It Makes It Easier To Get Up At 3am

you know,

if you ever want to feel how fast the world is turning
watch a planet rise
preferably venus when it is close to us and the sun

because the visual brain measures distance compared to the size of the objects, and the moon is so huge that it seems to rise slowly
but if you have a pure point of light and a horizon for reference, you can see the actual speed

i can tell you, it skeered me how fast the world is terning .....

the above picture is venus rising in the east. i had the full moon setting behind me in the west to light up the boats for me. it is the seaside town i am staying in for the summer, and this is pretty much just outside our door.
it is bliss here. we have a house painted with rainbows, which is a good environment for my own painting.

the last one i did was of the god Jupiter and his friends. it's from my collection Translocations Of The Red Child.





ps: yes the promise of venus got me out of bed, but alas; it is the rainy season here. though we live in the temperate zone, it is an El Nino summer.

Antpocolypse

i got there and the ants were everywhere. i am now used to them crawling up my legs. there are even sum in the car. i put a teaspoon of milo in a cup and terned my back for a moamant and then there were two ants rushing down the inside. i spilt some milo on the bench and i swear all the ants, wherever they were on the bench, instantly sped up. they inhalde the milo fumes and hypered up to find the source.

the howse has been subject to chemical warfare. chris renamed the bathroom Chernobyl.

today i followed the ant trails to their convergence, which was just out of sight in the outer edge of the frame of the partially openable window. i had to climb onto the roof to get a better look at the outside, but i still couldn't see the little hole. i sprayed chemical death all along the ant trails that weren't on food-frequented surfaces, and i mashed the benchtop surface with a nold reader's digest. i ran it along all the ridges and dismembered them all. i filled the questionable corner of the window frame with chemical death also.

i am not a vegetarian.

i shall see how long it takes the residents to notice.

i can still feel them on my legs......

I was wrong; it is not from Lundin

-turns out the piano at Mozarts is from WELLINGTON [wellington i miss you i will see you next year i promise (and i will take photos of jupiter from all over town in the small hours of the morning in the latter half of the year).

I was at Mozarts for open mic night last night; it went splendidly. i received vast instruction from a Muso, and learned the fourth chord that makes modern music [it is the major 7th]

so now i can reduce all songs to four chords rather than three in order to play by ear. [not including the minors]

after attempting to sing 2 1/2 songs, i realized that the entire keybord has been transposed three or four tones lower.
this terned out to be due to the age of the piano, and the fragility of the strings; the tuner could not safely apply as much tension to the strings as needed [about 100kg per string] and so had to adjust the entire set of strings to a lower tension and thus pitch.

it is the rest home piano that is from Lundin
i played it yesterday for grandpa
there was also a Pat there listening
and both were free with their advices on how to play chopin

but everyone plays chopin differently

and i also have my brothers instructions on how to play the chopin piece he is vicariously living through me [he is unable to play anymore]

it was lovely, having a lesson with Grandpa; he greatly enjoyed the nocturne that he seemed to be PERPETUALLY playing for the last 20 years, and i played several parts several times for him. it is fun to play.

Lovely.

The Aquisition

I have acquired this Amazing Dress

it is red

red dresses do instant wonders for one's social confidence

it is thick red felted material, made just for dunedin blizzards; i'm not sure whey it was sold in Orkland

apparently it was $10

my mother bought it but

it wasn't Quite The Right Shape and with some alterations it

[i had to writhe into it]

Will Be Mine

mine....

on the way

do you have a piano bar here?

a what?

or something with a piano and a nopen mic night? i'm from dunedin....

no he said, you wont find something like that here, welcome to Hick Town.

but he told me somewhere down the road to go ask, and so i did. and they told me somewhere around the corner, a bar called mozarts. they had a nancient piano at the back with the front taken off. i sat down and played chopin. the twitchings of the mechanism was a little distracting. below the fall board it said London in gold paint.

it had real ivory keys that were once roaming the savannah. they have open mic night twice a week.

on the way home, i passed the original bar, and informed the hick town men that i had found the perfect place in their hick town.

