echoes of the past
Mar. 29th, 2015 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yamamanamaI. The present (Gandolfi - Ascending Light)
Another day of gray oblivion.
A woman asked me about getting a portrait done, and I said "I'm doing you right now, phrasing." She asked me how I got into this and I said that it's because of all the interesting people I see, and I said this to Rachel too, but I'll try to draw people from memory and realize I forgot important details about them like the shape of their nose or some neat-o jewelry they have or something.
"I'm getting off, phrasing."
She said "see you," and I'm like "Boribory ny tany. That's what my friend said. So maybe I will see you again. Take care."
I saw that woman playing hip hop on her violin at the Green Line platform. It's like that episode of The Simpsons where Cypress Hill steals Peter Frampton's orchestra and they play Insane In The Membrane and Marge is like "now this I like" and I really wish there was a full version of it out there. There's a video on Portraits of America, although she had a disco ball last night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5caA_o1W_Ak
While you're there, check out the Human Juke Box.
A woman by the name of Rachel asked me if she could read to me while I was drawing her portrait. I said the perspective was weird but she loved the perspective anyway. I'll send it to you as soon as I find the cord for my camera. And I'll post every complete page of Sketchbook #2, every page of Sketchbook #1, and the portraits I did on the notepad I found on the ground in listen to my heartbeat here. It was chapter 7 of The Last Jew of Treblinka. Something about being made to dig sand and put it somewhere else. I may be misremembering but it struck me as being something pointless and meant only to exhaust the prisoners mentally and physically. Someone on Goodreads called Treblinka "unimaginable, incomprehensible horror." Rachel's voice is quiet and serene.
She says she has a hard time drawing from memory. I showed her my portraits of the woman with the hand of fatima necklace and the woman with a poofy afro.
I almost missed my stop while talking to her.
Thankfully, the path to Pita is protected from the horrid rain snow mix so I didn't need to run up to a random person and grab their umbrella (Archer reference alert!) whilst shouting "Hehehe! Woooo! Alex [censored] strikes again!"
I swear that there's always one guy who goes to the symphony in sweatpants and I'm happy for him because I don't feel underdressed.
Michael Gandolfi's Ascending Light, scored for organ and orchestra (the usual strings, woodwinds, and brass, tubular bells, xylophone, glockenspiel, mark tree, ratchet, triangle), based on Armenian folk songs and done in memoriam of the Armenian Genocide, which relates to my conversation with Rachel. Gandolfi may remind me of Emma, whom someone described as charmingly oblivious, but the genocide thing reminded me of someone who was definitely oblivious but not in the least bit charming. Because she could not comprehend the idea that the same racist gangs that would attack someone for being Tajik would attack her for being Filipino.
It was longer than I thought it would be. I was expecting maybe 10 minutes, followed immediately by Mahler's 6th symphony. It's about half an hour long, broken down into the first movement, Vis Vitalis, the second movement, which is a traditional Armenian lullaby played on solo organs, followed by variations on that theme, a reverie and an Armenian hymn.
Now, since this is a world premiere, there aren't any recordings. Come to think of it, I can't find The Queen and the Conjurer anywhere.
Atlas Lab has four new fans.
I ran into Julia, Justin, Matteo, and Amanda at Park Street Station on the way home (I sketched Julia and Justin on my way in). They were at Bob's Burgers Live, which wasn't so much Bob's Burgers-related skits as it was standup routines by the cast of Bob's Burgers.
It just occurred to Matteo that Eugene Mirman (Gene) and H. Jon Benjamin (Bob) both grew up in Massachusetts. So did Sam Seder (Hugo the Health Inspector).
Amanda says Tina is the best. I kinda agree right now just because I feel like Tina. I even told Julia that Emma was my Jimmy Jr. Julia thought what I said to Emma, which was "you may not be my girlfriend, but you'll always be a wonderful friend" was sweet. I don't always know the right thing to say, but in that situation, I definitely said it.
Julia has Imagine on one wrist and All You Need Is Love on the other wrist, along with some five-pointed stars on a string. She recommended some bands and wrote to them on my map of where the last Atlas Lab concert was. Rocky Erickson, Big Star, and Chris Bell.
Justin has a treble clef on one hand and a bass clef on the others, along with some swirls that were hidden by his coat sleeve.
Matteo is Italian, Ukrainian, and Polish, and has a hat with the triforce on it.
Amanda has something named Heisenberg and I'm uncertain if it's supposed to be a caricature of the physicist or a penguin. Her jacket had that stupid horse from Super Mario World along with a bunch of pins on it.
Julia told me to keep drawing. I said "same to you. Well, follow your passions, whatever they may be." to the four of them. Matteo said that maybe I'd find someone.
See, I told you I wouldn't forget.
