Mirror Box

End Of Year Albums/Tracks/Artwork/LiveShows/OTHER STUFF 2010

2010-12-23T17:57:00.000-08:00

Favourite band this year: Titus Andronicus

Top Ten Records in no particular order because i am fickle and apart from the Monitor, the hierarchy sort of fades between the rest of them. Oops that makes it sound like nothing else matters except the Monitor which is clearly not (entirely) true! I chose all of these because they were all records that, in some small way, had a time and a place for me this year:

Titus Andronicus - The Monitor

Four Tet- There Is Love In You

Abe Vigoda- Crush

Wild Nothing- Gemini

Ty Segall- Melted

Deerhunter- Halcyon Digest

Julian Lynch- Mare

No Age- Everything In Between

Active Child- Curtis Lane

Screaming Females- Castle Talk

Top (12) Tracks:

Well, its hardly surprising!

1. JPNDRDS- Younger Us: This band never fail and this track is like a first boyfriend. At one point i'd say it could even reduce me to tears, maybe at that point when he cheats on you with a girl who doesn't even have every single SY record on CD.

2. Caribou- Odessa: I played this one repeatedly when i went to Wimbledon this year, made the queues a hell of a lot more bearable.

3. Veronica Falls- Beachy Head

4. Mark McGuire- Brain Storm (For Erin): A recent favourite!

5. The Tallest Man On Earth- Love Is All: This is a really beautiful track and reminds me of home movies, being in Australia when i was a kid and all my favourite places there; the smell, the beautiful shades of red on the ground and in the sky.

6. Twin Shadow- Castles in the Snow

7. Ariel Pink- Frightnight (nevermore)

8. Wavves- Post-Acid

9. Fang Island- Daisy

10. Home Blitz- Two Steps: A fun little track which i think is about being scared and pretending you're not i guess.

11. Marnie Stern- Transparency Is The New Mystery: I fucking hate that P4K called this a 'power ballad' even if in jest, but whatever. She's awesome and this is awesome.

12. Sleigh Bells- Crown On The Ground

Favourite Artwork: Julian Lynch- Mare

Least Favourite Artwork: Best Coast- Crazy For You

Favourite Live Shows:

Titus Andronicus!- @ Bodega Social, Nottingham

Of Montreal- @ Academy 2, Manchester

High Society presents: Felix, Les Etoiles, El Heath- @ Bodega Social

Default This covers ATDI/SY/Fugazi/Refused/And You Will Know Us as part of Hockley Hustle- @ Bodega Social, Nottingham

Abe Vigoda- @ Bodega Social, Nottingham

Marnie Stern- @ Bodega Social, Nottingham

Fucked Up and Times New Viking would have PROBABLY made this list, if only those gigs were at convenient times for me when i didn't have work commitments (that's quite funny, really because i NEVER have any work commitments even when i do have work commitments)

Bunch of stuff i've yet to hear, some of which are friends' recommendations:

Sufjan Stevens- Age of Adz (YEP still haven't!)

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

Woods- At Echo Lake

How To Dress Well- Love Remains

Delorean- Subiza

Das Racist- Sit Down, Man

Big Troubles- Worry

Little Women- Throat

Rangers- Suburban Tours

Sun Araw- On Patrol

Richard Skelton- Landings

Giant Sand- Blurry Blue Mountain

Gate - A Republic of Sadness

Woven Bones- In And Out And Back Again

Things that should probably have got more listens:

Mark McGuire- Living With Yourself

Zola Jesus- Stridulem

Perfume Genius- Learning

Swans- My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky

Fang Island- Fang Island

Album i have been most baffled by cropping up EVERYWHERE and i'm not sure i'll ever listen to because of this fucking ugly cover.

Earl Sweatshirt- EARL

Hello reader we've reached the end of this miserable journey. I'd liked to know what YOU had on your end of year lists, too! Happy end of 2010!

Mix

2010-10-25T16:14:00.000-07:00

Oh, this is new and exciting. My friend posted about 8tracks ages ago, but i've only just got round to posting a mix. All these songs are on a mixtape i made a friend, but they're all stuff i've been enjoying so much off late. It includes my new found love for Burger Records- swiftly making my way through some of their bands, especially Ty Segall and i really like Nobunny as well for the concept.

There's some Abe Vigoda and Ganglians in there too, who i'm seeing in November and hugely excited about. "Crush" is such a great album i totally wasn't expecting it.

They Saw The Waves...That's The Way To Go.

2010-10-25T15:18:00.000-07:00

I saw this video a while ago and knew i was going to come to adore this band. "Beachy Head" reminds me of this holiday i went on once with my family in Spain somewhere. We stayed with some friends at a place near the cliffs, and the best moment i remember was looking down to the raging sea and just finding that situation and everything i knew about life sort of hilarious. This band are full of fun and dark moments.

Veronica Falls - Beachy Head from Philippa Bloomfield on Vimeo.

Sorry to have to break this to you, but really, you are nothing. You have no inner life

2010-10-11T15:22:00.000-07:00

By Niall O'Brian

"The Viewing Experience"

2010-09-09T07:19:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, i went to see "Mother" with my friend at Broadway and about 15 minutes or so in, Mike whispered to me "did you realise they've not put subtitles?". It's not really beyond me to not notice things like this, but i have to admit that it is sort of odd that someone had already decided to go and speak to the staff at broadway before i properly noticed that i had no idea what they were saying and still quite contentedly sat there as if i had any clue what was going on. I still believe that i could have watched the whole thing without subtitles, the film itself was quite captivating from the 15 minutes i saw, and rather than daydreaming inside a cinema (i have a problem concentrating on films sometimes) i think i was kind of enjoying it subconsciously for the very reason that i was completely lost in this world of language as foreign to me as the Southern Korea setting, and it wasn't exactly impossible to suss what was happening. For a fleeting few minutes i felt more involved with the film and the concept of it than if i were following the print.

This reminded me of the experience of watching tennis matches without commentary; the commentary is incredibly crucial (albeit pompous and annoying on occasion), and the lack of it when watching live matches (or not having one of those super cool radio gadgets) is something i didn't think i would miss so much -but there was certainly a level of 'consciousness' that i lost without it. What you gain in watching live tennis or other sports is an entirely different mental representation of what is going on and it's peculiar how i remember the least about Wimbledon the past two years when i've actually been there than the years before when i'd watched everything on television. Yet nothing beats watching tennis matches live, and i know that experience can enrich people who find tennis otherwise incredibly dull. However there's elements to watching games through the box that are just as enjoyable to me (and probably to other sports fans), and sometimes it's somewhat of a relief to go crawling back to the television after four days worth of numbing in the heat running from court to court lathered in sun cream and wincing at which way the ball is spinning.

As much as i'd like to sniff at commentary having been accustomed to entrenching myself in match stats for so long i often really don't care about what they're saying (i.e. Peter Flemming; the guy is always an ass about everything) the commentators haven't spent so long in the game playing or otherwise without gaining a tad bit more knowledge than you ;) Like watching foreign films i guess you can easily fail to acknowledge the context and the culture within which it is being communicated which an audience who belong to that language culture would. Invariably, one feels like they have lost out somehow, and indeed they have. Points are often too quick to notice and appreciate things like tactical advantages of a kick serve as opposed to a topspin slice, or how wind might be affecting shot selection without someone pointing it out to you or even how player's previous opponents/slam experience has set them up for the current match. Overall, commentary brings 2D to 3D, and as rubbish as that analogy might seem, it's certainly true of why everyone is falling in love with 3D TENNIS- "a tennis viewing experience like no other....blah blah" as seen on Sky Sports

Though this article is somewhat accurate, i think he under-appreciates how tennis fans will go gaga for anything that brings a new level of visual experience to the game. Tennis fans from what i've experienced are usually also the most embracing of sports enthusiasts and importantly, kids who like tennis are a fantastic market for things like 3D broadcast because generally those kids are absolutely crazy for this sport because of the level of accessibility it provides for them, being able to see their favourite players up close and personal on big show courts...and now in 3D when they can't make it to the show? That is a winning concept.

It's also true that the technical brilliance of professional tennis can never ever be fully known by the viewer, courtside seats are terribly impractical no matter where they are. My friend and i, being the spoilt brats we are, were sitting on centre court seats 2nd row from the front and still complaining that we weren't close enough to see the ball move properly, no one can help 'people like us'. But really, kinetics of the ball spin and placement and accuracy is mind blowing and if anything, i would hope that 3D would allow people to 'see' that more up close and appreciate the game at a different level than before. It's a lot of fun, and i'm pretty embarrassingly tempted by one of these '3D sports pubs', if only i could find an adequate companion to join me. I can see how 3D would be somewhat of a disaster in a sport like football though. Sport aside, without going into too much detail, i really don't like the concept of 3D in films, its as redundant as anything i've ever seen and i am yet to be enlightened as to how it is possibly entertaining after the bewilderment of this new visual dimension wears off.

Moving on, i was super duper excited when Frenchman Gael Monfils got to his first quarter-finals this year at New York. Though, I can't claim he showed any really sparkling tennis during his match against Djokovic, he is one of my very favourite players; awesome guy and a talented athlete not to mention amazingly fun to watch. However, i often wonder whether being a full time funny man is his main priority over actually winning matches......it's startling how Gael though pumped up and ready to go like a Lockheed Blackbird that he is, is still too much of a passive player when he reaches the deep, murky and heavily experienced waters of the Top 5 ATP rankings. Monfils is not a 'naturally' talented tennis player though he is a naturally talented athlete, and often though that seems to be enough to do well on the men's tour in this modern age, players at Djokovic's level can be very tactically aggressive and it takes more to break through at slam level. Even though it suits Monfils to be so charming, I fear that if he doesn't start revamping his boyish, class clown image he will find himself reaching the peak of his career before what is ideal. His roads already been a pretty bumpy one steeped in injury breaks, and his tireless defensive play is something that is becoming a terribly greater weakness than his hamstrings. I think it's time he started reviewing and re-watching his matches with his new coach, Roger Rasheed, to establish a good offensive play that he can stick to against bigger players.

