Word from Q

I asked Hassan whether it was really necessary to have a shopping basket in Flash and he said Yes. He explained:

What I have in mind is something where a short story title lies on top of a
long underlining line with a synopsis underneath, perhaps the whole thing
enclosed in a rectangular border, not sure, but anyway when you click on it,
the synopsis text rolls up into the line to fall back again as the extract
of the story with scroll/page flip buttons on the bottom or the side of the
text, as the entire unit moves to take over the page. Sort of see the
picture? And then that allows this to be visually related to the shopping
basket that will faithfully maintain the HoV ideal, which unfortunately is
offline at the moment so I can't refresh my memory.

Now all I need is the Aston Martin and the vodka martini.

SGTD

I got an e-mail a few days ago from Mithridates. He said if Tender Only to One was what he thought it was it should go public because it might help people who were close to the edge.

Also an e-mail from someone whose son had read The Last Samurai many times many years ago.

Also an e-mail from Hassan Abudu, who in the midst of jobhunting has grappled with PHP and MYSQL and produced a map for the website where readers can mark their location.

Also many e-mails from Mark Greif of n+1, who is seeing Your Name Here through the last stages before the magazine goes to print.

Among others.

So I have been discussing vexed questions by e-mail. Is it kosher to talk about bad things people do when one is fresh from a psychiatric ward, I say, citing the example of X. Mith: Yes, you should definitely use this. ...  Check with Rawls; I'm sure of it!!! It's in the chapter called "Fuck Him": Rawls uses Grotius in a really
interesting way there....

And what would be good headings for the map app, says Hassan. What would make speech bubbles less lame? What would make the forms look good? And what about a shopping cart for the website?

I was not sure this was such a good idea; there are more stories, yes, but they are on hard drives on three or four laptops, or a pile of plastic folders somewhere, and they would have to be cleaned up, and in short this looked like a good way not to finish a book.

I then remembered the website I had asked my first webdesigner to use as a model 3 years ago. Haunch of Venison. I thought, Yes, maybe we could pirate the design of the HOV website for the map page. So I had a look, and I suddenly realised that if I could have a shopping basket like the HOV shopping basket it would be worth digging up 5 stories to have something to put in it. I passed this on to HA, who writes:


laaaaaaaa ilaha illallah...  You know, when I first read you'd consider digging through terabytes of data and kilograms of paper to get 5 short stories together just so you could have an online store like this HoV thing, you had me wondering what sort of shopping basket could be that cool, I mean, it's just a freaking shopping basket, anyway, it's also just a webpage, how bad could it be.  Sweet Jesus and Mary Poppins  I will never doubt again. Next time I will show Faith! Holy fucking cow, where on earth did you find that thing? How am I also going to fully communicate the full scale and magnitude of my awe, and of course my newfound respect for web designers who take pride in their work, I mean, who'd ever think to do that to a freaking *shopping basket*, canonically the shittiest part of any website?!  OK, now I see where the bar has been all along, I see I'm going to have to step it up a notch now. *stretches fingers*
Which may sound irrelevant, or anyway irrelevant to thoughts of suicide, but the thing is, I've spent the last 12 years working on books where the look of the page was essential to the narrative. (I can't stand to look at the Greek and Japanese in The Last Samurai; I remember the way this was meant to look on the page, I think of the designers who fought successfully to achieve something amateurish, I don't want to think about it.)   I told agents: I want to work with an editor who's interested in design, who'll let me work with a designer, who's interested in the technical side, and they all said: You're never gonna get that, you're wasting your time, you'll go barmy if you try, no editor is interested in that, you'll drive yourself mad.  My website was supposed to achieve all the things I was told No Publisher Will Allow in books, so I hired a designer in Berlin 3 years ago and asked for something like the Haunch of Venison site, only with Jim Rose's kanji stroke diagrams, and No Webdesigner Will Allow.

Spolsky's criterion for good hires is Smart, Gets Things Done. It's strange to stumble across people who are SGTD not by sending out manuscripts, not by recruitment, not by paying people, but just by swapping e-mails with people who happened to read a book. If I'd been dealing with people like Mith and Hassan for the last 12 years I would have spent the time writing and publishing books, what larks. Meanwhile Hassan is full of ideas:

Oh, but I have reworked the database design so that a social networking book
exchange webapp should just fall into place naturally. ... What I changed: the user data we'll now be able to store when I'm done are: name, password, town, country, picture, books you own, books you desire, and an message section where you can send and receive messages. Anything else come to mind?

