September showers

I thought I would be clever this morning and leave ahead of the rain. As it happens, I would've been better off waiting. Fortunately I had a pair of slacks in my knapsack that I was able to change into once I made it to work. Unfortunately, the first line of thunderstorms pushed through around half-past eleven or so, which kept me awake and now I'm a groggy boy.

I'm happy, though, because this is just what the garden needed. The catnip seems not to have made it (though it's a bit early to tell exactly what is sprouting in that pot), but the mesclun is up and growing like weeds. So is the buckwheat. But the standout success of this past year is the autumn-blooming clematis, which is finally in its glory.



Can you believe that I trimmed it back not once this year but twice? And when I say "trimmed", I mean I took it back to the metal trellis that you can't even see any more underneath the profusion of vines. Despite the dry summer, I don't think I ended up watering it more than a handful of times.

On the near side, it was starting to climb the smoketree until our neighbour across the fence hacked it back, and it was already at least a month ago that it reached the roof of the garage on the far side. I wonder if another year unmolested is all it would need to cover it on two sides.

The only real disappointment is that there still isn't much scent. Other plants like this you can smell from several paces, but you still have to get right up to ours before you get any perfume.

Sounds of silence

Today around lunchtime my workplace staged a performance of John Cage's 4'33" in honour of the centennial of his birth. They did it DIY-style, so it had some of the feel of a happening. One of my colleagues brought a surf guitar. (Requests to play "Miserlou" or "Rock Lobster" fell on deaf ears.) Another had a didgeridoo. The head of Africana played a vuvuzela. There were two people with tin cans and a length of string.

The conductor used the same time intervals as in the original performance, i.e. 33", 2'20", and 1'40". He signaled the start of each movement with a downbeat and the end by lowering the baton. Some performers held their instruments on their laps, others readied them as if to play. Pablo held a set of headphones attached to an iPod queued up for Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (which he played during the tune-up phase). At the beginning of each movement, he turned on the power to the headphones, and shut if off at the end.

The silence would've been exquisite if not for damn fool photographer shooting it all with one of those antique cameras with a mechanical shutter. I seriously wanted to ask him to knock it off. Afterwards, a young guy asked my big bear colleague for a try on his didgeridoo. Whereas BBC failed to get a decent tone out of it, this guy played a mini concert in-between explaining his circular breathing technique. I was so rapt I clean forgot about the cheese platter in the next room.