state of emergency.

I have been going crazy over Bjork's Homogenic. In fact, just Bjork crazy. Growing up, I only owned Vespertine and I used to listen to it over and over when I was 14. It used to transport me to a wonderland covered in fluffy snow, like marshmallows, ice figurines that depicted women alongside animal companions and left a cold, frosty feeling in my mouth as though a snowflake had just landed on my extended tongue. This was the album of my chilldhood - it transported me back to my own home, Polska. Now I know that Bjork used the natural sounds of ice cracking in 'Frosti' and treaded snow in 'Aurora'. And I think that that it is delicious! Nature is full of music and I just adore itt when artists take advantage of this earthly instrumentation. I only downloaded the whole version of Homogenic just this week and it leaves me feeling almost nostalgic. This is supposedly an album that is dedicated to Bjork's home, Iceland. She utilises Icelandic folk tunes and the Old Icelandic choir mode of singing - half singing, half speaking (like Sprechstimme, though perhaps not so funny). It leaves me feeling the same way that 'Ma Vlast' does. Longing. For something. For something that's no longer here.

For humour's sake, here is Schoenberg

i am beethoven (no).

"time is always new; cannot possibly be anything but new. Heard as a succession of acoustic events, music will soon become boring; heard as the manifestation of time eventuating, it can never bore." - Zuckerkandl, from his book Sound and Symbol

Is this not the most perfect quote? I think it quite accurately depicts how I feel about music. When I was doing TEE, I used to always watch the hands of the clock tick lazily across the face, calculating how much practise I still needed to get done for the week. I didn't appreciate that time was slowly seeping through my fingers and that instead of fighting it, I should simply appreciate and be with 'the moment'. I once heard on ABC radio a professional French Hornist talk about her relationship with her instrument. She mentioned how sometimes you pick up an instrument and it just feels like your skin. You know it is 'the one'. I never had that feeling with trumpet but I did, and continue, to have that for my first love: my piano, Violetta. A sexy minx dressed in black.

I've decided to learn as many of Bach's Preludes and Fugues as possible starting with Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C minor, BVW 847. Bach clears my head. I don't think about anything other than the music. I feel more in the moment than I have ever felt with Violetta but it wasn't long before I encountered my first obstacle: to metronome or not to metronome? If I used the ticking device, I would be stripping the music of its unique quality, turning it into a succession of musical notes and rendering it pathetic. After all, the metronome wasn't even around when Bach composed this piece. What's good enough for Bach, is good enough for me.

Beethoven was the first composer to include metronome markings in his pieces and he was criticised by his colleagues who considered him senile and eccentric. His marked metronome markings are, in general, quicker than how the music should be played. Rhythm is a touchy subject! Apparently Galileo used to hum to himself as he observed the descent of objects. This enabled him to more accurately estimate the time in which things fell, as opposed to using other (unreliable) indicators. Clearly, we have a natural sense of rhythm which may be destroyed by the use of my pathetic, electronic metronome. Metronome, I am above you. (On a side note, some people tend to be rhythm deaf, like Che Guevara who apparently couldn't tell a mambo from a tango. Didn't stop him from causing political upheaval, though).

Evolutionists argue that rhythm is necessary for survival (see 'ear worms') and even in modern society you can see its importance in work songs. I know that I much rather listen to music with an awesome beat when I'm working out; it makes me get into a rhythm and makes strenuous exercise much more enjoyable and, simultaneously, easier. Some broken legged patients also find that certain rhythmic songs can help them regain their original 'body image' map, encoding the intricate wirings of the brain. Rhythm is represented through the entire brain - in the cerebellum, brain stem and the frontal lobe. I use mnemonic devises with a memorable rhythm when I'm trying to remember something in my study. There are bizarre cases of people with frontal lobe damage, that only respond to commands if they're said in a singsong sort of way and I guess poetry owes part of its success to people's fondness for repetition. When the clock ticks, ever tick is the same mechanical sound, but instead of "tick tick" we hear "tick tock." We seem to impose a rhythm even when there are identical sounds. How odd. The evolutionists alwayz have a wanky explanation for such thingz.

