sound/less bubbles

a not-so-random memory: 

my first boyfriend, the redhead, putting a pair of earphones in my ears and pushing play on a Smashing Pumpkins song while we just lay there. it's the best, he said. having music right in your ears while you just zone out, your brain totally wrapped up in the sounds.

it's weird now to think of what a novelty cheap earphones were in 2004. for me. him. us. what a novelty having a boyfriend was, too, then.

and what a blip mp3-players were, eh? I never actually had one, unless you count an iPod touch as an mp3 player. but those things seem too internet-enabled and multifeatured to count, I think. 

 

recently I put a bunch of actual mp3 files onto my current phone. I like having a little pocketful of Imogen Heap and Jason Mraz and Death Cab for Cutie to carry around.

 

I must confess though, music doesn't effect me the way it seems to effect others. my brain treats it like wallpaper, most of the time. sometimes rather loud, ugly wallpaper and sometimes quite lovely, attractive wallpaper... but more often just there, on the walls, in the background, drawing very little attention to itself unless the lyrics are particularly striking.

 

falling asleep to white noise of some sort is one thing, but having my brain all wrapped up in any given sound... I don't always find that very pleasant. 

 

my sensitivity to sound seems to deepen the more I think about it. even with music piped directly into my ears, I can still hear the hum of the dishwasher and/or the air conditioning and/or the PlayStation 4 (which has gotten particularly vociferous in its old age). when the neighbor's power tools and the traffic going by and dog park noise from across the way is all piling up around me, I hate this sensitivity. 

 

on the other hand, when little Hamilton is chewing on something he shouldn't be under the bed in the other room, it does come in handy to be able to hear the difference between pug teeth on a proper chew toy and pug teeth on a stolen ballpoint pen.
 

too much sound makes me edgy and irritable. so in pursuit of a world without so much irritation, I acquired a new set of fancy earphones today. they are the wireless bluetooth kind, and they come with two noise-canceling modes. I never thought I'd feel like I needed wireless earphones... but after lots of research and review-reading and consideration, these came out as the most effective and comfortable option.

will they trap me further within a bubble of my own endlessly unvoiced thoughts? I hope not entirely.

 

also I still think someone definitely needs to write about how headphones have done for music what widespread literacy and silent reading practices have done for books-- i.e. make them very private, internal experiences instead of communally shared ones. though perhaps someone somewhere already has and their article is just not on my radar yet.

sing, sing, sing

so I signed up for eight weeks of voice lessons this summer. it was kind of fun and random to enroll at the local community college and get a new email address and go actually check out their pretty Prescott campus.

it's nice. lots of cool sculpture gardens here and there. I was especially struck by this lovely little bench:

it hasn't been that long since I was a real student (and secretly/not-so-secretly, professorship is pretty much endless-studentship anyway), but it does feel like a long time. 4 years now I guess? 

but now, for this season at least, I am a part-time, non-degree-seeking Yavapai Rough Rider.

{ image borrowed from a local news piece about the YC softball team }

I had my first lesson this afternoon: 50 very enjoyable minutes with Dr. Audis, who earned her doctorate at none other than Texas Tech University. (interestingly, but not really coincidentally given all the myths and legends of our shared western/southwestern contexts out here, Texas Tech has a really similar mascot... only theirs is red-flavored instead of green...)

anyway, the first lesson was a great time. I tried not to be too nervous; I hummed warm-up scales through buzzing lips and emulated an ambulance siren with my voice as fully as I could. that last exercise was scary-exhilarating and hopefully that small thrill will help spur me to practice it even if it will likely frighten the pugs a little. 

then we sang through a few folk songs and a few show tunes, ultimately settling on these three as my summer repertoire: 

- the classic Irish folk song, "Danny Boy"

- one of the more heart-wrenching songs from Fiddler on the Roof, "Far From the Home I Love"

- and "Show Me," from My Fair Lady

I'm familiar with all three in some way or other, but despite their seeming simplicity they'll each make for an interesting challenge in terms of range, pacing, tone, emotion, and style. not to mention forcing me to sing the notes and timing as written and not just as I remember from musicals or popular culture or whatnot.

for these summer classes, there isn't a formal recital or presentation at the end of eight weeks, but it sounds like I'll at least get to perform for the other voice students at some point. that should be scary-exhilarating and cool also.

side note! in my googling for that .gif file from "Show Me," I discovered suddenly that Mr. Freddy Eynsford Hill is played, in the 1964 film adaptation of My Fair Lady, by none other than Jeremy Brett.

