| | Environmental
Whenever I live in a room that is really clean like my old apartment it tends to stay clean since I clean it all the time. Back in the day I would sweep the floors thrice a week, I had it all choreographed, and the kitchen shone every night. But when I live in a room that is inherently messy I take a much more desultory attitude. I will try try to do a quota of things each day but can't even faithfully do that. By the way, am I weird because having locks on the door or a bunch of barricades instantly implicitly increases my sense of well being?
Amatory
At times I get an ego about this. I feel as if I am different from everyone or most everyone else. I was going to make a more specific point about this but for some reason my brain refuses to focus close enough. I feel that I haven't had to deal with some of the things others have, and I am special for this reason but also find it incumbent on me to make especially awesome or catastrophic gestures based on what I started with.
Ambition
I used to think that life would be categorically peachy, and then I felt flat-out betrayed, whereas of late I feel as if my initial hunch was right but I have to stop taking advice from a large bevy of fools who have been parts in my life. Even though I am by nature a shunner of some degree I have been bad about this and subtly imitated my inferiors. What good is it even to look at the people around me if I will not help them or myself, eh? Moreover, why would I cast people off if I would not in good faith reinvent myself?
Not that there is anything wrong with humoring them but it is tricky to not end up being like them. Not to mention that when you are young and weak you like to compare and contrast. I feel that the only real friends I have are one from high school, one from college, and one transcendent. I was never popular as a kid but neither was I exactly unpopular. I guess I have seldom felt, and never with naked honesty to myself, what it is to be invisible to another. Even when I have been trying as it were to fence up in dating-ish leagues I never felt one hundred percent ignored. Maybe no one feels this way really, and I am too much of a romantic to feel it sort of even. A philosopher once said that you need malice to see yourself honestly. Me right now I don't care to venture otherwise. But at any rate, I think I should try and reevaluate some of my life's relationships to bring them more in line with the few healthy friendships I do have; the only reason this goes under ambition instead of amatory is I guess that in the long run friendships are one of the only reliable compensations that you have for what you do, for trying.
Erotic
Ever since I read this thing with Martin Amis I have become curious about other people's attitudes toward sex. He said that one thing you learn by and by is that it matters to others than you, and I was bewildered by this. These days I have no idea what is ordinarily abnormal. I guess this is all a way of saying that I feel so ambivalent about using xanga to talk about sex as I do not have any friends that this is really cool with. I guess I just assumed that all of my friends and such were ahead of me and more mature, but now I am quite clueless, not to mention dismayed at the state of American college movies. How to get some perspective without embarrassing myself. My operating script is that it is good and can suppress other issues for a long but not interminable period. I am not sure what else there is. I think that my counselor has been Northrope Frye who talks of the confusion of procreation and creation. But all that does is make you realize why you might want to do it or not do it for quasi-professional reasons. Ettiquette? Not getting yourself in trouble? Who even understands this? Maybe it does not go anywhere in the end and is just a pastime. Still though, it is weird since you can't put your own experience in a public perspective. Haha I remember years ago thinking that there is such a thing as a "public dream" and "private dream," ones that you join people in and ones to which you alone lay claim, and for the latter to turn into the former is a very special happening. However with pubic dreams it seems that you just have to get laid a lot and analyze for yourself but this is just a far far flung chance for me. I want to say it is not even to my taste but I do not even know. Maybe I am only lying to myself. Vanity of vanities indeed is this subject.
Mozart
requires that you take the risk of overstatement, right? You can't get it right by concentration alone. Maybe it is just the place that my mind is in right now but I feel as if WAM requires somehow more musical eloquence than is exactly kosher. Not that you have to risk affectation but maybe exquitism of a kind, or miniaturism. You either dispatch it as ambiance or you have to get a little too excited. Unlike other classical music where you have to concentrate but the music will more or less carry you, here it's more as if the notes have to be carried themselves while you supply the music. Maybe that is just how all of it is supposed to be. However, it is odd to have to arrogate musicality to yourself beforehand rather than be led by the score. It is much like opening your mouth with the explicit intent to flatter and charm. And you have to risk everything you do being too perfect to be presenting a quite plausible personality. This is how I think Mozart is. You have to like yourself a lot and feel that you are adored by others and can do no wrong, not as a privilege which you ironize but as one which you somehow do not impeach. Basically it is like a conversation where it feels so awesome that you think of surfing or high wire acts, in which the force of pure eloquence can be even diverting from the content of the music. I do not think Mozart really has shades in his stuff so much as mere segues and curly-cues; it's less like a voice than like writing which always returns to the point, as in old-fashioned letters where the final sentence somehow morphs into the valediction. The only exception to this rule are the adagio passages which are like the brief periods of sulking when you first start to suspect that even the love of your life is a somewhat impoverished affair. However it is still no more serious than sulky. The only tear-jerking is from the lack of happiness rather than it be a rant against injustice. In this it is the dead opposite of Beethoven where the slower passages are the only ones that hold out any possibility of peace or at least solace. The consolation in B is that the fast movements are sensationally violent and awesome. The consolation in M is that your petit ami finally gets off work and calls you. You realize what a fool you were not to expect that just this would take place. Mozart is a better stylist whereas Beethoven is more dramatic, but his drama is very pretentious and unnatural.
