bear

On Election Night, I went out to pick up groceries and ate an ice cream sandwich (cardamom ice cream with chocolate cookies) for dinner and then ignored the outside world as best I could. hyounpark was in San Diego for work; Elana invited me over to her friend's house, and I just couldn't with the world. I basically hibernated until Wednesday night, when I had to drag myself out for tech week for Carmina Burana.

I wore my What a Cluster! t-shirt; appreciative comments all around. Our director opened things up by leading us in Lean On Me a cappella. Reminded us that we, as artists, as musicians, were going to be called upon as "first responders to the soul." Read An Artist's Response to Violence aloud:

We loved [John F. Kennedy] for the honor in which he held art, in which he held every creative impulse of the human mind, whether it was expressed in words, or notes, or paints, or mathematical symbols. This reverence for the life of the mind was apparent even in his last speech, which he was to have made a few hours after his death. He was to have said: “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason.” ...Learning and Reason: the motto we here tonight must continue to uphold with redoubled tenacity, and must continue, at any price, to make the basis of all our actions. ... Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

And then we made music.

Afterwards, hyounpark and I walked towards the BART station, and at the light, a sedan with the windows down, passengers hanging out the windows, pulled up next to us, absolutely buh-last-ing FDT. Had a little defiant dance party on the sidewalk, a moment of community, and as the light turned green and they drove away, I felt a little better.

Lather, rinse, repeat for Thursday (honestly, tech week couldn't have been better timed for all of us in need of something to focus on and not doom-spiral over), and then Friday night concert. Someone on TikTok posted the first movement of our performance of Carmina Burana; their first time at the symphony. And they got to see a professional symphony conducted by somebody like them; see a chorus conducted by somebody like them. The classical music world has the potential to be a hell of a lot more inclusive; this is proof the efforts are worth it.

Since then, it's been reassuring to see people, commiserate, talk about next steps, what was getting us through the current moment. Even so, as I put things to try to look forward to on the calendar, it all feels so tenuous. But I've also been reminded of the value of being "900% me," as Kat put it. Showing friends the ridiculous platter of pastries we've been working our way through all week (thank you Paris Bakery, Alta Bakery, Ad Astra Bread Company, and Krispy Kreme); noghri remarking on the presence of donuts from that last iconic bakery with "you still like those?" Me: "I blame my Southern husband for continued exposure, but yes!" He, smiling, "I still remember how we met all that time ago." Me: "Yeah, my reaction made quite the impression, hahaha." So then I had to tell the other friends present the story of how I introduced myself to noghri, which is basically (seriously, I didn't manage to LJ this back then?! ugh, past self, why so coy!):

Setting: elemmire7's going away party, July 2003
Me: *perusing the snacks table, wondering what to munch on next*
*the doorbell rings*
noghri: *enters, bearing a box of Krispy Kremes, which were so new to Boston at that point they'd only recently opened up their Wellington location*
Me: *spies cute guy entering with said box of Krispy Kremes, promptly vaults across the room and lands firmly in front of him* "You brought Krispy Kremes! You're cool!"
noghri: *stares at me, a total stranger, at a loss for words*

Everybody hearing this story for the first time: "... yep, we can visualize *and* auralize exactly how this went down!"

So, yeah. Being 900% me in the topics I've posted about to Bluesky, since that seems to be where people are migrating for shorter-form conversation and staying in touch with each other at least one step further removed from the control of billionaires; so far I have talked about indie bookstores and transportation cycling and choral music. Being 900% me in digging into Thanksgiving menu planning - eyeing this pumpkin basque cheesecake, but also considering a persimmon custard tart with hojicha meringue? Kristina Cho mentioned it in her Instagram stories earlier this week; the recipe hasn't been posted yet, but it sounds right up my alley. Being 900% me in pondering, as Jackie asked us at coffee ride this week, what is my actual role in my communities now and in the future.

Because all I really have control over in the big picture is being true to myself, so.

Masking was up at Summersings last night - still under half of attendees in a full house, but nearly all of us volunteers were masked up. One of them commented to me, "I may not like masking, but there is a lot of covid running around out there right now, why not take this basic precaution so that my extroverted ass can keep hanging out with people in person?"

