Thank you Rebecca. I get a kick out of this poem. One of the many great things about writing is you can do grievous harm to stuff you don't like without doing grievous harm.
This reminds me of the time I went to Burning Man in 1996 and someone had made a huge sculpture from old, broken pianos. You could actually go up and play them and hammer on the strings. But the most memorable part was later on when they burned the sculpture. The piano strings were eerily twanging and making cries as the pianos were incinerated.
That must've been amazing to hear. They were screaming in agony. bwoohahahahaha!
Actually, I'm starting to enjoy playing my short repertoire of tunes. Today, I played Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas so it brought me to tears. It's a truly melancholy song perfect for these crazy roller coaster times. BTW, I've really been enjoying your Trump trial drawings. Hard to tell the reality from the satire; but these times are like that. The Onion has to work a lot harder to go beyond the already over-the-top news.
I don't know, Sue. I might have lit the match for you! That bike was waiting. Nice imagery in this line: "...a flimsy music stand easily broken with a punch from a frustrated child." Super followup to your previous memoir about piano lessons.
Thank you, Sharron, and to prove that Serendipity was sitting upon my shoulder, just take a gander at that photo. From Unsplash no less. It cracked me up. And I dare say more people are riding bikes these days than playing pianos; although may that music never fully stop.
This is the third piano death I know about. The first was an ancient upright grand some renter left in our house that was untunable and a piano guy said it would take $$$ to repair, so I dismantled it with a chainsaw into movable chunks, made firewood from the cabinet, and hauled the cast iron to a recycler. I felt guilty about the whole affair, dismembering an instrument once capable of calling forth Rachmaninoff and Chopin, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
The next piano death I witnessed was during an afternoon walk through a leafy neighborhood in Tbilisi, Georgia, in the old section of the city, not the ghastly part where the Soviet apartments where built and out of sight of the hideous Soviet era massive sculptures that mar the lovely hillsides. As I walked the broken sidewalk, I heard men grunting and cursing from the fifth or sixth floor of an old apartment building. When I moved from under a tree to see what was happening, I caught a glimpse of the end of a piano working its way out of a window. Suddenly. when it reach its center of gravity, it tilted down, ripped out the window casing, glass and all. and the entire mess fell earthward, then crashed onto a concrete patio in a magnificent cacophony of death.
The chances of being crushed by a falling piano are small but never zero.
Now I learn that a seemly sensible person who lives in my part of the world set fire to a piano in her driveway. I suppose even pianos must die from time to time, but what does it tell us about the people who killed them?
LOL Only in my dreams, but yes, my dreams are becoming a tad closer to becoming realized. Pray for me, Switter, to whatever god exists! Pray for me! Bwhahahahhaha!
As hinted in the essay, I did kill two keyboards and am playing on a third. It was such an upgrade, though, I struggle to quash my rage so as not to break this one.Getting better.
I’ve been discussing with my old guy about getting a performance art grant from the NEA to built a trebuchet big enough to toss an old upright grand piano from my house to the other side of the river, about a half mile.
In small, rural communities such as ours, there aren’t many opportunities for people to enjoy fine arts. I think my idea would really appeal to my people and our culture.
Sounds like a great idea, but if you do it, you'll have to invite the cast of Northern Exposure because they did this on an episode. Wish I could remember the exact details. Maggie's house burned down, but her piano survived. Chris as built a trebuchet, but had nothing to hurl from it. Why the piano was chosen as the fling of honor, I forget, but I'm wondering if Fleischman or Maurice had anything to do with it? The closing scene was spectacular. Pianos have good weight and aerodynamics. Tally-ho, Switter, and , as they say at NASA, God speed.
Well, apparently it’s a good idea if someone else thought of it, too. I don’t have a tv, so I’ve never watched Northern Exposure, but I believe the idea has as much artistic merit as other performance art projects funded by the NEA. We have an art center in our tiny town (culturally speaking, we punch way above our weight class) with a large, lovely acrylic painting of a slice of buttered toast. I see that as a salute to a delicious but often overlooked part of a hearty breakfast. My piano (or even a small car such as a Yugo, if there are any left that haven’t rusted into oblivion or left on the curb for recycling) would embrace much that is held in high regard here in our Intermountain West culture. Bold undertakings. The art and science of ballistics. Citizen self reliant self defense. The beauty of big things soaring through our azure skies. The thrill of gravity guiding the skyward bound back to the bosom of Mother Earth. The inherent beauty of a thing no longer useful performing a swan song as it completes its existence in a thrilling explosion of joyful cacophony.
Well put. All things, regardless of their useless(ful)ness deserve a flight into the Heavens that will end in Spectacular Glory. I believe that is well worth the NEAs support (if not NASAs). If Lee Deffebach can exhibit dozens of huge, colorful acrylic paintings of roads diminishing into the horizon at the Kimball Center for the Arts in Park City (circa 1975), then your performance art of Yugos, pianos, and whatever curb offerings you can pillage certainly has merit, on the political side as well as the socio-economic, artistic side. It is a performance I would love to attend. Please keep me posted.
