Bluesday, May 15: Coltrane

12 minutes til it's not Bluesday anymore

Moody AF

listen to this

10 seconds til the end

he really meant it man

imagine having that kinda ear

well i mean many people do, i envy them

envy? praise, maybe

so swaggy

he's the King of Swag

i am a peasant worshipping at his feet

at this point he'd already gone deep into his shit

man i seriously think if he stayed alive just a biiiiit longer

he wouldda had a real, real impact on how music is heard

like he would rival any fucking white dude in europe

he'd win

maybe it's just because we have more access to their brains

their brilliance

but this is like, the prologue

the prepared epitaph 

and then poof, just like that,

he's gone.

i'm very appreciative of the fact that his legend lives on.

i mean when you think about the jazz greats

like the real OG jazz greats, like

when you feel it real deep in there

into your soul

he's on a lover's like top 5, at least

the way that he can maneuver, kinda like

like a warm dry 

previously damp spring-

summer night, weaving through the

traffic

left and right and up and down

no holes in that pocket

all the great ones die too soon.

perhaps it's a chunk of why they're great.

but longevity is something you cannot fake.

The Last Quarter of the Moon

Nowadays my only desires involve being by myself.
I force myself into social situations to balance out my worlds:
The real reality, the one I almost lost because of trying to be someone I'm not.
I love my therapist; she's the only one who gets me, I think.
Before I fall in love with someone, like really press the play button, I tend to tell them I think I'm fucking crazy. Usually their response will determine how long we're together.
The longest relationship I've been in was with someone who was a raging alcoholic.
Just like my birth father. Haha, first I wrote bitch father.
He's dying, maybe. He's hooked up to an oxygen tank and a dialysis machine.
I keep thinking maybe I should say something to him, like I forgive him or I hope he's okay.
Those statements are only half true.
I don't give a lot of myself to anyone but the kids.
I call out people who can't get their shit straight, or I treat them like kids.
They should not be getting paid the same rate as me. Call it Aldrin justice.
I'm sick of sitting back and letting things happen that are unfair or unjust and really, I can usually get what I want by calling white people out on their shit.
That's probably the only good thing about living in Boston.
The only good thing.
I am the face of diversity, the only one who will play their games and play it well.
In the end, the kids are the ones who matter the most anyway.
There are so many of them who won't ever get a chance to tell someone they might love that they're fucking crazy.
When I graduate, I'm getting outta here. I'm gonna be international. I don't care how hard it is or how long it takes.
I used to have this image of the future.
It's gone now.
The only thing left is me, in a foreign land, doing work that I like, work that is meaningful, work that will change lives maybe. The most important part of that is work that I like.
It is all about me now.
And it's about damn time.

cancelled

It is so natural for me to alienate myself from the world that when I actually have a friendly connection with a human being, it consumes me to the point of paranoia about all the ways that they will hurt, disappoint, and leave me. It's a blacked-out cave with prehistoric hieroglyphics deciphering the self-hatred it took to get me here in the fist place. Add on the molotov cocktails of procrastination, anxiety, amphetamines, and this secret life of inevitable failure and voila! All the love is once again sucked outta my veins, but this time I'm just too damn old to feel sad about it. I haven't had a suicidal thought in a long time, a long, long, time. I can taste the prejaculation of glory with these thoughts of dying, my own blood on my hands. I wonder if anyone would even miss me. In a way, I hope they never find out.

reparations in Andover

sometimes evil wins
we'll all die soon anyway
so drink it with thirst

Bluesday, April 17: Arvo Part

Reading this fascinating article about how deep-brain stimulation failed or did not fail in its surgical attempts to cure depression, I realized most of mine was manageable once I remove myself from this world, the industry's world, the phone world, the internet world, fueled by narcissism and an excessive need to "connect" without fitting the proper puzzle pieces, impulsively "express" without the due diligence of definition, and "document," almost like a serial killer returning to the scene of the crime to relive the slaughter over and over again because he can't get his dick up in real life, kill after kill, post after post, tweet after tweet.

Escape, do I; find refuge in the flaws of man, once admitted; crave for the poetry of the Pastoral, perhaps more gothic, twice removed; I remain, I retreat, curiously, in that which I was repressed- artistically, historically, religiously. May I remain, may I retreat, may I reject repression while the world spins in its meaningless meaning, may I find the harmonic convergence in atonal tintinnabulation. It is the key to make all of this fathomable, holding fast to hope.

cunts are your mates

may 28, 2013

i saw him at the molé festival in pilsen. he looked awkward and lost, like he didn't know it was possible he could gentrify anything. my friends and i went to the bar afterwards, simone's. he showed up. i was drunk and said hello, my name is corrine. with a certain kind of accent he introduced himself and then joined us. my friends and i went to a house party in logan square. i invited him. we got more drunk. he heard me sing and play guitar. he said he'd pay to see me live. we went back to judy and danelle's house, did a bunch of blow. my radical queer lesbian friends are radical and queer. he was the only straight guy there but we had a connection. it was some sort of magneticism. we made out all night in the nooks and crannies of their apartment. then my friend put him in a cab. i should have gone. i wanted to. but they're lesbians and they're my best friends and i guess they know what's best for me? no, they really don't. so i left with two gay guys to get cigarettes. i don't smoke cigarettes. i smoked a whole pack of cigarettes that night. i woke up in dirty sheets that weren't mine and i woke up feeling flemmy and gross and i woke up with a stick and poke tattoo of a sharp sign that looks like a hashtag and i woke up with a bloody finger and bloody pants and bloody lips and a 5 page poem i wrote in sharpie and tag calligraphy about nonsensical loneliness. i texted my ex-girlfriend at 6:30 am some weird poetry shit. i still love her. i'll always love her. and i think the aussie was the closest one to kissing like her. he was a great kisser. and he wasn't weird and try to like feel up on me and shit. it was straight up makin out. it wasn't terrible, and i think we could have had a lot of fun. when he left, he said goodbye, and i said cheers, cunt. cuz in australia apparently cunts are your mates.