i passed the toothless old islander on the way, who lives in the house i have wanted to do a loose watercolour of for years. it is pastel blue and yellow and has old broken stuff on the lawn. we walked in the same direction and talked for a bit. i didn't tell him i was going to secretly paint his house now that i knew watercolour. some of his teeth are really long and grow diagonally/

i passed a nold man painting portraits for people, mostly in black and white, for roundabout $20 ea. he even had some pastels like granny's. he sounded american. i said he underpriced them and he said that's just what his daughter said and it's so that he sold more and so that he stayed busy. he hadn't changed the prices in fourty years......

i passed a closed down gift shop on the way, with stacked up merchandise along the edges of the floor.

i passed wards music on the way, and snuck into the back piano room and browsed and lost the nerve to play them. real pianos are a few grand cheaper than plastic ones.

i passed the christian bookshop on the way [i had wondered where it had moved to] and bought antony a pick [he has just bought his First Electric Guitar]. it says pick jesus.

lol.

art

and

music

not a hick town







i passed auckland art students on the way who had won a competition to repaint our railway overbridges.

i passed the art museum on the way and they had a Religion In New Zealand Art exhibiton on. it's a national exhibition, which has sparked a temporary colin mcCahon obsession in me. i am inspired. i am going to paint some frogs now.

No I Did Not Post In Noctober

I spent that month grieving for Jupiter
as it came closest to earth in 60ish years at the end of September and is now steadily moving away to the edge of the solar system

earth, on it's orbit, is overtaking jupiter on it's orbit
jupiter is directly on the other side of us from the sun
so during september
it rose at sunset
and set at sunrise
being overhead at midnight

-ish

and i missed it

i did not see it through the telescope until just recently
when it was further away







and this was all i saw









but next year

it will come just as close as it did this year

AND i intend to be in a richer sitty with a bigger telescope.

:D

Jenny and i were playing pool
and noted either how light the pool balls were
or how frictionless the table

and speculated
mabye jupiter [which was overhead then, it being midnight]
's formidable gravity was pulling them up off the table
the only thing bigger than jupiter in the solar system
is the sun itself

but jenny did accompany me all over dunedin taking photos of jupiter with interesting foreground. [how do i know which is jupiter? it's easy to find; it's the bright one.]

you know the old question "are you are mountains person or a seaside person?" well, i am both. i am a mountain person and a seaside person AND A PLANET PERSON.

i love to stare at planets, especially through strong lenses, and meditate on where they are in space and where they are going and how that relates to me standing near the bottom of the earth sticking up from it like a frightened hair.

i love to stare at planets and picture the solar system in my head and relative distances and positions, and contemplate how they reflect the sun's light to me.

I did see Venus in Noctober; I said 'why should i look at Venus, isn't it just a white disc?' and The Old Astronomer said 'climb up and take a look'
and i nearly fell off the stepladder.

it was a crescent.

and i suddenly felt like it was three dimensional
shaded and round
and in between us and the sun
and real
it is really there
not just in books

since then
we have been finding it in broad daylight
an undeniable white point in a blue sky
(things seem more real in the daylight)
and i know for sure that i am standing on an earth that

hangs

in

space

and i cannot control it's movements
or any of the other Bodies Hanging In Space either

i hereby postulate that astronomy is one of the Tenets For Mental Health

like sunshine and exercise and sleep

that we need to be in touch with the planets' movements so that we know our place in the universe, and are in touch with their steady faithfulness of prescence and movement.

also

it is very calming; there is no way you can be stressed about their speed. if it was there last night, it will be there for months. you can rely on them.
it is so good to know that there are things beyond my own control; i am not responsible for anything going wrong with the planets. i am not responsible for keeping them in line.

oh and i LOVE conjunctions. when i was up looking at venus, the Old Astronomer said with reverence that in a week or so there would be one night when the crescent moon and the crescent venus would be one above the other. i said in my heart 'whats the big deal'. but then one night i was driving home after work and nearly forgot my driverly duties entirely, as i was accosted by this dim cratered crescent and this beaming bright venus that was so nearly a disc, so nearly two whole dimensions.
i stopped and ran into the middle of the park i had happend to be passing and ran into the middle of the field

and snapped millions of pics of the same thing
through various apetures

conjunctions are beautiful.
this painting is also the moon and venus. can you picture that the moon is between us and venus, and the set sun is below the horizon and is lighting up the same fractions of the two Heavenly Bodies?

