#mine was glenn gould

[chaotic-gay-is-my-alignment]

I'm curious: Reblog and tell me in the tags who your extremely unusual and already long dead at the time high school crush was.

[strvngevsvngels]

Me, the boys, and a cold one

[ghostowlattic]

Heyo mate,

I really love your art, happy to find you at tumblr. I'm just wondering, are those digital or real creations? Your art looks so real but also seems like digitally created. You haven't used any tags for this information. Btw your art is amazing and really magical, thanks for existing ^^

Have a wonderful day and sun & moon keeps bring you good luck! Farewell :3

-Lona

Thank you much! I wrote some replies to this, all which ended up rather long winded, so instead as short as possible reply for you and others.

I really just love making music. I'm mostly a musician, songwriter, composer. Piano/keys but I play a lot of musical instruments or use things for soundmaking. I do have many sorts of visual arts posted but I'm 99.9999% certain you mean the recent deluge of AI assisted images I've been sharing which, are a blend of AI, diffusion/Midjourney, personal images, photos, but those are not real objects as far as all those terrariums etc go.

I try to actually tag anything I use for the most or just add 'generative'. Anything that doesn't pick up crypto peeps really. Anyhow, it's all more of a dreaming visual diary for myself and others. Or a bit of visual reflection of my musical brainscapes. I often use a mix of my own photographs images, fed into an ai model or two. But I don't promote myself as an artist really. I don't even mind selling prints of mine for the sake of health care and rations but, otherwise it's for just ideation, inspiration, dreams. People can enjoy it any way they want.

There's a lot I could say about it all and the good and terrible of ai or tech in general but would take up too much space here, I'm really not much of a tech bro person either, but I don't hate machines. We are an entire universe of jiggly energy so, whatever. At very least I like the notion of infecting such things with as much love and beauty and good ole weirdness especially if some is unstoppable for better and worse. This is all for the sake of it. Really, a ton of those images are already made so, vs just leaving them in a folder I figure I may as well share some for others to see.

Anyhow, thank you kindly Lona - and anyone else, if you like the images/blog feel free to check out my bandcamp or soundcloud or my music/video posts here. I think its rather visual and odd beautiful in its own ways also. Sorry for the longish reply but it's also for others who wonder or who send me inquiries lately.

I do like this Glenn Gould quote on art, 'The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.' – Glenn Gould

I love 'art' being for personal expression or communication of things which go beyond language and reference, for music at least. Yet I also love the romantic notion reflecting things which leave us in a state of wonder that seem larger, Nature, etc. VS just self expression and human stuffs. I guess to me I don't see much point of personal expression if it doesn't include a bit of awareness of not being the center of the universes.

Most of all I'm a biopheliac and sound lover. Very open always for collabs of artistic natures as well. Music, arts, film, games, public expressive dance terrorism, whatever.

[writingbyricochet]

WHERE PARADISE DIED AND LIVED - PLAYLIST (10.21.22)

bigger than the whole sky - taylor swift / strangers in the night - frank sinatra / late night talking - harry styles / little of your love - HAIM / willow - taylor swift / fever - dua lipa & angèle / love again - dua lipa / rumors are flying - les paul & the andrews sisters / nobody's darling but mine - merle haggard / until i found you (em beihold version) - stephen sanchez & em beihold / can't help falling in love - elvis presley / love me like you do - ellie goulding / little brown jug - glenn miller and his orchestra / in the mood - glenn miller and his orchestra / johnson rag - glenn miller and his orchestra / this is heaven - nick jonas / moonlight serenade - glenn miller and his orchestra / happy & sad - kacey musgraves / delicate - taylor swift / no plan - hozier / 3 AM - HAIM / afterglow - taylor swift / the night we met - lord huron / the heart wants what it wants - selena gomez / walls - the lumineers / vulnerable - selena gomez / another try - HAIM / at last - glenn miller and his orchestra / moon - jonah kagen / the man who lives forever - lord huron / soon you'll get better (feat. the chicks) - taylor swift / the great war - taylor swift / golden hour - kacey musgraves / this love (taylor's version) - taylor swift

Here it is, the Where Paradise Died and Lived playlist! A mix of some period-typical songs I imagine Sophie and Eddie would have known and contemporary tunes. They're arranged in rough plot order, barring the first and last songs that are more thematic than anything else. I planned to post this last week but delayed it in case Midnights had any suitable songs and I’m glad I did because she really hurt my feelings with the 3AM Version 💀 xx

listen on spotify / apple music

tag list: @canofpeaches @wayoftheghost

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this Week #133 (Year 3/Week 29):

First watch, finally: Louis Malle’s seminal debut feature Elevator to the gallows shot when he was only 24. Blacker than the blackest French Noir and with the groundbreaking, stand-alone score by Miles Davis, "The loneliest trumpet sound you will ever hear".

4 years after Agnès Varda made 'La Pointe Courte', but still a year before Truffaut's 'The 400 blows', 'Ascenseur pour l'échafaud' opened the gates for the 'French New Waves'. All the drama was on Jeanne Moreau's face, as she wanders desperately all night across the dark streets of Paris.

🍿

2 more from Iceland:

🍿 "Welcome to the world"....

My 4th re-watch of Rúnar Rúnarsson's Icelandic masterpiece Echo. It is now one of my all-time favorite great movies. 10/10.

(Photos Above).

🍿 Godland, my 2nd film by tremendous director Hlynur Pálmason (after 'Seven boats'). This ambitious story dominated last year's Danish Bodil awards. It's slow-moving visionary epic, like some of cinema's greatest works.

🍿

Limbo, a new Australian thriller shot in stark black & white in the vast, sparsely-populated outback. A laconic film with even more laconic people. Simon Baker, who was so suave as Jared Cohen in 'Margin call', plays here a character as far from suave as possible, a broken-down, dope-shooting, heavily-tattooed police investigator, sent out to re-open a 20-year-old cold case of a missing aboriginal woman. And the people he encounters are pained like the dying opal-mining town they occupy. Haunting, empty slow-burner. 7/10.

🍿

2 by Louis C.K.:

🍿 Surprise! I love you, daddy was an accomplished and funny look at a father and daughter relationship. Some crude CK humor + a story about creepy 68-year-old John Malkovich seducing a 17-year-old girl, it still stayed warm and real. Very much like the best of Woody Allen, he even wore his traditional glasses, filmed it in artistic black and white, referred to themes from 'Manhattan', and even used the music with a similarly superb ear. But like Allen himself, art followed life, it opened with a jerk-off scene at the office, and you have to separate the 'artist' from his 'art'.

This is my second Outrage CK from the period after his Me-too Masturbatory Fall From Grace (The first was 'Sorry'). He must be an unpleasant jerk to be around, but the two films were great. 8/10.

🍿 Apparently he made a bunch of short films in the 90's. Ice Cream was his second, an absurd piece about a man, a woman, 3 babies and a Mariachi band.

🍿

Re-watch: In 2011(?) Philips ran an international contest called 'Parallel Lines' in which they asked people to create a three-minute short film using only six lines of dialogue: “What is that?”, “It’s a unicorn”, “Never seen one up close before”, “Beautiful”, “Get away, get away”, and “I’m sorry”.

Director Ridley Scott picked the winner, Porcelain Unicorn out of 600 entries. One of his protegees submitted The Gift, a Russian-based sci-fi about a mysterious box. I've always loved them both.

🍿

While waiting for Alexander Payne's latest film, The Holdovers, I watched his debut feature Citizen Ruth, the last of his films I haven't seen before, about religious fanaticism in America. But even though it's a black comedy, my dislike for religious extremism is so intense, I couldn't take it at face value.

🍿

Also, while waiting for Nolan’s 'Oppenheimer', I watched the 1980 documentary The day after Trinity, to fill up on history I didn't know. A useful overview done in informative & sober oral history style. 9/10.

“Peanut butter and Vienna sausages and whiskey…”

🍿

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould is a 1993 Canadian anthology about the famed pianist. It's true that Gould was a God walking among us mortals, and listening to him play Bach any time of the day or night is the best thing one can ever do. But this artsy, stagey literary hand-job was boring and tedious. Like a religious veneration, it was not interesting. 2/10.

🍿

Les Biches is supposedly one of Chabrol's most famous films from that period. Apparently it's loosely based on Patricia Highsmith's 'The talented Mr. Ripley', with the main characters genders being switched. But I found their motivations confusing and the bi-sexual love triangle shallow and unconvincing. WHY, indeed?

🍿

Whenever I get bored by too serious films X2:

🍿 When my watch list of 1000 art films gets overwhelming, I just revisit the 2005 TED talk that chaotic Swedish doctor/magician Lennart Green gave in 2005. This rumpled sleight-of-hand master is one of a kind. 10/10.

