Come talk to me

I was walking down the street today surrounded by art and music and even though I was completely alone, I realised that I wasn't. Honestly I could've seen choirs of angels serenading me along joyous dives of waves of streaming liquid filtering the sun through and out into rainbows and I couldn't have felt safer. 

I fell asleep on the train ride home wrapped in my sister's fake-fur coat, on tenterhooks and beaming. 

Some diamonds to start your weekend a little early! I hope the universe is treating you well, as it did to the people who made it to Bennett's Lane the other night to be graced by Prince himself. Swoon!!!

No cover up

Any post that requires some kind of a preface always sees me flicking my thumbs with my pointer fingers over the keyboard, second-guessing how much you care to know about how I live. But I think I'm already quite open about lots of things and this won't be a long post but it's something that I've been thinking about a fair bit recently and honest writing is something I'm trying to practice here so hey!


I am, quite honourably and quite proudly, a concerned vault of information. There seems to be something inherently meek about me that makes people feel quite comfortable with turning me all confidante. It's important for you to know that I am really amazed and proud and amazed again that people trust me to speak to about more than the weather. I'm allowed to know things and I'm grateful for the entire process, because by being the listener I learn about empathy and kindness and being a trustworthy person and the speaker is relieved and spirited and pleased to share the load of this heavy life with someone else. It's all about expressing feelings through the filter of our life experiences I think. 


I talk a lot about mulling it over and I just think that there is no where near enough mulling going on these days. I'm always up to my waist in diaries and songs and drawings and scrapbooks and recordings that each document a different snapshot of how I felt about something or another at any one point in time. I talk to my Mum like friends talk to me about things that frighten me and excite me and make me laugh. 


But it seems to me like people just don't do expression much at all, in normal life (this is assuming that my existence isn't normal and from first hand experience I cautiously stand by that). It could be that I notice the lack of expression a lot more outside the electric confines of music/art school, however I think the premise remains. 


Without these things that I create I would be an overflowing emotional mess (more so than normal) and hideous to accompany anywhere. I simply do not understand how people keep a lid on their feelings like they seem to do, when I see 'people', like just the general populous, walking to uni, on trains, you know. I just do not understand. Perhaps that's not a great example because no one is visibly creating when they are walking to work...but I do get the general vibe from my time in other people's normal lives that art and music and all that is just a thing that happens...when in my head it's just as vital as a heart that beats. Shouldn't it be? 


But yeah anyway. I just think we should all talk more about our feelings and make everybody everybody's confidantes. That was supposed to be the main point of this post but as usual I thought about one thing then thought about a trillion different things at the same time. Another point I'm making in the last paragraph (whatever) is stigma is everywhere and should be banished. It's OK to ask for help and it's OK to see doctors about sicknesses that are not physical and it's OK to stay in bed for three days as long as you still get up at the end. 

Already shot that horse in the face

I've been feeling very sentimental about family recently. My two sisters and my Dad are overseas at the moment and it's just me and Mum and our dog Soda, not even nearly filling our house up. So it's kind of empty around here; not the 'I'll be back tonight after school/uni/work' kind of empty, with open books and clothes strewn and the lingering aroma of my sister's perfume but the extended-emptiness of holidays. My sisters' rooms are neat and clean for the first time in about six years (I think my little sister might have taken her entire wardrobe) and I'm free to roam in and out, flicking through clothes and books as I please but somehow it's not the same when I don't have to sneak in and out. 


So today I wore my little sister's scarf with her makeup stains all over it, and my big sister's headscarf, and trundled defiantly into uni for exams and the like. I appreciated the routine of going to uni today more so than ever, if only because of the little absences of my family's idiosyncrasies present in this weird version of normal life. I miss my little sister watching Seinfeld and Facebooking and eating two minute noodles and talking on the phone and doing homework all at once! I miss my Dad sneezing for ten minutes at a time! I miss seeing my big sister's bedroom light on through my window when I go to sleep! I miss walking out of the house at the start of the day and having things turned completely upside down by the time I get home!


