music = love
(first day of DJ lessons. yay.)
What I’ve found so amazing while hanging out with my fellow Bay-arean Miss Alexandra over the past few days, is how entirely beautiful it is to create art, make music, and live free, regardless of how stressful life can get. I walk into Alexandra’s house winded from a long walk and a stressful thought, and instantly I’m soothed when I discover the paintings she’s been nurturing all day, the playlist she’s been working on, and the awkward English comedy she’s been laughing at for the past hour. I tell her, “Man. I’m a fan of your life.”
I’ve been so caught up in the NY hustle over the past few months, so much so that I haven’t been able to do anything artistic- not even to update my blog! Even partaking in listening to new music has been impossible, and my writing has suffered worst of all. I feel 2010 is finally giving me some much deserved breathing room, and I’m finally finding ways to create again. Now that creativity is slowly finding its way back, I realize how dependent I’ve become on music- the way it moves me, the way it pushes me, the way I experience some crazy sublime explosion inside when the right song finds me. While I haven’t done much writing as of late, I’ve decided to learn a new craft, with the help of Miss Alexandra, of course:
Chicka-chicka! (No, I didn’t spell the spanish word for girl wrong. It’s my “DJ scratch” onomatopoeia, son.) Learning to listen to music with different ears offers me such important life lessons. To the naked ear, music’s timely precision isn’t always obvious. But yesterday, while going through the motions of my first mixing lesson, I recognized how exact, how precise, a DJ has to mix in an instrumental- just a mere fraction of a second off, and the whole song is entirely off. It’s kinda like life, isn’t it? Timing is everything.
Often, I get frustrated by how slow life seems to be- so many things I want hasn’t arrived. But music made it all make sense: too fast or too slow makes for a fractured melody. But when you await patiently for the right time to come, you dance through the grooves much more gracefully.
Let’s stay on our 1s and 2s, shall we?
There’s a movement in this movement/So move like you meant it
