pointless.

TOP TEN LISTS ARE FUN!

But ten is just a coincidence based on our fingers.
My favorite things I saw last year (in chronological order) were:

Collapsible Giraffe's Last Last @ Collapsible Hole
Young Jean Lee's The Shipment @ The Kitchen
Chellfitsch's Five Days in March @ Japan Society
The Necks @ Le Poisson Rogue
Cory McAbee's Stingray Sam
Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Rambo Solo @ Soho Rep
Terry Riley's In C @ Carnegie Hall
Hair on Broadway
David Byrne @ Prospect Park
Mucca Pazza @ Mercury Lounge
Fuerza Bruta
David Cromer's Our Town @ Barrow St.
God of Carnage on Broadway, original cast
Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge @ HERE
The Dirty Projectors @ Bowery Ballroom
Bruce Springsteen @ MSG
The Fiery Furnaces @ Music Hall of Williamsburg
Heiner Goebbel's Stifters Dinge @ Park Ave. Armory

It's really tempting to take off all the Broadway, Fuerza Bruta and Bruce, to make my list cooler and edgier. But it just ain't true dudes.

I'd also like to point out, that I'm a "musical theater composer", and there's only one piece of musical theater on this list. Written 30+ years ago.
And even that, I mean the show kind of sucks, it was just so damn fun.

SHIT.

There is a typo in the Metropolitan Art Museum. It's been there for at least 10 years. Every time I go, I check up on it, and sure enough last Friday it was still there, a completely unambiguous typographical error, surviving against all odds in this ivory tower of culture and history.

I mean, it's really bad. It's not like confusing "which" and "that" or something, where a lot of laypeople might not catch it. No, this is something that absolutely everyone could see; there's a really, really important letter missing from a word. It's not an alternate spelling, or a common misspelling. It's something like writing "hinoceros". or "lligator".

How can this have gone unnoticed for sooooooooo long? Or has it been noticed, and laziness or bureaucracy has prevented anyone from fixing it? Perhaps it and the surrounding exhibits are printed on some obscure old paper that would be hard to match. I like to think that maybe there is an old story about it, some old lady who typed it up and then was hit by a bus on her way home from work that night, in the rain, and the staff decided to keep the typo in her honor. Or perhaps there is an old voodoo curse involved. Or something about Frank Lloyd Wright's estate.

Furthermore, there is absolutely no reference to the error anywhere on the internet. I've googled the offending phrase and get 0 Met-correlated results. This even more so leads me to believe that there is hocus-pocus involved. I mean, no blogger has noticed this ever? None of the grammar-watch blogs or culture pages? No snarky Upper East Side teenager forced to do a report?

Anyway.

I love it. i love it so much. It's my favorite thing there.
It fills me with such glee and delight for human fallibility.
The perfect godliness in seeing the king with his shoe untied.

It's in one of my very favorite rooms, the Frank Lloyd Wright room, in the newly renovated American Wing.

Newly renovated!
Oh will these joys ever cease.

i am slowly starting to favor capital letters.
I am slowly starting to favor capitals letters.

Hmph!

sometimes i ALMOST write a blog. somethings ive recently ALMOST blogged about are:

• kanye west's voice correction antics
• how you dont have to use strings to make people cry, especially when its 5 fucking degrees out
• how much i liked young jean lee's "the shipment" and collapsible giraffe's "last last"
• performing at berkely rep vs. chicken johns ( = both really cool)
• related: how all i wanna do anymore is theater in rockbars
• whippits
• rick warren
  
• how much i liked the kronos quartet doing crumbs "black angels" at carnegie hall
• how nyc is different from sf (GAG!)
• how facebook is impacting our lives (DOUBLE GAG!)
  
