So what was it like, getting mugged? For those of you who have never had the joy, I had the joy today. One thing that happens is that you don’t really accept it is happening as it happens.

Colombians say every place is dangerous, so I don’t listen to them. Now I understand better and the lesson wasn’t that expensive. I was in a solitary place, I saw the guys circle twice eyeing me–two guys on one bike; shady but not uncommon–and I let them sneak up on me from behind. I guess I could have turned around and watched them. When I turned around the chap was brandishing a knife and they soon had their hands inside my pockets.

Which is why I don’t like to take my wallet with me, and fortunately I didn’t have it. But they got the cell phone, and that’s a good excuse to quit investing in that trendy stupidity. Second one–I’ve done my time and it is time to quit. But they also got my little black notebook.

There was no danger, of course, unless I had fought back, which I saw no clear way to do against two guys stronger than me and one of them with a knife. They wanted money and I had no money (lie!). So they told me to start walking one way and took off another. When they had got away I returned and soon found my discarded notebook with the 10,000 peso bill in it and the Parker pencil still attached.

May God have mercy on them; not only do they suffer from human depravity but it looks like their fair share of human stupidity has been exceeded. They’re mean, ugly and predatory; I’m sure they rode away from that encounter poorer than I did, and now I must not forget to pray for them.

And now? Do I return that way? Man, I do not want to be intimidated out of taking a walk wherever I feel like it by a couple of cowardly thieves that regularly prey on people there. But if I return carrying a pipe or something, they might round-up a few friends and see what it is I’m trying to protect. On the other hand, what if I go with nothing, just my book–can’t risk loosing my precious little black notebook again as useful as it is to have it along. Will that work? should I go armed with strong calls to repentance? A bit of a dilemma, because it really is a wonderful walk to get away from all the noise of traffic and hear birdsong and wind, and the cries of people being held up.

I have a new attitude toward bicycles now, and I look at people in a way I did not before, and I understand a little better. Suddenly and for the first time in my life, I feel like working out.

Well, I wandered myself through Villas de Granada, along a busy street full of a lot of of the good things of Bogota, and beyond. One of the main thoroughfares around here is la Calle 80 which turns into the Autopista a Medellin, which leads west away down the mountains. The flight path of a lot of jets involves that road, I noticed. I got there and headed west.

Soon one reaches a bridge made of guaduas. Guaduas are a sort of tough bamboo which is supposed to be better for building that steel and better resistant of earthquakes. They don’t use it for building here much because our building codes, apparently, are taken lock, stock and barrel from L.A. where they make no provision for using guaduas–welcome to the third world.

On the south side of said bridge one finds a long, paved bike path. It is a bike highway, actually: two lanes and you can get two cars on it, besides the sidewalk extending generously on both sides. It is overgrown and neglected, runs through a long swamp, and is perfect for walking.

The first think you notice is that you can’t hear the traffic. You hear the planes from time to time, but you hear the waterfowl mostly. And you see the waterfowl, white and black with long beaks and legs and great wings. The marsh hens are there, and other such fowl, along with the mourning doves and raucous birds. Saw cows too.

And it is long, often fringed with pino romeron, but not too often. I reckon it is a 45 minute walk one way. It ends at the Bogota river, with a bridge leading into a wonderful park where I found a grove of enormous eucalyptus. There the vista changed from marshes with the city in the distance, and the mountains, to just trees all around, and park-like adiaphora like courts, pitches and playgrounds. Didn’t explore much there, but there it is for me to explore when three and four hour walks are the order of the day.

But there it is! My paradise for walking and getting away from the city. It is about a half hour away waking, which all serves the purpose. Nowadays I walk for half an hour before I start reading anyway. And on the way back I can get buttermilk, or empanadas, or arepas, or buñuelos, or a Mexican combo, or pizza or a whole, roasted chicken.

I think I’ve found the part of the city I want to live in. I have certainly found my place for walking.

The Leon de Greiff concert hall at the National U. is a good place for a concert when the orchestration requires the orchestra pretty much take up the whole platform. It is a big, dim hall with good acoustics and little upkeep. I bet 50% of the lighting in the hall is clean out, and you can see water stains and mold in the distant panels.