Jeremy Brett? whose name I mostly only know because of my longstanding, if lazy, adoration of all things Sherlock Holmes? 

yes indeed, that Jeremy Brett. I may have to move this whole playlist of his Sherlock Holmes performances up nearer to the top of my summer watching list.

air, fire, summer

{ photo borrowed from who knows where. thankfully this image is in the public domain! }

there was a copy of this painting in a tall hardcover art book we had around when I was small (very probably an older version of this one?)

among all the art in that book, Flaming June and The Blue Boy were my favorites. the wrinkly silky textures of that bright orange, the closely nestled limbs visually marrying pure calm with the utmost vibrancy-- I think I wanted to be this woman, to feel all the warmth and smoothness of that summer nap all around me. 

I also wanted to write a hundred stories about that boy and his stare. what was he up to in that seventeenth-century outfit?

now that I look at both these paintings again I note the points of contrast and similarity. very different styles of art, different color tones and utterly opposite poses-- but similar attention to the loveliness of how fabric wrinkles and falls around a human body. 

I woke up surprised that it was June. June first, a Tuesday.

I thought of this painting, and I wanted to look at it again, and it seemed a decent excuse to blog. (will I make a habit of this blogging on the first of each month now? we shall see.)

I should find myself a nice art print of Sir Frederic Leighton's cozy, sensuous portrait of Flaming June, someday. I will always find it so beautiful.

-

another beautiful thing? the sound of the slightest breeze through the leaves of a quaking aspen tree.

some weeks ago I noticed that a few of our neighbors have aspen trees planted. small trios of them, brilliant green in the Arizona sun. while I walked the dogs around the crescent of our cul-de-sac street, the sound of those delicate coin-shaped leaves charmed me out of that particular breezy late spring day into a thousand memories. mountains, camping, school trips, girl scouts, hikes up from Tony Grove Lake.

such a distinctive sound, aspen leaves in the wind. rattly. subtle. crisp but also everywhere. maybe we should plant some aspen trees for ourselves someday.

or perhaps we could settle for the more visual beauty of some June lilies.

back and forth-ness

I pulled my high school journal out of its place on the shelf last week, to look back at what I wrote on September 11, 2001.

it's a half page of earnest printed penmanship, phrases like "live in infamy" and "dumb terrorists" smushed together in an account of an event I didn't understand.

I opened this old blogpost draft today, in the mood to blog, not sure exactly what about. perhaps it will be a sequence of thoughts, some from the past and some from the now, juxtaposed as if on shuffle mode. that's often how my brain seems to work anyway: non-linear, constellatory, like a small racquetball inside a hollow dodecahedron or something.

1
I've noticed lately that my vocabulary, at least when I'm standing in front of a classroom full of students in Louisiana, has opened its arms to "y'all." the southern, folksy "y'all" hasn't displaced "you guys" entirely as my collective second-person greeting, but it's obviously gaining ground. I can't decide if I like it or not, but at least it feels fairly normal.

2
I need to read some more Joanna Russ.

3
these two podcasts turned out to be in conversation the other day (and by 'the other day' I apparently mean about a year ago). according to my notes, I listened to this one, "The Oddest Thing in the Universe" by Reasonably Sound, first, and then, from the BBC's Infinite Monkey Cage, "The Human Voice." why language? how? apparently we human beings had all the physical capabilities for speech long before we used them to communicate in spoken words. spoken language is a strange, purposeful biproduct. maybe I should re-listen and see if the two episodes mean any more now that I'm almost finished reading Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet.

4
I've taken to putting all my old collection of mp3 music files on shuffle every so often, just to see what comes up. here's a list of what did:

Jack Johnson - Posters
Good Charlotte - The River
Blumfeld - Heiss die Segel
Peter Fox - Schwarz zu Blau
Ben Kweller - Run
Eve 6 - Girl Eyes
Andrew Bird - Hole in the Ocean Floor

when did I acquire Andrew Bird music? I don't remember. I do remember that the German stuff is from friend Yvonne, the rest from miscellaneous acquaintances in college.

5
in April 2016, I went to a musical about music (Once) all by myself. just before the second song--which sounded so familiar to me somehow--there were a few lines of dialogue I had to write down. I wrote them on an empty edge of the program. I wrote them down again in a sketch book. and I wrote them down here, too. the moment in these lines is so strangely memorable:

- are you breathing?

- yeah, I am.

