Nov/090
Martin On the Radio
Weird to think of me being transmitted...
Woo! Texas Public Radio has posted my “Classical Spotlight” interview on their website. You can listen in by clicking here.
I am shocked at how slow I actually managed to speak during this. Wow. You should have heard the interview I did for David Reffkin on “The Ragtime Machine” in California – I sounded like a ragtime machine gun. Even I couldn’t tell what I was saying, and I’m me.
In this TPR interview, I almost sound like a coherent, intelligible human being. Many thanks to John Clare at Texas Public Radio for offering to do the interview, and for supporting the efforts of the San Antonio Ragtime Society.
Also, if you’re reading this post in the future and the link above no longer works, you can access the MP3 file here:
Nov/090
The Texas Rag
I'm in Texas so much, they named a street after me.
Just finished a whirlwind musical weekend in San Antonio, TX, having gone there to participate in some events on behalf of the San Antonio Ragtime Society. Not sure what it is about Texas, but I spend more time there than any state other than Virginia and Pennsylvania. I’ve been there three times this year already: twice in May, for a wedding and the San Antonio Ragtime Festival, and now for this latest ragtime adventure.
Texas and I get along well. I love food. Texas serves entire cows as dinner portions. I like hats with teeth. So do Texas businessmen. I like trucks with giant horns on the front of them. Sadly there are none of those in Texas, but I did see one from Arkansas. Do they even have bulls in Arkansas? Epic.
I arrived in San Antonio late Thursday and stayed up late chatting with my host Jimmy, playing the piano, and catching up. It literally felt like I was just there, now that adulthood has months hurtling by faster than hitchhikers on the highway, but the bed was comfortable and much needed, as I only got 5 hours of sleep before I had to arise at an ungodly hour and go perform at a local high school.
I haven’t performed in a high school since I was in high school over [mumble] years ago, and for some reason I was expecting to go on stage and see Don Maser out in the audience laughing at my velcro sneakers. Fortunately, I just look like any other adult to these kids, and my fears of having to go cry in the bathroom were unfounded (I did anyway for old time’s sake).
Nov/092
Acceptance
I got accepted into George Mason’s M.A. in English program.
This makes me happy all over.
Normal people would be happy about this. I, however, am stressing out.
Let’s face it, it’s an M.A. in English. It qualifies me to do two things: 1) What I’m already doing, only with $17k in loans, or 2) Get a PhD. I work with folks who have Master’s degrees in the humanities, they make less than I do, and all I have is this Bachelor’s degree and a pair of Lucky Brand jeans.
I also read this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today and it made me feel like a wrinkly, shriveled candy wrapper.
I really am happy to have been accepted. I applied because a M.A. in English is sort of what I envisaged myself getting when I was asking the whole, “What’s next?” question after I graduated Pitt.
It opens the door to a high-school teaching position (my wife’s fantasy for me), as well as potentially puts me on the professor track. Also, the Cultural Studies program at GMU is top-notch, one of the best in the country, and Cultural Studies is basically the field that someone pulled out of my imagination and made real (“You mean I get to study the connections between the different artifacts of culture and what they say about us and the meaning of it all? SQUEE.”)
Nov/090
IKEA+Old Macs=Squee
In 1996, my mom bought our first modern PC. It was a Gateway 2000, back when Gateway was a cool company and the year “2000″ added an aura of excitement to everything. The computer had a 120Mhz Pentium processor and 16MB of RAM, which is roughly the same processing power as a rickety abacus, and ran the sleek new Windows 95. Pimp! For 10 years afterward I built my own computers and fixed other people’s computers and used PC’s exclusively.
Until, that is, I got my first Mac in 2006. The years since have been a kind of computing utopia, seated under the Bodhi Tree of Apple Enlightenment. I drank the Kool-Aid, took the red pill, signed on the dotted line, swallowed the lure, and have never, ever looked back.
Which is why this guy’s basement gets me wetter than a squeegee at a gas station.
This guy is single.
This Flickr album contains 40 pictures of the coolest Mac basement ever. This guy – anyone who buys a pallet of computers on eBay just to put in his basement is a hero in my book – found a way to display all of these old Macs into the penultimate nerdvana way. Look at the iMacs! You can’t imagine doing this with your old beige box, can you?
Just thought I’d share, since the world needs a little more color. Mmm…
Nov/090
On Friendship
Friendship comes out of nowhere, grows inexplicably, and has the potential to delight and devastate you like nothing else on the planet. If friendship was a plant, it’d be illegal and we’d have to buy it from the guy who stands outside the fence by the tennis courts.
I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship recently. It’s kind of a weird thing, if you ask me. The ideal friendship involves two people who share an equal amount of respect and affection for each other, but if you think about this, it’s crazy talk. How can you possibly expect someone with an entirely separate set of life experiences, hopes, goals, moods, and dreams to be able to reliably love you in the way that you need them to? It’s like relying on an electric motor with two magnets that may or may not attract or repel one another on a given day. When it runs, great. But what about when it stops running?
Friendship is celestial
Some friendships grow slowly over time, a planet accreting into a sphere under the gravity of shared experiences, while other friendships, Big Bang Friendships, explode into a galaxy in the first few minutes and feel you feel like you’ve found a shard of yourself. No matter how they’re formed, both take work to sustain and, if left to wither untended, sustained only by inertia and the memory of hotter days, you wake up one day and realize they died. The magnetism is gone.
Welcome
Welcome to the homepage of musician, writer, and filmmaker Martin Spitznagel!
Any questions, please e-mail me at martin@spitzfire.com.