In the end, I gave in. I'm no Galileo or Johannes Sebastian Bach. Just a silly 20 year old which philosophises too much about the importance of music. When you're learning a new piece, especially something by Bach, you need a solid beat, an acoustic event. If time is going to pass in its lethargic pace, completely disregarding my insipid and pointless need to relive and stay in the past, I'd rather be spending it with you, Violetta.

I'll finish by quoting Agnes de Mille (who choreography Copland's Rodeo - I seriously want to see this in concert one day), "the truest expression of people is its dance and music." Perhaps Paderewski's spider could differentiate between Chopin's etudes played in thirds from those played in sixths but music seems to be something uniquely human. I like spending time with others by dancing in my underwear and listening to Ravel.





Ps, Glenn Gould is a mega babe. Bach is supposed to be played on the harpsichord so it makes sense to play in staccato. On youtube, many were complaining that Gould played too slowly. I say fuck 'em and their stupid rhythmic expectations. Music should be an expression of yourself anyway.

the music bug.

'Unravelling Bolero' by Anne Adams. Ironically painted at the onset of frontotemporal demential which also plagued Ravel when he composed 'Bolero'

Someone once told me that my very existence proves that Murphy's Law exists. In the space of about a week, four horrible things happened and I crashed. I still don't know if the way I handled things was the best way of doing so, but I find my life hysterically amusing. Things from my past keep re-surfacing, like the bowler hat for Sabina, each time with a different but significant meaning. I can't help but laugh - I'm 20 in two days, why must things always take the most complicated route! :)

For a while, I felt numb. I was so removed from everything; I said hurtful things and placed myself in compromising positions and watched the action take place without even the sliver of emotion coursing through my veins. And then I heard Philip Glass's 'Opening' and the world beneath my feet, trembled. For about six weeks, I'd felt nothing. And now I felt everything. (Koko is a wankerrrrr)

Music can make you feel alive in ways that words cannot. Before L-dopa was brought in to manage Parkinson's, music therapy managed to temporarily inhibit the jerky stutter in motion that characterises the disease. People with Tourette's often find that playing an instrument harnesses and focuses their compulsion to touch and feel. In fact renown pianists Nick van Bloss and Tobias Picker both suffer from Tourette's. I guess what I'm trying to say, is that music can bring out the best in you. It stopped me from becoming a callous bitch. It can help those not only suffering from motor disorders, but also from emotional turmoil. When I felt like nothing mattered, no words could make me feel whole again. I heard 'Opening' and all this changed. I feel like it's woken me up from this dreamlike three years. Yes, I know I'm exaggerating.

The association of music with emotion and memory has been long established. I associate certain time periods and people with certain pieces of music. Everytime I hear Sonic Youth, I think of one of my dearest friends and I still can't listen to Metric's 'Help Me' because of the memories iand emotions t brings up but sometimes my connections between people and emotion and music become very convoluted. Sometimes, when I visit one of my friends I actually hear Kronos Quartet and feel as I did when I was 18 and whenever I see one of my closest friends' girlfriends, I hear 'Debaser' by the Pixies. I can't help it. I used to think that it was weird that I occassionally hear songs vividly in my mind when I simply am near someone. Perhaps this is a form of synaesthesia? Am I cross activating my auditory and visual cortices?

I think synaesthesia is more common than we recognise. I always associate the number three with yellow and seven with pale pink and feminine qualities. Nine is masculine and rude and mean. I read in a book that this is a "higher" order of synaesthesia which basically means that instead of mixing up the senses, ideas become cross-activated. Nabokov also saw different colours for each letter of the alphabet. In fact, when he was younger his mother gave him a box of coloured letters which distressed the poor kid who saw the letters coloured incorrectly. Luckily, I'm not this extreme. I've side tracked again, but synaesthesia is really facinating. Researchers reckon that in childhood, many of our senses are cross linked but that with time, "pruning" of unimportant/less used connections wires the brain in a different way. Begs you to ask the question, why are some people more susceptible to synaesthesia? Is there perhaps some sort of gene that makes some people less susceptible to pruning?

