Yay! Finally I'm on holidays - my first time off with nothing medical to do in nearly 3 years. Very strange feeling and I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself, so I've set a few holiday goals. In no particular order:

1. See a few movies (planning on going to The Motorcycle Diaries this afternoon)
2. Play with my camera a bit more - but fear not, I've decided that this isn't really the place for my lame photographic experiments, and especially when they're not really related to anything, so I've set myself up on flickr.com - http://www.flickr.com/photos/minim if anyone actually cares
3. Play around with Photoshop and Illustrator a bit and get to know them better
4. Go to some exhibitions (tomorrow's plan is for the Bill Henson exhibition at AGNSW)
5. Cook lots - try out new recipes
6. Actually compose something, I don't know what
7. Listen to lots of music

I've at least made a start on the last point with the first 2 LPs of my set of Prokofiev's Seven Symphonies:

Symphony No. 1 "Classical"
An old favourite - lovely and uplifting

Symphony No. 7
Amazing orchestration, although I'm not 100 per cent convinced by the 3rd movement's reinterpretation of his incidental music for Eugene Onegin. I love the simplicity of the original and some of the variations made for the symphony feel a bit like gilding the lily.

Symphony No. 2
Quite scary. I think I need to listen to this one a lot more to get the hang of it - it's quite confrontational. This symphony came after Le pas d'acier (The age of steel) on the record, which I'm quite taken by - fantastically powerful music.

I did listen to both Nos. 7 and 2 twice over each, so not a bad morning's work, I feel :-)

Here's an interesting snippet which I heard on the radio (ABC Classic FM for the chronically curious) the other day: Russian pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva died in the middle of a performance of Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues. I can't help thinking that that would be rather disturbing for all concerned. While the piece is most appropriate (Shostakovich wrote the Preludes and Fugues specially for her) - and the radio announcers were talking about it probably being the way she'd have wanted to go - it seems to me that such a consummate musician would probably have preferred to go after completing the performance. Just a thought. I personally dread the thought that when the time comes I might pop my clogs before finishing whatever piece I'm working on - I know it's happened before; there's grand precedent - Mozart, Schubert, Elgar to start with - but it feels so untidy.

Yesterday was a bit of a red-letter day for me - my very first Valentine's Day flowers! Amazing how good it makes one feel. And here they are in all their glorious colour (sorry - couldn't resist documenting this!):

Valentine's Day roses, 15-Feb-2005

Just finished reading an amazing interview with John Corigliano on NewMusicBox. It's really fantastic to hear a prominent composer like Corigliano speaking out about the cruddiness of programming by major musical institutions. The little ensembles do an amazing job of playing a great variety of music, old, new, accessible, scary, and while there are specialist ensembles, they rarely just play the same stuff over and over again - within their field, they'll often programme lesser-known works or composers, and they'll take risks that the major organisations would never even dream of.

I also found his comments on style extremely interesting - in particular his comment on being "an 'A' person. Eighty per cent of [his] pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing". I'm a 'D' person, myself - with most pieces (about ninety-five percent, hoping to one day get it down as far as eighty!) I'll get a certain way along and then end up stuck on a D in some way - either in an ostinato, or thematic material that just keeps curling back into that comfy position, or even just an excess of Ds and D-tending voice leading in the chords I'm using so that the music just wants to rest there. Which is generally the point at which I have to stop thinking about it for a couple of days, then cut the last 30 seconds off the piece and try again. SO relieved that I'm not the only one who has an involuntary fixation on a single pitch.

As always, the rest of this month's issue ("Classical" Music - R.I.P. (1750 - 2005?)) looks fascinating too - there's even a primer on how to write for accordion! Just love the idea that the accordion's big appeal might partly lie in its being able to "assist in the musical courtship rituals between young men and women"; romance would not be the same... In defence of this poor instrument, I do have to say though - for the sceptical - that beautiful accordion music does exist - have a listen to some of Howard Skempton's accordion works (Recessional, Small change and Under the elder have snippets online at this link) before you scoff too much.

This wasn't supposed to be like this! It was supposed to be a rundown of fabulous places and interesting people, not an ongoing saga of dental trauma! I've got to go back to the dentist again tomorrow because now that the surrounding teeth have settled a little, I can feel pain in the troublesome tooth, which I shouldn't because there shouldn't be any nerve left to feel anything. Heigh ho.

On a more positive note, and getting back to the fabulous places and interesting whatnot, I nipped up to Stanton Library in North Sydney (a fantastic library, BTW, if you live anywhere near the area) yesterday to pick up some books on Singapore and Malaysia, and came across this marvellous Chinese-themed mural on the hoardings surrounding the North Sydney Council's building work they've been doing on the library for an age. Here are two sections of it:

Mural, North Sydney. 06-Feb-2005.

The baker inside me was also very excited to discover that they've FINALLY got themselves a copy of Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake Bible, which I'm planning to have a lot of fun with as soon as I can actually eat anything again...

Queen Victoria Building. 04-Feb-2005

Well, it looks like the plan has changed again. The numbness in my face has improved, but still in a bit of pain and the dentist says he'd rather not go messing about with it until it stops hurting - probably the end of next week, which is the time I should be getting on a plane if I'm to get to Europe. So I think I'm just going to accept it's not going to happen and aim for a week in Malaysia with my friend Su. If I can manage a week and a half, then I might even try to spend a few days in Singapore too. I'm sure that would be good for a little retail therapy to dampen the sense of loss!

So still playing with the camera a bit - today's experiment was with spot metering, which yielded this shot of the QVB with quite a nice bit of detail, even though the light was behind it. I had been hoping to capture the lovely scuddy clouds that were whizzing about, but unfortunately they'd sort of whizzed right by by the time I managed to get out the camera and work out how to change the metering because the normal metering setting was underexposing the building. Oh well. In the end, it was a case of making a decision between artistic dedication and actually catching the bus I'd waited half an hour for and I'm afraid I went with the bus...

Oh God. Sat through the worst dental appointment I've ever had yesterday - 1 1/2 hours, starting with a session of raw nerve-poking. After about the 6th hit on my poor nerve, and me hitting the ceiling and yelping for the 6th time, my lovely dentist decided that the humane thing to do would be to anaesthetise me, even though he usually doesn't have to for this stage of a root canal. Guess I'm just a wuss.

Woke up this morning with half my face still numb, which he says is probably just super-sensitive me still reacting to the horrors of yesterday. Lord, I hope so. Really frigging uncomfortable, unable to move half the face without tingling and little nerve-shootings which Panadeine is only half able to cover up.

If anyone's actually reading this, please cross everything that it stops soon! Tempted to cancel the Grand Tour on the grounds that perhaps all this is a sign that I shouldn't go and maybe if I cancel everything the pain will stop... strange logic, I know, but there could be something in it. Haven't entirely given up hope yet though - and my friend in Kuala Lumpur tells me it's Chinese New Year next week, which would be marvellous to see.

Anyway, keeping my mind off things in the meantime with liberal doses of Buffy. Doctors of all sorts really ought to be made aware of the morale-boosting powers of a good few hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - one of those secret remedies, I guess!

Working on my contingency plan anyway, in case I have to cancel. To take the words of Lucy Honeychurch from A Room with a View out of context: "I must go somewhere - anywhere!". So Tasmania is a possible replacement for Europe - or maybe Christchurch/Dunedin for a week or two, or possibly even just Malaysia. Maybe will even buy myself a new computer, so I can run the Adobe Creative Suite on the same machine as everything else and won't need to jump between computers when I need to use it.

Hmm. Time to stop babbling now and make an appearance at work.