A TWO - TWO AND A HALF MINUTE QUICKY EDITION

I DON’T KNOW IF I AM BEING DISENGENOUS OR NOT


The first time I heard this song it was on Saturday Night Live back in the VERY early 80’s. I had come in from an evening run, late on a winter’s Saturday night. My picture of the moment still has me in my layered jogging gear, steam rising from my body, sitting in the middle of the living room in the 48219. I had never heard of Phillip Glass but watching him perform this song, “Rubric”, I made sure to find out who he was.


His minimalist style really has an appeal to my personal ethos. Other than “Koyaanisqatsi”, I can’t call to mind any other movie scores he has done, only that I have been able to identify his touch and is one of the few composers I have been able to recognize.


I am mentioning Phillip Glass and his music because Best Buy uses one of the pieces from “Glassworks” in one of their commercials. The song is over 30 years old and still sounds as recent as any of today’s music, particularly any ambient, technology-driven music you would hear today. After this performance I would go to Harmony House and pick up the cassette, and it would become a tape I would play in regular rotation on long runs. The music would soothe not only the aches and knots as they would form pounding the concrete, but ease whatever was on my teenage mind.


Thinking about it now as the most recent (hey it is February … another snow could be on its way!) storm has begun to ebb and the mounds that have been pushed in to larger piles have shrunken to heights that if I was either younger or spryer, I’d climb up and look down on ‘all that I survey’.


Apparently I am not the only challenged student in my Algebra class, and of course, that doesn’t make me feel any better. To be honest, I still feel disappointed that I am not performing at a higher level than I have been, even with all my Math Lab time. Tomorrow I have to hustle hard between the English Lab and my appointment in West Omaha. I think the Math Lab is open on Saturday and I ain’t doing much on Saturday anywho… even if I wasn’t going to go back on campus for Math, I would be humping my Research Paper… and I am cool with that.


Back to the Phillip Glass song and why I am asking if I am being disingenuous… I once thought that I would have “Rubric” played at my wedding and I would want to hear it before me and my bride disappeared en route to our honeymoon. There was a time where I used to know exactly why I would think about something like that, but not so much anymore. It sometimes appears on the slide in my mind but is gone too quickly for me to retrieve any information from it.


Anywho, it has been a long week… and I am going off to the gym for a make-up session… had to skip this morning going over my annotated bibliography and studying for Algebra. Hope to see you guys and your blogs soon!