Watching the Sound

I had the most beautiful birthday weekend -- pumpkin and apple picking with friends, wandering the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, eating delicious food.  There was still so much in bloom, even in these late October days, and I saw these purple flowers poking up from the dried leaves...does anyone know what they are?

Yesterday, I saw Fiona Apple and Blake Mills at the Beacon Theater, a concert I'd been looking forward to for months. Fiona Apple is one of my favorite musicians. I hear something different each time I listen to one of her songs. Sometimes, I'll admit, her musical expressions confound me and that's why I listen so deeply and intently. Music comes out of her body in a way that is wrenching and uncomfortable and I long to understand.

As I watched her yesterday, I quickly learned that her music is an experience that you can watch. I saw that rhythm and sound is corporal to her, that it comes when she is kneeling, bunched up on the ground or against her shoulder blades as she drums the wooden sticks there or as she bends in a perfect arch over the piano seat.

It surprised me, this way of visualizing sound, the deliberate articulation of chalk against a chalkboard or flesh and bone against wood that became percussion. Even her voice rose up from some wrestling, snatching force from her gut. It was all very beautiful and strange. A new way of seeing music I'd only heard before.

Embracing Imperfection

Today, I read this post from Jamie Catto on the Intimacy of Imperfection and felt as if I had been set free.

Catto suggests that it's not imperfection that is unattractive to others but the shame that comes from these imperfections.

These past few weeks (months? years? lifetimes?), I have struggled with, obsessed over, the idea of perfection.  Most recently, I've been overly concerned about it in the online space. I've felt as if I have to constantly revise myself. Every sentence, every word.  I've been very worried that the 'me' I'm presenting to the world is not the right kind of me. With this blog, my twitter and Facebook and email accounts, I have been given too many opportunities to delete, edit, and second-guess. 

How refreshing to step back, to understand that it's not the 'terrible' me I have to hide (for I am quite terrible) but the fear behind it that I have to shed.

So, I'll start small.  I'll start with a photograph on this (not-so) Wordless Wednesday.  There I was at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens with my point and shoot camera, pretending to be a photographer, trying to capture this dragonfly.  There I was, whining to myself that I did not have a good enough camera with an expensive lens, that I did not have an art background, years of photography classes, or even a basic knowledge of light.  There I was, crabby and pissed and stubborn but determined to take a picture of these delicate wings.

And what happened when I, finally, after snapping two hundred photos, captured that dragonfly in the right position, without it being blurred or shadowed or obstructed or just plain bad?

There was a freaking sign in the background.

To imperfection.  I start here.