Friday, July 12, 2013

Lost Blog

OK.  I went to the Hollywood Bowl 7/2/13 and 7/4/13.

I was camping after that at Malibu Creek State Park.  I went hiking 7/6/13 and got horrible blisters, so 7/7/13 I sat at my campsite and wrote out a very long and complete blog about my experiences, by hand, in a notebook.  I intended to scan it in when I got home and post it here.  The notebook got lost in the plane back.

Screech.

I had been writing in it for days, mostly about Josh ...

So, probably I'll be putting in bits and pieces here for a while.

Here's the first bit, about trying to drive to the Bowl with @elizzzibeth:


Here's a bit I posted on "Bad Grobanites"

People seemed to be filming freely at the Hollywood Bowl.  July 2 I didn't think that Josh sounded all that good.  His voice didn't have its usual richness and he sounded strangled on quite a few of the higher notes.  July 4, though, he sounded fabulous, tho Brave is still a problem.  It's just too high for him.   At least on the 4th it didn't sound totally strangled.

Here's the set list


Brave 

False Alarms

February Song

Un Alma Mas

Vincent

Alla Luce

The Moon is harsh mistress

Sincera

Hollow Talk

Hebel solo leading directly into Voce Existe Em Mim

Broken Vow

I Believe

You Raise Me Up

Smile (encore)

Josh did not sign autographs after the concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, because he left before the fireworks. I did get to say high to his parents after the July 2 concert.  I had met them twice before.  I didn't have the courage to say "Hi" to Chris.  I follow him on twitter, but he never answers my tweets.  I know he feels awkward that his twitter followers are mostly his brother's fans.  He looks much younger in person.

I still don't like Hebel's playing all that much.  It's not like he's making errors, but he's just not Lucia.  She's spoiled me.  She's the only violinist I've ever really enjoyed.    I do like Hebel's composition, that he plays in the instrumental interlude, tho -- and he's very cute.

Hebel isvery tall, tho.  Josh seems to favor tall band members.  I suppose that reflects his concern with security.  Christian & Tariqh could certainly act as backup security guards.

Ruslan is quite tall as well, tho very thin.

I originally had a ticket only to the 4th, but I decided to go on the 2nd as well.  They had a ticket left, fortunately.  The 4th was totally sold out.   There seemed to be people buying and selling tickets in the crowd at both shows.

I think that the 4th of July at the Hollywood Bowl would be worth attending even if Josh were not performing.  The acoustics are great and the fireworks with the music are amazing.  I was really excited to be there, even aside from Josh, and I'm grateful that Josh got me there.  

I got pix with a lot of Josh's musicians, tho not with Josh.  Josh's musicians seem quite eager to be recognized by fans, especially Dave, the drummer (whose last name I can no longer remember) wanted to be recognized.  He's devilishly handsome, but you don't see him, because he's in back behind the drums and a screen.  Most people recognize Tariqh, Christian, and Ruslan, because they're in front.  Actually Tariqh left early with Josh.  

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This is the restaurant where Grobies met for lunch on 7/2/13

http://thegrill.com/locations/the-grill-on-hollywood

 So excellent!  Delicious food. Seating on balcony over open air courtyard in H&H mall in Hollywood.  Temperature absolutely perfect.  Natural breezes feel like air conditioning.  Amazing.




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 Addendum 7/14/13

 More about the Hollywood Bowl.  This place is huge, seats like 17k people.  Excellent acoustics.  They show fireworks over the stage. 

 Plan to go next July 4, if you didn't make it this time, even though they'll probably have a different soloist, because it's just fabulous there -- and the absolutely perfect place to celebrate the fourth of July.

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Addendum 7/17/13

One of the things I remember writing about in my notebook was how I take orchestral music for granted.  I've heard it all my life.  There have been records, concerts, radio transmissions, TV transmissions.  I forget what  miracle it is that so many musicians can sit and play together and make a coordinated sound that is beautiful.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic played several numbers before a long intermission in both concerts.  I had trouble focusing on them, because I was waiting for Josh.

They had a stunning woman conducting, Sarah Hicks, who had painted her finger nails red, white and blue.

They had us participate, both by whistling along with the Colonel Bogey march and also by having members or veterans of the armed services stand during parts of the Armed Services Medley -- and having us applaud them.   They had fireworks.

It really was a stellar performance, but I'm too jaded. I take it for granted.  I don't like this about myself as an audience member.

