to-em

[to-em]

[23:03, 16/11/2020]: What about you? [23:03, 16/11/2020] Emilija: Listening to this beautiful spanish music all day [23:04, 16/11/2020] Emilija: like your fingertips become electric [23:04, 16/11/2020] Emilija: and you can smell all with subtlety [23:05, 16/11/2020] Emilija: and you feel how you hair is touching your neck [23:05, 16/11/2020] Emilija: and meanwhile next to that you feel a deep sadness of being

[to-em]

This song to me is representing my deepest, most down moments and the hope in them to come through. As if a muse, trapped in a bottle, was crying its song of solitude, inviting to be saved.

[to-em]

#inspiration

[to-em]

a boy who said Good morning

There was a boy who used to say   Good morning        every morning,   Good morning        with each first glance of my dawn, To take that tender bird into a capture, To promise that safe nest is waiting, To sway to give itself away,   Good morning,        a dangerous vaccine,        to him, they came as easy as   goodbyes.

[to-em]

Holes, canyons and cuts

The stomach is swirling making holes and canyons, uncarved before, flushing and turning around all my efforts of healthy mindful eating into pieces of useless crap. Meanwhile, an intense chaos of thoughts about people and feelings slowly slices a deep cut in my brain, creating a distinction, similar to today’s worldwide societal confusion between truths and beliefs, old vs new, feeling and knowing. Lost between the sacral and the scientific, between Dalai Lama and Machiavelli. Lost in the chaos, which are the truths of my own and which are merely the adapted ones. Holes, canyons and cuts... Give me that plain land with no name and one colour, one sound or many synchronised ones. Give me order, give me one answer, and I will pray to you. As long as I become whole again, with no holes, no canyons and no cuts.

[to-em]

As I read her Pulitzer-winning article, I couldn't help but admire the way she leads into the article with an introduction full of wit and beautiful use of language:

“The bulldozer approach, say the official renewal pronouncements, is a thing of the past. Total clearance is dead. We are going to save our cities and spare our pastoral splendors and make an environment that is civilized and humane.

Or are we? Everyone who believes in fairies raise his hand and Tinker Bell will live. There is no corruption in Vietnam, no Mafia in Sicily, and there are no bulldozers anymore.”

[to-em]

I remember, how I used to see her at times stop and stand still, in silence. I assume, in her head planning the rest of her and everyone's else's day. With her eyes gazing to far, her face still. Not a frown. Some tool in her hand, frozen for the moment, her strong waist leaning on firm legs. She was tougher than anyone else and there was nothing she couldn't do. But on Sundays her lips wore color. My grandma. My hero. My room now smells like her. — thinking about someone special.

[to-em]

...a drunken, cheating, utterly insane bitch from hell -- or in Irving's words, "the Picasso of passive-aggressive karate."

Irving Rosenfeld (American Hustle) on his wife

[to-em]

“In Western Europe everything is so neatly defined, so specific," Herfert explains. "A waiting room is a waiting room, an office is an office."

These pictures help me come closer to my own identity and why growing in the times of a country finding its order my worldview is so undefined. There are no certainties and the boundaries to both one's possibilities and abilities. The known truths and rules seem relevant and "open to interpretation". Constructs, so orderly in the western society, such as time - multidimensional and nonlinear.

Walking kilometers in silence with my grandmother to the train station, gardening, long waiting in the context of same horizons and places... The vastness and nothingness of the experience leaves you with you and your imagination to entertain, challenge and amuse yourself. Its a solitary experience and every solitary experience stretches the understanding of time.

"In Russia, in contrast, rooms are open to interpretation, many-layered and not so prettified. And I also noticed that there seem to be many more people just sitting around in them. None of them seems at first sight to know what they are doing there. I tried to integrate people like that into my pictures.”

http://designyoutrust.com/2016/03/surreal-photos-of-russia-that-look-like-a-strange-fairytale/

[to-em]

Celebrate life

[to-em]

Friday evening. The lights in the living room slightly dimmed just as my eyes after hours of working on the thesis. Reading into the analysis of celebrity role models and political influence. As this solitary work was driving me crazy, to get the feeling of someone’s presence, I put Gilles Peterson’s radio podcast . 

