Fasten your seat belts, folks, this is gonna be a long one - it's been a while...

Picking up where I left off in the last entry, Georg's (and his friend Verena's) visit to NY was fun! They spent the first two days wandering about on their own because I had to go to Philly on Friday around noon (more on that later), but Sunday I brought my car back to NY with me and we drove down to Ocean City, NJ. The weather was kinda bad during the 2 hr drive, but once we got there it was actually really nice. I put up a few pictures [here]. The change of pace was nice for the two of them after two days of Manhattan-sightseeing and for me too after a couple days of studying. After two more days of sightseeing (them) and studying/auditioning (me), we met up again on Wednesday in the city for coffee then went to their hotel in Secaucus, NJ, where we had a simple dinner - bread, cream cheese, turkey, ham, smoked salmon, and beer - watched TV (season finale of Survivor, which was also my first episode), and played Uno. Around 11pm or so, they had the idea (since I had my cello with me) that I should play something, so I did, somewhat tipsy, and kinda tired...it sure wasn't my best that I played that night. Then, farewells, and off I went to drive back to Philly; Georg and Verena flew back to Austria the following day.

In the meantime, I had my auditions for the Theory Master's program at Mannes, which went well...as expected, I have to make up some eartraining and figured harmony playing over the summer, but nothing impossible since I, as the eartraining professor keeps saying, "have a brain." But the faculty panel liked my writing samples, and the piano exam went surprisingly well too - they were impressed by my Brahms Rhapsody even though I made note mistakes up the wazoo...good thing too that they asked me when and how I learned the piece. Anyways, the acceptance packet came in a couple days ago, now I gotta decide if I want to add a third year of paying $24000 tuition or not...hopefully they'll give me some scholarhship money.

Since it just happened to pop into my head: I've completely revamped my picture section. It's kinda neat: I just create a new folder, dump my pictures in, create plain text files with the picture comments and it's all automagically (c Anthony Cowley @ the GRASP Lab at UPenn) pulled together into a new album and added to my [Photos page]. More power to PHP!

Speaking of Anthony Cowley. My former co-worker at the GRASP lab is going to be my co-worker once again! I paid the lab a visit that Friday when Georg was here to see off another former co-worker at the lab, Rahul, who got a position in Germany and talked to my former employer, and it turns out they are in need of manpower for the summer. I got sick of waiting for the guy in the IT department at Mannes (twice now I've run into him and had conversations about the job, and both times he ended up telling me to email him so that he could schedule a time for me to meet the other administrators, only to never reply to my emails). So, once again my summer schedule changes: Monday - Friday in Philly doing Penn job and teaching (plus rehearsals), Sat & Sun in NY for R&R and church gigs sunday morning. Phew.

Which reminds me of the next thing...my little vacation to Bushkill Falls, PA two weekends ago! Actually, it was a church retreat organized by Hye-woon's church, and they needed a cellist for the concert they had planned. I didn't get paid anything, but I didn't have to pay for the trip unlike everybody else. The concert on sunday night was kinda fun - lots of really good singers! I also got to play a movement of a Bach suite which went pretty well. The next morning was full of various activities - some folk dancing, a three-legged race (my leg is still badly bruised up from that), some word games - though the fact that everything was in Korean made things a bit harder, particularly the word games :P. Luckily, Amos, the choir conductor's son, stuck around with me and acted as my translator. He's finishing up his senior year at high school, so he's only 2 years younger than my brother. In fact, talking to him almost felt like talking to my brother...he's a good kid. In the afternoon we made a trip to the actual Bushkill Falls, the "Niagaras of Pennsylvania." Well, not quite as spectacular as the original but much more scenic, with trails leading past all the different falls (a total of eight) and through the surrounding woods which we explored in a 2 hour hike. A concluding barbecue put the finishing touches to a relaxing weekend. Pictures [here]!

This past weekend was the first weekend of student recitals at the Bryn Mawr Conservatory...three of my students (the three that are left now that others have either moved or temporarily, in one case at least, stopped lessons) had their performance on Sunday. The more advanced one I heard from the school's director did very well (though a bit rushed), and the other two that i did catch did well too, especially since it was their first time ever performing at a recital. A little shy and nervous, but who isn't. It's a nice feeling to see that all these weekly trips back to Philly are paying off!

