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Archive for the ‘music’ Category

I started taking piano lessons when I was about nine years old. My teacher, Joan, didn’t believe in using metronomes and always had long, fancy nails even though pianists aren’t supposed to. At some point during the first year of lessons, she told me that music is really all about MATH.

No math = no music. A huge revelation for me as a kid. It’s a big truth that’s never left me. At first my feelings about it were a little conflicted; it was sort of stressful (”I’m so bad at fractions!”), but realizing that math is the foundation of music (or at least one doorway into building and understanding it) never sucked the romance or beauty out of it. It never made it dry to me. It can be invisible enough that you don’t actually NEED to know it or think about it for it to be in there. That lesson primed me to notice as years went by that math and science are built into nature and art and our insides. That the basics of them are intuitive, like rhythm, but the more you know about the math and science of something, the better your music or art or appreciation of those things can be.

Knowing that art is really science has been a solace to me — art isn’t reserved only for a few people who are divinely inspired. It can be orderly: accessed and created systematically. With simple formulas. With a wide variety of tools mixed with individual perspective, personality and tastes to make it seem unique and magical, disguising the numbers in the craft of it.

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I shot a set of pictures of Delia wearing some hot Hello Kitty shorts on Friday night and the photos are all jacked up. I’m a long way from understanding the science of photography; I *like* numbers, but they don’t stick in my head very well so even though I’ve read about how cameras work and how OUR camera works I still don’t have it committed to memory or know how to manipulate light and settings quickly to achieve what I want. I have to just walk around and fiddle with things until I mostly-accidentally happen onto something lovely. Most of the good pictures I take are the product of luck and shooting A LOT without fully comprehending what I’m doing. I recognize what looks good and beautiful and erotic to me (or at least halfway decent) and what looks bad to me and have a few basic practices for making the former (especially in the “halfway decent” category) and avoiding the latter, but my technical skills are pretty basic.

All of the pics looked dark to me so I bumped the ISO up to 1000 or 2500, I forget now (hence the graininess) and the speed down to 25 or 30 — they still looked dark for some reason; I was letting the camera auto-focus (selecting the area to focus on myself with these little movable box thingies; I forget what Nikon calls that function but it didn’t seem to be working well on this particular night) and adjust the aperture itself until I decided to do a closeup and switched everything to manual (because it balks when we ask it to autofocus macros); suddenly everything was WAY TOO BRIGHT and I had to change the shutter speed. The only thing I can think of is that the camera wasn’t doing a good job of automatically adjusting the aperture and when I switched to manual and adjusted it myself then everything changed. It sucked because we wanted these pics to be bright.

The older I get, the more I see that MOST working artists — writers, photographers, graphic designers, sculptors, painters, musicians, etc. — are just people who’ve chosen to do that kind of work. That the only thing that sets them apart from the rest of us is the amount of time they put into their art and confidence they have in devoting themselves to it without worrying whether or not a jury of peers think they deserve to make money on it. Very few artists are people who actually possess something innate that the rest of us don’t have; most of it is taking the time to learn and apply information that’s available to everyone (or anyone with the resources to do a little research) and then investing money in the right tools and lots of time in practicing. Sometimes I think the most successful artists are the ones who are actually LESS gifted and too stupid/overconfident to recognize that there are other people (usually making zero dollars on their art) who are WAY more talented. Maybe the only way to be a successful “artist” is to NOT be great — to not complicate shit with too much vision, originality, or diverse techniques and just work from simple formulas to make things that are easily recognizable and accessible to the masses. See also Adaptation. If your work brings other people pleasure does it really NEED to be super duper excellent?

The older I get, the happier I am with shooting for mediocrity. Even mediocrity requires a lot of hard work (for me, at least). Mediocrity is attainable without being a given; you can stand out and make a decent living in a field simply by being one of the relative few to 1) choose that field, 2) commit to it for a number of years, and 3) make yourself known. All the better if you’re willing to take emotional and financial risks and make sacrifices for your work/”art”. The happier you are with mediocrity the wider your success. I’ve slowly shifted my focus of “pride” away from “talent” and pinned it on “work”; you can’t be proud of having good taste or being born with certain attributes making you better suited than most to doing one job or another. Those are only things you can be THANKFUL for. The things you can actually be PROUD of are hard work, dedication and defying convention to choose happiness. To call yourself an artist as soon as you choose to be one — to make it your job — rather than waiting until you imagine other people think you are good enough to deserve that label. Those are the people I admire more and more, the ones who are brave & devoted enough to create some form of art (even if it’s just fair to middlin’) and are savvy enough to make it a business.