Just to change the pattern of the days

2010-08-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

"Dust" by Ujin lee and Tom Edwards

"They'd admire the complexity of his plan, incomplete as it was. It had art and memory. It had a sense of responsibility, of moral force. And it was a picture in the world of their own guilty wishes... Astonish them, create coincidences so bizarre they have to believe it. Create a loneliness that beats with violent desire. This kind of man, an arrest, a false name, a stolen credit card. Stalking a victim can be a way of organising one's loneliness, making a network out of it, a fabric of connections, desperate men give their solitude a purpose, and a destiny"

I'm not sure if i enjoyed "Libra" as much as i did because i haven't completed a book for some time or whether I like being convinced of other people's guilty wishes. I found that sense of reconciliation in Iain Bank's "Wasp Room" as well (i had a conversation with someone about this book recently, really need to re-read it and actually i want to re-read Libra again because i felt short-changed and i could see through more of it if i tried again)....It's somewhat of an escape from morality and purely an insight into personal success, and the ways it can be achieved, told as a rehash of a pub story. It probably wasn't Delillo's intention to have readers feel sorry for Oswald, though paragraphs like the above suggest otherwise. But outside of just being a lonely man seeking a destiny and a purpose, Oswald was a falling man, 'tilting' maybe, and then he found the only way there was to strike a balance, to keep the scales level and you're tempted to feel relief, whether it's for him or something else. Some people just can't deal with lopsidedness. He was terrified, but of what we never really understand and a passive protagonist of what he believes (or what the author believes) as a presence greater than himself, greater than the historian Nicholas Branch. "Ideals", and often political ideals, grow into something uncontrollable, reality makes little sense and it's almost impossible to continue living in the same way; "if the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? we invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail"........

There's a sense of hilarity that works it's way through the whole book, the fact that the very concept of determinism or destiny doesn't exist for Oswald at all,at least not in the way he thinks it does, as he actively does something to put an end to his deterministic love affair by proliferating everything with interpretation, meaning, context and an overwhelming urge of creativity that he can't resist. I may be naive in saying its all a big guilt trip, but for what? Who is this boy with his hair messed up and his shirt sticking out of his trousers? "And he looked scared, and he looked wild........."

I suppose i know 'just enough' about the JFK assassination, and to be honest i don't really care that much about it, as compelling as it was, because Libra is as good a novel without having any real attachment to those events, just as Lee Harvey Oswald has little attachment to who he really was, he's a construct of a vision of who he really may have been, in history, in fiction, and who he thought he may have been in both.

Libra ends with a perfect restlessness;

"I stand here on this broken hearted earth and i look at the stones of the dead, a rolling field of dead, and the chapel on the hill, and the cedar trees leaning in the wind, and i know a funeral is supposed to console the family with the quality of the ceremony and the setting. But i am not consoled."

Im not sure if i've fully gathered by thoughts on this, maybe i should speak to Playing Pretend as i did borrow her copy (thankssssss). But there we are, life usually ends unfinished, and i have to make a start on Infinite Jest.

Stay Active

2010-08-23T14:58:00.000-07:00

Been listening a lot more to "Curtis Lane EP" by Active Child (Pat Grossi) of late. It sucked me in dangerously quick, like how religion can be overwhelming if you've never heard of it before. Luckily you can still enjoy the best of a record like Curtis Lane without having to convert, pray and maintain practise; it's just really really pretty music fusing choral and dark, melancholic synths. It's not hard to imagine beautiful music with that description, but i think it would be difficult to 'get it right' if you were going to try. What i love best about Active Child is that Pat grew up listening to really dirty rap- (his dad used to work for the rap label Priority Records) but he was also in Philadelphia Boys Choir for the better part of his childhood, so little Pat was introduced to and met Snoop, Dr.Dre, Eminem and still ends up playing gospel music. That's remarkable.

Where on earth did the inspiration for songs like "Weight of the World" "She was a Vision" "Wilderness" come from when your favourite records growing up were mostly about cunts and guns. Weight of the World reminds me in a strange way of the title music for Ecco the Dolphin on Sega; a little heartbroken, lonely, but hopeful. Can't say Ecco was my favourite game to play, now that i think back on it, it was highly inappropriate for my age at the time! It's about a lonely, aggravated dolphin who tries to organise his grief stricken existence by travelling back in time through seas of chaos at a very poor level of physical fitness where you have approximately 3 minutes to complete a really difficult underwater maze because of your failing respiratory system which means you always invariably DIE!

Despite all that, I love Curtis Lane, and this video gets across that 'expansiveness' quite well

Active Child - Wilderness from Jheri Evans on Vimeo.

After all the Agitation.....

2010-08-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

in fact i think it's just the kind of rude awakening i need.

.....and after all the frantic expeditions to make 3 months of an unorganised life organised, i finally found a moment of peace-about a week ago, a way of sitting still and being comfortable that way. I saw through all that bothered me, all the things i hadn't done or attended to, and somehow i managed to convince myself that it was all dealt with, until today.

The thing about old friends is, they bring up a lot of 'ugliness' that you would rather forget about yourself, but what's worse is when an 'old friend' is actually someone you met not so long ago, and you realise after all this time, since before and even after you met them, when you thought you might have changed.... you're actually just the very same person with the same insecurities that had been slovenly shelved for so long that they almost disappeared- you just found better ways of hiding them. I have one very good friend who sees the best things in me, but also knows what makes me feel exposed and insecure, and i hate that. There's nothing i can say or do, it's just a weird feeling i get when i'm with them like they're eyeballing me, and every small hand gesture or shifting of the eyes to a different point of focus apart from their line of focus is mapped with scrutiny. It's strange, because it's almost as if i hate them for trying to know me, but they still don't 'see' and that's frustrating for me. To (think) they know so much and not know anything at all. My plight in being friends with an emotional stump.

My friend moved city more than a year ago now, and i've realised that they're slipping away, perhaps they're getting older, moving on, finding a job working towards a career, or perhaps our relationship is moving on to a plateau. It's settled, and i didn't want it to- i've just realised. I wanted it to keep moving....but i'm not sure where.

Right now, if i could find some way of being emotionally blind i would take it. I perhaps used to enjoy this sort of self destruction seeped in sentiment, mystery, musing and lust but that is one thing that i have grown the hell out of finally, and i want some calm, no complications.

Perhaps i'll pull myself together soon, i need to, but i'm certainly not wasting anymore time on hopeful operative pretence.

I should basically be given a merit badge after those 4 paragraphs. I am suddenly turning emo, and i'm enjoying it somehow. I'm 'growing' and 'regressing' at the same time! I would rather decorate my personal growth with one of these below.....bit of a scaredy admittedly.

by awesome Tim Forbus

(sorry the feet are kind of gross, but try and look past that)

Ghost in the Machine

2010-03-07T15:33:00.000-08:00

Quite a lot recently, i've had this sense of unfamiliarity within my own body, its like a continuous 'what the fuck are you doing?' sense of being which makes me wish i didn't have to associate myself with my Self.

Most of this stems from an extreme detachment, or rather discrepancy, between what i intend doing and what i physically end up doing. It's true a lot of people have good intentions; i used to have intentions too, real ones, like an intention to get into University, get a job, improve my backhand slice, or read 3 books a week.

I've since deteriorated.

I now have intentions like making sure i don't break anything made of glass today. Or, sometimes i have an intention to not get out of my car again because i 'think' i've left the straighteners on in my bedroom. And then i go upstairs, not paying attention, forget why i came back in, i do something completely irrelevant, get back in my car, then wonder if i've locked the front door....and whether i've left the straighteners on in my bedroom. It's a sad state of affairs, and they're not 'intentions' they're just Standards of Sanity, i guess. Thus, my approach to life these days is one of Positive Apathy; why bother thinking about anything when it has no real meaningful effect on what you do, it reaches no further than the thought process itself.

I can only currently describe my feelings as a mix of 'locked in syndrome', phantom limb, being drunk and the relationship the rat and Linguine had in Pixar's Ratatouille. My brain is active but my body is incapable of creating anything beautiful or interesting, i don't recognise my hands when they make a sloppy job out of everything, i find it difficult to pay attention to anything that requires me to sit down quietly and mostly i feel like i'm dealing with a total idiot of sorts.

It's frustrating. What have i become? What was i before? Can i get up from this horrible nightmare.

Meanwhile, this video for Fang Island's "Daisy" strangely depicts a nightmarish version of the Diving Bell and the Butterfly. If you don't get it, watch it again- you'll see. The sense of exclusivity from the world, and how, you quite simply can never physically let people know that hot pants don't suit them.

Fang Island from carlos charlie perez on Vimeo.

2 0 1 0

2009-12-31T19:47:00.000-08:00

Every year brings new peculiarities that i look forward to.

Thank goodness for that

Moving Life of the Butterfly Collectors

2009-12-18T07:52:00.000-08:00

“Oh fuck it. Just burn all my stuff, just burn everything if it means I don’t need to pack anymore of this shit”.

It’s always been a favourite late night game of mine for a while now- to prepare myself for a fire evacuation by scaling my personal possessions down to just 3 items to take out of the burning establishment whilst everything else gets burned to black ash, never to be seen again- almost like they never existed in the first place.

There is a disturbing sense of catharsis in playing these kinds of games…. Not merely because I give a lot of my possessions a bit too much sentimental value, therefore anything that bears as much of a whiff of re-organisation and re-consideration is mentally harrowing, but also because late nights (always) call for an existential crisis- and this is how I solve them:

By somewhat manically looking through my cupboards, under my bed, through my desk, occasionally venturing out to the rest of the house, through photo albums, cabinets and cupboards, scaling my materialistic nemesis down to just three things to solidify one’s current existence…if that’s even possible- This is a game after all.

I need to ask myself- why do I need these 3 items to last for me, to escape the flame right now? Of course every time I play, I often change my mind about what I would take. The ever-evolving consciousness repositions it’s acquiescent self to any shape or form we wish to take on, seeking peace and perhaps personal improvement.

