magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

george: you think yr impulsive? who just bought a truck...

i almost brought that up yesterday: "i'm definitely still an impulsive consumer, but at least it's not a truck."

george: raise your glass to the marketing geniuses who planted pointless materialism or whatever into us at a young age. they are clever guys.

i'll drink to that. bastards.

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today's artist is tom phillips. i caught a brief glimpse of his work a humument last week while we were updating the artists' books. and i proceeded to mail order a copy. but from an independent bookstore instead of one of the corporate giants (i found this site and chose a semi-local affiliated bookstore with a nice website) and so it cost a little more and i haven't received it yet, but i feel better about myself.

today, i went and dug out the rest of the easily accessible books that the library has by or about tom phillips, including a pretty hefty self-compiled retrospective sort of thing called works and texts (most of the text on the official site seems to be from this book). in the sixties, when visual art and music were lot closer together than they have been at any time since, he composed a number of musical works that are as much about a visual score as about the resulting played music (which is apt to change drastically from performance to performance). given its interdisciplinary nature, i obviously gravitate towards the idea of visual art as music. it's a shame that more artists and musicians don't embrace these sorts of cross-overs today.

one of his musical works, opus xii, is an opera entitled irma. the libretto, suggestions for setting, costumes, and action, and auditory suggestions are all "treated" text fragments from a humument. these are all optional material, except for two required songs, an aria: "irma, you will be mine", and a chorus: "love is help   mate". there are also some accompanying melody fragments, that can be used, ignored, transposed, cut up, or spliced in any way. the only required characters are irma and grenville, but of course there can be more.

i am very much taken by the opera, and am interested in staging a production. maybe over wintersession. i might even be able to do it as an independent study and get credit. who knows.

chris.k asked if that was all there was to composing an opera. "you could a prolific opera composer." i guess i could. but i can't just start writing a whole bunch of operas in the form of irma. i need to find my own inspiration, and my own form.

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cooking dinner tonight, pasta, i spilled some boiling water over my hand. after silently cursing myself out for being stupid, and immediately taking some tylenol, i began to think about the last time i did more or less the same thing (although i was able to blame it on badly designed cookware then). tonight marks the last wednesday of the summer session. 3d was thursday and friday last summer. so that would make last year's incident, yep, the last wednesday of the summer session.

that's just silly, i said out loud.