• some weird racism stuff
• how i hate the left more than the right when they talk about bristol palin
• how the left has lost sight of love
• how much i like barack hussien obama (TRIPLE GAG!)
• (how that triple gag is about the post, not the guy. i do like him!)
• money
• stupid musical theater songs
  
• the sudden early thirties alcohol paradigm shift
• the case of david rice atchison, a senator from missouri claimed by some to have been president of the us for one day, march 4, 1849

see what a good blogger i am!

i have a old school german army jacket that i sometimes wear. see?:



anyway. i was on bart yesterday, in this jacket, coming home from a long and beautiful day of sf independent study: gg park, bicycle festival with crazy shoe tire bikes, buffalo, ocean, japantown, french thriller ("tell no one". its good!), cheese steak. i was sitting with my bike, when this guy boards, hes big, 30ish, wearing unseasonal flipflops and a baseball hat. he looks like a frat oaf. so then:

"hey. HEY! where'd you get that jacket?"
pause
"a thrift store"
long pause
pause
"you like wearing that jacket?"
"yeah"
long pause

and we go through the tunnel etc. silence. i go back to my book.
finally my stop arrives, i get up. hes in the door, so i have to go past him. i look him in the eyes just once.

"you better be carfeul who you wear that jacket around buddy.
you got a lot of balls wearing that jacket.
...
asshole."

i couldnt resist a small smirk. but thats all.

what is this, really? a jewish thing? its really my only guess...the guy certainly didnt look it though. maybe just a patriotic, american wwII old axis thing?

geesh.
i just wear it cuz it looks cool. and i like a lot of german composers.
geesh!

i am surrounded by small sprawling piles of paper nostalgia.
im moving to nyc in the fall, but this very week j&j are driving a giant silver bullet cargo van across the country. so im purging, the biggest purge of the last 8 years, and packing up all my big things, instruments, fancy clothes and worn-through books. and of course the box of unthrowawayable nostalgia.

i havent gone through this box in a long time, and its hitting me hard (doesnt help that im listening to the beatles, complete in chronological order, to maximize my nostalgix state)(btw, what the fuck is with all the clapping in "words of love"?). such a bizarre and arrogant swirlstorm of creativity my friends and i were! there are printouts of old email correspondence from dps, and, mat and more (including a few if i might say so quite beautifully understated love letters to a girl named jen henkin, whom i cant remember at all); there are cassettes and minidiscs of old college bands, early four track noise, a 7th grade "day in the life" documentary, and middle of the night cruise ship piano sessions, complete with elegantly mournful sighs of frustration when i time and time again cant lay down a single perfect chorus of "when i fall in love"; there are 8 years of old datebooks, with entries like "some new pants" and "telepathy/lobster claws/apocalypse"; and there are photos, and bizarre magazine cutout mailings, and old plays and scores, and frantic intoxicated illegibilities.

and above all, there are IDEAS; huge, lofty, horrible, wonderful ideas. looking through my old music notebooks is pretty wrenching when i focus on the specifics, all of these angular, atonal funk lines, unsingable jazz choir music, lots of different ways of notating "noise", 10 pages of random chord progressions created by dps's computer science genius. but the ideas, the ideas them selves are pretty amazing sometimes. there are outlines of complete, bizarre, unrealized music/theater pieces: "the wooden staircase", a ten movement masquerade of robed figures, closed doors, steeplechases and balloon men; a five year conspiracy art piece involving intentional mistakes by a major film company, symphony orchestra, book publisher and new york times columnist; there is "put all your eggs in one basket, put an entire cake in one bag".

all of it tingles and drips with the truth-is-right/stream-of-consciousness-is-truth early twenties idealism, with kerouac, with electric kool-aid, with phish lyrics, stockhausen and stravinsky, with dada and the rat pack and buddhist near-misses. aw god i got plenty old all right, and sure the art has gotten better, but there is that frenetic importance to it all that i miss. there is this urgency to all this creation of the past, this dire stakes, this attitude of love above all and !smash the glasses on the floor! that makes me want to head right out to north beach and find some brandy and a flapper-girl and take the piano out for a post-freebebop spin all over again. all those monkey truths may have had their strings and holes revealed over time, but the exuberant joy is still valid, and essential, and missed.

my favorite thing right now is this scrawled bit from a notebook dating from not too too too long ago, 2002 maybe:

--------------------------

GRANT WRITING TECHNIQUE
higher academic-
but enclosed
a small sealed envelope
special paper
unlabeled (or "the truth"?)

-i just have these things in
my head
and i need some $
to get them out.
i think it would
be good to
have
them
out.

-------------

i still kind of wonder if that would work.

