A hectic but exciting day

So I woke up at 10am. Slept pretty early last night, a whole night's chat with Manda was very satisfying and I didn't feel like staying up so late anymore for some reason.

I had two rehearsals to run for today: 1st being Ensemble 212 (viola), 2nd being the French Baroque performance in CUNY Grad Center (Baroque violin).

I took a shower and got "stoned" in front of the computer (you know, computer and internet are like drugs) for a while, and went to make my lunch --- vegetarian curry rice. Then I came back and found Manda was back from school and was online.

So I started a little chit chat with her until she said she needed to practice a bit before her lesson (her first lesson with Renee Siebert). Later, I met up with her at her place and she drove us to Sunnyside to try to find a parking spot and hop on to the train. But she gave up later because she couldn't find a spot, and also, the place looks scary for a girl to walk in at night. I totally agree with her.

So she drove us straight into the City, and she dropped me in front of Jazz @ the Lincoln Center, cuz I thought my rehearsal was near there. And fuck me, I made a mistake! I couldn't figure out where the Good Shepherd Church was. But luckily there was an old man overheard me asking someone by the streets and came up to tell me that it's next to Lincoln Center. I suddenly realized where it was!! Hell I even performed there before!

The rehearsal with 212 was pretty long but I didn't really felt that way, the rehearsing technique was pretty impressive. But my viola reaidng skills still needs to improve that's for sure! I did well in all the pieces until Classical Symphony. I think Prokofiev was drunk on vodka when he wrote this, because he thought the viola section is the third violin section...

The other rehearsal was almost back-to-back with 212, and I had to rush to 34th St right after the little "makan" (eating) at the church basement. Wasn't too bad, I didn't know that I could take a "1" train straight to the Empire State Building. Ha! New discovery! Pretty handy.

By the time I was finished with the rehearsals, it was like 9 something at night already. I went to Wendy's, ordered some super value items and started chowing while reading the last book of "Uzumaki" by Ito Junji. And hell, I finished the entire book in Wendy's! It was 10.15pm then.

I reached home at about 11.30pm.

x x x x x x x x x x

One exciting thing about today:

I got an e-mail in my junk mailbox, it's from the Downtown Music Gallery that said "Mark Feldman Quartet, etc..." I didn't even look at the other words! The name "Mark Feldman"* totally caught my eyes and I went straight into that e-mail and see what it written in there.

It's Mark's new CD on ECM, with this famous bassist, Anders Jormin, whom had an album out on ECM, titled "Xieyi" (Chinese word that has two meanings: <1> Relaxed life, <2> A certain Chinese painting technique that passes on the feeling to the observer instead of a real figure of something), which is among my decent CD collection. The review was a great one, and I decided to buy it at some point.

So I wrote an e-mail to Mark, telling him that I wanna buy this album and stuff like that. I also attached my MySpace site and the Evil Twin's as well.

About 10 minutes afterwards, I got his e-mail reply which made my heart swell:

"hi I listened to your music of evil twin and It is sounding really good!

New York seems to have been really great for you Your Music has advanced so much from the

CD that you sent to me.

I really enjoyed it and keep up the good work!

best

mark feldman"

*In case you dunno who Mark Feldman is, he is one of the most famous jazz violinist in the world right now. Based in New York, he played for many great names (and STILL playing for some of them), including John Zorn, Dave Douglas, John Abercrombie, Kenny Wheeler, John Taylor, Lee Konitz, Joe Lovano, Uri Caine, Trilok Gurtu, WDR Jazz Orchestra...etc.