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Monthly Archives: June 2007
Don’t expect it to get any better
I was rehearsing the first Shostakovich Piano Concerto yesterday, and it occurred to me that we tend to think of composers careers in a rather naïve way. Almost invariably, we tend to hear about composers “developing” or even “improving” throughout their careers, but I would actually suggest that many composers don’t improve or develop once they find their own voice.
Mozart is an interesting example of a composer whose improvement is well-documented. Because he was so famous as prodigy performer, all his juvenilia was published, which means we have a great mass of early works which are not as polished or sophisticated as his later music.
However, a composer like Beethoven seemed to arrive on the scene as a fully finished and developed creative artist. His three op. 1 Piano Trios are as perfect as anything he ever wrote. He carefully chose them as his introduction to the world- he wanted to announce himself as the most important composer of his day, and he did. Much as his style evolved and changed over the years, his level of accomplishment didn’t- he started as a master and stayed a master.
Likewise Shostakovich. His First Symphony, written in his teens, is as brilliant as anything in his output. The piano concerto we’re playing this week was written in 1933, before he’d begun to have problems with Stalin and the state, and yet the second movement is as anguished as anything he ever wrote. Too often, we tend to hear moments in Shostakovich’s output described as saying “I’m very sad because Stalin was mean to me and killed all my friends,” but I think that’s oversimplifying. Shostakovich’s early music is not only incredibly accomplished technically, but also has as much depth of feeling and as enormous a range of emotion as anything he would write later. Some of that pain obviously came from who he was, not just what happened to him.
Brahms- perfect from day one. Likewise Schumann. Schubert took a long time to figure things out. Mendelssohn- he was a thousand times the prodigy Mozart was, his early works like the Octet, Midsummer Nights Dream Overture and the early quartets are as good as music gets. Again, his early works are not just technically stunning, they’re deeply moving. Dvoark was an improver, but not as much of an improver as most people think- there are some great earlier pieces out there, it’s not just the New World Symphony and the American quartet that are worth listening to. Mahler 1 may not carry the spiritual baggage of the 9th, but it is just as masterfully crafted, something he himself pointed out to friends. He started his creative life as a completely finished creative artist.
This is worth pointing out because too often, we overlook early works, but it’s not as if Haydn needed 103 symphonies to work at his craft before he wrote the 104th. Beethoven’s first piano trio is as good as the last one. The first two symphonies are just as good as the others.
What you can hear in Beethoven over the course of his life is not an acquisition of new skills, but the evolution of his personality as shaped by hardship and suffering. What makes the late quartets and sonatas so amazing is not their brilliance, because he was always brilliant, but the rarified emotional worlds they take us too. On the other han, Schubert’s technical evolution was an outgrowth of his reaction to his illness. As he sought to express deeper and more painful truths in his music, he needed to develop new technical tools. Shostakovich, Beethoven and Mahler all started with all the tools fully in place, which is why their early works are so powerful. And in all three cases, there are always early works that even seem to anticipate the unique emotional qualities of their late periods. The slow movement of the second Beethoven piano trio is just as moving as any of the slow movements of the late quartets. It even has that strange sense of being beyond worldly suffering, even though he’d not yet begun to learn to suffer the way he would later. The great failure in the finale of Mahler 1, where the symphony seems on the verge of ending in triumph only to dissipate in nothingness and have to rebuild is an astonishingly mature gesture. It bespeaks an awareness of the difficult and sometimes disappointing shapes of life that you wouldn’t expect a 27-year old to have.Sometimes, you get a sense with certain artists that they express something that has not yet happened- a strange sort of musical foreshadowing. Mahler’s darkest work, the Sixth Symphony was written just before his world began to fall apart, which he was at the pinnacle of his professional and personal life. I often feel the Schoenberg’s final break with tonality was somehow the result of something like a prophetic vision- his music can sound like all the horrors of the 20th Century that were yet to happen. And then there’s the slow movement of the Shostakovich Piano Concerto… Two year later, Shostakovich would fall from favor as the Soviet Union’s most popular and officially respected composer to becoming something like a non-person. Was he somehow sensing his future in this piece? Did he have a vision of the dark world that was just beginning to appear around him? Or was he just a really good composer?
