You can do anything in a poncho

Well almost. You sure feel like you can do anything. Something that made my day, I was walking along oxford street early this morning, past the old car repairs and the pointless, but awesome card decorating place, when I noticed it was Autumn. You know when something just hits you like that?

Theres the wind

the smell

and then it ocurred to me that it must have been around this time last year that I started this blog.

so happy birthday blog!

I sometimes spend an hour thinking about whether I want to look cool or just look like I don’t care, do you ever get that?

here is my dilemma. Its sad but it gets me:

• I love to dress up, I like to think about the colour combination, the mix of era’s and whether i wear one of my crazy headscarfs.
• I like to walk around in trackies and bare feet.

So thats my problem, I see choosing clothes as like a watered-down, much more self-concious version of art.

I think I just wore jeans and a cool silky hooded jacket thing, which sort of combined the two of my needs, also, the silky jacket is a lot like a pajama top, which I like.

gah, why am I talking about clothes?

ANYWAY!!

another thing that made my day (does that mean i had two days in one? or maybe it just means two things went into making it good…)

the new Frankie is out!

and it came out a day early!

and I love nice surprises like that, although it meant I didnt have enough money to get sushi, that was fine, frankie fills me up quite nicely :)

I started thinking a bit about last year, and all the crazy shit that happened.

moving furniture in our boarding house rooms

sitting in the top compartments of cupboards

taking stupid photos

taking showers randomly, with our clothes on, because school had made us so numb.

dancing in the bathrooms

sprinting up and down the corridoors

watching stupid daytime tv

 

to be honest, I miss running up to my friends in our year area and givng them massive hugs so that they run out of breath, and then turning up late to economics, or missing the bus for sport.

I miss walking along the sun-drenched road to the beach after school, singing and dancing to the presets.

Running up the side of the tunnel things.

sitting on a boat in the middle of a playground.

looking at the people who were free and wishing we could be them

I didn’t truly appreciate having friends with me all the time.

I was always scared of not having friends there all the time, but I never knew what it would be like.

 

wow

another silly rant.

I’ll leave you there

 happy birthday blog!

I was trying to think of a name, and now I have one: I’ve never read any Kerouac. You underestimate the power of Dr Seuss.

You want to tear up the sky
and ruin the wind
you could rip off your face
and scream at the birds
they don’t give a shit
they just fly around
tweeting like lunatics

communication is the problem to the answer-10cc

Why do people love sad songs?

 

 

I’ve been learning this terribly sad blues song lately ‘Georgia on my mind’ after I heard it performed by some waapa students and I’m now wondering why people love sad songs?

Admit it, we’re all suckers for sad songs. I know, most of the music I consider good quality just happens to be sad. Many of the best albums, have been dedicated  to:

• a breakup
• death of a loved one
• suicide
• The insignificance of humanity 
• war

and I’m sure theres more.

Sad songs have been around for a while now. As long as people were sad and had a concept of music, that’s all that was needed. The first significant opera; L’Orfeo(1607), was based on the greek tragedy ’The Legend of Orpheus’, which tells the story of Orpheus going to hell to retrieve his lover, by singing to the gods. They let him have her on the promise that while leaving, he doesn’t look at her, she gets frustrated, ignorant to this, and while telling her he can’t look at her, he sees her and then she is lost forever.

Sad songs really took a big step in the Romantic period, with Schumann’s song cycles and Beethoven’s haunting symphonies. The use of dynamics really became popular, and this gave room for large amounts of expression and exaggeration.

 (taking a big jump here)

Sinead o’connor’s Nothing Compares, is constantly referred to as one of the saddest songs around. A heartboken girl sings of her lost love, and how no one else will replace him.