In all seriousness and my sentimental and romantic way I do feel that we are all each other, especially family, which means I am not all here...parts of me are halfway across the world, awake when I'm sleeping. Of course I can still function without them here but it's not the same, like if you're making a cake and you use Equal instead of sugar. Urgh not really.


Oh it's not so bad I suppose. The house is quiet and I can play piano whenever and however I want. I do like the quiet. And I like having my Mum to myself, sitting giggling watching The Simpsons with Soda on the couch. 


No, it's not so bad. And soon enough we'll be whole again. 

(Also in honour of the death of my COMPULSORY JAZZ playlist on iTunes, here's some Billie to commemorate all that is well and good in the land of jazz):

Right side of the wrong bed

Remember yesterday when I said that I couldn't listen to too much music with lyrics these days? OK well today that trend was abolished when I went a'searching for some music that I didn't have to think about to listen to. I stumbled across Ed Sheeran on Spotify today, and am happy that I did. He's great, looksee:

Ahh, pop music. It holds a special little place in my heart and soul. A place where there's no shame and it's cool to know all the words to We Like To Party by the Vengaboys. Ed Sheeran is nice, refreshing pop too, which comes along once in a while. The hilarious thing is, everyone is always surprised by it and it becomes like monumentally popular as if no one has ever been moved by music before. Think, like, Adele: 'Oh my God, a song with just piano? And the lyrics...they're...sad? Honest? What? I'm feeling real emotions?...I don't know what this is, but I like it!'


Music is just the best thing, don't you think? It literally appeals to anyone ever at any time, any age, any walk of life. My musical tastes are impossible to define because I tend to just fall in love with everything, which is why I think I'm a little overwhelmed right now. I saw The Sound of Music a few weeks ago; I wish I could remember the exact quote but I think Maria was talking to the nuns about having so much love and not knowing what to do with it all. That's kind of the way I feel about music at the moment. Even today, sitting in my room being very serious about jazz it just kind of struck me, what I was doing - and it's just exactly what I wanted to be doing, this time last year. It's just want I want to be doing right now, just inhaling music and sounds all the time. 


I'll take the exams and the tests and I'll try my best and everything because it just means more noise for me to sift through and count as sacred. I love my uni so much because even though we have the formal exams and everything, a sliver of the pounding creative heart of this place still worms its way into the stuff we're actually tested on. A lot of it is kind of like 'when you play music, especially JAZZ, you can pretty much do whatever you want. But here are the reasons why, and how it can work, and that's what you need to know. Also know how to draw a cow because you will be marked on that.' True story. It's all relative. 

Golden oldies

So I was going to do a post about why I would be infinitely better off in New York today than I am right here in my hectic bedroom up to my neck in jazz and used tissues, but you know, I went to the gym, and lying flat on the weight-lifty-thing swimming in sweat, I felt kind of OK. And when I got home I practiced my new fascination meditation which I've been slowly weaning myself into for the SAKES of my head's health and made the decision not to mope today but to be productive and content. So that's what I'm going to do. 


I've been feeling like less than the smallest blip on the musical radar lately and I'm not quite sure why; certainly I think, though, it has something to do with how MUCH music I've been exposed to over the past few weeks/months. It's overwhelmingly good and I feel as though I'll be trying to figure out where I fit into the 'musical cosmos', as my friend so eloquently put it, for a while yet. I wish I could just let myself float around and take things in for a while, but I have this strange drive to produce things, and get places, and be successful, even though I know I'm just not ready yet. Today my Mum said that maybe I'm looking too hard for something PERFECT and to just make the most of what I have right now and see where that will get me. I don't know. 


Well anyway, I've been drawn to the classics lately, with Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff standing out especially for the past couple of days. I adore the romantics of the riot at the  premiere of 'The Rite of Spring' which is dramatised nicely in the French film 'Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky' (the best part of that film I think, unfortunately at the very beginning). I have also fallen in love with Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2 in E minor (sweep any old thing into E minor and I usually fall for it):

Divine. I love classical music, and I forgot that for a while there; as an anxious child my Dad used to lend me his portable radio and I would listen to the classical station and make up stories to accompany the music. Somehow I can't listen to too much lyrical music at the moment and prefer to be swept up in the dramatics of an orchestra. C'est la vie!


