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!