Aug/103
Artist in Residence
Smells like victory.
Wow, I have some amazing news.
Every year, the Scott Joplin Foundation invites one musician to be their Artist in Residence for the year. This person is in Sedalia, MO for a week doing a Scott Joplin/Sedalia history outreach to local schools. The list of people who have done this reads like a who’s who in ragtime, including my mentor, friend, and all-around musical genius Tony Caramia.
And guess who is the Artist in Residence for 2011? THIS GUY. [points to self]
It basically breaks down to this: 11 schools, 5 days, 2 mini-concert/sessions each morning and afternoon for a total of 20 during the week, and then the week is capped off with a benefit concert of some sort on Friday night. I’m the youngest person they’ve ever asked to do it, which is awesome. The hope is that I’ll be able to connect with the kids, which shouldn’t be hard considering I’m already plotting how to turn Lady Gaga into ragtime.
I first went to Sedalia in 1998. I was 15, and I had to sneak onto a piano when my dad was in the bathroom in order to get a chance to play. Now I’m the Artist in Residence. Artist! With a capital “A”! That’s pretty awesome 
Jul/101
Heavy Is the Head (That Sells the Kanmuri)
...they painted that handicapped sign after I parked there...
My Toyota Camry is nearing the end of its useful life, and I’m kind of freaking out about it.
It’s not my first car. That honor goes to a 1995 Ford Thunderbird that my dad and I bought in Winter Park, FL in 2000. It’s not even my second car, a 1998 Honda Accord I bought from my sister. Still, this Camry and I go way back, and in some ways losing this one hurts more than the other two.
I’ve got this thing, that I contracted from my late grandmother, about objects. A sane person looks at a Toyota Camry with 209k miles on it and goes, “Okay, you’ve put $4500 into it in four months. There’s no end in sight for potential repairs. It’s time to stop putting money into such an old car.” A Martin, however, looks at that sad jalopy and sees his sixteen-year-old self sitting at the Toyota dealership on a sunny summer afternoon laughing with his brother, convincing his father to get a rear spoiler and a sunroof “because that will make it the sports car you should buy yourself,” all while his young brother-in-law sighs at the wastefulness of wood paneling around air conditioning vents not realizing that this memory, and a thousand others made and not yet made, would forever be taken away from him months later by a tractor-trailer’s unsecured tire careening into his car on the interstate. To this vision a sane person goes “Mur?” but that is just one of the moments that come to me when I look at this car, one of a hundred pictures in time that weren’t developed by Kodak but capture a moment in radiant color. And now it’s coming time to let that car go.
Apr/101
Whiplash
Nowhere is there a more happier crew.
I could seriously change my last name to “McFly” with all the time-traveling I’ve been doing. So far this week I’ve been in the present, nine years in the past, ten years in the past, forty years in the future, and three days from today.
As Marty would say, “This is heavy.”
Jess and I left DC on Friday night and flew to Orlando for the first time since I graduated from film school there in 2001. Our mission? A five-day excursion with her family to Disney World. Criminal as it sounds, I only made it to Disney World one time (for all of 6 hours) when I lived in Orlando. A classmate of mine dated a girl who worked at the park and got us free tickets, and we went to MGM Studios for one of their Star Wars Weekends. Those of you who’ve been there know that six hours at Disney World is like standing in the lobby of the MOMA and saying you’ve done the museum. It doesn’t really count.
We landed in Orlando at 10 PM, and from there we caught “Disney’s Magical Express” which, frankly, is neither magical nor express. The park is 15 miles from the airport, and we got to the hotel at 1:13 AM. We were on the Disney bus as long as we were on the airplane. Something is wrong with this picture.
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.
Jan/105
The Top 90 Moments of 2009
Here’s a tradition carried over from my old blog, Prayer to the Sun. At the end of every year, I make a list of the top moments in my life for that year.
Wow, it must have taken some cajones to put him on the cover of anything.
The list is not about my favorite moments, nor my best moments. These are the top moments, the “Hitler as Man of the Year 1939″ moments, the ones that changed me, moved me, taught me, inspired me, humiliated me.
