Henningmusick Première Approaching

 Owner of a previously-owned lonely heart.

NPR News: “A Brief Tour of the Alimentary Canal, From Spit to You Know What.” They had to go there, didn’t they?

Even if he sins, I never kick a Finn’s shins!

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

His face was a mask of woeful bone, but his eyes twinkled like the eyes of old giggling sages of China, over that little goatee, to offset the rough look of his handsome face.

— Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

On the theme of You never know unless you ask, tody my friend Paul Carson told me that he’s including my St Petersburg Nocturne on his June program. It is a powerful rare thing for any piano music of mine to be performed (indeed, at a guess, it has never happened since before the launch of this blog) so it is next door to redundant to point out that this is the world première. It’s one of the piano pieces I’m fondest of, the sound of the piece instantly bringing me back to the apartment in Petersburg, where I often noodled at the upright piano, which must have been something of a non-precious antique, and related memories of feeding ducks at a pond in a nearby pond with my then soon-to-be fiancée, a time when it felt like all the world lay before us.

Separately: whether we chalk this up to human carelessness, or to the shortcomings of AI, I have too little information to adjudge, but I was tickled, on seeing “The Gumbo Variations” from the Zappa album Hot Rats topping a list of “Longest prog songs,” when of course this track’s provenance is overwhelmingly the blues, Go Figure.