It makes me sad to think that some people can't react to music. Those with Asperger's can sometimes appreciate music, but not feel its full weight. Apparently Darwin lost his appreciation for music the more deeply he explored his theories on evolution. I read recently about frontotemporal dementia which really facinates me. Apparently this dementia can result in the disinibition of certain areas of the cortex asssociated with control and can unravel talents and a greater appreciation for the arts. One of my favourite composers, Ravel composed 'Bolero' at the onset of this dementia and artist Anne Adams, who had originally been a biology/math teacher, became enthralled by music and took up art. There's hope for everyone, even those with Asperger's! I find comfort in knowing that we all have some sort of musical prowess that we're not aware of. I don't want to wait around for dementia to hit, though. Man alive, music is wonderful.

Extra tid-bits:
- Williams Syndrome is a syndrome associated with heart and blood defects and mental retardation. Apparently those with this chromosomal aberration have a strong love and desire to play music for themselves and others (unlike savants which are highly robotic in their preoccupation with music).
- damage to the anterior temporal lobe of the dominant hemisphere (stroke etc) can lead to disinhibition of the parietal and temporal sections of the non dominant hemisphere. This can potentially lead to greater powers of perception.

ear worms.

drinking red wine, listening to Ella and pondering. I wonder when it was that people started to get songs stuck in their heads - ear worms, if you will. I guess now with iPods, CDs and television, we're constantly being exposed to tunes and the potential that a horrible tune sung by a whiney and anorexic American with a good beat, will get stuck in our minds - play on and on preventing us from being productive. Evolutionists hypothesise that our brains have evolved in such a way that we are prone to remembering repetitions in rhythms and in melodies. In hunter-gatherer societies such a trait could have been advantageous - if you remember the sounds of the birds and wind in a location known for good vegetation or scrumptious meat (lol) you could continually return to the same place and increase the survival of yourself and your offspring by bringing back enough to feed the fam etc. This evolutionary adaption has perhaps become a burden in an environment inflitrated by doof doof rhythms and banal melodies!

It's similar to the obesity problem. Once upon a time, having a sugar tooth meant that you would be more likely to consume high energy foods (because they are indeed tasty and delicious!) which were difficult to find. The Aztecs must have gone CRAAZZZzzzZZZZZyyyy when they found the cocoa bean! Now, a sugar tooth where delicious cupcakes and carrot cakes are just around the corner leads to unhealthy weight gain. (I read an interesting article today about how thigh circumference is correlated to premature death - the smaller the thigh, the more likely you are to die early or suffer from heart disease. Thank you Body Pump and thyroid disorder for rendering my thighs MASSIVE. Clearly, I am never dying). Our hunter-gatherer brains start to think that simply because you hear the latest Rhiana song 219346234750 times in shopping centres, clothing stores that this is something that should be stored in our minds. Oh, faulty brain! Why, why do you torment me so! Mark Twain wrote about this ear worm phenomena in one of his short stories - but were humans before this time also afflicted by the burrowing worm? Perhaps, but I doubt it was in the same way.

I read about epileptic/temporal lobe tumour patients that often hear music right before seizing. In a world that didn't hear music, did this exist? Did you hear bird calls or rhythms? How can one hear music if you're not exposed to it? Or is it perhaps your own invention? But if you don't know what music is, how can you construct a song in your mind? Are we just inately predisposed to melodies? I haven't felt so strongly for music in a long time. I wish I could hear music in my dreams and compose based on these melodies upon waking like my friend can. I used to think that I was somewhat less musical than my perfect pitch friends. I don't think so anymore. Music is much more than that.

Oh Ella, I've missed you so. As much as I miss NYC and more so than past memories.

"Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky, stormy weather. Since my man and I ain't together. keeps rainin' all the time."

Dear God, I love how I feel right now.

reminiscing.

