I've been tagged... sort of

[fpb]

Anyway, the name of the meme is "Five things my friends don't know about me." Let's see....

1)I used to support Milan (the football team), but I stopped when Mr.Berlusconi, who owns it, started using it for political advantage. Since then I have no favourite team.
2)As a child, I spent a few years in Monza, where they hold the car races. However, I never saw one.
3)I have long been a Katharine Hepburn fan, and was rather unhappy to hear, after her death, of her voracious, promiscuous and bisexual lusts before she met Spencer Tracy. I was however much more unhappy to hear that in 1948 she worked for the Wallace presidential campaign, which everyone but her knew to be a Communist front.
4)I am quite a good cook when I put my mind to it, but I don't do cakes or sweets.
5)At 15, I wanted to learn to play the piano, but I was forbidden to do so - for reasons too mean and ugly to describe here.

Now I am supposed to tag five people. Well...
jennilee
theregoesyamum
kennahijja
privatemaladict
avus

Comments

[gunderpants.livejournal.com]

Glad to be tagged.

Incidentally, cakes and sweets are the only things I can prepare really well at all. I used to be an absolutely disastrous savoury cook, but Mr Gun's been making me learn and now I can make approximately two dishes. I'm real housewife material.

Sad to hear you weren't allowed to play the piano. Fifteen was also, incidentally, the year I quit playing, after one annoyingly mediocre teacher (and the abysmal works of Eric Satie - I will never be able to listen to the Gymnopaedies again without ripping my hair out) turned off my passion.

[lyssiae.livejournal.com]

I will never be able to listen to the Gymnopaedies again without ripping my hair out

Indeed. I used to think they were beautiful pieces of music, and then my piano teacher made me play them over and over and over. It meant that I could play them passably, but stronger, that I learnt to detest them.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yeah - Satie - down there with Peter Warlock among my all-time favourite don't-likes. If that was what was inflicted on you, I sympathize.

[gunderpants.livejournal.com]

The Gymnopaedies are the single most mediocre musical set in the entire world: devoid of mood, melody, harmony, and not even requiring the slightest bit of skill to play. I'd been used to playing some pretty nice stuff with my old piano teacher (who grew up and learned under David Helfgott's teacher, so she pretty much knew her shit) like some oldschool sonatas and some other stuff, like Debussy, which was at least enjoyable to play. When I moved interstate and went to a snooty private school, the only stuff the piano teacher there seemed to want to teach was hideously boring, atonal background music that one would hear in a Chinese restaurant (at one point, I felt tempted to ask her if she would teach me to play 'Music of the Night' and 'Do You Know The Way to San Jose' on a synth so I could make a living selling bad records to dodgy restaurants) that was far below the skill level that I was accustomed to. She played me the Gymnopaedies, and the first thing out of my mouth was literally 'What the hell is that?', I think with a disgusted look on my face. I quit that day.

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

That's so sad about not being able to play the piano. My mum wanted to play piano when she was a kid - she loved music, and she dreamed of being able to play. Her father, for some reason, decided she had no ear for music - and refused to have her take lessons.

My mum to this day claims she has no talents - not just for music, but for anything else. It's sad because she never wants to try taking up a new hobby. No matter what it is, she just says "I have no talent, there's no point."

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It sounds as though the only way your mum could be got to have confidence in herself would be for someone to force her - at least initially - to do something like writing or drawing. Only I cannot imagine how it could be done.

[avus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tag. And I'm horrified you were prevented from learning to play the piano. While I haven't had access to one in years, it's still one of my treasured (though very amateurish) skills. I value it as I value reading. It gives me immediate access to some of the Great Works of Western Civilizaiton.

By the way, if I don't respond to a tag, it may be b/c I haven't had time to go through my f-list. That really does happen quite often w/ me. Always feel free to give me an lj nudge.