I kind of forgot to tell y'all that I've jumped the fence to Livejournal...
http://veryownplanet.livejournal.com/
Here 'tis.

Strange day.

11.30am
I'm hanging out my washing to the beautifully restless melodic arcs of Brahms Symphony No. 4, 1st movement. This music could just about make me forget my own name. The weather is strange, sunny and cloudy at the same time, the threat of rain hovering in the distance. It isn't warm, but it isn't cold. I look up at the sky and think how much the indecisive sky reflects my own mood today, and most of the time, and momentarily I soar up above the Hills Hoist, happy for a moment, cushioned by Brahms and the comforting routine of pegging underwear and towels on the line.

1pm
I'm heading into the Conservatorium for my meeting with the degree transfer information officer. I'm no longer taken aback by the wire fencing, although it disturbs me still. I discover that I'm unable to cross the road at the corner of Bridge and Macquarie Streets; the intersection is guarded by ten cops and a giant police bus. I'm running late, I'm out of breath, I just want to go to uni. I stick my face through the fence and ask a cop how I can get into the con. I have to walk all the way back up to the Mitchell Library and cross the road there, he says. The sound of the helicopters overhead bores slowly into my brain as I retrace my steps. I'm late.

2pm
I'm sitting in the Conservatorium cafe when the sound of helicopters grows suddenly louder. I wander outside, munching on my burnt raisin toast (it's all that's left to eat, pretty much; no deliveries can get through to the Con cafe, apparently). I join the small cluster of staff and students standing against the metal barrier, staring up at the sky. Helicopters swarm like giant black flies, and I start to feel sick. I run into David Papp, and we go back into the cafe for a coffee, nursing hangovers and cursing Apec. We talk about David's performance of the Martinu oboe concerto last night. He's happy with the way he played (he was brilliant), which is nice to see. Anthony wanders over and we start criticising the performance of the Mozart last night (piano concerto no. 18, I think). Too heavy, sluggish, turgid, Romantic, boring.

3pm
I'm in the library at uni, feeling stranger and stranger by the minute. Enter John. He wants me to come have tea with him but I can't. I have to go to Dulwich Hill post office to pick up my modem. We go to the admin office, wandering through the vocal department in the old building, singing made-up songs in silly opera voices as we walk, from a musical that we made up on the spot, called 'Gender Bender', stemming from my announcement in the library that I should be a gay man. 'Make Me A Penis' is sure to be a chart topper. We're giggling like silly kids.

4pm
I'm on the bus and I'm not laughing any more as it crawls through thrombosed streets. I think I'm losing my mind. I'm exhausted, tired of seeing wire fences and bins taped up with police tape, hearing the caustic drone of the helicopters, seeing familiar streets transformed into strange wastelands. I try to read The Wire, but I can't concentrate on a single sentence, and I can't stand to listen to music either. I'm suddenly bleak and desperate, trapped here on this bus, completely alone.


It all turned out OK in the end, though.

-You’re smiling. What did I do to make you smile?
-Exist.



I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, waking up at 4am unable to drift off again, lying awake, staring at the ceiling in the dark, thinking too much. I know it’s a classic depression symptom, one that psychiatrists scribble enthusiastically down on their notepads, but I am not sure if that’s why it keeps happening. Last night I could hear rustling and munching sounds in my kitchen; I crept down from my loft bed and flicked on the light, convinced that I would be met with the skin-crawling sight of a rodent fleeing at lightning-speed (a sight that I am unfortunately quite familiar with). But my kitchen was still, quiet, exactly as I had left it. As soon as I returned to bed the noises resumed, as did my sleepless vigil over my dark house. I don’t know how long I lay awake. Strange things happen to time, when you’re unable to sleep, and it’s dark, and all external markers of time’s passage are taken away. Time becomes all-important and irrelevant at the same time. How long have you been lying there for, awake, your mind over-active, performing elaborate calculations of how long until you will have to get up and rejoin the world? Minutes can seem like hours, stretched into eternities; at the same time, hours can slip by unnoticed, because you’ve dozed off without realising it. Either way, it doesn’t matter at all.

This idea is one that’s particularly relevant to me at the moment, as I am currently in the process of writing program notes for Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet For The End Of Time (1941). (This work is being performed at the Sydney Conservatorium on 23rd September; I highly recommend going to see it. I’ll be ushering, so come say hello). While the work is ostensibly based upon a biblical passage from Revelations, about angels and columns of fire and apocalyptic madness, ‘the end of time’ in this work is really the cessation of measured time, and the celebration of endlessness, infinity, eternity. As Messiaen puts it, ‘I did not in any sense want to comment upon the Apocalypse. My only wish was to articulate my desire for the dissolution of time’.*

In the eight-movement work, Messiaen manages to make ‘time’ both all-important, and meaningless; he does this with his own stubbornly unique musical language, which, through the application of obsessively precise and measured processes of rhythmic (and harmonic) organisation, creates a sense of ‘timelessness’, a negation of forward movement. How does he do this? One procedure that I find particularly fascinating is his application of medieval isorhythmic musical processes, which is particularly apparent in the first movement, ‘Liturgie de cristal’. (An isorhythm is a rhythmic sequence overlaid on a melodic shape, each recurring continuously but independently of one another. The overall effect is one of a dissociation of melody, harmony and rhythm). Here, isorhythmic proceses are layered; the cello’s 5 note melodic shape is superimposed over a rhythmic ostinato of 15 values, while the piano’s pitch material consists of a 29-chord sequence over a rhythm of 17 values.** Four ostinati are thus layered; musical ‘change’ in this movement, therefore, occurs only as result of the existence of differing combinations of repeated patterns at any given moment. It’s a paradox that I find endlessly fascinating; the idea of creating perceived ‘change’ from essentially static, non-developing, repeated musical elements. And it’s just one of several ways in which Messiaen’s obsessive attention to rhythmic detail contributes to a blissful abandonment of measured ‘time’ as a perceived organisational principle in much of this work.

