Georgina on My Mind

I'm not sure when it was that I realized I had done Los Angeles. Or that Los Angeles had done me. Or maybe it in't the city, maybe it's graduate school. Or maybe it's the endless trauma of living eight time zones, one continent, and one ocean away from my partner, for a very long time. In September, we will begin our fifth year of living apart. It has not been easy.

The great Heatwave of '06 hasn't helped matters. Nor has the fact that after two master's degrees, four years of coursework, countless seminar papers, and plenty of qualifying exams, I am finally advanced to candidacy. My acronymic status says it well: Ph.D. (ABD), Doctor of Philosophy (All But Dissertation). That is to say, suddenly I am in the position of supposing to be a full-fledged academic, minus one more (longish) seminar paper. When this year's job market swings into gear, I can technically start participating. Not that I really will, but if for some reason my dream job were to open up, I know that I should apply for it. It's definitely a good feeling, to know this, but it is also a little alien.

So Mary and I spend a lot of time talking about the future, rather than the present. In a year from now, she will be finishing vet school, and I will hopefully be on a fellowship that will relieve me from teaching in order to finish up the dissertation. So we will be living together once again, and will have the rare opportunity to choose where we want to live, at least for the year. We're thinking of setting up house in Philadelphia. I'd like to be near NYC for research purposes, and her family is in DC. We both have friends in Philly, and my sister lives there at the moment. And it is one of the last great cities that is relatively affordable--those student loans aren't going to pay themselves off. We're both city people, and would love a chance to live in some nice little apartment in an old building in a funky neighborhood. We both really want to get a dog--she wants a Rottweiler, I want a lady Bulldog who shall be named Georgina.

I have another year in Los Angeles, to enjoy the sunshine, and the company of my friends that have made these three years so enjoyable. I think I will enjoy this year more knowing it is my most likely my last here. I'll know that I should go out and do all those LA things I have yet to do, and that I should savor that which I have been doing. And I know that I'll definitely look back fondly at my time here.

But I think I've done Los Angeles.

Sunset Strip Melancholia

Walking to go see a movie last night, I strolled along the Sunset Strip for the first time in awhile. It was very busy for a Saturday night. I once read somewhere that you can always chart whether or not an LA party neighborhood is attracting celebrities or suburbanites by the nights it was busy--celebs don't go out on the weekend, they leave that to people who have to work for a living.

The Sunset Strip was the first real bit of Los Angeles I saw when I moved here. Mary and I drove out here in the summer of 2003 without housing settled yet, so we stayed with a childhood friend of Mary's who lives in the valley. We arrive there at night, and the next morning, he drove the two of us into the city to look for an apartment. We drove over the hills through Laurel Canyon, which is a narrow two-lane road that goes up and over the Hollywood Hills, crossing Mulholland Drive and winding down through movie star homes and bohemian shacks. At the bottom of the hill, you are suddenly spit out onto into a forest of giant billboards, outlandish restaurants, hotels so ugly you know they have to be famous, and legions of scantily dressed plastic surgery nightmares.

Once I was moved into my apartment, just a block away from the Strip, our friend took us out for a night. We first went to The Standard, and it was everything I wanted Los Angeles to be. It is just a hotel, with a lounge in the lobby where you can...well, lounge. But it was like no hotel I had ever seen before. There was a DJ spinning next to the check-in desk, a thick shag rug, round pillows upon which to sit awkwardly while drinking your watermelon martinis, and a pool out back overlooking a view of the entire city.. And the pièce de resistance was a lucite box behind the check-in counter, in which sat a young woman in her underwear, asleep. Apparently, The Standard hires women to hang out in the box in shifts, just for atmosphere. It's still my favorite place to go to remind myself I live in Los Angeles.

That first year in Los Angeles, I used to walk the Strip a lot at night, when I was bored and a little lonely. It was always fun to watch the scene. I'd walk by The Standard, to make sure the woman in the box was still there. Next came the Saddleranch, a western-themed restaurant with plastic dummies hanging out the upper windows, and a mechanical bull that always brings out the worst in drunken celebutantes. There was the Hyatt, where Jim Morrison supposedly used to hang by his fingertips from the balconies, freaking out the crowds below, and across the street an outpost of the House of Blues, trying to imitate a rusty southern blues shack. And across from the House of Blues was the Mondrian, home of the Skybar. It's an ordinary square hotel, but completely surrounded by inanity. Two giant wooden doors, so enlarged they look like toys, hang in the middle of the driveway. The valet parkers all have to wear white painters uniform, complete with white caps. To get to the Skybar--I've been once--you have to go into the lobby and take an elevator up to the top. There, you have to make your way past a velvet rope, but once you do, you are in this truly bizarre outdoor lounge overlooking the city. There is a pool, lots of ferns, and plush mattresses scattered about so you can kind of lounge uncomfortably. (There is a theme here.)

