Claudia — Page 723

Piano Update

January 8, 2019 at 11:33 am by Claudia

I spent a little time playing the piano yesterday afternoon after Adam finished tuning it. Boy! I haven’t played for a while and I’m going to have to work on my technique. And I was tired, so I didn’t have a lot of patience. Nevertheless, how wonderful to finally have a tuned and repaired piano!

It does need more work, however. That’s the bad news. The springs to the dampers are not in good shape, so when it’s played it has a live sound that would never do for a concert pianist but is okay for me and the average pianist. I want to save some money to get that done in the future. It would involve Adam and his co-workers actually taking the piano to his studio to work on it. It’s very involved, detailed work that is best done on site. It would cost about as the same as the work we’ve just had done, which, considering the meticulous work involved, is pretty reasonable.

It will have to wait. In my heart, I want to have the piano restored to its full power. Adam said that since it’s nearly 80 years old, none of this was unexpected.

I’m very impressed by Adam’s meticulous work and I trust his expertise. We’re so fortunate to have found him! My girl is getting her beautiful sound back, slowly but surely.

Adam working on the pedals.

Aren’t pianos beautiful? I never see this bottom section. Some dust removal was required.

And Adam did play some jazz – a version of “Stella by Starlight” – unprompted. I have it on video but I don’t feel comfortable sharing that on the blog. I don’t have his permission. It made me very happy to hear him play our piano.

This is my music cabinet, found at auction right after we moved here.

Mostly sheet music, with some dollhouse wallpaper and artwork that we wanted to keep flat.

And I played a bit of this little ditty.

I’ve never named the piano; it’s just my piano/Grandma’s piano.

We watched another screener last night, The Wife, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. I don’t want to say much about it if you haven’t seen it. She is wonderful, as is Pryce (who I got to see onstage many years ago.) Both of us had real problems with parts of the screenplay and with plot devices that didn’t serve the story or the actors. But Close is simply lovely and powerful in this role and I can see why she won the Golden Globe.

We’re waiting on more screeners – very slow getting to our mailboxes this year. My friends who are SAG members are having the same problem.

Happy Tuesday.

Monday Morning

January 7, 2019 at 8:14 am by Claudia

Must get a move on this morning. My piano innards are coming back home this morning!

I have always been a lazy morning person. It takes me a long time to wake up. When I had to work 8-5 for many years, it was a challenge. I could do it, of course, and did. But one of the perks of having more free time is the opportunity to laze around in my pajamas, reading a chunk of a novel, flipping through Instagram, writing a blog post, making a second cup of coffee and sitting on the sofa next to my husband as we have our morning chat.

So, as strange as this may seem to some of you, the fact that the piano tuner is arriving at 9:30 is throwing me off my game! Silly. In the midst of reading and checking my email, I realized that I had to get moving!

We watched the Golden Globes last night. We don’t do that as a rule, but it was fun! We were pulling for Roma and Rachel Brosnahan of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and were happy to see them win. And seeing Carol Burnett and Dick Van Dyke was wonderful. Burnett raised some interesting points about the state of television today – her show would never be done now. No one would spend the money on it. There’s too much competition from shows that are on what seems like a thousand different networks and devices. Don and I often say that there’s too much. On one hand, a lot of people get work and that’s good. (But they’re not paid nearly as much as they used to be. Trust us on that one.) And there’s more variety – more options. On the other hand, “too much” can dilute the power and quality of the work. But it is what it is and there’s no going back, unfortunately.

Food for thought.

Last night’s sunset.

Happy Monday.

From Across the Pond

January 6, 2019 at 10:41 am by Claudia

You know how much I love this bookshop, which is truly my favorite bookshop ever. It’s the stuff of my dreams, my dream being living in the same city as this treasure, better yet, the same neighborhood, where I could stop in two or three times a week and peruse the shelves and talk to the incredibly knowledgeable staff and buy wonderful books.

I follow the shop on Instagram and the other day, they posted about a book they had been recommending to their regulars. Here’s the post:

“A recent favorite of ours has been ‘Something of His Art: Walking to Lübeck with J. S. Bach’ by Horatio Clare. Joyful, intelligent and articulate, Clare has a clear eye for both near and far. He has a most wonderful knack of looking at a woodland track on a high ridge, with its owls and goldcrests, or at the margins of a light industrial landscape, and then conjuring its early C18th century ghost to walk peacefully before the mind’s eye. In beautiful, rhythmic, resonant sentences he describes walking along the route that was taken by Johann Sebastian Bach, who, as a young man, walked one autumn 300 miles north from Arnstadt to Lübeck to visit the aging organist and composer Buxtehude. Clare also did a short series about this last year for BBC Radio 3. This is another beautifully produced book from Litte Toller Books in Dorset, with a collage by Ed Kluz for the jacket. We absolutely love this book and have been having huge fun selling it to unsuspecting customers these last weeks. One came back a week later in a state of ecstatic intoxication to take everything we have by Horatio Clare – about a half a dozen…”

I ask you, dear readers, how could I resist? It sounds absolutely wonderful. “Ecstatic intoxication!”

I decided that I would order a copy from John Sandoe Books. When I was there, I saw a stack of packages wrapped in brown paper, with their distinctive mailing label, all ready to be sent out in the post – I even took a picture of the stack – and I could think of nothing more wonderful than receiving a package from them in the mail. So I emailed them, telling them of my visit in October and my love for their shop, and my interest in the book they had written about. They responded – or rather, Christopher responded – with some suggestions as to methods of paying and with an immediate “I have reserved a copy for you.” All so personal and lovely in the way that only the British can be. (And the way only an independent bookseller can be.)

I suspect it will go out at the beginning of the week. I told Don that I’m almost more excited to see the package than the book!

I’ve decided that I will do this once or twice a year; order a book that has been published in Britain and is not yet available here; something recommended by the wise and extremely well read staff.

A present to myself.

In other news, we have started to receive screener copies of movies and series that have been nominated for Screen Actors Guild Awards. We watched Beautiful Boy last night. It’s a powerful movie about addiction and the toll it takes on the addict and his family. It’s beautifully done. Timothée Chalamet is extraordinary in the title role. Steve Carell is wonderful and touching in the role of his father. The whole cast is pitch perfect. I didn’t know that it is based on a true story until the end of the movie. I recommend it highly – it is riveting.

In the past week we’ve seen Roma (I can’t say enough about this brilliant movie) Bird Box, and Beautiful Boy – each of them incredible.

I’m going to run an errand or two (we need more drinking glasses after breaking two this week!) because I’ve been stuck in the house for four days and I need to get out!

Tomorrow: the piano parts return!

Happy Sunday.

Piano Update

Monday Morning

From Across the Pond

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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