‘Went to the doctor and guess what he told me

guess what he told me

he said girl you gotta try to have fun no matter what you do

but he’s a fool”

Sinead’s voice sounds desperate and lost, haunting listeners that

All the flowers that you planted mamma

in the backyard

all died and went a way

i know that living baby was sometimes hard

but i’m willing to give it another try-yayaa (hit’s an uplifting major chord right here, as if to show her denial with her deluded sense of hope)

Bon Iver’s album ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ was written after a breakup. The music on this album is full of harmonic genius and heart breaking lyrics sung with passion. The song ‘Skinny Love’ is made up of the magical vi-I chord progression that is so commonly used in sad songs, It’s hard to explain why this works, it could be the complete purity and happiness of the first chord (I) contrasting against the sadness of the relative minor (vi). In his song ‘Woods’, Justin Vernon layers his voices to give a sense of vulnerabilty and rawness.

Jeff Buckley’s album ‘Grace’ was voted by Australians as the second best album to date. Buckley’s music is bittersweet at it’s extreme; With his constant use of unresolved suspended fourths, leaving an empty sad feeling (‘Last Goodbye’) and his incredibly versatile voice singing with passion. ‘Hallelujah’, an existential hymn-like piece, revisits an old love and in the process, questions his faith “Love is not a victory march/It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”

 

 

So why?

why listen to sad songs?

I think that people are constantly faced with sadness and tragedy wherever they go. You might see it on tv, on the news, or closer to home, and yet we are constantly expected to be happy, and if we aren’t, there are drugs that can be prescribed, prosac, anti-depressants, you name it, the list of drugs and the extent that people will go to to ‘be happy’, is a neverending list.  If we are always going to be happy, we’re never going to remember what it’s like to be sad and then we have nothing to compare our happiness with. When you listen to something like Jeff Buckly’s ‘Hallelujah, You enter a realm of bittersweet content, because you are feeling sad and at the same time, a certain happiness in knowing that you are alive and feeling emotions that are natural for people.

Forever, I am seeing things being so obviously dressed up and painted over, so that we don’t have to come to terms with sad and tragic things in life. American tv will insist that there is always a happy ending, it doesn’t matter if there isn’t a moral anymore, as long as there is a happy ending, it’s acceptable.

In amongst all the crazy shit going on in the world with envionmental and economic turmoil there needs to be some sort of hope. For there to be hope, I think there must be a certain amount of sadness and despair. For years, polititians didn’t believe there to be a problem with global warming, even with the proof from scientists, it has been inevitable that the misuse of the worlds resources, would be detrimental. However, the leaders, with the choices to be made, would remain in denial, fearing fear itself and fearing a negative attitude. There is always a way of getting around the truth, either leaving it out completely, or dressing it up, and painting over it in language that left the public feeling better. To move forward and finally hope, we have to accept and feel a certain sadness about a matter. People see sadness as a weakness and can’t cry anymore, however, if you ever remember going through a breakup, and went through a night of worrying, without letting your emotions take over, you might remember waking up feeling shit. Now compare that to the time you thought of all the worse situations and you cried yourself to sleep, you might remember you felt a whole lot better. Being sad and thinking of the worst, puts things into perspective, and reminds you that you can always feel better, especially after a cry.

Sad songs make you feel sad, hearing about other’s pain, puts your pain into perspective, and gives you hope.

you need to cry, to know what laughter really is.

This is cute

[Limedrop]

Why have people stopped listening?

Why are we always just waiting for our turn to speak?
Is it due to the impatience of the modern-day man?
or is it because we think that we can’t learn anything useful from our friends, or the common average joe?
Maybe it has to do with the ego? and constantly wanting to make an impact on other people’s lives.

So consequently there will be no parsnips.

I just want to sleep

my sister is having a ‘blood bath disco’

and is playing crappy crappy music

so i can’t sleep

It was very wierd, I was just sitting on the loungeroom couch and two guys were making out and my mum was just sitting next to me.

people are smoking in our backyard.

my sister holds more hard-core parties than me.

It’s probably the most hard core 16th I’ve ever seen.

haircut!

A friend tol me to do something outrageous today

so I cut my own hair!

I’m very happy with it actually :)