lake Tung Ting.  She had to show me how to brew the tea since in all these years, it was always my parents who brewed it for me.  She didn't bring any green tea because the process for brewing was a little more complicated and the margin of error was much smaller.  She didn't want me to ruin good stuff yet.  Even brewing the oolong took some pratice: If you don't steep it for long enough, it tastes like grass.  If you brew it for too long, it tastes like bad black tea.

Now, I'm more well versed in the tea world, but still kind of lost.  The best stuff almost always has no english on the label and more often than not, the label is in a script that I cannot read.  With Korean teas I fare a little better, but I still don't know tea terminology in order to be a knowledgeable buyer.  With wines, at least the label will always be written using the roman alphabet and at this point, I know most of the terms in French, Italian and German in order to make an informed purchase.  Through a close friend of mine, I found a tea distributor(Ten Ren) who caters to English speakers.  I now have someone to turn to when my mom can't help me out.  I went in there a few monthes ago with two of my best friends.  It was an amazing experience.  It got to the point where I had to tell my friends, "Get me the fuck out of here before I do something really stupid!"  I've been contemplating going back until my mom found out about my plans and gave me two Korean green teas and two Taiwanese oolongs.  And now that I've tried them all, I can safely say that they are unbelievable.

In all, I have many positive associations with tea - family, religion, ethnicity.  Of course there is the most immediate gratification - the taste.  The teas I'm into are like everything else in my life  that I'm into - they demand a certain degree of attention and contemplation in order for them to be appreciated.
 

Back in the Day, My Ass
 
I'm sick and tired of hearing about how much better things were in the past.  It's total bullshit.  Enduring such assertions pisses me off to no end.  In reality, things usually stay the same.  Sometimes, there are spurts when things go really well(Renaissance) or things go really bad(Dark Ages).  Sometimes, like say the Middle Ages, things go really well for some(Asians and Arabs) while things suck for others(Europeans).  Generally, things stay in some weird state of equilibrium, if you take the right perspective.  It's even in our genes - As a species, we have been genetically stable for 100,000 years.  A close look at today will show that this is the case today.

People mostly talk of the loss of civility.  Sure, there are some elements of etiquette based on common sense should be maintained but just because we no longer follow an arbitrary list of guidelines that are meant to preserve society as we know it doesn't mean that everything has gone to shit.  The people who came up with this shit and perpetuated it also actively oppressed women and minorities.  How in the world can you consider these people to be more civil in this light?  People are less civil because people are more aware.  People won't blindly obey someone or automatically respect someone just because it is mandated by an archaic set of rules.  (I think I can write a whole seperate piece on this....I just might do that!)

A lot of things are better now but people either have their heads too far up their asses to realize it or they find excuses to debunk the idea that something could be better.  Just recently, they showed that AFI 100 best songs show.  On the show, everyone was going gaga over Fred Astaire and to a lesser extent, Gene Kelly.  There certainly was a certain grace, poise and charisma that they both possessed that allowed them to do their magic onscreen.  But now, we have Savion Glover who is undoubtedly the greatest tap dancer to ever grace the Earth.  While Fred and Gene were magical, what Savion Glover does is pure genius.  He is redefining the boundaries of his art and at the same time is doing it better than anyone who has come before.

Many complain about the vanity of athletes today and speak respectfully of athletes of yesteryears.  They seem to forget that a vast majority of those athletes from the past were racist, wife-beating alcoholics in their own right.  A new level of dedication coupled with advancement in science and health has made today's athletes what they are today.  Look at the last decade of baseball - after hitting a low point with a strike, baseball has never been more exciting.  The NFL has found a way eliminate the creation of dynasties and defacto hierarchies that ruin the suspense in the chase for the Lombardi trophy.  Yes, the athletes are still jackasses for the most part but it's more fun to watch them play.

There's a revolution brewing in the music industry.  For far too long, the record companies controlled what we were supposed to listen to and like.  The government's sqaushing of Napster is only a minor defeat in a battle for freedom for music lovers by way of a more democratic access to music.  Musicians have found unorthodox ways to get their music out to the public and thereby slowly weaning themselves from record companies and Clear Channel.   Although things look promising, judgement needs to be reserved for now.

On the average, classical and jazz musicians are better today than they ever were.  Many music snobs talk about how much better, say, the Berlin Philharmonic was and how there's no one to fill Herbert von Karajan's shoes.  Well, Berlin has now had two music directors who exceed HVK's musical and artistic accomplishments.  Of living conductors, we have Abbado, Boulez, Kleiber, Temirkanov, Gergiev, Rattle, Barenboim, Harnoncourt, Haitink, Giulini.  They all can hold their own with the ones from the "Golden Era".

Actors have never been better.  The "Golden Age" of Hollywood was supported mainly by personalities.  Russell Crowe is slowly becoming the next Brando displaying the same prodigious talent and animal magnetism that Brando had.  Ther also is Edward Norton, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Denzel, Tony Shalhoub.  Also, there has never been a time when there have been as many good and talented actresses as there are today.   

Sure, there are many things that do suck now like the Bush administration, rogue states developing nuclear power, fundamentalism of all kinds that seems to be cropping up everywhere, rise of several prominent dictators, overpopulation, environment going to shit, etc.  Of course, the people who complain about what sucks today don't mention any of these things.  They just mention all the bullshit that I just wrote about.  

