Confessions of an unapologetic insomniac

I’ve never particularly cared for sleeping. It’s a ghastly waste of time, all those hours spent doing nothing, discovering nothing, accomplishing nothing.

When I was in Mrs. Martin’s kindergarten class, we would follow our snack time of Kool-Aid and Nilla Wafers with “rest time,” which was a flawed plan from the start —pump a bunch of five year-olds full of sugar and tell them to go lie on the floor. But each day, we’d all unfold our paper-thin vinyl mats and have our restful moment.

Twenty of us, lying prone on the floor, a tableau of tiny bodies littering the linoleum like the victims of a sniper attack. And I would lay there, wide awake, amazed by the classmates who were able to actually go to sleep in public. In what sort of homes were they being raised that they were allowed to just drop to the floor and lose consciousness? We were not housecats. This was not something to be encouraged.

At home, bedtime was a nightly battle, which I eventually remedied by giving the illusion of acquiescence. I suddenly developed a fear of the dark, and required a nightlight in my bedroom. Once I’d said my prayers and my bedroom door was closed, I’d lie on the floor reading books by the nightlight.

I was usually awake long after my parents had turned in for the evening. It was so frustrating, because there were a good number of things I would have liked to do with that time — baking, roller-skating, singing a selection from one of the musicals I’d written about my life — but I couldn’t, because everyone was sleeping, and I knew I had to keep up this illusion that I was too.

Long before I wanted to kiss boys or dress up as Dixie Carter, my categorical rejection of sleep was my first indication that there were specific rules the world followed that made no sense to me. I could rail against it, or I could just give the impression that I was like everybody else without too much trouble.

In my early twenties, I found myself in a relationship with a man who loved sleeping. It was his favorite part of the day. When we first got together, I found his sweet surrender to sleep mildly baffling, but adorable. He liked to nap. How cute.

But it is scientifically proven that the things you find appealing in the beginning will be the things you hate them for in the end, and five years down the road, his desire for sleep made me want to strangle him. It became his way of avoiding our rapidly deteriorating relationship. You can’t have a proper fight if one of you is unconscious. His willful narcolepsy felt like an elaborate plot to leave me without leaving me.

When Preppy and I started dating a few years later, I paid close attention to his sleep patterns. He liked to stay up late, and had a job which required him to get up early. Most nights he only slept for four or five hours, so I felt confident we were well-matched. But it turned out the early mornings were borne solely from necessity, and on days off he could easily sleep ‘til noon.

I panicked. I’d fallen in love with another Sleeper. I would make breakfast as an excuse to wake him up. I’d try morning sex. I’d play music too loud, or run the vacuum cleaner. I couldn’t just tell him that I resent people who sleep, because I’d known it was my freaky thing since I was five. So I tried to adapt, and go to bed like normal people. But it was Mrs. Martin’s classroom all over again, me lying there wondering why anyone would want this.

When the truth came out, as it is wont to do, Preppy was surprisingly sensible about it. He told me to stop thinking of it as time that I’m abandoned by the world, and instead think of it as the bonus round of my day: The extra lap I get to run when everyone else thinks the race is done.

Now, I schedule for it — we have our family time, and then husband and dog turn in for the night, leaving me with my time. I’ve come to cherish it.

Sometimes happiness doesn’t lie in changing behavior, but in changing perspective. And if you’re really lucky, you find someone who supports letting your freak flag fly any time of day.

Source http://www.thegavoice.com/index.php/opinion/domestically-distrubed/2102-confessions-of-an-unapologetic-insomniac

Notes From A Walkman Junkie: Work And Pants And Sandwiches

Ah, the daily grind–you know how it is–you go into work each day and begin your usual tasks: pricing, counting inventory, filing, typing out labels for art work, entering new items, organizing consignment contracts, phone calls, calmly informing the man yelling in your face about the prevalent window cleaning wars that you no longer require his services and that yes, you are perfectly happy with that new ninja window guy and then explaining to the costumers that witnessed this hostile verbal transaction–who offered the kind words of “We wanted to save you” –that “NO ONE CAN SAVE ME.”

I have grown quite accustom to these typical work day responsibilities and duties, however, last week, I was suddenly faced with an additional and unexpected new element while on the job: Mr. Sandwichpants.

I am going to level with you, readers. I had initially intended to spin an elaborate and hopefully humorous tale about this new odd man who has been visiting me daily for the past week in the gallery where I work. Unfortunately, I have, once again, been struck with some seriously sucky ass/can’t get off the floor/food in my hair/Dudley Moore movie watching/I thought my bunny was dead, but he was only sleeping very still depression.