Shostakovich Piano Concerto no. 1
Dmitri Shostakovich- Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings, op 35
In many ways, Shostakovich was a quintessentially Russian composer. As a symphonist one can certainly hear the influence of Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and even, to an extent, Rachmaninoff in their powerful orchestration and epic forms. On the other hand, in the concerto medium, and particularly in the piano concerto, he moves about as far away from the great Russian models as one can. Compare the Shostakovich concerto heard tonight with those of Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky and it’s hard to accept they’re in the same genre. It’s even harder to reconcile the fact that Rachmaninoff was still active when this piece was written in 1933.
Where Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and even Brahms had expanded the piano concerto into something like a symphony for piano and orchestra, huge, dramatic works over 40 minutes for vast orchestras, with piano writing that made the instrument itself sound like an orchestra, Shostakovich turned the genre into something completely new. His work is brimming with wit and sarcasm, clean and transparent where his predecessor’s were lush and voluptuous.
Shostakovich composed the work for his own use. He had been a very accomplished pianist as a student, even playing the Hammerklavier Sonata, perhaps the ultimate test for any pianist, on his graduation recital. Once he’d made the choice to dedicate himself to composition, piano playing became an essentially private activity for him. Throughout most of his life, until motor neuron disease left him unable to play, he continued to read chamber music with friends and to play and study at home. However, in his early career, as his reputation was expanding rapidly, he began to get requests to appear as a performer, so in 1933, he set to work on his first piano concerto, which he later premiered with the Leningrad Philharmonic and Yevgeny Mravinksy.
In the 1920’s Shostakovich’s piano skills had enabled him to feed his family by playing for silent movies. The experience obviously shaped this piece, which is full of music that sounds like it was ripped from a Charlie Chaplin film.
Throughout the work, the piano writing is extremely sparse- much closer to Mozart than Rachmaninoff, rarely going beyond two parts at once. It intentionally never even approaches the orchestral fullness of earlier Russian composers. The orchestration is also minimal- only strings and solo trumpet, who helps highlight the comedic content of the work. Shostakovich wrote the trumpet part with the principal trumpet player of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Alexander Schmidt, in mind.
Even in this early work, one can detect the unlikely influence of Mahler in the way Shostakovich constantly juxtaposes humor and grotesquerie on the one hand with the deepest tragedy and vulnerability on the other. The second movement, a Lento, is one of his saddest and most heart-wrenching creations, and yet the piece ends with a musical joke that surely would have drawn a smile from the ultimate musical humorist, Haydn.
Kenneth Woods
The Lancashire Chamber Orchestra performs Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto on Saturday, June 16 at Altrincham Grammar School for Girls with pianist Ivan Hovoroun and trumpet soloist John Bush.
c. 2007 Kenneth Woods
This is conducting
Excerpted from Marth Graham, “I am a dancer”
…I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit…
… To practice means to perform, in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
…Even as I write, time has begun to make today yesterday-the past. The most brilliant scientific discoveries will in time change and perhaps grow obsolete, as new scientific manifestations emerge. But art is eternal, for it reveals the inner landscape, which is the soul of man.
…There are times of complete frustration, there are daily small deaths. Then I need all the comfort that practice has stored in my memory, a tenacity of faith.
…It takes about ten years to make a mature dancer. The training is twofold. First comes the study and practice of the craft which is the school where you are working in order to strengthen the muscular structure of the body. The body is shaped, disciplined, honored, and in time, trusted. The movement becomes clean, precise, eloquent, truthful. Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.
…Then comes the cultivation of the being from which whatever you have to say comes. It doesn’t just come out of nowhere, it comes out of a great curiosity. The main thing, of course, always is the fact that there is only one of you in the world, just one, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost. Ambition is not enough; necessity is everything… It is at this point that the sweep of life catches up with the mere personality of the performer, and while the individual becomes greater, the personal becomes less personal… All this is necessary to any performance in life which is magnetic, powerful, rich in meaning.
Copyrighted material is presented here without profit under fair use provisions of copyright law for educational purposes only, and will be removed on request.
