building safety nets under my feet

[jazzfish]

Last winter I invested in a decent pair of headphones, on the grounds that if I'm going to be listening to more music I may as well listen to it in comfort. (Audio-Technica ATH-M40X, if anyone cares; the M50X came highly recommended, and these were half the price and something like 95% as good.) There's been a definite improvement in my quality of life. I no longer have to fiddle with earbuds, the sound is distinctly better and more full, and as a bonus my ears stay warm in the winter.

Today I finally realised that there are all kinds of neat subtle harmonies in Break Me Slow that I had never picked up on with tiny lo-fi earbuds. Who knew?

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Then last night I finally got around to watching the DVD that came with the 10th anniversary special edition of David Bowie's Black Tie White Noise (recorded 1993; picked it up over the summer). It's more or less an hour of Bowie talking about making the album, interspersed with musical cuts. This is Bowie at the top of his game creatively, and just beginning to hare off in a wildly new direction for the rest of the decade.

I hadn't realised that three of the tracks on the album were covers of other artists. They fit seamlessly. "Nite Flights" in particular feels exactly like a nineties David Bowie song.

I had also somehow forgotten how magnetic Bowie can be. Arresting, and clearly well in control of his art while still happily exploring new avenues.

January 2016 was some bullshit, is mostly what I'm saying.

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From the department of when I'm wrong I'm wrong:

And so I never got back in touch with her after that. By the time I could start thinking about possibly doing so it was not quite a year later, and I figured I'd just lost out.

Well. It seems I figured wrong.

The last couple of weeks have been supremely interesting. I feel more solidly grounded in myself than ... maybe than I ever have, while at the same time luxuriating in all that great new-connection serotonin & dopamine. It's neat. Makes it hard not to walk around with a tiny goofy smile all the time, though.

Comments

[wohali]

Hooray for renewed relationship! :D Sounds idyllic.

[jazzfish]

Yay I get to tell my vaguely-relevant William Gibson story! :)

A couple of years ago Gibson showed up semi-unexpectedly at the local (not-very-good) SF convention. He did an hour-long Q&A, and someone asked him about Pattern Recognition getting made into a movie or miniseries. Part of his answer:

My Hollywood agent, who is always very pessimistic-- he used to be Harlan Ellison's Hollywood agent, to give you some idea-- said to me recently "It's beginning to look almost exactly like a project does right before it goes into preproduction." And I said *hopeful voice* "Really?" And he said *skeptical/confused voice* "Yeah... it's weird."

So... yeah. It's weird. :)

(tbh it *is* pretty idyllic. i just have this voice in my head going 'yeah ... it's weird.')

[novel_machinist]

<3!! yay for all

[jazzfish]

Rather. :)

[thanate]

Awesomesauce! :) Hope things continue to go well and get you a good recharge on your brain.

(ETA: I totally had the "wait, where did those undertones come from?" reaction when I started playing songs on my car stero)

[jazzfish]

Thanks! It seems to be, so far. The recharge is even exceeding the additional scheduling load, where I felt like I already didn't have enough time/energy to do all the things I wanted to so I added in more.

I think the first time I noticed something like this was when I put a Blue Man Group CD on my parents' pretty decent system, and realised that it's not just one muddy bass line, there are like three or four distinct things going on down there.

[ckd]

Hooray for being happily wrong!

(I wouldn't mind being wrong about my baseline assumption of "not interested, or if interested not poly" regarding some people. It's not likely, though, and I don't have the sort of previous history you describe here.)

[jazzfish]

Thanks!

I very much feel like I hit a jackpot that I didn't even know I was pulling levers for.