His guest of the day was Goldie. An artist, whom I have vaguely heard before, possibly due to my Eastern European background or to a generational ‘not so much MTV’ difference. All of what I’ve heard or seen about Goldie was a documentary on dance music, where he stumbled upon as the most cocky DJ among all the legends. And then yet, still there was something nevertheless inviting about his aggressive appearance. 

The contrast with the modest Gilles seemed like a curious contrast. So of course I first skip-listened. And to my surprise, guess what caught my ear - jazz. Golden teeth, jerseys and jazz? I started listening. Despite that the conversation was based on the musical inspirations, the tone of voice of this man was gradually revealing a sensitive soul. The preparation, admiration, the action, confidence, the formidable pinnacle, followed by regrets, the loss, the calm, the humility. It’s not there in the words, so don’t look for it directly. It’s in the sound, of the voice of the music. It’s the way musicians communicate with the world. That was the phantom of Goldie, who that evening spoke right at me.

It reminded me of the 90s and the golden 2000s. I was a kid then. The 90s in Lithuania, a generally dark grey country were dark and grey. Coming out of the soviet occupation was as slow and awaited as the first signs of spring. Long grey winters dominated the year and city street lights in either dark blue or grey sky is my image of childhood in the 90s. I still remember how cool was to have cola, Toblerone or satellite TV. While Goldie in UK was a total different story. Drugs, raves, fame, ego, MTV.  

The moment came, when I heard ‘Inner City Life’. This acid tune, those layered breakbeats, gripping and groundbreaking in the history of Drum’n’Bass are now 20 years old. Hearing them for the first time, with no prior reference of when and where and how they emerged, it took me right back to the backseat of my parents car driving through the grey sleeping districts of the post-soviet Vilnius.

https://www.mixcloud.com/gillespeterson/goldie-words-music/

[to-em]

Is music universal? Are we all touched by a the same nerve when the note hits our ear, and then brain and then that particular memory? Do we live-through identical moments in the same depth? Similar? Or is that ridiculous even to question? I am looking for a universality of minds and hearts, so I would not think that I share the feeling of music only with the one I won’t share it no more. 

[to-em]

Kevin Morby’s Harlem River. A love letter to New York City that transforms its eponymous subject's long stretch of water into a metaphor for a wandering heart. 

So perfectly it is portrayed through this dance, so masculine, so spontaneous in its moves, the uncalculated twists and turns. You can hear the blend of a hungover morning and tap dancing in the chords of the song. A story of a loose vagabond, that turns into a gentlemen, lead by sentiment. Sentiment to love, to city, to life. Love, defined by man.

[to-em]

A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life. Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.

[to-em]

Watch Bloodmoon, a short film by Lisa Smidt on childhoold influences. Interestingly, the imagery does not at all speak of what the voice over is appealing to. The slightly sudden jump from childhood observations, loneliness and a love story shows the intention of the director to link it together. I thought the contrast of a pale figure around the water and the grey dark rocky shores, silky cloth touched by the wind and cement balconies was there to show a feeling of misplacement. Just like the narrator stealing the voice from silent characters, as if distancing the inner subjectivity, enhancing the introvertion.

Each one’s childhood draws an individual perspective. It makes you a subject. Thus makes you subjective. No one will ever see life the way you will. Only love cuts through subjectivity. By trying to see life through the eyes of the other, we love. That is why there is nothing as addictive, as absorbing, as destructive.

[to-em]

*by Robert Montgomery, a modern poet. I came across his interview today where he said he likes the pathetic and the melancholic. Because melancholy is the joy within sadness. I though, melancholy is cheesy. Sarcasm, apathy is what’s on at the moment. Cheesy isn’t. Ironic, I am cheesy and I hate cheesy. Or pathetic? But hey, Robert Montgomery doesn’t hate it or hide it. Or maybe I am actually just afraid to be a poet.

[to-em]

He is from New York. And even though I have never seen it, this is how the idea of this city sounds to me.