We have better halls, but this one in the middle of that ghetto, the National U., located exactly on the Che Guevara plaza, with a silhouette of the blighter right over the entrance to the hall, which is somehow fitting in that there’s the unprepossessing exterior and then there’s what goes on inside. It is big, it is not all that interesting, it is dim–of course–but it feels like coming home: comfortable, the audience knows what to clap at, you can hear, and the quality is not so bad for what you pay. It is a giant oyster shell and a womb of sound, a dilapidated and experienced star-ship, and that is what it needs to be.

We have a new director here: Enrique Diemecke, a Mexican who’s also on with the BA Filharmonic, the Long Beach Symphonic and the Flint (yes, MI) Symphonic—but he’s good. I think the Argentinian connection has been a bad influence: he has a cheap, flashy style that’s off-putting. He talks before he puts on the performances, which is annoying—we can read the program notes. He attempts to guide us into appreciation and it is a sign of the decline of things, I suppose, that we can probably expect someone to come and talk to us before we listen to the music probably more and more rather than less and less. Old Lior Shambadal probably didn’t even know Spanish, and so we were spared.

The Bax was Tintagel. The director informed us that’s probably were Arthur was. It was—according to Mallory—where the vile Mark of Cornwall was, and La Beale Isolde, and of course Sir Tristram who at one point, to disguise his identity, was Sir Tramtrist. Not Arthur that I can recall. The piece was new to me, and not a bad piece to warm things up. Not hard for an Anglophile to enjoy if not particularly memorable.

(In the orchestra there was a cellist with bare arms and a sequined blouse and loud lipstick. She looked like an upper-class Mexican to me, and I could not help feeling there was something of the cellist missing in her get-up: the decorum, modesty, the suicidal impulses one associates with such careers.)

A lengthy Argentine with peculiar, pointed shoes (most Argentines are unreconstructed Italians), Luis Ascot, played the Ginastera piano concerto #1. The program notes said it had a lot of dodecaphonic bits in it, but I couldn’t tell them from the other bits, and it all sounded modern. I like it because I like brilliant, modern music and this music was brilliant. Ginastera may not have got the most charming pair of glasses available to him at the time, but he could make interesting sounds. I admire his vigor and—though this may sound sarcastic I do not mean it that way—his determination.

I don’t know if you would pay money to know what the music made by corpses floating in the blue light at the bottom of the sea would sound like, but I would. How strange sometimes, how seemingly random the sounds, and yet not without their attraction to me. I do not wish the thing would end for all the paranoid scratching and the sinister sounds of tinkling glass. The notes crawl like orchestrated arachnids—and where do they crawl? In the folds and tunnels of my brain, is where, and I find the whole experience wonderfully unusual. How curious, and of course, because they are nothing if not self-conscious, how marvelously intelligent they manage to make it all feel. Not beauty so much in the 20th Century, perhaps, but intelligence. And the days are coming, if they are not here already, when we will wish we had at least intelligence.

I was glad for the Ginastera, and I’d go back for more.

Here’s what I wrote about a part before we came to the last movement: A viola laments and the orchestra erupts in calamity; we hang on every last bit of it. A space ship lands, poised, full of delicate rocklike formations in tanks of amber liquid, and for twenty years they do not move. Then the aliens come to life. In the twenty years, sounds follow each other like drops, like echoes ricocheting in slow motion, and the wash of timbre laps the shores of that sea, consciousness, with alien evocations.

I like that stuff, man. And of course, it all ends with rhythm because what is left to us but raw power? We can appreciate raw power here. We clapped heartily for Ascot and he gave us what I reckon was a Piazzolla encore: short and neat.

In the interval one looks upon one’s fellows, wondering—don’t you? I was glad to see intelligent old men, or at least intelligent-looking old men. Foreigners keep the arts appreciated here and families. You see what you see, of course, besides the people who straggle and you wonder why or how the sod got in.

The second part was Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Even I could tell the band and the director haven’t yet found all of their connections. But Diemecke brought them along and husbanded them for the Nimrod. The Nimrod, now, is a kind of hymn but with such sublimity that one might say it is the hymn only the gods sing. And Diemecke knows this. He was saving up for the Nimrod, and it was truly unearthly. I have never in all my days experienced what I experienced in that concert hall. And then the memories of that as the piece concluded changed again the whole piece for me. I haven’t heard it very often, and only once or twice complete. I don’t want to either; I want it to be a special thing I only hear in concerts, I think.

It was some good performing, and some good music as far as I can tell who have mostly love and not a lot of understanding. I’m going to keep an eye on the upcoming and be a bit more in attendance than formerly.