Back and Ready to Roll

California seems a haze to me now as I return back to the swirling chaos of New York, to teaching, composing, living. Spent a glorious few weeks with my fantastic wife driving down the coast from San Francisco, seeing my old campus at Santa Barbara, and visiting old and new friends in Los Angeles. It was wonderful but exhausting. We ate a lot of mexican food (the best of which is only available on the opposite side from us, for some reason), checked out a little bit of a rehearsal for the Stewart Wallace/Amy Tan opera The Bonesetter's Daughter at the San Francisco Opera, saw a play about Beethoven (on which, more later), read good books, saw no movies nor spent any time in the water, and visited historic sites both of my own youth and of reality. Big Sur, the Henry Miller Library, a shopping center named after Huxley's forgetting drug. Enough said.

Thanks for patience, all of you, and I'll be updating regularly until the next vacation, scheduled tentatively for 2015.