-you won't die if you play this song with me.

and then she plays. they sing. he lets himself pick up the guitar again. his life is changed.

6
I've joined the community/campus choir that just started up last week. the director keeps talking about a particular rendition of one of the songs in our repertoire. was my youngest brother a part of that choir in 2014, or not yet?

   { the pinboard on the wall of my office }

muscle memory

this song by the singer-actor-musician-person Hilary Duff seems to play every time I stop at the local grocery store. you can listen to it over here if you don't remember how it goes.

I, somehow, remember it pretty well now that I keep hearing it.

even on first re-hearing it a few weeks ago, it astonished me how deeply and fully I recognize and remember this song. this song from 2003 that I don't have particular memories connected to or anything. as far as I remember, it was just popular back then. on the radio all the time.

and now it seems to be on all the time again. or the grocery store has limited music on rotation. who knows.

does anyone still listen to music on the radio?

lately I have been biking around town and to campus a little bit. around the neighborhood for exercise. across the river for lunch.

the feeling of being on a bike in a small college town takes me back to the early 2000s in a way similar to the lyrics of "So Yesterday," but it is much less surprising that this happens. muscle memory is supposed to be deep. riding a bike is supposed to be unforgettable.

as a Purdue student, I think I biked to campus a total of six times the whole five years I was there. West Lafayette had too many steep hills in it.

Logan, Utah also had some steep hills (like the one this building sat on), but I was younger back then and it wasn't so hot and humid all the time either.

as an undergraduate, too, I had particularly limited choices about transportation. unless the car-owning people in my life were willing to offer rides, I had to bike or bus or walk myself everywhere. and thankfully there were wide roads and sidewalks and plenty of space for all those things. and free buses, too. (I miss a good handful of things about Indiana now that it's almost 2 months since we left it, and the relatively sleek public transport is among that handful of things.)

the feeling of being on a bike is a somewhat precarious feeling. balancing. weaving. it's familiar, but my muscles and my breathing are still readjusting.

a new fall semester always requires readjusting. remembering, but also putting away the past to face new things. it probably feels more precarious than it really is.

fall semester, 2017

if all goes as it supposedly should, this will technically be my very last fall semester as a student. I am not sure how I feel about that yet.

I think I feel less optimistic than I was feeling last fall. this year is so different, so pressure-filled. so seemingly monumental in all its changes and changing. a final year. slipping away already. counting itself down from 11 months and a half to only 11 months and a quarter, just like every year but also in an extra-bewildering way now. the idea I can't help but swirl around in my head over and over again is: there will never be enough time.

and maybe that idea is right. but also... maybe... I'll deal with my finite amount of time just fine.

I will have to. we'll all have to, and so it goes.

today's writing music: Solar Fields
today's re-reading: Kathleen Fitzpatrick
and today's prooflistening: poetry

a day for not going on walks

I was going to get up just before sunrise today, and go for a walk, but it was snowing. and my waking self decided to think about dreams (they were, from what I remember, about deep blue love, yarn and instructions) instead.

the day has taken me other directions. podcasts. LibriVoxing. reading interesting snippets. writing out thoughts. watering plants.

it's still a bit too cold to go for a very enjoyable walk today. reading and writing are much more appropriate.



this was the xkcd on Wednesday. it resonated enormously, matching up with all my recent feelings of having too many screens in my face all the time. mostly it's work. but also twitter and email and youtube and endless vacillating between distractions and productivity and in-between.

I used to leave the house without my phone all the time. maybe I should do more of that. just every once in a while.

I also used to write in paper notebooks much more than I seem to do these days. I definitely should do more of that. just let me finish this blogpost first.

ps: this audio series is adorable and if you like music and adventure, you will probably like it.

words + goats + love

I don't remember how I found the All Things Linguistic tumblr blog, but I love it. usually it points to and comments on other interesting pieces about language and usage around the internet. for example, this bit about how we use "waslike" as a verb to recount approximate or paraphrased speech/attitude/reaction-of-whatever-kind. I was like "hey wait a second," and she was like "oh what is it now?" and then he was like "leave me out of it please."

other posts I loved were this one on lexical gaps in English and this one about pronunciation and singing.

and speaking of singing, I must run to choir rehearsal this evening.

p.s. I also discovered this goat-themed twitter account recently (thanks friend Dan for somehow leaving digital breadcrumbs back to it for me) and it is delightful in all ways.

rambly melodies and voices

today's short and sweet review: The Delphic Wristwatch

the podcast's tagline describes it as "luminous snow globes of words and music"