I used to think having to work hard at something or take a lot of time to make something acceptable was something to be ashamed and embarrassed of. If it wasn’t easy it meant I wasn’t good at it. Now I realize that’s total bullshit (even if I still FEEL that way sometimes). The strategic choices and commitments you make to invest work in things that make you happy, better, more skilled, or even just capable of seeing you should make a different choice (I’ve always believed that quitting is something to be proud of; that whole “quitters never win” line is such a crock of shit). The time you spend allowing yourself to suck ass — IMMERSING yourself in sucking ass and slowly filling in the void of your ignorance with knowledge — just so you can become mediocre at something you love and then keep working to try to improve upon that. Beyond mediocrity there are so few people who are actually able to recognize the difference between mediocrity and greatness, there’s no reason to beat yourself up if you’re not capable of becoming that elite.

Being a “jack of all trades, master of none” ROCKS. It’s fun, it’s challenging, and I don’t love any one thing enough to give up all the other stuff. So I really have to be satisfied with mediocrity, slow progress, and making balanced choices to devoting little bits of time here and there to different things I love. Like making flash cards to learn photography stuff. You’re never too old for flash cards. I’m not, anyway.

I am mediocre at so many things, and have managed to balance (with great mediocrity) such a gigantic shitload of different kinds of work that I deserve to be quite proud of myself and my extrao
rdinary mediocrity. I feel so blessed to be in a position to dabble so widely. Lucky lucky lucky, and proud of myself for creating a notable percentage that luck by my choices. For recognizing my luck and exploiting it to the best of my limited ability.

Some of us are able to do our work just because we’re lucky enough to have the resources to buy tools, to live in an environment filled with inspiration and/or to be close to people who make beautiful subjects and do most of the art/work for you.

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I love arranging forkfuls of food. Ones where I have the perfect ratio of one thing to the other(s). Mashed potatoes to gravy to meat. Raisins to flakes. Heavens to Betsy. It doesn’t have to be fancy, the formula just has to be right. Everything pleasingly arranged in relation to each other. I will never be a good cook because I don’t want to practice how to be; that’s Delia’s thing. It’s my job just to love eating, every day, tasting and swallowing over and over and saying thank you, honey.. And to figure out how to arrange camera settings like food on a fork, adjusting hole-sizes, timing mechanisms, and digitally tweaking things in perfect relation to the kind of light shining on my girlfriend.

Last night we stayed up way too late, but it was worth it to catch up a little on something we haven’t had enough of lately: SEX. Watching/listening to Daniel Lanois (see below) put me into a magic place, and reaching over to feel Delia’s semi-hard cock made fucking her totally irresistible. I alternated between stroking her cock and feeling her swollen, growing boobs before I got on her and came two times to her one. The whole thing was super-intense, partly because it’s been a couple of weeks but mostly just because it IS.

It’s super windy here today with a projected snow storm rolling in; I think we lost power last night so most of our cams went (and stayed) down until we got up. Don’t be surprised if it happens some more over the next week. I *hope* it won’t interfere with the shows and chat we have scheduled this weekend, but if it does? You’ll know weather is the reason.

Enjoy the full moon tonight, if you can. It will probably be clouded over here.

I’m going to make myself keep exercising because it’s paying off after a week of being consistent; I feel a lot better already. I did fall off the wagon yesterday and tried to tell myself getting a massage was AS GOOD as getting exercise, but sex and backrubs really aren’t all that aerobic so if I want to keep feeling good, I need to do some physical work tonight.

I have galleries to post for members, but honestly I don’t like them enough to post them right now so I’ll put something else up and we’ll shoot something better.

