promiseoftin

Kaitlin (I had to ask how to spell her name because there are so many different ways) is a florist. Her bag was covered in stick-on gemstones. Once I found a bunch while on a walk and pocketed them in order to make something with them (this was years ago and spoiler alert, I never did) and she said it was probably her that dropped them. She has a star pendant and some sort of leaf pendant. She has a crocheted chicken on her other bag because her driver was once selling his mother’s crocheted critters and she was so charmed that she had to buy it.

Nia was wearing a Type O Negative shirt. October Rust. October Rust was her first album. My first album was World Coming Down when it came out, but the thing is I listened to Cinnamon Girl when that came out just kind of forgot about them until Everything Dies came out. Sort of like Deftones and Vast in that regard, except I picked up Vast’s two albums (at the time) on a sort of whim of the “hey, I remember this song” variety. October Rust is my favorite of their albums, though.

I got the Santorini Summer Salad from Salonika, which is mixed greens, watermelon, green and black olives, cucumbers, feta, pickled onions, pita chips, mint, sumac, urfa pepper, red wine viniagrette and rose water syrup. Quite good. I thought that an Urfa pepper was a type of pepper like a pepperoncini but it’s acutally ground up into a powder. I want to try their visino limeade, visino being sour cherry. I don’t know if that’s a summer only thing but what I do know is that it’s been around for a while. The bee was harassing me for that but then some people showed up with fig and goat cheese pizza and the bees started harassing them instead. And, you know what, I can’t blame them.

There was a pre-concert consisting of a choir singing sea shanties (A-Roving, Song of the River, Reflections of a Lad at Sea, Away From The Roll of the Sea) and Under The Sea from The Little Mermaid. That's your solution to everything, to move under the sea. It's not going to happen.
As bad as everyone talking is because somehow they're unaware this is going on (I daresay they could do a better job getting people's attention), it’s better than Jordan Hall where all you can hear is the conversations.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold - The Sea Hawk overture
I thought this was the overture to an opera but it’s actually from a movie. Well, I guess they did have opening credits before Star Wars. It’s an Errol Flynn movie about an English privateer and the Spanish ambassador’s niece.
Maurice Ravel - Une Barque sur l’océan
It’s synchronized with a video of right whales.
Paul Gay - North Atlantic Sea Songs
It’s a world premiere so you aren’t going to find it anywhere. He’s the principal trombonist of the Boston Ballet’s orchestra.
The two baritone-sung movements are rather slow and contemplative. One is a poem he wrote called Seabreese and one is the Robert Frost poem ‘Stars’. Flying Lesson: Profile of a Puffin sounds like the theme music for a knockoff Bat-Villain named the Puffin, whimsical but with a bit of a menacing undercurrent, and Squall sounds less like a squall and more like a dance. The geese are the end were unexpected but welcome.

Samuel Barber - Adagio for Strings
This shows a video of glaciers and reefs then and now but ends with an optimistic note showing the Cuyahoga River and Boston Harbor. The first part was easy. You can just match up all the details. But reefs? That’s just guesswork.

I guess they removed the Hebredies (which they played at their last collaboration with the Aquarium and replaced it with Pirates of Penzance and Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov’s Caucasian Sketches (!?).
Pirates of Penzance works because they’re sea pirates, not space pirates or Mad Max style land pirates. Oh yeah, if you’re at all familiar with the song Hail Hail, The Gang’s All Here, the melody was ripped from With Catlike Tread, which shows up in the overture.
As for Caucasian Sketches, it works for a procession of sea turtles. It started spitting rain at the time. It also got cooler.

Claude Debussy - La Mer
The rain stopped by then.

Emma is a dancer and really likes the way I get little details like her necklace.

Someone compared Dubai chocolate to a Reptar Bar and now I can’t not see that.
burning question: what flavor do you think Reptar Bars would be? I’m thinking key lime because I’ve had chocolates with key lime goop that is that exact shade of radioactive green. But it should also have nuts and caramel according to the jingle Angelica sings. But, y’know, if you’re going to make a Reptar Bar, you’re going to have to make it taste green, not just be green.

Megan has tattoos of a serpent and a teapot filling a teacup, of a watering can filled with flowers and a flock of butterflies and I drew that arm behind her although it was only there for a brief moment.

Jack is a shih tzu mix with a cleft palate. He’s 9 months old.

Gerald Finzi - Intimations of Immortality
The cool weather, and I mean, it’s usually July that’s acts like that, and the thick smoke haze from California fit the elegiac quality of Finzi’s music. It’s a rarely-performed work, which is a shame.
It’s a poem about how everything was simple in childhood and accepting that this is so, sort of like Fern Hill, but it kind of goes on to be about how growing up may suck for some people but it doesn’t have to, that adventure is still out there if you know where to look.
Or at least, that’s Channing Yu’s interpretation anyway.
The guy nearest me had a tattoo of Evil Homer and Yoda and SpongeBob’s neighborhood with the pineapple and the rock and the moai head. Nearby, people were waving Colombian flags because the tenor is Colombian and his credits mention several Mozart operas and I’ve seen him in those.

Ottorino Respighi - Pines of Rome
I first heard this live in the summer between freshman and sophomore years of high school and I think Respighi has grown on me since.

And that was it. Short concert, even if you inlude the brief talks and the intermission.

Katie is a cellist who had her hair in a braid slung over her shoulder. She got on the train at JFK so I think she was at the concert. There was a guy with powder blue hair and a guy with half normal black and half ember red and all curly hair.

Big Balls was beaten up probably because he chose the wrong person to harass and the far right is trying to conjure up heroics, as if Big Balls would be the kind of person who rushes in to aid someone in distress. Call me if you’ve heard that one before.

I also learned that Nashville is building its own version of the Vegas Loop which I guess makes sense because the bachelorette party demographic overlaps with the can’t-have-the-undesirables-getting-into-our-suburbs and I dunno putting-pickle-and-french-fries-on-our-hotdogs demographic.

burning question: Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?