And for comedic value as much as anything else, I've been trying to get educated by watching Leonard Bernstein's series of Harvard lectures entitled 'The Unanswered Question', where he talks about music and linguistics and it is gloriously, amazingly seventies, and sometimes he puts his glasses on the top of his head and it's just the best thing ever. Here he discusses the harmonic series and he hurts his hands by hitting the top of the piano and it's fantastic. 

Anyway this was a clever ploy to dig myself out of the jazz rut I've been nestled uncomfortably into for the past week or so (I have to listen to, and be able to recall and write details on, a number of 1-second excerpts of important jazz pieces for an exam I have on Tuesday - the SHAZAM EXAM. Har har har). You take Rachmaninoff and love him and I'll see you after I smash some Lennie Tristano Sextet golden oldies. 

She is another canyon lady

Just being a lady of the canyon.


Three separate plans have fallen through this weekend and I have been disappointed by each one! Interesting, though, the reasons I am disappointed were different to what I had expected and I feel as though I've realised things about FEELINGS through these disappointments that I wouldn't have otherwise. 


I have so much work I feel like I should be doing so I'm just going to do it and definitely NOT look up 2012 Eurovision videos on YouTube. 

Minnesota, WI

If there's one thing I love, it's old photographs of important composers looking serious. 

Here is a picture of me looking serious trying to be a composer with my composer jumper on. 

Yeah it's not the same. 

Today I was thinking about ruts and how to make them. Not ruts in the normal sense but like ruts in our systems; say we are born whole, with no dents or bits missing or anything and as we grow and learn and live our experiences become indented into us so that, if all this was literal, we'd be little bits and pieces and banged up and glued together and everything. 

Anyway I like the idea of ruts especially, because in my head, I see life-ruts like those wheel marks in dirt roads, or the space between a person's ribs wide enough for fingers to splay out into. Something that's only been made because of a pattern repeated a million times - like knowing you'll never stop caring about someone, no matter how much they upset you or frighten you or treat you badly.

That 'I just don't think I'll ever get over you' kind of love is a life-rut, I think. Loving someone so long and so hard like that makes grooves in our systems, and dents and things, you know. And they're not always bad, but I mean it all depends. 


I also feel like everything creative ever can be scooped out of the life-ruts we have, where everything beautiful and imaginative pools like a picture I saw once of a skinny girl holding jellybeans in the space inside her collarbones. 

Oh, say can you seeee

Three-fifths of my family are leaving for GOD BLESS AMERICA in two days. I am very sad that I don't get to join them because of uni assessments and whatnot, but I'm reassured by the notion that New York and I will be good friends when we do meet. You know I think we both share a fear of mediocrity. Also today Lady Gaga said 'everything in my head moves like 42nd street' and something bigger and stronger and nicer than me was there with me, all the way in my nothing town in Palookaville, Australia. One day, New York! 


In other news I'm getting sick with something sinus-y and glumpy and in a way it's kind of a relief, because it means I don't feel so guilty about walking instead of running or making flower crowns instead of practising this:

which will feature on an exam I'm doing next week. Urgh. I really like Steve Reich but I like to appreciate rhythmic pieces rather than try and stretch and squeeze my wild head into polyrhythms and patterns to actually play them. I don't know. My rhythm teacher is very nice to me because he likes my clothes (he says) and can tell that basic numeracy skills are not my forte, but am trying really so hard that my fists make fingernail marks on my palms. 

I have a million things to talk to you about

I have a few ideas of the reasons why I keep this blog, most of which are mainly selfish and mainly cathartic and mainly to do with my desire to capture nostalgia and put it in a cage forever (a public and permanent one (thanks internets)). I love writing and the one thing I do miss about high school is the amount of writing that we were required to do. We used to have to do these things called 'context' essays in English that basically allowed me to be as vague and philosophical and heartbreaking as I wanted, while still responding to a prompt which limited those monster tangents that I find myself riding around on here. So if you were wondering why my posts have increased over the past couple of months it's because at best I used to write like 1500-2000 words a DAY last year and I feel like I still have all those words floating around inside of me this year with nowhere to go so now they're here, splattered all over your computer screen like insects. Well, articulate insects at least. 