Further down the Strip, you go through a section called the Sunset Plaza, which is pretty boring--a poor man's Rodeo Drive. Then you get to the rock club section of the Strip, home to the original Tower Records, Book Soup (the only independent bookstore for miles), the Viper Room (formerly owned by Johnny Depp, and the scene of River Phoenix's overdose), the Whisky (Jimi Hendrix used to live in the apartment above), the Roxy, the Rainbow Room, Shamrock Tattoos, the Key Club, and finally you are spilled out into Beverly Hills.

It's a strange place, the Sunset Strip. It's been a bastion of excess since the 1920s, when it was an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County that therefore was not policed by the LAPD. It became part of West Hollywood in 1985, and has been considerably cleaned up. No more prostitutes, and the drugs available for sale are now fancy party drugs instead of heroin and crack. And the really fancy celebrity party scene has mostly moved east to Hollywood.

But it is still an alluring place, and I never get tired of walking it.

Viola Dreaming

Inspired by a variety of factors--my recent return to the stage, a general desire for something meaningful in life--I played my viola yesterday for the first time in two years. The last time I took it out of its case was at the end of my first quarter here in Los Angeles, when for a seminar we put together a small amateur performance of a few scenes from an eighteenth-century opera-comique.

The poor old guy is in good shape, luckily enough. I couldn't find any rosin, and the A string I have on there is a cheap brand that I must have put on as a last-minute replacement, but everything else was just as I had left it. The same stickers and cartoons were taped up on the inside ("Stop the Violins!"), my trusty folding chinrest, the same mechanical grey pencil I used to make notes for much of my time at Wesleyan. There was even a program in the pocket of the case from the last "real" concert I played in, a premiere of a string quartet by Justin Yang, then a grad student at Wesleyan. It was an extraordinarily difficult concert, physically. One of the movements was almost forty-five minutes of holding one note in a long sustain. It was also an emotionally difficult work. The piece was about violence, specifically school shootings. Overlaid on top of our live playing was taped excerpts of interviews with survivors of the shootings. Some of them were very hard to listen to. Justin was quite religious, I recall, and I believe the last movement with the enormous prolonged sustain was supposed to enact catharsis of a sort. To be honest, it kind of worked. Rehearsals were difficult, but during that one performance I was entranced enough with the sound of the chord that I didn't mind the passing of time.

So anyways, back to my viola. I played for a little bit, although I made the rather stupid choice to launch into a difficult piece and was rewarded with instant muscle cramps, pains that were immediately familiar even if I hadn't felt them for a long time. My fingers still knew what to do, however. Some of the pieces I used to play, especially the older ones, are permanently burned into my muscles, and I don't think I'll ever be able to shake them. Other pieces, like the more difficult ones I worked on during the year I took lessons at Wesleyan, were a bit harder to pick right up again.

I don't know how I feel about being a musician and a musicologist. One of the things we musicologists always gripe about when we are together is the standard question asked whenever we tell people what our occupation is: "oh, so what instrument do you play?" In those situations, I often refuse to admit to playing anything, since describing myself as a non-musician is closer to the truth than calling myself a musician. Certainly I wouldn't now be a musicologist if I hadn't once been a musician. But part of being a musicologist is being intensely critical of music-making, especially your own. When my closest friend has two degrees from Juilliard, it is hard to say that I do anything similar! I'm more extreme than most about this, and certainly my own department tries to encourage us to continue performing, but the reality of the field is that few of us still consider ourselves musicians. We know too much to say that without irony.

It's a schizophrenic position. We owe our careers to our own history of performing, and our careers (for many of us) keep us from performing with any seriousness ever again. Our--I should say "my," I suppose--playing music becomes intensely private, as if ashamed of itself. An English professor draws upon a lifetime of enjoying reading to be able to....read! But musicologists draw upon a lifetime of performing music to...read.