II. The Past (Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 6)
I first heard Mahler's 6th symphony at the end of 2007.
The first movement is a march which wouldn't sound out of place in Star Wars, the second is a scherzo-march, the third is a pastoral adagio, and the fourth wavers from triumph to tragedy.
The second and third can be switched around. Gustav felt the first and second movements sounded similar to each other and switched the two. I think as far as "parallels the way my life was going with each movement was a season," the order the BSO used fit better.
This is his only symphony to end in the minor, rather than in triumph or resignation. Oh, to me, it gives the illusion of triumph, but the two sledgehammer blows take that away.
It's not so much that I don't want to bring up all the messy details. It's just, well, I see things from my perspective, and it's really complicated and I don't understand all of what happened even armed with summaries of entries and chat logs. I'll tell you some important points.
I think that I've always had the ability to get really close to people in a short span of time.
I always feel like I'm on the periphery of friend groups. This has its advantages in that I don't have to start over if things get fucked up and it has its disadvantages, in that I'm never really privy to anything in my friend groups.
It was definitely a sea change. I think I was getting more personal towards the end of 2006 although I wrote personal entries before that, it wasn't just dopey but funny things about squids and weaponized hamsters and liberating cakes with kiwis and strawberries by putting a white box over the cake with the word "BOX" written on all sides so they think their cake has quantum mechanically transformed into a box and walk away. I guess the reality is Gamingforce's journals moved away from personal stuff and towards forum drama. I also think the proto-MRA douchebags like Traumatized Rat and Colonel Skills ran all the decent members out. I picked the worst possible time to say something to Hyde and he hated me for it. And Miyomi was becoming more and more competitive. Sometimes I'm charmingly oblivious too, like that time Miyomi chewed me out for linking to X-Entertainment in her journal.
I did say I was self-absorbed, in that I often blame myself for things that aren't my fault, like maybe someone important to them died or maybe they're figuratively buried under a mountain of work or maybe they just went through a nasty breakup or maybe the moon's in the wrong house. But I don't consider myself selfish.
Summer wasn't exactly idyllic. I gained and lost a friend because she wanted people to talk to her on AIM, and since I thought that she was griping about her life, I thought that meant she was giving me free rein to gripe about my own crisis. Amara had his own crisis. Xpander hates me only because Miyomi does. I remember saying shitty things about Adara but can't remember what they are specifically and can find nothing about them in either AIM logs or the internet. Perhaps it's a false memory. Miyomi was steering me towards that path. It worked out nicely. Adara was busy.
On the other hand, the Landmarks Orchestra started giving free concerts. It started with Beethoven's 9th symphony. That's the first one I went to and I went on the Internet Archive and found out it was their first free concert.
Adara was cordial, if distant, when I last talked to her.
Xpander still hates me. Odd that the one person without a legitimate grievance towards me would be the most hostile.
Let me tell you about the worst feeling imaginable. It's love sickness at the same time you feel like you're going to vomit out your spleen, and they're kind of related but mostly not.
It didn't help that her name was Caitlin, by the way. Or Katelyn. Or Caitlyn.
I don't think we were relationship material anyway. I have a tendency to do that. It's not so much that I don't see cues, it's that I'll see cues that aren't really there. It was like that with Heather. And then I found her on Facebook and then spent the next few weeks operating under the assumption that they were not in fact the same person. Oh, well, I don't think it'd have worked out anyway. Think "she needed a visit from the Shepherd from King Roger"). Jill and I were strictly platonic.
Like the last movement, autumn of 2007 wavered between triumph and tragedy. Kara Mano Iru (one of the few worthwhile people I met on Gamingforce) stopped responding to my messages because I still wasn't over losing a whole fuckton of friends and I made things worse because I thought the distance between us was growing. The hammer blow was when she blew up at me for basically never thinking to ask how her day was going or tell her I was sorry or anything. What I wanted to say was "I'm sorry but it's fucking hard to apologize for something specific when I've wronged you in so many ways." What came out was a lot different. The morning after, she posted a message in the livejournal, telling me to have fun and enjoy life. She'd be impressed with me now. Or at least pleasantly surprised.
Time doesn't heal wounds. You have to fix things yourself.
Things improved next spring between us. There's that bright spot, I guess.
Blue said I was perhaps too much of a romantic for real relationships.
This has fuck-all to do with Emma, by the way. I planned for this to be an entry about 2007 and a musing about how easy and how painful it is to lose touch with friends and almost-lovers all along. Some things change, some things stay the same. It was as true with Caitlin and Danielle as it is with Sarah and Danielle and Adrienne and the green-haired woman.
III. The Future (Atlas Lab - Wake Up Slow)
burning question: There are fourteen and a half million people in New England. Do you think that one of them I encounter will be Sarah or Adrienne or that woman with green and strawberry blonde hair or am I casting stones at the moon?