🍿 Or I pop in Mike Judge's Office Space, and enjoy this perfect black satire one more time. "...The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care..." 10/10.

🍿

Wes Anderson visited the iconic JM Vidéo rental store in Paris, and pulled out a bunch of his favorite movies from their shelves. [This 20 min. tour was actually more enjoyable to me than any of the 8 films of his I had seen!]. I jotted down some of his picks for future watches (Kurosawa’s 'Drunken 'Angel', works by Rouben Mamoulian, musicals like 'Meet me at St. Louis', Renoir's 'The Crime of Monsieur 'Lange', Etc.)

The first from his list was Hollywood (1980), a 13-part history of the silent era in Hollywood, by British archivist Kevin Brownlow. Narrated by the distinct voice of James Mason, this YouTube series is, unfortunately, only available in low-res 360p, so I watched only the first episode. It reminded me that I never saw Griffith's 'Birth of a nation', which I need to, at one point. But not today, Satan, not today.

🍿

I didn't like Adam McKay's Don't Look Up the first time I saw it, and I didn't like it again now. I wanted to see a comedy about the end of the world, but this was way too noisy and "Netflix-hip", and still very fake. 2/10.

🍿

A recent 1-hour conversation between Paul McCartney and Conan O'Brien at the Tribeca Festival, in connection with McCartney's new books of own photographs from 1963-64. Lovely, in spite of Conan being extremely self-centered.

🍿

First attempt to watch Empire of the sun, my 17th sentimental movie directed by Spielberg. A sweeping saga, with his usual epic scope & dramatic score, told from a child point-of-view. Also, 13-year-old Christian Bale's breakthrough role. But the distorted white Orientalist focus of the story made it unwatchable for me, and I had to stop after an hour.

🍿

Throw-back to the "Art project”:  

Adora with Glenn Gould.

By the way, Adam Ellis, who drew the second-only Adora illustration in March of 2011, has a new horror film coming up in a few months, 'Dear David' - Yeah!

🍿  

(My complete movie list is here)

[fiveofghosts]

You haven’t kissed anyone for a while now.

To you, everything tastes like blood.

[wavesofwisteria]

Pianist Glenn Gould

[rabbitcruiser]

World Sight Day

World Sight Day is an annual commemoration that falls on October 8th of this year. Vision or sight for any person is indeed a vital thing to look or see the world. The visionary problem exists from children to adults to old age people. It is an advocacy and discussions event about the vision on the eye health calendar. World Sight Day is an international observance that focuses on bringing attention, awareness on blindness and vision impairment.

“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” – Helen Keller

History of World Sight Day

The second Thursday of every October is observed as World Sight Day (WSD). It was first observed in the year 2007. World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) created this day. The organizations aimed at spreading awareness about visionary problems through a large number of different events. There are so many age-related circumstances which lead to the blindness like cataract, refractive error, and glaucoma. These visionary problems can be quickly and easily treated or cured at a low cost. The timely intervention will often delay or reduce their vision consequences. The awareness event aims to educate the public globally on how to prevent and treat the loss of vision.

According to the WHO survey, people live for longer, but they tend to exist with the blindness, a chronic condition which is continuously increasing. WHO states that 45 million blind peoples in the world, i.e., nearly 80 per cent are over 50 years of age. Of about 90 per cent of the blind people reside in low-income countries. They are older people, particularly older women, who are facing difficulties in getting essential eye health care. World Sight Day was first initiated by the SightFirstCampaign of the Lions Club International Foundation originated in 2000.

Lions Clubs International in collaboration with blindness prevention organizations from all over the world commemorates the World Sight Day on October 8, 1998. Later this event was integrated into a global initiative coordinated by the IAPB named VISION 2020.  It is a joint program initiative between WHO and the IAPB. Many non-government organizations, communities, and professional associations, eye care institutions and corporations are involved. The IAPB generates theme and certain core materials for the event. Members and supporter of those organizations independently organize all the events.

Themes of World Sight Day

2005 – The Right to Sight

2006 – Low Vision

2007 – Vision for Children

2008 – Fighting Vision Impairment in Later Life

2009 – Gender and Eye Health

2010 – Countdown to 2020

2013 – Universal Eye Health

2014 – No more Avoidable Blindness

2015 – Eyecare for all

2016 – Stronger Together

2017 – Make Vision Count

2018 – Eye Care Everywhere

2019 – Vision First

2020 – Hope In Sight

How to Celebrate World Sight Day

Indulge yourself to raise public awareness about blindness and vision impairment. You can educate people about VISION 2020 and blindness prevention. Take part in awareness-raising walks or distribute pamphlets, posters, bookmarks, booklets that carry information the raise awareness about preventable blindness. Plant trees to commemorate this Day. You can submit a photo for an international photo montage that focuses on the theme of blindness.

Source

[seattlesea]

Songs I Listen to While Writing Sorted by Genre/Type of Scene

(Some songs will be in more than one category)

Romance Scenes- we fell in love in october by girl in red Strawberries and Cigarettes by Troye Sivan Fool by Cavetown Call Me by 90sFlav Girls by girl in red 3AM by Finding Hope Dream Girl by Anna of the North Stay by Zedd & Alessia Cara Somebody To Tell Me by Tyler Glenn Secrets by One Republic Paris by The Chainsmokers Safe and Sound by Capital Cities Wild Heart by Bleachers A Thousand Years by Christina Perri Fire on Fire by Sam Smith Angel With a Shotgun by The Cab She Looks So Perfect by 5 Seconds of Summer Jet Pack Blues by Fall Out Boy Trade Mistakes by Panic! At The Disco When the Day Met the Night by Panic! At The Disco Moral of the Story by Ashe We Can’t Be Friends by Dream Koala Public Making Out Is Like Ugh by DNE Moon River by Audrey Hepburn Mystery of Love by Sufjan Stevens Alewife by Clairo Girls Like Girls by Hayley Kiyoko Futile Devices (Doveman Remix) by Sufjan Stevens  Midnight Love by girl in red

Calm Scenes- Call Me by 90sFlav 5:32 by The Deli Crush by Esthie Coffee Breath by Sofia Mills Santa Monica Dream by Angus & Julia Stone Fool by Cavetown Golden Hour by Jonathon Morali Crosses by José González Death Bed by Powfu (Beat Only) 3AM by Finding Hope Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks Shy Girl by Kedam Counting Stars by One Republic Kaleidoscope Eyes by Panic! At The Disco She Had The World by Panic! At The Disco This Is Home by Cavetown Lua by Bright Eyes Sweater Weather by The Neighborhood Bedroom by Litany FLAMIN HOT CHEETOS by Clairo Will She Come Back by girl in red To All Of You by Syd Matters

Sad/Emotional Scenes- Obstacles by Syd Matters Runaway by Aurora Cancer by My Chemical Romance Unsteady by X Ambassadors State of Dreaming by MARINA Raquel y Sergio Juntos by Ivan M. Lacamera Coming Home by Falling in Reverse Spanish Sahara by Foals I’m Bad at Life by Falling in Reverse 7 Years by Lukas Graham Lost It All by Black Veil Brides Teen Idle by MARINA Hall of Fame by The Script Ocean Eyes by Billie Eilish 21 Guns by Green Day Pirate Love Song by Black Heart Shatter Me by Lindsey Stirling Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap Dollhouse by Melanie Martinez The Light Behind Your Eyes by My Chemical Romance Helena (So Long and Goodnight) by My Chemical Romance Famous Last Words by My Chemical Romance I Don’t Love You by My Chemical Romance The Ghost of You by My Chemical Romance Bishop Knife Trick by Fall Out Boy Indomitable by Casey Lee Williams The End of All Things by Panic! At The Disco Always by Panic! At The Disco Impossible Year by Panic! At The Disco Dying in LA by Panic! At The Disco Northern Downpour by Panic! At The Disco Far Too Young To Die by Panic! At The Disco This Is Gospel by Panic! At The Disco House of Memories by Panic! At The Disco Moral of the Story by Ashe Reason to Stay by Sody Anchor by Novo Amor Sober II (Melodrama) by Lorde Mt. Washington by Local Natives Mountains by Message To Bears