I came across this odd, ambient remix via LibriVox. the creator made use of various LibriVox recordings in the 5 episodes that exist so far, so he notified the LibriVox team and they linked to the podcast in the forums.

it is not like any other podcast I have ever encountered and I hope it continues.

find it on facebook, website, or soundcloud.

the $10 founding father without a father

I have two of the loveliest friends to thank for originally exposing me to Hamilton: friend Liz, who teaches high school English around here, and friend Patti, who is a fellow Purdue rhetoric & composition scholar. they are both kindred spirits of sorts-- fellow English major geeks and appreciators of much beautiful and random culture. Liz and I go see Shakespeare whenever we can, and if Patti lived closer we would be religiously watching Elementary every week.

I clearly recall the day last spring-ish when Liz mentioned the fact that someone had made a hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton and asked if I wanted to hear some of it. we had crafts in our laps and the soundtrack on her phone, hooked up to bluetooth speakers.

it's intense, this music. relentless, rushing, and deep. and smashed-full of intricate lyrics. if you haven't listened, you must. go listen.

Patti and I binged on Hamilton the whole drive to and from New York last summer. I remember being so excited to see the two-disc album in her sack of CDs. reading the liner notes while she drove gave me such headaches, but it was worth it as the price to pay for familiarizing myself with all the layers and nuance of Lin-Manuel Miranda's wordsmithery.

some months ago, on our trip back from the beaches of northern Michigan, I forced dear Jeremiah to listen to the whole soundtrack. he had been skeptical, and as a human who is often quite skeptical of the celebrated and the hyped, I cannot blame him for that.

luckily, once he heard the masterpiece he was in love with it too.

we decided to get tickets to see the show in Chicago. they were not cheap, but life is short, right?

there was quite the countdown from the moment of that decision to the night of the show. in the meantime I spent too much time reading through annotated lyrics. I discovered this ridiculously amazing tribute of a podcast series all about Hamilton (thanks friend Beth for that tip). and Liz and I got together to watch the Tony awards, to see the cast and crew and producers of Hamilton win lots of prizes.

and then there was also a PBS documentary about the making of the show, and about Hamilton himself, and about America. it was beautiful, and you can watch it online up til November 18th.

last weekend, the day arrived at last. we took the train into the city, dined at the oldest Italian restaurant in Chicago, took selfies in front of the marquee, and climbed a lot of stairs up to the balcony of the theatre. 

there were of course piles of merchandise for sale: totes, hoodies, program books.

what will I put in this tote bag? maybe it will be the tote bag I take to the library, for books and audiobooks and such.


right now all it has in it is the fancy program book and the less-fancy playbill. fancy glossy perfect-bound program book has excellent photo arrangements of the original Broadway cast. it's gorgeous.

the Chicago show was also gorgeous. being so familiar with the soundtrack already made for a very interesting and layered entertainment experience. the Chicago actors are not the Broadway actors, so they all put their own little garnishes on their parts. there was so much motion and energy in the performance--a visual-kinetic counterpart to the rhythms and dynamics of the recorded music by itself. I found myself drinking in all the lighting decisions, the ambiance of the whole stage. at almost any time, no matter where the spotlights fell or who was monologuing, we could see silent actors at the corners of the action, in the background, walking past or sitting patiently. they didn't always have parts to sing or back-up vocals to add, but they were very there, as watchers.

I could probably write a lot about each scene, each song. but I'll spare you too much gushing and touch on my favourite bits from each half. the favourite moment from Act I came in a trios of songs: "Guns and Ships," "History Has its Eyes On You," and "Yorktown." this is how the Revolutionary War was won. this is where we establish the theme of history watching from an unreachably far, high place. that theme haunts the rest of the show, touching each character in very different ways. the whole sequence was simply masterfully orchestrated-- bodies, music, voices, lines, colors, contrast, tension-- and then the Brits surrender and it all dissipates into relief, crystalizes into jubilation.

it's harder to pick favourites in Act II. the whole character of Jefferson is delightful in his unflinching high-mindedness. I loved the stark, tenuous feeling of Hamilton's impending mistakes in "Say No to This." and I trembled and cried a bit at the very end of "It's Quiet Uptown."

