This is the coldest March I can remember. An Arctic blast descended from the north and I'm freezing my dinglezoobies off.
"Dinglezoobies" is a little-known medical term that refers to regions of the body of which we are reluctant to openly discuss.
The temp dropped to 12 degrees last night (that's Fahrenheit, for those of you in Jeddah). I'm in Tennessee, which is supposed to be a southern (mild) state. Today's landscape was encrusted in ice worthy of a Shackleton expedition.
I stayed up all night to make sure the water pipes didn't freeze.
While babysitting with the pipes, I passed the frigid hours by transferring more of my old piano tapes to mp3 files.
An extremely rare cassette tape of one of my recitals got caught in the recorder and was ripped apart (one of many reasons why I've always despised cassettes). I'm fairly adept at fixing them, but it requires disassembling the cassette and splicing the tape together with surgical precision.
I was sitting on my bed, messing around with the ravaged cassette tape. The headboard of my bed has a bookcase and there's a heavy metal lamp on it.
Somehow -
the lamp fell and hit me right on the head. Unfortunately it didn't knock any sense into me - but it hurt like hell.
So, where is the musical accompaniment?
Here it is. I just made two more quick "videos" from my old (ancient) piano recordings.
I used to perform a lot of Bach when I was a music student, but I personally never liked to play his music on a modern piano. The harsh and overpowering mechanisms of the pianoforte (and the pedal) are in complete contrast to Baroque music. Bach should ideally be played on a clavichord or harpsichord.
I played a 17th century Dutch harpsichord when I was in college (at that time I was the only student allowed to play it).
My second musical selection is Polichinelle op.3 no.4 by Serge Rachmaninov.
Polichinelle is derived from the commedia dell 'arte character Pulcinella, which (in layman's terms) is Punch from Punch and Judy.
Confused? Heck, so am I.
Anyway, this is an early composition by Rachmaninov - he wrote it in 1892 when he was nineteen.
It's also an early recording by me. I recorded this in Los Angeles when I was either twenty or twenty-one.