They are mistakes, triumphs, failures, wild successes. Some are comprehensible by anyone, others belong only to me. They are not listed in any particular order, only the one in which I think of them.
If I left out a moment you think should be here, don’t be upset. Exact your revenge by leaving a comment!
Martin’s 90 Top Moments of 2009
- Finding out on a conference call, while in the process of cleaning out Jessie’s grandfather’s house, that my employer had been sold to a company nearly 20 times its size.
- Shooting the SSCC Golf Invitational video with Mark and friends, including arriving an hour early to the course to secretly film the epic opening with Mark.
- Mark’s epic drive at the SSCC and then chasing evil SSCC squirrel up the hill at Cacapon Resort.
- Having a friend say “how dare you” to me in anger and actually mean it.
- Selling out of my CD, “Tricky Fingers,” halfway through my concert in San Antonio.
- Getting a fire started at the campsite in Shenandoah using wet wood, an air-mattress pump, and the fabled “awkward catamaran” log structure I invented.
Dec/090
Rosie’s Corner
Being interviewed made me feel like a star...
Early in 2009, I had the privilege of being interviewed by Dr. Rosemary Hallum for her “Rosie’s Corner” article in “The American Rag,” a periodical devoted to traditional jazz and ragtime. Rosemary has interviewed many, many people, including many of my favorite ragtimers, and it was a surprise and an honor when she contacted me and asked if she could profile me for her July column.
What started as a simple interview blossomed into a wonderful dialog about everything from religion and politics to the muses and everything in between. I think we found in each other a fellow traveler and fellow seeker, and our extended conversation, held over the course of a few months via e-mail and phone (and including a few Google searches of me, I think, as some bits of my resume snuck in here!) was one of the most enjoyable parts of 2009.
Here’s the article in its entirety. Warning: This is one of my most self-indulgent posts ever, which is really saying something. You might want to grab a cup of coffee, a pillow, and an in-flight magazine because damn, can I talk, but enjoy! I think she captured my voice very well. Thanks again, Rosemary, for making me feel like a star.
IT’S EASIER TO ENJOY HIS MUSIC THAN TO SPELL HIS LAST NAME: MARTIN SPITZNAGEL
by Dr. Rosemary Hallum
Human beings are remarkable, each one unique and different from the next, from their fingerprints and body structure to their thought processes, talents, and interests. This makes my writing work very intriguing, because I get to interview many diverse people from sports stars to cooks, from composers to performers.
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.”)
Aug/090
Happy Birthday (to me)
Good God, I’m 27.
It wasn’t until I saw all the candles ablaze on top of the cake, which was barely large enough in diameter to contain them all, that I realized I’ve done the birthday thing more than a couple times now.
Needless to say I extinguished them with extreme prejudice.
I could have signaled airplanes with my birthday cake...
My birthday was Monday, although the actual day passed by in a blink. We got breakfast with Dad at Bob Evans, and he brought candles to put in my pancakes and we all sang loud enough for the restaurant to hear.
The afternoon is a hazy blur in my memory, probably because I spent it trying to recover from my ragtime-induced flu.
In the evening, Mom hosted a birthday party and made a delicious dinner of roasted potatoes, turkey, homemade stuffing, homemade vegetable medley, and to top it all off, a three-layer chocolate cake with white icing. We had a bunch of people over to celebrate, and I got some lovely gifts, including a Michael Jackson CD (sweet) and a stylishly bangin’ new tie (which is not something I ever buy myself).
The celebration has continued throughout the week. One of the advantages of getting older is that your birthday can be spread out over multiple days, unlike when you’re a kid and everything has to be reliant on The Party. We went to dinner and a Pirates game tonight, courtesy of Mom. On Friday, Jess’ family is taking us horseback riding at night. I’ll return to DC on Saturday, where there are hopefully a few birthday cards and gifts waiting for me.
Welcome
Welcome to the homepage of musician, writer, and filmmaker Martin Spitznagel!
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