I feel very lucky to have been in that theatre, with the beautiful, pathos-infused results of so many fellow-humans' creative work. how lucky we all are, to be alive to see such stories crafted and told so marvelously.

dimensional

this is the song playing in the background:


it's from the best Muse album--my most favourite one because it was my first--the one called Absolution, and it is playing downstairs because freund Jeremiah put it on. he is making lunch. I am writing. (blogging counts as writing--it so does. especially when it's been three weeks since I last wrote anything here.)

so: an update. people use blogs for that sort of thing, it seems. I more usually use mine for pseudo-academic musing, but today, an update. there are drafts waiting for finishing, of course. one about facebook, one about the word "defense," and three about books I've read or am reading. snippets about human-technology, about collaboration and commitment. those will have to wait til next week. or next month.

for now, a string of memories and memories-to-be from various facets of this amelia's life.

I visited northern Michigan a few weeks ago. it was a glorious mix of misty, cool, drizzly summer shower and sparkling, steady, beating sunshine. there was hiking, dunes, kayaking, lakes, and plenty of laying around on a beach reading.

I'm teaching an online class. it is pretty nice to teach from wherever, wearing whatever, responding to students as needed. we are three weeks into this eight-week course. I hope we all get through it happily and that some sort of learning happens on all sides.

my research team and I designed a pretty poster to hang at a conference this summer. not my typical communication/English/humanities conference, but the American Society of Engineering Education conference. the poster is there this week, along with a few of my colleagues. I'm staying home to write and write and write an article or two or three.

dear Chris and I chipped away at a few more levels of Portal 2 on Friday. every six or twelve or nineteen months or so, I manage to make time for a videogame. keeps things balanced.

dear Chalice visited last week, too! we wandered the sweltering little town of Lafayette for a few days, exploring a few restaurants I hadn't been to before, dipping bread in peppered olive oil at one I hadn't been to for many months. it was a grand few days hosting her and Dan. 

most of the corners and edges surrounding these fun bits of my life are eaten up with writing and meetings about writing. I like it that way, even if it means I'm always, no matter what, inhaling and exhaling the feeling that I should be writing. 

down with sameness

the soundtrack behind the Saturday yoga class I attend at the campus rec center has become distractingly familiar. 50 minutes of yoga, 50 minutes of lovely light music to go with it.

there is always The Beatles' "Blackbird."

and always a slow, haunting version of "White Winter Hymnal," with all its oddly disturbing lyrics.

and an instrumental arrangement of "Landslide," a song I don't care much for anyhow.

and this interesting mashup of of Coldplay and Taylor Swift. I like that one. but...

a part of my brain, every weekend, is listening for all of these pieces, waiting and waiting for something to not be there, or for something different to come through the speakers.

you'd think it'd be the opposite--new music selections intruding as distraction, shuffled playlists contributing to a sense of disorder.

nope.

I might be wired differently than most. sameness is not comforting for me. I like to rearrange my furniture, put different photos on the wall. my routines shift with the seasons and with the semesters. all good habits are inherently flexible.

the Saturday morning yoga routine this year has gotten disappointingly familiar, too. the instructor, who shares my first name but is at least ten years younger than I, pretty much always leads with cat-cow and spinal stretches, a nice child's pose, moves into a gentle vinyasa, a few warriors, vinyasa again, triangle, probably pyramid too, then tree poses, one last vinyasa, a plank variation or two or three, then pigeon, savasana, the end. and she'll close every practice with the same string of words, a relatively lengthy rote translation of namaste that sure, does seem profound upon first hearing, but trite after seventeen times or so--

"I honor that place in you in which the entire universe dwells; I honor that place in you which is of love, of integrity, of wisdom and of peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are One."

namaste.

the end of yoga practice is so peaceful. it's a moment you want to carry carefully with you into whatever you're about to do next.

but on Saturday mornings at the rec center here, we get a quick namaste at the end of yoga and a sudden, jarring transition to an apparently standard post-workout self-esteem building ritual: "give yourselves a round of applause for a great practice today."

so not peaceful.

maybe some people like to carry self-esteem building applause with them as they leave the gym. if you are a person of this sort, I would love to hear from you and learn about your world. me, I would rather keep things peaceful.

maybe I should fill out a few comment cards pleading for an end to the disruptiveness. would anyone else really miss that pointless round of applause if it weren't there? I doubt it.  

I might be wired differently than most. or maybe it's that I began yoga with teachers-in-training, and always had a new one leading practice every Friday at the community college where I worked. such variety, there was. one week very active, playful, power-yoga poses, and the next week very meditative chanting and breathing and focusing. I miss that. not ever knowing exactly what kind of experience yoga would be. being exposed to all sorts of yoga was pretty awesome.

but at the rec center here, there is one yoga instructor on Saturday mornings. she teaches one sort of class, a Yoga Foundations class, where nothing very different comes up from week to week.

