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| Some songs come back to me again and again, and their effect never wanes. The voice, beat, melody, instrumental part, the atmosphere that the song brings into my room coming out of the speakers on either side of my laptop, the lyrics, the time in my life in which I heard the song first, who I got the song from...some songs are such huge influences on the way I think.
This is one of them. Bolded are my favorite lines.
Debussie, by Daphne Loves Derby (Album: On The Strength Of All Convinced)
I've been looking through these eyes
Of black and white for far too long
And now these deepened colors seem so shocking
Bless the cold, cold moon
That moves the sea that makes the waves
That made this scene for me to see and be moved
Will my life be long enough
To see the things I want to see?
I believe this world is just too big for me
Every cloud that passes by
Is another cloud I'll never see
Maybe I just try too hard
To understand all of these things
Bless the hands of painters
Who have captured melon skies
And starry nights for us to see and feel
For all of time
Will my life be long enough
To see the things I want to see?
I believe this world is just too big for me
This life is just a blink of an eye
A glimpse into a world we were never meant to see
So don't hang on to anything at all
And all the things we have
And all the people we have known
Will fade away so quickly
Into the deep
And memories of love will be
The only warmth we have in the end
I think I do believe in fate. Unrelated to the song lyrics, but nonetheless. Things take their natural course - ups and downs and everything in between - and we shouldn't try to change it.
I'm overly sentimental and hesitant and awkward and attached to too many people/things/places.
I want to help everyone pack for college. I really, at this point, do not believe that a new life will start for me next month. I don't believe that it is starting in a matter of days for people or has already started for others. Or, if it does/is, it'll only be temporary, and we'll go back to our respective high schools and complain about teachers and look forward to last period on Friday afternoon. I'm going to be proven wrong, I just wonder how long it will take me to become one with reality and stop living in some random dimension I've created for myself. I've actually been living in it for years, I think. "Real life" (in the depressing sense) has always been something on the side. But now I'm forced to join it. | | |
| Temporarily. I was "exploring LiveJournal" as the site calls it, and I started to edit a picture of Damien Rice (the first picture going from the left) and then an earth-shattering thought came to me. What if I instead of stealing 100X100 size icons from various sites, I'd find pictures, resize and edit them myself, and make that the new layout? A different road than the one that took up minutes, hours, days of my time when I used to make layouts every weekend? What resulted last night was a frustrated, horrible mood at a failed attempt. I was so irritated I almost jumped of my skin. I realize this is usually what people say when they get scared, but that's what I felt like doing. I had forced myself into this world of meticulous details and sizes and characters and I wanted to get out. But this morning was a new day, and I finally made what you see at the top. It looks easy enough, but for me, it was the exact opposite. I lied in that I said what my layout would be in the previous entry, but it ended up being something else. I lied temporarily because I might change it sometime in the far off future and make the layout I had initially envisioned.
  
Enough rambling on that front; I'm afraid I just wasted however many seconds it took you to read that paragraph. Right now I want to make a list of the things I will miss about this house that I've lived in for most of the time I've lived in California, which is about twelve years. Of course we had the crappy house for rent when we first moved, but I don't need to go into that.
I'll miss:
-knowing exactly how much to move my leg out of the way when walking from the sink to the counter to avoid hitting the dishwasher, jutting out when it's open.
-eavesdropping at the top of the first staircase, unseen but hanging on to every word that my family says about various things, hilarious and otherwise.
-how my house is always the perfect temperature, no matter the temperature outside.
-the smell of my house after a long trip. Each house has one, right?
-my room, the biggest bedroom in the house.
-my DVD and book collection, always there for me to admire and squeal at. (Yeah, it makes me that happy.)
-going downstairs after all the lights have been turned off, opening and closing drawers carefully and slowly so not to make the slightest sound and getting myself something to eat or drink.
-the hours I stay up in my room, truly alone in a sense, since everyone else is in a different world: sleep. Those hours have been both some of my best and some of my worst.
-the calm, quiet nights of Palo Alto.
-Mitchell Park at 5 in the winter, 8:30 in the summer, whatever time the sun starts to transform my part of the world, when I go to the library, passing the kids enjoying the best years of their lives, wishing so much I could be one of them.
-my mattress. It's nothing fancy, but I find it the most comfortable mattress in the world. No Tempur-Pedic for me. It also beats those ones for king-sized beds with the springs inside by far.
-Fresh Choice, so familiar, I always know what to expect.
-M2 at Cubberley, where a lot of memories happened.
-the tens of dolls perched on the edge the top of walls (hard to explain) from all around the world, overlooking the kitchen and living room.
-lazy weekends in which I stay in my pajamas and don't shower
Maybe I'll continue this list later. I put in some Palo-Alto-in-general things that I'll miss.
  
