The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Well, I was just sitting round the apartment on my same old butt, eating crappy Indian takeout, looking longingly at the box of wine my friend C sent me, etc. etc., when I decided to do some due diligence regarding my exciting assigment as vlogger for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. In case you don’t know, the YouTube Symphony will be performing at Carnegie Hall on April 15 and there will no end of excitement there and symphonic synergy smoothies and virtual musical orgasms and DJs and free naked snowboarding lessons and everything your heart can desire, so you should buy your ticket here. (Can I have my check now?)

Anyway, as you can imagine, I was very curious to see who got picked as the pianist winner. You can go look for yourself at this link. The pianist is by his own admission not primarily a “classical player,” whatever the heck that horrible phrase means, but there is something very likable about the playing.

For some reason I found his video very moving. Something about the Italian sunlight–or is it a spotlight?–streaming in from the undisclosed above; something about the beaten-up upright, cornered against the wall, guts exposed … But maybe most affecting is the dog in the corner, slumped expectantly. I admire how the video begins without people, with just piano and dog; who knows, perhaps only at this moment of being filmed they realize they are both beasts?

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Samuel Beckett, 1932, trying to describe the poems he’s written that seem better to him, less “constructed”:

I cannot explain very well to myself what they have that distinguishes them from the rest, something arborescent or of the sky, not Wagner, not clouds on wheels; written above an abscess and not out of a cavity, a statement and not a description of heat in the spirit to compensate for pus in the spirit.

Clouds on wheels! Snap!

Without introduction, Mozart’s K. 533 leaps into being:

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… and one of the many things one could love about this idea is that it says thanks but no thanks, I don’t really need or want to be harmonized.
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For reasons that cannot be fathomed, I will be a member of the vlogging squad covering the YouTube Symphony Orchestra “summit” in New York City. Yes, I am working for “teh Google.” 

(Sell your Google stock immediately.)  

I hope you will find my first foray into video interesting, if not at the intellectual level (???) perhaps of Think Denk.  What I like about this debut is that it compresses an astonishingly small amount of useful information into its languid four minutes.  Within that limited time span, it seems to commit, or at least yearns to commit, every possible mistake of videography, often flagrantly, even immorally, with total disregard for the health and sanity of the viewer.

While appearing to be merely an naïve self-introduction, this video, I aver, contains all sorts of anxieties of identity (am I a pianist? a blogger? a YouTube commenter posing as a pianist? a pawn of corporate projects? etc. etc.), and simultaneously, intertextually, attempts to violently transgress even the basic expectations of the self-made video genre, so that while contravening these in a pose of writerly but sexualized constraint, it points a shaking, trembling finger at the caffeinated camera, which is really a laptop, if only to say “Why?”