I should visit other yoga classes, I guess. see if they lead practice differently. at the very least they probably have different playlists in the background.

lists and dreams

eight days and a bit until a new year.

I have dozens and dozens of things to blog about. I have photos all lined up from my Blue Apron adventures (Patti has begun blogging about that already and I am way behind on my side). I have reflections on my final fall semester of coursework, and in-progress thoughts on winter break projects, and daydreams about future things. I have books I could review and places I could muse about.

when I have too many things to blog about, but haven't blogged in too long, and cannot decide where to start, it seems the best thing to do is set the vague list aside and throw something random together. photos usually work pretty well.

so. let us take a whirlwind snapshot tour of this amelia girl's past few months. summer feels both like yesterday and an entirely different country. I saw some new places. Kentucky in the spring. Michigan in May. New Orleans in June. Wisconsin in August. New England for October. 

ponds and gardens. lakes and boats.

we waded in Walden Pond. I collected a few acorns.

I saw some old places too. Indiana trails and creeks. city blocks and tucked-away parks.


and I went home for a wedding in September. met some new nieces and nephews.

my crazy brother's wedding day was perhaps the most windy day I have ever lived to see.

and I'm home again now, reshuffling and unwinding after a crazy semester, breathing in and stretching out before the next one begins.

there is snow. and chocolate. music and family.

I'll blog more about all the other stuff later. 

strangening

I keep seeing this particular redheaded kid walking around campus. I know nothing about him, but I notice and recognize him without any effort at all.

why?

usually it's the intersection of Grant Street and State, the edge of campus.

I'm not over there that often... am I? bookstore, business school... not my usual scene.

but actually I do find myself hiking over there weekly or so now. I'm research-assisting for professors over in Young Hall this year. 

anyway. redheads.

one day I noticed this particular redhead, recognized him, and wondered what the chances of my seeing him almost every time I walk over that way actually were. is that calculable? hmm. that time we both walked north, up to the curb, to wait for the traffic to give us space to cross.

as we stood there, I imagined myself quoting lyrics from the Dr. Horrible song.

"love your hair," perhaps I would say, with a silly inside-joke-ish smile.

but I didn't. I didn't even mumble.

I wonder what the chances are that this random kid would get the reference, anyway. even if I sing my compliment... he might not.

talking to strangers--even strangers you cross paths with multiple times per week--seems so weird to do most of the time. the reason for it has to be either unquestionably pressing or innocuously shallow. it's either hey you really ought to watch out before you gets hit by a bus or hmm, nice day for all this awful construction they're doing, isn't it? two very different extremes.

speaking of strangers, I must tell you all about my favourite new podcast of the same name. it lives over here on this website called Story Central. Lea Thau, the host, is the loveliest. the work she does is a marvel and a half. I want a job like hers.

if I ever actually do find an appropriate path-crossing moment in which to comment on how cool and red the hair of this fellow-Purdue student stranger is, I'll let you know how it goes.

seventeen: shrouds

oh the mist thismorning. and this yellow / white / yellow / mist  / green / grey color palette caught my eye as I walked somewhat disorientedly around a slightly different part of campus. it seemed worth capturing.

in other news:

reading.

listening.

writing this.

ten: destroy my sweater

I had forgotten about this half-parenthetically-titled song. the video is embedded underneath all this concert-reminiscing--go listen.

it took me til the second verse to remember this song. it sounded different played live, with all the crowd-noise and amplification layered around, and I almost didn't recognize it at all. it is sadly not among the many Weezer tracks I've collected over the years, but it is among the Weezer tracks that I very much like. I remember it on the radio in my car and the wind through the window and my voice trying to match the song's pleading.

I'm putting this song on the list of songs I would totally not mind having any musically inclined and handsome men sing to me as we smile at at each other. (this song is also on that list, though I know the fact that Mr. Freddie Mercury was not exactly the straightest of fellows might make it a slightly odd candidate.)

so. random Weezer concert? why not? it was free. it was a Friday. why not? (I'm choosing to ignore the fact that it was sponsored in connection with a ridiculous college sports organization. let's not talk about that part.)

what we saw of the concert was cool. we left campus last week at around half past three and drove straight to the city. we parked at the Indianpolis Zoo. we walked through what was left of the drizzle to the state park where Weezer would be sandwiched between a band called Cold War Kids and another band called Imagine Dragons. we wandered past tents and booths giving out ad-bedecked swag and selling beer. we found a place to stand on the muddy, trampled grass, and we waited. the ground was sogged and cold. the little toes on my right foot started to numb a little before long.

