US Tour: 11 dates crossing 7 states

SE principal viola, Catherine Marwood, ends the US tour blog from our final destination, Ann Arbour, and looks back to concerts in Urbana-Champaign and Chicago. 

Day 15

Today we leave the lovely warmth of the south and head north to Urbana-Champaign Illinois. Texan hats and boots made their appearance in the rehearsal yesterday and on the bus this morning. We’ll be setting new style trends in Sauchiehall Street…

We arrive into Chicago after a long descent through thick clouds and emerge to a 20 degree drop in temperature. The bus is quiet on the 2.5 hour journey to the hotel due to some enthusiastic sampling of the Texan night life after the concert. There were rumours of a 4.30am return but I couldn’t possibly comment.

Life returns to the group with a good meal and Team Girls hit the bowling alley. Much fun had by all.

Day 16

The day dawned wet with intermittent thunder, constant rain and the general consensus that a quiet morning in was required. There were distant sounds of practise from hotel rooms and I heard rumours of a gruelling session in the gym led by our fitness guru James but I have to confess I only took part in the former. Alison had not been so lucky with her travel the previous day. Chicago airport was closed after we arrived due to more storms and, as she was behind us, she was diverted to Dallas and the Milwaukee where she ended up without the case and various bits of plumbing that make up the natural trumpet featured in the programme for tonight. Order was restored by the time of the rehearsal and we all enjoyed our experience of playing in the huge but resonant hall at the University of Illinois in Urbana. A generous champagne reception followed and I spoke to two gentlemen who professed to playing the trumpet. Naturally they were glowing in their praise of Alison and also of the concert in general.

Day 17

Breakfast and a bagel and all on the coach ready for a Chicago experience before the rehearsal. Unfortunately Chicago has been hit by storms and there is severe flooding causing road closures and chaos. We sit in a stationary traffic jam for ages and a 3 hour journey turns into a 6 hour one. The only excitement is a visit to McDonald’s and an overdose of salt and fat. We are all expert at sleeping whilst travelling now but few achieve it with such grace as Cheryl.

Plenty of time on the journey to contemplate American culture, the incredible diversity and vastness of the country and the oddities of the common language that divides us (as someone once said). Passed a poster on the motorway inviting me to visit gunssavelives.com and there are lots of signs prohibiting weapons in bars. Strange to our eyes. We have met many lovely people and there is a warmth and openness that is very endearing. The audiences have been generous and enthusiastic giving us standing ovations at all the concerts and we will take many happy memories with us. Whale watching, a visit to NASA, and roof top cocktails in NYC rate highly for me.

We finally make it to the hotel at 3.30pm in time to check in and extricate concert clothes. Then it’s on to the hall for another well attended concert. We’re all feeling pretty weary by now but a big effort is made and it all goes well. We then take the lift upstairs for a ceilidh led by Alistair and some members of the group abandon their instruments and encourage the more reluctant guests to dance. There is a lot of whooping and many smiling faces when we leave. Some folk visit a spectacular bar on the 96^th floor of a skyscraper. ‘ Wetherspoon in the skies’ as Thorben puts it but I made straight for the 12^th floor and bed.

Day 18

Breakfast in Chicago was marked by a certain amount of dissatisfaction with slow service but more especially with the tea. The concept of tea bag + boiling water = tea is not always evident in this country and we were all tired of barely lukewarm coloured liquid. ‘It’s the American way’ our waiter assures us. We leave Chicago for another long coach journey and we arrived in Ann Arbour for a quick sound check in the beautiful hall …

We had a fantastic audience of 2500! It seemed to me to be the best concert of the tour and I’ll remember it for a long time. The acoustic was beautiful and everything seemed to flow with ease. Alison played wonderfully well. The colours she is able to get out of the trumpet and her control and sensitivity are quite breathtaking. The audience stood and cheered with great enthusiasm. We all felt quite emotional and there were a few tears backstage.

It has been a really momentous experience and I don’t think you could find a better group of people to spend 3 weeks with. There has been much laughter, great concerts, moments of difficulty of course but those always serve to bind people together and strengthen ties and I’m sure we will always look back with great affection and the knowledge that the Ensemble will grow and develop further from here. I have been proud to have been part of it all and there is real sadness that it coming to an end although it is rather wonderful that we meet again in Glasgow in a few days time. The management on the tour have been absolutely fantastic and I can only imagine all the hours and hours of time that have gone into making it happen. We owe them a huge thank you and also to all our supporters, funders and sponsors who have generously given to the cause. I think we did you proud.

