a day in the life of piano monkey

i have been working at music-related environment for a long time. from 1998. just about ten years now. i have been to three separate universities and sat through many classes, slugging through sleep and boredom at times. i have sat there by the piano, organ, harpsichord, celesta, by myself, with a few, with a gigantic orchestra and choir. early morning sessions to midnight recording sessions. some on one day notice, some planned for six months in advance. some as listener. some as recording engineer. a handful as an usher and green room attendant at a major concert hall. a very few as a page turner (this is the most difficult i think). and there are things that i have been thinking recently. and i may as well write to all of you, as it could be amusing, third person or first person perspective. as an audience or a player, whatever. a random passer-by even. a recital is a great opportunity. one worked hard, it's not a surprise gig that was dropped on one's lap (well usual...

Monkey and the Moon Reflection, Gekko Ogata (1859-1920) on way home from work, i looked up, as i often do. it is funny isnt it, we no longer really have to hunt for food or worry about predators- well, not in the sense that you may be eaten by a sabertooth tiger or something. there are much unlikely chance that something may fall out of sky and actually kill you, though in rough place like canada (this is for you european pansies dealing with the snowstorm earlier this year)(with affection, of course), there are people who gets killed by falling ice sleets from big building roofs. but mostly, such tragedies are limited to inconvenient bird poos and such. and living in a downtown area, one either gets really skilled at jaywalking (though this, i think the brits do it better) or follow the traffic lights (a sure way to arrive alive, most of the time). and both can be done with just a bit of side glances. so, in concordance to the anonymity along the mass, one often looks nowhere whi...

as i try to not to shed a tear for myself, i became mute, deaf and blind. how is it an idea becomes so much larger in its absence? often one hears about the sum of the parts being larger but we seldom express the parts being larger once the sum have been broken into pieces, unequal, no longer compatible. if one were to say that there are no reason to be crushed by the daily churn, then i assume that one lives with heart of plastic. recycle, reuse, reduce- it is a noble idea for the planet, however not ideal for living, breathing being. life is messy and warm, bloody and inconvenient. the elation of life is not free, never it has been freely given to one without reason or cost. while gliding through lucidity, it is difficult to remember that there will be times to fall with all acceleration from the very height that made it all possible.

it is funny being back at the olde alma mater. till end of the spring semester 2010, monkey is wearing engineer hat (though most damage probably will involve fingers, either paper cuts or getting it jammed along the mic stands or something), recording student recitals. classical. jazz. undergrads. grads. ensembles. solos. etc etc. ive been back so often that it seems as if i never left sometimes, except for the faces- most of them arrived to campus long after i was gone. but with various spider webbing, there are some faces that i am always happy to see- like book bomber, mad soprano sax kid and fairy-kid-paternal-unit. and there are more that i get to know. there's something about being in the edward johnson building. some of the very familiar sights are now gone (the famous/infamous green couches that sucks your living will out of you; now it's kind of shiny brown), but mostly similar things- like the red couches on the spaceship 3rd floor student lounge. it makes me...

oooh irony. though it is amusing and life-saving at times (humour- wasnt the one of the very few things that separates us from real simians?) i say it could be somewhat inconvenient at times, like this morning, which was NOT serene by any means really. initially i was going to write about the difficulty of life: emotions. the way one feels and interacts with the world. opening up to people and communicating, sharing, being at a distance, emotionally confused or torn, that heavy stuff. but the world does not want me to think about my self-absorbed emotional sphere. instead, im hit on the head with somewhat more objective, practical humour. damned slapstick humour. i remember talking numerous times about the 'difficulty' of playing a musical instrument. piano, having 88 keys and having one of the most complex looking scores (beside ensemble and may be organ scores) is often considered a challenge (especially if one is teaching the required 'keyboard skills' course, w...

to everyman his little cross. till he dies. and is forgotten (waiting for godot, line 154) an old doodle done in some theory or musicology class. days of spring is here and to top it all off, it is st. patrick's day. irish or not, we can all be a plastic paddy for the day, drink the green things and bang the floor with heels, along with some sort of jig reel coming out from a satellite radio in a bar. the colour of the day is kelly green and we all yell out: happy st. paddy's day. yay. two years ago, i wouldve been spending my first day in glasgow, meeting up with good friends to start a hiking trip up in the scotland. st. paddy's@scotland. it was also green with plastic paddies, some sort of fiddle-related noise and attempts of jig reels. a pint of guiness@ 14'c, the room temperature of the united kingdom, not north america. (this is a funny one, the average house room temperature in north america is actually couple degrees higher, at 20'c, decadent!) a self...