Me, afterwards: "DAMMIT I MISSED MY CHANCE TO MAKE THE FAC EAS PUN WITH ANOTHER CHOIRISTER. And we're even doing the Mozart Requiem tonight!" Admittedly, I'm only about to start my second full season with this choir, still sussing out who is amenable to saucy sweary puns and who do I need to at least keep things PG for.

(Mozart went well; it helped that most of us had sung it before. The Lauridsen Lux Aeterna was new-to-me and lovely and I hope I get a chance to sing it in a more rehearsed context next time.)

*

Seeing Noah Lyles win his 100m dash a couple of days ago, then watching him end up in 3rd place on his 200m sprint this morning, not only barely making it across the finish line, but witnessing him collapse. "I wonder if he's having an asthma attack; I know he's mentioned having asthma in the past." Watching the (unmasked!) medics working on him while he was breathing hard, being taken away in a wheelchair. Hearing him announce, now masked up, a couple of hours later that he'd tested positive for COVID a couple of days ago? And how quiet everyone on the broadcast is being about dozens of athletes' unexpected withdrawals from events, especially the highest-profile names of people expected to medal? Or those who, like Lyles, tested positive and competed anyway? (40 positive COVID tests from the Australians alone?! But at least someone's counting there, what about the other countries?)

Feeling like the house of cards is going to collapse any day now.

Bay Area friends! We've got another concert coming up with Oakland Symphony Chorus a week from Friday (February 16, 8 pm at the Paramount; The Artist As Activist), and we'd love to see you there. The Symphony will be performing Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No 6 and Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No 5, and we'll be joining them for the world premiere of Carlos Simon's Here I Stand: Paul Robeson.

And then in April, OSC will be collaborating with Pacific Edge Voices for their The Sound Garden of Love concert at St. Mark's in SF. On the program: Elgar's Lux Aeterna, luminous and crystalline; it's new to me, but I'm looking forward to floating up there, supported by close harmonies. And to my utterly ecstatic joy, a piece with which I am quite familiar: Vienna Teng's The Hymn of Acxiom. Yes, when I found this out, my squeals could be heard clear across the bay. :D (I know! I still need to write about her Freight concerts in December, but suffice it to say for now that I am glad those shows have become part of my end of year rituals, grateful for every year she's managed to find a way to come back since my first time in 2019, or done an online concert the years she couldn't.)

There is something very now-ish about taking a song created with electronic voices based on one person's voice, and extracting it back out to a group of human voices to perform with all of our quirks and foibles, and the power of community enabling a group performance where we as individuals will need to take breaths unplanned, will make mistakes, but will make art, beauty, together. It feels zeitgeist-ish, similar to how I've written 100,000 words' worth of stories in the last six months, as if I'm rebelling against the mainstream embrace of large language models as authors, algorithms as intellects, corporations as people. Now-ish, even on the accelerated schedule of technology changes, because the forces Teng described in the early 2010s have had more than a decade to entrench themselves into our lives.

*

Sometimes, the advertising algorithms get stuck in a rut. Like Lily Diamond, I, too, have been inundated with lingerie ads in my social media in the runup to Valentine's Day, now barely a week hence, and I'm mildly curious if it's the usual spray and pray targeting feel of most ad campaigns, or if any signals I threw out being a person online have contributed to so intensely refocusing the ads that I'm being shown.

( (someone is gathering every crumb you drop )

But what's being advertised even more avidly to me at the moment than even the seasonally predictable lacy red and pink and black trousseaux? These Friends of the Boundary Waters x Hippy Feet Merino Wool Hiking Socks.

( they are cute ... )

( look, I know I tend to evangelize about wool socks, but also 'now we possess you, you'll own that in time'? )

(o how glorious, glorious, a new need is born)

*

Later in that piece, Diamond confesses:

Aside from feeling bullied by an ostensibly omniscient algorithm that's supposed to know me and anticipate my needs better than I do myself, I feel a bit let down. It feels good to be known. I've made many a joke about my phone being a pseudo-surrogate boyfriend, but it's the algorithm we rely on to feel understood psychologically, spiritually, capitalistically.