I'm reminiscing. Bee Hives is a good album. I drank too much. Yay to drunken times with the fam.

detachment rock city.

I feel so detached from everything lately. It's a good feeling. It is nice not to feel like you owe anyone, or yourself for that matter. That you need to look out for anything. Like a friend told me last night, "it's not about love or emotion, it's just something that happens". These are just events that make sense at the time.

heart of glass.

It feels as though there's a boulder residing in the place where my heart should be. But It's not a heavy feeling. It's not light, either. It's just an emotion. What emotion, I don't know. I don't think it matters so much. Like a piece by Ravel, I don't think that Glass wanted to paint a feeling. Just evoke an emotion through a piece of music that is in itself emotionless.

I wish I could turn off my thoughts and sleep.

jazzed up.

These songs remind me of someone that I don't really miss so much anymore, which is odd because I couldn't listen to either of them for about two years without feeling the need to cry and burrow into the ground. On another blog, I published 5 songs that represent my life to date but I completely forgot about this time in my life. Maybe, because it coincided with some of my worst moments, I'd dissociated myself from them.

I often wonder, is it possible to love someone, really be in love with that special someone, if you never technically dated? A friend of mine told me last week that when she looks back at her past relationships, she realises that she only truly loved those who continue to mark her years after. I think that simplifies things too much. In retrospect, everything looks different. Magda says that you can only truly love someone that loved you back.

I was walking around the art gallery last week and randomly ran into a friend from my past. After talking for a while, he mentioned something that has made me jump for joy. The boy that had driven me mad for about a year, that drove me into the arms of my biggest mistake, that kissed me only once, that gave me the CD that contained these two songs had felt the same way about me. I never thought that someone like him could be infatuated with someone like little me. He always seemed bigger than me.

Hindsight changes everything. It obscures the feelings you may have felt and dilutes the thoughts that raced through your mind. I thought that I had met my first love at 19. I now realise that I was kidding myself. I wanted to tell my last partner about everything in my past, but not this one stolen moment (there I go with the jazz references, again). It's difficult to get over your first love. My God, I wonder how things would have panned out if only we had been honest about the way we'd felt.

I should get a diary, but I prefer to type. If ever I get upset, I will remind myself of the love that blossomed for a little while, but never really bloomed.

it's unbearable!

So I started reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being and there was this one passage that really resonated within me. Near the start of the novel, the narrator brought up the idea that life is like a musical composition and that there are motifs that keep on being repeated - like how Anna Karenina meets her love at the site of a train station suicide and then takes her own life in this same manner. Or how the bowler hat keeps returning, each time with a new meaning, for Sabina.

The idea reminds me of the structure of a Sonata. In the Exposition, the themes are brought up and then played around with in the Development. They're inverted, given new harmonies, turned major or minor and embellished, but it's still the same motif and when you hear it, there's this sense of familiarity, clarity and unity. That's exactly what the composers were aiming for in the first place. I'm going to be 20 in three months time, I'm probably nearing the end of my Exposition, but I feel as though sometimes I'm seeing and hearing the same things over and over. I feel aulde.

I don't think this is the place to divulge some of the more personal recurrences that I see, but there are small things. Like how your partner smells exactly the same like the other people that you've been with despite the fact that none of them use the same cologne. It's like you're with the same person over and over again. For me, the songs 'My Girl', 'Sunny Side of the Street' and 'Lady' keep being played everywhere I go and I can't help but feel this strong pang of nostalgia in my gut every time I hear them. Whenever I stop over in Singapore, I see the same bench where I rested my head against Magda's shoulder after our long flight from Perth. I don't know where it is in Singapore, but I always find it or walk/drive past it unintentionally. I don't want to know its whereabouts. Everytime I see it, it's almost as though I see us sitting there and the notion that I will never again be the exact same person that I was 6 years ago, used to freak me out. I'm being incredibly wanky (do I overuse this word?), but I like the idea that we're constantly evolving along the same old motifs.