Action/Fight Scenes- Finish Line by Skillet I Ran (Epic Trailer Version) by Hidden Citizens Another One Bites The Dust (Epic Trailer Version) by Hidden Citizens Back From the Dead by Skillet Never Give In by Black Veil Brides The Phoenix by Fall Out Boy DESTROYA by My Chemical Romance Warriors by Imagine Dragons Bella Ciao by Manu Pilas What’s Up Danger by Blackway & Black Caviar The Resistance by Skillet Feel Invincible by Skillet In The End by Black Veil Brides Days Are Numbered by Black Veil Brides Fallen Angels by Black Veil Brides Caffeine by Casey Lee Williams This Will Be The Day by Casey Lee Williams 300 Violin Orchestra by Jorge Quintero Radioactive by Imagine Dragons Ready Aim Fire by Imagine Dragons Silent Running (Epic Trailer Version) by Hidden Citizens I’d Love to Change the World (Matstubs Remix) by Jetta  Tommy’s Theme by NOISIA The Sharpest Lives by My Chemical Romance Mama by My Chemical Romance My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light ‘Em Up) by Fall Out Boy The Carpal Tunnel of Love by Fall Out Boy Young and Menace by Fall Out Boy

Happy/Fun Scenes- Tongue Tied by Grouplove Bang! by AJR 100 Bad Days by AJR Wasted by Tiësto 3 Nights by Dominic Fike City in a Garden by Fall Out Boy I Took a Pill in Ibiza (SeeB Remix) by Mike Posner  Safe and Sound by Capital Cities Collar Full by Panic! At The Disco Ahead By a Century by The Tragically Hip American Idiot by Green Day Superhero by The Script Wild Things by Alessia Cara Here’s To Never Growing Up by Avril Lavigne Do It All The Time by I Don’t Know How But They Found Me Burn by Ellie Goulding Move To Miami by Enrique Iglesias & Pitbull Mad Hatter by Melanie Martinez King of the World by Young Rising Sons Bulletproof Heart by My Chemical Romance Na Na Na by My Chemical Romance Miss Missing You by Fall Out Boy Where Did The Party Go by Fall Out Boy Sunshine Riptide by Fall Out Boy Last of the Real Ones by Fall Out Boy Wilson (Expensive Mistakes) by Fall Out Boy Time To Dance by Panic! At The Disco Crazy=Genius by Panic! At The Disco The Overpass by Panic! At The Disco Roaring 20s by Panic! At The Disco Victorious by Panic! At The Disco LA Devotee by Panic! At The Disco Don’t Threaten Me With a Good Time by Panic! At The Disco Something Good by alt-j Hollywood by MARINA

Badass/Dark Scenes- Pretty Waste by Bones UK Bubblegum Bitch by MARINA Born For This by The Score Kings & Queens by Ava Max Castle by Halsey Caffeine by Casey Lee Williams Heaven Knows by The Pretty Reckless Joan of Arc by In This Moment Believer by Imagine Dragons Sand Storm by Apashe you should see me in a crown by Billie Eilish Power & Control by MARINA Fancy by Iggy Azalea Look What You Made Me Do by Taylor Swift Empire of Our Own by RAIGN Revolution by Unsecret & Ruelle Unstoppable by The Score Control by Halsey Gasoline by Halsey Tag, You’re It by Melanie Martinez  Up In The Air by Thirty Seconds To Mars So What by P!NK Do It Like A Dude by Jessie J Ready For It? by Taylor Swift Teenagers by My Chemical Romance Centuries by Fall Out Boy I Don’t Care by Fall Out Boy Rat a Tat by Fall Out Boy Stay Frosty Royal Milk Tea by Fall Out Boy Champion by Fall Out Boy Thnks fr the Mmrs by Fall Out Boy One Thing by Casey Lee Williams I May Fall by Casey Lee Williams This Life Is Mine by Casey Lee Williams Let’s Kill Tonight by Panic! At The Disco Girls/Girls/Boys by Panic! At The Disco The Good, The Bad, and The Dirty by Panic! At The Disco Mount Everest by Labrinth Legendary by Skillet Homewrecker by MARINA Modern Day Cain by I Don’t Know How But They Found Me

That One Vibin’ Scene- When I RIP by Labrinth Sweatin’ Somethin’ Awful by Okey Dokey Wasted by Tiësto Leave Me Alone by I Don’t Know How But They Found Me Piano Fire by Sparklehorse Blinding Lights by The Weeknd Good News by Ocean Park Standoff Hey There Delilah by Plain White T’s East of Eden by Zella Day Hazy Shade of Winter by The Bangles (or the Gerard Way cover) 5:15 by Bridgit Mendler Here by Alessia Cara Joan of Arc by In This Moment Mr. Doctor Man by Palaye Royale Cool For a Second by Yumi Zouma Counting Stars by One Republic Daddy Issues by The Neighborhood Ho Hey by The Lumineers We Can’t Be Friends by Dream Koala Public Making Out Is Like Ugh by DNE Sober II (Melodrama) by Lorde North by Sleeping at Last 400 Lux by Lorde No. 1 Party Anthem by Arctic Monkeys Still Don’t Know My Name by Labrinth Primadonna by MARINA dontmakemefallinlove by Cuco

That ‘Holy Shit I Can’t Believe That Just Happened’ Scene- All For Us by Labrinth (or the Zendaya version) Raquel y Sergio Juntos by Ivan M. Lacamera Forever by Labrinth Coming Home by Falling in Reverse Superheroes by Falling in Reverse (also works really well for cliffhanger-ending scenes) Carry On by Falling in Reverse The Thunder Rolls by Garth Brooks (if you don’t like country music, listen to the All That Remains cover) Zombie by The Cranberries Obstacles by Syd Matters Glory and Gore by Lorde Empire of Our Own by RAIGN When It’s All Over by RAIGN Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap

The Cinematic Teen Experience Scene- Amsterdam by Imagine Dragons Midnight City by M83 Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush (Meg Myers’ cover does better with the category though) Good News by Ocean Park Standoff Circles by Post Malone Rollercoaster by Bleachers Bad Idea! by girl in red Mr. Brightside by The Killers Fireflies by Owl City Undercover Martyn by Two Door Cinema Club Check Yes Juliet by We The Kings The Kids From Yesterday by My Chemical Romance I’m Not Okay by My Chemical Romance Fourth of July by Fall Out Boy Tip Toe by Imagine Dragons Someone To You by Banners Gone Gone Gone by Phillip Phillips Make You Mine by PUBLIC Out of my League by Fitz and The Tantrums Perks of Being a Sunflower by Soft Glas A World Alone by Lorde Wetsuit by The Vaccines Bored to Death by blink-182 There’s a Place by The All-American Rejects 18 by Anabor Mother by Smallpools Tompkins Square Park by Mumford and Sons 400 Lux by Lorde The Horse by Beach Fossils Ribs by Lorde Can I Call You Tonight? by Dayglow Hot Rod by Dayglow Marlboro Nights by Lonely God Under Stars by Aurora Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap Do Not Wat by Wallows Cold Cold Man by Saint Motel Forget Her by girl in red Buzzcut Season by Lorde A World Alone by Lorde Time to Pretend by MGMT Kids by MGMT Bags by Clairo My Tears Are Becoming a Sea by M83 Talia by King Princess (or the girl in red cover) Maybe by girl in red

And yeah that’s all I have for now. If you want any other categories just ask cause I’ll probably make a part two anyways. 

[so-this-is-my-blog-i-guess]

I was tagged for the following info by @icalledyoudumb and @alwaysdearie .

1. Favorite color: Periwinkle. But really any blue/purple. I don’t care much for red/purples.

2. Last song I listened to: https://youtu.be/ndJYRigKKT8

3. Favorite Musicians (including singers): Ian McCulloch (Echo and the Bunnymen ⤴️, Itzhak Perlman, Joe Walsh, Glenn Gould, Jonny Greenwood, Thom Yorke, Joey Ramone, Bing Crosby, Gene Krupa.

4. Last movie I watched: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037635/

5. Last show I watched: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1860659/

6. Sweet, Spicy, or Savory: Any. I just like things that have a strong taste.

7. Bubble Water, Tea, or Coffee: Coffee, as my header shows. Those are a bunch of cups of coffee that I had over time at Kelly’s Diner in Somerville, MA.

I tag (which I rarely do, but here goes) @gotankgo @justbeneath-thesurface2 @spinningininfinity @thisspaceof-mine @millerflintstone @retake-retoocs @mtman1 @randomberlinchick @thatsnotyourpurse @lisagotherwingson

[starrynight-sunnyday]

hey how are you? i’ve been feeling pretty anxious lately and your blog makes me feel a little bit calmer so can you recommend me others like yours? (and i saw your post about glenn gould and decided to listen to the concert you mentioned, it made me feel better thanks)

Hi there! I’m sorry you’ve been feeling like that :(

I’m glad listening to GG’s performance made you feel better though! I really hope things get better soon.

About recommending blogs similar to mine, I don’t know if they are similar but they are definitely some of my favorite ones 💖 (most of them are mutuals so I like them even more, even though we don’t really talk lol).

