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May 21, 2012, 7:41 pm in public
If you like to periodically delete yourself, like I do, and use a PC, like I do, you may benefit from the following steps I just took: Download and install http://bluestacks.com/ The end. May 17, 2012, 2:28 am in public
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There is nothing quite so lovely as being totally over an ex. May 17, 2012, 2:20 am in public
We are all various portions of introverted and extroverted traits, in an ever shifting organic concoction of tides and spikes and infinite purpose and possibility. In my opinion, applying both of these guides toward each person in your life is simply known as: “caring”. May 13, 2012, 12:28 am in public
Some random pictures from my road trip to Cali, including some show photos from Mr. December playing at Louie’s in Rancho Cordova. I’ll add to this as I take more and post process them. The Flash Player and a browser with Javascript support are needed.. May 11, 2012, 10:26 am in public
Chris just emailed me to let me know that our picture was accepted into the Plastic Fantastic Show. They accepted an alternative crop of this image. The shoot was entirely Chris’ concept, I just got up at 7:30am and let him take pictures of me in the cold. Congrats! 
See the amazing pictures from a previous show here: http://lightbox-photographic.com/exhibitions/PF2FP/ May 4, 2012, 1:05 pm in public
I could potentially be enticed to keep at learning how to write music down if I had one of these to do it with.
May 1, 2012, 12:44 pm in public
Washing the Duwamish shore off my feet after a spontaneous early-morning shoot with Chris Clark, for the purpose of submitting work to a plastic camera only photography show. We shot with a Holga! 
April 30, 2012, 11:23 pm in public
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. April 30, 2012, 5:11 pm in public
Took a few minutes today to learn one of my favorite pieces from the Madness Returns soundtrack. No clefs were harmed in the making of this video. Honestly, with how frustrating and clunky and annoying it is to attempt to learn music as it’s written, I’m not sure I’m going to bother with much more sight reading. I’d rather memorize chord charts and work on fingering. April 28, 2012, 11:22 pm in public
If I’d tried to learn this song last night by reading it, I wouldn’t be able to play it now or have retained the information needed to play it in time and with soul to it. Instead, I cheated and took 15 minutes to learn it by ear, so I could fucking enjoy myself for a change. I dunno how I feel about this reading music shit, man. April 26, 2012, 10:48 am in public
After my latest rant on reading music, I took a well-deserved break for a couple days. Upon returning to practice, I found that my focus had shifted from reading written music and the fingering exercise I practice to a metronome. Currently I’m still all about the fingering exercise for challenge and warmup, but now I’m also playing memorized songs with the intention of playing with more efficient fingering, using my ring finger more, and playing to a beat. As for written music, I haven’t given up on it, but rather than going through lessons from a book or video and stumbling through sheet music, for now I am improvising simple songs and using http://noteflight.com to write them down. The process of doing that is keeping learning creative and allowing me to discover some of the more detailed aspects of written music on my own. The fingering exercise has been frustrating to me. My goal is to learn the next one in the series of 60 when I can play the one I’m working through at double-time 160bpm in smooth velocity and without any full-on trainwrecking. It’s going slowly, however I’ve discovered that playing to music versus a metronome made a huge difference for me this morning. Here’s double-time 120bpm all the way up the keyboard (two more octaves than specified in the book). That’s more along the lines of where I’d like to be. Now to get it about 40bpm faster. April 25, 2012, 11:32 am in public
It’s been 3 1/2 weeks since I deactivated my Facebook account due to temporary mental meltdown, and I am now happily back on Facebook with a new strategy and sense of the sites purpose. I transformed my Facebook experience from an anxiety producing time suck into a manageable, fun activity (and learned some awesome shit along the way) The short of it is: I’ve decided that the people I want on my Facebook are people that I like ‘hearing from’ in some way as often as I check my Facebook feed, which is multiple times per day — people I want to be that constantly connected with. I went from 547 facebook friends to 80. I did that by asking the following of every connection I had on my Facebook:
I also got really clear and honest about a few things: Social pressure and politics: Anyone who was on my personal profile because of guilt, obligation, or some other form of uncomfortable social pressure is no longer there. Filters: Anyone who was under my “restricted” filter, or whose updates I had hidden or usually skip in my feed, were also removed — which included ex’s, the intensely religious, performers and people I just don’t have a lot in common with anymore. Positive spam: My wall is now set so I am the only one who can post to it. My profile is dynamic and transient purposely, and I’ve often felt anxious about deleting other peoples posts while I periodically scrub my profile, which I do often. Whether it’s on my wall or tagged on theirs, both of our lists of friends can see it, so I have removed the responsibility of conspicuously maintaining the life of lolcats and inspirational quotes that people are thoughtful enough to share with me. My experience making these changes has been exceedingly