The evening ended with a much deserved group celebration and an appreciation of what each member had added to the tour led by the comedy double act of Tristan and Andy. There was a lot of laughter and some tears and I imagine it will be a quiet bus as we leave for Chicago airport and the long journey home. See you in Glasgow on Wednesday.

US Tour: 11 dates crossing 7 states

SE principal cello, Alison Lawrance, on the third leg of the Scottish Ensemble US tour writes about Florida, New York, and Texas.  

Day 12

8.30am: we’re leaving the hotel for the departure gates of Orlando airport and after a late return in the early hours of the morning from Gainesville, everyone’s looking very sleepy. We’ve had many problems flying with our cellos on this tour and I’m sure today’s not going to be any different. It didn’t start well on day 1 when the check-in desk couldn’t find my cello reservation, saying that American Airlines only take one cello per flight, and that was my desk partner Naomi’s! He finally realised his error after chatting to various colleagues.

Today, I had altercations with 3 ground stewards wanting to tag my cello case and put it in the hold. Every time I’ve boarded a plane a stewardess greets me with ‘Have you purchased a seat for that ma’am?’ to which I would like to reply ‘ No, I’m just trying to smuggle it on board and hope you won’t notice’ but instead I smile sweetly and brandish my cello’s boarding card.

Today is a 5pm concert at New York’s Town Hall…

We’re very excited to be playing in such a famous venue which many musicians believe has an even better acoustic than the Carnegie Hall. It holds an audience of 1,500 and it’s sold out – it’s a wonderful feeling to walk out on stage to a packed house. We have a mad dash from JFK airport into the city, and only time for a short rehearsal so we work on a few musical ideas. We’re all struggling with tired limbs from playing our socks off last night but hope once the adrenalin kicks in we’ll be fine.

We’ve been hiring a double bass in each city to avoid the problems of flying with a bass and unfortunately the quality has generally not been good. Graham, our bass player for this tour, explained to me that they’ve been set up for playing jazz with strings very close to the fingerboard, good for pizzicato but not for bowing loudly….it just makes a rasping noise which I confess has made Naomi and me laugh. Thankfully today’s is a proper professional bass, set up for classical playing, so Graham’s a happy bunny.

We start the concert and realise the acoustic has changed with a full audience making the sound more harsh under the ear so we work hard to counteract it. It’s what I call a lonely acoustic when you can hear yourself very clearly but not the other players (thankfully we chat to some of the audience afterwards and find out that the sound is amazingly detailed but warm). We’re delighted the concert went well and the audience seemed to love it…. they were already on their feet and clapping before we’d finished the final bars. Alison played beautifully as usual and Jon’s Mendelssohn concerto sounded fantastic….I was very proud of him. We’re all on a high after this performance so we quickly check into our hotel and then pile into taxis to take us to an open air rooftop cocktail bar overlooking the Empire State Building.

The views are ‘totally awesome’ as they say over here!

The down side is that it’s rather chilly but all of us are handed hooded red dressing gowns. I can’t decide if we all look like Santa Claus or we’ve joined a commune of Tibetan Monks.

Later some of the group move on to a blues bar (which I thought I was going to) and others on to a club for some dancing (which is where I ended up).

Day 13

Awoke at 8.30 still fully dressed and all the lights on in my room….. I must have been tired! A free morning in New York before a 4 hour flight to Austin Texas. I’m being a geek and head off for a violin shop to buy some strings. They used to be much cheaper in America than the UK but I’m shocked to find out that’s not the case any more…$299 for a set! Have a stroll through a bit of Central Park. It’s about 15c with clear blue skies, a pleasant change from the searing heat of Florida…

..

Arrive in Austin about 9pm and many of the group head off for a protein overdose at a steak house. Early night for me…my feet and ankles are so swollen from all the flying and salt in the food that I fear I’m turning into an elephant…I even dream of being squashed by one.

