California, A Place They Say Glistens Gold.

May 11, 2009

Dear Raziel,

I hope that you had a nice weekend! I wanted to let you know that Orientation at SFCM will begin on August 18th (I mentioned in my previous email that Orientation began on August 21st, but this date has now changed). Sorry for any confusion. Please let us know if you have questions.

Sincerely,

Melissa Cocco-Mitten, Assistant Director of Admission

Reading things like that just never get old. Everytime I open up my e-mail and see one from the conservatory, I get super excited. I recently read an e-mail from them saying that all the single rooms had been reserved and that I would have to share a room. I was bummed but who knows? It could be for the better. My only deal is that I like my privacy and I like being on my own. I lived with my brothers for 17 years of my life so it's not like I can't live with other people, but it's been nice not having to worry about who wants to watch TV or take a shower etc etc. What if when I meet my dream girl(a beautiful violin/piano player) and she wants to go back to my place? What if he is a stiff that will get upset when I come home drunk and play Call of Duty in the late hours of the night? But then again, maybe this guy could be really kick ass. I'm not going to be pessimistic about the whole situation. I'm actually pretty excited to meet the guy. And I'm sure it's going to make some things easier for me. So while yeah, it sucks that I can't live on my own, I'm sure a room mate will work out well in a lot of different ways.



Joaquin Turina-Generalife

Chaos. My trio performed this at the competition we handily won. I was sitting in my room earlier today thinking to myself, what's a challenging piece I could play that not many people play? How can I identify myself? When I was playing with my trio, we tried searching for a trio arrangement of the piece but couldn't find it so we had to base our idea of how the piece goes off the video above. It just kind of clicked to me that playing Generalife would be a great piece to identify myself with. It's simply just bananas. Yes. Bananas. And I have such a good idea of how to phrase it already. I looked for the music and couldn't find it so I e-mailed the performer above asking if he had his transcriptions for sale. He responded in spanish with a link that didn't work. Sucks. I really do want to learn this but chances are I won't be able to find the transcription. Unless I transcribe it from a piano score which I am not willling to do.

I was at a party the other night somewhere in the fountain apartments. I had no idea who the girl was that owned the place but I was singing that classic country song "I sware" with her and a few other people. Why mention this? Because it's music! Music at parties is so crucial. Partying is something I love doing quite a bit. Bad thing is that I only have a handful of friends that love punk music as much as I do and I only party with one of them because he's mah best fwend. This brings me to my next subject. Kind of.
Remember Taking Back Sunday? Of course you do, you loved them in 2004 and 2005. You had to. MTV was feeding it right down your throat and you were taking it like a champ. You had your black shirt with the yellow logo. You had the shit ton of black bracelets on your wrist. You had your black hoodie. You had your dyed hair. They are one of the bands responsible for how high school kids dress today. Well here it is, I actually liked Taking Back Sunday in 8th grade. But at the time I was also way into Brand New, New Found Glory, Saves The Day and Rufio. So my liking for them was prett legit. I hate how that comes off. It comes off like a typical punx kid trying to say he did it first but whatever. But all that aside, I used to really dig them. Years would go by and yeah my punk rock attitude got the best of me and I would kind of keep it in the closet that I still would dig some of their songs. I would have never gone out and said that I dig the new TBS song but if someone asked, I would say yeah its catchy. Alright get to the point. Because MTV fed this stuff to the youth of america, it was played at parties in my high school days. I remember soberly or drunkenly singing along to this song with my friends in my arms. Memories I can never forget. Would sing those catchy mainstream pop punk bands like Coheed and Cambria, New Found Glory, Story Of The Year, My Chemical Romance, Matchbook Romance, Yellowcard etc. etc. So it was pretty sweet that people were enjoying some(never really liked soty or coheed) of the bands I did. Fuck, I'll still say One For The Kids is a solid pop punk record. Well once upon a time a shitty ass genre took over. Hardcore, screamo, emocore, metalcore, post hardcore, all the fucking shitty names that rarely actually described the music they played. That trend thankfully died out but there are still bands trying to jump on it. One of those bands is called This Or The Apocalypse. Why bring them up? Well they recently decided it was a good idea to cover Taking Back Sunday's "Make Damn Sure." Can you imagine that? Your really fucked if you didn't even like Taking Back Sunday to begin with because then it's collaborating two terrible things. But jesus, even with having this somewhat guilty pleasure for TBS, I hated it. I took this as an insult. How dare they try to shit on all my memories? How dare they insult the art of covering music? It just doesn't make sense to me sometimes. I wish I could have been there when they were like "DUDES! Let's cover Make Damn Sure!" Where could it have been a good idea?

You can listen to this disaster here.