Category Archives: life

Personal diary style

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I will try to write something like a diary style blog today:

Lazy morning. Breakfast. Tea made from cheap Ceylon teabags in the low, small and plain brown Chinese teapot. Milk in the teacup. Soft Fazer rye bread; one with cheese and one with liver pâté. Grapefruit juice. No yoghurt today.

Very few emails. Re-read a couple of letters from yesterday instead. Read the news on the web. Looked through the latest threads on a music forum.

Listened to “Allegresse” by Maria Schneider (the jazz composer, not the actress..). Very nice music – playful and beautiful, and not much of a normal busy big band sound, which I was grateful for (I am not so fond of conventional big band stuff – all the aggressive brass chords, and such things – so I don’t like all pieces on other cd’s with Maria Schneider Orchestra). I ordered the CD Tuesday night last week, at online order from Artist Share, and got it in the mail on Friday morning. Surprising, as I know it normally takes 6 days for letters to go from New York to Stockholm.

(photo of Maria Schneider by Jimmy Katz)

Tried to play through a collection of ten old piano pieces by Steve Dobrogosz (check the link for info about his appearence on the Stockholm Jazz Festival 2006). Good to practise again, to play the timed sounds, to hear something new, but this isn’t really my kind of music – not interesting enough. The pieces were fairly easy to read and understand, but since I haven’t heard them before, I couldn’t figure out why some things were composed like they were, and how to interpret them (even if there were some ideas – comments and suggestions – printed on the back cover.)

Made some pasta with beans for lunch. I like it, and it is nice to cook something new instead of heating leftovers in the micro.

Putting the things in order for tomorrow’s painting class. Had to scrape dry and half-dry paint with a sharp knife from the palette I used a month ago. I had imagined that I would continue on the two pictures I am working on, so it was better to leave the paint that was left. Not. A few days is okay, with the water soluble oil paint I use at home, but not weeks in thin layers on the palette. I used the last of a quantity of still soft white to fill an empty space on a sketch I have been dabbling with.

Packed a jeans jacket I got through mail order yesterday again, in a tape-sealed plastic bag, to send it back to the mail order company. The jacket was for my son, but I had miscalculated the size (was some confusing info in the catalogue, with everything presented in French sizes instead of S-M-L or EU standard system), so he needs a bigger one. This one was more in my size, but I don’t need a Levi’s jacket just now.

Laundry. Sorting things in the dishwasher. Cleaning/dusting some floor boards in the rooms upstairs, and the staircase.

Not a bad day, after all.

MaLj

Listening and thinking

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This week I have painted, and I have tried to listen to more music than I usually do, and I have listened to people.

In the painting class there were eight students present this Thursday. Most of them old people that have time to spend a weekday every month in the studio, learning to paint in oil, and then continue the work at home on their pictures in between the lessons. Anna the artist was moving around in the studio: looking at our works; commenting on colour and compositions; showing us the technical tricks of classical painting; and explaining paint chemistry facts of life.

Friday morning I was supposed to work, but when I got to the workplace found that the material I needed for my new project hadn’t arrived yet, so I had to spend nearly three hours almost idle, reading catalogues and talking with colleagues.

Friday afternoon I started to participate in a couple of shockingly honest conversations with internet friends. Perhaps I should rethink my policy of avoiding chat symbols (“emoticons”)? I am not sure if people really understand what I say, what I mean, and when I am serious but amused (often), serious and concerned (happens), joking (and sometimes using obscure word-play), angry (seldom), hurt (seldom), unfair (happens), mistaken (unavoidable).

Saturday (today) I met a couple of friends I haven’t talked to for a long time. There was much to reveal about what has happened since last summer. Their life has been in constant turmoil for months, with unexpected events and things happening to themselves and to the children. The small dramas of my own life seemed lame and not worth mentioning, in comparison with the stories they told. Suddenly it became quite easy to understand the reason for something I already had heard through gossip and had thought outrageously mad – why they were dreaming of escaping from it all, planning to buy a large enough sailboat to live on for the next four or five years, on a slow journey around the globe.