Tonight’s ending on a very positive note that could even be viewed as a metaphor for other things going on in our lives; we finally installed a second hard drive for storage on my main work machine so I’m moving big files off my weighted-down C drive. It feels like a fresh start! Right now I’m filling up some of that space by transferring non-work photos over to this machine so I can enjoy playing with shots we’ve taken for fun/to learn about our camera.

November 20th: a buck Delia spotted in our neighbor’s backyard:

Our “new” camera (Nikon D300) has been therapeutic for me, making me stop and take time out to really LOOK and lose myself in details outside of myself. I’m not the kind of person who tries to capture EVERYTHING with a camera — I definitely appreciate being in the moment with family, friends and on vacation — but when we’re at home (which is the same as being at work unless we make a really concerted effort for it not to be) doing the daily grind it’s a big challenge for me to get out of my head. But now, when something mundane and beautiful captures my attention I feel justified in grabbing the camera, ostensibly to learn to take better photographs, and spending 5-20 minutes to really SEE and try to understand what I’m seeing: the light, the textures, the motion . . . challenging myself over what’s real and not real because it can look so different viewed with my eyes compared to how it’s captured by the camera. Immersing myself in all those different versions of truth and light and darkness and the stories we instantly create and details we insert after pulling them out of our asses when we think we’re looking at our surroundings.

Looking out our window a few hours ago:

We actually bought three 500 GB hard drives months ago for three different machines and up until today, had only installed ONE of them because of little nuisances like not having Dell’s annoying little drive “caddies”, not having serial ATA cables with the 90 to 180 degree corner jobbies so the case will close properly, me despising crawling around on the floor fucking with all the cables and cords tangled around dust bunnies, etc. If you heard me screaming last night it was when I bashed my elbow into the corner of my desk during that process. Anyway, we finally took care of it and I ordered everything we need to install a couple more on other machines.

The past couple of days I had the alarm set for 8:30 in the morning to try to get us back into a groove of semi-normalcy; at least I *thought* I set the alarm for 8:30. Turns out I forgot to adjust the ipod when the time changed so we were actually being woken up at 7:30 which just didn’t feel right. We’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll even start my day by going outside with the camera.

November 2nd as the sun took a dive:

And now a couple of random notes:

*Check out Delia’s post about today being the Transgender Day of Remembrance (and way to go Governor Gregoire for signing the proclamation – the most we could have expected Dino Rossi to do would have probably been to wipe his ass with it).

*Last night I enjoyed a conversation with my wanker in which I wasted lots of time raving about this Teddy Thompson fellow and a performance we saw on Later with Jools Holland. Here it is, and it slays me:

I’ve only downloaded one of his songs (a cover of “She Thinks I Still Care”, one of my all-time faves) because there’s no way I can narrow it down so I’m trying to hold out to be able to buy some of his albums, though I will probably download his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Tonight Will Be Fine”:

Guess what gets the most play on our satellite? It’s the XM channel called Audio Visions playing new age music. We have it on almost all of the time; our dog LOVES it, curls up right next to the speakers and trances out. During the day they sometimes play annoying cheesy crap, but at night they start up with “Night Visions” and this creepy woman with a vampire accent practically whispers interjections like, “in the TOETull dahknessss of nighyyt you sseeeee nahthing but ah beeelliyawn starssss . . . NAHthing but peeeeeeeeace, sweeet peeeeeeeeeissssssse. This is oddyo veezhuns, and you haf nighyyt veezhuns.”

So yeah, we totally love it and daily mimic her pronunciation of Audio Visions, like when we see the longing look in the dog’s eyes and ask, “awwww, do you want your awwjoveezhuns?”

Audio Visions rocks at night when they play spookier, spacier new age music, including delicious programs from Hearts of Space (note: only new age nerds would be oblivious enough to the world to waste an excellent three-letter domain like hos.com on music that once had such a limited audience it could only find space on public radio, but I digress). I’ve bought a lot of new age mp3’s based on play they’ve gotten on Audio Visions that I never would have heard otherwise.

Because Audio Visions, Night Visions and Hearts of Space have been cheap auditory therapy for our household I’m pretty fucking attached to the channel which is why I’m freaking out today upon seeing the channel name has changed to read, “Spa (replaces Audio Visions)”. Does this mean no more Hearts of Space? No more vampires reading poetry accompanied by the sounds of trickling streams, heartbeats and twittering birds?