Day 14

Everyone at breakfast is comparing notes on their preferred bed firmness. In this hotel we can remotely control the mattress firmness from 0 (way too soft) to 100 (rock solid). We decide we like it around the 50 mark. Have a walk around the city. It’s much more urban cool than I’d imagined: a real mixture of old and new. The State Capitol building is the largest one in the US and very impressive with its pink granite glistening in the 30 degree sun.

Today’s concert is at Austin University, one of the best and wealthiest in the US, and home to the Texas Longhorns. Passing the huge stadium we see a real live longhorn cow with 7ft horns doing a photo- shoot outside. The Bass Concert Hall is vast and they have amplified the harpsichord a little to help the sound carry. This is our last performance of program 2 of the tour and we experiment with different tempi in the concert to keep it exciting. The audience seem to thoroughly enjoy it and we get another standing ovation.

US Tour: 11 dates crossing 7 states

SE viola player, Andrew Berridge, on the second leg of the Scottish Ensemble US tour writes about LA, Manhattan (Kansas), and Florida.

This is my first proper tour as a member of the group and the build-up to leaving was a strange mix of excitement and trepidation – how does one pack for such a long stretch and for a 30 degree temperature range? While we’re now fully in the swing of things and relaxed into ‘tour mode’, the excitement at where we are hasn’t subsided, and the LA concert was an early highlight. A beautiful and superbly appointed concert hall, it still felt intimate and special on stage, despite the daunting size and the feel that we were on somewhat hallowed turf. Alison was superb and the group really responded to the energy of the place, and the standing ovation(s) were met with huge smiles all round.

Day 6

At this point, the group split into two – most headed off to Manhattan (another day of gruelling, and delayed, travel) whilst five of us departed in a different direction. Two members of the group (Tristan and Xander) are getting married shortly after we return home, and this seemed the ideal opportunity for Jon, Thorben and me to take them on a short seminar course to prepare them for married life. After long hours of internet searching, the others had found a travel window which enabled us to attend a series of meetings in a small town out in the desert, called Las Vegas. After procuring suitable transport in the form of two convertible Mustangs, we did our best to stifle our grins and headed into the unknown…

For reasons of continued employment it would be unwise to divulge all of the details of our trip, but suffice to say we attended some interesting and thought-provoking vocational short courses on topics as varied as fund management and fiscal responsibility, safe disposal of potentially toxic liquids, appreciation of traditional American fine dining, and complex interactions with a rather persuasive gentleman called Gabriel (‘Angel’ to his friends, apparently). For some of us the intensity of the experience proved exhausting and they retired early while a couple of us eschewed our beds (in the bizarrely pyramid-shaped hotel) to continue our education into the night, only to be disturbed by an alarm reminding us that our cab to the airport was to depart in 30 minutes. Despite the arduous nature of the experience, we all had aching faces from the sheer joy of learning, and it was certainly 24 hours that I won’t forget in a hurry. With apologies to the rest of the group, it was bloody brilliant.

Day 7

After another rather tiring journey we arrive in Manhattan, Kansas. It’s a small university town and the hotel is almost on the campus. Several of us recharge in our rooms before a mercifully short sound check, and then the concert at the McCain Auditorium…

When repeating programmes like this, any small change is seized upon. Tonight is Alison’s first outfit change and she arrives in a stunning white dress, and plays like a dream. Special mention must go to Jon, though. Heroic comes nowhere near to describing his performance of the Mendelssohn. We sample some of the local brews and retire, exhausted.

Day 8

The night has been filled with thunderstorms as a cold front moves in. The temperature has dropped from mid-20′s to almost freezing, and it’s distinctly unpleasant. Manhattan feels distinctly Scottish in the rain. I wander out in search of anything and am struck by how difficult it is to actually walk anywhere in American cities. While the road is fairly pristine and full of enormous cars that dwarf anything back home, the pavement is full of potholes and puddles up to a foot deep. After persevering for half an hour I give up and return, cold and disappointed. On the way back I pass block after block of stereotypical houses with large porches and swing seats, one of which has a camper van sprayed camouflage green. It has a bumper sticker which reads “I’ll keep my freedom and my guns and you can keep ‘the change’”. We depart for the airport later that afternoon; the flight is delayed as the weather is still causing issues. When we eventfully fly, we are treated to a visual spectacular as we first skirt the storm, and then fly over it.

