(something bad happened before this)
20.2.21 11:11 all seems normal. we laughed about the old cartoons again. and I pull up monkey king and we laugh about it. my mum said to look at the version she watched as a child. she told me to take a panadol. from being too on edge. i feel a lot better, my headache and nausea. i didn’t know migraines usually are accompanied by nausea. i just filmed my cat seriously with the phone like a camera, as if I was a director. I realised some things. how I could *zoom and frame the subject in a way that eliminates all the unaesthetics, just create an almost abstract scene. for instance, angling from below, my cat, against the nature backdrop of the curtain my mum really likes and spent a lot of time finding and choosing. (*also, perhaps it is possible to do a film without cuts (all footage is important) sort of contrary to chris marker’s la jetee, where only a second or so is moving image. perhaps I could have one cut. ) using my small camera for some footage of my cat through his fur. all with my mums practicing the erhu in the background. I thought about the performance we went to. perhaps I could collage them together. marc said, when I expressed how difficult I am finding to think conceptually about the medium of video, he said think of it as collage. and he is absolutely right. I always feel much more confident and on path after talking to him in a tutorial. he said he is intrigued by the concepts and ideas, and everything had something that was intriguing about it. hm. I feel an almost guilty, undeserved excitement for editing footage. I’m thinking of it now like a visual poem. perhaps I just didn’t have the right material before. yesterday, at the new flat, I took some low quality footage with my small pink camera, of the curious, numerous clocks, whilst playing with the music box sounds and also the ‘thunder’ instrument my sis got a few years ago for her bday, that she doesn’t use at all, but apparently it is an african instrument of some sort. i love how much range it offers. I could play it, someone who has no musical talent, I could feel especially its vibrations, and it is so simple, constructed by a metal spring and a cylinder structure, decorated. I liked how it could imitate nature. I liked how it could sound mechanical. I liked how to operate it, you operate it with your human hands. I very much like the idea of instruments, and I am fascinated, amazed at them, especially after knowing how the erhu is specifically made from the skin of a python to create that gong-ming. and how you don’t press the strings against the main structure, but merely place your fingers upon it. it is probably one of the hardest instruments to learn. there are no guidelines on where you place your fingers, like the violin, you have to rely on your senses. play by ear, by body. and you are playing with others’ bodies. wood, python, horse. my mum said the other day, it doesn’t behave sometimes. the longer you play it, the louder it gets, because of the skin, how the vibrations affect it over time, I am assuming. it is fascinating.
I just asked her to explain it again, I wish I got the footage. I ran and grabbed the camera and she said no. don’t film me, go away. she was in her pajamas. she said, don’t sneak film. I already did before, but just audio. anyway, she said if you don’t touch the erhu for a while, it gets ‘min’. stuffy. I just looked at the character for it again. its ‘door’ with ‘heart’ inside. I can’t help but think of the incident today, of course. but I don’t think Im ready to bring that back in. in many ways the erhu is a metaphor. but I won’t go into those cliches. you can make the connections. she said, it has pores, you need to open them for it to get to its gongming. its a beautiful sound, loud and clear. not stuffy at all. like a clear blue sky. it is strange how we look at a cloudy day like it is depressive. I wonder if other species of being see different types of climate differently. anyway, I need to actually get a start on sarah’s presentation now. I’m a bit stuck honestly. I can feel traces of my migraine still lingering like some bruised ghost. I hear my cat snoring, still, under the loud and clear erhu.
the migraine before was so severe, one of the worst I’ve had in a while. there was one brief moment where it was clear and the colour behind my eyes was as well. (video idea? half believable like the spiritual light photos but narrated seriously. maybe I could read from the translations.) titled ‘HEADACHE’. I thought in that moment pusa was helping me, or the internal one is, and I thanked them. and it crept back. I thought also, the sounds it felt like, the different waves of pain, the loud thundering not unlike the instrument, and a sprinkling tinkling thing perhaps not dissimilar to my nails against the rusted violin strings.