Of course, it’s possible that it won’t change, or that if it DOES change it will be for the better, though I doubt it if their recent broadcast of a muzak-styled saccharine rendition of a sickly sweet piano tinkling the precious Beatles’ melody “In My Life” layered over ocean waves is any indication of what’s to come. Apparently there’s some kind of Sirius / XM merger going on which I haven’t taken the time to read about but is fucking up almost all of the music we’ve been enjoying via Directv.

Note added Aug. 8th 2010: I just found this interesting post on the Hearts of Space website with more information about XM, Sirius (who recently dropped HOS), Audio Visions and Spa.

This is even more upsetting to me than when Court TV changed their channel name to the criminally deceptive “TruTV” and amped up their programming with even more super-dramatized crime and disaster “documentaries” with titles like, “Most Shocking” cops and robbers high speed chases with fake sound effects dubbed in. I pray for media literacy to be taught in this country, but I don’t hold my breath. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching all of that shit, but it pisses me off when mainstream media gets away with passing skewed misrepresentations of real events as “truth” without disclosing how they’ve distorted it with artifice, bias, and added “production value”.

“TRU” my ass! Maybe they think the stupid spelling is enough to act as a disclaimer: TRU! Not true in any boring conventional sense of the word. TRU! Because you don’t have time to squeeze in all of those letters, much less all the pesky facts! TRU! As much truth as we can squeeze in between ads from our sponsors! TRU! For people who don’t believe in accuracy of reporting OR spelling! I know, I shouldn’t take the misuse of words like “reality” so seriously. I guess I’m just old-fashioned that way, especially when I suffer from the double standards that allow television giants to distort and shit all over essential words in our vocabulary while I am threatened with federal obscenity prosecution and having my payment processing taken away if I dare to tell the TRUTH about my body (that blood comes out of my pussy and that’s totally healthy and I can and should be able to have sex with myself and others while that’s happening). Instead I am forced to misrepresent myself, women’s bodies and sexuality by hiding my period on my porn sites.

Seriously, is my bloody cunt more dangerous than using words like “truth” so loosely?
How irresponsible is it to degrade the meaning of words that are supposed to be the cornerstones of civilized ethics? I do not trust that all people will intuitively recognize the difference between “TRU” and “true”, “reality show” and “reality”, or porn pussy and real pussy.

How did this post arrive here? This is why most of my blog entries wallow in draft mode. I’m going to have to start advertising myself as The Naked Non Sequitur. Except it’s not really true that I’m naked right now or even most of the time just because I’m a webwhore, but I guess it’s TRU enough.

Tonight while Delia was at her AA meeting I really wanted to play piano and sing, but as usual having the audio on the cams makes me feel totally self-conscious. I know I shouldn’t be, that even if I suck ass it’s entertaining, but that doesn’t matter; I want to be alone.

It’s not that hard to turn the audio off on the cams, but I feel guilty about it and worry that people just joining for the first time will check the cams, not hear anything, and think I lied about broadcasting audio. On the other hand, I feel guilty about not doing something I enjoy and value (making music for the sheer pleasure of it AND to practice/improve) so I think I’m going to start setting that time aside when Delia’s at her meetings for alone time at the piano and just turn the audio off on the cams. I might even log in a special silent cam since I don’t mind people WATCHING from a voyeuristic angle, I just don’t want to be heard, critiqued, etc.

Maybe if I keep that up we’ll start having monthly or weekly “performances” or something so the mystery can be revealed and to motivate me to focus on doing more than just noodling around.

I’m feeling really blessed to have good friends that I love after spending a few days totally spoiled with good company: Kris Madison and Amberlily drove all the way out to our remote locale so we could have a Sex and the City slumber party (Amberlily’s fun idea). Seeing the movie was entertaining, but the best part was just spending time together and having the chance to talk. Half the time we were off cam (in other rooms or out of the house) or had the audio off so we could speak freely, so it might not have been a big treat for the voyeurs, but for ME? It was heavenly. I actually feel *rejuvinated*.