( (someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to (say just the right thing and) show that you're understood) )

(leave your life open, you don't have to hide)

And yet I'm posting this publicly, anyway - rolling the dice, seeing who will read, engage. (Hoping for who, rather than what. Betting that silence means what.) Going on four years of having our social life circumscribed by circumstance, our social media interactions bound by ever tighter limits.

Posting this here, while knowing that everyone is tired of creating Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of, and burned by the corporate mainstream options that are tolerated enough, if limited in other ways. And, too often, too worn down by the demands of twenty-first century life to conjure up the activation energy to engage, either. (Who has time for 2000 words of my rambling observations?) Yet I'll still link to this on the mainstream social networks where I know people, because. (I guess with Bluesky opening up this week, I ought to look again and see who's made digital homes there, on Threads, on Mastodon. I gave up last year because, again, Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of.)

*

I've also been reading Rebecca Solnit this weekend. Her latest for the London Review of Books, In the Shadow of Silicon Valley, weaves together a lot of loose threads. It's long, but worth the read. What caught my attention most was how she talked about the social pandemic both predating and coexisting with the current medical pandemic, a crisis of extractive technology impeding human connection, exacerbated since the first stay home orders. The loneliness Diamond expressed above, too.

( (let our formulas find your soul) )

The piece ends with even Solnit sounding weary, she of changing the story from despair to possibility.

"I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 and used their wealth to undermine its diversity and affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets and push its politics to the right. They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.

I used to be proud of being from the San Francisco Bay Area."

Valentine's Day will mark 4.5 years since hyounpark and I arrived (back) in the Bay Area. It is a markedly different Bay from the one I left for college; I am a markedly different person in my 40s now from who I was in my teens. But even with the 13-month interruption of staying home curtailing our plans to establish our Bay-based social life, see old friends more regularly, make new friends? The best parts of being here have been the relationships we're forging and reviving, the community we're finding our way into. And among our community, among the people we know, we're all trying to make things better for all of us.

We're all a chorus here, doing the work, needing to breathe at points when the sound must go on. Staggering our breathing as individual singers so we can sustain the sound as a whole. If you're feeling like Solnit here? Breathe. To end by quoting Vienna Teng again: "We've got you."

22 years, and it will always feel a little unreal.

Here in the Bay Area, unless you're a politician with a national profile, or somebody with strong ties to NYC or DC, it's just another day. I've been home for four years now, but having spent nearly two dozen years before that in the Northeast, with that formative event shaping so much of what came after? Makes me feel out of step with everyone around me today, disjointed. And I don't mean in a "patriotic" flag-waving kind of way; it's the collective trauma and grief from that day spread unevenly across the country. My east coast expat expectations running up against time and distance, the sudden political swell of the flags on this date awkwardly angering me as always but there's a part of me for which it still feels like recognition when the rest of the country has moved on to the point of forgetting?

I don't jolt awake at 5:46 am Pacific anymore, three time zones west of where I spent my 20s and 30s. And even so, 8:46 am Eastern usually meant I was on the T or at my desk, at least if it was a weekday, taking a moment, seeing others sharing that ambient awareness and pausing, too. I would jolt awake if it were a weekend with a sense of having failed, somehow, illogical and ridiculous as that is.

The last couple of years, when I've had words for these pandemic-era reflections on 9/11, they've been more quietly despairing than they have been in awhile. I don't know how much of that is the unevenness of grief despite distance in space and time, versus what we're now calling the polycrisis; last year, I described it elsewhere as "because we've had so many more awful things since [then] piling on at an exponentially accelerated pace." The year before, "it feels like we should have been able to do more and better since then."

A friend of mine described the things that have happened to us since then on the anniversary as a kind of "layering;" there've been good and bad things, but most of them on a personal level rather than a societal one. That the grief has remained the same, but life has gone on; trees shedding their leaves, burying the grief in these other larger layers of living, but then suddenly the wind shifts, and the grief is exposed all over again, no matter how long it's been.