Another day of gray oblivion.
A woman asked me about getting a portrait done, and I said "I'm doing you right now, phrasing." She asked me how I got into this and I said that it's because of all the interesting people I see, and I said this to Rachel too, but I'll try to draw people from memory and realize I forgot important details about them like the shape of their nose or some neat-o jewelry they have or something.
"I'm getting off, phrasing."
She said "see you," and I'm like "Boribory ny tany. That's what my friend said. So maybe I will see you again. Take care."
I saw that woman playing hip hop on her violin at the Green Line platform. It's like that episode of The Simpsons where Cypress Hill steals Peter Frampton's orchestra and they play Insane In The Membrane and Marge is like "now this I like" and I really wish there was a full version of it out there. There's a video on Portraits of America, although she had a disco ball last night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5caA_o1W_Ak
While you're there, check out the Human Juke Box.
A woman by the name of Rachel asked me if she could read to me while I was drawing her portrait. I said the perspective was weird but she loved the perspective anyway. I'll send it to you as soon as I find the cord for my camera. And I'll post every complete page of Sketchbook #2, every page of Sketchbook #1, and the portraits I did on the notepad I found on the ground in listen to my heartbeat here. It was chapter 7 of The Last Jew of Treblinka. Something about being made to dig sand and put it somewhere else. I may be misremembering but it struck me as being something pointless and meant only to exhaust the prisoners mentally and physically. Someone on Goodreads called Treblinka "unimaginable, incomprehensible horror." Rachel's voice is quiet and serene.
She says she has a hard time drawing from memory. I showed her my portraits of the woman with the hand of fatima necklace and the woman with a poofy afro.
I almost missed my stop while talking to her.
Thankfully, the path to Pita is protected from the horrid rain snow mix so I didn't need to run up to a random person and grab their umbrella (Archer reference alert!) whilst shouting "Hehehe! Woooo! Alex [censored] strikes again!"
I swear that there's always one guy who goes to the symphony in sweatpants and I'm happy for him because I don't feel underdressed.
Michael Gandolfi's Ascending Light, scored for organ and orchestra (the usual strings, woodwinds, and brass, tubular bells, xylophone, glockenspiel, mark tree, ratchet, triangle), based on Armenian folk songs and done in memoriam of the Armenian Genocide, which relates to my conversation with Rachel. Gandolfi may remind me of Emma, whom someone described as charmingly oblivious, but the genocide thing reminded me of someone who was definitely oblivious but not in the least bit charming. Because she could not comprehend the idea that the same racist gangs that would attack someone for being Tajik would attack her for being Filipino.
It was longer than I thought it would be. I was expecting maybe 10 minutes, followed immediately by Mahler's 6th symphony. It's about half an hour long, broken down into the first movement, Vis Vitalis, the second movement, which is a traditional Armenian lullaby played on solo organs, followed by variations on that theme, a reverie and an Armenian hymn.
Now, since this is a world premiere, there aren't any recordings. Come to think of it, I can't find The Queen and the Conjurer anywhere.
Atlas Lab has four new fans.
I ran into Julia, Justin, Matteo, and Amanda at Park Street Station on the way home (I sketched Julia and Justin on my way in). They were at Bob's Burgers Live, which wasn't so much Bob's Burgers-related skits as it was standup routines by the cast of Bob's Burgers.
It just occurred to Matteo that Eugene Mirman (Gene) and H. Jon Benjamin (Bob) both grew up in Massachusetts. So did Sam Seder (Hugo the Health Inspector).
Amanda says Tina is the best. I kinda agree right now just because I feel like Tina. I even told Julia that Emma was my Jimmy Jr. Julia thought what I said to Emma, which was "you may not be my girlfriend, but you'll always be a wonderful friend" was sweet. I don't always know the right thing to say, but in that situation, I definitely said it.
Julia has Imagine on one wrist and All You Need Is Love on the other wrist, along with some five-pointed stars on a string. She recommended some bands and wrote to them on my map of where the last Atlas Lab concert was. Rocky Erickson, Big Star, and Chris Bell.
Justin has a treble clef on one hand and a bass clef on the others, along with some swirls that were hidden by his coat sleeve.
Matteo is Italian, Ukrainian, and Polish, and has a hat with the triforce on it.
Amanda has something named Heisenberg and I'm uncertain if it's supposed to be a caricature of the physicist or a penguin. Her jacket had that stupid horse from Super Mario World along with a bunch of pins on it.
Julia told me to keep drawing. I said "same to you. Well, follow your passions, whatever they may be." to the four of them. Matteo said that maybe I'd find someone.
See, I told you I wouldn't forget.
II. The Past (Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 6)
I first heard Mahler's 6th symphony at the end of 2007.
