Naming

My yogurt came out great. I never tire of waking up to see if the sourdough rose or the yogurt incubated overnight. I like to have friendly bacteria working hard having fun making instant and slightly-drunken families in my kitchen while I sleep.

Today is Giuseppe Verdi's birthday. I love opera and I used to be convinced I had been adopted because I loved opera and sauerkraut with equal passion and nobody in my family paid attention to these things but then I saw my mothers feet in sandals and her toes looked like mine so I had to drop that theory. Only her toes looked very angry. Recently I could see my biological father's face in mine when looking at a photo of him at age 18. I met him long after I could spot any resemblance but I tried hard to find one. He had blue eyes but not much hair when I met him. He was 6 foot 4 with a long face and clumsy like Dick Van Dyke in the TV show. He had a deep radio voice. He made the bloop bloop sound effects for Sacramento tomato juice. He was the original ad man with three advertising wives, real glammy lookers. I got to see photos from my half sister of the old advertising studio days in 1965. Amazing to see the old TV cameras and women in stilettos and strapless dresses smoking cigarettes. He trained as a teacher and did that for years, and then wrote kids books and when he was 18 he was in the army and before that he was a lifeguard at a summer camp back when my mother first met him. She was 16. He was 18 and looked like a Greek god in our old black and white photos.

Today is also world mental health awareness day something our society needs to pay attention to. Nearly every crazy news story in the NYT has mental illness behind it or maybe that's just my take on things. Every crazy story in my family has mental illness behind it.

I think Giuseppe Verdi would be a great tiger cat name. And the composer (Mikhail) Glinka would be a great Yellow Labrador name. I love naming things pets, bands, anything. I think I got that from my father even though I didn't grow up with him or see him often, I give him credit for that piece of myself. That was his job for most of his long life. He wished he was a novelist but he was an advertising copy guy in Yonkers with a rusted out Carman Ghia and a green leaf as an inspection sticker. He had more angry wives suing him for child support and made more promises to 'take the kids to The Bronx Zoo and the Thanksgiving Day Parade' than any man would want. He loved a daily dose of dry martinis with a few green olives. Gin and dry vermouth were the only things in his barren fridge besides a container of Dannon coffee yogurt and a package of Lender's bagels in the freezer. A sad but telling story. I guess I can laugh about it now. He made a martini for me when I was 15 and visiting him in Yonkers. I had never had a drink in my life. I remember placing my fully-loaded and untouched dinner plate under the table to feed his gorgeous collie named Shadow and that's all I remember except him dropping me off back in Larchmont on Cooper Lane where my mother and step father lived in a gigantic brick Georgian style house. I never took to drink, just like my mother. Caffeine was my illegal drug growing up. I'd have to sneak coffee and tea or have it at friends houses along with television and candy. When my my mother and step father were driving off to their weekend 18c country house restoration I'd plug in the coffee pot just as they pulled away. Bliss for me was staying home and drinking coffee and making paintings, steaming up a head of broccoli and reading poetry in the sun, and dancing around the house alone. Not much has changed in that regard. I am easily amused and that annoys some people but luckily not many around here. This is why I love this quirky poor town. People don't have much but they are friendly and they appreciate what they have, which is a gift in itself.

It's the birthday of Giuseppe Verdi, born in a village in Parma, Italy (1813). His parents owned a tavern and were not very well off. But his father recognized musical talent in Giuseppe and bought him a spinet (an upright harpsichord), which he kept for the rest of his life. By the age of 12, Verdi was the organist for his church. He started playing for other churches farther away from home, and then he went off to music school. He lived in the town of Busseto and boarded with a wealthy grocer who liked Verdi and wanted to support him, and whose daughter Verdi ended up marrying.

Verdi wrote marches, overtures and other pieces for the Busseto Philharmonic Society and the town marching band. But then he set his sights elsewhere and got an opera, Oberto, performed at La Scala, the most important theater in Italy, in 1839. It was a modest success. Then tragedy struck: his wife died of encephalitis. Verdi had already lost their two children in infancy. He vowed he would never write music again. But he couldn't resist when he read the powerful libretto for Nabucco. He turned it into a stunning opera, premiering on March 9, 1842. The audience applauded for 10 minutes after the first scene, and after the chorus, the audience demanded an encore, even though they were prohibited by the Austrian government at the time. Even the stagehands, who rarely paid attention to the performance, would stop what they were doing to watch and applaud the show. Verdi used the same librettist for his next opera, Lombardi. The librettist had a procrastination problem, and Verdi had to lock him in a room in order to get him to write enough on time. Once Verdi made the mistake of sticking him in the room with his wine collection. Hours later, the librettist emerged drunk. Verdi wrote a total of 26 operas, most notably Rigoletto (1851), La Traviata (1853), Aida (1871), and Falstaff (1893).- Writer's Almanac

Mikhail Glinka was born in the village of Novospasskoye, not far from the Desna River in the Smolensk Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father was a wealthy retired army captain, as the family had a strong tradition of loyalty and service to the Tsar, while several members of his extended family had also developed a lively interest in culture. His great-great-grandfather was a Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth nobleman Wiktoryn Władysław Glinka of Trzaska Coat of Arms. As a small child, Mikhail was reared by his over-protective and pampering grandmother who fed him sweets, wrapped him in furs, and confined him to her room, which was always to be kept at 25 °C (77 °F); as such, he developed a sickly disposition, later in his life retaining the services of numerous physicians, and often falling victim to a number of quacks. The only music he heard in his youthful confinement was the sounds of the village church bells and the folk songs of passing peasant choirs. The church bells were tuned to a dissonant chord and so his ears became used to strident harmony. While his nurse would sometimes sing folksongs, the peasant choirs who sang using the podgolosnaya technique (an improvised style — literally under the voice - which uses improvised dissonant harmonies below the melody) influenced the way he later felt free to emancipate himself from the smooth progressions of Western harmony. After his grandmother’s death, Glinka was moved to his maternal uncle’s estate some 10 km away, and was able to hear his uncle’s orchestra, whose repertoire included pieces by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. He was about ten when he heard them play a clarinet quintet by the Finnish composer Bernhard Henrik Crusell. It had a profound effect upon him. "Music is my soul," he was to write many years later, recalling this experience. While his governess taught him Russian, German, French, and geography, he also received instruction on the piano and the violin.

At the age of 13 Glinka was sent to the capital, Saint Petersburg, to study at a school for children of the nobility. Here he was taught Latin, English, and Persian, studied mathematics and zoology, and was able to considerably widen his musical experience. He had three piano lessons from John Field, the Irish composer of nocturnes, who spent some time in Saint Petersburg. He then continued his piano lessons with Charles Meyer, and began composing.-Wikipedia