Bluesday, April 10, 2018: Ángel Parra

Puedes matarme si quieres,
mi amor no lo matarás,
tengo la esperanza puesta
en volverte a conquistar,
que una vez te diste entera,
nunca lo podré olvidar,
amor.

Puedes quitarme el aire
que preciso pa' vivir
pero no podrás quitarme
la fuerza que nació en mí
cuando mujer, cuerpo y alma
me diste en el mes de abril,
amor.

Quítame la cordillera,
quítame también el mar,
pero no podrás quitarme
que te quiera siempre más:
lo que entre dos se ha sembrado
entre dos se ha de cuidar,
amor.

You can kill me if you want to,
but my love
you will not kill,
I have my hope put on
win you over again,
that once you gave yourself whole,
I could never forget it, Love.

You can take away from me
the air that I need for living,
but you can't take away
the force that was born in me when woman,
body and soul
You gave me in the month of April, love.

Take away from me the mountain range,
take away also the sea,
but you can't take away from me
that I will always love you more:
what between two
has been sown between two
has to be taking care of, love.

Still here.

Hello. I think it's time for an update.

I've finally applied to grad school. Perhaps I will be a music therapist in 3 years. Took damn long enough.

I've been making trap beats on Garage Band. I got an iMac recently which is timely since my laptop only works half of the time if it wants. Trap beats. It's the easiest shit I've ever made. It's also probably the most fun I've ever had making music for the sake of making music.

I teach music six out of the seven days of the week. Today I did not go to work because I did not have the capacity to pretend. Not all days are like that. Today was.

I thought that leaving Chicago was the hardest thing I've done. I was wrong. Being successful at being sober is harder. I have better vision now. I can process things more clearly. My anxiety does not dictate my lack of productivity. But. I feel like a part of me is gone. Perhaps it wasn't part of my DNA like I thought.

Which is scary for me, I guess. As I enter a new era in my life, I'm discovering parts of my identity that I didn't even know were there. And while there's space to mix and match and be colorful, I also have to say goodbye to part of myself to make room for the rest of me. I think I tried to do that the first two years of living in Boston, but it was a cop-out. It was a shortcut. It was what I thought I had to do, not what I really wanted to do.

Well, here I am today. I'm getting paid to do something I'm not only good at, but I'm passionate about. I'm more confident in myself, though sometimes I still have doubts. I try to make the most of every day, most days, though I still have days where I don't go to work because I can't pretend. I'm not tortured, but I'm also not super elated about my present condition. I am grateful to have love, but I fear I'm not doing enough to hone and keep it alive.

I can't seem to think in metaphors anymore.... but I see the world in front of me and it's right there. It's real. It's more real than I've ever known it could be.

I think that gives me peace.

My objectives really are as follows

to be stimulated
to do good
to reach potential
to do it all in a classy way

to not run away
to resist from temptation
to keep my heart open
to find perspective

Bluesday, October 10: Radiohead

In Rainbows came out 10 years ago today. 10 years. 

Years ago, on 1101 S. State Street in the South Loop of Chicago, I had people over for a late-night-night-cap. It was probably 2008 or 2009. At one point, a group of us were sitting with our legs crossed on the floor of my bedroom, passing around a mini-bong that was not mine but eventually became mine, filled with half water-half Jameson. Megan Tucker was thumbing through my CD collection, because cell phones were not everything yet. She pulled out this album, decorated in its recycled-paper, darkly colorful and unconventionally folded case, looked at me, and asked, "who ACTUALLY owns this CD?" I responded, "Me. It's my favorite." That statement is still true. It's the one that means the most to me.

Many die-hard Radiohead fans who are the butt of ironic internet satire when it comes to pretentious Generation-X douchebags have said that it's the "most accessible." It probably is. It doesn't mean that other albums aren't- and in a way, I guess they are literally correct. The way this album was consumed was the most accessible- before the Beyonce's and the Chance's and the other big-time record releases with no record store release dates became the thing, there was In Rainbows. But these die-hard fans usually aren't talking about method of listening as much as they are about aesthetic. Singable melodies, un-confusing lyrics, danceable rhythms, a molotov cocktail of emotion, so meticulously balanced as to not cross the land mines of utterly depressive, completely obvious, and corny-ass sadness: it was track after track of perfection for someone who was questioning what "perfect" even meant. 

The catalytic flavors of these songs contain sharp hints of the most important memories of my life, the ones that I go back to, time and time again, the ones that represent my first renaissance, clinging onto an identity that was never the same. Me, quite actually, In Rainbows, with colors representing the different layers of my life, wondering if there could be a sort of Keep in inevitable Growth- at the time, I couldn't separate the light enough to realize the inevitability of growth meant change, and that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. But as I sit here, in the house I "grew up" in, writing this explanation that won't ever fully be able to scope exactly how much this record means to me, I wonder if I ever really understood... and if my growth, inevitably, will separate me from what home is, like ripples on a blank shore. As I get sink deeper, the more I expand, until it's too big to see each individual ripple- they become part of the shore, the water, reflecting the person I have chosen to be.

Hopefully, and I mean that- full of hope, I continue to strive for that whole-hearted esoteric understanding- like the "secret rhythm" of "Videotape," like the downbeat of each measure of "Reckoner," like Jigsaws slowly but surely falling into place. But the difference now is that I control the tempo of their fall. I'm the one who calls tetris- and I'm the one who determines how it affects my life, how my big ideas can actually happen. I think that's okay for now. 

Here's to the next 10 years of 10-track perfections.