UPCOMING CONCERT
UCPOMING CONCERT
Lancashire Chamber Orchestra
7:30 PM
Saturday 16 June, 2007
Altrincham Grammar School for Girls
Cavendish Road, Altrincham
Copland- Quiet City (trumpet solo by John Bush)
Shostakovich- Piano Concerto no 1 (soloist Ivan Hovorun, by kind permission of the Royal Northern College of Music)
Haydn- Symphony no 92
For more information or tickets please email georgina@bridgewater-hall.co.uk
Concerts are green
I’ve long been a big fan of Pliable’s blog, On an Overgrown Path, but I was saddened to read his post today- “How Green Was My Concert?”
Pliable asks if
“shouldn’t we be more concerned about the greenhouse gases that are produced by a season like the 2007 BBC Proms?”
He makes a couple of valid points, particularly about the value of having touring orchestras stay in town for more than one concert at a time. Certainly, the opportunity to present a number of concerts by a visiting orchestra benefits the audience the touring orchestra and the musical community. Everyone gets to know each other better, whether it is the audience and critics learning the breadth of strengths of the visiting orchestra or the orchestra getting to know the acoustics of the venue. However, I do respectfully disagree with Pliable’s notion that we somehow ought to be limiting international orchestra touring in the name of limiting climate change.
The fact is, the Proms is part of the solution to the world’s problems. It is one of the most powerful agents of cultural exchange and enlightenment in the world today, a place where musicians and music lovers from all over the world come together in a vibrant environment, and is the most important example of high art as a vital, popular and relevant part of society anywhere in the world. Whatever it’s flaws, there is no other music festival on earth, in fact, no other cultural event on earth, that offers the standard of excellence, the accessibility to people from all economic backgrounds, the breadth of repertoire or the sheer fun in high art that the Proms does.
The lunacy of the US government’s position on global warming could only be sustained in a world where there is an insufficient amount of cultural exchange and a low level of public discourse. There was once a time, when great nations remembered enough of the horrors of the world wars, when cultural exchange and dialogue was considered a vital part of making a sane and safe world for our children. Orchestral touring was not considered a vanity project for millionaire managers and conductors, but a central part of an international effort to foster understanding among nations and peoples.
It’s popular, even a national pastime, here in Britain among music lovers to complain about the Proms, but as someone who grew up in a much larger country that has never been able to create a cultural institution like the Proms, I find it singularly upsetting. All this kind of perennial bellyaching does is give more ammunition to the hatchet men who would defund the BBC’s cultural programming altogether. Look at how music criticism has just disappeared from the American newspaper in two weeks. These institutions, which affect the lives of millions, are vulnerable. Record companies disappear, newspapers cease to be relevant, orchestras fold, festivals stop. Please, Proms-bashers, consider shutting up. Please. Don’t slit music’s throat. Leave the “I love you so much I have to kill you plot” for the opera, not the press.
The fact is that the carbon emissions of all the traveling orchestras appearing at the Proms in any year is only the tiniest fraction of the emissions of the millions of tourists coming to London each summer to see the great city, and go to the Proms. The carbon footprint of all the Proms musicians and attendees is only the tiniest fraction of what a single major rock tour generates over a summer. How about the FA Cup, the NBA, the NFL? Cancel the Olympics first, and we’ll talk.
Daniel Wolff, over at Renewable Music, writes in his concurring opinion that
“it’s not about ending tours or guest conducting gigs, but rather limiting both to a reasonable, and artistically defensible number in a time when information can travel cheaply, but flying an orchestra is an extravagance.”
I would contend that we are already at that limit. Universities are having fewer guest speakers and lecturers, chamber music series are folding or cutting back. Recitals are a rarity. Letting Tiger Woods fly to golf tournaments on a private jet is an extravagance. Sending the Boston Symphony to the Proms is important for Boston, important for London and important for the health and development of the music world.
If society is serious about global warming, the single biggest step all nations could take is to build rail networks that people can use. If Britain wants to be world leader in reducing climate change, it should triple the number of scheduled rail services and cut all rail fares by three-quarters. Global warming is a huge problem- governments need to go after the huge polluters, not demolish the tools of global enlightenment that could help us build a saner society.
I would contend that we are already at that limit. Universities are having fewer guest speakers and lecturers, chamber music series are folding or cutting back. Recitals are a rarity. Letting Tiger Woods fly to golf tournaments on a private jet is an extravagance. Sending the Boston Symphony to the Proms is important for Boston, important for London and important for the health and development of the music world.