I could say more, much more, but I am meeting someone in Rosenthalerplatz in 15 minutes, so I am already late.  The beta of the map app is here:

http://www.helendewitt.com/secondhand/newusers.php

Secondhand Sales & Web 2.0

Hassan Abudu, who has recently graduated from Stanford, is trying to work out how secondhand sales and other exchanges that recycle books might be meshed with some sort of system that could benefit writers (e.g. through something like Facebook). If any other readers have ideas he would be interested to hear from you; he can be contacted at meyian (at) gmail (dot) com.

tone or technique

My mother has just written an e-mail in response to Hassan's description of the concert by Lortie, which I sent her in an e-mail some time ago. She is preparing to move into a house at a place called Leisure World, which somehow conjures up a combination of The Stepford Wives and Westworld (my mother will either be turned into a robot or killed by one) but I believe is perfectly pleasant.

... the long piece you sent by Hassan about his reaction to the recital by Louis Lortie was simply enchanting. I am having anxiety attacks about being so out of touch with you in the midst of this chaotic move, so am shoving everything aside for the moment to respond to this amazing account of his response to this performance. What is particularly interesting to me is the perennial issue of describing a physical action using language. The conversation he had with the man he eventually sat next to was fascinating. He quoted that guy's saying that good tone is the key to proper piano technique, when it seems to me that only through proper technique do you arrive at good tone. Mrs. Gunn was a fanatic about good tone, and looking back at it, I feel a very beautiful tone resulted from her emphasis, but that it was achieved by much tension and forcing. Am pretty sure that was why Ann's master teacher, Mistislav Munch, had her do months of nothing but the double thirds etude with emphasis on different members of the groups of four sixteenth notes. It was a way to trick the body into producing the tone without forcing.

[Ann is the pianist Ann Schein, with whom my mother shared lessons for many years.]

Romantic pianists revisited

David writes

I did like reading that account on your blog - of course, for me Herrmann's score for Vertigo is unforgettable, because it is my favourite film AND the music is very blatantly written in homage to Tristan.  But I liked even more your friend's description of Louis Lortie and his various conversations about pianists.  It illustrates what I think I've said to you before, about how a person who is a trained performer experiences music in a way that people like me simply cannot (I think I discussed this when I went to a piano concert with Sally and Jeremy).  And I really must try to hear some Ades - I somehow keep missing concerts where he is on the programme, but I've heard so many wonderful things about him.  I had no idea he was Jewish.


Meanwhile I had written to Hassan

It would be splendid if you reached the stage where you felt you could put yourself forward for a masterclass.

Hassan:

This is the stuff dreams are made of. In truth, I only started playing when I got here, and according to your link on expert performance, I have 6 years left to go... Although, there was this very cool moment last summer that warms me up. I left my shades in a performance room earlier and came back to get it, but decided to start mucking around on the piano instead of leaving. A chap walks in and strolls around the room. I finish as far as I could get on Liszt's Un Sospiro, and ask if there's a class happening. He says, no, no, keep playing, so I play a la maniere de Borodine. He correctly identifies the piece as Ravel, but forgets which one. He tells me he composed something based off of the end of Ondine, and plays a bit of it for me, and that's when I learn he's a visiting professor assisting with a course for the summer. We talk about Ravel, and I mention that he's my second favorite composer (at the time), and who's my first, Rachmaninoff, and I launch into his (very overplayed) C# minor prelude. I go frenetic with the descending thirds at the end and give those fff chords at the bottom my entire body weight.

Well, when done he praises my playing. Dangerous words, they could give me fatal hubris, but the gist is he hasn't heard playing with that much emotion in many years, and that it's all gone nowadays. We talk a bit about how much I agree with him, and then he asks if I'd be interested in working with him, playing his compositions and whatnot. I say I would love to, and he takes my e-mail and phone number down.

This is one that I have kept in touch with, and I send him the odd e-mail

from time to time and I get alphabet soup messages back. I looked him up,

and he does happen to know some French chap called Boulez fairly well, in fact, he wrote a book about discussions they had on music.

****

Well, what can I say?  I think of a colleague of Boulez's wandering into a practice room on the West Coast and being thrilled by a young pianist who explains that his favourite composer is Rachmaninov.  How is it not possible to love this?