Off the top of my head:

@beecollector (zaineb i hope you are good love) @sleepy-lilac @ephemeralki @mondwirr @theskyisinnocentlyblue @sandylipstick @serotoninsuggestion

Stay safe love!

[weeb-alcove]

2019 English Playlist

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL77pv5URcE8b4_k9_GQYZoQYz_HhRDP2D 

In English: 

“99″ - Barns Courtney

10ft - Eileen Yo

5 Seconds of Summer Babylon Easier Lie to Me  Teeth

88rising History Midsummer Madness ♪ from their album Head in the Clouds II ♬ Breathe I Love You 3000 II Indigo Strange Land These Nights

Affection - Between Friends

Aftertaste - Whethan

Ain’t Goin Back - Russ

Alan Walker Are You Lonely Different World Do It All for You Lily  On My Way Play

All Fall Down - Johnny Glenn & Ally Hills & Just Juice

All Over Again (remix) - Lost You & Michael Moawad

Another Summer Night Without You - Alexander 23

Aphrodite - Rini

Ariana Grande Esta Noche ♪ from her album thank u, next ♬ bloodline in my head NASA

Arms Around You - XXXTentacion & Swae Lee & Lil Pump

Ava Max Freaking Me Out (Bingo Players remix) Not Your Barbie Girl So Am I

Bae - Trevor Wesley

Bars and Melody Lighthouse (Dave Winnel remix) Waiting for the Sun

Bazzi Caught in the Fire Focus Mine Myself No Way!

Beat of My Drum - Powers

Benee Evil Spider Find an Island Glitter  Monsta Want Me Back  Wishful Thinking

Better Not - Louis the Child

Big Sean Berzerk Single Again

Billie Eilish everything i wanted  When I Was Older ♪ from her album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? ♬ 8 bad guy bury a friend ilomilo  my strange addiction wish you were gay  xanny 

Birthday Party - AJR 

Break Your Heart - Taio Cruz

broken - lovelytheband

Caffeine and Dopamine - Keepitinside

Camila Cabello Find U Again  Señorita  ♪ from her album Romance ♬ Bad Kind of Butterflies  Liar My Oh My Shameless  Should’ve Said It

Cardi B Money Please Me

Catch Feelings - Henry Young & Zachary

Céline - Gallant

Cemetery - Coin

Chanel - Frank Ocean

Chase - Aaron Carpenter

Cherry Cola - Kuwada

Cigarette - offonoff & Tablo & MISO

Clairo Sofia Throwaway

Close to Me - Ellie Goulding & Diplo & Swae Lee

Cold - Boy In Space & unheard

Come My Way - Plvtinum

Conan Gray Generation Why Greek God  Maniac The King 

Creep - Radiohead (GAMPER remix & Dadoni & Ember Island)

Crush - Lucian & Tiffany Day

Crying My Eyes Out - Stephen Puth

Crystal Dolphin - Engelwood

Dangerous Love - Justice Carradine

David Guetta Better When You’re Gone Blame It on Love

Daya Insomnia Left Me Yet Wanted

Don’t Be Gone Too Long - Chris Brown

Don’t Lie to Me - Lena

Don’t Start Now - Dua Lipa

Eric Nam ♪ from his album Before We Begin ♬ Congratulations  Love Die Young

Everything - TobyMac

Eyes Wide Shut -  Glades 

Falling - Trevor Daniel

Fine - Rufus

Finneas I Don’t Miss You at All  Let’s Fall in Love for the Night

Fitz and the Tantrums Hand Clap Out of My League

Flower - Johnny Stimson

Friends - Feyde

Funeral - Miguel

G-Eazy 1942 Nadie Como Tu 

Get Away - Ed Black

Giants - Becky G & Keke Palmer & Soyeon & Duckwrth & Thutmose

Glass Animals Life Itself The Other Side of Paradise 

Greyson Chance Boots Shut Up

Halsey Eastside Graveyard

Heart in Tokyo - Good Gasoline

Heartstrings - STVN & Jenna Carlie

Her - Alex Aiono

Hey Violet Better by Myself Queen of the Night

High School - Umi

Hometown Smile - Bahjat

Honne  Crying Over You  Day 1

How Do You Sleep? - Sam Smith

IDK - Bruce Wiegner

I Fall in Like Too Easily - Ashton Arbab

I Feel Love - Suggi

If I Can’t Have You - Shawn Mendes

If You Need Me - Julia Michaels

If You’re Over Me - Years & Years

I Heart You - Baby Ariel

I’ll Be There - King Henry & Sasha Sloan

ILYA - Fly By Midnight

In Betweenin’ - Austin Brown

Indiana Massara Apology Smoke in My Eyes

i think i love you (but i dont like you) - push baby

It’s Not You It’s Me - 6LACK & Bea Miller

Japanese Denim - Daniel Caesar

Jaymes Young Infinity  Northern Lights 

Joji Sanctuary  Test Drive Yeah Right

Jonas Brothers Only Human Sucker

Juliet - Sebastian Javier

June - Sage Charmaine

Just My Luck - Tia Ray & Kehlani

Kailee Morgue Go to Sleep Headcase

Katy Perry 365 Harleys in Hawaii

Kiss Me Thru the Phone - Soulja Boy

Lalala - Y2K, bbno$

Last Hurrah - Bebe Rexha

Lauv Drugs & the Internet I’m So Tired

Lava Lamp - Dandi

Left to Right - Marteen

Lennon Stella La Di Da Polaroid Workin’ on It

Lifeguard - iamnotshane

Lovefool - The Cardigans

Love Me Wrong - Allie X & Troye Sivan

Love You Like That - Dagny

Madison Beer Fools  Hurts Like Hell

Maggie Lindemann Friends Go Would I

MAGIC! Girl at Coachella Lay You Down Easy 

Make You Mine - Public

Mango Love - Shawn Wasabi & SATICA

Mask - joe.k

MAX Love Me Less One Two Things Worship

Middle of the Night - Monsta X

Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince - Taylor Swift

MØ Blur Don’t Leave Kamikaze Nostalgia  On & On  Red Wine 

Mona Lisa - Valntn & Peter Fenn

mxmtoon Blame Game Prom Dress

My Family - Karol G & Migos & Rock Mafia & Snoop Dogg

Nobody - Emilee

No Sleep - Martin Garrix & Bonn

Nostalgia - The Beamish Brothers

NOTD Keep You Mine Romantic (NOTD remix) So Close

Ocean Man - Ween

October - Alessia Cara

Oh Wonder I Wish I Never Met You Super Love

Only You - Cheat Codes & Little Mix

On the Low - Justin Park

Pardon Me - Dion

Permission - New Hope Club

Pharmacy - Isaac Dunbar

Pink - No Rome

Post Malone ♪ from his album Hollywood’s Bleeding ♬ A Thousand Bad Times Circles Die for Me  Goodbyes Take What You Want 

PRETTYMUCH Blind Solita

Quinn XCII U & Us Wayback (remix)

R3HAB All Comes Back To You Don’t Give Up on Me Now Lullaby This Is How We Party

Raincoat - Kieron Lee & Chloe Ho

Rebels - Ivy Adara

Red Sippy Cup - Ellis G & Tristen the God

Rei Brown Picture Frames Real Love

Rescue Me - OneRepublic

Right Now - Nick Jonas & Robin Schulz

Rolex - Ayo & Teo

Roots - Galantis & Valerie Broussard

Roxanne - Arizona Zervas

Ruel Free Time Real Thing Younger

Say It to My Face - Maty Noyes

Selena Gomez Bad Liar I Can’t Get Enough

Sick Thoughts - Lewis Blissett

Skeletons - keshi

Speechless - Dan + Shay

Stay Home - Faye Risakotta

Sugarplum Elegy - Niki

Summer Love - Hyu

Summer Time High Time - Cuco & J-Kwe$t

Summertime in Paris - Jaden & Willow

Suncity - Khalid & Empress Of

Superfruit - Maude Latour

Sweet Little Lies -  bülow

Swimming in Your Feelings - Haven

Talking Loud - Jennifer Zhang

Tell Me - Mika-Intersection

tell me how you rly feel - adam&steve & Lostboycrow

Tessa Violet Bad Ideas Crush

Thank You - Junny

The Chainsmokers Family Kills You Slowly Takeaway

The Vamps All Night All the Lies Can We Dance  Just My Type  Middle of the Night Missing You  Somebody to You  We Don’t Care 

Think About Me - dvsn

Tired - Jasmine Sokko

Tomorrow Tonight - Loote

Virtual Reality - ieuan

Waste My Time - Grace VanderWaal

Why Don’t We Come to Brazil I Don’t Belong in This Club I Still Do Mad At You  Unbelievable  What Am I (Casualkimono remix)

Why Don’t We - Austin Mahone

Why Haven’t I Met You? - Cameron Dallas

Woke Up Late - Drax Project & Hailee Steinfield

Yellow Hearts - Ant Saunders

Yoandri All the Way Bravo Cherry on Top It’ll Be Ok Only You

You & Me - Marc E. Bassy

You Got Issues - spring gang & Amaranthine

Young the Giant Apartment  Cough Syrup

Zayn Rumors There You Are

In French:

Tous Les Mêmes - Stromae

In Spanish:

Rebeca - Mc Livinho & Gerex & Maejor

Teléfono - Aitana (remix with Lele Pons)

Electronic:

Monster Gambling in Tokyo - Idealism

Sorry I Like You - Burbank

Sunset Lover - Petit Biscuit

[bluewatsons]

David Marchese, James Ellroy on his life in crime, his imaginary dog and the need to provoke, New York Times (August 19, 2019)

James Ellroy: I’ve had precious few moments, where I’ve said to myself: ‘Ellroy, you are the king. You’re the greatest crime writer that ever lived.’ The reflex kicks in . . .You’ve got more work to do.”