Would it be the three single most used items in my life? - laptop, ipod and phone. The three most irreplaceable in sentimental value? The three most literally irreplaceable (last photographic evidence of a granddad you never met) ? Or Irreplaceable certificates and qualifications? Do any of these things really mean anything to me and how really is it possible to separate the metalmarks from the swallowtails and decide which ones we really want to keep? After all, they’ve all gathered as much materialistic dust as they can manage, and I wanna spare these redundant sunavabitches the wrath of a burning building.

When I play my little fire evacuation game, and it’s been a hard day I try and make things easier on myself and the items count increases from 3 to as many as I can carry with my bare hands or otherwise a small carry case. All these things came to mind when I was packing for moving house 2 weeks ago, and I also thought about how, if I had to escape in a fire, those 3 items I should take is a hilariously bold move with a room that needs 12 brown boxes to house it’s contents. I might as well stay in and burn.

Moving isn’t anything new to me, i’ve moved 5 times before between continents, but it actually gets harder every time. Growing up in a family of ardent lepidopterists does that to you….My dad has kept possibly every replaced battery once used for his alarm clock, and also, all the pretty letters my mum has ever written him, received through transatlantic travel They were neatly placed inside the brown leather saddlebag he used to carry around. My mum keeps a ‘bottle of love’ I gave her when I was 6- a jam jar with a random assortment of (terrible) paper scrawls. As well as all every doll, or toy horse I loved and betrayed. I keep a conch that I took from a fisherman and sometimes I curl up on my bed with it pressed to my ear, listening to the waves of the shore I stole it from, and willing it to suck me inside. Some things we’ve had for so long, that we can barely remember those memories that used to flap and beat in our minds. Just ordinary things, too, and it’s all the more depressing to see when they’ve long lost their colours and have remained lifeless for years.

I don’t think Materialism is something that should be feared, it’s a way of holding onto life, holding onto our own sense of self and where we belong in this big wide world.

And for that reason, a movie I saw recently “Bunny and the Bull” by Paul King made me smile a few times. Obviously I let my preconceptions about it being made by the Boosh director dull any real expectations. It was indeed highly decorative, and visually rich, but it was also a very sensitive movie, centred on a painfully sensitive character- Stephen, whose life appears dominated by materialism, categorisation, organisation and perhaps OCD, to the point where he is terrified of leaving his own front door to a horribly unstructured world. What a nightmare!

Stephen’s home is wallpapered top to bottom with brown boxes, categorising almost everything he has ever used, owned, touched or produced (he stores his urine). One day when his meticulous daily routine is disrupted, he turns to the items in his boxes to recreate his unorganised past, hidden well from his consciousness through careful organisation of the present.

(This paragraph is a bit of a spoiler for the film so skip if you wish) The core of Stephen’s rather strange past story and strange current circumstances is only revealed at the end of his reminiscence when his bold, charismatic and close friend Bunny dies, leaving poor, shy, sensitive Stephen devoid of the safety and comfort he found through the abrasive Bunny. Were Stephen’s hoards of useless ‘stuff’ representative of his need to fill the emptiness he felt in bereavement? Does it represent a need to stay faintly attached to ‘real life’ through ‘real items’, providing closure through the comfort of knowing that most things can be kept safe and close to us always, even though Bunny was lost. Does it represent a coping mechanism, which allows him to structure his life at his own pace and in his own way than faltering for the unreliability of reality? In the end, Stephen manages to overcome his inner demons and begins to leave his house into the cold, inner city air. If Stephen were real, I would have liked to have asked him at that very moment, which 3 items he would salvage if his house were to burn down right behind him.

I should imagine it would be his scarf, hat and gloves.

It’s how we work- If only we didn’t attach ourselves so deeply to pretty, engaging, yet essentially useless items! They would still have wings, and would have just flown from a burning building. Maybe we’d see them around some day.

Growing some Antlers instead.

2009-11-20T15:51:00.000-08:00

It's not my fault really that Nottingham have had some p4k 'gems' in the past few weeks, and thus i am provoked most unfairly to keep these gigs in the blog roll, despite my reluctancy- i am reluctant. i am.....

On Monday night, The Antlers played at the Social....and it was incredible.

It seems we need to start providing bands with some sort of award if their live shows can actually outshine their album/hype mutualism. When i first listened to "Hospice" i thought it was an awesome album, as did probably everyone who bought/downloaded it. I tried my best to ignore the contentious maps of meaning through the inter-webs that crumbled around Pete Silberman's beautifully constructed tower as if it didn't exist- and i couldn't see it falter. I paid no attention to the lyrical density or the fact that albums like this can have real 'concepts'.

...But it became apparent to me on Monday night, that "Hospice" cannot be exclusively phlegmatic on any level- the more you listen to it, the more obvious the hidebound of someone's extremely painful experience, and it's quite frankly, terribly haunting. Not merely because of the emotional burden that goes hand in hand with scenes of illness, hospitals and death that form the bathing fluid of Hospice, but because these emotions can be so probing to even those who haven't fully experienced them.

Death is inevitable, and we all have death anxiety; Irvin D. Yalom (who wrote a wonderful collection of stories called "Love's Executioner and other tales of Psychotherapy") calls it the 'price of admission to self-awareness'. Everything i've realised is down to evolution and telekinesis.... and an extension of such is the way death anxiety works on a collective consciousness. Everyone knows what it is to die, what it means to not exist or to not have someone else exist, to come to terms with the fact that it's a lonely old world and no one person has much of a chance of existing with you forever, no matter how much you love them or need them or want them.

It's also only when we face death that we have the sudden capacity to do remarkable things for others and for ourselves.

'though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death can save us'

the fact is that she won't survive, the idea is that i keep bedside manners and do the best i can.....which means she can throw the thermometer right back at me if she wants to, she can scream and curse and then apologise as many times over as she wants, she can tell me to leave because she doesn't like my tone, even though i'm only trying to make her smile, but something keeps me standing by the hospital bed.

Peter Silberman's lyrics cut through me like a thousand knives; all of which can be found very neatly presented here

"There's a bear inside your stomach, a cubs been kicking you for weeks, and if this isn't all a dream, then we'll cut him from beneath. Well we're not scared of making caves, or finding food for him to eat. We're terrified of one another, terrified of what that means. But we'll make only quick decisions, and you'll keep me in the waiting room, and all the while i'll know we're fucked and not getting un-fucked soon. When we get home we're bigger strangers, than we've ever been before. You sit in front of snowy television, suitcase on the floor..."

I guess the track "Bear" is somewhat obviously touching on the idea of abortion, but it kinda reminded me about a form of cancer therapy based on 'visual imaging'; an admittedly pathetic sense of self-healing where the patient creates a visual metaphor for their chemotherapy fighting against a visual metaphor for their cancer. I thought of the bear inside her stomach as this wild and growing tumour in her body, and them not feeling scared of finding food and caves was the created sense of boldness they both had in getting through chemotherapy, he mentions making 'all the right appointments' in an earlier verse, and being terrified of one another stands for each others situations; one coping with a terminal illness and the other knowing and sensing the huge loss that is about to present itself, yet somehow the relationship needs to stay together, until it is no more.

You think you can say everything to someone who you know is going away for a very long time, but things just don't work that way, and all you care is that they don't notice how scared you are. I didn't ever intend to cut these lyrics up like this, but they come alive on that album, and whatever it means, the last thing i want to do is vitiate them. But what is this album if it isn't one to rip up? Hospice is so overexposed, it's actually underexposed....you can't understand another person's grief. This is where collective consciousness doesn't work.

I'm scared to sleep i hate my voice 'cause it only makes you angry. I only talk when you are sleeping. That's when i tell you everything, and i imagine that somehow you're going to hear me'.

When i try to move my arms sometimes, they weight too much to lift. I think you buried me awake (my one and only parting gift). But you return to me at night, just when i think i may have fallen asleep. your face is up against mine, and i'm too terrified to speak................

Live and Kicking with Bears and Japandroids

2009-11-07T14:47:00.000-08:00

I've been knocked out pretty much all week. Days and days pass me by in bite size chunks; i look through a hole in the wall every morning i wake up, and see two hours in a 24 hour time span. Two hours spent numb after i've dragged my self around, kicking and screaming for so long that i can't even remember why anymore. And at those times of rare animation, it's pretty ridiculous to chew right when you've bitten off a little more than you can physically handle.

This week was different, because this time i was kicking for a different reason- the undeniable pleasure of great live music will always exist, no matter how dead you feel sometimes. I had travelled to Leeds on the Thursday for a mesmerising evening with Grizzly Bear. They came up and had a little taste, a little feel, and looked up at you with their big Grizzly Bear eyes and there was something special there (this is also what the camera crew on BBC's "Life" had said about the giant squid they were filming, i admit it, i plagiarised). ..

Under the blue and green light canopy, and the mock fire flies trapped in glass jars around them flickering their little wings, Veckatimest took on a whole new meaning for me. Ready, Able was astonishingly lovely, my favourite on that album. Cheerleader soared around the ceiling like birds in formation. The echoey vocals on Knife sounded like Romantic yetty calls up to the balcony where i was stood, and not for a second was i deterred by the ridiculous amounts of people that were rammed into Leeds Met Students Union (it's been a while since i've been to a gig this 'big'), and a good few of them were illuminated around the face with mobile elements (Boo).

As if this wasn't enough, the very noisy, very snazzy, very Sai's top 09 list of albums Japandroids were down in Nottingham supporting A Place To Bury Strangers at Bodega Social. After a rather depressing Friday of catching up on 2 weeks of lecture notes, i was almost too depressed to leave my room, but the very thought of missing Japandroids was a little painful- so i paid 8 quid just to see them support, since i'm not really a fan of APTBS.

