dysphoria today

I let my beard stay an extra day or two, and suddenly I felt compelled to shave it. It's easy to rationalise my body hair during winter, while I feel like the beard is a great freak-out tool, but long-term it's not my style. I wouldn't say I fell in love with Auckland over the weekend, but I'm definitely keen to move there (even if briefly) for a change of pace. My medium-term goal is this Pacific Islands tour idea that I'm cooking up: I realise that Mika used AUT to further her goals, but I'm really not as into teaching as my script would suggest. - That's more Sondheim than me: I'm of the opinion that songwriting isn't really a teachable skill. That's what he told me. For me, the motivation to take students is mostly financial: it's way more related to my degree than dealing weed, though that's looking increasingly necessary to provide some bridge funding. Tough times... and the word from my mainstream friends is that weed is hard to source. - I get bored easily, though I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD. I'm crap at keeping jobs because I'm too lazy to want promotions, but too restless to do the same thing for more than a few months. The body hair is bugging me too, but since I lost my job there's not much chance of affording laser hair removal. Plus I like hairy women, so it's easier to rationalise (I'm caucasian, and body hair is a major difference re: trans things I reckon). - As for my classical training... there's a phrase we all learn in first-year, which is this idea of the 'museum culture' -- that around the late 19th Century, German and Austrian conductors (like von Bülow) began to regularly program music by dead composers to a greater degree of frequency than living composers. Where once orchestras had been living documents of various cultural trends of today, they started to increasingly play Bach (following Mendelssohn), and other dead music. It spread quickly, and that's more or less the culture that we see ourselves as inhabiting; it could be seen as similar to kaitiaki, but western knowledge isn't so geographically limited. - If one reads my work literally, I'm more or less ambivalent about this idea. Portrait of a Knight is both a paean to and a cautionary tale about the limitations of the museum, while These Words Are Meant For Someone is more like a desert island disc of sounds I'd heard. If people want to stage These Words Are Meant For Someone, I think Manny is the person to talk to; as far as I'm concerned, I've already done my job for that, and I'm open to other people arranging those scores. Mine were purely for the synthesiser, so they're not practical. I'm quite keen for a legit tenor to take a crack at the harmony parts, which are really gnarly... I'm not up to those. - I'm very influenced by Peter Brook in how I approach movies, and those sort of epic theatre events are the thing that I'm into theatrically. I feel like festival culture is inauthentic compared to those things that Andre Gregory talks about in My Dinner with Andre, but I've always wanted to try that sort-of way out there thing, and I guess Gary supplied me with that opportunity. The trance music is a pleasantly surprising influence, but it's coming from quite a similar place, I reckon, so it blends well with my opera and jazz sounds.