David Marchese: Almost all your books are set in the past,1 and I know that you’re intentionally disconnected from modern culture. Are you missing out on something important by not living more deeply in the times in which you live?

James Ellroy: I have a quotation here. [Ellroy removes a note from his shirt pocket.] This is the great pianist Glenn Gould on the great composer Richard Strauss. “The great thing about the music of Richard Strauss is that ... it presents to us an example of the man who makes richer his own time for not being of it, who speaks for all generations by being of none. It is an ultimate argument of individuality, an argument that a man can create his own synthesis of time without being bound by the conformities that time imposes.” That says it all.

David Marchese: O.K., I know you like to do shtick in public. Is that shtick2 about concealing anything?

James Ellroy: A lot of it is being the pit bull staked by chain to a spike in the front yard. I’ve been writing a book for a couple of years, and then they slip the chain off and I can run wild. But I realize part of it is a cover-up. My early life was horrible privation living with the unhousebroken dog and my dad3 telling me, “I [expletive] Rita Hayworth.” I passed that off as [expletive], and then 10 years after my dad died I saw a Hayworth biography in a bookstore and looked his name up in the index. It didn’t say he’d eh eh eh but it did say that he was her business manager between about 1948 and ’52.

David Marchese: Could any of your self-mythologizing stand to be deflated?

James Ellroy: The more I look at my own life, the more I realize that traumatic influences have played a part in it. I’m talking about my mother’s murder.4

David Marchese: Hasn’t your mother’s murder always been central?

James Ellroy: Yeah, it formed my mental curriculum. But there’s a particular aspect of my youth that has become distorted by repetition—like going to jail.5 It was not the big house. It was the jail of six-man cells and two stupid white guys, two stupid black guys and two stupid Mexican guys lying about their daring criminal exploits and their movie-star girlfriends. “Oh yeah? With Marilyn Monroe?” “Yeah, sure.” And also my breaking into houses6 and sniffing girls’ undergarments and stealing five-dollar bills. Technically it’s burglary, but it was craven. It was circumspect. It was very easy to do back then. People didn’t have answering machines. You rung up the phone, and if they didn’t answer they weren’t home. I did that 15, 16, 17 times over the course of two and a half years and got away with it.

David Marchese: You stopped around the time of the Manson family murders, right?

James Ellroy: Yes. That’s when people started having the security signs, “Patrolled by Bel Air Patrol.” So I quit doing it. I never stayed in the houses very long. Fifteen, 20 minutes. Maybe a half an hour. All together that was probably 10 hours of my life. But on a great many occasions I spent 12, 13 hours a day reading in public libraries. I wasn’t presenting information disingenuously, but looking back as an older, wiser person, I go, “I mostly just read a bunch of books.”

David Marchese: Are there any parallels between your state of mind when you were sneaking into people’s homes and your state of mind when inhabiting the life of a fictional character?

James Ellroy: Trespassing was about curiosity and yearning. It was for the girls at Hancock Park.7 Those girls live in me—Kathy, Julie, Peggy. I grew up a poor kid within a few blocks of this ritzy, WASP-y enclave. What I did required a certain concentration and was thrilling even though it was immoral. I was trying to sate my emotional hunger. For decades now, the only thing that has done that for me has been creating large-scale fictions set in the past.

David Marchese: Why do you pine for the past?

James Ellroy: There’s this old Stephen King quote. Someone asks Mr. King, “Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects?” He said, “Why do you assume that I have a choice?” Fate tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, Ellroy. I got a job for you.”

David Marchese: My armchair-psychologist reading would be that you want to be back in the era in which your mother was still alive. And I have a hunch that your feelings about social probity and your conservatism are a reaction to the chaos of your adolescence.

James Ellroy: There’s a big element of truth to the latter. My feelings about probity are also about shame for my old disordered state and the crimes, albeit small, that I committed. As for my mother, Jean Hilliker, I’ve always marked historical events by whether she was alive for them. I’m always thinking about stuff like that.

David Marchese: In old interviews, you’ve described yourself as the kind of guy who spends his evenings brooding about the women in his life. Is that still the case?

James Ellroy: I brood like a dog. As far as my second ex-wife and once-again girlfriend, Helen Knode,8 and I go, monogamy was never the problem. It was cohabitation. So this is Helen’s idea—We have two pads. We’re in downtown Denver. I got a two-bedroom loft, and Helen has an identical one down the hall from me. I’ve got everything turned out exactly the way that I want it. Lots of pictures of bull terriers, pictures of my own book covers, the bust of Beethoven. I’ll sit at my desk and I’ll put my feet up and I’ll brood.

David Marchese: About what?

James Ellroy: About the new book, about this particular book tour. Mine is a big career, and people sometimes deny the solvency of the new books because they had a signature reading experience with a book way back. “The Black Dahlia,”9 that’ll be the only book for them. Or they conflate the movie “L.A. Confidential” with the novel “L.A. Confidential.”10

David Marchese: Are you only brooding on work?

James Ellroy: I’m very happy with Helen. I’m not brooding on Shirley Knight in “The Rain People,” which was a movie from 1969. Or Lois Nettleton on a couple episodes of “The Fugitive.”11

David Marchese: “The Fugitive” was such a weird show. There was always this implied sexual tension between Richard Kimble and whoever the lead actress was in a given episode, but nothing would ever happen.

James Ellroy: This is very, very interesting. “The Fugitive” exerted a deep pull on me. A romantic and sexual pull. Wherever Richard Kimble would go, the grooviest woman in the town — which somehow always looked like the San Fernando Valley — would gas onto him and they’d have their moment of truth and they may kiss a couple of times. But it was all unconsummated because he had to run from Lieutenant Gerard. The actresses on that show did a number on me. June Harding, Shirley Knight, Brenda Vaccaro, Diana van der Vlis, Suzanne Pleshette, Sandy Dennis. That’s the only time I’ve ever been obsessed with a TV show.

David Marchese: Aside from TV shows, what other products of the past do you miss?

James Ellroy: There was a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard in L.A. that had stores that sold wide arrays of perfectly fitting Shetland wool crew-neck sweaters, perfect saddle shoes, perfect tweed jackets and shawl-collar cashmere sweaters. You can’t find that stuff anymore. Nobody wants to dress that corny. You know, I also used to go [expletive] crazy buying women clothes. In ’07, I was on the loose in L.A. during the time of my divorce and I had a wingding with a woman. In the couple of months this wingding went on, I bought her $20,000 worth of clothes.

David Marchese: And then it ended?

James Ellroy: Yeah. She kept the clothes, which is O.K. Hey, I try.

David Marchese: I feel like maybe you romanticize women in a weird way. Where does that tendency come from?

James Ellroy: One day she was there, Jean Hilliker, and then one day she wasn’t. She died horribly. She’s been through a thousand metamorphoses with me. I finally realized that in the two memoirs I wrote that are very much about her that I didn’t get to the heart of her. It was because my gift is fiction. I’m not a journalist or a memoirist. Hence, Joan Conville12.

David Marchese: Trying to get to the heart of a person who died when you were 10 is like trying to catch smoke.

James Ellroy: Yeah, you can’t. I’ve overdramatized my mother. I’ve underdramatized her. Helen has told me a trillion times, “Leave your mother alone. Let her rest in peace.” I’ve honored her in fiction. I tried to get to the core of her in a dramatized fashion. I co-opted the exterior facts of her life. I don’t know if there’ll be a moment of peace with that.

David Marchese: When you say that your mother has been through a thousand metamorphoses, does that extend to your feelings about real-life as well as fictional women?

James Ellroy: I’m a sucker for a tall redhead. That’s for damn sure. I think that I’ve never gotten over sex.

