A Tale of Two Writing Websites

I have been writing on Substack recently. It's so easy as far as including videos and images and such, and I would like to keep doing that.

However I always enjoyed this site and I want to keep updating it.

There was always the feeling here that you could write anything and not overthink it. I started this out as a way to talk about my Leonard Pennario writing project. When I kicked off this blog, he was still with us.

I used to mention Pennario every day in the blog at some point or another. It was the little hook. 

My book about my months in California with Leonard Pennario is 400 pages however the people who have read it have told me it is a great read. It is not your normal book about a concert pianist, I will tell you that. I welcome all comments about it and all feedback.

I am working on a new book, of his friends' recollections of him. I think it could round out my narrative. This is an easier project. Heck, I can just look back on this blog and remember all the people I tracked down and spoke with. 

Perhaps go back to writing about Pennario on this site?

That is a thought!

In addition, here are some things I have written on Substack recently:

How I want to bring back the Buzz column. This is the column I wrote for something like 15 years in The Buffalo News. I still have that voice -- how could I forget it? I started writing the column yesterday and it was just like hopping back on a bike.

 My stroll through the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, now known as the AKG. I am sorry, I prefer the stentorian old name. I like the name Albright being spoken. Letters aren't as much fun.

My dream where I saw Franz Schubert and he was really handsome.

Got to write, you know?

Born to write!

I guess the important thing is ... 

Keep writing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sleepless at the computer

A lot of today went into working on my Leonard Pennario project.

Come heck or high water I am going to have it done and out by this fall. I will have something out by then anyway. It might be more than one volume.

There is one thing I can do that always gets me psyched and that is listen to him. Today I tapped into Pennario performing the Rachmaninoff Second. 

The only trouble is, it is amazing and distracts me.

Just the opening chords. Did any other pianist get them perfect like that? Every one builds on the one before, so perfectly.

Pennario!!

He is just so great!

Well, I got through some work anyway. I should mention this work began at 5 a.m. I was up early! I could not sleep and so I got up.

May I say that sleepless that I was I managed to work for two hours without spilling coffee all over the computer keyboard as Howard did this morning when he sat down at it after a full night's sleep. You should see me trying to type this now. Not pretty!

While Howard was working on his stuff and spilling hs coffee I went for a walk in the park to wake up. The sun was out!

There are worse times to do editing, which is pretty much what this has come down to, than when you have not had much sleep. You are a little impatient and tend to cut stuff more willingly than when you have slept soundly. Do not worry however. It is like clothes bound for Amvets. They sit in the car trunk for a few days to give me time to reconsider.

Things that are deleted may always return.

In the meantime things are going well. It helps not working this huge job, you know? You have a little more time to think. Also, I have to say this, I love to write about music. I love to draw too, and I do not have to cut that out, I cannot. But I can do both.

Speaking of music and art is that not a dandy portrait of Pennario on the cover of that album?

The maestro!

I can hardly wait for the book!

On the Second Day of Christmas...

Today I celebrated the Second Day of Christmas by writing and addressing a few Christmas cards. It is not as easy as it looks!

Now I see why all these years I never get around to sending Christmas cards. Leonard Pennario used to send Christmas cards and if he could find time to do it, I can, you know?

However.

Where do you find people's addresses these days? I have some close friends who, I do not have their addresses.

Not only that but, my slogan in life should be: "It is never time for the artist to lift her brush."

I am never done!

I am making touches on the card I am mailing. I drew and painted them myself, which does not help things along. My sister and I began drawing our own cards to send to each other and that started it. This is one design of about 20 I have --

... and now I have become obsessed with decorating envelopes. These people I am sending cards to will be so embarrassed! The whole neighborhood will notice these cards.

On the other hand ... on the other hand ....

I do not devote huge portions of my life to this. I had to work today. I had to do other writing. Doing cards is something you can do with shards of time here and there. When Howard is on the computer. When he is watching a video of some pianist lecturing you on how to play Schubert. I can listen while doodling around with this stuff.

Late at night is also a good time to do this.

You will go to bed with visions of sugarplums!

The Predawn Biographer

The sunlight this morning feels good! I was up too early ...

working on my Pennario discography which is just about done, except for I am checking all kinds of things, footnoting all kinds of things, dotting my t's and crossing my i's.

Crossing my eyes, haha.

Can you tell it was an early morning for me?

Today was all about the Debussy Preludes. After a couple of hours of work verifying this and that and exploring this and that possibility (and the music world wonders why this book is taking me so long)  I allowed myself to get on Google and ask: How do you get through a day without much sleep?