grounding and positive. I feel good about my decisions and about the people I have chosen to keep in touch with differently than through my personal facebook. My sense is that my friends list will probably top around 100 and stay there or below from now on. 100 is a much more manageable and appropriate number for the way I like to use my profile. By the same token, I now use my artist page to post a lot more stuff, including posts from neevita, and to keep in touch with my friendly acquaintances. People I’ve met with or worked with on shows, my students, Vita Arts contributors, clients and coworkers are among the connections I direct to the artist page, and I have noticed that the value of my passing social interactions have increased by being less saturated with acquaintances’ everyday chatter. Additionally, I did exactly the same thing with the pages I had liked. I went from a daily feed full of pages like “I don’t need Anger management, you just need to shut up” to ones like “Street Art Utopia” and “Our Beautiful World & Universe”. I don’t know if this is a general guide to being happier with Facebook or anything, but I am consistently in a much better mood nowadays, and doing this stuff really worked well for me. April 25, 2012, 10:33 am in public
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This mornings discovery: I have just enough room at the foot of my bed to do morning jumping jacks, complete with a mirror so I can watch my boobs bounce. April 23, 2012, 4:49 pm in public
Packed up for the Synth Spa, thanks to a keyboard case, grocery bags, packing tape, and an entire roll of purple duct tape. Complete with working wheels and top handle. Godspeed little buddy. April 23, 2012, 4:03 pm in public
It’s in the 70′s and sunny, and I’m reminded of the elation and release of the summers of the mid 1990′s in Sacramento, after I’d spent long periods of my life encased in my filthy room, with aluminum foil on the windows to keep the light out of my life, and a suicidal depression to keep the light from my soul. Those were the summers I rode on my boyfriends handlebars after being inside for weeks and almost cried when I felt the breeze on my face. The summers I discovered iced vanilla lattes and off-roading in the mud. When I got drunk in public for the first time seeing Cake at the Cattle club for $8 and saw Hole and Beck at Lollapalooza. Those were the summers I bought myself my first car, went to Vegas for Defcon for the first time, went on my first road trips into the wilderness, and felt my first real tastes of freedom. 
Every time the weather turns toward summer again, I remember those times, and I’m so glad I didn’t die, or let my heart stone over. The harshness was what dominated me then, but now that it’s over, it’s those moments of light from my past that shine through more than brightly and profoundly than anything else. Excuse me, I believe I have something in my eye. April 22, 2012, 12:40 pm in public
Like a fleeting moment of complete realization of some immense, intangible universal truth that isn’t fading, it just hit me square in the face how rarely my experiences of strength equate to comfort. It’s mostly just fucking agonizing. The moments of peace in my life come when I get to stop. April 20, 2012, 2:56 pm in public
I tried reading through my first 3/4 timed song the other day, and I fucking hate the living god damn shit out of it. Stupid fuckhead song. Pop goes the fucking weasel. Do you have any idea how fucking discouraging and demasculating and fucking embarrassingly STUPID it feels to be bested by a FUCKING NURSERY RHYME? Yeah I’ll pop your fucking weasel, you little smugly cuntfart. FUCK YOU and FUCK your stupid fucking ancient inbred fucking jackass language up its snot-packed dickhole. WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT OF THIS STUPID SHIT? Whoever it was I’m glad you’re FUCKING DEAD. April 20, 2012, 2:11 pm in public
Created in the wee mornings hours with http://www.noteflight.com — I found myself fiddling by ear and decided to see about writing it down in music. The interactive tools on the site helped me create the sheet music by choosing the notes and mimicking the sounds. The pitches of the notes were pretty easy to translate and were well understood while I was working, but the timing and softness of the piece still just looks like greek to me written out. It sounds right when it’s played, which ended up being the most time consuming part to figure out when I diverged from quarter/half/whole notes. Once I got to those parts, it was mostly trial and error with very little knowledge behind it. I’d never seen the fermata symbol before, but knew how ties worked (though I always forget if the pitch is unchanged you’re not supposed to play the proceeding notes) and figured they’d work how I wanted them to by what the symbol looked like. I knew the rhythm dot already, though in practice I suck nuts at playing them because there is math involved. I chose flats over sharps because a) My brain seems to recognize when pitch needs to be lowered easier than when it needs to be raised and b) The symbol is easier to differentiate, since neutral and sharp symbols are similarly shaped. In looking at this further I can see a few places where I could have written the same music differently or more streamlined, but I don’t really care all that much being that this was a first time experimental learning kind of thing and that was sort of the point. |
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I never really did get how I could be talented at music with it being a math-based language, and lately, I just really wonder how I ever managed to convince anyone IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD that I’ve ever had any fucking idea what I was doing.