Generally, if you wait long enough, confusion will turn into apathy.

Last day in Seoul.

This could have gone better.

Michael Jackson once turned an antonym into its own synonym, and it was bad (bad, as in good). These days, the word "epic" has, in effect, come to mean "trivial." That's bad, as in bad.

The Montreal Questionaire. On the eve of my departure for Korea. Hello again, 2008?

To better introduce yourself (Be creative!)
(Answer in a few short lines):

1. How old were you when you started to play? What led you to choose music?
I was about seven years old when I started playing piano, though far from seriously – most of my childhood was dominated by a somewhat “normal” upbringing per se; that is to say, hanging out with friends and playing sports. I didn’t actually “choose” music until age 20, after my third year pursuing a Legal Studies degree at UC Berkeley (a school which I left prematurely). Suffice it to say that my side hobby of playing the piano quickly took over any (totally incompatible and ridiculous) desire to pursue law. I left California and moved to the East Coast.

2. Do you have a career or passion that you would like to follow in addition to music?
Sadly, we are naturally destined to be inextricably connected with that for which we have talent – the rest, I guess, we designate as hobbies or perhaps more poetically, passions. I would like to write like Vonnegut, but I can’t. I would love to sing like Fischer-Dieskau, but you don’t want to hear that. I want to paint like Kandinsky; alas, in my dreams alone. Someday before I die, I want to dunk a basketball. That probably won’t happen.

3. Who is your favourite pianist and/or artist?
Since he fits into both categories comfortably, I don’t even have to think much to answer “Leonard Bernstein.” Aside from his ultra-cool/super-hip “West Side Story,” his all American good-looks and charm, his ability to turn the esoterically intellectual into something colloquial, his charismatic piano playing, and gargantuan intellect, Bernstein constantly reminded every one of us that the power of music goes beyond the merely aesthetic into the realm of the humanitarian.

4. Describe a particular moment that left its mark on you:
While I was attending UC Berkeley, I worked as both a security monitor for the Music Department and later took a job as a “lounge” pianist for an upscale Italian restaurant. I remember the exact moment I decided to pursue music, while playing a Chopin Nocturne for the restaurant; I realized, I no longer cared about anything else. I went home and downloaded the applications for the Yale School of Music and The Juilliard School. The rest is history - it’s been almost exactly ten years since then now.

5. What person, living or dead, would you have liked to meet (performer, conductor,
politician, movie star, etc.)?
Though I’ve seen him around the city (and, sadly, never really had the courage to march up to him and introduce myself), I would love to sit down and have a meal with Elliott Carter, if for nothing other than to hear a first-hand account of every major event of the 20th century. I sometimes wonder what it must be like to look back at nearly 103 years of wars, upheavals, politics, genocides, and most obviously, the evolution of modernism in music. Maybe it’ll happen. It looks like he’s going to live forever.

6. What’s on your iPod?
Ha. Does everybody have an iPod these days? If I owned one, it would probably contain (totally arbitrary): a Schubert song, a Beethoven string quartet, a Tupac track, an old school Mariah Carey song, the Crucifixus from Mass in b minor, and the like.

7. What is your favourite TV show/movie?
TV. This is embarrassing: 24, Whose Line Is It Anyway, Family Guy, Prison Break, Jerry Springer (hush), and lately, The Food Network. Movies: Anything by Tarantino, Wong Kar-wai, Kurosawa, Coppola, Kubrick, Almodovar; or anything containing an Alien, Rambo, or a Terminator.

8. Tell us about something you can’t live without:
Too many. Sushi, Karaoke, Single-malt Scotch, Seamless Web, Wikipedia, the Moma, the Guggenheim, the YMCA, my copy of “The Rest is Noise,” K-town, chamber music, friends and family.

9. What will you do in 2012?
I guess I’m going to continue my efforts to eradicate that popular stigma of the “freelance musician” as a terrible synonym for “unemployed and broke.” I’m based in New York City, the mecca for classical music and the arts, so my plans go with the winds of my own career. Upcoming tours include one in South Korea with a violinist and another with a Baritone. Basically, I’m just going to try and live.