Jupiter is coming back at the end of next year. I shall be in the richer sitty, taking photos of it behind facades and architectures and sculptures and moutains, all of which will be anew to me.

My Name Is Kat

they called me kat in my first flat

there were other girls called kat too

i love cats
and had reservations about the grandmotheriness of kathryn

i let the crazy people call me kate, as the word 'kat' causes confusion [i work for mental health support providers]

i think kat as a nickname was invented by Ten Things I Hate About You
i think the kat in that movie was so called because she was catty

but i think the connotation has been outdated with legions of modern and variably lovely girls nicknamed kat in the last few years

god i love my generation

pring

it is spring because the chocolate on the windowsill is moistly warm.

it is spring because i am wearing red and blue and orange.

it is only the second day of spring and already the cat meows discontendly for play.

but then is most delighted to discover, and curl up on, my summer jacket which i discarded on the chair [the jacket which is on it's first outing from the closet since i moved in with the cat], a jacket which it has not smelt before.

there i omething underneath my ' ' key and it doen't work without punching.

paint, neuropsychology, and goldberg

i wish to discover the left -> right neurological shift in my music performance.

i have already found it for my art; have learnt to switch off the left brain's obsession with identity, with 'what-an-object-is, and how-it-should-look' top-down processing, to tap into the right brain's 'shape/contour/what-it-actually-looks-like' bottom-up processing.

i read this in the book 'Drawing With The Right Brain'.

very generally, the right brain deals with new infomation, and the left brain deals with familiar information.* the right brain deals with what it sees, and the left brain stereotypes it. if you draw with the left brain you will end up with a picture of what you think you should see, not what you actually see.

anyway, both of them are art. but if you're trying to copy something from real life, only the first way will satisfy.

they say the left brain is dominant, which is why they do surgery largely on the right side, and why they remove parts of the right hemisphere for intractable epilepsy, but to say that it is dominant, is, i think, misleading. they both have different equal roles. right side damage seems to impair learning. new information is stressful. I have neurosurgery on my right hemisphere every so often.

so how do you do this 'drawing with the right brain'? turn the model upside down and then recreate what you see, on the page. this will confuse the left brain's attempts to categorize it.

what i want to know is how can i do this for my music performance? how can i play flexibly, intuitively, improvise, and jam with other muso's, who are also improvising? at the moment i play with the left brain; i play Chopin as i read it, and i have memorized my contemporary performance songs. i dont know how to switch off the top-down processing of it, the this-is-what-it-is and this-is-how-it's-played and this-is-what-it-is-to-sound-like.
i dont' know how to invert music. i don't know how to do what i can't even imagine. i think i will make another cocoa.







*i read this in Elkhonon Goldberg's "Frontal Lobes And The Civilized Mind". It doesn't seem that anyone else, or popular neuroscience, has read this book; there' still a lot of the old-fashioned 'left=language' and 'right=creativity' labelling around.

I Am No Longer In Control Of My Universe

I slept from precisely 10pm till precisely 6am. I discovered that I had one teabag left. I did not discover there was no milk till the bag was already steeping, and the cup already losing it's temperature to the cold damp vapor of the kitchen in an inversely-square manner. I did not discover that my car was parked-in till outside in my slippers, and had no wish to disturb the hungover souls for car keys. Nor did my slippers disturb the footpath much. The sunrose while i was in buying milk; the world was seductively rosy when I went into the petrol station, and was golden and shiny when i exited.

I have got three cups out of this bag so far.

until you resurrect that horse...

...i am not interested in watching you flog it.

go, get on your bandwagon and begone. go for a ride and then come back and get off.

then i will speak with you.

