DanielSonenberg.com

Yeah, exactly, what AM I doing up at 1:38am, especially since I woke up at 5:30, and will do it again tomorrow (oh, today, as in in a few hours). But I have an answer for you in three short words: I. Am. An. Idiot. Oh sorry, four. My composition teacher Daron Hagen once told me that sometimes, even when you're dead in the middle of the most pressing, horrendous deadline and you're working round the clock at it, sometimes, all the same, you just need to watch television. So after a long, long day of finalizing the score for Act II Scene I of the Summer King and dispatching the product of my labors to singers and copyists, and then after a band practice and a return home, I settled in front of the old Inty-net and zoomed over to ABC.com. Because they've undisappeared Day Break (remember the show whose cancellation I was so upset about?) Yes. It's back - streaming only, at ABC.com. And ABC really and truly hates this show - they waste no opportunity to treat it like poo. They announced all big and glorious that starting Monday, January 29, they're going to premiere one episode a week, each Monday, until the series runs its course (it was originally supposed to fill the gap between the first and second half of Lost - a vastly inferior but much more popular effort). So here we are, on the 29th, and what does ABC do? Just dump the whole series on line, no pomp, no circumstance. No dragging it out week by week, just here - have em all, we really don't think they're worth anything. And I really wouldn't waste this cyberspace with my rant if the show weren't deeply, deeply good. It's a scandal that this show was canceled, and an even bigger scandal (or wait, something really cool!) that you can now watch the whole season for free on the web, with only limited commercials. To do so, go here and navigate to Day Break. Hopper is a cop played by former Rent star Taye Diggs. He's living the same day over and over again, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, only in this instance each day he wakes up he's framed for the murder of an assistant district attorney. Sure the show's overwrought, melodramatic, and what have you, but it's also thoughtful, complex, moving, and seriously imaginative television. The acting is top notch, and everyone in it's a hottie, so I really don't see how the American public missed the boat on this one. But at least morons like me can now deprive themselves of intensely needed shut-eye, staring into the same computer screen that's held my gaze since the sun was on its way up this very...I mean yester...day.

I'm deep in the thick of score and part preparations, with the help of an able and eager team of copyists. Though I know I'm no Beethoven, the whole process cannot help but make me think of my all time favorite Beethoven letter (and believe me, there are LOTS of good ones!) Here it is, for you, in its entirety. To quote Homer Simpson in regards to the last sentence, "It's funny cause it's true!"

I hate choosing categories for my posts sometimes. Why do I only get to choose one? Darn this irksome software - I should join Word Press or Blog Spot like every other blogger in the west. Oh well. I'm off caffeine. I've quit, knowing full well that I'll start up again in two or three or ten months. I can live with that knowledge. I quit every so often to remind myself that I can - that it's in my power, and that no drug is the boss of me. But I also tend to quit – or aspire to tend to quit – during times of great stress. Ultimately caffeine, coffee in particular, does me no good at all. It knots up my stomach, makes me feel edgy, gives me headaches if I have two or three cups, and, I’m certain, lessens my productivity. The problem is, there’s nothing in the world that excites me more than a double maple latte (down at Arabica, one of the several great coffee places in Portland). The aroma of it, the taste, the environment it often accentuates, the whole ensemble just transports me in a way that is purely and deeply emotional. And decaf doesn’t have that same effect at all – it never tastes right. And not only that, it makes me generally feel just as lousy as the real stuff so why bother. From my own non-empirical, non-scientific survey of one, I’m convinced that caffeine is just a minor player when it comes to the toxicity of coffee. After all, there are so many folks around who are eager to spout out the fact (probably urban legend) that black tea has more caffeine than coffee. Maybe so, but it’s a cleaner, clearer, and alas, less sexy buzz it delivers. Anyway, I’m off coffee, and I’m eating grains for breakfast, soaking them, boiling them for 45 minutes, the whole production. The only thing wrong with my routine is that I’ve had insomnia – undoubtedly stress related, although I was convinced it stemmed from a failing heart (had all the tests in the book last week and turns out my ticker’s in tip top shape, but my brain is used up). So the doctor tells me we have to deal with the sleep issue and prescribes 10mg of Ambien. As I mentioned above, I really don’t like being beholden to any chemical, especially one that begs to be ingested ritually each night. My past experience with sleep medication was over-the-counter stuff, which always completely knocked me over and out, but left me with a whale of a hangover the next morning. The old run-over-by-a-truck effect. Reluctantly, to put an end to eight nights of insomnia, I tried the little white pill. And catastrophically discovered it to be a wonder drug. It doesn’t knock you out, just facilitates sleep. You sleep when you want to. And when you wake up, even if it’s only 6 hours later, you feel rested and whole. No side effects, just clean, pure, simple sleep in a little brown bottle. Of course, it’s very goodness and pureness and wholeness and all that has me convinced it’s lethal and disintegrating my organs. OR, it’s a pact with the devil – each swallow another payment of my immortal soul. But don’t worry about me. After only two pills Alex turned cop and this place wouldn’t be more tightly restricted if the FDA were calling the shots. Good to have the love of a local cop though, I’m telling you.