David Marchese: What’s that mean?

James Ellroy: Just the whole thing. O.K., here’s a joke I first heard in the early ’60s. It’s a howler—“I want to find the guy who invented sex and ask him what he’s working on now.” Sex is a head scratcher. It remains prevalent. I was sitting with Andrew Wylie, my agent, in Columbus Circle a couple of days ago so he could smoke a cigar on his way back to the office. We were sitting there, talking a little, looking around a little, and I said, “There sure are a lot of healthy-looking young women in New York City today.” He said, “I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

David Marchese: In the past when journalists have asked you about your conservative politics, you sometimes give confrontational answers. Were those authentic reflections of your thinking or an expression of your urge to needle? I’m thinking about stuff you said about Obama.

James Ellroy: I don’t even remember what I said about Obama.

David Marchese: The word “hate” came up.

James Ellroy: I voted for him! But what did I say? That I hate him or something like that?13 I think it was a British journalist who I said that to. We were sitting in a hamburger joint in L.A., and he was pissing me off. He was hassling me about Obama, and I was like, what do you want me to say?

David Marchese: It does seem as if you’re often asked to justify your politics in ways that wouldn’t be expected of liberals. Why is your conservatism treated as something requiring explanation?

James Ellroy: Being conservative is considered by many people as a codified expression of—You’re not nice, you’re unenlightened, you’re not one of the gang, you’re not one of the humanists. It should be evident in “Perfidia”14 and “This Storm” that I despise totalitarianism. I write characters who are the good guys and who also occasionally drop the racial slur, the anti-homosexual remark, but with these characters racial animus is never a defining characteristic. It’s a casual attribute. I like the idea of race as anecdote. I live by anecdote. I live to the exclusion of epigram. Those who think that all people who would express racial animus do that because of a deep-seated hatred boiling within them don’t understand that at a certain time and place it was the common linguistic coin of the realm.

David Marchese: I understand that people have a tendency to define conservatism in narrow political ways, but what does it mean to you?

James Ellroy: I have always described myself as a Tory. Underneath my profane exterior, I’m very concerned with decorum, with probity, with morality, and I have a painfully developed conscience. I despise unconscionable acts, whoever is perpetrating them. Helen says that what I am more than anything else is a Protestant. That’s what it is.

David Marchese: Can you tell me what you meant when you said you live by anecdote and to the exclusion of epigram? Am I wrong in thinking that anecdotes and epigrams aren’t terribly dissimilar?

James Ellroy: We were talking about race. In my books, I deploy racial anecdote, unmediated by any kind of preaching, any kind of philosophy. For example, two months before the first Watts riot, I had adventures in South Central Los Angeles, repossessing cars, going around with an unscrupulous fellow, looking for street hookers. I had heard a rumor that if you want to get a girl, you go to Cooper Do-nuts on Western Avenue and Adams Boulevard. You talk to one of the counter guys there and he’ll always know somebody who will drive you around. Well, I did this. I was 17. 1965. The girls had themselves a couple of white tricks, that’s for damn sure. We had all kinds of adventures, driving around to one pad after another and shooting the [expletive] with all these black folk. It was a rollicking good time. So, I live in anecdotes like that. I see something, it makes human sense to me, and I’m on it like a pit bull.

David Marchese: Do you feel any internal friction between your conservatism and, for example, your obvious relish in the content of the anecdote you just described?

James Ellroy: There’s the old F. Scott Fitzgerald line.

David Marchese: About how the test of first-rate intelligence is someone who can hold two opposing ideas in his mind?

James Ellroy: Absolutely. It’s an old saw, and that’s me. Mine is a Christian ideal that expresses of the presence of God and the presence of sin. It’s that kind of duality. It’s banal in my case, and in my expression, in my every way of life. But you can only do the do-right so much before you’re going to have some reaction against it.

David Marchese: Critics have called your books nihilistic. But to my mind it’d be more accurate to argue that the characters in your books care too much. Does that make sense?

James Ellroy: You’re absolutely right, and nihilism is a maddening criticism to hear. Optimism is best expressed in “This Storm” by the two words “people change.” They do. Elmer Jackson enters “This Storm” as a good-natured, horny rube who has the common good sense to hate the Klan, because of their high jinks in his North Carolina hometown. He’s chastened by the events of the book, and he changes. The character of Hideo Ashida changes. Dudley Smith changes. William H. Parker changes. If people as hard-core and as driven by the animus of the times as these folks can change, that’s optimistic.

David Marchese: Reading “This Storm,” which is so much about American Naziism and racial paranoia, it’s hard not to think of the resonances between the time in which the book is set, 1942, and today. Were you thinking about those resonances as you were writing?

James Ellroy: People have asked, “Isn’t this novel with all the whacked-out right-wingers and left-wingers and anti-Semites and nativists and race hucksters really about America today?” I said, “Nah. It’s about America in 1942.” Nothing stands in for anything else. If I wanted to write a novel about America today I would damn well do it. I don’t think much about what’s happening today.

David Marchese: Do you read anything contemporary? Or is it mostly old crime stories?

James Ellroy: I’ve read Daniel Silva15 because a colleague at Knopf said, “You might like this guy.” And that’s that. I’ve read through a lot of anthologies of Library of America; American noir of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s and American noir written by women, the two volumes edited by Sarah Weinman. I’ve been going at that like a pit bull.

David Marchese: Speaking of dogs, tell me about your current bull terrier.16

James Ellroy: Helen and I have an imaginary bull terrier named Ingrid. We have a great deal of fun anthropomorphizing bull terriers. Ingrid is a reddish-brown and white bull terrier and also a psychopathic cop who’s immortal. Her first enforcement gig was with the pharoahs when they were whipping the Israelis into slavery. Ingrid’s also very badly alcoholic.

David Marchese: That’s too bad.

James Ellroy: Yeah, but she’s immortal. Wherever Helen and I live, Ingrid joins the Police Department and goes on the robbery squad. Ingrid does what a great many people would like to do. She phone-books suspects and shoots ’em in the back. The anthropomorphizing is all in good humor. There’s no explicitness. Ingrid’s idea of a man is the sodden, overweight, alcoholic police officers she’s seen in cop movies. Her favorite film noir actor is pudgy and corrupt Edmond O’Brien.17 We never get into the mechanics of a human man and a dog doing it or anything like that because Helen and I are very wholesome at our cores. I love dogs insanely. Though I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been bitten.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: You are one of the rare intelligent traditionalist blogs that appreciates high culture of art, music, and aesthetics. I don’ consider myself racist and people can call me an old stick in the mud but I love high culture as it is central to our European identity. I have been concerned how classical music especially concert hall performances are in terminal decline. Do you think this is because diversity killing classical music?

Classical music concerts are in decline. That’s the bad news.

Classical music is thriving. That’s the good news.

Classical music attendance for concert performances have been generally low especially when compared to pre-1945 levels in Europe and the US. It’s also true if sales of CDs etc are an indicator too.

Like you, as a believer in the heritage of tradition of western civilisation I find this deeply troubling. Western classical music is an achievement of high culture and more importantly an integral and unique to the DNA of Western civilisation.   The questions as to why is a tricky one because it’s not just one thing.  Is it the music being performed that’s old hat? Is the audience or the lack of one thereof?

It’s painfully obvious that audiences are not there to support it. Why?

I think part of the blame can be laid at the foot of the producers of classical music concerts. The largest contributors to keeping today's orchestras alive and functioning are usually old, rich, white, conservative people who enjoy their Beethoven and Brahms. They don't care about any music post late 19th century.

Firstly, I would take issue with where they think classical music begins and ends. Classical music is not music trapped in amber for all time. It can and must move forwards. This is why - despite some truly stinkers in 20th Century classical music composition - music composed in the 20th Century is given short thrift and met with sniffy indifference.

The paradox here is that they say there is no demand for such contemporary pieces because the audience isn’t there. But if they don’t show the courage to showcase new works then how will they grow an audience? It’s a sticky wicket to say the least. 

Secondly, in being such stiff shirts, there has been a stunning failure to educate and entertain the next younger generation of the value of classical music. The decline of classical music has been a tragic failure of handing down tradition from one generation to the next. Its root cause has everything to do with the material corruption and spiritual laziness of its own native European people - young and old.

But I don’t want to lay the blame too much on the older generation despite the above criticism. This is because at least they invest money into classical music. The younger generation can’t - because they need to make a living - or won’t - because they are not emotionally invested in it. 

This nicely leads me to another crucial part of my answer.

I think blame can also be laid at the feet of us, the audience.