I had almost no hope of seeing the actual stage from the middle of the crowd, but every so often the sea of shoulders and heads did align just right and I glimpsed the band members up there, rocking out on their bestickered electric guitars. on stage they looked so small compared to their images on the screens behind and beside them. their real faces looked paler. their bodies like toys, almost.

every song sent a slightly different pattern of deep, deep thrumming into my knees and torso and heart. there was plenty of shoving and being shoved. there was plenty of variously flavored smoke. ah, live concerts. the are perhaps not one hundred percent my thing... but they are so unique it's easy to enjoy them anyway. friend Mitch who also tagged along confessed to us afterwards that he's not a huge fan of Weezer anyway, he just loves people-watching at concerts.

and why not?

I had forgotten about this song. before looking it up today, I hadn't seen the music video before. (music videos are a very strange genre. this one is no exception.)


a note: Mr. Lead Singer Rivers Cuomo doesn't look like that anymore.

he looks like this.

six: but too soon for bare feet

today was quite grey. I am weighed down with exams to write and books to read, review, takes notes on. this time of year--it is excruciatingly stressful and/or teasingly wonderful and/or wrackingly mixed. depends on the day.

I am wanting to rearrange furniture, and walk outside in the rain, and sing or dance or leave. 

but I have exams to write. 

this song and Jason Mraz's very nice voice accompanied me home from the bus stop earlier. the match of grey anxious twilight longing seemed beyond perfect.

you are not made of metaphors

this poet came to perform this week, at my little university in this little Indiana town. 

...okay, neither the town nor the university is all that little.

Sarah Kay, famous for these poems, that TED talk.

I keep thinking about this poem, "The Type." wondering who I am.

last Tuesday, in a long, narrow chair-filled faculty lounge at the Purdue Memorial Union, she performed several pieces, some from her new book, some moving and poignant, some sappy and silly, some in between. it was very fun.

we were discouraged from making recordings ourselves, but you, if you were not there (or if you were), can, thanks to this internet wonderland, find and watch recordings of some of the same poems performed at other venues, at other times.

"Montauk"
a story full of time-skips, summers, expanse

"No Matter the Wreckage"
which made me wonder about men as ships and women as sailors, so seeming backwards.

"Private Parts"
as I doodled all over this bit of scrap paper (black ink courtesy my own pen, pink courtesy a pen borrowed from the nice fellow-who-accompanied-me-to-this-poetry-performance) I made notes on idea from this poem: "corners sanded away, the parts that once only fit one person."

now that I'm blogging about it, I had to look up the real bit of poetry I was trying to capture at the corner of this doodling. it's more specific. it's more evocative. it's real and if you listen, you'll hear the line, just there:

and the years have spread us like dandelion seeds, sanding down the edges of our jigsaw parts that used to only fit each other.

I of course want to take the idea of that--the kernel of memory of touch and meeting and change--and run with it through a lot of stretching, complicated thought-work. will identities always be settling, smoothing? what does this mean for eternity, for unity? does who we are ever stop losing uniqueness? will this time, these years, ultimately lead to inevitable mass conformity? does it ever work backwards? can we hope for getting sanded into less-smooth, less-conforming, more-particular pieces? why or why not?

hmm.

these poems I've linked weren't all, of course.

the piece about South Africa was very sad.

the one she said she'd never performed before--"Dragons"--was intense.

of course that toothpaste + bicycle tire love letter made us laugh.

I have work to do, other than poetry and other than blogging. but I keep thinking.

letting.

being sanded.

the middle eight, after the chorus

the bulk of my music collection, I confessed to my passengers as we embarked toward the capitol of Indiana for various conference adventures last week, was obtained primarily from boys I knew in college. my tastes have evolved some since then (more Iron & Wine, less All American Rejects please), but my actual music collection has definitely not. the twenty-eight hundred music tracks I had back then are roughly the same twenty-eight hundred tracks I at some point between 2002 and 2006 swapped or ripped from all the boys in all the dorm rooms across the hall, upstairs, around the corner, or down the street. only 1582 of those songs, however, are worthy of being carried around in my pocket. only 1582 of them were with us that morning, on the little ipod I'd hooked up to my car's barely-functional tape deck. Songs, Shuffle = a potentially bottomless basket of nostalgic surprises.

