I really enjoy listening to music, and doing other things as well to take it easy. Currently my favorite songs are “Karma Police” by Radiohead and “Abraham” by Sufjan Stevens. These songs contain open-ended and speculative interests, with the former suiting men who ironically drone to empty skies and the latter adopting an ascetic and hymn-like tone. It is a fun and useful item to have, when one thinks about how women could change these sentimental styles and concepts by inserting themselves into and re-originalizing the thought processes of the music. I enjoy hobbies as light-lifting ones, whether it be doing beginner-level yoga or scrolling through Netflix and Slate magazine as a hilariously pseudo media scholar who thinks about the human condition. Apart from hobbies, my passions and vocational pursuits include reading novels and books, and free-writing. My free-writing has always turned into creative writing of some sort.
My favorite movie is “Pather Panchali”, which is directed by Satyajit Ray. It’s important to me for a number of reasons. Growing up it was the one among those heritage movies that my parents would show my brother and me that hit closer to home. As I grew older I did not just have hesitations about watching it again but about watching it again on my own, for a movie-night break from other routines by dimming the lights. “Pather Panchali” is in the gray and somber area between realism and naturalism. It stars a regular family that is taken down poorly with emotional and financial burdens as it ages; the mother, father, son and daughter are situated in a pastoral, rural, and residual space that my father, and then my mother when she became connected to him through marriage, immigrated from into America. The movie has a resonance for me and is thus special. It will remain as a reminder of the culturally and aesthetically framed experiences that I did not have the chance to grow up enduring, but that I can access through both old and modern media if I choose to.
“Anything can sink in anyone’s mind …”. I can’t recall the source of this quote, but it does remind me of people’s capacity to be nurtured or exploited, and to shape themselves through the environments that they surround themselves in.
Edit: Regarding the little I’ve written about musical versions, I’ve paired a masculine and feminine or, at least, a male and female take on the same music, complete with their respective conceptual and arrangement nuances. “Iris” is an original by the Goo Goo Dolls, and Kina Grannis performs her cover of their original, thereby claiming something of her own experience through the Goo Goo Dolls’ song. In a take of listening between the two versions of the song, I notice that I have different thoughts and emotional responses.
I look forward to getting to meet you all more in the upcoming weeks!
Trina