Poem: Obsessions
27 Thursday Feb 2014
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in27 Thursday Feb 2014
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in24 Monday Feb 2014
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inTags
album, album art, aliens, amber, as if to nothing, craig armstrong, inhaler, music, new york city, story, title, track listing
Sometimes I like to do this thing where I make up stories for albums that have nothing to do with the albums themselves. These stories are usually just based on the song titles, and have little or nothing to do with the lyrics or music. I’ll give an example with Craig Armstrong’s As If to Nothing. The track listing for the album is as follows:
I’ll reference the tracks with their numbers, followed by what part of the story they resemble for me. So, here goes nothing:
1: You’re falling through the sky, maybe from space, and everything is a great blur. You’re accelerating towards the ground at an unbelievable pace — it feels like the world around you is being torn apart — and you’re about to crash. Boom! You land in the concrete and make a big hole in the street. You remain there, not being able to move a limb, and then you fall asleep because you’re, oh, so tired. 2: You wake up and find yourself in the streets of what you recognize as New York City. You climb out of the hole your body created in the concrete, dust your shoulders, and get moving. 3: It suddenly hits you: where are all the people? You’re in one of the busiest cities in the world, but there’s nobody to be seen. And it’s not like the city’s dead or deserted, no. It’s just… very quiet. 4: You’ve done some exploring now outside, but found no one. You decide to start exploring inside, and so you enter the butcher’s shop that is closest to you, and there they are, people. But what is that? They’ve all been frozen in amber. You don’t understand how or why or when that happened. 5: So there it is, the city of New York. Everything’s so still, but not in a dead way, no. It’s as if the people are learning to be more like trees. They’ve all slowed down and can appreciate everything around them. 6: You move around the city for a while and up in a dance hall, in what appears to be a dance party. Looking at the band’s sheet music, you see that they were playing a tango waltz. All of the frozen couples look so happy. They’re sort of dancing forever now. 7: It’s been a few hours now since you’ve started exploring, and the night is approaching, so you check your pockets for anything that you might use in your exploration. You find an inhaler. But, just before you could lift it up to your mouth, it falls and sprays on one of the human couples frozen in amber instead. You pick the inhaler up from the floor, and find, to your great surprise, that the couple whom were sprayed upon were now free from the amber. 9: You can’t believe what just happened, and so you start talking to them to see what the story was. It is now snowing outside, so you decide to take a walk with them as they tell you the story. The story is that an alien spaceship flew over the city in broad daylight a few days ago, and they froze all breathing creatures in amber. 8: You’re now on the rooftop of a skyscraper, watching the sky and singing together. The gentle snow has stopped now, and you’re trying to make sense of all of this. 10: You’re still watching the sky, when you suddenly realize that it is starless. What’s up with that? The lights of the whole city are off, so you should be able to make out at least a few stars, but you can’t see anything. Suddenly, a bright light appears from far away and seems to be accelerating towards you. 11: It’s the spaceship that froze the city in amber! What do they want? Why are they here now? They finally come out of their ship after landing, and speak to you and your friends. They tell you that they froze the people and animals to protect them from dangerous solar flares that the human scientists hadn’t detected. Had they left them alone, they would’ve instantly died. You ask them to remove the amber now that the solar flares are over, and they agree. However, they will have to leave right after that, in order not to scare the people off. You are given a paper that you should only look at after they’ve left. 12: They get into their spaceship and fire up a huge sonic blaster. It transmits a supersonic frequency that removes all of the amber in the city, and everyone is free once again. As the supersonic frequency faded away, the spaceship disappeared in the darkened void of the sky. 13: Now everyone’s up and talking, but there’s a huge problem: all of the amber has escaped the city and drifted towards the sea, and now the sea is polluted. You check your paper and find that the aliens left you a song to sing to clean the sea. It will only work if enough people sing the song. But how much is enough? 14: The people of the city find this whole song thing a little bit ridiculous and pathetic, to say the least. It takes you a lot of convincing to win them over, and finally everyone agrees to sing together. 15: Everyone from the city sings the song together, and the amber disappears in an orange glow. Humanity sings its first alien song, and behold: not only did the amber disappear, but the sick were healed, the old and tired died peacefully, and the city was aglow.