But yeah. Despite the hours I spend holed up inside my room writing, or singing, or sewing, or crying or laughing or dancing, I do get outside to experience the life and the vibes, and of course, you know how I think the universe is always trying to teach us something. 

I got to thinking about this yesterday actually. 

Part of the process of my artwork inevitably finds it laid out flat, taking over my entire bedroom's floor. This is fine because what is also part of the process is the complete obnoxiousness of the thing; it takes over my room, my head, my life. I step all over it in shoes and socks, drop makeup and drip my wet hair onto it, use it as a blanket as I endlessly sew block colours onto it and crease it and fold it and stuff it in corners until it looks loved. 

Anyway so last night I just got out of the shower and didn't realise that I had cut my ankle and was bleeding, slowly but profusely, all down my foot. I got dressed normally standing barefoot on the work - and when I was done, I looked down to see an unmissable big red blood mark all over my work. I honestly see no alternative, even now, to how I reacted: I walked around in a circle on the work and made a kind of blood ring around the centre piece, just to even it out a bit. It looks fine, and even though I thought I'd never put a piece of my body into an artwork of mine I have now, and I think I can safely assure you that I am crazy but in a calm and logical way and I'm not dangerous or anything so please let me stay here in my room with my blood art. 

So I got to thinking about why it is I keep this blog and I think part of the reason why is because I like to be able to look back on these ridiculous things that happen. I write everywhere all the time but never more so articulately or concisely than right here. Like I said before, if I can, I will keep nostalgia in a cage. 

I'm crawling on your shores

A head full'a music and a heart full'a thread! 


I'm back where I belong, using my artwork as a blankie and listening to my Mum's car mixtape from 1998. There's too much music that's beautiful today for me to feel OK about polluting posts with words, so just kick back and enjoy the good vibes and I hope the universe is treating you kindly!

The human in everything

1am, good enough as a reason to be listening to this and believing every single word more than I believed in my entire primary and secondary school catholic/anglican education.

Something's mighty, mighty wrong

I'm coming to you from uni today as I sit filling in time between classes, reworking the first piece I wrote when I started this course. I hate it like I hate most things that sit stagnant on my external hard drive for too long. It's that time in the semester where due dates, once vague and tiny off in the distance, are actually becoming quite real, and I'm throwing myself completely into this course without any kind of caution. It's amazing and I'm having an incredible and fun time but today I caught myself - I'm meeting up with an old teacher tomorrow for coffee and my head just kind of went 'OK, so gym, yep, working, do this this and this, coffee - what do I have to prepare for coffee?' So my head is a funny full place at the moment.

Last night after class a couple of classmates and I went out for happy hour drinks and pizza. I spoke to a boyfriend of a friend about life, in that absurdly summarised way that strangers do; we asked about his passions and he said that he had none, which seems to be  a pretty common thing. A lot of people don't have something that they are totally and completely consumed by. He asked my friend and I what our passions were, besides music, and we were just kind of like 'well...uh...listening to music' and honestly stumbled over words and thoughts to come up with anything else.

Personally I don't think it's so bad to be chained by love for something because in the end it is just love, in a pure unadulterated form, nothing complicated like in real life. I normally hate things that are pure and perfect but this is the only exception. Music is just there, it's there all the time, so much so that I don't even realise how it's woven itself into my every orifice.

It's nice to have a passion, just over your shoulder, in your head, all the time. I mean, I don't know what it's like to NOT have one because I've always loved sound and art and all those wonderful things, so I'm totally biased. But I like it anyway. It's nice on days like today when my eyelashes fell off on the train and I totally dessimated a test on Logic Pro 9 and I just dragged myself into the recording lab to get some work done and a guy just asked me to do a voiceover in his project and I'm too nice and too tired to say no. 