"by KonArtist on 08-30-2002 @ 03:33:38 AM
Im more of a rap fan, so if i like a song like this u know that its good. This song is probly the greatest non rap song i ever heard.

by Skippy921 on 06-14-2005 @ 03:20:17 PM
This song to me means that there will be a change in your life and sometimes you have to step out and look from a far at your life and deciede what you want to keep and what you need to let go of. And sometimes these things we choose to do are impossible and not popular, but you have to stick to them or you will end up in a rut of life not wanting to be there, but you are because everyone else wants you to be and you lose sight of who you are and where you came from and going back home again means finding your roots and who you are and who you want to be, you have to think back to when you were as pure as a child and thought like a child and what you wanted back then. then with your heart racing you gotta do what makes you happy. trying to find "your one true swing" something that cannot be learned only remembered.

by TasChiBandGirl on 03-04-2003 @ 09:16:31 PM
Tough song to put together. I think it's about somebody who is having a sort of crisis. Not sure exactly what type. They're up at the hill or what not, thinking things over. It coudl be the possibility that the person got their heart broken and is contemplating everything, and their father and friend are trying to bring the guy back to their place, to realize that everything is okay, but they're too destroyed by the ex-love. Then they realize, that they do have to leave it all behind, thus the last line. Of course don't take my word for it.

by LoganNYC on 09-25-2002 @ 06:12:08 AM
well every time i hear the line
"son, grab your things, i'm hear to take you home" on
the radio, i get chills.
let's just say, i was in a situation where my father was in a position to say words similar to those to me, and the rush of emotion from one line is amazing.
music is a very powerful thing.

by Thursdaylove on 03-24-2006 @ 09:52:49 PM
A friend of mine just got out a prison a week or so again and when his parents went to pick him up, they played this song. So whenever I hear it, I always think of a kid getting out of prison.

by SongMeaningGuy on 06-11-2004 @ 03:02:50 AM
This is a stirringly visceral and spiritual song. Whenever I hear it my eyes fill with tears of joy. Sometimes I think I would like this song to be played at my funeral. The idea being taken home at the height of a mystic vision is profoundly moving.

by Aight on 04-28-2007 @ 10:31:52 PM
I have always considered these lyrics to this song to be totally about drugs.

by cyrolophosaurus on 04-04-2007 @ 01:30:12 PM
I used to think it was about suicide, but that was my own morbid interpretation of it. It was written as Peter was leaving Genesis and looking to become the solo artist that he is today. Just because it is about him leaving a band, certainly does not make it less deep or meaningful. The lyrics are inspirational and meant to open to individual interpretation. He wrote about his own feelings and experiences but let it be vague enough so that others could apply it to their own lives.

Sorrow on 06-12-2002 @ 07:43:00 PM
I could be wrong, but I always thought this song was about Jesus. And I'm not even christian.

by jnb987 on 01-08-2005 @ 03:16:10 AM
I heard that the eagle that flew out of the night was Bruce Springsteen. Apparently, Gabriel decided to go solo after seeing one ot the Boss' legendary mid-70's epic shows. "He was something to observe" and Peter "had to listen had no choice."

by kenba on 10-04-2004 @ 02:30:58 AM
this ain't steak... it's 'solsbury'"

whenever i spellcheck,
the suggestion
for
"davemalloy"
is always
"dismally"

cmon!!

Some thoughts on modern music distribution and rarity,
by Hoi Polloi Musical Director Dave Malloy

Hi!
So. Hoi Polloi Artistic Director Alec Duffy recently won the Sufjan Stevens Xmas Xchange Contest, with his song "Everyday Is Christmas" (official site here). First off, let us say that all of us here at Hoi Polloi are just pleased as punch and beaming with joy for Alec's honor and Sufjan's kind words. We have all been huge fans of Sufjan's work from the first (Alec first told me about Sufjan right after Michigan's release, when he discovered that they worked in the same building, making Alec rather girlishly starstruck. I was initially a bit confused by Alec's excitement, because I thought that he was talking about Cat Stevens, and that Sufjan was Cat's new Islamic name; Alec soon corrected me, and I became smitten myself. And that moment in "Feel the Illinoise"..."I cried myself to sleep last night..."...oh thank you, Sufjan!)

Anyway. As winner of the contest, Alec (and thus Alec's theater company) is in sole physical and legal possession of an original Sufjan Stevens track, "Lonely Man of Winter".