Oh! The perfect counterpoint to your previous piano post. Bravo, Sue! 🎶
Thank you Rebecca. I get a kick out of this poem. One of the many great things about writing is you can do grievous harm to stuff you don't like without doing grievous harm.
🤣
This reminds me of the time I went to Burning Man in 1996 and someone had made a huge sculpture from old, broken pianos. You could actually go up and play them and hammer on the strings. But the most memorable part was later on when they burned the sculpture. The piano strings were eerily twanging and making cries as the pianos were incinerated.
That must've been amazing to hear. They were screaming in agony. bwoohahahahaha!
Actually, I'm starting to enjoy playing my short repertoire of tunes. Today, I played Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas so it brought me to tears. It's a truly melancholy song perfect for these crazy roller coaster times. BTW, I've really been enjoying your Trump trial drawings. Hard to tell the reality from the satire; but these times are like that. The Onion has to work a lot harder to go beyond the already over-the-top news.
I don't know, Sue. I might have lit the match for you! That bike was waiting. Nice imagery in this line: "...a flimsy music stand easily broken with a punch from a frustrated child." Super followup to your previous memoir about piano lessons.
Thank you, Sharron, and to prove that Serendipity was sitting upon my shoulder, just take a gander at that photo. From Unsplash no less. It cracked me up. And I dare say more people are riding bikes these days than playing pianos; although may that music never fully stop.
This is the third piano death I know about. The first was an ancient upright grand some renter left in our house that was untunable and a piano guy said it would take $$$ to repair, so I dismantled it with a chainsaw into movable chunks, made firewood from the cabinet, and hauled the cast iron to a recycler. I felt guilty about the whole affair, dismembering an instrument once capable of calling forth Rachmaninoff and Chopin, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
The next piano death I witnessed was during an afternoon walk through a leafy neighborhood in Tbilisi, Georgia, in the old section of the city, not the ghastly part where the Soviet apartments where built and out of sight of the hideous Soviet era massive sculptures that mar the lovely hillsides. As I walked the broken sidewalk, I heard men grunting and cursing from the fifth or sixth floor of an old apartment building. When I moved from under a tree to see what was happening, I caught a glimpse of the end of a piano working its way out of a window. Suddenly. when it reach its center of gravity, it tilted down, ripped out the window casing, glass and all. and the entire mess fell earthward, then crashed onto a concrete patio in a magnificent cacophony of death.
The chances of being crushed by a falling piano are small but never zero.
Now I learn that a seemly sensible person who lives in my part of the world set fire to a piano in her driveway. I suppose even pianos must die from time to time, but what does it tell us about the people who killed them?
LOL Only in my dreams, but yes, my dreams are becoming a tad closer to becoming realized. Pray for me, Switter, to whatever god exists! Pray for me! Bwhahahahhaha!
As hinted in the essay, I did kill two keyboards and am playing on a third. It was such an upgrade, though, I struggle to quash my rage so as not to break this one.Getting better.
I’ve been discussing with my old guy about getting a performance art grant from the NEA to built a trebuchet big enough to toss an old upright grand piano from my house to the other side of the river, about a half mile.
In small, rural communities such as ours, there aren’t many opportunities for people to enjoy fine arts. I think my idea would really appeal to my people and our culture.
Sounds like a great idea, but if you do it, you'll have to invite the cast of Northern Exposure because they did this on an episode. Wish I could remember the exact details. Maggie's house burned down, but her piano survived. Chris as built a trebuchet, but had nothing to hurl from it. Why the piano was chosen as the fling of honor, I forget, but I'm wondering if Fleischman or Maurice had anything to do with it? The closing scene was spectacular. Pianos have good weight and aerodynamics. Tally-ho, Switter, and , as they say at NASA, God speed.
Well, apparently it’s a good idea if someone else thought of it, too. I don’t have a tv, so I’ve never watched Northern Exposure, but I believe the idea has as much artistic merit as other performance art projects funded by the NEA. We have an art center in our tiny town (culturally speaking, we punch way above our weight class) with a large, lovely acrylic painting of a slice of buttered toast. I see that as a salute to a delicious but often overlooked part of a hearty breakfast. My piano (or even a small car such as a Yugo, if there are any left that haven’t rusted into oblivion or left on the curb for recycling) would embrace much that is held in high regard here in our Intermountain West culture. Bold undertakings. The art and science of ballistics. Citizen self reliant self defense. The beauty of big things soaring through our azure skies. The thrill of gravity guiding the skyward bound back to the bosom of Mother Earth. The inherent beauty of a thing no longer useful performing a swan song as it completes its existence in a thrilling explosion of joyful cacophony.
Well put. All things, regardless of their useless(ful)ness deserve a flight into the Heavens that will end in Spectacular Glory. I believe that is well worth the NEAs support (if not NASAs). If Lee Deffebach can exhibit dozens of huge, colorful acrylic paintings of roads diminishing into the horizon at the Kimball Center for the Arts in Park City (circa 1975), then your performance art of Yugos, pianos, and whatever curb offerings you can pillage certainly has merit, on the political side as well as the socio-economic, artistic side. It is a performance I would love to attend. Please keep me posted.