Fashionist Nonsense

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Went shopping for a new handbag. Knew very little in advance about the fashionist faiblesse for certain designer bags and purses, but the first thing I found (in the first shop) that looked like something I could use – the grey-black bag I went back to buy after I had looked at all possible solutions of the carry-around-things problem in a couple of other stores – turned out to be a look-alike copy of the bag ‘everyone’ is said to desire most of all these days, according to the fashion journalists – a Mulberry Roxanne. When I found out (through a little googling and a little magazine reading), it was embarrassing. Am I that easily fooled, so I subconsciously remember a picture of a nice bag in an article I obviously read some months ago without paying attention (fashion has never been an interest of mine)? I can’t remember having seen anyone in my little corner of the world carry something that resembles this design.

Fireworks and ferries

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I am watching the dark sea and the horizon. Soon the fireworks will explode everywhere – in the village, and across the water. Other lights in this dark winter evening are coming from the ferries – huge vessels slowly and almost silently moving half-hidden behind the nearest islands.

I wish all readers a Happy New Year 2006!

Hysterical bird

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Found a little blue-tit fluttering around in the bedroom when I came home. I have heard something making noises in the ventilator in the outer wall some nights the last weeks, but was unsure if it was a dry leaf, a bird, or a mouse. Now it got out by its own efforts, so I know. Out in the room; out of the window.

Advent Sunday coming. I hope the lamps and wirings in the window star and the electrical candles for the window sills are functional. Time for gingerbread and hot wine. And my usual three-day-long search for the perfect Christmas cards to send, now that decorations and cards for the season are out in all shops.

First snow

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Frost and snow. Nothing to write about. Last night I finished and published two pages of a piano piece I had planned to do something more than my usual miniature style of. But it just wanted to end there:

Lady M pays a visit to a painter

After finishing that (the first inspired composing period for months) I have still a dozen books to read, cd’s to listen to, other people’s music to comment on, a diary and a novel to write, some “commisioned” music I have no idea how to start on (or if it matter at all to spend time on), and a house to clean and shirts to iron, and sewing projects, and more music to write and revise and prepare parts for, and I just sit here…

Totally aestethic and healthy

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What is art? Is it an attitude or a life-style? Or, is it a necessary expression of human experience? Something that can hurt as much as it can heal? How much is personal in artistical expression – and to which limits can an artist’s control over his soul, body and environment be extended? Does the art need to be centered around the artist’s ego, and reflected in the things surrounding her in her life world?

My questions were provoked by a recent visit to a local artist’s studio and home, after I had decided to become more involved in the visual arts, and in the things going on in my neighbourhood, and learn more about painting – something I haven’t tried since school. Maybe that decision was a reaction after I heard some weeks ago about the death of a distant relative – a great painter and wonderful person. I suddenly realized that I had missed the chance to discuss art, life and music (he was also a jazz pianist) with him on the occasions when we have met through the years. It was just the usual social talk, and I always let others ask their naive questions about his pictures, and be content with the obvious answers. There must have been so much more things I could have learned from him. Now I have to learn it on my own (as we all have to, more or less).

So, now I wonder a lot about the mentality of artists, and what they are doing to stay healthy and/or creative. Some work in chaos; others in order. Some live in a mess; other live in a totally aesthetic perfection. My relative was much for order in his studio (and in his entomological collection), but the home decoration (mostly by his artistic wife) was never over-whelmingly perfect; and their focus was not on the methods to get a long and healthy life.

Success can be dangerous, so it takes some modesty and maturity to handle…

The normal state of the art(ist)

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The frozen leaves –

if you are in the creative soul’s hell, you will see them:

all the mis-told stories, all pathetic poems, all the letters you wrote, all diary pages, all the lecture notes, grocery lists, excuses to your children’s teachers, silly postcards, and – all the music –

cold, still, looking strange, wrong, handled with or without care, and then re-sent – deep frozen.

(Our hell isn’t a warm place. We call it Nifelheim.)