And it has raised the interesting question: well, what to do with it?

We've talked about it quite a bit, and we've come up with an approach. Alec has asked me to write a little bit about it.

Already Alec has been approached by a few websites, offering to host the song. Certainly the easiest and most immediately gratifying thing would be to share the song with all the world through the all inclusive, world absorbing internet. It's the great hallmark of our age that everything is so easily accessible to all (well, all economically and socially able to access a computer; but that's another rant). And it's a lovely thing, this vast world of information and art at our fingertips.

However, there is a part of us here at Hoi Polloi that mourns a bit for something lost. For the not so instantly available, for the hard to find. For the labor, the anticipation of seeking something out. For the rarity.

My two record collecting obsessions as a kid were The Beatles and Prince. It was clear to me growing up with my parent's record collection that was something wrong with the (American) pre-Rubber Soul Beatles catalog. My only source of information was the scattered record stores of Lakewood, Ohio, which had an abundance of even more confusing alternate titles...Something New!...Beatles '64...Love Songs...all with just one or two different songs on them! How could I simply and easily (and on a $5 allowance) get all the songs? How could I get every song The Beatles had ever made? The discovery of the record Rarities in a Detroit record store increased my curiosity and insatiability...I wanted it all. Every new vacation town was scoured for used record stores, in the hopes that some new track might be found.

With Prince, my obsession took a slightly different flavor: the 12" and the B-side. The realization that "Erotic City" wasn't on Purple Rain opened me up to a whole new medium, the dance single...and man that weird piano solo on the "Let's Go Crazy" extended mix! I was hooked, taking buses to Yellow Pages found record stores in Shaker Heights, Bay Village, Parma. "Shockadelica"? The 22 minute "America"? This shit was INSANE; and I was one of the few people to know about it. It was like knowing a masonic secret.

It was special.

And then CD's came. The British catalog, Past Masters Vol. 1 & 2, The Hits/The B-Sides and the gaps in my collection were finally filled. And I felt happy, sure. Years later, Napster and Limewire filled in the final 12" mixes, and I was Prince complete (pre-93 that is, I'm not nuts). And nowadays, I've got every Bjork and Radiohead B-side, easily BitTorrented, easy easy easy.

But the romance, the romance of the unfound, the unknown!!

So. We'd like to do something unique with this track.
And so, in an effort to rekindle the flames of rarity, it is not our intention to release the track over the internet.
We'd like to make the hearing of this song something truly special.

We'd like to invite you to email us (sufjansong at yahoo dot com) and arrange a special hearing. We're in Brooklyn. We've been doing Wednesdays and Sundays, with about four people per listening. Bring your best headphones. We'll have cookies and tea.

It is not our intention to hoard the song; we feel the delicate balance here, the danger of seeming like the cruel older sibling dangling the toy out of reach. No, no, we want this to be nice! ANd special, and memorable, and dear, and fuzzy, and all.

There are also tentative plans for a holiday show for 2009 in which the song will figure prominently...and after that, who knows? Like Sufjan's own 50 states project, we have high-reaching, long term visions for this project: a song that's passed on over the years from person to person, a hermetic grail, never being ripped into the world of the digital. Absurd, sure. But we think that Sufjan's artistry will stand the test of time, and we'd like to add to the mythical world of musical legend with our curation of this song: the song that will never be uploaded.

It is our intention to do something truly special, something new for the world of music and digital media. We hope you'll all join us on the ride.

Hoi Polloi

UPDATE:
fansite response is here

bah humbug! and scrooge mcduck!!

which are really not the spirit of our idea at all. the idea is to share it, just in non-massmarket/internet ways. like in the old days. (canary pointed out this really interesting article by david byrne- the stuff on music as a social event- dig?)

anyway, i think the original manifesto doesnt properly emphasize that we would love to share it with people in a special way, in person special, with tea and cookies.

so drop us a line...really. were nice. and in brooklyn.
its a really lovely song.

my hugest, gushiest, most sincere grin-plastered-on-my-faceiest outpouring of joy to my dearest friend alec duffy, who won the sufjan stevens xmas xchange contest:

http://xmas.asthmatickitty.com/

alec really does deck the halls every day.
hes the prince of peace.