(That’s it. I switched around the order of tracks 8 and 9 to make the story flow better. I know it’s not well-written at all, but the point is to convey what I’m imagining, and not to write a proper story. It’s closer to a waking dream than to a fully-realized dream, I think. Meh. It’s a little bit over the top, but that’s what I want from it… something a young boy would imagine.)
This story has nothing to do with the album itself musically or lyrically, although I could find/create some links if I wanted to. Anyways, here’s to a great album from a great artist. Final thought: the album art fits the album perfectly.
24 Monday Feb 2014
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inTags
album art, andrew bird, anouar brahem, astounding eyes of rita, jazz flute, king crimson, lifts, lyrics, poetic, poetry, sifters, talk, wind
Thought 1: British people sometimes make fun of Americans for talking in lifts.
Thought 2: Who/what else talks in lifts?
Thought 3: The wind talks in lifts, when it lifts the wings of birds to glide over the world.
I like it when I have poetic thoughts like these. Related music: King Crimson’s I Talk to the Wind. Awesome jazz flute solo in there.
“Sound is a wave like a wave on the ocean
Moon plays the ocean like a violin
Pushing and pulling from shore to shore
Biggest melody you never heard before
What if I were the night sky?
What if I were the night sky?
Here’s my lullaby, my lullaby to leave by
Lullaby to leave by
If I was a night”
~ from Andrew Bird’s Sifters
I’ll leave you with the album art for Anouar Brahem’s The Astounding Eyes of Rita, and the title track from the album:
22 Saturday Feb 2014
Posted Images, Photography, Thoughts, Writing
inSometimes seemingly meaningless moments in your life connect in a way that you would’ve never anticipated before they happened, to create together a moment that is much more meaningless than it should be. An example: when I was much younger, I was reading a Mickey magazine, and there was a story where Donald Duck and his nephews were in the North (or South, can’t really remember) pole. There was a huge snow storm, and an Eskimo man invited them to his igloo. On their way to the igloo, the man told them that Eskimos have a huge number of words for snow in their language (can’t remember the exact number; I read that magazine over ten years ago), and one of those names had something to do with the devil. I think it was “devil’s dandruff” or something along those lines. Anyways, so a long time ago, I read that story. Then, sometime during last year, I’m listening to Hammock. I’m listening to their albums in chronological order, and so I eventually reach the following track on their fourth album: Dust is the Devil’s Snow. And then, out of nowhere, a flood of memories of that comic I read over a decade ago came rushing to my head, and it was a very strange and beautiful moment. That’s it, though… I just remember a comic I read because of a song’s name. This sort of thing happens all the time, but usually not with over-a-decade-old memories.
I just described that moment as being “strange and beautiful” above. This reminded me of an album’s name: Yoav’s Charmed & Strange. That album name makes me think of quarks, because there are six types of quarks: up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. I don’t see how quarks are relevant to the album itself, though. This point brings me to another idea: if you asked me right now to think of music I know that have to do with physics, I probably wouldn’t consider Yoav’s album, because I’m not consciously linking it to physics, even though I know it is. My brain has this weird way of categorizing and connecting things. This is what a brain does when it learns something new, which brings me to a different point: there’s no clean way to take proper notes on paper. When you learn something in class, you learn a broad concept (e.g. a definition), and then you move through it step by step to explore its dynamics. On paper, we write in a linear fashion (which is why we have lined paper), but what happens after the lecture is over is that the smaller points connect to bigger points and the bigger points connect to each other in weird ways, and what you need now is a mind map and not lines, because it all seems so fragmented in your notebook.
Speaking of subconsciously and consciously registering things, I want to know if this happens to you too: does it sometimes happen that when you’re listening to something (someone talking, or a song, or anything without visuals) that you can sort of see a vague visual image in the eye of your mind of what they are talking about? This happens to me sometimes, usually when I daydream while listening. Some classes at uni are very helpful with that sort of thing… boring, boring, boring, daydream, see in my mind, class ends. I think that’s what hypnosis would feel like.