If society is serious about global warming, the single biggest step all nations could take is to build rail networks that people can use. If Britain wants to be world leader in reducing climate change, it should triple the number of scheduled rail services and cut all rail fares by three-quarters. Global warming is a huge problem- governments need to go after the huge polluters, not demolish the tools of global enlightenment that could help us build a saner society.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the Bruckner
One of the most common questions I get both from audience memebrs and fellow performers alike is “I just don’t get so-and-so’s music, what am I missing?”
I think that is a great question, regardless of the composer, whereas hearing “I don’t like so-and-so’s music” is a very sad thing. Why give up? Why cut yourself off? Better to say “I don’t like…. yet!”
I’ve genuinely never regretted getting to know a piece better- even pieces that don’t become central to your love of life can still have something to offer, and with great composers, I almost always find that the very characteristics of their music that I find most off-putting at first become the qualities that I later value the most.
One composer about whose music I hear this “I just don’t get it” all too often is Bruckner. Of course, I’ve also heard a few “I don’t like’s” when it comes to Bruckner as well.
Bruckner is actually one composer of whom I think most people have read too much about and heard too little of (and here I am, writing more!), a sad fate he shares with Schoenberg, Schumann and Hindemith. In these cases, most of what you read about them is not very helpful or interesting, and, even where true, it’s not the kind of information that’s going to make most listeners want to run out and by the album, or go to a concert with completely open ears and minds.
I owe my love of Bruckner to a dinner party with friends of my parents when I was about 13. For some reason, my mom mentioned that I had recently discovered the music of Mahler….
“Oh, is he the absolutely awful one?” asked one of our fellow guests.
“No darling,” said their spouse, “Mahler is tedious but tolerable because he at least writes some nice tunes. It’s Bruckner that is absolutely unbearable.”
“Bruckner- yes that’s the one! The worst composer who ever lived!” A general murmur of agreement quickly followed: “Terrible!” “Bloated!” “Old-man music!”
“Unbearable?” I asked. “Why?”
“Oh, you’ve never heard any Bruckner? Lucky you! It’s absolutely horrendous music. It goes on for hours, it’s thunderously loud- written for gigantic brass sections and there are no melodies at all.”
“Really?” I asked.
Another diner then chimed in, “Didn’t the university orchestra do one of the symphonies a few years ago that completely emptied the house?”
“Yes!” someone else answered. “The first movement must have been forty-five minutes long, after which about a hundred people left. Then the next movement was even longer! About three hundred left after that. By the end of the concert, only a quarter of the audience were still there.”
“Well, what does it sound like?” I asked.
“It’s quite hard to describe. We had some records but threw them out- it was just so strange and loud…. and long”
Needless to say, I ran out and bought an LP of Bruckner 9 the very next day, and fell madly in love with it on first hearing.
I could tell you that when I hear Bruckner, I don’t hear religiosity at all, I’ve never heard any Wagner in it, I’m not reminded of cathedrals, and it never occurred to me in my own listening over several early years that it sounded like organ music at all.
To me, Bruckner sounds like the cosmos- or should I say Cosmos, the old Carl Sagan show?
It is all the world, and all the planets and all the stars and all the galaxies. More than almost any other composer, at his most visionary I find his music gives an unmatched sense of the absolute limitless mystery of the universe. I don’t hear faith in his music, I hear awe. I don’t hear certainties, I hear wonder, terror and doubt. It’s very incomprehensible vastness is what makes it so beautiful and so moving. It’s like being lost in nature and looking up at the night sky and having the stars sing to you- their voice is more terrifying, more strange and more powerful than ours.
But that might not help you want to run out and get the record. Maybe you just need to hear that it’s the longest, loudest, strangest, most awful music ever written. It worked for me.
c. 2007 Kenneth Woods
Three things no performer should ever say
1. My teacher told me to do it that way
2. I heard it that way on a recording
3. I like it that way
Just thought I would underline the point…. See previous post for more detailed discussion….
Find yourself by forgetting your self
Guiding principal-
The more selflessly a performer follows the written instructions of the composer, the more personal their performance becomes.
The more subjective their approach to what’s on the page, the more generic their performance tends to sound.
