Tag Archive for 'music'

Planting fake memories in permafrost of my brain

Do you remember that old movie “Total recall” with Arnold Schwarzenegger? Thinking about self-hypnosis and our abilities to induce memories, I decided to “create” fake memories inside my head. If you ask me why, I would tell you, probably just for fun. Actually, I believe our memories are mapped. None of them exists on its own, but rather refer to each other and interlinked with each other… our brain representing a big search engine, kind of biochemical based Google employing a random search. Try to refer to any memory you have: to make things easier, strong memory, or a memory of big importance for you.

An example. I have a memory of trying to climb up Everest.  It’s not the case of being megalomaniac, but rather accidentally. As long as I was there, you know.  I actually posted this memory here, on September 11th… :) , … nope, the date is just a coincidence. This memory opens up like a Russian matreshka doll: containing yet another one nested inside another etc. Thinking about that day brings back other memories: of finding a fossil near Milarepa’s cave, of fluorescent dog, of friendship, of moments while waiting for our friend we collected some stones and arranged them into a message “FREE TIBET”, of dying from thirst and cold. Whatever. This memory is also nested in others: of my long journey across Siberian plains, Mongolia, China, Nepal and India, of places I visited and people I met etc. OK, you have the picture.

Now imagine, you plant a fake memory inside your brain. Something completely out of sane mind and context, like planting a rare orchid somewhere in Siberian permafrost. If it will live, your brain would have to rewire it with some other facts, blending “reality” and “imagination”. So, what I’m interested in, is this “shadow zone”, border area in between, this vegetation between orchid and permafrost which my brain has to create to “index” this fake memory.

To make things even more interesting, I decided to experiment with planting fake memories in different contexts. For instance, I always wanted to visit Peru. So I thought  about planting a fake memory of this trip. But this task is way too grand, and the real trip would have too many details, so probably I wouldn’t succeed. Nevermind. I am writing a story at the moment. The best and easiest way to write is to write about something you know. It also gives the story some credibility, and makes it more captivating to read.

This story plot, to put it short,  goes partly in the future-past loop excluding present, partly in the parallel universes and most of it inside the black hole , with 3 main characters - creators of those parallel universes embedded without their acknowledgement in the mind of one character, whose consciousness is being badly split in 3 parts, meaning he is a schizophrenic (schizophrenia, actually literally means “split mind”, schizos phrenos in Greek, if I’m not mistaken). Moreover, these multiple “fake personalities” are being split in their own turn, forking further as the story develops… so it’s a kind of fractal consciousness in senses of being fractal and being fractured.

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Kaoma - Lambada

After the wall came down and David Hasselhoff conquered the Eastern German charts with “I have been looking for freedom”, this was the second tape I posessed.

After the freedom was there because walls dividing a country were pulled down, my mom and me danced Lambada in our living room, out to the courtyard, embracing the opportunities the changes had brought. A piece of the world that had seemed so far a year ago manifested itself now in our frontyard. A piece of Brazil in Eastern Germany in the sweltering heat of the summer in 1990.

Fran

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The Dog Days of Music

A friend and I meet at a house to jam with some new people. My dad drops me off after a bit of a drive, and I am struck by the nearly identical nature of this house to the one I grew up in–even the outside colors are the same–though as I walk through the garage, I notice the concrete bricks along the foundation are differently patterned. The main floor of the house looks just like my own home from childhood as well, including even the addition we built on to our kitchen over ten years after constructing the house!

We go down to the basement (which looks completely different) to set up and meet our new musician friends: a brother and sister who seem a little straight-edge. I met them online recently because they, like me, enjoy listening to SwissGroove streaming radio, and a few of the cover songs we play sound like music fit for that station. I bring my percussion rig along but leave my congas and bongos at home as I didn’t quite know what to expect, but even with reduced equipment it takes me well into the first song to set up. I also bring my pipe, still half-packed, but decided these two were not into that at all and let it stay in the plastic bag of my belongings. After awhile I notice some advertising posters in the basement, and it seems like these people are members of the band Belle and Sebastian.

The house also boasts a collection of small, shaggy and annoying dogs. These dogs possess sharp claws and bad tempers and get upset very easily, becoming aggressive and latching on to your hand, leg, or anything else they grab. They seem to receive enough attention yet act as if they desperately need more. I cannot stand these dogs.

After jamming I sit in a couch, still in the basement, to watch a Yankees baseball game. I stay under a blanket to protect myself from dog attacks–with reasonable success until the game ends and their dad comes home. As he and I chat the dogs return, angrily jump on the couch and blanket, and proceed to bite, claw, and generally make life miserable.

I really hate these dogs.

Jacob Haqq-Misra

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I had forgotten…

…about those days when I wanted nothing more than to be a concert pianist playing fifty concerts a year around the world…..

I was fourteen. And, some how playing those virtuosic pieces with all the sentimentality that was brimming out of my teenage self, I thought I knew what I wanted to do. I played those pieces composed centuries, decades ago with all my heart and passion, like no one else had. I played it my way. I brought listeners to tears. And a couple days after I turned sixteen, I left for London to music school. I thought that my life was made.

Technique, technique, technique… The physical-ness of being a musician. It really is identical to that of being a sportsman. Without the genes that guarantees height for a basketball-er, or the thighs and long calves of that of a sprinter, it doesn’t matter if you know at the bottom of your heart that your soul was meant to do what your body couldn’t do. I practiced nine hours a day, but I never had the fingers of some of my school mates who could rattle Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky without needing to practice more than an hour a day. After three years of doing all I could, literally breaking myself on the wall each day and night, I knew that what my heart sang and what I could do well were drastically different. I ended up in university majoring in Economics, some thing I could do with my eyes closed. I received top honors, but yet it was and still is a huge struggle to come to terms with the fact that what I love and excel in are two different things.

I treated myself to an iPod video today. As I was downloading music into this new iPod, I came across some of my old recordings of more than thirteen years. My heart was all there. It is another reality. Perhaps one that I have had hidden for too long but yet I am unable to revive. That memory is the silent part of my existence that will only be known to me and only me.

Bunny

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