Over & out. I've got washing to do, and pictures to stick up on my bare walls.

*Olivier Messiaen, cited in Iain Matheson, ‘The End of Time:a Biblical Theme in Messisan’s Quatuor’. In The Messiaen Companion, ed. by Peter Hill. London:Faber & Faber, 1995, pp. 234-248.
** I got these figures from Iain’s article. I’d love to say that I went through and analysed it myself, but I didn’t, and frankly, why bother when someone else has already been through and counted the chords?

Because I am too lazy to write something new today, here is an excerpt from one of the old diaries that I uncovered recently whilst unpacking.

'The Tales of Full Time Employment', Part 1: Withams Coffee (Catastrophe Waitress),1999-2000.



This job can't really be classified as 'full time', as it was not strictly Monday to Friday. However, I usually worked there 5 days a week. Four days at the Wynyard store, and one day on the weekend at the Waverton cafe. I had started out at Waverton, but was shafted to Wynyard after abusing a regular customer because he called me 'darling'.

At Wynyard, we had a morning rush which lasted for about 1 1/2 hours, as the station was flooded with suited folks on their way to work. I like to think that myself and my colleague (and friend) Katie, with our outlandish pink hair, colourful clothing, pierced faces and loud soundtrack of punk, hardcore and/or electronica, provided an interesting diversion for them on their way to the office. This morning rush was a period of temporary insanity. Katie adn I would alternate making coffee and taking the orders. I soon became a coffee maching nazi and would guard the machine with fists of iron when it was my 'turn'. This became a sore point between Katie and myself, particularly as I was branching out into the Italian coffee-making method, while Katie adhered to the French method that we had been taught. Coffee wars ensued.

(I remember once setting fire to a tea towel during the morning rush. I left it too close to the grill, which we used to make raisin toast. A customer brought it to my attention. I turned, stared at the budding inferno for a moment, then walked over calmly and threw it in the sink).

The afternoon shift was a period of unbelievable loneliness and boredom. I spent it sitting at the counter, reading, writing, sending SMS messages to all my friends begging them to come and visit me. We would get about 20 customers between 11am, when the morning person would leave, and 5.30pm. And that was on a good day. The only bonus was the CD player and lack of supervision. I listened to a lot of Fugazi whilst mopping the floors and washing up.

I left Withams because the boredom was driving me insane. I didn't realise it at the time, but my colleagues all thought that I was stealing money out of the till while I was there by myself in the afternoon. This wounded me greatly, but I recovered eventually.

Written sometime in 2002.

By the way, does anyone actually read this blog? If so, please indulge my vanity and leave me a comment.

Last night was sleepless and icky. My mind churned with horrid thoughts, ugly images, trying its best to convince me that all is terrible, I've failed yet again, I will ruin anything good that comes into my life, I will eventually go mad. Midnight came and went and I was still awake, alone, despite the warm sleeping person lying next to me. Why is it that lying awake next to a fast-asleep person makes me feel so utterly lonely? They've managed to escape for a little while, sunken down into the world of dreams, gone elsewhere, while I'm still painfully present, wanting nothing more than to be unconscious for a little while. I climbed down from the skybed and made toast in the dark kitchen, ignoring the skittering cockroaches that scattered in all directions when I turned on the toaster. Turned on the TV, flicked through a book, lay on the couch and looked at the patterns on the ceiling. It was probably about 3am when I finally managed to drift off to sleep, holding onto Rob for dear life as usual. I'm a clingy sleeper. Dreams came and went, strange collages fuelled by insecurity and fear. When I tried to give voice to them the next morning, nothing made sense.

On the way to uni today I listened to Simon and Garfunkel, and was briefly transported back to my childhood, as I usually am whenever I hear their music. When Vanessa and I were kids, my father only had one tape in his car: a worn-out Simon & Garfunkel best-of, which provided the soundtrack to most of our trips in his red station wagon. My father always liked driving; sometimes while my mother was at work, we'd go for drives, aimless drives, just to see how far we could get. Always the same songs in the backgound, imprinting themselves in the minds of the two little girls sitting in the back seat. I can still remember all the words to most of their songs. At the end of The Boxer, the tape had become damaged, sending the pitches of the final chorus rolling and wavering. I can't listen to the song now without superimposing these pitch modifications.

My bus was side-swiped by a Woolworths truck outside the Annandale Hotel, knocking the mirror to the ground. This is the third time that this has happened to a bus I've been a passenger on.

It’s relatively warm this morning. Spring is on its way, it seems. My newly waxed legs feel strangely exposed, freed from stockings and jeans for the first time in months. My knees meet the air appreciatively. I’m walking to work, listening to The Tears, holding a giant cup of coffee, extra shot. I’m thinking about the fact that I only have $20 to last me for a week, yet consider a giant coffee to be an essential expense.

I had to buy a large, because the small cups at the café have been turned into advertising space. Not just for coffee companies, but for anyone with the dollars to buy it. (I don’t really have a problem with a coffee company logo being placed on a cup, although ideally coffee cups would just be blank cardboard, or printed with pictures of aeroplanes). Currently it’s the Commonwealth Bank. Buying a small cup of coffee, therefore, would turn me into a walking advertisement for home loans, credit cards, numerous financial products that I wish did not exist.

Things like this bother me greatly. They me want to just stay at home.

1. Ikea