Unfortunately, the two-piece only managed a 20 minute set, since they arrived late because their van broke down, but those 20 minutes were spit fire. Brian King the guitarist has a ridiculous amount of raucous energy about him; his enviably skinny guy frame in straight cut dark blue jeans jittered around on stage like a nervous cat. He says in his charming canadian slur that they used to think they were the loudest band ever until they toured with APTBS, and then they felt like a couple of girlies...."like your jeans" scoffed a punter, ZIINNNNGGG. Brian was not happy, and gave us all permission to spit on the guy- he was clearly some fat, rigid ugly person jealous that he wasn't sporting such a physique to prance on stage holding a guitar somewhat convincingly.

The Social crowds are always too cool for their own good (as my friend aptly mentioned after the gig), and remained relatively static despite the hysterical dance-worthy numbers in Hearts Sweats, Rockers East Vancouver, Young Hearts Spark Fire & Boys Are Leaving Town. I wasn't ashamed. I paid 8 quid for this god dammit and i'm gonna have a hip shake.

Got a drink while APTBS were on, went up for the last song. Strobe lighting gave me a fit. Loud. It's fucking loud up here. My ears, they're gone.

Light. all i could see was the fucking light- and this is why they cut Japandroids short???! Whatever. I bought their fucking t-shirt.

So anyway, i see drowned in sound did a ridiculously fucked up review of the Post-Nothing record.....no, it is not about suburban numbness, or blank interactions, or the modern Western malaise of personal and social detatchment. It's just not.

The Cooking Life: Titus Andronicus makes amazing culinary transformation- try it at home!!

2009-10-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

Have a horrendous morning filled with car clamps and 2 hour social development lectures??

About ready to die when you get home and literally starving into your knees???

Want a satisfying lunch to ease the grievances?

Find that dusty Titus Andronicus album in the corner of your kitchen and put it into that fucking CD player, because it does exactly what it says on the packet- the "Airing of Grievances"

" i'm a hardcore smoothie lover and like my smoothies to have the perfect consistency; smooth, no coagulation between fruit and dairy, light, tasty, with just the right combo of ingredients. Couple that with ricotta and pine nut raviolli and you have a perfect lunch. But its difficult to get a lunch looking and tasting this perfect (well for me anyway) and its even worse when you're running on 2 1/2 hours sleep"

BUT NOT ANYMORE BECAUSE TITUS ANDRONICUS CAN ACTUALLY SOLVE THIS:

I'm telling you, just once, try making anything in the whole wide world listening to that album and it will come out beautifully. I like the album, not love, more like. But those guys are culinary transformers. I am going to write to them and thank them.

Or maybe i just had a lucky day in the kitchen?....naaaahhhhhhh.

Try it out at home by making Nigella's dark chocolate raspberry pudding cake (it's delicious, even if Nigella is um, the opposite)

185g self-raising flour

25g cocoa powder

250g unsalted butter

2 tbsp creme de framboise (optional)

100g caster sugar

100g light muscovado sugar

250g good quality dark chocolate

185ml strong black coffee

and 370ml water

2 large eggs, beaten lightly

250g raspberries

icing sugar, for dusting

1. Preheat goddam oven to 180C, fan 160 gas mark 4

2. sift flour & cocoa, set aside.

3. put butter, creme de framboise, sugars, chocolate, coffee and water in a thick bottomed saucepan and stir over a low heat until everythign melts and it looks smooth and glossy.

4. stir this mixture into sifted flour and cocoa. beat well until all smooth, then beat in the eggs. (dont worry if its runny, it will set, DONT ADD MORE FLOUR)

5. pour into cake tin (i used a heart shaped one :) ) until 2cm thick, then pour on raspberries, and put rest of mixture on top.

6. bake in oven for 40-45 minutes.

7. grunge is what the cake is alllll about, so dont bother making skewer come out super clean.

8. leave to cool for 15 mins and dust with icing sugar, cut into a broken heart if you wish, because broken hearts are more interesting than complete ones...

and it should hopefully come out like this.........

No Such Thing as Nosaj's Thing

2009-07-14T17:06:00.001-07:00

The first listen i had of Nosaj Thing's album "Drift" was when i was driving down a relatively lonely dual carriage way on a dark afternoon with huge fat rain droplets pelting down on my windscreen. The sky had just about closed up and there was nothing but the stark distinction between wet and dry as i sat in my little car with the hard, starving rain threatening to break through my windows.

"Drift" sounds like that space between the wet and dry, the space that i feel relatively sheltered in but all the while i can feel the tension that builds as the rain gets harder. If i put down my window it will attack me, though i can't help but want to do it anyway.

The hugely exciting openers "Quest" and "Fog" sounds like what would happen eventually if i decided to open my windows and doors to a torrential downpour, and my car was consumed by rain water; dark and dank and delightfully distressing, and me stood in the midst of it, soaking through and through. By the time the glitchy synth action of "Caves" came around i would spiral into a state of mania, not contemplating my actions but reliving the necessity of them in denial.

On the first listen, i could only get up to track 6 and got impatient with the rest of the album- i thought most of the infectious swagger of this record and the 'drops' were already exhausted from tracks 1 to 6 . How wrong i was! Lords the last track "kicks 7 different types of ass" as one person put it on a album review comment on a site i was on earlier.

I do like this video a lot too- "Aquarium" from the Views/Octopus EP.

Good Literature for an Emotional Breakdown...with love from Russia

2009-07-14T12:52:00.000-07:00

My struggle with reading for want of a more interesting book each time this summer has got me thinking of the Twentieth Century Russian Literature module i grew to adore in First Year. The module was the most depressing thing i've ever studied (obviously not because i didn't enjoy it) but because the process of falling in love with it required ripping the literature apart tentatively, layer by lamentable layer to it's bitterly sorrowful core. I remember sobbing over open pages the night before the exam, not because of fear of failure, but because it hurt to come to the realisation that through the swathes of surrealism, dark humour and fantastic tales of dodgy science and lovingly fraudulent characters in these books, there lay only (and not so well disguised after all) genuine human suffering.

I think i felt more emotionally destroyed by these books because of the brilliantly submissive style of writing the authors adopted to follow censorship guidelines set by the Soviet government. As a result, everything about the books; the characters, the plots seemed 'unreliable', not because of the author's intention to deceive the reader exactly, but because of the need to reveal as much as possible through as little as possible, which felt slightly abusive. In practical psychology, the individual is easily reduced to a vulnerable state through the realisation of their childhood state. I felt like reading these books did something similar to me, because of the sense of struggle to find and validate the familiar or 'the obvious'.

The module covered some lesser known works of russian literature (as opposed to the Tolstoy or Dostoevsky) in the context of the changes that occurred within the country during the Soviet period.

‘Dammit, i spent five years doing nothing but extracting cerebral appages...You know how much work i did on the subject- an unbelievable amount. And now comes the crucial question-what for? So that one fine day a nice little dog could be transformed into a specimen of so-called humanity so revolting that he makes one’s hair stand on end.....this doctor, is what happens when a researcher, instead of keeping in step with nature, tries to force the pace, and lift the veil’.

I wrote my essay on Bulgakov's relatively under-appreciated 'Heart of a Dog' (the full english translation can be found here) as opposed to his most recognised novel 'The Master and Margarita" (which i actually haven't read yet). Heart of a dog has the 'mad scientist' moniker highly in place as it follows the story of a Dr. Preobrazhensky- a bourgeoisie surgeon with a typical distaste for the proletarians echoed by his ambition to transform a lowly street dog (Sharikov) into a human being- who ironically turns out to be a proletariat who Preobrazhensky must either come to terms with or destroy. As you can imagine the end is inevitable.. It is a relatively simple storyline that Bulgakov builds upon beautifully to allow for worlds of exploration in thematic structure which includes the obvious conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariats and also class struggle to a Communist utopia in Russia.

Preobrazhensky complains about the carpet being removed from the staircase in his block of flats, by the management committee of soviet communists, he says in anger,

‘Did Marx forbid people to keep their staircases carpeted?’

Being somewhat of a 'scientist' myself, i particularly enjoyed the portrayal of science under the Soviet system in Heart of a Dog. The short comings of science in the novel reflect the short comings of the political system. Not only did the Soviet Union limit the ability of science to improve by restricting the type of research conducted (i.e. genetic research was discouraged in order to culturally isolate Russia from capitalist influence of Germany where genetics was a prime area of study), but also by channelling the obsession with space research and animal experimentation that lead to unethical scientific practise (i.e. Demikhov's two headed dog - also there was a program recently on channel 4 about Soviet Dogs in Space if one is interested)

"There is always a place for heroism in our lives"

"Omon Ra"by Victor Pelevin (full English translation here) was probably my favourite of all the novels we studied, because it epitomises the playfulness of Russian Literature in expressing those strong values of friendship, compassion, bravery, all the nice things that make good adventure stories, yet is a thoroughly harrowing, awesome bit of Russian sci-fi which follows the young Omon, a boy with an aspiration to leave his dull soviet life to be a fighter pilot. Omon's brilliant ability in aeronautics has him unexpectedly accepted into a space program to the moon where he is trained up to be a astronaut. Along the way, Pelevin sensitively presents humanity in a heartless world with a brilliant plot twist. Heart-Breaking:

"all of my childhood dreams about the future were born of gentle sadness native to those evenings that seem to be detached from the rest of your life, when you lie in deep grass by the remains of someone else's campfire, your bicycle resting nearby, the west still bearing purple bands from the sun that had just set, while in the east there are already first stars popping up. I haven't seen or experienced very much in my life, but I liked most of what I have, and I always counted on the trip to the Moon to absorb everything that I passed by in hopes of encountering it again later, to take it in more finally and forever this time; how was I to know that the best things in life are always seen as if from the corner of one's eye? While I was a kid, I often imagined extraterrestrial vistas: stone-strewn planes, furrowed by craters and illuminated by otherworldly light, sharp mountain peaks in the distance, black sky with the glowing coal of the sun and stars around it; I pictured the layers of space dust, many feet deep, and the stones resting motionless on the lunar surface for billions and billions of years - I was for some reason strongly impressed by the thought of a stone being able to remain in one place for all that time, and then I would bend down and pick it up with the thick fingers of my spacesuit. I thought of looking up and seeing the blue globe of Earth above, looking like the school globe distorted by the teared-over lenses of the gas mask, and how this ultimate moment of my life will connect me to all those other moments when I felt myself on the verge of something wondrous and unfathomable"

I should be reading that one again soon.