It is amazing the questions you can ask Google and I get a kick out of that. All kinds of other people have invariably asked that question before you and the question pops up before you are even done typing it.

When it comes to answering this particular question, there is not much I have not heard of. They always tell you to drink plenty of water, which annoys me, I don't know why. There is just something about that "Drink plenty of water," that makes you just want to go, shut up.

And here is what else kills me. Almost every list of suggestions you find tells you to nap for 20 minutes.

To nap!? How? Where?

We have a ladies' cloakroom at work with a couple of couches. Sometimes you walk in and someone is asleep on one of them. But I could never do that. I would be way too self-conscious and would never be able to drop off. Plus I do not like walking in and finding someone asleep there. Here you are just trying to hang up your coat and change out of your boots, and you are tiptoeing around feeling like this intruder.

And the cloakroom is a better option than is enjoyed by most people who work in offices.

I guess you could fall asleep at your desk  ...

... but why not just wear a sandwich board announcing that the wheels have come off your life, you know?

End result, as we say here in Buffalo: No nap and will these people please quit suggesting it to us.

Wow, I have suddenly realized something! I have a suggestion of my own to add something that actually works.

Kvetch!

I have been sitting here complaining and I realize that all of a sudden I feel awake and alive.

That is the secret!

Two gentlemen of Buffalo

I am always getting excited about stuff that I write but over the last couple of weeks I was really taken up with this story I got to do about walking in the footsteps of Buffalo's two dead presidents, Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland. Above is a painting of me working on the story and neglecting the rest of my life.

Remember my picture of the Cleveland statue? It is surely the best picture ever taken of a statue of a president. Cleveland at Buffalo City Hall in the middle of a snowy night, taken while I was slip-sliding around on that icy marble. Whoa. Whoa!!!

Cleveland's last words are on the back of that statue. He said: "I have tried to hard to do right."

I also like the first words he said when told he had the nomination for President.

"By Jove, that's something, isn't it?" Cleveland said.

It is a treat to have a president who drank beer in the very bars you and your friends drink beer in, you know? And so honest, and such a hard worker.

I also got to admire Millard Fillmore too although it was my friend Michelle's job, not mine, to write about him. I admire how Fillmore came up from dirt. All these years I had assumed he was blue-blooded and wealthy, with that name and those patrician good looks. Queen Victoria is said to have admired Fillmore's manners and to have pronounced him the handsomest man she had ever seen.

I was shocked to find he came from this miserable poverty, that he had to steal books just to learn to read. To go from that to impressing the Queen of England with your looks and your manners! It is amazing.

Apparently it used to bother Fillmore, and you can see why, when everyone was saying Lincoln was the first president born in a log cabin.

"What about me?" Fillmore would say.

Anyway, good man, and although he is criticized harshly in some quarters for passing the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act, he declared personally that slavery was abhorrent to him, but it was something everyone had to endure until the Constitution could be amended. Historians give him credit for keeping the Union together at a crucial juncture. I could go on! My point is, it is not as simple as seen on the History Channel.

As I said to the History Museum the other day, I am available as a speaker on the subjects of Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland.

In addition to, of course, Leonard Pennario.

Escape to Kmart

Today because it was cold and I felt I needed a break I treated myself on the way home to a trip to Kmart. Kmart is always fun.

I always start out the same way, walking in without a cart and figuring I can always get a cart later. I always end up needing one and going back. Today that happened to me when I found jar pumpkin pie spiced candles for $1.50. They were these big candles and I am allowed to burn candles when they are in a jar. Something like six of them were left and being a piggy Buffalonian I had to buy all six.

Go back to Start! Do not collect $200 but do collect a cart.

Other things I scored at Kmart: 25 cent packages of index cards, 100 cards a package. I bought two but you know what, I might go back and get more. I burn through huge numbers of index cards in my Pennario project. I have these files that go back to when I was in California with him. They are still in the same boxes and I keep stuffing more and more cards into them.

There is one card sticking out of the box right now that I am looking at: "1952, 9/12, Letter from Vengerova." Isabella Vengerova was one of Pennario's teachers.

There are a couple of cards after that about Capitol recording sessions and then you get this card: "1952, November. 'Bwana Devil.' First feature-length 3D movie." Why that is important is a long story and you will just have to wait for the book. Lucky for me I am not writing about some boring pianist, is all I can say for now.

Anyway, index cards. Evernote has nothing on them. I have 200 new ones now and might go back and get more.