The key to good writing is honesty. When I say honesty, I mean honesty with oneself. In other words, write about what and who you are, and not about what you think people want to read about. Give way to your own voice, and let it grow, and then grow with it. If you really want to write, you will write about what you care about and the things you think about, no matter how insignificant they seem. I’m thinking of stand-up comedians right now… my favorite ones are the ones who can share their thoughts with the audience and make them laugh, no matter what their thoughts contain (from silly situations to vile imagined ones). The best way that I know of to create a genuine reaction from people is to be honest… to stand naked in front of the world, showing them that this is who you are. (I speak of very big ideas here, but we all know nobody likes to stand naked in front of the world. I, especially, get cold easily, so no. Relevant lyrics: “Don’t get any big ideas, they’re not gonna happen.” ~ Radiohead – Nude).
During this past week, I was told that I am too nice for my own good. How does that work? I know I am nice, and I know when people think I’m nice and “innocent,” so to speak. I think lots of people confuse “nice” and “innocent.” Up until adolescence, I was usually too nice and innocent for my own good, I’ll admit that. I’ll also admit that it put me in a lot of uncomfortable situations, to say the least. Through my teenage years I lost my innocence (as we all do), but I didn’t lose my niceness. How does that work? The thing is, I can’t stop it right now. I can’t stop people from seeing me as a nice person, and worse, from automatically seeing me as an innocent person too. Sometimes I think it makes me look weak.
Let’s talk about weak. There are a few things that worry me as a young man. One of those things is manliness. I’m not the manliest guy out there — and I don’t mind that — but I mind being put in a place where I am doubting my manliness. I know I can be soft sometimes (but I’ll get rougher with time; working on it), but I don’t want to be a man like some of the men I know… I don’t want to be a dictator or a non-artist or an overly-practical man, or an asshole, or, or… Media frames men in a certain way, and some of the men I know live up to the stereotypes, and it kills me, because I am as much of a man as they are, but now I have to prove it — just because I’m a little softer than they are — and how can I? I think this will be one of the things that’ll keep me alone for a long time, unless I can get over it. I’ll probably regret writing this when I’m a little older and rougher, but I couldn’t care less right now.
Final thought: we forget names, not ideas. Names of ideas are irrelevant as long as you remember the idea itself.
21 Friday Feb 2014
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inIf I ever open a gallery with photographs from all over town
Branches
I’ll name it “Branches” because it’ll be
Trees
Close ups and focus plays and light through
Branches
Especially leafless
Trees
They stand still and silent waiting
Or not waiting but smiling
Nude grandiosity
They are simply so
Beautiful creatures with
Branches
Bare and strong, raised towards the ether
Praying
Maybe I’ll call it “Prayers” instead.
21 Friday Feb 2014
Posted Images, Thoughts, Uncategorized, Writing
inThis post is being written on the spot right now, without any preconception of what I’m going to write. The post will be titled General Rant, but will be more of a stream-of-consciousness thing, even though it won’t be elegant at all. First thought: I could make this post a short story about an army general named Rant, like with Summer in 500 Days of Summer. I had no idea what the film was about when I first saw it, and so I thought it was 500 days of the summer season. Meh. The song that I was just listening to is Janelle Monáe’s 57821. A friend of mine recommended the album on which this song is found, The ArchAndroid, and it’s one of my favorite musical discoveries in a long time. It’s a very diverse album, but still very much together, — a solid and ambitious effort that not only lived up to my expectations, but completely shattered them — and Janelle’s vocals and music are exquisite on every track. She bursts with life. Speaking of Janelle, there’s a line in the last track, BabopbyeYa, which is very similar to a line I thought up in my head a long time ago but never wrote down: your hair is a symphony. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me… it’s happened a couple of times before at least, but I can’t remember with what. How every anticlimactic. Now listening to James Blake’s Digital Lion. The first thing that comes to mind when I read the word “lion” is Aslan (because he’s on the cover of my copy of The Chronicles of Narnia). I don’t imagine a digital lion at all, though, and never have. Not sure why. I like this track a lot, and Brian Eno contributed to it, which only makes it better. Brian Eno’s music may not be my all-time favorite, but listening to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports changed so much of how I thought about music. Eno’s a genius. Back to Digital Lion: there’s a part in the song where the vocals remind me of an old song by Amr Diab, but I can’t remember which because I haven’t listened to Amr Diab in so long. My sister downloaded James Blake’s albums recently, even though I already had them downloaded, and that annoyed me. She also downloaded the best of Deep Purple, and I have the whole discography (but she didn’t know that)… meh. My sister’s musical taste is good, but not very diverse from my point of view. She mostly listens to indie pop/rock made in the past few years, but she can appreciate good music that is similar to her style. I’d love to expand her musical world tenfold, but she won’t let me, and I understand that, but it still annoys me just a little bit. Now playing Jeff Buckley’s Dream Brother. I love the line where Jeff sings, “Her green eyes blew goodbyes,” because when I first heard it, I thought “blew” was going to be “blue,” and so the play on words was interesting. This song has a very strong Doors vibe to it. Jim Morrison is the man. I was never really a hardcore Doors fan, but I do love some of their songs. I usually don’t place emphasis on lyrics when listening to music, but Morrison is different. One time I thought I’d found my favorite line by him, butt hen it turns out I’d misheard it. The line is from Horse Latitudes, and it goes as follows: “Awkward instant, and the first animal is jettisoned.” (I love all of the lyrics to this track, but this line was special when I misheard it.) Before I read the lyrics, which was after quite a few listens to the track, I thought it said, “Awkward instant, and the first animal is jealousy.” I thought that image was very powerful, of jealousy as an animal. When I read the actual lyrics, I was sort of disappointed, but… meh. The same thing’s happened before with songs and with writings. A friend of mine from a class in uni had written a short story in Arabic (for which he won the first place award in a competition in uni), and I didn’t read it until a long time after he sent it to me. I just had a glimpse at the hard copy when he was first handing it in. The line I misread made the story for me, but when I re-read it, I was disappointed to read the actual line. He had written something about the people with the wealthy pockets doing such and such, and I read that as “the people with the whore-ish pocket.” There’s a difference of just one letter in Arabic, so the misreading was understandable. I liked my misread version much more. Meh. I stay “meh” a lot. Jeff Buckley’s Forget Her is playing right now, because I forgot to clear the tracks from the album in iTunes when I played Dream Brother. I want to be in a band, but I don’t know people who are prepared to do it. Those who are are already in bands, and so I’m stuck in the middle. Hopefully I’ll work out something soon. Now playing Feist’s Gatekeeper; one of my favorite “little songs.” It’s my second most-played track in the past few years, and almost my most-played track now. The most-played track for me is currently Radiohead’s Nude. Radiohead are great. Thom Yorke is great. Speaking of Thom, I love Christian Scott’s trumpet cover of Yorke’s The Eraser, from his solo album. Scott is one of the most promising young trumpeters on the jazz scene, specifically because of the context in which he places his trumpet. His jazz is different in a way that I can’t describe properly now because I need to sleep. I like listening to trumpet players a lot. My favorite old trumpet player is Miles Davis, hands down, and my favorite modern one is Roy Hargrove. Everything Hargrove touches turns to gold. I remember the first time I listened to him, and I was blown away… so much fun in that performance. Sometimes I think I should shut up more often inside my head, but then I can’t stop it. I should start writing down the lines I forget for future reference. I’ve been drawing my geometrical drawings, so that’s nice. I wrote a poem after the drought, so that’s nice too. I think I had a pretty nice day. I watched two George Carlin DVDs and I love him even more now; he’s a philosopher and a poet of his own kind. I live in a bubble. I should probably go to sleep now.