I guess that pretty much sums it up. I think I'm missing a week somewhere that I can't seem to remember anything about other than traveling back and fourth between NY and Philly. Tomorrow morning it's back to NY for a rehearsal on Thursday and also possibly an eartraining lesson; Friday afternoon back to Philly to the GRASP lab at Penn, then a performance saturday evening and back to NY afterwards. Hopefully once I start working at Penn things'll settle down and I won't have to make like 10498015924 trips between NY and Philly every week.

So Brian, of [4F fame], and I met up today in Koreatown for lunch at this $9.99 all you can eat Sushi buffet. Stuffed myself full with all sorts of traditional and not-so-traditional (some concoctions were downright strange!) rolls, tempura, and other dishes...then we walked around Koreatown a bit, found this really cool-looking modernly designed bakery/cafe place, so Brian decided to get a bubble tea. We walked in, the waiter asks us if we want it to go or if want to sit down. "Sitting down sounds good" we thought and said, so the guy led us to a table. While walking, we noticed that there's trees(!) inside the cafe and that each table had this squareshaped recess cut out in the center filled with white pebbles. The whole cafe just looked really cool. So Brian orders a Taro bubble tea from the menu (which was basically a squareshaped plate of glass with the menu enclosed in it - you'd half expect it to be a touchscreen device), even though it's a whopping $6.99...the waiter turns around to me and I tell him "I'm good, don't want anything." "Excuse me, but the rule here is you have to order something to drink if you sit down." Well, fine, I think, look over the squareshaped plate of glass menu, and realize that none of the drinks are really any cheaper...and grudgingly order a Strawberry Milk Bubble tea. "They better be worth 7 bucks" Brian and I thought. Well, here's how they looked like:

Yes, pretty to look at, and yes, pretty yummy, but COME ON, 7 DOLLARS?? We decided that it must be the white pebbles (see in the picture?) that we were paying that premium for...In any case, we hung around for a good half hour, making bad jokes about bubble tea (they should be paying me royalties for selling bubble tea - the Taiwanese invented it after all!) - we thought we might as well enjoy our time there, since in all likelyhood we'd never be back. Maybe I should have argued with the waiter that as Brian pointed out on the squareshaped plate of glass menu it said that "only customers ordering drinks may sit on table" and I, of course, was sitting at the table, not on it. Or, maybe I should have made use of that hard-earned right and actually sat on the table :). Now that would have something.

SEVEN BUCKS!!! That's almost as much as we paid for the buffet lunch!!!

I decided to try this RSS thing and create a feed for my homepage. It [validates]! If you want to be kept up to date about my website (and who wouldn't?? ;)) just subscribe to my feed at [http://hsushibox.cjb.cc/myrss.rss].

It's 1 am, I just got in from Philly from a performance - a joint concert of three different choirs for which I was invited to perform in the Guest Performer's section of the program. My brother and I played the first movement of the Brahms e-minor sonata...yes, yet again. But it's a piece worth having as your signature piece :).

Plus, it's an interesting way to measure one's own growth as a musician...Today's performance from a technical aspect wasn't necessarily the best I've ever played (the concert took place in a church without A/C so the air was as hot and humid even the end of the concert around 10pm as it is outside during the day), but from a musical, interpretational view I thought this was by far the best of the three performances. That's where I think I've made most progress this year, understanding issues in interpretation, that in music, to much more a degree than I previously believed, there is no right answer. 90% of the artistry in music I now believe lies in formulating and articulating an interpretation that is sound, interesting, and most importantly, unique and memorable. The technical aspects are still important of course, but they serve to convey the mental picture of the music in the musicians head. Anybody with proper training and some talent can play a piece of music - but to make the music your own, that's where the difficulty, and hence the artistry, lies.

And that's why today's performance I think was a successful one - tonight's performance was entirely the result of hours of sitting down with the score of the music with my $100 USB MIDI keyboard, analyzing form and harmony, observing motivic relationships between various passages, attempting to bring large-scale cohesion to the music AND recognizing and articulating the smallest details and nuances...tonight's performance was 100% my own interpretation. Tonight, I was not merely a cellist; tonight I was a musician, an artist.