I wrote about Platonov's "Foundation Pit" in the exam; an account of dystopia set during the first year of the Five-Year plan, evolves around the idea of the Kohlhoz- the complete Collectivization of farms ordered by Stalin and the destruction of the Kulaks (rich peasants) resulting in a horrific famine and death of thousands of innocent people. The plot is straightforward; the peasants are building a 'foundation pit' so as to build on top of it a huge house to accomodate all the proletariats of the world where they can live in peace together, and find 'happiness through labour' away from the destructive world. The peasants are steeped in a hopeless existence glossed with illusions of a empty promise unable to recognise that they stand knee deep in dirt. Yet they 'do it for their children' and use the young girl Nastya as the little hope that they work for, the little girl who represents the new Russia who they are building the pit for. *Spoiler* one can't help but be amused that at the end of the novel the pit serves as a very large grave for the little girl who dies as a result of neglect from the workers, too caught up in their own dreams that they abandon reality.

However, reading this book is a little less straightforward as although from the outset Platonov seems to wallow in crude 'pity for the pitiful', his surreal style of writing (precursor to modern existentialism) about people and their lives rather confusedly, produces words just as futile as the endeavours of these peasants who dig mindlessly night and day for a pit that is forever doomed to be completed. It seems that Platonov has this extraordinary talent for immersing his characters and his readers in emotional angst, stubbornly producing the existence of the suffering peasants in his novel into the mind of the reader ever present now as they were back then.

‘they lay in their empty coffins as if they were cramped little homes, feeling shut in and at peace’.

It is interesting to note that Platonov grew up next to a railway, where his father worked as a railway engineer. It is said that the young Platonov considered the trains as living and breathing machines, which is most evident in the breath of life he gives to his works, especially the foundation pit, where the characters in themselves are represented as hollow, starving, hopeless souls, filled only with pretty passionate pointless words.....It is a great read if only for the writing style but be prepared to get serious, seriously absurd.

I hope to be this enthusiastic about a book again some day. Forster's "Passage to India" almost killed me. I can't start on "Midnight's Children" just yet either.

Swiss Maestro Vs American Hot Rod

2009-07-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

*drum roll* Match Analysis!

Last time these guys were at a Wimbledon final together was 2005- Federer won.

Roger has a 18-2 winning record against Roddick usually achieved with breadsticks and bagels, by that i mean, 6-1 and 6-0 respectively. I am going to be extremely lazy and direct you all to THIS INTERESTING PAGE, it's not really laziness actually because this brilliantly accurate analysis is much better than what i could give you right now, with detail on the abduction angle, receiving stance, arm rotation on the serve and physical ability.

It's true that a lot of that analysis seems to be in 'survival of the fittest' mode, but it is often ignored when discussing tennis on t.v. or on commentary. Obviously the 'mental edge' is more interesting to talk about and more understandable, as a lot of people will probably not follow flexibility of the 'abductor muscles' but it is hugely intriguing nonetheless especially if you train and play yourself.

Other points to consider:

After the semis yesterday, Roddick half collapsed with emotion on his way up to the changing rooms, purely overwhelmed with what he has achieved. Coming this far after a heavy drought means the world to him, and it hasn't been easy...he played two very gruesome matches leading up to the finals... does he have enough left in the tank for sunday?

Can he hold serve? Can he keep his serve at least 95% first serve percentage? This is actually not a joke!!!! We can all expect a ridiculously dull final if Roddick cannot keep his best weapon polished at least half of the way.....

Its possible Federer will tank, that is, give an easy first few games to Roddick... Andy must not get excited and expend all his energy in the early sets, he should be experienced enough to know this already. Roger can go for hours at a incredibly high level of tennis, Roddick cannot do the same and he needs to really keep this in mind and cut the points short.

Federer's crown is pretty much inevitable. but hopefully Roddick will give us something to watch tomorrow, and maybe he will provide a useful platform for Roger to play some of his magic shots- which is entertaining enough....!

Player	Aces	Ist serve pct.	Sets lost/ Bagels dished	Unforced. Errors - Total/ Winners	Bk pt conv %	Time on court.	Matches played
Federer	77	67	1 / 0	71 / 239	49	11:29	6


Roddick	160	71	6 / 0	112 / 331	31	15:45	6

The world's a better place at SW19....

2009-06-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

Returned from Wimbledon a few days ago feeling more enthusiastic than i have ever been about this slam. Just one visit for a tennis geek is enough to make it feel like home.

Standing amongst thousands and thousands of enthusiasts, seeing top players in every direction you look, ice creams and strawberries (no matter how overrated they are) and fresh green lawn courts on a bright summers day just wreaks of the thrill of the tennis season.

The trip to Laandan was indeed three days of total tennis intoxication, which Mike aptly called a 'propa tennis getaway this' when i rolled up at his house with tennis racquet and all. Living and breathing of the stuff, from our evening game to the mornings absorption of casual match chit chat while queuing. We rolled our eyes at the Murray articles every day, and spent the rest on courts and walking around the grounds. If that wasn't enough, after a short break of tube journeys home from Southfields station, we hit the t.v. to catch 'Today at Wimbledon' before bed. It was awesome!

Nothing matters at Wimbledon except the tennis. How wonderfully uplifting. The world is a better place temporarily.

I had always thought that getting into Wimbledon was almost impossible without putting yourself through great hardship, but Mike and i found that you can get there for 7.30am in the morning and still get guaranteed entry with a grounds pass by 10 am. Obviously this means a 2 hour long wait, but it is not a shuffling queue because they let you through in batches supposedly, so we only had to 'move' in the queue once. The rest of the time we sat on the grass outside in the sunshine, listening to our ipods and discussing players and matches. They apparently reserve 6000 grounds tickets, but one day we were 6135 and still got in just fine. (it is unwise to leave it too late however).

The trip was very much a success considering we were not really uber prepared or anything and kind of gave up on checking schedules of play for the next day (it is more fun when it is a surprise!). We saw loads of amazing players- Lleyton Hewitt, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Gilles Simon, James Blake, Andy Roddick, Juan Carlos Ferrero (mike said he saw Andy Murray and David Ferrer walk by), Santorro, Jamie Murray play doubles (he was a bit shit), Jelena Jankovic from a distance, Fernando Gonzalez (total joker, Thiago Alves, Amelie Mauresmo, Kuztensova (french open champ 09... My trip is in digital format here on vimeo

A few very handy tips i picked up on a first visit to Wimby....

1. It is always worth having a nice stroll around the grounds before you do anything to get yourself acquainted with the courts and with the Championship. It's relaxing and very enjoyable. (Also extremely helpful if matches have been moved around to different courts and you want to get there quickly without having to ask around for directions) The place is huge and confusing in crowds, and it is a good idea to kinda know where you are going. We also brought a notebook to keep a mental check of all the good matches on so we had a rough plan of the day....

2. Always make sure you know which court you are cueing for when you don't have reserved seating. The queues can take AGES, since they don't let you on the stands till a game finishes so that the players are not disturbed. This means something up to a hours wait, and you don't want to find that you have actually been queuing for the wrong match/court. (this did happen to us, but luckily we only queued for about 30minutes before realising)

3. If you want to see good players on practise courts, GET ON THERE FROM 12 ONWARDS. About lunchtime all the best players come out to play, not much chance of seeing them past 2pm.

4. Keep your eyes peeled, players just walk past you all the time. This is not to get pictures/signings- they are busy people and probably have a lot of things to get one with, but sometimes they will be walking towards a practise court or a unused match court to warm up. (we saw andy roddick this way). So it is sometimes worth stalking them and seeing where they go.

5. Take food, everyone does and they all munch sandwiches during the matches. It is easier this way, because you won't really have time to actually buy food and sit and eat because the important thing is to get your ass to as many matches as possible and the queues for food are not worth it! It is also of course more expensive to buy on grounds.

6. Don't go overboard with sensible footwear, you can get by just fine in sandals, but try and make it flat. HOWEVER, don't ever wear those primary coloured plastic sandals that are all the craze now, selling at your nearest Topshop. Yea, they look good, but your feet will DIE. DIE!!

7. They do not accept card for grounds passes. Have some cash on you £20 for first week grounds passes...i think 40/50 for show courts..(though you will need to camp)

8. Always check out ticket resale to see if you can grab a £5 show court ticket. When we went, Andy Murray was playing the last match on centre and there was a massive 6 mile queue for tickets at ticket resale, so hardly anyone was queuing for court 1 and we got a ticket on there to see Fernando Gonzalez (awesome player beat Murray at French) within 10 minutes...

9. Don't expect to see top 5 players on your first visit. Expect to see top quality tennis and good players, but not the best. You may just be disappointed, but really, everyone who plays at Wimbledon is a delight to watch even if they are not Rafa and Roger. You will have a guaranteed awesome time if you love tennis anyway, and just go with the flow, because luck is all around at Wimbledon...

10. If you are going as a pair, take someone you can honestly really put up with, i was very lucky, but the last thing you need is to spend an inordinate amount of time with someone who makes you want to fucking kill yourself/ (or kill them). And probably best to take someone who knows as much or more tennis than you, as player spotting is 10x more efficient, and also the whole experience is better spent in the company of a tennis enthusiast who will not get bored and nag you for food in the middle of a match.

Well, that is all i can remember right now... but hopefully it should be pretty helpful, because none of this info is available via the website or otherwise.

I apologise for anyone who is actually following my blog posts and has noticed it hasn't been updated during these Championships too well. I suppose this is not a problem really, but i enjoy keeping it 'up to date'. I just have little time in my life for everything including tennis sometimes. US open will be better organised on here for sure, since it is my favourite championship.