In Boston, there was always this emotional undercurrent on the anniversary - half the planes left from our airport; everybody knew at least somebody who was there, and most of us knew many people directly affected, close friends and family. For someone living in the heart of Red Sox Nation - literally, I was living four blocks from Fenway Park at the time - I knew an awful lot of transplanted Yankees fans (and one contradictory die-hard Mets fan), most of whom came up to Boston for college and then never left; many of whom were there on the day. (I even dated one of said Yankees fans for awhile; I like to joke that when we broke up, that was what reversed the curse a month later, you're welcome.) But it also meant the survivors' guilt was real, was always closer; that the sensitivity around it was that much sharper than for others whose ties to the events were more attenuated.

It was an impossibly beautiful late-summer morning, then, clear blue skies. The day before, she talked about seeing a rainbow from her office on the 99th floor of the towers, right after a short but powerful burst of rain.

Today, there was this.



And now, my fellow soprano has been gone longer than she was here, silenced prematurely a lifetime ago; even her faded unofficial memorial sticker in the Union Square subway station now removed. Singing along tonight with Water Night, one of the last songs we sang together; with the Faure Requiem which I sang that fall with hundreds of others to honor all the dead. Dies illa, dies irae calamitatis et miseriae, dies magna et amara valde ... dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem.

Five years ago, just before 9 am, I puttered off to the bath; it was a hot September Tuesday morning and I didn't have to be at work until 10. I'd been chatting with theducks and kudzita and several others since the sun had woken me earlier, golden dawnlight through my window warming the walls and drawing me out of bed hours before I had to be at work.

( that day, content warning for everything 9/11 )

I went back to work later that week; I joined a choir again a few weeks later. I sang at various memorials; at one of them, I got a phone number on a napkin from a boy for the first time ever. If anything, I travelled more that winter, spending time with those I loved in faraway places. I went down to New Haven, twice. I went home for Christmas, then up to Portland and Seattle to visit West Coast friends, and rang in the new year in Vancouver chez pukajen; on the way home, we stopped at a steakhouse, and thanks to prime_meridian and ascian3 and sleipnir, I finally understood what delicious steak could be. I started a long-distance relationship with a guy in DC thanks to geebee_x, and flew into National multiple times, becoming quite familiar with the DC flight restrictions; he actually made the first visit, on a chilly January winter weekend; returned for Valentine's Day a few weeks later; continued to come see me. All of us seeking connection with those we loved; all of us freshly reminded how fragile it all was. And at the end of that winter, I visited danialindenberg in New York (with Ingrid and Angie and Marvin), and we met up with Michelle and Peter and went down to Ground Zero to pay our respects, and for the first time, I stood at the base of the Towers-That-Were, and gazed up into the sky, following the shafts of blue light as they trailed high into the clouds, imagining what could have been.

so i looked up and out the window and there were these gorgeous cotton-candy clouds floating along outside, stained pink by the setting sun.

and outside, there were people, cherishing the warmth of a summer evening, but more so than usual. it's in the air - no one wants to say anything, make any direct references that might taint the spirit of tonight. celebrate togetherness. remember innocence. silently hope that everything remains peaceful, but shake the worry out of your head before it can affect things, for now.

but never, ever take things for granted.

that's why they're out now, strolling with their babies, picnicking on the grass, sitting at cafe tables for hours. relaxing. being neighborly. telling the stories that the clouds are writing. all this, activities typical to a summer evening - but with a keen subtextual urgency to it.

tomorrow is for mourning, remembrance, and peacefully honoring the people who died a year ago, and the way of life that died with them. tonight - tonight.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
--john mc crae, in flanders fields

just stuck at work. i should be home in the next 45. network's been down all day so i had no way to communicate i'd be coming home late.

anyone who's near copley or who WENT near copley is fucking nuts. luckily ingrid and yamuel are safely away.

i spoke with vic down in New Orleans, and the deans came to his dorm to warn minority students not to go anywhere alone for the next few days, so as not to make themselves targets. and it's not limited to the south--hate calls have been made to arab-american organizations in california, and quite frankly, you couldn't pay me to be out of doors by myself after dark right now.