Like eating glass

I was sitting in the front seat of a car when my friend, behind me in the back, spoke about 'impending doom' and how it comes in impossible waves. I leant my head against the seatbelt and made eye contact with myself in the mirror like you do when you're trying to talk someone in or out of something and my face was freezing as the boys blew smoke in and out of their bodies with the windows wide open. 


In my experience the doom is likely to cleansweep you after a couple of drinks. There's something in there that's toxic and unnatural and seeps into us like a disease and makes our heads sick with heavy thinking. So I shrink back on big nights and shouts and rounds and all those things; I don't drink much at all anymore, hyper-aware of how similar its effect on my level head is to slamming a fist down on one side of a set of scales. Everything goes everywhere and what's left is just a big mess, mess that you just have to scrape together and place back carefully into balance again. 


It's not to say I don't like drinking at all, because I do. Also I don't begrudge anyone who drinks more than I do! This is just a funny thing that I have, like my aversion to Burger Rings and the way I like to cross my 'j's when I handwrite them. And in much the same way people ask why I don't eat things or why I wear birds in my hair or why I'm sewing a felt Lady Gaga onto a tie-dyed tablecloth, they ask me, bewildered, why I don't want another beer. I don't ever say 'the impending DOOM' because I do try to maintain acceptable degrees of sanity when with company. But I will laugh it off, just like I'm laughing it off now, because the whole idea of ME in GENERAL is kind of hilarious. If you think about it. 


I'm an 85 year old in a 19 year old's body. It should bother me more than it does.

I've been here since midnight for you

Some 'exclusive' photos of my latest monstrosity, tentatively titled MOTHER MONSTER. Half fan art, half religious offering, it's stupid and kind of funny and also alarming. There's a sound component too, and you can listen to the first draft here, and scroll down to the previous post for the actual video.


But seriously someone help. What even is this.  

(As a sidenote tie-dying is like the easiest and most fun thing to do to an old tablecloth like this).

Don't you know I love you???

Last night I was stumbling my way through a not-so-distant-past time warp of a party, and thinking about how I still notice the exact amount of strain on a single person's face before their lips part to reveal teeth in a smile.


Even though conversation was mainly concerned with university and cars and "so, how've you been?"s, and not at all concerned with the things I like to talk about the most, like feelings or music or The Brady Bunch, I had lots of fun last night, pretending to be in high school again. The dull aching of my feet is a silly reminder of stomping my way through the Venga Boys like I didn't even know it was so not cool. 


I've learnt a lot in the past few months, mainly to do with the realisation that my heart isn't wild because I'm a teenager but because it's just the way we are made. I always thought it was being 17 that made feeling things so consuming but I've come to realise that we were arranged to be this way all along. Whether the arrangement is voluntary or not is another question. 


I have suddenly begun to think that it is. Probably just because I think feeling is the best thing to ever happen ever, ever ever. 


I think that's why I like obsessing over things or things that occupy my mind without me realising, until I'm thinking about one thing and nothing else for days on end. Being so in love with a poem that you have to carry it around in your pocket all day so you have easy, fast access to it at all times. Listening to a single song on repeat for an hour because there's always something there for you. Pasting your bedroom with pictures of a person you've never met and probably will never meet, and whom has no idea you exist or that you know  they exist, and of who you have absolutely no idea of their personality or hopes or dreams - the compulsion to do that, the drive that makes us fixate on things or people that will never happen, or never be really real to us except only in pictures or through a screen or a security distance, it's so weird. It's fascinating, the way we build people and things up in our heads until they become this divine entity, impossibly perfect and amazing, something not even real. Not even real!


We use our heads in such funny ways! Apologies for the tangent this post went on; I'm distracted by a piece I'm working on based around the idea of obsession - and it's fast becoming, well, that. 

I know the time for us has passed

Uhh OK so Bloc Party. What's up? And why, why have I not discovered you until now?????