The first movement is a march which wouldn't sound out of place in Star Wars, the second is a scherzo-march, the third is a pastoral adagio, and the fourth wavers from triumph to tragedy.
The second and third can be switched around. Gustav felt the first and second movements sounded similar to each other and switched the two. I think as far as "parallels the way my life was going with each movement was a season," the order the BSO used fit better.
This is his only symphony to end in the minor, rather than in triumph or resignation. Oh, to me, it gives the illusion of triumph, but the two sledgehammer blows take that away.
It's not so much that I don't want to bring up all the messy details. It's just, well, I see things from my perspective, and it's really complicated and I don't understand all of what happened even armed with summaries of entries and chat logs. I'll tell you some important points.
I think that I've always had the ability to get really close to people in a short span of time.
I always feel like I'm on the periphery of friend groups. This has its advantages in that I don't have to start over if things get fucked up and it has its disadvantages, in that I'm never really privy to anything in my friend groups.
It was definitely a sea change. I think I was getting more personal towards the end of 2006 although I wrote personal entries before that, it wasn't just dopey but funny things about squids and weaponized hamsters and liberating cakes with kiwis and strawberries by putting a white box over the cake with the word "BOX" written on all sides so they think their cake has quantum mechanically transformed into a box and walk away. I guess the reality is Gamingforce's journals moved away from personal stuff and towards forum drama. I also think the proto-MRA douchebags like Traumatized Rat and Colonel Skills ran all the decent members out. I picked the worst possible time to say something to Hyde and he hated me for it. And Miyomi was becoming more and more competitive. Sometimes I'm charmingly oblivious too, like that time Miyomi chewed me out for linking to X-Entertainment in her journal.
I did say I was self-absorbed, in that I often blame myself for things that aren't my fault, like maybe someone important to them died or maybe they're figuratively buried under a mountain of work or maybe they just went through a nasty breakup or maybe the moon's in the wrong house. But I don't consider myself selfish.
Summer wasn't exactly idyllic. I gained and lost a friend because she wanted people to talk to her on AIM, and since I thought that she was griping about her life, I thought that meant she was giving me free rein to gripe about my own crisis. Amara had his own crisis. Xpander hates me only because Miyomi does. I remember saying shitty things about Adara but can't remember what they are specifically and can find nothing about them in either AIM logs or the internet. Perhaps it's a false memory. Miyomi was steering me towards that path. It worked out nicely. Adara was busy.
On the other hand, the Landmarks Orchestra started giving free concerts. It started with Beethoven's 9th symphony. That's the first one I went to and I went on the Internet Archive and found out it was their first free concert.
Adara was cordial, if distant, when I last talked to her.
Xpander still hates me. Odd that the one person without a legitimate grievance towards me would be the most hostile.
Let me tell you about the worst feeling imaginable. It's love sickness at the same time you feel like you're going to vomit out your spleen, and they're kind of related but mostly not.
It didn't help that her name was Caitlin, by the way. Or Katelyn. Or Caitlyn.
I don't think we were relationship material anyway. I have a tendency to do that. It's not so much that I don't see cues, it's that I'll see cues that aren't really there. It was like that with Heather. And then I found her on Facebook and then spent the next few weeks operating under the assumption that they were not in fact the same person. Oh, well, I don't think it'd have worked out anyway. Think "she needed a visit from the Shepherd from King Roger"). Jill and I were strictly platonic.
Like the last movement, autumn of 2007 wavered between triumph and tragedy. Kara Mano Iru (one of the few worthwhile people I met on Gamingforce) stopped responding to my messages because I still wasn't over losing a whole fuckton of friends and I made things worse because I thought the distance between us was growing. The hammer blow was when she blew up at me for basically never thinking to ask how her day was going or tell her I was sorry or anything. What I wanted to say was "I'm sorry but it's fucking hard to apologize for something specific when I've wronged you in so many ways." What came out was a lot different. The morning after, she posted a message in the livejournal, telling me to have fun and enjoy life. She'd be impressed with me now. Or at least pleasantly surprised.
Time doesn't heal wounds. You have to fix things yourself.
Things improved next spring between us. There's that bright spot, I guess.
Blue said I was perhaps too much of a romantic for real relationships.
This has fuck-all to do with Emma, by the way. I planned for this to be an entry about 2007 and a musing about how easy and how painful it is to lose touch with friends and almost-lovers all along. Some things change, some things stay the same. It was as true with Caitlin and Danielle as it is with Sarah and Danielle and Adrienne and the green-haired woman.
III. The Future (Atlas Lab - Wake Up Slow)
burning question: There are fourteen and a half million people in New England. Do you think that one of them I encounter will be Sarah or Adrienne or that woman with green and strawberry blonde hair or am I casting stones at the moon?
