summer by katharine eastman
.
ambient - very similar to the first track on Cascade. I like it very much.
I've started this track at the start (a stupid thing to say, I know, but maybe you know what I mean) - and because my music relies so much on long echo it takes a few minutes to get hypnotic, and the early stages contain periods of silence and uneventfulness which might be disconcerting to the casual listener, or the nervous listener
.
.............................
.
yes I do seem (no "seem" about it) to be churning them out lately. When I was young and on a binge I was very unproductive - just reading and watching favourite films and hearing favourite music. It's been almost ten years since I was last drinking as much as I am now and that's not great - but the only good thing about it now is that I am productive when drinking. Because there is nothing else to do. There wasn't much else to do even when I was sober.
I've got great friends and a wonderful hilarious girlfriend and family are okay and I live in a city where there's masses to do all within walking distance. And yet at heart I am a loner.
I come from the school that believes that once you are an alcoholic then you are always an alcoholic - even if you haven't had a drink for 20 years - you will always know what the crazy years were like and how far the sober normal world falls short, no matter how hard you try to make the best of the sober final years.
Drinking isn't easy. Anyone who thinks it's a cop-out or a refuge or the easy way out - well not in my experience. I know how boring me-and-my-drink-hell stories are - and this isn't one of them anyway - I've always loved drinking - it gave me the happiest periods of my life - it forced me (someone who is a natural conformist) to live a fairly non-conformist life, without career or mortgage or pension plan etc etc etc - and somehow I got through - and I do truly think this recent period of drinking is just a blip until life all around us gets a bit more ooomphy again.
When I was married we had lots of "comfort films" - those cuddle-on-the-sofa films that are warm and safe and funny - things which the expert critics hate and which might be embarrassing even to talk about here among friends - The Bucket List, Meet The Fockers, Breakfast At Tiffany's ..... etc etc etc, and one of them was The World's Fastest Indian. There's a bit right at the end of that film when Anthony Hopkins arrives back home in NZ after his triumph in America and it's a long time since I last saw it but he says words to the effect that all he wants to do is get back into his shed and carry on with his projects and that is how I am.
.
........................
.
(recorded this afternoon, photo last month Vanessa Oliver)
.