Just to let you know (I don't know who I'm addressing when I say "you"...) I am going to transfer all the entries I write until August to my July file of writing. Since I don't have any due to an orchestra tour/a road trip, I haven't been writing regularly like I have (for the most part) since January to honor my new years resolution. My July document is empty and that worries me because the month is almost over. Which is why I plan to write here everyday, not all of it relevant or insightful, just to have something to read, anything to avoid a gap in my writing year. (Like a lot of cultures have a lunar year, I have a writing year. I like that.)
  
Rule number 2
Don't be a fool
Rule number 3
Get up off your knees
Rule number 4
Open your door
Rule number 5
Keep it alive
Rule number 6
Don't be pricks
And rule number 8
Don't leave it too late
Rule number 9
Just take your time
Rule number 1
Carpe Diem
-Rule No 2 Y, Damien Rice, bolded my favorites. | | |
| My new layout idea: The first line will be movies/TV shows/musicals/anything else I want and the second line will be all about books. Lately, and by that I mean within the last two or three days, books have been determining my mood. Whatever the character in the book feels, I feel. It makes me feel pretty weak, to be honest, but it's a good kind of weak. I don't necessarily like being affected by things so easily, but I don't know what I'd do without it.
A simple outing to Trader Joe's - and certain people or actions definitely made me feel like the 50 year old in the book I'm reading now that cries at the messiness of a girl's braids.
I saw an old Asian woman that needed a walker, my height. Accompanying her was a tall African-American woman, helping her with the groceries. I wouldn't mind doing that, helping people do things they can't do themselves anymore for old age or otherwise. It's a selfless thing to do, and since Trader Joe's isn't Costco, I saw them a couple times throughout the grocery shopping period, every time lingering on the old woman's face, twitching and her mouth trying to form words but failing.
I followed my mom to the wine section, pushing the shopping cart behind her. Black, shiny bottles on either side, tens of different labels and years, nothing I really cared about. Instead, I noticed the people in the same aisle. Almost every adult likes alcohol, right? The two other people in the aisle were so drastically different, yet they were buying the same thing. There was a man, bald with a beard, wearing a red sports shirt, the fabric stretching over his bear belly. I couldn't hear him breathing, but I could tell he's one of those heavy breathers that snore so loud the sound goes through the roof. On the other side of the aisle was a Mother, the sporty kind who goes to the gym and puts her two children at daycare while she burns a few hundred calories. She seemed kind of manic to me, a really fierce expression on her face. Maybe this was from the exertion of working out. Her children were adorable; one was in the shopping cart (the kind that has a seat designed for a toddler) and the other was standing behind the cart, staring up at my sister, never breaking the stare. I watched her eyes follow her. What was going through her head? My sister had a paper cup from sampling a drink in her mouth and was holding it there in between her teeth, maybe this is what caused the wondrous look in the girl's eyes. Back to the wine: The actual type they were buying probably had opposite connotations, but there you have it, humanity united by alcohol.
I haven't been playing piano since my lessons stopped. I tried today and almost gave up, my fingers lacking the quickness and agility they possessed not a month before. It really scared me, but after Trader Joe's I tried again and saw great improvement. Still not like it used to be, but at least I could get through some runs. And I found that I really missed making loud, dissonant, accordant, lyrical, emotional music by pressing black and white keys together with all the strength my fingers can muster. I should never let that much time go by without touching the piano again, bad things could happen, have already happened. But this time, I think I saved whatever I was getting close to losing. Of course I played for an altogether high of twenty minutes, it's enough to let me know "I've still got it." I walked away from the piano, satisfied and triumphant.
I do miss writing here. A short while before I moved to emailing myself and journals, I said to myself, "I'm going to keep my xanga forever." I hope I will be returning to more regular posting in the future.
Wow, I'm so rusty that I forgot the only way to insert pictures is by HTML. The picture below is me at my happiest.
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| I was just writing in different places. In different ways and times, without icons, about different things.
High school countdown? Down to the double digits. Just recording that as a landmark moment. This is huge.
But that's not what this entry will be about.
Two days ago my teacher told my photo class (only about ten students were listening, the rest off in the darkroom or doing something not related to school on the computer) that for the next two days we'd be watching a documentary on Richard Avedon. Home Vision Arts is a company that makes documentaries on all sorts of photographers. I think we watched the one on Amy Arbus and Annie Leibovitz last year. I remembered lots of black and white images, a series of contact sheets filmed slowly, and many people praising the photographer of the "episode". Maybe from instinct, I groaned with my classmates when she announced that. She was taken aback and said, "I used to love movie days when I was in high school! What's wrong with you guys!"
For about the first ten minutes of the video I was only half paying attention, but the pictures caught my eye. I took my backpack and moved to the front, squeezing by the rows of desks that were placed too closely to each other. Students were texting, sitting forward ostensibly paying attention to the film but really sleeping, or just had their head facedown on the desk because they had nothing better to do. Meanwhile, I enjoyed my seat up close to the big screen, no heads in the way. The next day I was ready to watch the second half of the documentary, completely riveted and fascinated and envious of Richard Avedon's portraits.
  
