After a whirlwind of a week- or has it been a month? Has it been two months? Three? I’ve stopped keeping track (in my head). After a purposely unknown amount of time, I finally have two beautiful days (in a row) off.

Most recently at work, I’ve felt most like a triage nurse- jumping from one critical situation to another. It appears that somehow mixed in with the urgency and adrenaline and complete communication overload, things have shifted. People I love and care about are shifting, moving, evolving in meaningful ways. Because of that, and after taking a deep breath, I find myself on the other side of a mountain of work and the view is completely different. So much can change in one week and so I am taking this moment to put my hand up and say I am a bit disoriented.

This week I went to see the documentary: Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda. Ryuichi Sakamoto is a Japanese composer, producer, performer. The documentary is essentially about a portrait of an artist with a terminal illness (throat cancer) and his struggle to create meaningful work with the limited amount of time he has left. Sakamoto is an explorer of found sounds, he takes a violin bow to a drum symbol, plays a ravaged tsunami-weathered piano and literally fishes for the pure sound of water trickling through a glacier. Watching him discover sounds is like watching a child see a magic trick for the first time. Pure joy. At one point in the film, he is scoring a quote he loves from the film The Sheltering Sky (he actually did the score for this film originally). His eyes light up as he listens to his creation, but just for a moment. Is it that he has become compelled to switch tracks and listen critically to his own work or is it the grim reality of the very quote he is so fond of? The movie is quite heavy, but his music is beautiful and it is a pleasure to see someone get so excited about sound.

This is the quote from The Sheltering Sky:

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” 

I have started reading Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus. Man, what an education! I have to read it with headphones on and with the album on trial being played in tandem. These old music critics really have such a unique voice. What a treat.

I like this excerpt from an interview with Dylan:

I think I felt some need to balance out the lack of culture I was ingesting. I went out and bought so many records. I have no regrets. I am listening to my live Spiritualized* album and I am congratulating myself. I have great taste.

*terrible band name

^record treasures

^pug; new shoes

30 Minute Playlist – These Days