Posts tagged with "music"

was I more alive then than I am now

I try to sched­ule my time with peo­ple very care­ful­ly; with intro­ver­sion, there’s a del­i­cate bal­ance between iso­la­tion and over-stim­u­la­tion. I always make sure I get a lot of alone time between major events. The only prob­lem is that means I’m alone for too long when plans don’t work out.

On the oth­er end of the spec­trum is the fact that I can nev­er say no to peo­ple if I’m too busy. I’m the one with­out kids, so my sched­ule is a lot more open than most my friends, and I nev­er know when I’ll have anoth­er chance to see them. This is prob­a­bly why I’ve been film­ing for four days straight.

Luckily, this includ­ed a won­der­ful per­for­mance by the inim­itable André Bluteau, whose debut CD is out now, and which you should most def­i­nite­ly pur­chase after lis­ten­ing and sub­se­quent­ly lov­ing.

I added a touch of grad­ing to give the video a bit of creamy 1950s American din­er feel. I’m thor­ough­ly impressed by Apple’s Motion soft­ware, and the pow­er it has to cre­ate object-track­ing text effects. Text can add such a nice­ly sub­tle cin­e­mat­ic touch, though doing 3D trans­for­ma­tions to make words match the plane of a fore­ground object is an exer­cise that will make your eyes bug out.

Andrew Vincent live @ Raw Sugar Cafe

The only thing pre­vent­ing me from mak­ing out with this man was his green hat. Don’t, don’t, don’t cov­er it up.

Also head­lin­ing was Andrew Vincent, who opened his set with Girlfriend’s Dog, a song I first gave to Bronwen when we start­ed dat­ing. It was right before she moved in for the sum­mer, and she had Bear, who was also a Labrador Retriever.

Now I under­stand why I need to much time in between events. After the con­cert, I did­n’t fall asleep until three in the morn­ing, even though I was exhaust­ed. The strug­gle not be shy and intro­vert­ed drains me, but the sim­ple act of being around so many peo­ple leaves me inor­di­nate­ly ener­gized. It’s too much some­times, but I nev­er know what to think of that feel­ing.

so I had to go out and find love of another kind

All I tend to do nowa­days is tin­ker on the gui­tar or uke. It’s nice to have projects, to be able to exper­i­ment and explore and scream. Music is such a won­der­ful medi­um.

And the small rit­u­als1 — mois­tur­iz­ing cal­lous­es before bed, fil­ing nails, tun­ing, clean­ing, adjust­ing the action — always bring a com­fort­ing famil­iar­i­ty when every­thing is per­fect. Not to men­tion that won­der­ful­ly juicy feel­ing when hit­ting cer­tain chords just right.

Larissa

 

Ever since I left my Tai Chi stu­dio, I’ve been look­ing for a hob­by to throw myself into. Something just as com­plex and slow to mas­ter. It’s nice to feel like I’m improv­ing myself some­how, and the best part is I don’t need a part­ner or a sub­ject or any­one else.

  1. Ironic, me being a Taoist. [↩]

Pendulum — The Island

I’ve always main­tained that a per­son isn’t alive if their heart does­n’t pound out of their chest when lis­ten­ing to The Island by Pendulum1.

It’s a grad­ual build-up, most of Pt. 1 Dawn being the devel­op­ment until Pt. 2 Dusk hits (at about the 5:20 mark in the video) and the beats real­ly kick in. Then it’s just waves and waves wash­ing over my body like small orgasms and every hair stands on end.

It’s mes­mer­iz­ing to lit­er­al­ly see how this music makes me feel, as the rip­ples of goose­bumps crest and sub­side. I can trace the paths of shiv­ers across my skin; some last longer, though they may not be as strong, while oth­ers come and go quick­ly, my body unable to sus­tain the cli­max.

This is the only song that has this kind of effect on me. There are plen­ty of oth­er tracks that give me goose­bumps, but none of them do it so many times or with such inten­si­ty. By far the strongest peak is dur­ing the bridge at 7:10, when every­thing sub­sides to the organ, and it’s like you’re being bathed in the warm light of a sun­rise.

