Brian's quite remarkable blog of wonder.

I've been sick. Very sick. I'm not sure with what, flu I guess. Yesterday I should not have gone to work; the irony was apparent as I bussed hundreds of health care professionals from their workplace to their parking lots, as my head lolled about exhaustedly behind the wheel.

There's nothing like being sick to really take the edge off of you, to dim your emotions and null your ambitions. Not that I'm usually a very interesting person, but when you're this sick, you give up on trying to handle external stimuli altogether, you use as few words as possible to communicate to your friends and coworkers... and when you get home, you crawl in bed where it's just you and your clammy wet forehead, and your weird feverish subconscious thoughts.

That's what it was like yesterday. Today I feel better, and hopefully tomorrow I'll feel good enough to eat at El Ranchero and then go bowling.

My life has been eh. A lot of it good, some of it rather not as good. But I can't complain.

Megan and Liz have taken to calling me "stupid fuck." I think it started as Megan's response to me spilling beer once, and it just sort of caught on (ironically, spilling beer was very low on the list of stupid things I did that evening). I don't really mind it, it's always a little special to have a nickname, even an obscene and degrading one. But its use interests me. Lately I've been a "stupid fuck" for disagreeing about the quality of movies. It's no secret that I hate almost all movies that come out, but this is definitely not because I'm stupid. On the contrary, this is because I think about almost nothing but movies, I think about the potential of film as an art form and how almost nothing we see at our local cinemas realizes this potential. But I am starting to wonder if maybe I'm being just a little too cynical about movies. Star Wars: Episode Three and Finding Neverland, two movies which I have watched recently with my friends, both of them I have bitterly panned; were adored very widely by critics (see www.rottentomatoes.com, a somewhat useful and also somewhat flawed source for movie reviews). Am I indeed a stupid fuck? Or am I right: are critics so used to terrible movies that they'll laud any piece of detritus Hollywood casts in their direction?

To back up my point of view, here's a quote from director Alexander Payne, speaking while accepting an award for Sideways: "I think there may be a problem with a world in which making small, human and humorous films is 'an achievement.' It should be the norm."

I think I'm coming down with a cold or flu or something. This will be the second year in a row I've gotten some kind of virus on my birthday. I don't feel too good, and I should go to bed and try not to think about movies.

Samuel Barber. Leonard Bernstein. Pierre Boulez. Benjamin Britten. John Cage. Aaron Copland. Henry Cowell. Harry Partch. Cole Porter. Francis Poulenc. Alexander Scriabin. Stephen Sondheim. Each one of them gay or bisexual. Apparently the exception rather than the rule among twentieth-century composers.

Why were there so many good reviews? Revenge of the Sith is terrible, utterly terrible. I have never walked out of a theater with such a sour expression in my life.

Reasons why it's terrible? Two major things: Hayden Christensen delivering an unforgivably awful performance as Anakin, and George Lucas' incredibly amateur writing and directing. Christensen's "dark" acting was a simple matter of saying all his lines with a vague scowl and a monotonous, surly tone of voice. Lucas' writing was just characters basically having long dialogues describing the plot. When these two things combine, such as when Anakin and Padme are having lovey-dovey conversations, the result is comically terrible... literally, most of the audience was laughing at one such scene.

Thank God there will be no more of these movies.

This is quite possibly the first time I've ever said a mental "Fuck yeah!" to anything Donald Trump-related.

So, the issue of utmost importance to all of us is Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith, a movie whose midnight screening tonight at Cinema 6 I am lucky enough to have a ticket to (Jake waited in line all night)! I can't wait... this film is, like Anakin Skywalker, the "chosen one," in that it has a sacred and mystical duty to save the Star Wars series from overall terribleness. But unlike Anakin, we don't yet know if it will end up being a good movie or an evil movie. Will it be "more of the same: wildly flamboyant effects serving weak characters, bad acting and obtuse plotting" (Bruce Westbrook, Houston Chronicle)? Or may it "well be the best of all six Star Wars movies" (Rob Blackwelder, Splicedwire)? Tonight...tonight I find out!

I've had a very bizarre weekend. Everything is going screwy. I'm very stressed out. That's about all I'm at liberty to say. Sorry for the vagueness.

I'm more than a little annoyed at the weather. I can't really be happy unless I get a really nice day once in a while. And the weather here has been pretty bad. It's unsettling, as May is usually about the nicest it gets, and for the entire month so far the temperatures have been pretty consistently about 10-15 degrees below average. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen the sun for about a week. It's depressing the hell out of me. My bad I guess, for being so stubbornly in love with nature.

So here I am discussing the weather on my blog. Gott in himmel. All right, what else? Oh yeah, I've been composing. I was writing a bunch of piano waltzes, as you may recall, but I got bored with that project (I feel that stylized dance forms have the serious potential to be inane and boring unless realized by capable hands) so I am putting it on hold for now. Now I'm working on another piano piece, one which will be very different, I think, from anything else I've written. I like it already.

I still don't really feel like a composer. I just went over to the mirror and said, "I am a composer." I couldn't do it with a straight face.

