at home

at home
Originally uploaded by madabandon.

Yesterday I took most of the day for myself, to rest and get over this nagging cold. After the whirlwind of last week, and last night's very successful performance, I truly enjoyed being at home. I enjoyed sitting on the sofa reading and admiring my new coffee table. It is a thing of beauty and definitely makes my old half-destroyed sofa look much better. You can see Mabel and if you look closely under the table you can see Hammy's back.

rusty

trolley
Originally uploaded by madabandon.

That's how I am feeling today, a little rusty and creaky. I woke yesterday with a bad sore throat. I still have it today, and I am feeling a little creaky in my joints and quite tired. I think that the crazy schedule that I maintained last week, actually for the last ten days or so, has taken its toll. Tonight I have to play a set with some pretty awesome musicians, and so I am just trying to reserve my energy for that. But all I really want to do is sleep.

home

messy bedroom (detail)
Originally uploaded by madabandon.

I have been spending a lot of my time at home lately. During the week I have been so busy with work that when free time comes I have little desire to go out. And my steady upgrading of my apartment continues to make it an increasingly comfortable and peaceful place to be. I have just purchased a new coffee table from DWR. It's actually a bench, but makes a perfect coffee table and will look great in my place, since almost all my furniture is simple, modern, and made of wood. This is special because it is the first piece of furniture that I have ever paid full price for, having cobbled together some wonderful stuff from warehouse sales, the sidewalks of Brooklyn, hand-me-downs, and such. I have bought the Nelson Platform bench (made by Herman Miller). It is a truly beautiful piece, one that I have wished for for years, and I decided rather spontaneously that for once I will not even try to be frugal. It will arrive later this week, or early next.

a rolling stone gathers no...

I am posting from my shiny new iMac. I bought it with part of the proceeds from my IRS refund. My old iMac was almost five years old!!! I of course was using my trusty MacBook more and more, but even that one is a few years old. This is a great computer. The large clear display is easy on my eyes.

The adage quoted in the post title certainly applies to me. I have been so incredibly busy lately that I hardly have time for much that is not scheduled. I don't mind a bit. Other than being tired, I feel like I am thriving. There have been some troubling issues in my personal life--worries and such--but they are balanced by my happiness with my work and the feeling that I am succeeding on a number of levels.

And when I do sit down to compose I do so with a sense of clarity and purpose that has long been hard to find.

still

hanging
Originally uploaded by madabandon.

I just heard one of my favorite sounds, one I don't hear very often. I live three blocks from New York Harbor. It is very foggy out right now. I just heard the low cry of a foghorn. I remember when I first moved to Brooklyn almost twenty years ago, and how, the first night I was in my apartment, even closer to the water than I am now, I heard them, and how exciting it was after four years in land-locked Chicago.

Who Am I?

• I travel the world to find great indigenous ensembles. I bring them into a recording studio and capture them doing their thing.
• I steal this work wholesale (although hopefully I pay the musicians well, and maybe give them royalties).
  
• I can't write a decent melody so I create a kind of numbing patter-song over top of the ethnic music in which I have wrapped myself.
• I release this as an album and the Starbucks-music crowd laps it up, buying hundreds of thousands of my recordings, allowing me to live in sumptuous style while enjoying a reputation as a pop-culture superstar.
• my initials are P.S.