as we drove, friend Patti and I tried brainstorming ideas for a vocal duet to perform at the English department fundraising show. should we choose something funny? something awe-inspiring? I tossed dozens of silly suggestions up and down in my head as we drove, sometimes riffing off the selections my little ipod dished up, sometimes spinning ideas out of nothing. this? or this? maybe this one? or something ambitiously a propos of nothing, like this?

none of those are exactly duets, though. could we make them duets, and would it be difficult, and would it be worth doing? and even then, how would we track down instrumental versions to use for accompaniment?

to Soundcloud for answers I went. I figured they'd have plenty of instrumental versions we might borrow, and they did. I also came across a ton of other stuff.

Soundcloud is a neat place for audio-exploring. remixes of a million shapes and colors abound. and while I think the concept of remix has very intriguing implications, its very musical provenance and history isn't something I have hitherto appreciated. neither sixties dance halls nor eighties recording studios have been places I turn for good music, though I don't quite know why not. those venues were not conveniently across the hall or around the corner, I guess. and furthermore, most dance music isn't really meant to be sung, and therefore it isn't generally my kind of music.

swimming in and around and among all the techno synth lyricless-ness I found whole channels, like this one, devoted to curating mixes and mashups.

I've embedded a couple that I found disorientingly recognizable. I've got both Weezer and Simon and Garfunkel songs in my own collection, but hearing them on top of each other is... odd. it's a surprise of a puzzling and delightful kind. it felt a little like when in your dreams, all the settings are utterly familiar, while also looking nothing like the places your waking self knows they should look like.

I wonder if that disorientation only hits if you've heard the original versions of the remixed/mashed-up songs before. after all, if you don't know how they are 'supposed to' go, the remix might sound normal. if you've only heard the cover, it could become the default, the truth, even if some other iteration came first.

colleague Tony is writing interesting-sounding things about music and rhetoric and creativity. the whole metaphor of remix is becoming so pervasive now, so repurposed (itself remixed?) it hardly makes sense to link the term so closely with only audio tapes and instrumental transitions. the idea is almost everywhere now.

the conference adventures (ATTW, CCCCs) pelted me with other people's ideas. the rest of my semester--or perhaps even life--might involve my brain finding ways to make mashups and crossovers with all that information and then some. 

in the meantime, Patti and I are going to don a pair of goggles and a pair of fingerless gloves, respectively, and remix bits of this.

secret recombinations

tofu.

and potatoes.

with a garlic, mustard, lemon not-quite-sauce.

this was my taking-a-break-from-crazy-final-essay-writing kitchen adventure this week. you can find the recipe I messed with linked here on Pinterest, where it links to this dietician's blog, which you can then follow back to this food and travel writer, who got it from this vegan guy, who saw the recipe in a magazine next to a wine advertisement. pretty much all of those sites display much nicer tofu photographs than mine.

it was pretty neat to be able to trace this recipe so far across the internet. (or would the more fitting metaphor be 'so deep'? or should I ditch spacial metaphors and just say 'so many clicks'?) it's always good to see bloggers crediting wherever they got their ideas, for some reason.

other interesting thing is how much the recipe changed, or didn't. travel writer ditched the leeks. Vegan Dad himself admits, "The original recipe calls for sweet potatoes, which would be quite good, but I had none on hand. It also called for chicken, which I didn't have either." the dietician left out the vegetable stock and pre-baked the tofu for extra crispiness. me? I used the wrong sort of mustard and added onions and garlic instead of paprika. I also sprinkled bacon on some of the leftovers yesterday, which might make the vegan guy cringe--but ah well.

a week or so ago, the following offhand, asynchronous conversation happened:

Carl: Excited to be making some shrimp tacos with mango slaw tonight.
me: Carl. start a food blog. post all these recipes you make. I would be a great fan, if you did.
Carl: All the recipes I use I basically find on the internet. That's my only barrier to starting a food blog: a lack of originality.
me: whatever. your cooking the thing will infuse plenty of originality. that is what food is all about. ultimate remix culture.

all the recipes anyone ever uses these days are probably found on the internet. so what? as evidenced by my chain of recipe links above, food really does seems to embody the ultimate remix culture. even if you use the very same recipe and measure everything precisely, your dijon potatoes with tofu will not be the very same as anyone else's.

and the especially good news is that friend Carl has decided to embark upon a food/music blog, the concept of which I think is most awesome. lovely Tolkien quote and everything.