I also thought i would articulate my disappointment that Gael Monfils was not playing at Wimby this yr because of a knee injury. All my best wishes go out to him,i hope he recovers soon enough for US open.

I fell of my bike just like i always used to

2009-06-21T14:43:00.001-07:00

I realise these posts are slowly becoming a bit personal and self-centred (it's probably why the font size has become smaller and smaller), but i am too lazy to start a new blog to separate this junk from, well, the rest of the junk....So today i went on a bike ride with my bro. I think the last time i rode my bike was a good year ago. Last summer in fact, so no wonder it hadn't felt like summer properly, until i went for a ride today.

My brother had already asked my dad to take my bike out by the time i got back to the house after my Oxfam volunteering shift, and i was quite happy to hop right on still sporting the inappropriate dress i wore into town that day. It was wonderful. There was a nice cool breeze, and no cars and just my brother shouting 'i am the supersonic' (whatever that means) peddling like crazy miles ahead of me.

He has finally learnt to ride his bike without any stabilisers, and can't get enough of being outdoors on the two wheels. Though i am 11 years older than him, i am still 'young' enough to be just a bigger kid to my brother, and i enjoy spending these precious moments with him, where i can cling onto that dwindling childhood euphoria before it really gets too late.

Sometimes i wonder just how long i can go on like this, before we both outgrow each other.

Probably the most fruitful thing that came out of this bike ride was when i fell over. I was in such a intense day dream, thinking about all the good times i had on my bike, that i lost track of where i was going and my front wheel skidded of a deep set pavement. I went crashing down, but luckily on the pavement side rather than the road side- and grazed my knees and left leg pretty bad.

To my brother's surprise i lay down laughing hysterically despite the sting down my legs, and i treasured how it felt. Its been such a long time since i've had this kind of fall that i embraced it, hoping that i will get another one sooner rather than later.

It feels good to get hurt like this. It seems that there is nothing but emotional pain with every year added on and sometimes you just want it to hurt where you can see it and where you can heal it.

I will be taking my bike out again tomorrow, and i won't look back.

Day 11/12/13 reflections: I'm slacking, it's inevitable, but i am always inspired

2009-06-05T15:42:00.000-07:00

There are some things that i enjoy to such an indescribable degree that i will gladly allow it to consume my daily havoc of a life, despite the fact that i should know better...

So even if i could go back a couple of weeks and get the chance to start all over, working harder, planning better, focusing my concentration, sleeping at decent hours, i would fuck it up all over again on purpose. Because anything that i would have achieved by doing all those things, would mean nothing to me in comparison to being able to follow such an incredible French Open.

Of course i would feel differently when i get older, and no longer have this unrivalled frivolity to wile away my time looking up match statistics, discussing player tactics and giggling at post-match interviews at 1am in the morning with my friends before exams. But i'm here and this is now, and i just. don't. care.

Every now and then, as a fan, you see a game of tennis which reminds you why you love hearing that ball bounce, and why that sound seems to be able to go beyond all the boundaries of perception to capture your attention time and time again, no matter what else is at stake. The Del Potro vs Federer semi-final was one of those games, and even with my unsettled post-examination head, and only being able to catch the last 2 sets, i could just about let all my worries subside me and settle down to watch the magic that occurs with a ball, a racquet, a net and just blistering desire.

There are probably only two people that i could just about stand beating Federer. Those two are Nadal and Juan Martin Del Potro.

Standing at 6 ft 6inch, Del Potro plays like his life is literally on the line, never ever giving in, he's almost like Murray in some ways, in that he is like this machine that will return every shot hit at him, except a huge difference is that Del Potro with enough honing will be miles more talented....Obviously his height gives him a major advantage, which is a big factor to why his serving motion is just so so good, and unlike some of the bigger guys, Del Potro actually moves pretty smooth on court, and just batters the ball every time it touches his racquet. With all the speed and power he is capable of generating, his passing shots are close to lightening, and i've noticed he has a gentle 'touch' at the net, which is an area that he would benefit a lot from with more practise. I have found it interesting to note, that the guys these days left lingering near the last rounds are all absolutely huge!- re: Monfils! Sam (Given-much(too much)-attention-2008) Querrey! Mario Ancic! etc.. But specifically Monfils and Del Potro are two of the most dangerous, and i was more than prepared for having to see Roger ousted by the Argentinian.

As i said, i didn't watch the first few sets, so i'm not sure what gave Potro the lead, but from seeing the last 2 (and a 1/2) all i could really decipher, is that he worked his little socks off, because he looked as tired and worn out as one could get being Juan Martin Del Potro by the time i tuned in. Federer's game isn't really the sort to grind people down physically, but certainly mentally. Just a Roger on top form is enough to put a huge mental barrier on the best players, and for a tender age of 20 years (!) Del Potro is doing such a beautiful job, and has the sort of fighting spirit that most players never adopt in their entire professional playing career. I always think that there is a very marginal line between the top 10 players and every other player, and the line is bound mainly by unrivalled mental strength....

This was evident when Del Potro so casually hit to the Federer forehand. Ok, so it is both Roger's downfall as well as his lethal weapon, but either way, you can only be very brave or very stupid to hit to that side...Del Potro is certainly the former, because if he avoided it, like so many players do just feeding to the backhand, Roger will have no mercy, especially when he is feeling good about himself, which was clear today.

One can tell when Roger Federer is a little nervous, behind that sheen of serenity there are all sorts of weird and crazy things going on up there. Up there is where the racquet battering is going on, and the only signs we see of that is when he tugs at the top right hand side of his shirt/ the left part of his shirt by his navel more often, or places a strand of hair into his sweat band a unnecessary number of times. The high is sometimes his ever so rarely heard bursts of frustration muffled by the towel he brings so quick to his face to hide the anxiety...

Just none of that today, cool as a fucking cucumber. The shots he missed he took in his stride, and the shots that were just too good, were taken with the utmost respect for his opponent. But in reply, these days, Roger adopts his 'i'm gonna serve it out motherfucker' attitude after he loses a point that shats all over his parade.

Some people see Federer's attitude as arrogant, but what they don't realise is that it is in fact genius. Why waste you energy on showing emotion? When you can use this as added fuel to up your game.

Two sets to love down. Again.

*Swoon*

How did he do it?

The beautiful thing about the fine physical specimen that is Roger Federer, is that, no one can ever really answer this question. But there are a few things today:

1. The Drop Shot- sweeeeeeeettttt as hell! I don't think Federer has ever been hitting drop shots this good for a loong time, and on clay too!- perfect. Clay is a base-line game (well duh, re: Nadal...), and this is the most perfect shot to play to an opponent who is a good few metres away from the baseline like most of the time.....However, it still needs to be executed with perfection (Murray take note): Federer is such an elegant player that all of his shots are precise, relaxed and flowing. The drop shot, even though it's basically a slicing action has to be just as relaxed and flowing to be good, pretty much. So it's no wonder Roger can do these so well. The backspin on the ball (can't remember which set/ game ><) was so good on one of the points, when Roger hit it as a inside-out forehand. The ball stopped in mid air and just dropped dead in it's tracks.

2. The inside-out forehand- Genius weapon, masterful. When it's good it's really good, and one only needs to see Roger's body take that wondrous turn to his forehand side to know with no doubt that this is going to pierce through the air and onto the line with no chance of retrieval. It was whip-like today, and i don't think i ever saw a hint of a slip. If it stays like this for the final, he will have no problems..

I have to say though, that i was a little disappointed with the Monfils vs Federer quarter-finals because i really did expect it to be so much more exciting. I have a lot of love for Monfils's drive and passion encompassed within such a young heart, and his serving motion is just plain awesome! (even though it is apparently modelled on Roddick's, but whatever). Gael is THE coolest player on the tour it has to be said, and it was a tad bit of a shame seeing him practically giving the game to Federer- but i do hope his knee gets better soon enough, because i love watching Monfils and all his heart thumping action. It was nice to hear someone call 'Come on My Son' from the stands ('My son' is Monfils translated :D)

I really have no idea WHAT to expect for the finals, but it will undoubtedly be e p i c. I can only be glad that i have been born at a time and into a world where i can observe such inspiring people.

Fuck this was meant to just go in my diary entry tonight...

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Day 6 short reflections

2009-05-30T07:07:00.000-07:00

The picture speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Freaking 54% first serve percentage is NOT going to carry you through anywhere near the final. The shots were messy, he was allllll over the place, Tipsarevich wasn't even playing great tennis but he still managed to take a lead in the first set.

Lucky for Murray, Tips retired (what is it with these Serbians??!! RE: Djokovic) in the second set after calling a doctor on court, popping a pill, and then deciding enough was enough. The camera shot on Murray's face when Tips left the court after the game said it all. He knows it's not good enough. I hope he gets throttled by Cilic; the 20 year old Croatian player, currently ranked no 13.

6ft 6inch Cilic will bring the game, he has a tendency to get bashed around, and flopping over his long legs, but when he's focused, he is really good. Murray will be looking to swatting this fly out the way.

I am supposed to be revising for my Psychology of Addiction exam which is less than an hour away right now. This is how much i have given up on everything in my life except tennis.

Matches to look forward to today:

1. Paul henry Mathieu vs ROGER FEDERER (last match of the day) should be sweeeet.

2. Philip Kohlschrieber vs Djokovic (lets see what tricks Djokovic has up his sleeve)

3. IN PROGRESS NOW I WISH I COULD WATCH!!!!- IGOR ANDREEV VS DEL POTRO- both absolute warriors.

Tennis, where were we?

2009-05-27T08:02:00.001-07:00

Seeing Federer drop tears like he used to drop winners at this years Australian Open was enough to put me off tennis for a good 4 months. I've since recovered, but amidst the inconveniences of, well, my degree :/ i've had to put tennis at the back seat for awhile, till now! Roland Garros is upon us- Clay Court Kingdom, for only one King. I need to pay severely for my lack of devotion and thus need to gather my thoughts on this one..