I've also been reading a lot of Walt Kelly's Pogo comics. That, at least, makes me feel good.

Well, I had a great time in Minnesota. Even though I was only there for about three and a half hours, I felt bizarrely welcome. As I foresaw, it was incredibly weird listening to my piece played by real-live musicians... and also weird receiving tons of compliments about said piece (for some reason, I don't do well with compliments, especially sincere ones). It was utterly shocking to see John Jensen sightread the piano part almost perfectly, sometimes turning to me while playing to make funny comments... he's a delightfully crazy guy. Afterwards I watched from afar a rehearsal of the St. Olaf band, which was good. Then a trip to Chris's place to listen to some of his recent compositions, and finally the two of us went out for sandwiches and discussed things musical. It was very fun and very like old times.

Then I drove home in a thunderstorm and got lost in Mason City, then got lost again in Waterloo, where my car started freaking out and I had to overdraw my account to buy some motor oil. Despite this, I think I re-realized on this trip that there is absolutely nothing I like more than traveling.

So what of D60's song at No Shame? That went well enough, yes, but was too ill-rehearsed to be truly fantastic. We didn't record it, because A) we weren't able to get a mic for my vocal after all, and B) I realized when we got there that I didn't even bring a tape so we couldn't have even recorded a crappy version if we'd tried. I don't think I'm going to do any more songs at NS.

I am now done with my damn Kirkwood class! It's summer! Too bad the weather has been strangely crappy and cold. Much celebration is in order.

Tomorrow (today, technically) I'm driving to Minnesota. Chris has been working on "Mirth and Hilarity" with a pianist who is, I'm told, extremely good. So I'm going up to Northfield to check on the progess of things, I guess. Anyway, it should be fun and interesting and slightly terrifying. It's amazing: I poured hours into writing and revising a piece of music, and tomorrow, at long last, I'm going to actually hear it played by two brilliant instrumentalists. It'll be extremely weird to hear something that originated in my brain come out of other people's instruments. I'm slightly intimidated. I don't know if I'll have anything to say... They'll want me to say stuff (that's the whole point of me going up there), and I'm worried that the secret will come out that I don't really know much about composition. Ah well, I'm sure it'll be fine. And it will definitely be nice to see Christer again, not to mention getting out of Iowa City for a little bit.

This week will be the ultimate musical ego trip for me, as the next day (Friday) I'll be performing "I, the Undersigned" with my band at Best Of. I made a new arrangement of the song that features a more complex instrumental section and a slightly cooler ending. And we're going to have a microphone this time around, so the lyrics will actually be audible! Um, there's another scary thought.

One final thing: yesterday I learned of the death of an artist named Al Turner. He was a friend of me and my family, and an absolutely brilliant illustrator of sci-fi and fantasy stuff. I did an internet search for him and, shockingly, couldn't really find anything; I guess I always figured he was more well-known. Well, he committed suicide this week, for reasons that I don't know. I'm very depressed about this, as this guy to me was a beacon of artistic triumph... he had kind of a hard life, always worked factory jobs, but until about a year ago he never saw hardship as a reason not to do art. And when he found out I had dropped out of college in 2002 he wrote me a very serious letter to express his disappointment. I wonder now exactly how much Al was responsible for me pushing myself to go back to school. Anyway, this is all still sort of sinking in (as these things always do take some time to digest). I guess I'll have plenty of time to think about it in the car tomorrow.

Well, wish me luck!

It's been an incredibly excellent weekend.

Friday: dead week at No Shame. As is always the case with dead week, the show was pretty good; and there were three musical numbers by my new favorite band The Michael Tabors. Also, we found out that my Dirty Sixty song made it to Best Of No Shame next week. Lots of people go to Best Of! Wow! And then later we all went to Village Inn and afterwards talked to cool people outside for a long time in the cold.

Saturday: the Cambus graduation bar crawl, or in other words, tons of people don the same shirt and engage in dispicable drunken behavior downtown for the better part of a day, all the time spending money like it was the end of the world. Me, Jake and Liz showed up fashionably late and left fashionably early; and I think I emerged with the belief that nine straight hours of pretty much anything, yes, even drinking, can be pretty boring. Which is not to say I didn't have fun. Some highlights include: Jake and I deciding to smoke some cigars, purely for the visual hilarity of it, and later very much regretting it; Liz's perpetual hiccuping problem; and me giving an unsolicited violin lesson to a street performer. Then I felt bad so I gave him a dollar.

Sunday: I went to the UI Chamber Orchestra concert, and heard a crazy orchestral/electronic piece by professor Fritts, and Bartók's Viola Concerto (among other things). I'm now somewhat scared to be a composition major, because there's a chance I'd have to write scary electronic music about math. Later I saw The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's really good. Although I think in this case I can say that in most respects the book is better, I really enjoyed the visuals, particularly the Jim Henson Vogons. A good puppet creature is still much better than a CG creature, and I'm starting to think always will be. I kind of expected more of the characters to be British; I was somewhat disappointed with its mid-Atlanticism, but whatever.

So that was my awesome weekend. Come to Best Of on Friday and see my band!