Movies that are Better that the Book
 
We all know that no one can ruin a great book better than Hollywood.  Take Lolita and Great Gatsby, for example.  Every once in a while, a movie is as good.  What's rare is a movie that exceeds the book.  Here are my picks:

Godfather /Godfather  II
Some people call Mario Puzo's book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century.  I'm not quite sure I'd agree.  Puzo's strength is in his storytelling.  His glaring weakness is in dialogue.  Some of it is so bad that I got extremely frustrated every time I came across an extended volley of words between characters.  Coppola greatly improved upon the dialogue and also gave the story grand operatic quality that didn't exist in the novel.  Clearest case in point is the flashback sequences in the second movie.  The stories of Vito Corleone's upbringing in the novel are interesting but not as dynamic and spellbinding as the movie version.  Don't get me wrong, it's a great read - one gets a more complete psychological picture of each character and some of the stories that were left out of the movie are just amazing.

Field of Dreams(Shoeless Joe)
Shoeless Joe was written for baseball geeks and stat whores.  It's Hustler magazine for Bill James.  The movie is an unabashed love letter eloquently expressing all the wonderful nostalgia and mysticism associated with baseball.

Amadeus
The movie retains all the best parts of the play.  The ending of the play kinda sucks.  For the movie, Peter Shaffer restructures the play by borrowing from his best work, Equus.  Like in Equus, the bulk of the movie is narrated in flashback by Salieri.  A confessional with a priest takes the place of a therapy session.  The result is that the ending of the movie doesn't suck.

Last Picture Show
Bogdanovich's movie was probably the most poignant movie made about growing out of adolescence.  The book was about a bunch of dumb and horny rednecks ruining each others' lives.  

What I'll Miss About Baltimore
 
As much as it does pale in comparison to other East Coast cities, I'll miss living Baltimore.  It has a very identifiable character that a city like DC doesn't possess.  "Making it" in a city like Baltimore seems much more manageable due to its size and how centralized all the power and influence is.  If you exert the effort, you'll get to know the city fairly well and the city will get to know you rather quickly.
 
I'll miss my favorite places such as the Brewer's Art - a bar where the atmosphere is vibrant but at the same time, conducive to conversation and mingling with no impediment from loud music, smokiness, or large crowds.  It is one of the rare bars where they have every type of drink I could possibly want - good wines, whiskeys, and even grappa.  Of course their beers! Goodbye, Ozzy.  Goodbye, Festivus.  And most of all, goodbye, Resurrection!  Some of the best beers I've ever had. 
 
I'll miss going to Wine Underground where as soon as I walk in, they greet me with a glass and have me try something they know that I'll like.  I'll miss Craig Salemi, the wine manager who knows my taste so well that he'll enthusiastically point out any new wines that I absolutely need to try and has never missed the mark.
 
I'll miss going to Bird of a Feather where they have a revolving stock of 150 different single malts.  Again, a place without loud music and obnoxious jocks, frat boys and bar sluts.  I'll miss both drinking and eating at Blue Agave where their 70+ tequilas and their margaritas can hold their own against best whiskeys and brandies, and martinis around.  I'll miss eating at some of my favorite restaurants such as the Helmand, a delightful Afghan restaurant; Bocaccio - a high-end Northern Italian restaurant with a wonderfully pretentious waitstaff; Abacrombie - five star food at obscenely low prices; Monday nights at Mick O'shea's where we can get a great burger and a beer(always Resurrection) for $5.99.
 
What I Won't Miss About Baltimore
 
I won't miss seeing parts of the city that belong in a war-torn Third-World country.  I'm certainly not going to miss walking 2-3 blocks in a nice neighborhood and suddenly fearing for my life.  I certainly won't miss the sloppy and mean service I get in most restaurants here(the ones listed above excepted, of course).  Food shopping in a major city like Baltimore should not have to mean a trip into the suburbs for decent produce and prices - that's embarassing.  I will be relieved to be no longer living in the STD, TB, and heroin capital of the US.  I will no longer have to watch in horror as  the city officials continue to shun education and drug rehabilitation as realistic means of reviving the city for business and real estate ventures which will only benefit the few that don't need the help.

Conclusion

It's way too fucking cheesy to say, "Most of all, I'll miss my friends", but let's explore that.  The people I'm proud to have called my friends are all ambitious and talented and not all of them were musicians, mind you.  We connected through respect for culture, our passions and our drive.  It didn't matter that we love or strive for the same thing.  Only the fact that we had these strong inclinations within us mattered - That's all it took for us to relate to each other.  Baltimore seems to be a pit stop for such people.  We are all grateful for what this city can offer us right now, but we must be honest to ourselves and acknowledge the possibility of a better future elsewhere, as comfortable as Baltimore has made us feel.

I never settled in socialy so easily as I have here.  I can walk behind a fellow reed player, hum a few bars of "Giant Steps" and have him turn around and finish the chorus.  We can crowd into a friend's apartment to drink beer and watch conducting videos.  I can have people over for dinner, talk about world politics, sustainable development, and have an animated discussion about santorum.  Here's hoping that I am as lucky in Urbana.

Yes, I will miss much of Baltimore while at the same time feeling that by moving, I will have been absolved of many of the worries and frustrations I had about living here.  Knowing that I need to take this opportunity in the Midwest keeps me from being too sad about letting go all the wonderful experiences I had here.  I will certainly entertain the idea of coming back in the future not because of some silly yearning for my soon-to-be past but because I feel that I can lead a successful and fulfilling life here someday.

Something Like Procrastination.

Oh the irony! There are a few reasons I started this blog. Some friends wondered aloud what my blog would be like and more importantly, I am the king of procrastinating. I couldn't think of a better way to procrastinate than to keep a blog. Due to a combination of being exceedingly busy and deferring my procrastination, you get the paucity of quotes you see here that is my pathetic excuse of a blog. One must get a very skewed view of me through my posts as a perpetually horny wine obsessed film geek. Well, out of pride, I intend to dispel any of these ideas through more frequent postings!

Enjoy!