(No, not a reference here.)
I spoke about attending Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and client gives me sideways, quizzical look, “I didn’t know you were an ‘end of the worlder.’ Are you?”
Apparently, I am.
The image is my desktop. Not the metaphor for a desktop, but the actual top of the desk, itself.
With Mercury in a Retrograde Pattern, I have much advice. I will, on occasion, follow my own advice.
I undertook re-ripping the entire Ring Cycle, roughly 15 hours — or more — of performances. Why I like having a hard copy of the CD, didn’t really need to, but seemed like the most correct course of action. Fresh, smaller mp3 files, all in order. Seems like I have more than one or two copies, and it’s all ordered and condensed now.
The iPod in the picture, a first or second generation Apple “shuffle,” I think, I don’t recall the name, it was a gift. Special gift.
Not a big deal, in some ways, old girlfriend gave it to me, special woman. The gift itself wasn’t the big deal, it was the gesture. Unasked, intuited. I played with that thing for a while as a walking tool, not much bigger than the earbuds themselves.
While the Ring Cycle is more than a year away, I was getting ready, after ripping all those CDs, and instead of my phone, I thought I’d put one opera on the little iPod. Turns out, all four in the cycle now fit.
The first time I ripped the opera, I used the “lossless” aif format. Huge files. This time, just mp3. This time, it all fits.
The first time I prepared for the opera, I had the CD set, and I loaded the operas, one at time, into the platter on a CD player, run through a stereo I no longer have.
I’d run that, one opera at a time, over and over, as I learned the nuances of the music, the echoes and reverberations that shifted through the orchestra.
The music is enjoyable and the Teutonic, Nordic myth layered into it, that stuff is engaging. I’ve been thinking about interpreting along a more post-modern line of reasoning, too.
The picture was a reminder, about the girl who gave me the iPod, the up-and-coming event, the march of technology, and where we’re at today.
Tiny little thing, isn’t it?