(OK, maybe the discussions were along the lines of : Look, Pierre, why can't you just write like Rachmaninov? )

The Last of the Romantic Pianists - Another Chance Encounter

Hassan has sent this account, which I love, of a chance encounter which led to his meeting Louis Lortie:

So it's really not all that much... In April I attended a recital by Louis Lortie, who was playing a programme of Liszt, Chopin and Thomas Adès at the Dinkelspiel Recital hall on campus. The first piece he played was Liszt's transcription to the overture to Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser. I hadn't heard it at the time, but he played it like a god, and I enjoyed it very much. He had this uncanny ability to make the attack and decay of adjacent notes melt away leaving a fluid singing line floating above the other notes. I don't think I exaggerate when I say I'd never heard that effect before. Anyway, he finished, got up to enthusiastic applause, bowed and went away. I had managed to get a seat up in front, but it was way off to the side. So it really wasn't much of a view from there, one could only see his back, elbows and maybe a bit of finger if you're lucky. Someone from my aisle probably thought the same thing and left to take a seat up front in the center. Lortie came back onstage and played Adès' Traced Overhead. Love that piece; it kind of sounds like air bubbles leaving sinking debris from a shipwreck. More applause and he goes offstage. He comes on again. Before it's too late, I also switch seats and end up sitting beside the man who did so before me. Lortie waits for me and then plays Adès' Darknesse Visible and Lizst's Vallee d'Obermann. He's done, lights come on, and now it's time for intermission.

"What did you think?" I ask the man. "Oh marvelous playing. No one has that kind of sound anymore. It's a lost art". I disagree, saying I find his kind of luminous tone similar to Grigory Sokolov's. Sokolov? he asks. Yeah, and we talk about Sokolov for a bit. He seems to know his stuff, so I ask if he plays piano. He tells me that he used to be professional pianist, played concerts, did the touring thing, but now he's retired and only plays at private recitals. We leave the concert hall, still chatting. I run into a friend and he says he'll be outside and we can talk more if I like. I join him outside the lobby after a bit, where he's lighting up a cigarette.

"Oh you smoke?" He nods, exhales. Offers me a cigarette. "These are some of the best cigarettes in the world." Tells me he got them from Belgium. He give me a light. No joke, they were really good. So good I could make this a story about how a random encounter can lead you to your best cigarette ever, not about how you meet people that offer you shortcuts to Louis Lortie masterclasses in Europe, but I should remain focused. We chat for a bit, and I learn that he's the director of the La Jolla piano institute. Strongly believes that good tone is the key to proper piano technique, I differ that dynamic control is, but he insists. We go on to talk about the golden age of piano, Chopin's style of teaching tone production, and how it's dying out. One of his teachers descended from the line of Chopin piano students. I mention that Alkan took over Chopin's students after Chopin died, and this is new to him. I tell him about my plans (dreams really) of applying to Juilliard's master's program in piano sometime after I graduate. Tells me he has two sons doing so already, but adds, "If you really want proper technique, you should attend one of Louis' classes. He's got the real thing. He teaches masterclasses, and he does one once a year in Italy. You should contact Louis' manager, [the name of Lortie's manager, I forget] and attend one of these masterclasses." Wow.

We keep going until the intermission bell is rung, where we then enter the hall and take our seats again. Lortie comes on and plays Chopin's Nocturne No. 17 and his Sonata No. 3 with no break in between. Tumultous applause when he's done. He comes back on, and plays a Chopin étude for an encore, I don't know what number. My friend asks me if I'd like to meet Lortie backstage, and of course I say yes. Following his assertive lead backstage, we get rebuffed by security. My friend insists that Lortie's expecting him, security insists that he can't go any further, and defiant, he returns with me to the hall. He's telling me that the secret to good tone is light touch when finally Lortie appears in casual wear. He apologizes for keeping us waiting, and tells us that he accidentally locked himself in his dresser. In bad French my friend speaks complementary of me ("Il est très interessé!"), and they talk a little bit about Adès' Jewish origins that he apparently Adès' rarely admits to. Lortie has to go, so does my friend. I scrawl his contact info on my programme (now lost!) and leave.

Voila! And there we have it.

ps: Oh, feel free to edit any of this however you like...

pps - an apology:

I fear I might have exaggerated a little. Is my friend technically one of the last few Romantic pianists? I guess it depends on how you define the term. It usually refers to the early 20th century pianists particularly the famous ones, and Horowitz was viewed as the last of that generation, so technically, there are probably no more now. People claim Kissin's one, but other than his repertoire choice, I think it's a misnomer. That free-flowing, interpretive style in exchange for an odd flub or two manner of playing has been out for a while, note-perfect performances with minimalistic box-step rubato (if any at all) is in. But I guess, either way my friend was roughly between 60 or 70, and he had a very old-fashioned set of pianistic priorities. So a qualified yes for either way of looking at it probably sums up to an overall yes. But you decide...

[WOW. I wouldn't have thought of Kissin in those terms, no. I heard him once in Berlin. If there was anyone in the audience who hadn't noticed that the piano is a percussive instrument, the penny must have dropped two minutes into the programme.]


ppps:

If you're wondering how it all ended up, I still haven't gotten in touch with my friend, even though a bit of internet sleuthing should clinch me his contact info. At some point I will, but I don't think I'm ready for a Louis Lortie masterclass yet though it'd still be nice to follow up on our conversation.