I also got a couple of packages of pencils for a quarter each. I put a pack on Howard's desk as a surprise. I like getting him office stuff.

And, oh yes, I got a cell phone charger. That was what I went in for!

I went into Kmart just for that and I came out with all of this.

Oh well.

I needed it!

I confess .... about my desk ...

Because of my clean desk I have become the confessor for people who sit at desks.

They tell me how clean or cluttered their desks are! I guess I am an extreme case because mine was so messy, and so people feel comfortable confiding in me.

One thing I used to do with Leonard Pennario, when he asked me to, was occasionally help him straighten out his desk. We would go through random papers and try to figure out what could be thrown out. Most of the time we would give up and just end up sitting there laughing about something. But the time was not wasted because it led to things I might not have found out otherwise. For instance if I had not happened on the correspondence from the Motion Picture Academy I would not have realized that he voted on the Oscars.

Speaking of voting, I remember we worked together on his absentee ballot for the government election. Haha, no privacy with me around! Pennario was fun that way. He didn't care what I looked at. I remember that now with such affection.

I am happy to say I have a letters organizer that belonged to him. It used to sit on his desk and hold papers and now it does that on my desk. It is just this cheap little thing but I like it because it reminds me of those afternoons, sitting around with him.

Looking at my clean desk I am haunted by something I once heard a comedian say. I can't remember who the guy was -- he might have been famous, he might not have been.

He said:

"There are some people, ain't nothing on their desk ...

".... Ain't nothing in their head either!"

So true.

Out from under the Net

Son of a sea cook, my home computer has been on the fritz and keeping me away from the Web log! Well, the computer is not entirely on the fritz. I could use it for my book.

End result, as we say here in Buffalo, I got a lot of work done! That woman up above in the picture? That was me yesterday! At least that was what I felt like.

It made me wonder if Leonard had reached down from the sky somehow and flicked a switch.

No Facebook for me!

No Web log!

No YouTube! Luckily I have my stereo.



 It is a learning experience, I will say this, not to have the Internet. You realize how often you use it, how easily you can be lured onto it. Every other paragraph I was re-reading, I would think of checking something, of looking for something, and then -- Doh! No Google!

No eBay, so I could not check to see if a certain publicity picture had surfaced. Hey, you never know.

And I am not undisciplined. I actually have pretty good self control. Sometimes I laugh at myself, when the Internet is not down, because I want to look for something and I deny myself. "Overruled," I will say. "Not necessary."

And yesterday it felt kind of good to have my computer as uncluttered as my desk.

But occasionally something does come up you want to check. And -- so primitive! I am thinking of checking the spelling of someone's name, or something, and ... what do you do?

"Maybe I have this book downstairs," I caught myself thinking.

A book! What a concept!

I have my teacher Stephen Manes' vintage Grove dictionary. I treasure it even though it pre-dated Pennario and so he is not in it. So there is that.

Yesterday I was wishing I had the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

So primitive!

Allergic to allergy pills

About every 10 years, zut alors, I get allergies. Something turns up floating around in the air, some peculiar pollen maybe, and it gets to me.

That happened yesterday. The night before, my eyes had been itching, and yesterday morning it was driving me crazy. Eye drops didn't help. Nothing helped. I was desperate to make it stop. So I did the dumbest thing. I took allergy pills.

Nighttime allergy pills! As in, "Don't make any plans."

"Why did you take those?" Howard said. "They'll put you to sleep."

"Too late, I already took them," I said.

Did I ever regret that!

I had to go into the office and I had a dozen things due. Plus two interviews! La la la la la la la la.

The bright side was, my eyes had stopped itching. But I was drugged. This one guy I was interviewing on the phone asked me a question about did I know so-and-so and there was just this silence while I sat there. I had to say something so out of desperation I just told the truth.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I have these allergies and I made the mistake of taking these pills. I am afraid I am kind of a zombie."

This was a comedian I was talking to and he did not laugh! Oh well. Pennario would have thought it was funny. He used to laugh at my jokes, one of the many things I loved about him. I was not technically joking about the pills but it was kind of funny, you know? Well, I thought so.

One of my co-workers at the paper took this picture of me.

Luckily as in the case of Nyquil, these pills are like a parking meter. Eventually your time is up. A few hours later, around 1 p.m., I started coming out of it. I was on the phone interviewing my second interviewee and I felt the fog lifting. Gradually I awoke. And my eyes began itching again.

Systems normal! Well, almost.

I have learned from this mistake! No more Glenn Gould behavior.

No more pills!