One of the things that I have learned by watching videos of David Foster is his great ability to make people feel enthusiastic about what they are hearing.  There was one bit in one of Jackie Evancho's DVD where he took her to see a painting & he got her excited about the painting.  I thought as I looked at it that it was one of those types of paintings that I take for granted, just as I take classical music for granted. It was some kind of large oil painting from two hundred years ago, or so.  Clearly it took a huge amount of time to paint.

David got Jackie to be excited about the painting, and I realized that i should be excited as well.  He was right.  It was an amazing painting, but I've been to too many art museums and seen too much art, just as I've heard too much classical music, and I take it for granted.

Josh's sound is new to me, so it's exciting.  That's wonderful, but I should take a page from David Foster's book and learn to be more enthusiastic about the musical miracle of well done classical music.
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Second addendum 7/17/13

Thinking about that experience on July 2, and also the many other times when Josh has sounded not so hot on his high notes, I am wondering what is going on.  Is his voice changing with age?  Has he damaged it by performing so frequently when ill?  Does he have some other health issue?  Or does he just do better when he's had more time to rehearse with the musicians and set list?

I worry that if he goes on Broadway in 2014, as he says he is going to, that he may completely blow out his voice by trying to sing 8 times a week.  If you go back on this blog, you will note that I saw Mandy Patinkin -- someone who Josh has mentioned as admiring -- at the Tarrytown Music Hall some months back.  His voice seemed to be failing, as it was so very tremulous that sometimes you could not discern the pitch.  Granted he's older than Josh, but he also sang on Broadway for a very long time.  I have to wonder whether he wore his voice out.

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Addendum 7/18/13

Another aspect of getting to the concert, this time on July 4, was that I was coming in from the north.  When I took the exit for the Hollywood Bowl, I ended up in the line for people who had special parking passes, which meant I was basically not moving for like 45 minutes, which meant I barely had time to grab dinner & eat in my seat -- and I ended up spilling food on my clothing, while eating.  I thought the signage was confusing.  True they said my lane was for people with parking passes and the other lane was for general admission, but in between it said "event parking," which seemed to apply only to the lane that said it was for special passes.

So, if you're coming from the north on 101, go into the general admission lane.

I was coming from the north, because I had just checked into my campsite at the Malibu Creek State Park.  I chose that park, because it seemed to be the closest place to Malibu that had camping.  I wanted to visit Malibu, because I understand that Josh has a house there.  I think he's trying to sell the house.  Still, I had this desire to be sort of closer to him.

I had no clue what to expect from Malibu.  I had been to the Santa Monica beach before and I sort of expected something like that.  I was totally wrong.

Malibu is a small, long, thin community that clings desperately to narrow patches of land along the coast between the beach and the costal range.  

The mountains are imposing and desolate looking -- great dry stretches interrupted by scrub.  I felt almost as if I were on Mars when I looked at those mountains, so forbidding and uninhabitable, jutting steeply up.   I didn't take pictures of them. I don't know why.  I only took pictures of things that looked good to me, not that scary drive up Malibu Canyon to the park, not the desolate mountains.  I should have.  Here's one, but it was taken in the spring, when the grass was green, not in summer when the ground is bare


Here's another, but farther up, where there is more vegetation


Here are a couple that I took, but only where there were irrigated yards and houses






If you sort of squint, you can see the mountains behind.

The press images emphasize the beaches, but those are mostly private beaches that you can't see as you drive along the coastal highway.  There's one publicly accessible beach, the Malibu Lagoon State Park.  By the time I got there, I had such bad blisters from hiking at the Malibu Creek State Park that I couldn't really hike on the beach.  

Of course, by law, they can't exclude pedestrians from the area between the low and high tide lines, so if you go by there at low tide you can have a nice walk, but they have fences trying to discourage you from coming and they have the houses on stilts right out to the high tide line; so if you go at high tide there isn't much place to walk.  

The walled areas around the beach lend a further forbidding aspect of the community that already seems forbidding because of the harsh-looking terrain.  As I was driving along, I wondered how Josh felt when he was there.  Presumably, since he wasn't right on the beach, he couldn't get there either, except at the state park.  I wondered if he felt shut out, as i did.  Here are some photos of a walled community near the beach.




Here's the fence across the beach



Just not very friendly.

I did like the shopping mall though.  They had some great restaurants and the grocery store was very nice.

It took me a while to find the neighborhood that looked a bit like what I would imagine would be around Josh's house.  It was down quite a bit from the state park beach and the main shopping mall.  I didn't stop and photograph because there wasn't parking right there.

I finally tweeted him my location at the campground, but I think by that time he must already have been in Colorado, or en route there.  In any case, he didn't come visit my campsite, but I pretended he did.