Pianistic
I keep wanting to quit every playing the pianoforte again but when I do I always get called back, so I figured I may as well just keep with it. It is not like the guitar you can take with you and noodle around in dorm rooms and hotels and yet it is surprisingly easy to find instruments that people will let you play. But at the same time I despair of ever getting really up to my own standards. It seems to take way too much work with this instrument, and work you are supposed to put in as a kid. My parents want me to give lessons now but I just don't think I'm up to it at all and I wonder if it would be possible or worthwhile for me to get there. I guess at some level it is just one of those childhood goals that you have to drop after a while, but with me it is really important since it is one of the few things that I concentrated on as a kid. Strange that I did better with singing in some respects. These days I could probably learn just about anything if you give me time but I doubt if I could dispatch it with confidence even if I practiced for ten years cause I just don't have the foundation. Hrm. When I was a kid I always thought that one day even if it is just for personal amusement I would get to a virtuoso level, and this would be my hobby. As-is I could just keep plugging away and I already know a fair number of pieces but what is the point if you don't get better? I feel as if some kind of pressure is needed to improve, but at the same time, this may be inimical or at least not directly relevant to music as such. In short, if your goal is sheerly to improve your musicianship you may as well quit because who cares? Shouldn't you care more what you would do with this skill? At least, they are equal. I am just so behind at this point that it seems better if I give it up and use the extra time to incubate life plans for things that I do not even know about, like how to deal with fantastical emergencies; or to meditate on my eventual death. Back in the day music was linked to the unforeseeable because I figured I would one day teach my kids but now I realize that this was just a silly metaphor for wanting to teach yourself.
On the other hand, though this might just be to distract from the inevitable giving up, I have a weird new interest in music composition and playing the oboe. One because it is just fun and surprisingly, incredibly gratifying. I woke up one day and for some reason felt like I should write this melody, so I wrote the solfege in a quasi-indication of rhythm (imagine phonetic lyrics transcription) and at the end of that I felt freakily awake, like more than I had in years. It was almost a feeling of terror. So I think that it could be fun just to make stuff up. At a selfish, evil sort of level also I like the thought of having my own little patterns in to which I put my own affective experience to store like the chemical energy in a battery.
Oboe just because. How hard can it be to learn? Everyone says hard, first you will get a sinus headache then you will have a burst lung and stroke from blowing so hard on the reed. Even as far back as medieval times it was known that the oboe requires "moche wynde" and can be good or bad for you for this reason. But I feel that I should have good abdominal control and omberture from the years I spent in school puffing through my lips, and besides this it has what like eight keys. It can't be that hard to learn. Better yet it is a great instrument for toting around, lighter even than a guitar or bowed instrument and also better for self defense I reckon.
Technic
I have none and in lieu of quitting I am going to just quit the playing of all pieces. I have to work on scales and such and it is quite embarrassing. More I guess just to get hands played in. I am awkward with how far to sit, how to get my arms out of the way and stuff. It is like a singer trying to use half their breath and a sandwich in your mouth to not work on these things, or just being unable to control. Very embarrassing. I still have to do do hitchy things and there is a sort of passagio in my finger crossing. I blame it on the imbalance on my finger size. The thumb is huge, gets in the way, and pinky much smaller than ring finger. Overall I think they are not bad hands to play this instrument as they are of OK spread and thin enough not to call for playing with the points of the nails or anything (apparently this gets to be an issue for some people?). I think they are basically inane though and do not show that much natural selection. Huge (and flexible) thumbs, vestigial pinkies. Good for gouging of eyes, bad for music. Claudio Arrau has shortish pinkies so perhaps I should analyze videos of him but then it sounds like some kind of athletic competition. I am not sure if it is really considered presentable width to have a twelfth. I think that the thirteenth must be the norm. I know lots of kids have much smaller hands but kids are kids. So many pieces have an octave plus a fifth chord and I have to roll it =( It is one more damn thing to worry about. I want just to park my hands over and move only the fingers.
I am only saying this on xanga to hold myself to it. I guess it was coming. At some point in my life I had to break down everything that I worked up to before so as to make it come back naturally or quasi-naturally
Touch
It is a lot of fuss but I think that I have to worry about this. When I was a kid I just wanted to play tunes and so forth but now I realize that you have to think about the style as such in which you feel the instrument. This is probably something I could stand to do in life too but classical music is all in all a more rewarding parcosm at least to take it for a spin. What separates music from video games is probably just this ability first to internalize (which is more or less a matter of the ear and brain) and then to recreate based on the DNA. I do not think I have any special talent but I know good from bad in this respect. Many musicians never know what they in fact heard, so they recreate an affectation based on a specter of style. I also think that quite a few talented pedants and second tier geniuses never get the music quite out of them in a communicative or actually valuable way (esp true of complex solo performances.....). Then you are left either snowing the air totally or creating your own mannerisms to plug in where you have excised the ones inherent in the score; lots of pianists feel to me to do this to get past hitches in memory or understanding because they are scared by or in some way else repressing the natural shape of the piece. Either flaw is a thing that some can get away with but it is bad when you pick up on this stuff and copy it just because others did not get in trouble. Whatever happened to having your own standards? We shall have to see. So that is my zen manifesto for hobby satisfaction.
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| | Posted 6/30/2009 5:10 AM - 1 View - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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