Lifestyle Dissected

I am so determined to learn this next. With every fibre of my being. Expect a video of me playing this in a couple years of so.



I've been spending my days reading, going to class, practicing, etc. etc. etc.



List of things to listen to / re-listen to:



This Heat - Deceit

True Widow

HTRK - Nostalgia

Dis-

Magik Markers

The United Sons of Toil / Lars Bang Larsen split (highly recommended)

Jacques Ibert

Beethoven symphony arranged for piano by Liszt (?)

More Liszt

Georges Delerue



Also, I recently re-listened to The Chameleon's Script of the Bridge. I really, really listened to it. Every note, every word, every single change in sound, I tried to catch and piece together. Truthfully, that album is probably one of the most essential in all music. It covers so many different topics just in the lyrics, and if I could choose two songs that could easily sum up an entire generation, I would choose "Second Skin" and "View from a Hill." My favorite lyrics from "Second Skin" are:



It's like you fail to make the connection

You know how vital it is

Or when something slips through your fingers

You know how precious it is

Well you reach the point where you know

It's only your second skin



And from "View from a Hill" (possibly the most beautiful song ever created in the history of EVER):



Pick myself up and take the air

The fragrance of children everywhere

Slowly absorbed into my square

Debating what is and isn't there

Who cares



Ugh, if you ever have doubts about life or just want to lie alone somewhere and let your mind wander off, listen to Script. It holds so many answers in its multifarious layers, and to add to that, it is just so perfectly, piercingly beautiful.



Currently reading: Pnin by Nabokov (along with various Lovecraft fiction). Well, I'm basically finished with it, but I'm now going through it and writing down memorable quotes and other such thoughts that stood out to me. Here are some of my most favourite of favourite quotations taken from the novel:



"The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense."



"Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion."



"My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong slimy untouchable monster that one had to be parasitized with, alas."



"Pnin of course would have given her a divorce as readily as he would his life, with the wet stems cut and a bit of fern, and all of it wrapped up as crisply as at the earth-smelling florist's when the rain makes gray and green mirrors of Easter day..."



"Pnin would get drunk on his private wines..." (Meaning, Pnin would reminisce about his past and it would fill him with such joy and mirth he would laugh uncontrollably, or smile in some infectious way).



"[The Egg and We] was ... a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure." (I included this simply because of the magnificence of the sentiment).



"Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?"