I'm only just checking in here, and just for a moment. The sun finds me wherever I roam, but truth be told it's been an awful lot of hours indoors these days, couped up behind a computer, preparing music, calling and emailing performers, arranging air travel for myself and others, preparing seminars, and living that devil-may-care dream for which you all admire me. Or whatever. I wonder if the me I imagine you perceive bares any resemblance to your actual perception, let alone the actual flesh and bone me that sits and puts in these occasional torrents that go I know not where. I'm having concerts, did I mention? On February 2, March 9, March 18, March 30, April 13, April 20, April 27, it's a different kind of time. But I'll try to keep the nonsense flowing as best I can.

Here's an extended quote from a creepy and ghastly little book from the 1920s called Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, Musician and Murderer, by Cecil Gray and Philip Heseltine. It may or may not be well known to my readers that Gesualdo wrote amazingly complex, chromatic madrigals in the late 16th century, and was influential not on the generation of composers that immediately followed him, but rather on composers of the 20th century, most particularly Stravinsky. As famous as he is for his weird and beautiful music, however, he is probably best known for an act he committed relatively early in life: upon discovering that his wife had been carrying on an affair for several years, Gesualdo elaborately planned and executed (with the help of his servants - he was very well born) the murder of her and her lover. Soon afterwards he exiled himself to his country estate, where he continued to compose music that was increasingly at odds with the taste of his times. Anyway, after an opening section called "Gesualdo considered as a musician," I kid you not, the authors present a second section called "Gesualdo considered as a murderer," and it is from this frightfully disturbing, but at times no doubt humorous, set of pages that I now quote, somewhat at length.

But more particularly is there a definite connection between music and murder, although it may not be readily apparent. Not that many musicians have actually committed murders (apart from Gesualdo, one can only think of Salieri who, as everyone knows, poisoned Mozart); nor, strange to say, have many musicians been murdered themselves, except Mozart and Stradella. The connection between the two activities is much more subtle but none the less close. In the first place, the significant fact should be noted that the beginning of the decline of murder as an art dates from precisely the same period as the development of music as a personal expression, i.e., the beginning of the 17th century. In the middle ages music was more a craft than an art, because the emotions which we now express in music were then actually expressed in life. In these good old days one committed a murder if one felt like it, and thought no more about the matter; today we write an Elektra or a Cavalleria Rusticana instead, in order to work off our feelings. In definite relation to the increased difficulties attendantt upon the practice of murder, music has become more and more sadistic. In place of inflicting the utmost pain on a single individual, we outrage the ears of thousands.

And so we find in the particular case in question. It was not until Gesualdo gave up murder that he seriously took to composing....My only purpose here is to point out that Gesualdo's eminence in the art of murder is no less than it is in the art of music, and that his achievement in both spheres has been unduly and undeservedly neglected.