We eventually arrive in Melbourne, Florida in the wee small hours.

Day 9

A chance to rest with a day off. Some head out for Kennedy Space Centre while the rest of us hit the beach. It is blissfully hot, and several of us renew our Santa Barbara sunburns. In the evening we head out for a group meal, taken by some of the local taxis. The drivers impress with their southern drawl and tales of joggers being taken by ‘gators (“all they found was her right arm”). We revise several of our lessons from the desert, play pool, and head back feeling rested. I can’t sleep so go for a walk on the beach. I go much further than intended, enjoying the warm air, starlight and crashing surf. All in all, a good day.

Day 10

It is HOT and lethargy is rife. Today’s concert is in St Mark’s, a local church up the road. The air is stifling and none of us really feel like playing in that environment, but the people running the place are lovely and we are very well taken care of. Happy memories of cream puffs, vast platters of fruit and cookies, and welcome air con in the dressing room. The venue is pretty well sold-out which gives us enough adrenaline to get through, but it feels like a very long night. After the concert we are ushered on to the coach and set off through the heat for Orlando.

Day 11

The heat and locality prevent much happening; I stay in the protection of the air con and iron the shirts I’d washed in the previous hotel. Domestic bliss. Almost. Some of the others find the pool until we leave for the University of Gainesville, Florida. It’s a couple of hours away along endless motorways, and the tedium is only broken when we see our first ‘gator by the side of the road. It seems remarkable that we’re actually on campus at this point, and start wondering if they ever go walkabout?! Tonight we play the longer of our two programmes, and it is, again, difficult in the heat. Alison and Jon keep us all going with their inspirational performances, and the Tchaikovsky serenade gains extra life. Alastair Savage’s stirring rendition of ‘Herr Roloff’s Farewell’ makes us all feel transported back to a more familiar place, and it’s a very emotional end to the concert. We come away feeling like we’ve run a marathon, so the thoughtful provision of ice cold refreshments by both Alison and the promoters is most welcome on the coach back. It’s an early start in the morning, and most of us just head for our rooms and collapse. After all, we’re off to New York in the morning, and this one is going to be fantastic.

US Tour: 11 dates crossing 7 states

SE Leader, Jonathan Morton, on the first leg of the Scottish Ensemble US tour writes about their journey from Glasgow to Los Angeles, and then to Santa Barbara, San Diego, and back to LA!

Day 1

We all meet at Glasgow airport on another bitterly cold early morning. Deciding what to take on a trip with wildly contrasting climates (with temperatures ranging between 29 and – 3 Celsius has been tricky. Thorben, our Chief Executive, has concerns about the lower end of the thermometer, and has opted to take a heavy winter coat. He is the only one in the party with this opinion, so of course we start teasing him about how cumbersome he will feel when we get to California. He looks forward to being smug whilst we all freeze in Chicago.

During the flight from NYC to LA we get to see vast expanses of wilderness, including the Grand Canyon…

as well as dense urban sprawl…

The last leg of our journey is by coach, out of LA and onwards to Santa Barbara. We hit the infamous rush hour traffic, with miles of bumper to bumper shininess – gleaming chrome, glass, and metal. Carwash must be big business here. 22 hours after leaving Glasgow and with a strong dose of jetlag we reach our final destination, comfy beds in a typical motel in Santa Barbara.

Day 2

A free morning in Santa Barbara means a walk around town and down to the beach. Pelicans, beach volleyball, palm trees, truly laid back and friendly people. Mediterranean fragrances everywhere – orange blossom, jasmine, lemon trees. All rather intoxicating after the endless spell of revolting UK weather. I’ve never seen so many smiley faces at the afternoon rehearsal!

Alison Balsom is here (she flew out here a few days before us – wise move jetlag-wise), and we work on the new repertoire for the tour, a series of baroque pieces for the natural trumpet. Alison has had one made for her in Switzerland, and she is brilliant at showcasing its quieter but sweeter and more complex sound.

The evening is spent sampling the local IPA on the pier, followed by local seafood at the buzzing Enterprise Fish Co, a popular joint specialising in ‘mesquite charcoal broiled fresh fish’. Violinist James Toll gets high on a local oyster, his first!

