Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2002 May 11

# 11 May 2002, 01:55AM: I like listening to choral music, especially faster-moving and non-religious stuff. I've known for a long time that I like a cappella of the doo-wop and arrangement-of-pop-tunes varieties, but I also like a bit of the Josquin and the folk songs and "El Grillo" (The Cricket), as I've discovered and come to appreciate in this Basic Musicianship class.

We of our Music 20A class will put on a concert of choral singing as part of our final. You can come! It'll be Wednesday, 15 May, at 2:45 in Room 125 of Morrison Hall. We'll all sing Tallis's If Ye Love Me and Josquin's Mille Regretz together, and we'll break into small groups for other pieces. My group will sing a sea chantey called We Be Three Poor Mariners or something like that. Come on by!

Today a few cool things happened. I finished In Code, which is less annoying than I'd thought. It's more interesting than Dan Rather's autobiography, that's for sure. And it clearly explained public/private-key cryptography better than any other treatment I'd ever read.

Sarah Flannery is a special sort of person, the type of which the world needs more. She's the type who can confidently approach a hard task and try at it and try at it and count her failures as learning experiences and live with the humility and keep going until she succeeds, self-esteem intact. I'm the other type. I've met quite a lot of that Sarah Flannery type over the years, and I always envy them, and now, maybe if I can just accept that I'm not like that, my envy won't have to get in the way of being friends with these people.

I saw a campus showing of the recent French cinema hit, Am�lie. The showing I attended was sold out but, through just hanging around and vaguely hoping for an opportunity and then snagging it when it came by, I found some reluctant scalpers and got a ticket. Yay scavenging!

I enjoyed the film, and of course I wept and shouted at the protagonist to act differently, but I think my expectations of the movie were too high -- the ad said it/she (the protagonist) would change my life! -- and so I didn't walk out of it with the same bliss that came to me at the end of High Fidelity.

The three French films I've seen during my Berkeley career, the ones I remember, are Am�lie, Romance (ugh!), and some quite good and moving picture I saw at the Fine Arts a few years back with my sister. It was about a youngish woman living in Paris (aren't they all?) learning about what's really important in life and breaking away from her unfulfilling routine to form relationships with others and hear their stories. Hmm, a pattern! The gimmick was that she was looking for her lost cat, and I can't remember the title. "Black Cat"? "White Cat"? "Black Cat, Big City"? "La Chat Diabolique" (Leonard's translation of "That Darn Cat")? "My Lost Cat"? These vague, non-Boolean "it was a French movie about a girl who lost her cat" stirrings don't play well at the IMDB. I'll remember the title eventually so's I can recommend it to you.

Later, I played designated driver, dropping off some acquaintances at a party and then driving home (alone! in Berkeley! on a Friday night!) with nary an accident. I will not say that there were not hairy moments, but hey, life without hair would be pretty Golden Age of Sci-Fi extraterrestrial, and in those stories women just faint and overreact and get referred to by their first names, and that's annoying.

I'm continuing the ravagement of The Philip K. Dick Reader (which is what I am too, I guess), as you can probably tell. Yummy stuff. I like that I've now read "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" and "The Minority Report" so now I don't at all want to watch the corresponding blockbuster films. Oh, and I finished that short-story collection I bought at the anarchist bookfair, Down and Out in the Ivy League by J.G. Eccarius. Enough good stories and hours of enjoyment are in there to justify the $2 or $3 and hours I spent on it. I'll lend it to you if you like.