  1. To get the full effect, you def­i­nite­ly need head­phones. Otherwise, it should be loud enough to war­rant a noise-com­plaint by your neigh­bours down the street. [↩]

gotta go on

This is my cur­rent anthem. T‑Dot rep­re­sent.

Sometimes I won­der if I only love Toronto because of the peo­ple. There are always things to do and friends to vis­it, and it feels like my home­town. I hate the dri­ving, I hate all the cops down­town, I hate the fact that it takes me at least half an hour to get any­where, but I always look for­ward to going back.

baby sun conure

Baby sun conure. This lit­tle guy was just start­ing to grow feath­ers, and kept in an incu­ba­tor.

The iso­la­tion was nice, but it got to the point where ____ would say he was proud of me just for hav­ing lunch with some­one. Now I find myself going out more and more and it’s a refresh­ing change of pace. Not that I felt like I was uncom­fort­able being home alone; more like the urge to be out over­took me, even if that meant I was still alone among oth­ers.

I won­der if my her­mitage was just an extend­ed stretch of time I need­ed to recharge after my trip to Europe. Or maybe it was know­ing that the next stretch of time until the sum­mer was going to be busy.

This time it does­n’t feel like a tran­si­tion peri­od, because I know it won’t last. I’ll even­tu­al­ly go back to extend­ed time alone, and I’ll for­ev­er be in the flux of socia­bil­i­ty and soli­tude, win­ter and sum­mer. The only thing that’s con­stant is hap­pi­ness. Sure, there are flash­es of mis­for­tune, but they’re fleet­ing, con­tained, and just a part of day-to-day life, noth­ing out of the ordi­nary. Maybe this is why I’ve been find­ing it hard to write. I’ve always been fueled by suf­fer­ing in some way or anoth­er, but all that’s left now is this con­tent­ment.

One measures a circle, beginning anywhere

Been liv­ing on too much sin and not enough sleep, though most­ly it’s in the form of calo­ries and sug­ar. Thank god I have an Asian metab­o­lism.

Things are hap­pen­ing so quick­ly around me. Chris is get­ting seri­ous with his girl. Pat and Jen had their first baby, a boy named Kyden. ____’s get­ting mar­ried in April. (What? Yeah. What? Yeah.) Funny how I’m start­ing to feel like the one who’s all set­tled.

It makes me fan­tas­ti­cal­ly proud to say that I’ll be assum­ing best-man respon­si­bil­i­ties, though I still asked ____ who he was going appoint cause I nev­er feel like I can take any­thing in our friend­ship for grant­ed. His anger at my hav­ing asked was prob­a­bly the warmest ges­ture I’ve had in a while. That means with the bach­e­lor par­ty, the wed­ding, and anoth­er wed­ding I’ve to film, I’ll be dri­ving to Toronto three times between now and spring.

I’ve already lost ____ to an extent, as he’s only had about two months to plan his wed­ding, and he’s been busy with such. But even though our phone calls were my main form of con­tact with the out­side world, I haven’t noticed their absence, or as much as I thought I would at least. I think I’m get­ting used to being so out-of-touch with peo­ple. There’s so much ful­fill­ment one can find in a book or a movie or an instru­ment, let alone the vast­ness of the inter­net.

One of my ven­tures was mak­ing a tri­al World of Warcraft account1, just so I could try being social at a dis­tance, but I still could­n’t both­er inter­act­ing with oth­er peo­ple. And since the whole point of pay­ing a month­ly fee for an MMORPG is to have that kind of inter­ac­tion, I stopped when I maxed out at lev­el 202 on the third day. Good thing too, because it was the only thing I did for those three days.

I used to feel so guilty about being alone, think­ing I should be tak­ing advan­tage of some oppor­tu­ni­ty to be social. Then I real­ized that if I ever got too uncom­fort­able and lone­ly, I’d get up and do some­thing about it. I’m too hap­py and too com­fort­able here right now. I think that’s why I can’t tell if this is where I’m going, or where I already am.

  1. Which I’d pre­vi­ous­ly vowed nev­er to play, know­ing my addic­tive nature to any char­ac­ter-build­ing games, and WoWs nev­er-end­ing game­play. [↩]
  2. The max lev­el for tri­al accounts. [↩]