I really liked that campground, BTW.  They filmed some movies in that park or nearby and the M*A*S*H* TV show.  The whole park looked like an old western.  I kept expecting to see John Wayne and white actors made up to look like Indians riding up.

I normally live in New York.  When I first got to the Santa Monica Mountain range, I first thought that it seemed very empty, because of the expanses of dry ground between the bushes.  Later, I got used to it.  When I got back to New York, I felt nature seemed cluttered by comparison.  I found that when I hiked in the drier area my head felt quieter, as if the empty spaces allowed my internal dialog to quiet down.

I was reminded of the fact that biologists think we evolved in the Savannah areas of Africa, which would be similar in vegetation to Los Angeles County.  Also I was reminded of "Horse with No Name" by the group "America."  I kept singing to myself "in the desert, you can remember your name.


The park, tho, being over the first line of costal mountains, was substantially hotter than Malibu itself, tho still not so bad as areas further inland.  The mountains in the park that were closer to the coast had more vegetation than those on the side farther from the park.  This was an area with more vegetation.


This is a photo looking away from the coast, where you can see it getting drier



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Another addendum 7/19/13

Here is drummer Dave's website

http://www.davedicenso.com/

Like I said, he was eager to be recognized by fans -- and he's very handsome, with a captivating smile.

I was just reading Lizzi's blog.

Like her, on July 2, I spent a lot of the time cringing and wondering whether Josh was going to hit notes -- and trying to focus on the notes that were good rather than the notes that were bad.  There were certainly a lot of great notes, especially the lower ones -- and especially later in the concert when he seemed more warmed up.

As you will know, if you read the earlier blogs here, I am a person with a mild autism spectrum disorder ("ASD").  One of the characteristics of people with this type of brain (and I'm not sure it's a disorder really, just a difference) is seeing exceptions rather than rules.

The example I like to cite is when my son, who was the first in the family diagnosed with an ASD, was 4, my brother came to visit us a couple of times in his small airplane.  This airplane was painted white, but it had a small number of (maybe 2?) orange stripes on it.   My son was quite impressed with the airplane and was eager to see it land.

He called it "Uncle Peter's orange airplane."  As I said, most people looking at this airplane would have said it was a white airplane with a few orange stripes, because the vast majority of the coloration of the airplane was white.  But my son saw it as orange, because he has an ASD.

I'm similar.  I hear the exception.  So I winced at every strained and false high note during that July 2 concert, while others seemed to think the concert was ok.

But, also, particularly at the beginning, I felt Josh's voice lacked its usual magical richness.

Plus, I felt that his face looked pale and puffy on the big monitors.

I spent the whole time wondering what was wrong with him. When I met with Lizzi afterwards, she felt the same way.  We were both concerned and wondered if he needed a break from all this touring or something.  It was hard for us to enjoy that concert, if we were worrying about Josh, who we both love.

Fortunately, when I heard him on the fourth, he sounded absolutely fantastic.

Anyway, Lizzi thought he sounded amazing at Red Rocks as well.

I know he sounded better on his later concerts in Europe than he did in the earlier ones, as well -- based on the YouTube videos.

So, maybe, rather than needing a break, he needs to stop taking breaks, because when he takes a break he loses his focus or something or the muscles in his larynx lose tone -- who knows?  Not that I can see him becoming like Chris Botti who has been touring 300 days a year for 9 years.  Somehow it seems like Josh would get bored with that, tho apparently Chris doesn't.

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7/20/13

Here is a satellite overview of where we were misdirected to, when using my Android phone, Google maps, and the navigation software on my phone to try to get to the Hollywood Bowl


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2nd addendum 7/20/13

I was talking to a friend about this experience, 4th of July at the Hollywood Bowl, and thinking about how I would never really feel the same way about fireworks again.

First, there was the extraordinarily perfect temperature and humidity.  Second, there was the absence of bugs (quite the revelation for someone raised in Wisconsin, where it was always humid & buggy on the 4th and you had to be doused in deet to go out).  Third there was the wind that blew the smoke away from us, rather than towards us (which unfortunately has happened to me at many fireworks displays -- disgusting).  Fourth, there was the perfect music coordinated with the fireworks.  Third, there was this extraordinary feeling of being there with 17k people.

I am falling in love with Los Angeles.  It's only the second time I've visited there as an adult.  I was there once in High School to go to Disneyland, but then I went in 2010 and in 2013.

But I just can't begin to describe what a wonderful place Los Angeles is.  Words fail me.

Certainly, there is nothing like the 4th of July at the Hollywood Bowl.  Nothing will ever compare to it.  I can't recommend it highly enough.
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