Somewhere in the weeks since I last posted, there was a volcano in Iceland, days of extreme heat and cold, and the first exciting thunderstorm of the season. Apocalyptic signals aside — it’s fascinating to really consider these undulations of spring weather and the spastic texture of the earth’s crust. (Makes for better pondering than sovereign debt and the fragility of the airline industry.)

One of the performance casualties from Eyjafjallajokull (I had to cut/paste that) was the cancellation of the American premiere of Louis Andriessen’s “Life” — a piece for the Bang on a Can folks, with a beautiful video component by Marijke van Warmerdam. I was in The Hague last month visiting HC and friends, and I got to see BoaC perform this shortly before they became stranded in Europe, missing their Carnegie show. It’s a really affecting piece — hope the performance will be rescheduled here soon.

I don’t pretend to know anything about Portuguese cinema, or really anything in particular about films, but I went to see the creepy fairy tale Silvestre last week at BAM, which is featuring a run of films by João César Monteiro.  I think I decided to go just because of the wild color saturation of the film’s promo photo, and its reminiscence of Holbein and Cranach portraits and St. Vincent’s latest album.  And because BAM is a five minute walk down the street… Awesome.

In other news, played a fun concert with the Red Light Ensemble on Tuesday, at Symphony Space (Nimoy).  A portrait of composer Nils Vigeland, with some bits of Ives and Feldman to map the celebration.   My deltoids made it into the New York Times…

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