Ever since I can remember (but probably before as well, since I had to develop this habit from somewhere) I have had a penchant to write down an interesting facts I hear in movies or quotes that make me smile or people's names I think I'll have to refer back to. Throughout this documentary, I'd be scribbling things in my student planner every which way, squeezing a quote in between homework assignments and random design drawings. I want to organize them here, and elaborate them and connect my notes with pictures that I stared at for as long as they stayed on the screen before they moved to another person talking about the genius and rare qualities of this 20th century photographer.
-fascinated by movement, the human body, especially the face. It has worlds of detail in every wrinkle, every inch of the face makes up some part of their life. And a face can contort in so many ways, the eyes and nose and mouth can scrunch up and elongate to a certain extent and stretch and be manipulated in endless ways - and no face is exactly the same. (Though I have not studied identical twins' faces closely enough...maybe Avedon did.)
 
-Richard Avedon (1923-2004) tells a story through fashion: gloves, cigarettes, the look on every face: "utter chic boredom". He went beyond the glamour and glitz and flawlessness of fashion and told a story through each photograph. Everyone has a story to tell, even the bystanders, the people that aren't necessarily the subject of the picture but are still present and contributing to the complexity of the photo.
-Nastassia Kinski - model in the snake photo. If you want you should search her name and look closely at the snake's tongue that is kissing her ear - the only time that that happened, Avedon had what it took to capture it. As he said, "Nastassia rose to the moment, the snake rose to the moment, I rose to the moment..." He then made the picture into a poster and sold two million copies.
-One of Avedon's photographic subjects discussed in the movies was Isak Dinisen, a writer who was obsessed with beauty to such an extent that it drove her to anorexia. (Understand that most people I am talking about here I don't really know anything about except what was said in the movie..just a sidenote.) He photographed so many important people of the 20th century from around the 40s to the 90s, I'm guessing. He thinks a photographer's job is to use this weapon called a camera to capture how the world was, to preserve it so kids that are coming into the world know what happened before they were born.
-Ronald Fischer - bee model. Avedon said that it's a Buddhist take on things (I am badly paraphrasing here)...just silently enduring the hardships of life.
-Dorothy Parker in her old age, (in 2002) after her high success is over...someone said "It looks as if all the wit she ever had left her a second before that picture was taken." Avedon brings out the worst in her and that low time in her life will be captured forever.
 
-great quote: "One of the great joys in life is watching light."
-more names: Duane Michaels, Irving Penn. Last photo is by Duane Michaels. I saw this photograph, saw the name that appeared in white text and then faded and wrote it down before I forgot.
I found myself passionately agreeing with many of the things said by Avedon himself or his art directors/people who have associated with him in the past. Although he is very charismatic and poised and had a vibrant personality, whenever anyone would ask him how he'd describe himself, he'd say, "The most isolated person in the world." Also, watching light never gets old. The way it falls across anything - a leaf, the road, grass, a five-year-old's hair, a hand - studying that is so rewarding and moving. After all, that is all photography is - drawing with light.
I hope that some of these pictures have transfixed you for longer than the time it takes to take a snapshot and I hope I have conveyed how interested and intrigued I was by every single one of his pictures, how this photographer and the documentary itself has reopened my formerly dormant but always stifled fascination about the charm and insight of each human being.
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