Title

we go to the movies and we know how it goes. we know how it will go. we don't even have to watch or listen or think cos every plot has the same corners and bumps in it. the scene is set with estranged family/lovers. the plot swings wildly between extremes, beyond extremes. they almost get away, the evil surely kills them, then they get away just in time. just when we think they are finally safe, the worst happens. we are so certain they are dead but they come back from the dead and we know that they will, because that is the only ending that would return the family and lovers to each other, bring the evil to justice, and leave the only casualties the shallow wimpy characters.

i love watching the beautiful Hollywood faces, the gold firelight or blue moonlight highlighting the sides of the nose, ringing the nostrils, edging the lips. there are always more shadows and highlights around the eyes and mouth than the rest of the face. the little shadows at the inside edges of the eyesockets.

i love being carried along by the storyline, letting the plot suggest itself to my by the silences, the volume, the facial expressions, the vocal inflections, the language of camera angles and close-ups, the soundtrack.

i love having the story in common with the rest of the population. to talk about with strangers on buses. we went through the same dangers, died the same death with the same hero's and losers, enjoyed the same reunions and ever afters. We have walked the same path and are standing at the end of that path together. we take our own paths from here and go to our own homes.

truth

it is lunchtime. it is sunny and warm. it is midwinter. i am outside sitting at the picnic table. this newspaper has been out here for weeks and is still soggy but the top is crispy, warm, and dry. i have attempted the crossword. i am drinking tea. i am writing in a silver pen. i am eating creamy porridge for breakfast. it is lunchtime. my laptop is broken. my watch has stopped. but the silence is nice and i make another cup of tea.

Where Did It All Go So Right?

My second-to-last-night home, I was lighting the fire and it was trying really hard to die. My thirteen-year-old brother advised me to put it out of it's misery and start over. I didn't. I couldn't. Ten minutes later it was roaring at us.

We had tea and he was gulping his bean segments down one at a time with juice. The large glass juice jug was between him and Mum, and he was dodging round to make the image of her face distort, calling her a retard. He completely lost it when she had only one eye and a squashed skull. Warning him that if he didn't stop laughing, his lime juice would squirt out his eyes, didn't stop him.

Once he had stopped laughing enough, he said something very fast about two minutes and twenty seven seconds, and Mum was like, “What?!? Two centipedes?”

I'm not sure how I started the Leonard Cohen impressions, but Mum won them.

Then I was using my knife and fork as chopsticks, mostly just flipping food off my plate.

It all ended with Mum spinning round in the kitchen squealing that there was a cockroach in her top and throwing her clothes off one layer at a time. All she found was a loose earring down her shirt.

He and I made chocolate sauce for our icecream, and we all sat in front of the fire, which was by now in it's prime, Mum with just the chocolate sauce jug and a spoon, to watch TinTin.

Where did it all go so right?

I Like Winter

I am not a gardener. I shall never be one. If I was one, I would stop. If I bought a house with a garden, I would introduce weeds and goats to it. I love dandelions. I love daisies. Gorse is not pretty, but its tenacity is to be admired, and perhaps adopted. I despise onion flowers, but I love potato vine. Scottish thistles have their place, and it should be set for them on a clean tablecloth with pewter utensils. Roses look best with a backdrop of kikuyu; it creates juxtaposition, which is the purpose of my life.

The more plants the merrier; how dare I tell the ecosystem what to do, like it is too young to decide for itself? Do I know better than wind, pollen, and microevolution? Shall I remove potential from my garden? Do I expect it to receive it's orders politely? Shall I recoil at it's refusal to cooperate, it's continual attempts to usurp me, to invade my garage, and crawl into the cracks of my windowsills? Plants are not a subdued race, but are often the victim of racism, their freedom fighters slashed and poisoned.

As for me, I shall lie amidst my gangly green overgrowth and write with a biro in a spiral bound notebook and no-one shall steal my joy.

Champagne

I love this song!

So do I!!! I want it at my funeral!!!!

Can I sing it there???

YES!!!!!!!!!Will you die soon?




I create opportunities for innappropriacy. He laughs like a two-stroke engine. Listen, I will pull his handle.

I collect them. I wear them around my wrist and discard them at will.

Buddhism

and everything i said was just awesome and true
and everything they said to me was awesome and true and
i think they put something in the air.