2009 aims for top players:

1. Nadal- Win Wimbledon again. This will absolutely set in gold his number one position, and his new legacy as face of tennis for the new generation. Perhaps most importantly, Nadal's aim will b

e to defend his winning position at Roland Garros. RG is HIS Tournament- it has been for four years, and if this becomes the fifth consecutive year he will have officially set a new record of five consecutive years as French Open winner (with only Borg being the runner up with four consecutive year wins).

2. Federer- HAS to try his hardest to at least GET TO THE FINAL at Wimbledon. Winning, is another thing, but if Federer can't make it to the final, he will lose a lot (probs all) of his cred not only from other players, but the majority of the tennis world. He also needs to capitalise on his good fortune of winning the Madrid Open, hope that Nadal's knees play up more, so he can bag the French.

3. Djokovich- I'm not entirely certain what's going on with Djokovic anymore, he always seems to be just swanning around, making it into tournaments, but never making any obvious 'mark of significance'. Djokovic lost to Nadal at Madrid, despite Nadal whipping out the unforced errors every few minutes..I am not impressed with Djokovic anymore, obviously this is not a nice thing for anyone to say, taking into account that i am not anywhere near the gruelling standards these guys are currently at, but still, i always accepted his arsey pretentious behaviour before, owing it to his self-righteous upbringing...? Djokovic always seems so ridiculously close to being a outstanding player, but just lets everyone down (including himself) in the process. I think we can all expect some 'drama' from him at RG in the form of some 'knee injury'.

4. Murray- There is just no getting rid of him. Obviously Murray's priority this year is to make it to make it to at least semi-final for Wimbledon. In his head, the aim is to be number 1 at the end of the year......Not happening. But he will try, he always does. The past few months have seen him improve in leaps and bounds, most notably in his fitness, his movement on court, mental strength and execution of tactics. If he wants to get anymore close to no 1, he needs to rack up all the titles he POSSIBLY CAN, and also has a ton to defend too. Murray needs to display all the potential he has, a young and promising player (has to be said, unfortunately) like himself needs to show people what he's got early, especially since there's more than enough young guns crawling up the ranks.

SO, last month's big news was Federer's win over Nadal at the Madrid Open; clay court, which has undoubtedly given Federer a HUGEEEEE psychological boost. This sort of circumstance is exactly what he needs before going into clay court season, and here's proof of that on an exclusive with CNN:

"He's won four straight times here in Paris which shows how tough he is, but if you play him the right way there will be chances, he is only human and we wait for that moment when he is not at his best; hopefully that will be this year," the Swiss said.

I am struggling to catch all the matches with revision and all, but Federer's win over Alberto Martin was a clean cut, 6-4 6-3 6-2, in just under two hours... Also looks like he has had a nice hair cut :D

2009-05-26T17:27:00.000-07:00

Someone tie me to 200 balloons so i can fly away from this world.

Grizzly Bear / Two Weeks from Minimaxwell on Vimeo.

When doctors get sick

2009-05-25T06:37:00.000-07:00

Life has these strange ways of reminding us that it still exists within every fragment of our bodies, and we can't ever get away with not participating in its horrible little games.

It only takes a single, unexpected text, an hour before an examination to pull you back into reality- which so easily fails to possess weary souls:

'I need u 2 pick Ash up frm school. Dad has been admitted into QMC'

With a lack of response to calls and texts back, we can only spend the next 4 hours convincing ourselves that we never got that message. That we could still remember the Broadbent Filter Model of Attention within the half hour left of this exam, and that we can always be stronger than we feel. Nothing seems real, and the car ride home from school will inevitably be a hopeless, dewy-eyed Pokémon discussion.

Back home, one car may sit unusually complacent on the drive, so that little boys can smile at the sight of it and gush 'Dad's home'. It is difficult to understand what sort of introspections a 7 yr old may have, when 7 years have been and gone where Dads are never home before 7pm.

When we turn around, and suggest to them that the car has never moved off the drive from morning, there is only something short of a simper and a quick glance back in the vehicle's direction as a response.

An hour or two may pass before someone puts forward the suggestion that an outing to the hospital is a very good idea after tea and biscuits. They drive, they visit, they sit, they exchange a kiss or two and then they leave. Car rides home can be nothing more than creative silence.

On arriving, we may sit out in the dusk with a face wet from silent tears, and tremble, holding the hopelessly brave, while they cry indecipherability onto the lapel of an equally affected other.

But we can see our luck, when it is reflected on the windows in the front porch, showing the difference that lies between losing something, and being reminded of how much there is to lose.

The patient can only be grateful for the luck that is felt through the endoscopic instruments reaching down their throats, sourcing the pain. There's a sweet familiarity to these techniques; the imaging, the precision, the countless research meetings, the computer, purging with clips of the convoluting gastrointestinal tracts. There's a pain that they get used to making a living out of in starch white coats, that they never imagine could plant itself in seemingly capable bodies. And seeing their colleagues look on, diagnose and discuss, while their own body has shown the signs of disintegration, is enough to shake them all into the reality that provides their bread and butter. The reality that they will all be in someday, lying on the white beds, breathing the white air and hoping that they will be cared for by someone as competent as themselves.

Brain Music: Four Tet

2009-05-19T17:29:00.000-07:00

I never appreciated Kieren Hebden's work so much before, but since starting revision for Yr 1 Psychology properly, 'Pause' is the one album i have on repeat almost constantly. It's a been a while since 2001, but the record is still just pacifying 'brain music' that seems to flow as one with the neurones firing around in my confused cerebral hemispheres. Maybe it's the context of my work this week (which has been a lot to do specifically with brain areas and their functions) but i couldn't help but think of 'four tet' as 'four tête' i.e. four heads, which in reality is quite true of the brain anatomy.

The motor cortex and frontal cortex can be thought of as one since they both belong to the Frontal lobe of the brain. The sensory is part of the Parietal lobe, and the visual is part of the Temporal lobe. While the Occipital lobe constitutes the cerebellum area.

Each of these lobes have a specific function, so seem to be four separately functioning 'heads', yet they all combine so beautifully into a integrated system. Unique in their capacities, yet entirely dependent. 'Pause' by 'Four heads' is such a complete album, listening to it makes me feel so aware of this integration of all these working parts of my head, and the stimulation of motivation that fabricate themselves from physical brain matter.

'Twenty Three' specifically reminds me of CSI music, the one that they use in the sequences of 'laboratory investigation scenes' where samples are being analysed, and tested, and fingerprints are taken etc etc. The rhythm is a driving force for my brain, in a highly positive sense, which for me portrays it as less of a 'slave system' in remembering this bombardment of information, but as a strong, and fully capable organ, that i shouldn't ever be afraid of exhausting.

[When i was little, and i felt things were too tuff, i always used to imagine bits of brain falling off inside my body and tumbling into the rest of my body, and the hollow of my chest and empty belly. Now i realise it is so far from that sort of fragility! ]

Another source of joy comes from the beginning of 'Mosquitoes' where the sound resembles that of a blue whale song (You have to wait a whiel before you hear the whale,there are better ones, i haven't properly explored to find some decent sound clips). I love listening to whale and dolphin sonar communication; for the thrill of it just being so foreign to me, and how there's this whole other language i will never be able to learn, no matter what. Kieren's work on this album is both foreign and familiar, which must be why it is so entrancing. Like whale song is familiar as a language of some kind, the children making noise on the track 'Park' is familiar, but the setting of the song is in a other-worldly medium. Just as whale song will never be comprehensible to us, nor will anyone be able to understand it for what it really is, other than a form of sonar communication.

'Glue of the world' stimulates my working memory, 'Everything is alright' are the action potentials flowing through my motor neurones to my fingers that allow me to keep keep keep keep keep keep keep keep on on on on on on on on on on on on on typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing..........................

...............................................................................................

...........................................and never stopping....

Video Gaming and Perceptual Processes

2009-04-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

Game Developer's Conference 2009 is upon us.

At home, i rarely experience a personal moment that isn't soundtracked by my brother's nintendo/playstation/computer games. Off late i'm becoming increasingly concerned for him- the amount of time he spends in front of screens is ridiculous, and i'm sure there's actually a very small percentage of reality that his eyes see these days. It's exhausting even thinking about having to prise him away from his digiblip pseudo universe, and i sometimes wonder if he'll develop into what i conceive of as a normal human being. By this i don't mean that i think he is getting aggressive, or anti-social, or using games as a 'emotional vent' or all the other increasingly outlandish claims that 'psychologists' make in newspapers and TV. He's a pretty normal seven yr old, as are the majority of his classmates who are hardcore gamers.

But with this generation, growing up in an age where video games have gone past the loveably defunct graphics and thoughtless, mild mannered gaming of Atari and Sega days, turning more and more to cold, calculated, plotted shootings and murder that bend around basic ethics....something will have to give? I guess everyone wonders how this fantastic world of realistic gaming doesn't change the way kids perceive the world through a physical and communicative medium. Does it necessarily mean corruption?

This is what psychologists should really be interested in.

The past few days i've been studying perception and what it means to 'perceive'. i.e. is perception just an extension of our cognitive abilities? Or are there mechanisms that are uniquely perceptual processes. The basic idea seems to be that perception is a sort of 'slave' to higher-order processes like interpreting and understanding information and cannot be altered by how the participant 'desires' to see the world. BUT a perceptual system can be 'tuned up' to collect evidence of a particular type from the environment. A well known experiment is Blakemore and Cooper's kitty rearing study. Kitty H was grown up in an environment composed of horizontal lines, while Kitty V reared in a vertical environment. Recordings of single neurons in their brains showed that orientation-selective cells had a preferred orientation of within 45ºof the exposed orientation in the environment. The kittens eventually became blind to lines and edges in the non-preferred direction. i.e. kitty H could not perceive vertical lines…

Essentially, perceptual systems at the heart of our biological make-up are sensitive to the environment, their sole purpose is to provide us with a valid account of what there is out there- A ‘best first guess’ is what they say. The action we take upon whatever we see is then up to our cognitive systems to interpret- but this can’t be done without a initial valid account of what we are actually ‘seeing’i.e. perception should be able to communicate effectively to the cognitive system that there is a rabid dog dripping with foam at the mouth running towards us, and the decision to run or lie down silently and wait our horrible death is up to the mind’s central processing unit. Most likely we will choose the first option, and hence perception is of an essential survival value- this makes a lot of sense. But what does this have to do with gaming?