(small monkey, with that very familiar expression: wha? paternal gene pool's fav pic of me. hopefully he'll still have a 'fav pic' of me after the impending doom/ torrent of a sort) often it is interesting to look back to the past and find a familiar however strange reflection of a self. once was, no longer is, however realistic- in a sense one is an accumulation of all things imaginable: heterotopias, memes, collective knowledge, inherited biometrics, you name it. the past exist only because the present is in progress. progress toward the future, which no one could be sure what it may become. and future must exists as the present could never pause, it marches on its own steady beat, the thread being churn out by the three ladies of fate, ever so steadily, impersonal and disinterested in the courses of individual strands. the only unfair and fair quality among the variable human lives. out of curiosity, i looked into last year march, trying to see what i was doing- i...

this is barely the end of the first week back in canada . phew. nothing died nor burned. so i suppose things are alright. there are many emotions and feeling that will be sorted out as time will pass by. and there is nothing more to be done in such cases. like baking cake. you have to put the batter into the oven and wait. nothing more nothing less. how frustrating! well, if you are seasoned baker, you will also add the time to 'cool' the cake. so really, the actual baking is just the middle step, grunt. it's been nicely busy, here and there. much to either surprise or expected, i have not played the piano since my uk audition. partial reason was hyper-extended right thumb. another was lack of goal. perhaps the biggest one was the drag of an emotional deflation, when things dont go well, or rather , not the way you wanted it to go. though some thinks that i tend to take a big break since 'coming back' isnt too difficult of a process- well, im just not very ...

it is 0241 am EST and im wide awake. now, i ran nearly an hour today and went to practice, rehearsal and a concert. that should be sufficient to send one to sleep- but no! so having a free cake (i recently received a free cake courtesy of debakery, a toronto-based start-up bakery farcebook web group; they promised a free cake for 100th member and that was.. me! yay!) (and this cake have been splattered to many people around me as there is no way i could keep it in the house with some sort of warped will power. i mean it's five inches deep), i was pondering why am i still up- then realized: coffee. for a long while, ive been caffeine-free. or it seems long anyways (i think, without fags and coffee, sometimes life can be never-ending episode between unreachable pleasure). i think last time i had coffee was on 23 of february. or even earlier. and though there's a nice espresso maker in bird house on 32nd floor, in some sort of valiant effort, ive been away from it in order to ...

photographer marc steinmetz collects images of home-made prison-escape devices it is the night of the oscars. it seems a bit strange as i am not so keen on the movie as an entertainment medium- as my friends would know that it takes much determination on their parts to bring me to a movie. but since i somewhat missed a gigantic amount of television (funny enough, i really wanted to watch some tv while i was over in europe, especially during the 2010 olympic ceremonies, but trying to watch non-english coverage in uk was almost impossible as all those things were heavily copyrighted), i suppose this is a good way to make up for it. i dont even know the half of the movies on the list. though i can recall a few of them being a real entertainment, and often education as well. it made me laugh to listen to the contenders for the documentaries, as i have seen all that has been nominated (unlike the best film categories, where i feel somewhat clueless). that is what i usually rely on the m...

this picture is titled '- tea party,' funny how different it meant to the two parties. as im chewing on my peanut buttered toast, i am scribbling couple things out of interest. small but sure differences. miraculous that one can understand one another sometimes using languages. i suppose that's why sometimes we fail and people turn their backs on others/ ignore/ be unkind/ ruthless. sigh. nutella vs. peanut butter bitters at room temp vs. ice cold lager cold rooms vs. 32 nd floor roasting rooms credit card with smart-chips vs. without spotify vs. no more spotify *damn pissed (drunk) vs. pissed (angry) chips vs. fries crisps vs. chips indian vs. whatevers on toronto streets tea vs. dinner loo vs. bathroom fag vs. cig supper (wee bit snack before bed) vs. supper (dinner) biscuit vs. cookie chemist vs. pharmacist dust bin vs. garbage bin ground floor vs. first floor sweets vs. candy tin vs. can rubbish vs. trash 'you alright?' vs. 'how goes?' but i wa...

(lac leman/lake geneva: last wk sometime) in terms of musing in public by form of writing, the month of february was a lean one. beginning of march have gone without a sound and here i am, back@yyz, fourth of march, in year twenty-ten. it has been very busy, for an unemployed bum monkey! every time i crossed some border, there was always this look of incomprehension - amusement: 'what do you mean, you are just travelling and nothing working? are you sure you have not been paid for playing?' (what playing? just because i said i have studied music in school?) it is a difficult to explain it to paper pushers i suppose. or even my own self. the answers dont fit neatly into the little divided squares of official forms and the concept that im just floating around is received with a bit of apprehension, if not a hard stare. i say i have studied music (true), but have not been paid of it (no, not at the moment), nor have been playing (not much). it is so weird to think that about ...