Day 3

Today is our first concert day, at the University of Southern California, a large and immaculate campus a short drive from Santa Barbara.

To take us there, we board a small bus with blacked out windows, driven by an incredibly friendly and chatty guy called Tim. When he finds out we are classical musicians he plays me a track from an album of Led Zeppelin songs played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (with added rhythm section). Some of the guys on the bus notice that the engine seems to have a lot more power than you’d expect in this kind of vehicle, and Tim confirms that it’s a 6.8 litre V10!

The concert goes well, with a great crowd and a standing ovation at the end.

Day 4

On arrival at the hotel in San Diego we are told that due to some ‘air-con upgrading works’ at the hotel we are meant to stay at, and we have been moved to Chateau La Jolla Inn, a ‘residential community’. This actually turns out to be a retirement/nursing home… our first chance to practice an important tour rule – be flexible and keep smiling!

Which we have to keep doing today, as the double bass provided by the local promoter is totally inadequate (a few phone calls later, reinforcement is brought from the San Diego Symphony). On the plus side, the hall is located next to a stunning beach…

complete with seal colony…

Slow traffic prevents Alison from getting to the hall in time for the sound check… but of course she plays immaculately in the concert, and the audience seems to enjoy the US premiere of James Macmillan’s Seraph. Another highlight is violinist Alisdair Savage’s playing of Scot Skinner’s ‘Herr Rollof’s Farewell’ as an encore.

Back at our ‘hotel’ we find that the front door is locked, with no receptionist in sight… Creative fence jumping is called for, a fitting end to an unusual day.

Day 5

Back to LA today, where we perform in the gorgeous Disney Hall. This is a big one…

International Touring – a player’s thoughts

After a successful tour in China in May earlier this year and with a USA tour (our biggest international tour ever!) coming up in April next year, we asked Scottish Ensemble cellist Alison Lawrance why she loves international touring, and why it’s important. Here’s what she said…

“One of the best things about touring is getting to know your colleagues better. When you’re spending 16 hours a day together for more than two weeks (I think we have one free day in the US), you certainly find out what makes people tick! I think we’re extremely lucky in our group as we all get on so well, and we’ll probably plan to do things together on our day off!

Although venues and audiences vary quite a lot when we tour Scotland, the differences when touring abroad are vast in comparison; because everything’s new you can never guess how an audience will respond to a performance. Also, playing in a 2000 seater hall is a very different experience to playing in smaller rural village halls in Scotland (a bit like Strictly Come dancing moving from the small studio to Wembley!) We get taken out of our comfort zone, which is challenging, but it also a very positive thing. The excitement when arriving at a new venue with unknown acoustics is immense. I found the huge Chinese concert halls that we performed in during our tour in May particularly amazing.

Also, most of the venues we’ll be in during the US tour promote well-known, prestigious series and are home to very knowledgeable audiences.  If you combine performing in these sorts of environments with having the chance to work on the same programmes over a longer period of time, away from home comforts and familiar concert halls, it all adds up to that extra something special from an artistic point of view.  We’ll be wanting to impress this new crowd!

I love meeting the locals wherever we go, and if China is anything to go by we’ll certainly be trying to get to know the ‘real’ America – the people, the cuisine…and the best bars! A few drinks together after a concert is a great way to wind down.

Every tour is different and the excitement of the unknown makes each one special; you never quite know what lies at the end of the next flight or coach journey.  Despite this, you always come back enriched by the experience and ready to meet up again on home ground with renewed vigor.”

We’re taking part in the Big Give Christmas Challenge in order to help us reach our fundraising target for this ambitious tour.  The Big Give offers our supporters the opportunity to have their valuable donations doubled.  Visit  new.thebiggive.org.uk/project/SEUStour from 10am on the 6, 7 or 8 December, and your donations will automatically be eligible to be doubled until the pot of match funding runs out for that day.  So please set your alarm and help us take SE across the pond!

Happy Birthday Britten!

Today marks 99 years since the birth of the great composer, conductor and pianist Benjamin Britten! As one of the central figures of twentieth-century British classical music, he is one of the most important composers of music for strings.

