Fourteen Years Ago Yesterday

 Probably the funniest line in Spielberg’s Minority Report: “Take her to Radio Shack.” Funny not least because that Shack is boarded up.

More pop singers should exploit the phrase “You know what I don’t mean.”

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Mr Aldridge, are you considering the question, or are you just dead?

— Jn Cleese, addressing a coffin in court

Gentle Reader, I posted earlier this summer modestly memorializing my pianist friend Scott Tinney. Facebook has become but a shell of itself (witness an ad which periodically crops up on my phone: “Social Media Is Pay-to-Play, Rise Above the Noise,” in its way, a masterpiece of cynicism fused with scorn for users who in fact socialize on social media. But for the time being, until the algorithm changes for some reason of monetization, one bittersweet benefit I yet enjoy on that platform is the occasional reminder of friends who have passed on. Thus, on 9 Aug, 2011, extremely gratifyingly, Scott wrote to me:

I finally got around to printing and reading Gaze Transfix’d yesterday. GOOD STUFF, MAN! It’s now part of my repertoire. Barbara Allen has a good friend in you, and now a good friend in me. Am now printing Lutosławski’s Lullaby, and will read it at my piano within a few little minutes. Sorry to be so long in doing these things, but you have no idea of the hell I´ve been living for the past 2 years. I´ll explain at another time... the internet place is about to close.

I should write more and it should have been timely, but for the present, I report simply that the Henning Ensemble concert in the Library went smashingly well.

In thinking of October in King’s Chapel as a quartet, I am thinking of a fresh arrangement of Le tombeau de W.A.G. For next summer, I am scheming a memorial piece in honor of my sister late Kim for two bass clarinets, since we´ve got ´em. I have not completely lost sight of Janky Juke Joint.

I’ve just been on the phone with my publisher, so I have a mental-cleanse project of a set of brief flute duos (for the passing of the Communion plate) to chop out.

And, completely separately: I’ve gone in very short order from never actually having heard Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody, to hearing it via Sirius in a friend’s Chevy, and almost immediately then heard a two-piano arrangement recorded by Katia & Marielle Labèque. The Universe is making up for lost time!