The rumors are true, I am become swine. Terrible timing; I had to pull out of a concert and a record­ing session with this lady, and also miss last night’s Metrop­o­lis Ensemble show at LPR and Julie Wolfe’s big piece tonight at Zankel. Thanks to Yale’s very cutting-edge new website, I was able to listen to the live stream of Thurs­day’s New Music New Haven concert from the comfort of my bed. The high­light was a big chunk of Chris Cerrone’s opera-in-progress, Invis­i­ble Cities&#8212 a piece I’ve watched grow and develop first hand, accom­pa­ny­ing dozens of rehearsals over the past year. It was thrilling to hear it realized with a full orchestra.

The Food Issue of the New Yorker arrived a few days ago, and while my appetite is dimin­ished, my capacity for reading about food (and watching Top Chef) is not. I’ve felt a secret kinship with Calvin Trillin ever since I learned we share the same favorite dish, spaghetti carbonara. This week he writes about poutine, a dish which has always struck me as osten­ta­tiously vile (though I would probably try the foie-gras poutine). What made me smile, though, was the follow­ing anecdote:

Cautiously, I tasted the Afghan’s poutine, which was the basic fries-curds-and-gravy dish without embell­ish­ments. My response was similar to the response I’d had some years ago when the composer Ezra Laderman, despite knowing full well that few eupho­nious sounds had ever been coaxed out of a shofar, wrote a fanfare for shofars that I heard played at the dedi­ca­tion of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale: “surpris­ingly inoffensive.”