Dead. I think there's something almost darling about their lyrics that attracts me so. So simple, but so honest, and so beautiful. Kele's solo stuff is rad too. 

In other news tonight I went to a party with high school people and I danced until my feet screamed to these songs and I don't even care.

Once a crystal choir appeared while I was sleeping and called my name

Today was an errand day. I bustled from here to there with things to do (just the way I like it) and an eye on the time. No one ever tells you, though, how difficult it is to have an errand day when your mind is full of night befores and ideas for songs and projects and the like. Particularly so when you are alone!


People who know me know that I like to be alone. It's not a teenage thing or an anti-social thing or a sad thing, it's just a thing, that I do, have always done, and it worries my Mum more than it worries me. Well, I think it does. I've always known the invaluable nature of good company but my own head has been loud and obnoxious enough to make me forget, for a little while there. 


Last night had me facing solo transit between two social engagements, and I suppose it was an interesting thing to do and inevitably I compared my mood to that in company and alone. It seemed as though the universe was reminding me to count my blessings as I traipsed through laneways in a gleamy haze of cider on an empty stomach (which, for the record, makes normal things like late night shopping and eating salad about 38% funnier). While it's all very well to work and write and exercise and everything else, it's incomparable to the rush of affection I get for my best girlfriend as I watch her pouring drinks for regulars at the pub that she works at in the city. I love her like I love all the people I'm lucky enough to call my friends, of course including old and new. The old, who whisper to me that a boy thinks I'm cute and texts me with a joke remembered from months ago. The new, who write me beautiful cards and play soul tunes to empty rooms on Thursday nights. 

Oh my GOD. This post has seriously exceeded the cheese limit I normally impose on everything I write. I'm supposed to be really moody and profound. Sorry guys. Here are some pictures of me hanging out at a waterfall.

I totally forgot, a check out girl said I was crazy at Coles when I wore the above outfit. I was going to say I thought she was crazy for having blonde streaks (SO 2002) but I decided not to because I don't think crazy is such a bad thing to be, really. 

Death: and its problems

I absolutely and truly believe that everything will be alright only because the alternative is much too depressing to consider. 

'Get in, loser. We're going shopping.'

I made another crown and I don't see myself stopping anytime soon. They're getting bigger and I'm becoming more like Carmen Miranda. Help.

I'm sitting here watching the remnants of Mean Girls, in an attempt to send myself to sleep with it's warm familiar comfort. I'm overwhelmed by love for the world and the people I'm allowed to call myself friends with, who take offhand comments I make over coffee and store them away in their minds until the night before my birthday, where I'm presented with a token of the glamour I try to exude on a budget every single day. That is, I now own my very own 'raspberry beret', and a beautiful, divine, perfect, ruby-red Chanel lipstick, the kind that makes big men cry at train stations. 

Everyone please remember: 'a thing of beauty is a joy forever.'

All conquistadors

It was a heavy weekend. Mulling over with my friend last night it was reinforced that feelings exist to be felt and sometimes we have to indulge in them, just for a little while, and cry and scream and throw up and swear. Charles Bukowski knows whats up:

I have a funny feeling that even in that state of indulgence I would still drag myself over the broken glass of an impossible head to go to uni, or to do work, or to go for a run, ya know. I have a ferocity in me that made five different people tilt their heads to one side over the past week and tell me that I work too much, think too much, worry too much. It's all true, but I feel the happiest when I'm exhausted, joyous neck-deep in ProTools and pianos and ecstatic sewing wool into old sheets making monster installations 'til early hours. It's not just for nothing. 


I see so many beautiful things in this world, in this small life that I'm living here. I owe it to the universe to be creative, active, to celebrate everything good and hopeful and positive that exists even in so much strife - despite so much strife. I am so lucky that I am in a situation where I have a brain, a heart, family and friends and a body that can run and jump and lift things and a heater duct to sit on on cold mornings. 


Everything I do is filtered through sadness but sweetened with hope. Because after all...without hope, I don't really know what we'd all be doing, still here. 


A little tangental but Frida Kahlo also knows what's up: 

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.”