I think I'm obsessed with knowing everything about love and sex; for crying out loud, I want to be a sexologist. I'm concerned that because I'm constantly trying to learn and experience as much as I can, I will never feel the unbearable lightness of being. I was with someone that I thought I loved, but I was never comfortable around him. There was always something in my gut telling me to leave. I didn't end up ending it, though. My gut also told me to stay, and so I felt heaviness.

My grandmother's name is Marianna and when she was a teenage girl, a fortune teller told her that she was going to marry a man named Marian. She disregarded this piece of information, laughed it off, because it would obviously be too ridiculous to marry someone whose name was so similar to your own. Law and behold, that's exactly what happened. You have to ask the question, do recurrences happen because they're predetermined and a part of our musical composition or because we want to see connections. I'd like to think the former point is correct, but then again, I think back to Friday night / Saturday morning. In my drug addled mind, I thought that it was no coincidence that Animal Collective's 'My Girls' played on as I connected with another person since my break up. It felt like that night in October last year when i danced with my last partner. Was it another motif repeating itself or a clear sign that Amps doesn't change its set list?

I often wonder if Maj chose the right guy or if the fortune teller's words were in the back of her mind when she said 'yes' to Kaku's proposal. It's odd though, someone came up to Mamulek out of the blue once when she was on her lunch break and told her that she had to spend more time with her brother. Wujek Waldek died a few months afterwards. When I was in India, waiting for the train to Jodhpur in Jaisalmer, a man told me that "red bird is going to fly at 21" and when I asked if this was a bad thing, he said "no, very lucky hand". I hope so. The women in our family seem to have easily readable futures :) Either that, or the turbaned stranger didn't know how to speak English properly.

I've side tracked a little. Fark, I know how to ramble. Was talking about it with Magda the other day; I tend to be quite open about my experiences nowadays, even on public forums like the internet. I guess the more secrets you have, the more likely you are to talk about those that aren't as significant.

If the musical composition has an Exposition, and a Development of the themes presented, then it has to finish with a Recapitulation and Coda. In the traditional Sonata, the Recap was essentially a repeat of the Exposition which is boring. If life is like a musical composition, (and even if it's not, I will always see it this way) I think it would be like one of Ravel's sonatas. The themes return, but they're way funkier and more intensely harmonised than the initial presentation :) I'm still at the start of my life - my music is only just beginning to develop its themes and motifs.

I like this book, and I like how I've changed over the last three weeks. It seems silly and corny to say that I'm starting to feel like myself again. Maybe I wasn't living my life to the fullest over the last two or three months, but now I am.

to beautiful Joni...

I remembered a phrase recently that I'd heard in a Joni Mitchell doco. It really bothered me; I couldn't remember the song I'd heard it in. But it wasn't a lyric.

In the 70s Joni was romantically linked to Graham Nash who wanted to marry her but she felt as though she'd come from a lineage of women who's passion for art and music had been buried by the men they'd ended up with. So she left him, and said these last words in a telegram, "If you hold sand too tightly in your hands, it will run through your fingers."

I haven't felt like myself recently; not that that's necessarily a bad thing. I just feel as though I'm on the cusp of something (what wank). I find that phrase so beautiful and it seems to move something within me because it's so true not just with romance and love but with everything. I used to be unbound by people or events or my aspirations. I used to be reckless and thought little of the consequences of my actions.

But then I got burned.

Now I think that I try to hold onto things too tightly because I don't want to be hurt again. I was recently described as being "straight-edged" and it really insulted me. I enjoy reading my text books and staying in on the weekends so that I can learn something new about the world. I don't think there's anything wrong with that but is this restricting me to a life where amazing experiences can pass me by?

I feel quite closetted at the moment. Why should one description make me feel so character-less?

I miss art; I miss music, I miss painting. I find a kindred spirit in Joni. She seems both lost and centred and in my opinion, she is the ultimate artist. Strange, how my passions have changed over the years because I know that despite doing Science and Medicine and Honours and all those scholarly things, I'm always going to be an artist.

From tomorrow, I start painting again.