With each passing generation our Western society is nurturing its own people to be musically illiterate. By that I mean millennials have no real grasp of appreciation of classical music, let alone learning a music instrument or going to attend a classical music concert. Like Latin in school, we don’t teach children how to be musically literate and enjoy the wonders of Peter and the Wolf or Holst’s The Planets as a starting point on a life long journey of cultural enrichment. This enrichment is a unique inheritance of their Western civilisation unlike any other culture or society.

This isn’t an either/or argument i.e. less Taylor Swift and more Schubert. It’s a false choice.

Why limit your musical palate?

Is diversity the reason for decline of classical music?

No. Not in the way you might think.

In my humble opinion the decline of classical music in the concert hall has precious little to do with the controversial topic of diversity. Diversity is not the cause of it but a symptom of it. 

Today's classical orchestras are quite diverse. Classical music will always be considered as stuffy museum music by the general population. Being sensitive to diversity of today's classical composers won't fix things.

Any classical composer writing music these days, regardless of ethnicity, gender or skin colour, is doomed to failure because of the economics of the business. So giving preference to today's composers by gender, skin colour or ethnicity won't help revive it.

Diversity within orchestras is wonderful - and I have seen some virtuoso performers across the globe, especially in Japan and China where they have a genuine love for classical music which is inspiring to witness. But ‘diversity’ within classical music itself is muddle headed.

'Diversity' is a concern of disintegrating societies in malaise that have lost contact with their heritage and identity.

The honest truth is that Western classical music was the creation of aristocratic Europe. It should not be forced into something it isn't. The foundation of classical music was created by White, European, males of a Christian background - after all classical music began in the church.

Without taking a thing away from some very talented and wondrously creative African, Asian and female composers, the music simply didn't include Africa and Asia - or America, for that matter! - as part of its origins.

It would be as if one were to insist that any forum that highlights the many fantastic forms of American music that was started by African-American people - Gospel, Ragtime, Jazz, Blues, Rock, Hip-Hop, Rap - should have to include a fair sampling of non-Blacks that contributed. 

As for the dying of classical music, it is not dead or even on life support.

It has simply moved, though, from the church to the concert hall to electronic and digital media.

As far back as the 1960s, the pianist, Glenn Gould stopped touring and began recording exclusively in the studio. His final recording from the 1980s included his conducting debut (Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll"), and if not for his untimely death, his next step was to record piano concertos with himself as both conductor and soloist; able to use technology for the purpose of editing and dubbing every aspect to his own specifications.

People will continue to attend concerts. I try to attend when I can. Indeed not too far from my place of work I can attend lunch time recitals and concerts in an old church and it’s heavenly to feel uplifted to such sonorous heights.

But such is the pace of modern life it’s not always possible. But my thirst for live classical music means, like for many others, the technology has made it so much easier to enjoy what ever music you like without being economically and geographically inconvenienced.

I look at films (another love of mine) and accept that even this most modern of mediums is changing with the viewing habits of people through digital online technology. Going to the cinema is really going to see big blockbusters and watching your artsy niche films increasingly on laptops and phones through streaming services simply because of economics of the film industry.

To me not watching a film - any film - on the big screen loses not just the romance of the occasion but also the bonding of diverse people into one room.  Going to the cinema was like a social glue to bond community of people who lived in the shared neighbourhood. It’s also changed the nature of film itself in the way we tell stories - think of the decline of episodic television to more serial arc based stories to - what we have now - binge watching series in one sitting.

Likewise the challenge for classical music is learning how to adapt with the times without compromising the rich tradition it carries....too much. How it continues to meet that challenge will be fascinating to watch.

Thanks for your question

[stupidpianist]

9 october 2018

18:06: It’s 18:06 while I’m starting this post and I’m, like, “therapeutically” listening to Glenn Gould perform Chopin’s third sonata over my speakers, and I have this apples and cinnamon candle going to my right. My brain is saying, “burn, baby, burn, yeah, that’s right,” at the candle, I think.

Deciding to do this through mutual “peer pressure” I’m getting from continuously reading Knausgaard’s My Struggle for the last several years, and more recently from Megan Boyle’s just-published Liveblog, which I’m now, like, fifty-one pages in, feeling increasingly obsessed with each subsequent page (i mean like the books are peer pressuring me i don’t mean like ppl are, attacking me, or something, for not doing this). I’m gonna quote the start of her liveblogging experiment:

“Starting today, march 17, 2013, i will be liveblogging everything i do, think, feel, and say, to the best of my ability. right now there is no one i talk to frequently enough to effect by my failure to follow through with tasks i said i’d do. the only person ‘keeping tabs’ on my life is me. as time has been passing, i have been feeling an equally uncontrollable sensation of my life not belonging to me or something. like it’s just this event i don’t seem to be participating in much, and so could be attending by mistake. maybe i wasn’t invited. clerical error. i witness myself willfully allowing opportunities to fade away, because sometimes, for whatever reason, it is hard for me to do things that i know will make me happy.

i can’t control getting older but i can control what i do as i age. also, i feel like my memory is deteriorating. i used to like documenting my daily activities. that seemed to help me remember more. lately the things i’ve been doing haven’t felt worth remembering, but i feel like that could just be a mind trick, and if i start writing more again, i’ll convince myself everything is basically the same as however many years ago it was when i felt more satisfied or hopeful or whatever it is i don’t feel now.

**THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE INTERESTING** **I AM NOT GOING TO TRY TO MAKE THIS SOUND INTERESTING OR TRY TO MAKE YOU LIKE ME OR THINK ABOUT IF YOU ARE READING THIS OR ENJOYING READING THIS, IT’S JUST GOING TO BE WHAT IT IS: A FUNCTIONAL THING THAT WILL HOPEFULLY HELP ME FEEL MORE LIKE IMPROVING MYSELF**”

Feel strongly that this, p. wholly, encompasses why I’m gonna try doing this again, too. Previously “in my life” I used to make, like, daily videos, or “vlog”-type things, and for another period, I wrote one short story a day, and for another period, I wrote, like, a letter-a-day to the general public describing what I did that day, and during each of these periods, I think I felt my general productivity, motivation, mood, well being, increase notably.

Also feel strongly that I won’t be able to, nearly as accurately, follow my day minute-by-minute as Megan did, will probably revert to something I write at the end of each day, or something, I’m not sure yet, or, like, maybe smaller posts as the day goes on? I don’t know give me a couple of days to figure it out please, I really don’t, I’m not sure.

Feel excited by this, feeling like, “yeah, this is a good thing to do, yeah, yeah, you do this, George, just ‘give it a shot,’ ‘go for it,’ ‘you got this.’”

18:22: Just got a text from my mom that said “the big pile is beans! Silly” in response to my replying “too spicy!” to a photograph she sent me, of a mound of flat beans, and a couple of cayenne peppers next to them. I just replied, “I meant the big red peppers.” I’m grinning a lot.

(earlier today) 09:00: Woke this morning to the sound of workers on the floor above mine still renovating apartments. They do this aggressive, rhythmic hammering, which then stops for a few seconds, then resumes for a seconds, then stops for a few seconds, then resumes again. Made it extremely hard to “sleep in,” which I wasn’t even planning on doing, but after cancelling all of my alarms, I sort of just drifted in-and-out of sleep in a weird numb stupor. 

12:00: Eventually got out of bed, feeling semi-disgusted at myself.

Decided to go with a “classic” outfit today, something from my youth, something from years past, something timeless. Chose brown pants with repeated cartoon raccoon pattern on it, grey long-sleeve shirt, “Don’t Give Up. Never Give Up.” black hoodie. 

13:00: Felt “mild amazement” that I was “somehow, already” dressed, in a vaguely positive way.

I was like, “yes, yes, yes, keep riding out this positive emotion,” and made a “G Fuel” energy shake. Strawberry shortcake flavour. Highly recommend. Chugged smoothie while idly watching YouTube videos of tech topics. Had a moment where I was like, “oh crap, dude, you’ve only got, like, five hours of productivity left in the day, you gotta leave, get out of your apartment dude, leave, leave now,” and then, sort-of panicking, grabbed backpack, headphones, iPod, put on shoes, ran out of apartment to McLennan library.

13:16: Yeesh it was so warm today, like, what happened? We gonna get autumn or what, huh? You too chicken to “bring on the cold”? Got to the library, sweating like a disgusting piggie. Chose a computer in the Cybertheque area, couldn’t sit next to the windows where I usually like to sit to squirrel and people watch out my peripherals. I was all, “man you’re gonna get so much done, you’re gonna get all that goodass studying done aren’t you, you’re gonna breeze through these readings,” and then NOPE nada that is not what happened at all. I just pulled up Spotify and played Grouper and then read more of Megan’s Liveblog for like three straight hours, with “intense focus,” I felt, like, “undeviating focus,” like, “laser-like focus,” like, “hawk-like attention to detail.” Felt mildly insane, like, I absolutely could not believe how engrossed in the book I was.

