Did a gig last night in the Fremantle Maritime Museum and I came accross this submarine parked out the back. Notice the torpedos carelessly strewn on the ground next to it. You wouldn't catch Sean Connery leaving his Red October sub parked so carelessly!
Also, this was my second viola gig of the year. (72 violin gigs and 2 viola gigs since I landed here) It has been quite a shock to the system playing the violin so much. 16 hours a week of regular gigs nowadays and thats not counting the classical stuff. Playing the viola last night was such a pleasure, wallowing in each individual note like it was an eternity (off beat waltz time crotchets of course) and as for the tone, INFINATLY better than the treble clef screeches of the violin. And the music for the viola, its so well written, even the simple quartet stuff, subtle yet vital to the chordal progression of any tune. It NEARLY made be want to go home and practice (practice is when you play your instrument but dont get paid, generally a bad habit to get in to). So there ya have it, I'm a born again viola player. I'll still masquerade around as a violin player as long as it pays, but at heart I am a viola player through and through. Not another viola gig for the rest of the year and all violin gigs every night till the first week of october. I'll have to work on that!
Just as an offshoot and a dialogue in the surreal and idle thoughts of an overgigged viola player, I was packing up after an irish band gig (a fairlly boozy one) the other night, and an annoying drunk guy came up to me, waffling about all sorts of stuff and generally telling me how to do my job, after about 5 minutes of not saying a word as he rambled, I actually phased out of the conversation (which is very unlike me) and calculated the dollar value of my violin and its relation/comparrison to the emotional and aesthetic satisfaction and the sheer poetic irony of whacking him over the head with it (which again is very unlike me). I even put the bow down, plugged out the pickup and started to hold the violin like a bat! I figured my pub gigging violin is worth about $400, but the fun of hitting him over the head was only about $49.95 max so I chose to solve the conversation diplomatically by pretending not to speak english and walked off. That has been my first case of gig-rage.
On another more normal note, the 2 penalty points I picked up for speeding over the mountains between gigs from Kerry to Cork a few years ago have expired this afternoon.
No comments:
Post a Comment