Once upon a time, 24 was actually a really good show - great concept (the show proceeds in real time, each ep is an hour in the life of hero Jack Bauer and his colleagues (and occasional adversaries at the Counter Terrorism Unit), excellent, suspenseful writing, and even pretty good music. I remember when the first season ended everybody thought, how could they do it again? In other words, how could they expect us to believe another 24-hour story line? What plot devices were left? Well, now the show is on season six! And the answer is: none. There are no plot devices left. The show repeats itself ad nauseam, every episode is full-on, no real development, just explosions and mini-climax after mini-climax. 24's answer to character development is death. That is to say, rather than having characters emerge with real feelings or personality traits or back story, 24 - as seems the vogue in TV dramas - kills them. That's how they generate drama and emotion. And to begin with, every character is pretty much a two-dimensional cartoon, taking on various personality traits willy nilly as the plot demands. Chloe, the socially awkward computer whiz with no inner sensor was a fresh, delightful character three seasons ago. But now her little quips are tired and we've heard them all before, nothing at all has happened with her (except for a couple of barely believable love interests, and a turn behind an assault weapon that appears to have left no mark on her psyche). The worst thing is, the show really can't top itself anymore, but it tries. In typical Fox-like fashion, the creators feel that each new threat has to be bigger and badder than the previous one, but there comes a time when you just can't up the ante anymore and you need resort to something else (like, say, real drama). How many suitcases containing nuclear devices are opened to creepy music and hushed silences over the course of the series? Answer: too many. It packs no punch anymore. How many evil terrorist dudes turn out to be just the underboss of the even-eviler uber terrordude? Answer: just about all of them. How many devious terror plans are actually just a distraction from the even more devious terror plan? Answer: all of them. How many creepy, annoying, how-the-hell-did-they-get-this-job in-fighting CTU bureaucrats are there? Answer: at least one per season. Oh I don't like the show at all, it leaves me with an icky feeling. And that's to say nothing of the unending violence, the glorification of torture, the often right-leaning political viewpoint. Unlike Battlestar Galactica, which leaves me in awe of its creators after every episode (how can they be so smart? the characters so rich? the plot so detailed and well-conceived? the moral issues so thought-provoking?), 24 has me rolling my eyes and cursing the TV. It is low, low, low entertainment.

And yet I haven't missed a single episode. Why? There's really only one answer: Kiefer. Kiefer Sutherland is that good. The rare convincing male action lead. His character is paper thin, goes through the same emotional near-issues each season, is ridiculously super human and unkillable (in the latest episode he stood mere meters away from a nuclear blast and watched the mushroom cloud rise, and yet you know he'll survive - probably even grow stronger from it). But he has that velveteen intensity that just melts all resistance. This is beyond gender, beyond sexuality. All I, or any of us 24 junkies need to hear is that fierce whisper: "I don't have a lot of time right now" (a line he says just about every episode) and we're putty, staring dumbly for another hour at what has clearly become the dumbest show on TV.

Hi everyone. I'm a bit beyond language, and for reasons I can't explain even to myself, this picture seems to say it all.
Today we gathered to say goodbye to Julian Norwalk. I hope he gets to sleep in from now on.
I hope too that you'll listen to my band perform live on the radio tomorrow night (Friday 1-12, 7:30-8:30pm - live streaming and on 90.9 in the Portland area)!