I recently came across an informative article called ‘Rage Against The Machines’, with a refreshing view of video game culture. The article discusses gaming in the perspective of a product created by humans for humans, and therefore the incomprehensibility and insecurities that people have with gaming are entirely irrational. He discusses gaming constructively, with the impacts it has on the way children learn complex social behaviours, as a developing cultural activity (the PS game Ico is apparently visually based on the works of Giorgio de Chirico) and the place of gaming amongst other leisure activities such as reading and sport which gaming has relatively little economic impact on. The article actually mentions a bit from Richard Bartle’s biting article in the Guardian attacking those who discredit the future of gaming.

“Games are mainstream. Drown, or learn to swim”

Soon there will be a society where gaming will be a vital part of developing culture. What of these people? How will they work? How do they perceive? What will they turn into? Indeed Piaget's best work on child development did include 'learning through play'. This is just 21st century play.

Perception seems most important in our modern visual culture, more than it did in generations before. It makes me wonder sometimes whether the pressure of a visual culture is big enough to significantly alter the way our perceptual system works, starting from my brother's generation.

Games such as Bioshock and Mass effect with their uber fancy graphics and painstakingly detailed character descriptions lead individuals through fantastic worlds, where noone can be trusted, yet the need to engage and make a connecion with this freakish world is vital. Bioshock for example, is set in an alternate history 1960 in an underwater world called Rapture, Jack (player) must survive attacks by mutated beings that inhabit Rapture. It's full of DNA harvesting, ex-Nazi collaborators and complex moral decisions with bloodthirsty spatterings...

Bioshock

Mass effect

In reality we look for expressions in people's faces and body language to aid us in our social interactions with other people. In video games, there is no difference (oh apart from the fact that we're dealing with aliens and mutants). The world continues to destruct itself with violence and selfishness, innocent people die everyday, and everything seems to be spiralling into a grim and compassionless future. Maybe it's the hard skin and keen eye that develops from playing games like Grand Theft Auto and Bioshock that's needed to cope. 'Survival of the fittest' taken to the extreme.....

This is the kind of thing that they should include in dull cognitive psychology books.

In line with this i’ve been listening to The Advantage self-titled nintendoesque album- basically covers a lot of video game songs…

And also: This is shit hot.

Dreams and Psychoanalysis: "A Cinematic Representation"

2009-03-24T06:25:00.000-07:00

Magritte's Portrait of Edward James 1937

Hello, it’s Mango-has-gone-off-Monday! (well it was yesterday when i wrote this and forgot to post it)

So YESTERDAY i could make no mango smoothie because the mango had as you now know, completely gone off. Is it obvious that i’ve already stopped trying with these posts.....?

I came across this article today in the guardian on mental illness as a occupational hazard for poets. Mostly, i just enjoyed this part:

“Batty and Wardle have both 'done time' on psychiatric wards and written resonant, gutsy and humorous poems about their experience”

Here we are, blistering evidence that mental illness in the long term increases everyone’s ability to be a creative tour de force (but conditions apply) on a mission to an ultimate utter lack of creativity (suicide). I’m not going to lie, among all the sadness of this month including Goody’s cancer-hit-and-run, i have undoubtedly found it difficult to keep the frown upside down. Getting as little sleep as possible allows me to avoid the point of contact where my unconscious finds ‘expression’ in the animated and illusory world of dreams. However, the past few days, an unbearable slumber has over ridden my otherwise unfailing adamance. The outcome: Teething Nightmares.

I’ve been having repetitive dreams of being shot, and always in an act of cowardice. i.e. the shooter will ask me to hand everything over, and tell him the whereabouts of my family and all my personal details, and if i do, he will leave me alone. Inevitably, i tell him everything, and then he turns around and shoots me heartlessly. Mostly, this occurs in the first person, but the other night, i dreamt that once i was shot, i realised i was a little girl and not myself. I had unwittingly walked into someone else’s body, and now enduring their pain. Then i had to watch the little girl being placed on a foreign hospital table, spurting blood; the bullet had hit her in the stomach, yet all this while, it was me who was feeling the pain, like i had replaced her soul with my own.

Even more bizarrely, the rest of the dream continued with me switching roles between myself, the doctor and my grieving mother, like some tireless schizophrenic. A sort of "Doppelgänger effect’ from the inside out (since i don’t tend to remember whether these people looked like me, but they all definitely were me in spirit). This was the only part that i was really interested in; the various infestations of me within different characters or ‘roles’.

The point of me saying all this is: i believe that a recurring dream must be something of significance. By the by, i came across a book entitled ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema’ the other day. Normally i wouldn’t have the will to read something like this, but felt less compelled to rebuke it when i realised it was a well disguised coffee table reading handbook to the interpretation of dreams.

On cinema:

“ If you only knew how strange it is to be there, it is not life, but it’s shadow, it is not motion, but it’s soundless spectra”

Maxim Gorky (cited in Popple 1996:97)

The book was basically trying to address the fact that dreaming as the epitome in psychoanalytic interpretation is directly comparable to the big screen, in terms of both cinema and dreaming act as a type of ‘psychical apparatus’ in learning to tell the difference between what we perceive and what we imagine. Mainly so we don’t end up like Uncle Josh:

Josh here is unable to distinguish between the film and reality. This is a crude example, really.

I think uncle Josh is hallucinating, and it has nothing to do with the fact that he may be an idiot and can’t tell he’s watching a film. It’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time to hallucinate and have someone interpret that as your inability to perceive. Uncle Josh is a kind of ‘mirror’ that unites the external picture to the internal, his emotions are manifest in the screen, similar to how i felt mine were manifest in the other people in my dream. Again, i take this to be the inability of my self to distinguish between other people’s emotions and my own...

This is ultimately ‘doubling’/ idea of establishing an ego etc, which the book references to ‘Der Student Von Prag (The Student of Prague) using the idea of a ‘double’ where in the footprints of Faust, impoverished scholar Balduin gives up his reflection to a sorcerer in exchange for wealth. Silly boy. Balduin finally drives himself to suicide where he shoots the apparition of his double ultimately killing himself. Rather like that scene from Fight Club right at the end.

Der Student Von Prag...

So ultimately, i am no longer inclined to analyse my dreams in terms of Oedipus or the individuating ego because i am not that insane yet. Freud aptly implies that dreams show that a normal capacity for hallucination persists in us all: in other words, i should go to bed at a decent hour until furthur notice..

Next psychoanalysis and film installment will probably be on Hitchcock. Just kidding! Actually it will. But maybe first on inter-group processes...

Popple, S. (1996) ‘The Diffuse Beam: Cinema and Change’, in C. Williams (ed.) Cinema; in The Beginnings and the Future, London: University of Westminster Press, 82-99

Sleeping in halves, Sleeping in wholes.

2009-03-18T18:29:00.001-07:00

Ok, so now that i've reflected on my first post on this blog in a rather different frame of mind, it's obvious how ridiculously melodramatic that is (and there i was, hoping not to try and make epic introductions)

I'm a melodramatic person, it has to be said. I promise to not ever put anything quite as dramatic again.

In my defense, i'm pretty lost in my work, lost in society, and lost in my head right now. This morning, i effectively just needed to get myself from my house to university since i'd unwittingly stayed at home the night before to sort some things out. Due to my knack for cutting off with reality, i had to drive back to my house 4 times after a half a journey completion down the dual carriage way to get an item i'd forgotten and crucially needed that day. That means i forgot four things four times and made a total of 8 half journeys. Amounting to what would have been 4 full journeys up and down. It was like a part of me was not even 'with me'.

I was half asleep. This is pretty funny, because dolphins do this anyway quite literally. The two hemisphere of their brains sleep independently, and seems to serve as some crucial survival value- quite the opposite to the connotations of being 'half asleep'.

I covered sleep some time ago in a tutorial. I think this video should be pretty interesting; i haven't really got round to all (6?) parts of it yet.

The Ugly Love: An introduction

2009-03-18T06:30:00.000-07:00

As a wonderfully unsophisticated blogger, i’m going to try and pull this off.

Hopefully with some relative charm.

Last night, I was a disgracebook status ‘F.R.U.S.T.R.A.T.E.D’, at having come to the realization that a big part of my ‘interest spectra’ had almost totally disintegrated. Something that used to make me want to know more, was almost indistinguishable from the other things that i vaguely show an interest in and move along from just as hastily.

I’m being contradictory for a very good reason. I have an ugly love for Psychology:

Missable.

Replaceable.

Mostly now unfathomable.

At university, it is a rather dire science, that i sometimes feel is as cold as the laboratory. Just to demonstrate my romanticism; at the beginning of first year, i thought our lab sessions consisted of a mass of white coated first years observing wired bodies studying a Kanizsa figure or inkblots through a glass observatory. If not that, then at least some pigeon and coloured bulb action, please. It is not any of those things, instead we sit like zombies in front of computer screens calculating t-tests and pressing keys according to whether we see a word or non-word.

As a result of my failure to engage myself with my course, i'm having a bit of fun with it, starting a blog and what not. It's one last try of redemption for all those people, myself included, who have the ugly love.

Mostly, the blog will just be a ‘supplement’ to the topics i cover on my psychology course that will hopefully include art, music, films, books, interesting articles i happen to come across, and anecdotes from friends and strangers alike.

Bridging the gap between academia and general intrigue has never been more riveting. Because if i don’t have the motivation to keep this blog updated, then it inevitably means i don’t have the motivation to finish my course. If i do finish it, then it would be a complete and utter waste of my time.