poem by Frank O’Hara

Blue windows, blue rooftops

and the blue light of the rain,

these contiguous phrases of Rachmaninoff

pouring into my enormous ears

and the tears falling into my blindness

for without him i do not play,

especially in the afternoon

on the day of his birthday.  Good

fortune, you would have been

my teacher and I your only pupil

and I would always play again.

Secrets of Liszt and Scriabin

whispered to me over the keyboard

on unsunny afternoons! and growing

still in my stormy heart.

Only my eyes would be blue as I played

and you rapped my knuckles,

dearest father of all the Russias,

placing my fingers

tenderly upon your cold, tired eyes.

Rachmaninoff died just three days short of his 70th birthday, which was April 1.  He remains a favorite of mine.


 

“We all need somebody to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.

The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public…

The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners…

Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark..

And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.”

Here are the Wordles representing last night’s speeches:

Obama:

Jindal:

Thanks to Wordle.net, we can now create our own word clouds similar to what is shown on other sites.  This is so fun I am tempted to put one at the bottom of each post, to show that post’s wordizationness, if you will.

All they do is count up the words and size them according to their frequency.  Since creating my photoblog in summer of 2005, the over 7000 photos now on there can now be summed up as follows….

My last couple posts on this blog are….

Dude, for real.

I’ve had a technology issue with some mass-storage devices that has been partially responsible for the lack of updates recently.  Heck even the photoblog hasn’t seen a picture since October, despite that I’ve been snapping away like a turtle.

But the device repairs are happening this week and next, so for better or worse the flow of drivel shall soon un-shrivel.

As I get older, one thing becomes clearer, above all else.  The one singular force we reckon with, that cannot be stopped, and is the real master of all our decisions, is that of time.

You can say that again.

From Despair, Inc.

It’s a shame there are people out there who make you question your own kindness as you move through life.

This morning, one of them got twenty bucks from me.

I looked it up shortly thereafter; a classic con job.  My only guard all day against strong self-loathing for falling for such a scam has been the thankful realization that all I lost was $20.   Not my life, and not a limb.

For twenty dollars, you can put your good samaritanism on layaway, indefinitely.

At least this time, I can’t blame it on the rough and tumble of New York City; the scam seems prevalent all over the world.  I was thinking at the time, which is worse? Losing a bit of cash, or not helping somebody genuinely in trouble when you could have?

It seemed worth the risk, but it’s hard not to feel like garbage afterwards.

I’ll admit the guy was good.  But what cinched the deal for him was that he somehow knew my name…

so this weekend i have just turned on the new redesign of this site, which places the earlier website for music, this new blog site, and the separate photoblogging site all “under one roof” so to speak, a change i had been wanting to make for a long time but figured it would be too much work… and it was. but i’m really quite joyful to have it resolved.

during the process of tweaking and reshaping, i suffered through many reminders of how my own years-old PHP and CSS coding is held together with rubber bands, different modules from scattered moments in my programming past forced now to seamlessly work togther… if i really wanted to satisfy any and all elements of my web design OCD, i’d reprogram the whole bag of tricks from the ground up… and that is definitely not happening. anytime soon, that is. i shall try to care little about what’s under the hood.

Also, the following domains from my past, which were sitting and collecting dust in my registrar account, all now point to various areas of this site:

• justpiano.org
  (my original blog site from years past)
• stoeckley.org
  (the first domain I ever owned, about ten years ago)
• …and a few others
  

i’ve been on a major, i do say major nostalgia kick lately, so it’s nice to resurrect these puppies, even for something as basic as domain forwarding. Now, if I can just stop watching 80′s movies.

I used to keep a blog quite a while ago now. I got sick of it, coming up with things to say all the time, stuff I rather wished I had never written, just filler. I like the format a lot though, and I’m completely under the magic spell of WordPress, the community that programmed the open-source blogging software installed here and at countless places around the world. They did a great job and it’s fun to use.

So I decided to use it more for offering RSS feeds for my new music and photos, which are the only main focus of this site (so far).  This also lets me comment more thoroughly on the music and photos I want to share. And, I’ll geekishly admit that I rather liked using the blog structure to keep track of my recipe collection, which will probably benefit a couple people each decade.

I haven’t the slightest doubt that other nonsense will trickle in now that it’s here, and that might be good or not so good, but at least stuff is separated by categories so visitors can get to what they want easily enough, and bypass all the uncategorized garbage… that is to say, I’m hoping to keep any posts on more meaningful topics/categories relevant, so not every new photo or piece of music will get a mention here — only those I’m sorta proud of.

I am importing a few older blog posts (and their comments) that were already written to elaborate on photos, food, or other nifty items I thought worth keeping.

i tend to kill off blogs when i realize i’m letting too many sentences slip by with run-on grammar and other language deficiencies.  i’ve pretty much decided at this point in my life that i am not a journalist, i am not a novelist, i am not an essayist, nor am i an editor, a language professor of any kind, or a speech writer.  thus, wordy and redundant writing should not get me too down on myself… yeah.. keep thinking that, andrew.

cheers, and thanks for stopping by.