Here's the sun going down outside my pantry window. It was a pretty gruff day, cold and rainy I think - I was inside for all of it - but then there was this moment of utter beauty so splendid that even Mr. Moto couldn't wreck it. Now it's so many hours later and I have insomnia for the second night in a row. Not sure what it is. I guess missing that critical moment when your whole body screams “end it now!” because you’re reading the New York Times on line, or answering emails, or dully flipping through websites like television channels, and then that golden opportunity for perfect sleep is gone, never to be retrieved. I lay in bed with a magnum flashlight reading articles on Gesualdo and Charles Ives, and I felt my heart pounding from the late night soy hot chocolate I concocted for myself and Alex, who was in a zombified sleep next to me – she listens when her body commands. It’s partly all the dying that’s happening around me, though. You’ve heard about Monty and Uncle Herbie, and then this week the father of my first real girlfriend succumbed to cancer, and one of my academic advisees at school, a 19-year-old jazz guitarist, cracked up his car and checked out. I don’t know if I’m sitting up scared or sad. These events bring home to me that life is a minefield, and it really is the few and the lucky who walk safely across, like my 95-year-old grandmother, telling me she’s had enough – it’s ridiculous for anyone to live so long. There is no fairness, no justice, no sense to death, and I suppose, for that matter, to life either. I think of Gina Brandt Fall, the writer and force of nature Alex and I met when we met each other, her electric personality and the power of her words, her reading to us in Monday Music at the MacDowell Colony, a pivotal event in the forging of our young love. Of Gina’s incredible “Tacos” story, about an incident in a subway station with an undercurrent of familial catastrophe, and of Gina’s probing and messy and thoughtful unfinished novel, which we heard in bits and pieces over time. Of Gina’s awful, awful cancer, that devoured her so quickly we didn’t have time to catch our breath, and of our visit with her in California, and then her gurgling voice on the phone in the waning hours of her life, Alex and I beside ourselves with not knowing what to do and screaming into the phone we love you Gina. I sometimes don’t understand how we, the living, are supposed to just laugh our way through this existence, with all its outright unbearability. And then I think but laugh we must. And I think of the time my dad died, the one and only time that happened, and sitting shiva for a week and all the relatives and friends arriving, one by one, with a paper-wrapped whitefish as an offering. The whitefishes they piled up, one by one, and it just seemed so hopelessly funny, so funny that to this day the very word whitefish (which is a foreign word in Maine) brings a slight titter to my throat. And each new guest came bearing whitefish as if it were the only hope for all of our futures and perhaps it was. It’s my first impulse, you know, to send whitefishes out to all the grieving, all the suffering souls in the world, or even in just my little corner of it. But then I think the gesture might be misinterpreted. And so I send emails and cards, I call, I don’t know quite what to say and I probably laugh nervously a bit too much. What is this business of dying? I’ve seen my share for a young lad, and I still don’t know. I don’t know what you say to the father of a boy who drives his car too fast and skids on the ice, especially when this father and I have been in email contact for years, working to have the son make all, or at least some of the right choices. So much invested, so much suddenly gone. The grades were better this semester, the future looked bright. So much caring and love and frustration and teeth clenching and understanding, and then what are you supposed to do with it? “He died instantly" - as if that’s a good thing. And my uncle Herbie, who survives Hitler and still at 89 has so much fight left in him and then gets flattened by a truck on his daily constitutional. Or my ex-girlfriend’s dad, who retired and then got a rare form of cancer (the kind that’s too sickeningly common) and just WENT, really, really fast. I don’t understand how we manage not to just disintegrate. Literally fall to pieces, implode or explode or just gradually expand into the atmosphere, raining our sorrows – all that’s left of us – on the planet in a fine but cutting mist. So I lie in bed and think of myself and all the people I love, my friends, my family. I think of what I haven’t said, and I think of which conversation might be my last, and I think of which conversations – recently – actually WERE my last, and what I should have and didn’t say, and what I wish I could say now, and the density of suffering that even these isolated passings (to use a euphemism I HATE) engender, and then I think about Iraq and I am vapor, a prickly gaseous bog tormented by insomnia and night frights and all the demons of this world and the next one. My kingdom for some sleep, the only hope for any of us, the gentlest mother. But in lieu of that for Christ’s sake please send whitefish.

Technically I'm forbidden to post this photograph, which is of the mess my studio was before I spent 5 straight hours (tonight) cleaning. Alex drove down to Boston, though, to visit friends and museums, and by the time she sees this it'll be one or two posts down, so no worries - right? Her worry, I think, is that my students will happen upon it and discover that behind the calm, reasoned, and always elegant surface they perceive in yours truly lies an unholy maelstrom of chaos. I know better. Every time I go to a new place, move to a new town or hit an artist residency or make a new friend, anything, there's always this honeymoon period where I'm not universally known as a walking messy clutzy catastrophe. Strangely that honeymoon period tends to last hours, not days. Even without my doing anything violent or awkward or just plain stupid those around me seem to be able to suss out my ineptitude in the physical world. In class I always hear titters as I bump into the desk or trip over the piano stool, but interpret those titters as meant in the most gentle and supportive of ways. When it comes to teaching, through shear force of will I have managed to put in place several systems of organization that protect the efforts of my charges, but my personal affairs are an unruly kingdom. I so desperately wish I were organized, that I were the type of person that, when I take off an article of clothing, had a burning desire to fold it and stick it in a drawer rather than to throw it onto the floor, or when I opened a piece of mail knew to just which file or which shredding device to send it, but the mundane artifacts of this world bewilder me into a state of complete disfunction. I open the missives, stare at them, and then put them on the top of one of several developing mountains. My policy is to never throw anything away ever no matter what, so if something is missing, I know that if I dig long enough I'll find it. And then once every several months I have an absolute meltdown, generally between projects (finished one this morning, start the next tomorrow), and I just clean and clean and purge and sort until order reigns again. And then I maintain the order for about a week and the hellish stew of stuff, the static that undoubtedly corrupts my productivity and probably even shortens my life expectancy returns. I'm in the sane state now, but too wiped to take and post another picture, so you'll have to take my word for it.

