Feb/100
Matchlock
A symptom of the illness..
Williamsburg, VA, has a serious problem. A dire problem. A pancake house problem.
Seriously, this town has way too many pancake houses. You see a pancake house, you’re like, “Aw, cool. That’s fun.” Pancake houses seem vaguely Nordic to me, like something you’d encounter nestled in a cove in the Alps on your trek through Europe, and so when I saw two pancake houses I was like, “Wow! Jackpot! Which one do we hit up first?” But by the time I counted eleven pancake houses within three miles of each other, I realized that I had entered another world. A syrupy world. A world that doesn’t know when to stop building pancake houses.
Jess and I celebrated our ninth Valentine’s Day together. This is, of course, ridiculous, seeing as it’s hard for me to believe that I’ve even been alive that long let alone in a relationship for that long, but here we are. Jess has always been naturally gifted with this “holiday,” even though we both regard it warily, like mice in the garden watching the prowling house cat, as a painfully commercial day full of artificial pressures to spend money. This conviction hasn’t yet translated into not celebrating it – like many Americans we are vaguely against it and still participate – but we’ve gotten to the point where price-hiked roses, store-bought chocolates, and teddy bears made in China (all three of which I got Jess for our second Valentine’s Day – I’m a winner) just don’t really mean much anymore. I take this as a good sign.
Feb/100
Billy Mayerl Rocks
Had to share this epic video, courtesy of Scott N. Here is one of my heroes, Billy Mayerl, making all other pianists look like hacks and liars.
BILLY MAYERL AND HIS CLAVIERS
Fun fact: Flying across those keys on the right is a very young Marian McPartland, the famous host of Piano Jazz on NPR!
I play a number of Billy’s pieces, but no one alive can play them as well as he did. That said, I really, really want to try that play-two-pianos-at-a-time trick now 
Feb/106
The Seagull Shuffle
Seagulls are really bad dancers.
I’ve been working on a couple new tunes lately. I had a relative dry spell there for *cough* six years *cough* but am happily back to writing music on a pretty regular basis. And, unlike when I was a teenager, I’m actually writing things down this time.
Part of this latest effort has involved going back to tunes that I wrote when I was a teenager and sprucing them up, updating them with new harmonies and ideas. It’s not like anyone has heard those old pieces, and I’d rather turn them into something I perform than just have them sitting in the past forgotten. Besides, I can do a lot of things at the piano that I couldn’t do then, which helps.
Oh, and I have some idea of how music works now. That helps too.
And so, with that said, here’s my latest tune. I’ve been writing a bunch of meaningful pieces – Theresa Novelette, Marty’s Blues – and I thought it was time I went back to my roots and wrote a piece of beer drinkin’, cigar smokin’ ragtime.
Oh, and it needed to be named after a bird. Don’t ask questions.
I give you “The Seagull Shuffle”:
Feb/100
The Boxing Reindeer is Dead
The head is the best part.
From my step-nephew:
The boxing reindeer is dead. He got crushed in Tyler’s book bag. But, you get one of his body parts in memory of him. Please, be safe.
Best wishes,
Tyler
I cannot be the only person who recognizes the genius of my nine-year-old step-nephew.
Literally, he may be one of the funniest, quirkiest people on the planet. I aspire to this.
Feb/100
The Great Pipe Nothing
24 inches of snow fell in 12 hours! Ah!
The entire reason I came to Pittsburgh this weekend was to perform in a theater organ concert with Bryan Wright and the Boilermaker Jazz Band. That was before anyone knew Pittsburgh was about to get 24 inches of snow.
Needless to say, my concert got canceled faster than a Joss Whedon series on FOX.
I was really looking forward to it, too. I was nervous – I’m not a theater organist and was about to pretend to be in front of hundreds of people – but I was also excited, the same kind of excited I get every time a new “Star Wars” project is announced: blind hope that it’s going to be awesome, and stark terror that it’s going to be terrible.
But after the sting of that passed, and the calls were made to family and friends that we wouldn’t be getting together after all, and after a day spent shoveling hundreds of pounds of snow out of Mom’s driveway, not to mention rescuing a few stranded motorists unlucky enough not to have new tires on their car (and who were, I assure you, surprised to see someone with Virginia license plates so deft with a shovel), I was shocked to find myself so energized at 11 PM that I had to go for a walk in the snow-blanketed neighborhood to get myself anywhere near ready to sleep.
Welcome
Welcome to the homepage of musician, writer, and filmmaker Martin Spitznagel!
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