21 Friday Feb 2014
Posted Art, Poetry, Thoughts, Uncategorized
in17 Monday Feb 2014
Posted Music, Thoughts, Uncategorized, Writing
inTags
earworm, frank sinatra, love, marriage, miscarriage, music, musicophilia, oliver sacks, song, writing
Sometimes it happens that I have a song stuck in my head, like other people… it’s OK when it’s a song I like, but not as much if it’s not. But that’s not where the problem is: my problem is when a very short segment of a song, usually five to ten seconds long, gets stuck in my head. Usually it’s a random sentence from a song I’d listened to recently (without excessively replaying it), and what happens is that this ten-second clip keeps repeating itself over and over again for hours, and sometimes days, on end, and I can’t do anything to stop it. It drives me mad. One of the worst times when this’d happened to me was with Frank Sinatra’s Love and Marriage. It’s a nice song and I enjoy it a lot, but then I had a part of the song stuck in my head for just a little over three days… three whole days of the same few seconds looping over and over non-stop inside my head, mercilessly. The part that was stuck in my head was when Sinatra first sings, “Love and marriage, love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage.” Somewhere during the three days, my mind changed the lyrics to, “Love and marriage, love and marriage, and your wife just had a miscarriage!” If that isn’t unsettling enough for you, it was coupled with a mental image from this video. (The part with the pop was when Sinatra sings the word “miscarriage,” and the whole scene had a lot of blood in my mind.) I know how creepy this makes me seem, but please bear with me. So, I stayed for three days with that in my mind, and naturally, I tried to stop it in every way I could… I sang, I listened to music, I slept, I danced, but nothing worked. It was torture. On the fourth day I woke up and the song started again, but thankfully it stopped after a few hours. The normal thing that happens is that a ten-second loop stays there for somewhere between a few minutes and a few hours and then it fades away.
Not too long after this had happened, I was reading a book that was recommended to me by a good friend of mine. The book was Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks. (Sacks is a neurologist with a profound love for music, and so in this book, he looks at everything that happens in the brain with regards to music, from normal emotional reactions to its effects on people who’ve had parts of their brains removed, etc. It’s a wonderful book.) In the fifth chapter of the book, Sacks talks about earworms, which are songs that stick in your head. He writes: “A friend of mine, Nick Younes, described to me how he had been fixated on the song “Love and Marriage,” a tune written by James Van Heusen.1 A single hearing of this song— a Frank Sinatra rendition used as the theme song of the television show Married…with Children— was enough to hook Nick. He “got trapped inside the tempo of the song,” and it ran in his mind almost constantly for ten days. With incessant repetition, it soon lost its charm, its lilt, its musicality and its meaning. It interfered with his schoolwork, his thinking, his peace of mind, his sleep. He tried to stop it in a number of ways, all to no avail: “I jumped up and down. I counted to a hundred. I splashed water on my face. I tried talking loudly to myself, plugging my ears.” Finally it faded away— but as he told me this story, it returned and went on to haunt him again for several hours.”
Lo and behold! Someone had a very similar experience to mine, and a neurologist wrote about it in his book! However, as was explained in the book, earworms are not fully understood yet, and there’s no guaranteed way to stop them. Think of them as musical hiccups. I’ve thought before about making a list of earworms that have personally affected me in order to look at them and see if a special something triggers them in my mind, but I never got around to doing that. I’m yet to stop myself from seeing music titles in everything, for example, I automatically “saw” James Blake’s Life Round Here when I wrote “I never got around to … ” a couple of sentences ago. This isn’t annoying, but I could control it more. (But should I?)
Enough of me blabbering about what goes on in my head for now. *sigh*
I’ll leave you with something that an amazing author, who I am lucky enough to be friends with, told me today when I was wondering whether I should read or write (because I had some free time): “The answer to that is always write, then read, then write again.”
14 Friday Feb 2014
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inThe things a blank page can do
Six years ago, I used to attend this school which offered us what I now look back on as a blessing overlooked. In the midst of our busy school day, they’d set aside just 20 minutes following our break time, in which the whole school would do nothing but READ. To me, it was one of the most breathtaking scenes ever; walking through the corridors and seeing our classes full of nothing but students immensely engaged in their books. Both, the teachers and the students, took those 20 minutes seriously; the teachers always making sure that the atmosphere’s comfortable enough for everyone to read, and the students never skipping that part of the day, always having their books along, and quietly sitting down to read.
Looking back at it now, it wasn’t really just about those 20 minutes, it was about their effect and all what followed. I’ve noticed how…
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13 Thursday Feb 2014
Posted Uncategorized
inI absolutely love the credits design and song/music.
True Detective – Opening theme song (The Handsome Family – Far From Any Road (HD) – YouTube.