This apparent paradox is, one of the most important tenets of my musical belief system.
I was reminded again of this when I was wearing my cellist hat back in February. After my first run through of the Elgar concerto with the conductor, he remarked that he thought my interpretation was quite fascinating, because it was so different from any he had ever heard.
I was a bit surprised (but flattered) by his remark because it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that I had an interpretation of the work at all. I was just trying to play exactly what Elgar wrote, as it appears on the pages of the score, as best I could.
Of course, after I thought about it a bit, I realized that he made a good point- I did sound different to all my recordings of the piece, even though that had never been my aim.
In the conducting world, it is considered bad form to listen to recordings, although everyone does. The reason for this is that it’s all too easy to base one’s performance on what one has heard rather than what one has read. You end up imitating instead of generating. Many players, even very good ones, don’t have this same prejudice, and, especially in their years of training, tend to build their performances from what they’ve learned off of recordings.
I once heard the world’s most famous teacher of an-instrument-that-shall remain-nameless tell a student who was struggling to find the right tempo in a movement of Bach to go listen to the four most famous living performers on that instrument recordings of it and take the average of their tempi. I’m not making that up. Listen to four recordings and take the average.
I had an early and intense lesson in diplomacy as a student conductor when I conducted a fine fellow-student in one of the Mozart wind concerti. Before the rehearsal she gave me a video of the “most famous ____ player in the world” playing the piece. It was pretty great ______ playing, but not very good Mozart. Worst of all was the second movement, a lovely, simple, singing Andante in ¾ that was played in a funereal, lifeless, thudding six. I’m normally very happy to do whatever a soloist wants, but she and I talked about it a bit, and I even showed and played her a couple of Mozart arias in the same Andante ¾ groove. She was open to the idea of doing it a bit quicker, and agreed we’d try it with the orchestra.
I never quite got it to a true andante, but when her teacher came to the dress rehearsal, all hell broke loose. Her teacher, hearing me start the second movement tutti (bear in mind, I was just a student), immediately interrupted me and told me, rather politely, to please take it in six, and much slower. “Of course,” I said, “but don’t you think that for Mozart, an andante should definitely be quick enough to sing the tune in one breath and be felt in the larger pulse unit….”
Somewhere before the end of that quote, he interrupted be again, this time not so politely, and told me to “remember my place.” He even asked me whether I had “bothered” to watch the video. Within minutes of the end of the rehearsal, even when I’d quickly complied with that request to take the tempo-di-videotape, he’d called both of my teachers to complain about my snotty attitude…. Yikes….
The funny upshot of this was that about a year later, the new most famous _____ player in the world came to town to solo with the big orchestra in the same piece. Funny- he took the Andante as an Andante, in a nice, flowing, three. Turns out the next year another student of this teacher was doing the same piece with another student conductor, and that student conductor got a new video of the new most famous ____ player in the world, and was quickly admonished not to take that movement too slowly. Mozart’s wishes were considered irrelevant compared to those of the past and current most famous _____ players in the world. Yikes again….
The upshot of all of this is that many of us are taught to build a performance like a collage. You’re playing Elgar? Take a bit of Ma, a handful of Harrell, some nice chunks of Mork and a fistful of du Pre. It’s all a matter of selective imitation. It’s a bit like hip hop- sampling things you like, rather than creating them yourself. Sampling may be an art form, but it is a lower art form, unfashionable as that is to say.
There are three things I don’t like to hear young soloists (or conductors) (or old soloists) say.
1- My teacher told me to do it that way
2- I heard it like that on a recording
3- I like it that way
Those are only things one would ever need to say to defend the indefensible. The only defense of a performing choice is the score, which is always open to infinitely varied readings. But just because a score can be read honestly in an infinite variety of ways, it does not follow that all ways of reading a score are honest. As a performer, my likes and dislikes are irrelevant. Imagine me refusing to take an accelerando that Mahler had marked because I didn’t like it. That’s not my choice to make. My job is not to impose my likes and dislikes on the orchestra or the audience. My job is to understand it- once I understand it, I always like it. Appreciation follows understanding, and not the other way around.