But why do you care about me anyway? Are you still reading this? You weirdo. What could be more boring than reading about someone else's messy life. I apologize. It's just that I've been reading some other blogs and I notice that blogs generally tend to be, in one way or another, about the wondrous qualities of their authors. Mine probably is too, and that gives me pause. I really don't want to build myself up. I need for you to know that at the core I'm really pretty awful, okay? Once we have that understanding, I think we can move forward, and I can start writing again about herring or bagels or weird music and you can go back to reading it without knowing why.

Oh yeah, one more thing (because good things come to those who wait). I made a New Year's Resolution: Eat more lentils.

I posted a few weeks back about a show on ABC called Day Break, starring Taye Diggs (that's him in the pic). If I were truly a savvy blogger I'd hyperlink to the post, but instead, I'll let you dig for it with the brand new danielsonenberg.com search bar. Isn't it exciting? While you're searching, you can also look up that other post, from further back, when I said I was giving up television for good. Yeah, well, we see how that turned out. I am nothing if not human (and occasionally deeply in need of mind Novocain). Anyway, I watched a couple of more episodes of the show and got hooked - it's like 24 meets Groundhog's Day - high concept, very intense, great acting and writing, overall just a solid show. Well, I knew something was up a couple of weeks ago when I went to abc.com and saw that the next episode "had not been scheduled yet." I mean, this show was slated to run consecutively until Lost, which is more popular but not as good, made its triumphant return in February. Anyway, I went back to abc.com yesterday and discovered that all mention of Day Break has been scrubbed clean from their website. It's as if it never existed. Of course through google and wikipedia and all that I was able to ascertain that the show had been canceled due to consistently declining ratings. Apparently the last episode they aired only drew 3.9 million viewers (yeah, I'd be really bummed if one of my compositions "only" reached that many folks). So they just pulled the plug and flipped the bird to viewers like me, who had gotten hooked into a serialized drama, every episode of which had already been shot and paid for. In the can, so to speak. Apparently there were initially whispers about airing the eps on-line, but there were some sort of "music clearance" issues, so now Day Break has simply been disappeared. Is it just me, or is this deeply callous, insensitive and even immoral behavior on the part of the network? I mean, why would I ever, ever invest in another new show on ABC, now that I know that they don't give two squats about my happiness? I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. And the thing that kills me is, there's this other show called Big Day, another 24 knockoff, but this one idiotically about a single wedding day, stretched out over a whole TV season (stop reading for a moment and contemplate the inanity of that). Alex and I tuned in briefly because it stars Wendie Mallick, who was absolutely brilliant on the very funny show Just Shoot Me. But Big Day is truly awful, a clear misfire. I mean, I understand there is something called taste when it comes to humor (as every friend upon whom I’ve forced a viewing of “A Charlie Brown Kwanzaa” has reminded me), but this is not about taste. This is just an ill-conceived program with terrible writing, no comic timing, and no real interest whatsoever. It feels like watching a comedian out and out bomb at a comedy club. And yet this show, this STINKER that no sane person could possibly enjoy (unless they liked Gods and Monsters, I suppose), doesn’t get canceled by the American Bonehead Company? Grrr….

Well here's how I spent the day and the night of New Year's eve (yes, you guessed it, reload and you'll see more pics). We gallavanted around Two Lights State Park in the sun and the snow, and then had a cast of thousands join Truth About Daisies at the Dogfish Bar and Grill on Free Street. Sure we had some sound issues, and I'm not sure any of the band was fully physically and mentally prepped for the 4.5 hour non-stop playing extravaganza, but all in all I think we came out on top. And I'm not sure I know a better way to usher in a brand new year than sitting, surrounded by dear friends, banging on drums and catterwauling my lungs out. Here's to all we have to look forward in this crooked number year!