Due to this recent affliction of morbid sadness and woe, I fear that I will be unable to make the story of the mentally off sandwich-enthusiast pants man (who slowly crept into the gallery with his pants wide open and asked me for a safety pin and then asked me if I would pin his pants together for him because he only has the use of one hand and I politely declined his request and offered him an alternate suggestion that he did not hear because he is hard of hearing so I loudly repeated my response of “NO I WON’T HOLD YOUR PANTS TOGETHER. YOU SHOULD FIND A MAN TO DO IT” so he did and then he returned the next day to tell me that he is “Going to the beauty parlor soon” where they will “Make him a handsome man” which evidently meant giving him a messy side pony tail because that is what he showed up with the following day when he came in to ask me with excited, crazy eyes, “Guess what I did today? I got another hole punched on my sandwich card–only one more hole punch and I get a sandwich free! Do you have a sandwich card?” and I said, “No” and he insisted, “You just don’t know what you are missing” and I assured him, “I think I do.”) funny.

I apologize for my shortcomings this week and hope to be able to pull my head out of my ass very soon. I leave you with “Christiansands” by Tricky. Enjoy his freaky cool voice. Thank you, Jackson for directing me to him.

Source http://frothygirlz.com/2011/02/10/notes-from-a-walkman-junkie-work-and-pants-and-sandwiches/

Francesco Tristano at (Le) Poisson Rouge, NYC (2/3)

At one point during the double piano set by whiz kid Francesco Tristano and veteran Bruce Brubaker– two artists steeped in the 20th-century piano tradition– I jotted down in my notes: “I’m just not sure what the point is supposed to be.” Maybe that was the point. Avant-garde artists frequently set out to mystify their audiences, appealing to an elite and eccentric few, while shock and confusion were stalwart aesthetic values of the Fluxus movement and other happenings going on in this city during the 1960s and 70s. Make no mistake– Tristano and Brubaker are consummate musicians, unarguably at the top of their respective fields, and they know their stuff. They had a novel, wild idea: play two concerts with programs of both contemporary and classical piano music, from Cage to Schumann to Buxtehude, at the same time, at one of the hippest venues for classical music in the country. See what kind of freaky concurrences result, how each pianist will engage in a dialogue with both the music and with each other, and how the introduction of electronics will affect a wonderful synchronism of styles, touching on all the notable giants of piano music over the last 400 years. Unfortunately, their idea simply didn’t translate to practice.

Tristano is an artist who has mastered his instrument across various classical genres, having recorded both the complete keyboard concertos of J.S. Bach and the complete piano music of Luciano Berio. He is also an accomplished electronic artist, creating restrained and intelligent pieces of electronic music that toe the thin line between pop and classical, between Brian Eno and Philip Glass. Brubaker is an equally accomplished artist, especially fond of minimalists John Adams and Philip Glass, and the early works of John Cage, which actually sound out as music. All of these musical ideas are ones that I like– so why didn’t they gel in concert?

One issue was a lack of form in both the overall presentation of the show and the pieces themselves. Played as one continuous hour of music without any breaks for applause or for the audience to get their bearings, the music came off in an onslaught of sound. Many of these are outstanding pieces on their own– Messiaen’s Regard du Père and Cage’s Dream, for example– that weren’t allowed to breathe in their own space; they lacked a certain formal rigor. These are complete works, composed by exceptional musicians who understood that music needs to stand on a strong structure. Chopping up a Buxtehude fugue and interjecting anachronistic 20th-century harmonies seems to defeat the purpose of the genre altogether, leaving the audience unable to hear the delicate interplay of interweaving counterpoint when the rhythm lags and sections are interrupted. More detrimentally, there was very little dynamic range or expressive variety; the entire performance sat comfortably mezzo-piano with a hushed, atmospheric mood.

The pianists seemed to play with an overdeveloped sense of rubato, destroying much of the rhythmic drive that this music has. Even a piece by Philip Glass, a composer known for his notorious musical pulsations, sounded like an impressionistic cascade of chords rather than a rhythmically grounded work. The aforementioned fugue lagged, and moments of Schumann fantasies were a little too fantastical. The night was a pastiche of historical fragments: a Baroque trill here, a rich series of Romantic harmonies there, a chunk of a fugue, a plucked piano string, a Picardy third, and electronic blips.

There were parts that did work, mostly when simultaneous pieces seemed to actually complement each other (a stylistic dissonance was the norm for most of the evening). Tristano’s original piece Mambo (heard below) set up a funky, off-kilter bass line that pushed the music forward in one of the few overtly driving segments of the set, accompanied by the loud consonant chords of Glass’s Wichita Vortex Sutra. Unfortunately, the electronics were too tame in the live performance. Bits of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke intermingled with the lush, impressionistic harmonies of Cage’s Dream.

Yet most of the night came off as sounding like “the classics” played on the grand piano, in a rhapsodic, tempo-free milieu, while dissonant electronic sounds burst out from the electric piano. The indeterminate aspect of the performance (I’m not sure how much of this was actually synchronized) seemed a direct lineage from Cage, while the dissonant pointillism surrounding recognizable consonance was a hallmark of Ives’s style. Both are ideas that I’m quite fond of. It was, to be sure, an admirable experiment, something that has worked for others and, for some listeners, probably lit up their night– as I left the venue, I heard a number of patrons comment on how much they enjoyed the show. For me, it was postmodernism gone wrong.

Source http://consequenceofsound.net/2011/02/07/francesco-tristano-at-le-poisson-rouge-nyc-23/