Facing the night.

Lost.

Insert faux-emotional, pseudo-wise-but-garbage, wannabe-deep statement regarding "love/life" here.

Then vomit.

"Now I know we said things did things that we didn't mean and we fall back into the same patterns same routines but your temper's just as bad as mine is you're the same as me but when it comes to love you're just as blinded baby please come back it wasn't you baby it was me maybe our relationship isn't as crazy as it seems maybe that's what happens when a tornado meets a volcano all I know is I love you too much to walk away though come inside pick up your bags off the sidewalk don't you hear sincerity in my voice when I talk told you this is my fault look me in the eyeball next time I'm pissed I'll aim my fist at the dry wall next time there won't be a next time I apologize even though I know it's lies I'm tired of the games I just want her back I know I'm a liar if she ever tries to fucking leave again I'ma tie her to the bed and set this house on fire."

Self-sovereignty attaches to it the imprisonment of emotional chaos; how can that logical former possibly overcome the naked potency of that all-destructive latter; as if the concept of choice were at all inextricable from that of the pitiful reliance on emotional necessity. Need. Want. Must. Have?

Detachment forces itself to engender artificial facades. Wait, isn't that redundant. Wait. What?

I don't remember what I was talking about. Remind me?

Looking for hope. Desperately.

Valentine's Day.

Artists wade into the ocean of poetry and painting, assumedly searching for self-connection to those thick brush strokes; or those words scattered on a page. But art, at heart, is a lie. Why not use pop song lyrics?

Eminem wails away, but what really happens when a tornado meets a volcano?

Imagination and the self-pity of late night thought paralyzes sleep; like a clown, I put on a show. Yearning again for that eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

Wait a minute, this is too deep. Gotta change the station.

Nobody knows it but me. The Tony Rich Project.

Notes from the Underground. Truth.

Isolation, sunrises, and Schubert.

The snow tips of the steel bars rain down on the Metropolitan Opera plaza; the Chagalls fight each other - who is prettier? Nobody cares, the fountains are dancing and the Phil is playing. Iphones are ubiquitous. I swim, sweat, then drown into those helium harmonies of 960.

Ginsberg says about New York City in 1960, "three men sprawl drunk in the birch thicket on the small dump road they finished the whiskey."

"The universe is so airy, you need only get up cold and walk the dirt road at dawn to be in Heaven."

Soaked knee-deep in the crystalline mud of more snow than an abandoned Polish perogi; time to man up.

Not having a phone = higher probability of serendipity. Or isolation.

RIP Milton Babbitt. I care. I listen.

Back to the sweat-filled confines of the YMCA; steams enshrouds the air and that brownish rust glossing the metal lockers distracts enough from the air-drying revitalization of a miniscule sauna, a vague reminder of an era not too long ago.

Schubert, be flat. When you were my age, you were about to die soon. But Pergolesi had already been dead for three years.

Mallarmé says “I am alone, while all these men around me live in the idolatry of a mirror reflecting in its depths serene.” That probably sounded gayer in French.

Facing the night.

Rest in peace, Mr. Stessin. You once meant a lot to me.

"I'd catch a grenade for 'ya /
Put my hand on the blade for 'ya"

"To resist the resistance, to make peace with this score on its own terms, may not be possible in our time. It would signal recovery of an optimism that our century's wars, upheavals, atrocities, and holocausts - and the despairing attendant cynicism that has from the beginning undergirded the modern movement - may have precluded once and for all. Yet the fact that we continue to insult and distort Beethoven's gigantic affirmation shows that it is still under our skins, that it still troubles the conscience of trivial artists like Ned Rorem, that it still awakens in us longings for what we can no longer believe in, but wish we could. We are still in the valley of the Ninth. And that gives hope."

-Richard Taruskin, regarding Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (1989)

Cheap shot on Rorem, Richard. Cheap shot!