0 This is what happened: Rockridge at 23:13

I love Rockridge Bart. It is my favorite platform for public transportation by far. I hate waiting, you see, I despise and fear the anxiety of unknowing, I am paralyzed by uncertainty. I am jolted by the sudden windy roar of arrivals in underground stations, though I've had minutes to expect the next train's arrival as announced on impartial red lights like reverse raindrops.

I hate airports and never showing up at the right time, always unmercifully early, or in one case, unforgivingly late. There is nothing in-between, no small window of perfect timing that makes you feel like God has blessed your journey, your commute now a pilgrimage as you walk uninterrupted, with purpose, from the bus down the stairs through the turnstile down the escalator into the welcoming open doors of the right-destination train and the doors beep as you cross the gap and close immediately because finally you are here and now they can leave.

At Rockridge, freeway traffic muffles the train's electric harbinger with its own irregular cadence of rumbles and gravel. When the train (SFO/Millbrae) is still a couple of minutes away, you can see it approaching silently, crawling along the center of the freeway, each section jostling and following one another like an impossibly large and fast mealworm. It is here. I am gone.

1 This is what I think about that: Response to "Young Musicians and the Ethical Swamp" at 17:27

This is a response to an SFCM professor's blog post which was put up just over an hour ago, entitled "Young Musicians and the Ethical Swamp". In it he writes (very eloquently) about how terrible and wrong it is for young musicians to be writing concert reviews these days. You can read it for yourself, he's a good writer and I have nothing against him - except I couldn't stop laughing while reading the post.

I was intrigued by his description on facebook of "young, active musicians" writing reviews as "an ethical quagmire, an absolute wrong, and potential career suicide" and just had to read it to see what was so wrong about it. But after swimming through his seas of metaphors and cliches, I found hardly any criticisms beyond 'inexperience' but plenty of thinly-veiled admonitions: "Monstrous wrong", "Potential damage to their own careers", "utter failure to comprehend the most basic level of appropriate behavior". The whole post just sounds intentionally scathing and defensive and hardly constructive to any "young musician" currently writing reviews.

First, I feel that age makes little difference in reviews and the expression of opinion, as long as there is a grasp of the fundamentals of writing and expression through a written medium. I won't be romantic and cheesy and say that even an 8-year old's opinion of a concert is valid and we can learn something from their opinions, but the experience of the same concert from a 20-year-old's perspective and an experienced 60-year-old's may differ greatly, and I want to hear both of theirs.

Second, I've never written a concert review before for the same reason that I've never enjoyed a concert review written in the paper; I don't understand the point of its existence. On what basis are you supposed to judge a concert? By its genre, or professionalism, or quality of the program, or the venue, or the production value, or their artistic statement and whether or not they achieved it, or......

I mean, I've been to amazing, AMAZING concerts where I was riveted every moment, and I've been to concerts when I've fallen asleep in the middle of a program (and these two experiences are not mutually exclusive). But what am I supposed to put in a review if I were to write one? The subjective approach, while potentially funny, has no objective value and of course largely depends on a bias: "Jack Van Geem played super well tonight! I'm glad I got my program signed because I'm gonna put it under my pillow and hope to absorb his talent through his autograph." The objective evaluation, on what there is in music that could be measured objectively, is dry (and funny in its own way): "Van Geem had over 99% note accuracy in his performance tonight. The sound quality of each bar and note he hit was perfectly controlled. The tempo of the pieces were appropriate and did not change inappropriately during the pieces."

I only know what I like, and to an extent I know what is good, but that is heavily biased by my own tastes and oftentimes my blood sugar at the time.

Third, I think that the opinion of young musicians is relevant and useful because we probably communicate in a different language than the older generation. I think my professor feels especially defensive about his generation's authority to write reviews because he has been used to seeing the same names under the headings of newspapers for so many years, and the familiar is comfortable. But if we kids don't ever start to gain experience in writing because older people keep saying it's an ethical atrocity, then there will be a sudden gap of musical review-writing talent when they all die and there are no contemporaries with any experience.

Finally, as an ending and as a disclaimer: I don't care much about classical music, so this pithy battle has little emotional investment from my part. Well, not that I don't care, but I don't understand it at all. Maybe the majority of the people reading that blog post will know of this unspoken set of "professional ethics in a musical community", and if that's the case they can have their circlejerk for all I care. Until someone writes these ethics down and explains them to me, it just seems pretentious, no matter your age, to be writing scathing, destructive (I wanted to write unconstructive but that's not a word) criticisms of a generation that's trying to learn.