This season, the Scottish Ensemble is joining in the Britten celebrations.  The Ensemble already performed Britten’s eerie masterpiece Les Illuminations with Glaswegian tenor Thomas Walker in October, to great critical acclaim. Now our annual concerts by candlelight return to Scotland from 3 – 8 December, which includes performances of Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, as well as Bach’s iconic Goldberg Variations arranged for string orchestra by Dmitry Sitkovetsky.

Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge was the piece that established Britten’s international reputation, and it is now considered one of the true masterpieces of the string-orchestra repertoire. Britten had previously thought about writing something based on his former teacher’s music, and decided that the theme for his set of variations would be taken from the second of Bridge’s Three Idylls op.6 for string quartet. Britten’s Variations is in many ways a character portrait of his beloved teacher.

Learn more about the December tour and watch a clip of what you can expect by clicking here.

We hope to see you there!

Scottish Ensemble Variations concerts

Our annual concerts by candlelight return to Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, Aberdeen and Inverness from 3 – 8 December. We’ll be performing Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and Bach’s Goldberg Variations, plus there will be another new musical postcard from Martin Suckling. Our candlelit concerts are very special events, and a great antidote to the usual Christmas offering. If you’ve never been to one before, here’s a taste of what you can expect.

Postcards from Martin Suckling #2

Our real-life postcard from Martin

We’ve commissioned Martin Suckling to write us musical postcards throughout our 2012-13 season, with the first, In Memoriam EMS, arriving in time for our Illuminations concerts in Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Inverness on 22 – 25 October and at our 1st concert of the 2012-13 series at Wigmore Hall on 30 October 2012.

Postcard

We were thrilled to receive our first ‘real’ postcard this morning from Martin – here’s what he had to say about the performance of his first musical postcard for us:

Dear Scottish Ensemble,

Thanks for the amazing performances of In Memoriam EMS over the past 10 days! Watching you play is such a thrill – it’s given me lots of ideas…

I’m writing your next postcard-piece at the moment. My starting-point is the memory of your striking entry into the Caird Hall in Dundee – the pied-piper Pachelbel ground swelling the ranks of the Scottish Ensemble with players from the local youth and amateur orchestras. We’ll see where it leads me – it’ll all end in microtones again, no doubt!

Very best wishes,

Martin

In memoriam EMS

If you’re in the UK, you can listen to Martin’s piece broadcast live from Wigmore Hall on the BBC iPlayer until Tuesday 6 November. In Memoriam EMS appears around 1 hour 5 minutes into the programme – though why would you want to miss out on SE’s performances of Mozart Divertmento in D major, some Purcell Fantasias and music from opera and Bach’s Violin Concerto in E with our very own Jonathan Morton as soloist?

You can also listen to Martin chatting backstage after the very 1st rehearsal of In Memoriam EMS in this blog post, or catch his next musical postcard to us in our Variations concerts by candlelight in Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, Aberdeen and Inverness from 3 – 8 December.

Martin Suckling interview

Our final residency in Dundee came to an end yesterday – and what a weekend it was! A full report of what we got up to will be coming up later this week, but for now it’s straight onto our Illuminations concerts in Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Perth from 22 – 25 October 2012.

As well as performances of Britten’s Les Illuminations with visuals by Netia Jones ( on probably the biggest screen you’ve ever seen outside the cinema. Honestly.) performed with tenor Thomas Walker, we’re also giving the very first performances of our new commission from composer Martin Suckling, In memoriam EMS,  the first in a series of musical postcards from Martin that will be dropping onto our doormat  over this season.

But what’s it like to hear your music performed by a whole ensemble for the very first time? Marketing & Development Manager Keren chatted to Martin straight after the first rehearsal yesterday afternoon.

If you’d like to hear Martin’s music for yourself, find out how to buy tickets on our website

.@ScotEnsemble Thanks one and all! Fabulous playing - amazing concert; Britten totally gorgeous and stunning visuals from Netia Jones

—
Martin Suckling (@mcs42) October 23, 2012

Netia Jones speaks to New York Times

Netia Jones spoke to the New York Times this week about her version of Oliver Knussen’s opera Where the Wild Things Are, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book which is being performed by the LA Phil and Gustavo Dudamel this week.

Netia’s next project will be her visuals to be performed with Britten’s Les Illuminations with us in two week’s time from 22 – 25 October. You can read more about Netia’s work in this blog post