Start with the score, and you have to build your concept note by note, symbol by symbol. You have to read the music, think about it, and make your own decisions about how to execute what you see. Why is this here? Why isn’t there a dot on that note? Never mind that “everybody plays it short,” what did the composer write? Why? By definition, everyone one of those questions, processes and decisions will lead you somewhere unique to you. The less you try to interpret and the more you simply try to realize, the more personal your playing becomes.
“Man, I’ve never heard the piece like that. Really interesting….”
Yes, you can have that happen to you! All you have to do is not try to sound like yourself but to sound like the composer wanted you to sound. The harder you try to do it, the more like your true self you will sound.
c. 2007 Kenneth Woods
The music world on Elgar’s 150th
I’ve been rather saddened and even a little baffled in the lead up to the 150th anniversary of Edward Elgar’s birth to come across statement after statement to the effect that, even today, the jury is still out on Elgar’s significance as a composer.
With all due respect, it is not.
Unfashionable as it may be to say this, even if the most famous critic on earth were to say that Elgar’s music is not that good, or that he is not a “major” composer, that does not mean there is an argument to be had or a debate to be held. Even if you, dear reader, do not like Elgar’s music, even then, that does not mean there is anything for “the jury” to deliberate. Saying something loudly, or repetetively, or in a distingished publicaion does not make it true.
The fact is, the only measure of Elgar as a composer is not in critical opinion, or audience response. It is not to be found in the quality or number of recordings of his music. It cannot be assessed from concert performances.
Much as Elgar himself said that music was the highest art form, “written on the skies for you to note down,” the only true measure of Elgar’s value, achievement and importance as a composer is in his written scores.
There are precious few perks to being a composer, but there is this one- truth is truth, and if you write a great score, no comment, no performance, no fashion or debate can change that. You can be killed in Auschwitz, banned in your homeland, denounced before all your peers, publicly ridiculed or forgotten, and it matters not one bit. The true value of your music is in the scores you wrote down. Truth is truth.
Let me also add that Elgar may have been English, but his “Englishness” is completely irrelevant in assessing the quality of his music. Heritage, culture or race- forget them all. Elgar’s music is no more or less valuable for it’s “Englishness” than it would have been were it “imbued” with “Blackness,” ‘Jewishness,” “Germanness,” or “Kansasness.” Historically, although many good composers were German, not many Germans were good composers…
For those of you who choose not to live with those scores to discover the truths within, that is your privilege. Life is short, and we all make decisions about what passions to pursue. However, don’t be tempted to equate a blind spot with an insight, and do not delude yourself into thinking that your assessment of a piece has any value whatsoever, unless of course, it is your own piece you are assessing.
It is no coincidence that those of us who have spent more time with more of Elgar’s music have a higher respect for his work. The river flows that way always- from understanding to appreciation and not the other way around.
I could write pages about his mastery of motivic development, his orchestration, his powerful sense of form, his genius from writing tunes you think you’ve known all your life or about the simple, heartrending sense of Weltschmerz that he captures better than most of his German colleagues, but I won’t. My opinion ultimately means no more than anyone else’s- it’s not my arguments that you should listen to, but Elgar’s music.
Instead, I just remind you that the truest piece of human wisdom is the old cowboy proverb-
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
And lift a toast to Edward Elgar, a wonderful composer- one of the very best.
C. 2007 Kenneth Woods
Comments and conversations
Here’s a nice follow-up/comment from David Sabler’s blog about his recent article on the Oregon East Symphony.
There’s also this and this from Oboinsight.
I’ve also been pleasantly surprised how many folks have responded to the Haydn thread. Hopefully this means real hipness is not dead. Check out this and this….
Also, this gives me a nice opportunity to remind readers how much I like comments, even ones that might dispute a point, on this blog. In fact, although I now get more hits on this blog every day than I ever imagined I would I continue to get way few comments than I’d hoped for or would like. Is it just a conductor thing? Are people so used to not conversing with the guy holding the stick? A lot of conversations at work begin with something along the lines of “was reading your blog last night and I really thought you should have also pointed out that….” Hey- put it in a comment! It makes me feel like I have friends!
Speaking of friends…. After much cajoling, I’ve set up a MySpace page. It’s been up there for one whole day, and I’m already stressing out about this “friends” business- it’s like going back to school. If you’re reading this and are on MySpace, why not add me to your friends list…..KW
