User Profile

if i was smart, i could have been looking up all the artists mentioned while reading those chapters, so that i could listen along and understand what the writers were talking about.

instead, i'm just starting chapter 7 and went back and wrote down as many as i could find. and now i'm listening to one but can't remember what chapter it was mentioned in or what they said about it

robertrich.bandcamp.com/album/sunyata-inner-landscapes enjoyable though

this is the first kind of academic art book i've read since my mfa, which kind of burned me out on this stuff.

and it's really neat and a bit emotional to run into concepts around ambient music that connect with the installation art i was making at that time. one of the essays even references a book i cited in my mfa thesis paper. as i slowly got into making ambient synth music over the last few years, for a long time i told myself it was "just for fun" and had nothing to do with what i made before. but there is a throughline and it keeps hitting me as i read these essays.

taking a lot of notes around fragility in music, and the temporal "spaces" that music creates for the listener

i'm stewing a bit on the repeated apparent contradiction in the oppressive movements described in the book between "they are trying to control you with gender ideology", that academia etc is trying to control people into believing dogmas; and the idea that the ability to transition or have reproductive rights are based on an "excessive" liberty that people don't actually have a right to...

i know the contradiction is often the point but to see it laid out plain. "freedom" is only for certain people.

please do yourself a favor and read this. talia's digestible collection of essays thoroughly deconstructs patriarchy and the subjugation of women, and shows how the social construct of sex assignment works to produce transmisogynistic societies.

oh no, i was reading this chapter that was talking about musical and unmusical listening, listening with attention and not paying attention

i realized i wasn't paying attention and had to go back a page

Strange's writing is extremely approachable and all the concepts are applicable today. Many of the modular synth examples are even still commonly used. It's like having a (really technical) conversation about synthesizers with a friend.

I hadn't read this before and a friend sent it to me. I loved the illustrations. Also Stuart's brother George is extremely ADHD and I am in this novel and I don't like it. (don't like relating to George, do like book)

I read this before I send it off to my mom who has been kind of struggling with my transition stuff and needs help learning about it. I don't know how it'll go over. This might be hard to read for folks like me who need their parents to read it as the mother in the story takes SO LONG to come to terms with her son's transition. But it is based on a true story and I think that it's all pretty genuine and raw. The artwork in it is gorgeous.