I WASN’T ALL UNPRODUCTIVE look here me out please, you have to at least be on my side a LITTLE: okay here’s the productive things I did okay:

-checked electricity/hydro bill

-checked when midterms were

-checked work schedule for the week

Look I know I know it’s not a lot but please just shut up for like two seconds gosh

A strange thing that started happening—even though my mood started, like, at 7.5/10 when I got to the library, after three hours it dropped, like, severely. Like a lot, I have no idea why, just the natural curve of the day I guess but like by 17:00 I was at a 3/10 if that and was like, “I gotta get out of here, get out of here, yo, hey, stand up, walk outside, get some of that ‘sweet, sweet’ sunlight before the sun disappears for another twelve or thirteen hours, go, log out of the computer, move your butt, move faster, go go go go” and then the “go”s continued faster and faster until I was outside, and, like, dancing a bit to the album I was playing (Prequelle, by Ghost. Been listening to a lot of Ghost recently. Been really “Ghost”ing it up, if you smell what I’m cookin’.)

Then while walking I was like, “alright, okay, it’s ‘time,’ when you get home, just start writing, just ‘do it,’ it doesn’t matter if you have nothing to say, you’ll thank yourself later,” and alsoo another part of my brain was going “start yoga, you promised [your best friend] Alli you’d start yoga, you even told me you wanted to start yoga, why haven’t you started it yet????”

18:40: Earnestly feeling a lot better, yeah, yeah, I am!! I’m gonna finish this post for today but wow that actually helped a lot. I know that Megan’s liveblog experiment ended up having net-detrimental effects on her life, we’ll have to see “how this goes.” Also unfair to compare each experiment as hers was minute-by-minute, and mine is like totally not minute-by-minute to such a significant degree that the data sets can’t be cross-referenced, I feel? I don’t know.

Do any of u ppl have a yoga mat you are looking to sell or could let me borrow? My apartment floor is linoleum and almost as uncomfortable as it is unpleasant to look at. I have, like, this rug from Ikea, but it’s not really in a good position for “yoga-like purposes,” nor is it especially padded, or furry, or like, whatever, you know what I’m trying to say. Gonna use it for now and just “see how it goes,” maybe it’ll actually be just fine? Gosh I don’t even know, feel so unsure about everything. Feeling hopeful, though, feeling “very hopeful,” this was a lot of fun, yeah, yes; gonna try and put in more detail tomorrow, with more timestamps “for accuracy,” or something. Feel strongly that this will be possible, will be bringing around a notebook to “log things in” now that htis project has started, yeah, uh-huh, mhmm, yes yes yes

[sfpml2]

Letters to Ylfa: A Peculiar Form of Self-Analysis

Nietzsche taught me that every great philosophy, up until his own, had been but “a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography” and, with his own philosophy, he challenges me voluntarily and consciously pronounce my own philosophy as a species of autobiography. I, being up for the challenge, often refer to my philosophy as a “peculiar form of self-analysis”, as I do in the letter below.

Ylfa,

I wanted to write to you about the peculiar form of self-analysis that I am engaged in, a form of self-analysis inspired by the psychoanalyses pioneered by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan and the schizoanalyses pioneered by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

As you know, the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalyst successfully “treats” their neurotic patients by getting their patients to “traverse” the phantasies that their unwanted symptoms express: the psychoanalyst gets their patients to recognize the “reality” of their phantasies, the aspects of their phantasies that transcend their imagination. The “reality” of every patient’s phantasy is an unspoken/unspeakable wish or desire, and a phantasy is successfully traversed by a patient when a patient learns how to speak of their unspoken/unspeakable wish or desire—this is why they call psychoanalysis the “talking cure”. For most of his life, Freud thought that the unspoken/unspeakable wishes and desires of his patients were wishes and desires to break taboos: e.g., to engage in incest and patricide. Freud, during his later years, and Lacan, following Freud, came up with a richer idea of what was unspoken/unspeakable. For the late Freud and for Lacan, unspoken/unspeakable wishes and desires were not desires and wishes for anything at all but, rather, desires and wishes for nothingness, for annihilation. Desires and wishes for annihilation are often, but not always, expressed as desires and wishes to break taboos because breaking a taboo is a way to invite annihilation. From this perspective, a psychoanalyst treats their patients by getting their patients to speak of their desires and wishes for annihilation: the idea being that, when one is overwhelmed by one’s desire or wish for annihilation, speech can discharge this desire or wish in a manner that annihilates the speaker virtually rather than actually, a manner that is more or less harmless, leaving one’s actual existence more or less intact.

Deleuze and Guattari counter Freud and Lacan’s claims. Deleuze and Guattari say that there is no such thing as a desire for annihilation: desire is always creative or, even better, desire is creativity. There only appears to be a pure desire for annihilation insofar as we have an interest in conserving what has already been created, already been established. Freud and Lacan were conservatives: they could see their patients as having desires for annihilation because it was their job to help their patients maintain a status quo. Deleuze and Guattari were radicals, they considered a desire to annihilate what exists as a conservative (mis)representation of a desire to (re)create existence anew. So, rather than traversing our phantasies by speaking aloud our desire for annihilation, Deleuze and Guattari argue that we should (re)create with and through phantasies. Now, this does not mean that we should all go fuck our mothers and kill our fathers like Oedipus: no! Our desire to break a taboo is only a reification of the destructive aspects of our (re)creative desire. Our phantasies are characterized by figures that can be traced back to a reality that we despise and wish to destroy, yes, but our phantasies are also characterized by figures that are completely and utterly new and phantastic, figures that we have never encountered in reality, figures that we can endeavor to create. Freud and Lacan cast the imaginary as an an-archic agent of destruction by de-emphasizing unreal, phantastic desires and emphasizing real, taboo desires; Deleuze and Guattari cast the imaginary as an-archic agent of creation by emphasizing our unreal, phantastic desires and de-emphasizing our real, taboo desires. For Freud and Lacan, the unwanted symptoms of our mental (i.e., semiological) "illnesses" index our failure to repress our real, taboo desires, our desires for annihilation; for Deleuze and Guattari, the unwanted symptoms of our mental "illnesses" index our failure to express our unreal, phantastic desires, our desires for (re)creation. Freud and Lacan would “treat” us by getting us to use speech to (re)cast our desire for (re)creation as a desire for destruction, by getting us to forswear our desire for (re)creation. Against Frued and Lacan, not only do Deleuze and Guattari guide us to speak of our unreal, phantastic desires, they also, more importantly, guide our bodies to act on, act out, enact our unreal, phantastic desires, to annihilate and recreate existence anew.

Between Freud/Lacan and Deleuze/Guattari, I find Carl Jung. Jung was, like Deleuze and Guattari, preoccupied with unreal, phantastic desires. This is most evident in the manner that Jung differed from Freud in his readings of myths and stories. Freud thought that myths and stories were compelling because they were misrepresentations of our real, taboo desires, misrepresentations that affirmed the most real, taboo desire: the desire that I may triumph in the Oedipal love triangle between Mommy, Daddy, and Me. Jung scoffed at this idea. Jung was convinced that myths and stories were compelling because of the unreal, phantastic desires that they affirmed. Jung argued that the enduring appeal of the most compelling myths and stories had less to do with their appeal to real, taboo desires that are shared by a population and much more to do with unreal, phantastic desires that shared by a population. “Archetypes” are what Jung called these unreal, phantastic desires that populations managed to share, and Jung thought that the (re)creation of archetypes was the only means for people to gain a sense and understanding for each other’s unreal, phantastic desires. For Jung, only the (re)creation of archetypes enabled communions between the unreal, phantastic desires of different persons and these communions facilitated collaborative (re)creations of existence.

So, you find me here, using the myth of the Minotaur as an archetypal symbol and schema for my attempts to play out my unreal, phantastic desires. The myth of the Minotaur, the theme; my life, a series of variations on the theme, like Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Paganini, which Clara Schumann called the Hexenvariationen (Witch’s Variations) for their difficulty, or like Bach’s Goldberg Variations (re)played by Glenn Gould at different stages of his life.

Indulge me, if you will. What myth, fable, or legend would be the archetypal symbol and schema for your unreal, phantastic desires? Let us try to imagine how our two archetypes could encounter one another, as in a story where Frankenstein’s monster meets a Werewolf, or, better yet, as in those Hatian Vodou myths and legends that bring together Taino zemís, West African vodun, Roman Catholic saints and martyrs, and Old Testament angels and prophets. Let us create so many syncretic variations on the encounters between our different archetypes, and from these variations a new, mutant archetypes may emerge, singular to us, archetypes that enable communion between your unreal, phantastic desires and mine.

With love,

Muindi