We did spend a lot of last night in bed talking (with the audio *on*) which was probably pretty entertaining for voyeurs to listen to (or not, depending on their perspectives); we had insanely heated arguments (I almost lost my voice/damaged my own hearing with my own high pitched protestations) about really inconsequential shit (which is the best kind of thing to debate). Does Holly Madison “deserve” better than Hugh Hefner who tells her she’s not photogenic enough to be a centerfold? Do Tim Harrington’s (of Les Savy Fav) performances insult/make fun of his audiences or are they a layered casserole of joy? Those two questions, their characters’ milieus, and the surrounding issues were the basis of HOURS of delightful discussions.

And there were brownies.

We are lucky to have such good friends.

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HERE is the latest on our babymaking project: One Down, One to Go.

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For once I don’t feel like I need a day off to recuperate after socializing (just a little catch-up on sleep), so before bed tonight I’m going to try to plan a couple of good shoots for tomorrow and get them out to my members as soon as possible.

Okay, sex with Jimi Hendrix is definitely the stuff fantasies are made of so I’m definitely curious about seeing his purported sex tape with two chicks. Looking at the preview video, I’m not convinced it’s him (the face the guy’s making looks like someone doing a comedy skit) but as a chick the mere IDEA or suggestion of fucking Jimi Hendrix is enough to send me into a groovy orgasmic hallucination. I’m almost afraid to watch it and have the fantasy ruined; I’m not the only person to feel that way, either.

I also have mixed feelings about the women in the video who are not identified and if the film *is* authentic/wasn’t staged (which I doubt), it’s kind of gross that the women apparently haven’t been identified meaning they’re likely to still be alive but they haven’t given consent and won’t be compensated, and we in the porn industry will be making money off of them since they’re the ones front and center in the video, with “Jimi” only making brief appearances. While their anonymity facilitates fantasizing about sex with him, it makes me uncomfortable the way they’re being discusses by the press as non-entities.

Living in Western Washington my whole life, there are basically three Elvises: Elvis (duh), Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain. And two of them are the stuff of sex dreams.

Hmmm. . . maybe an Elvis & Jimi threesome? Or would that be too much . . .

Let’s see, what have I been up to lately? Here are a few links to fill in the gaps:

*In case you haven’t already read it, I’m not pregnant. I feel much better since I posted that entry, but yeah. That’s what I *did* feel like.

*I updated my radio station playlist after realizing I need to step it up about ten notches if I want to justify the increasing expense of having one. Note: it’s probably not interesting reading unless you’re “into” reading process-oriented planning stuff.

With my emotional state and my choice in tunes, listening to my own station gave me a bloated throat-lump and more crying. In a sorta good way.

*For the past few weeks it seems like the viewers/chatters in my webcam shows have been MUCH more pleasant than usual. I wind up the shows loaded with lots of warm fuzzies and really appreciate the change in tone. Coincidentally, most of these shows were during my vibrator-abstinence period and my PERIOD period so they were very chat-oriented shows with less actual showing-off of my body. Normally a less explicit show leads to the natives getting restless and very rude, but for some reason the crowds have been noticeably more tolerant, receptive and respectful than they have been in the past few years. I think that the big cam network might be filtering out some of the freeloaders because the crowds also seem smaller. Whatever it is, I like it; it’s a lot more fun and relaxing.

*Our hosting company had some hiccups and is doing some upgrades so our sites have had (and might have more) downtime than I’ve seen with them for the past six years. They are doing some upgrades April 1st Monday Night/Tuesday morning
between 1:00am – 6:00am and hope to limit the down time to fifteen minutes, but it’s possible there could be more.

I hate the impact that has on people’s perceptions of our sites, but it happens to everybody at some time or another so I hope everyone will be patient with it. Members: if you want all the technical details and apologies from our hosting company, I’ve posted them HERE and HERE.

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We’re going to have to do some heavy time (and semen) management in the upcoming weeks to try again to get pregnant, shoot content, and do some major work to try to get our income boosted (this week is going to be TIGHT) so I’m making a lot of lists, plans and goals. It might make me even more boring than usual, but also more productive (but maybe not more productive in the “fun” way).