Some cold, hard facts about what's been keeping me busy (and keeping me busy they have).

Started work in the GRASP lab at UPenn again. Great to be exercising my left brain again - I miss programming. The main project for the summer is to put togeter an educational robotics kit for Microsoft, based on [ROCI] and a robotics hardware platform developed at UPenn last year called the RoboticBus. Undoubtedly, I will end up being pulled into other related projects as well, as all coders in the lab inevitably do - the other day, Vijay Kumar, one of the bigshot profs in the Engineering dept, came up to me and said "Hey Oliver, I already talked to CJ about securing some of your time!"

Soccer! Yes, soccer again finally, with a group Jean Griffin (who as visiting prof taught the [3D animation course] I took at Swarthmore and is now pursuing a PhD at Penn) referred to me. I couldn't find my cleats, so my usual advantages oof speed and quickness turned into a double edged sword this time as I found myself slipping all over the place. My last slip happened on the last play of the day - by which I scored the game winning goal :P.

A long time table tennis partner and old friend of mine in Austria dropped me an email totally out of the blue recently after being out of contact for a good 7,8 years now. Doing very well, with future career pretty secured and all. He had an incredibly inspiring story to tell of his older sister (whom I also know from old table tennis days) who several years had an operation on her back which resulted in her being rendered paraplegic. However, turning to paraplegic table tennis, she's since then become Austrian champion and is currently ranked #9 in the world and is aiming for the Peking Olympic Games in 2 years!!

Saw Batman Begins. Awesome. Probably one of my favorite superheroes, even though he's not really a superhero. So many things about Batman just seem to resonate with my own beliefs...though who knows, perhaps 99% of the people out there think that too after seeing this movie. Perhaps if I feel like sharing it, I'll ramble a bit about this topic in the next couple days. In any case, I'm going to see it tomorrow again, on IMAX :P.

Got a free ticket to the NY Philharmonic concert tonight, a performance of Mahler 6 with Lorin Maazel. I've never heard the piece before...and found it exciting in parts, but also found myself somewhat lost in other parts. That's the kind of piece that I need to study in more depth before I can appreciate it. I liked the 1st and 3rd movements though. Interesting tid-bit of information: the program notes said that the second theme in the first movement - the "Alma theme" in which the composer sought to capture the essence of his wife - is almost note for note a quote from a now-forgotten opera written by Mahler's predecessor as conductor at a theater. The words to that tune in the opera: "God keep you, it would have been too lovely; God keep you, it was not meant to be." I will leave the research into Alma Mahler's life and character and what her husbands and lovers thought of her to those who are interested and spare those who are not.

Browsing on [Sport.orf.at], and Austrian sports news site, I stumbled on this [table tennis news item] which brought a pleasant surprise in the last sentence: The article mentions one of the Austrian players named Daniel Habesohn in the men's divison of the Brazilian Open already having lost and being out of the tournament. Back when I was still in Austria, I used to play against this Daniel Habesohn at tournaments and championship games!! Not only that, but I'd beat him too :P (he was really talented though, always competing against players in older divisions than him).

Just an interesting thing that happened yesterday at the IMAX movie theater where Frank and I saw Batman Begins. After the movie, both of us felt the call of nature aka the bladder and consequently tried to find a men's room to take care of business. Since there was nothing on the first floor, we decided to look in the basement where unbeknownst to us there were additional theaters (ours had been on the third floor)...so we came off of the escalator and turned around the corner when somebody from behind us yelled "Excuse me, Sir, your ticket?" So we explained to him that we were looking for the bathroom, and he pointed us in the right direction.

As I then commented to Frank, I thought it was interesting that to the ticket guy it must have totally seemed like we were trying to sneak into that theater and that "Actually, we're looking for the bathroom" was our bail-out line. Just goes to show you that once in a while, the most natural explanation ("natural" meaning "the one we've been wired to think of first") can be wrong and the truth seemingly farfetched...

Of course, who knows, maybe the ticket guy didn't think that at all, and it's just good ol' cynical me who's been wired to suspect thusly.