Come September, they can't remember why

Because it has been a summer of STUFF and TASKS I have gotten dangerously lax about keeping up with even my own output. Some items you might have missed:

Sick Puppy 2012: opening concert (Boston Globe, June 18, 2012); closing marathon (NewMusicBox, June 28, 2012).

Reviewing Bruce Brubaker.
Boston Globe, July 3, 2012.

Reviewing Gerhard Oppitz.
Boston Globe, July 21, 2012.

Reviewing the Boston Landmarks Orchestra.
Boston Globe, July 27, 2012.

New England's Prospect: Output and Gain. Reviewing the Bang on a Can 2012 Summer Institute marathon concert.
NewMusicBox, August 2, 2012.

Reviewing the Boston Chamber Music Society.
Boston Globe, August 6, 2012.

Having It All.
NewMusicBox, August 10, 2012.

2012 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music: part one (Boston Globe, August 13, 2012); part two (NewMusicBox, August 16, 2012).

Also there are book-related things afoot; see the post below.

In the meantime, if your summer has been anything like the summer here at Soho the Dog HQ—i.e., cheerfully chaotic, mysteriously overscheduled, and leaving one grasping at free time with both dirty, bitten-off fingernails and a bewildered unfamiliarity with the concept—you probably could use some refreshment.

Staycation

Fill a tall glass with ice cubes. Add 2 oz. gin; ¼ oz. Bénedictine; and the juice of one lime. Fill the rest of the way with diet orange soda. Give it a stir.

Does it have to be diet soda? Yes. Yes, it does. And really, the more day-glo artificial-color orange the soda, the better. If you can't bring yourself to buy better-living-through-chemistry orange soda, you might try the Staycation's cousin: the Orbital Sunrise, which is just a mimosa made with Tang instead of orange juice. It is, if I do say so myself, delicious. Ad astra per aspera!

At a lid-flipping price!

The First Four Notes, my long-awaited (by me, that's for sure) book exploring the cultural history and misadventures of the opening gambit of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, is ever closer to being an actual thing. Proofs have been proofed, hilariously serious author photos have been taken, bound galleys are fanning out across the land in search of blurbs, all in anticipation of November 13, when the book drops. (Can a book drop like a record does when it's released? I will drop a copy on the floor myself, if necessary.)

One thing left to do is to get a website up to promote the book, but until that happens, this space will have to suffice, which is why you can now find, over on the right, some pertinent links and information. This includes a now-tiny-but-hopefully-at-least-slightly-longer-eventually list of author appearances. That's right, I might be coming to your town! (Unless your town is Brigadoon. No way I'm falling for that again.) As things are confirmed, I will continue to post more and more detail until the density of information reaches the Bekenstein bound and I find myself giving a reading inside a black hole. Where I bet the refreshment table is superb.

The image at the head of this post, incidentally, comes courtesy of my Boston Globe colleague Jeremy Eichler, who generously rescued it from an old Boston Symphony program book. If anybody out there actually still has one of these t-shirts, send me a photo, and you will be rewarded with all the fame that an intermittently-updated blog can provide.