the white sheep
bore into you with their
beady eyes
then bow their heads
back down to graze
on the neon green grass—
As should you.
welcome to dewdrops, loves. it's been a while, but as usual... sit back, relax, and enjoy -- preferably with some tea...
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Monday, October 28, 2019
Mazas Opus 36, No. 7
“You need more soul. Imagine yourself as an old man, in the last days of your life, reminiscing under towering trees and falling autumn leaves.” My violin teacher had reached the peak of his impatience and finally, face cradled in his hands, instructed me, a ten-year-old girl, to do the impossible.
Over the previous week, I had been practicing the piece as my mother loomed over me, attacking every stroke of my bow. A plethora of technical markings swarmed the expressivo neatly printed on the very first measure of my score. By the time of my lesson, I had reduced the soul of J.F. Mazas to nothing more than a handful of incoherent notes with no fancy techniques to mask the droning. Standing flush with the white brick wall, I stared into the wine-red carpet below me as my teacher sat across the tiny room in his imperial black office chair with my mother, who leaned back on a worn leather sofa, shielded from my distress by a coffee table strewn over with magazines, recording the lesson from behind the camcorder as always. Mr. Lin kept his eyes closed and restored himself to his usual position, both arms on the armrests, waiting for me to implement his directions in the next playthrough. Had I not feared for a future filled with a fusillade of my mom’s criticism, I would have thrown my hands up in defeat, violin and all. Yet, though he sat like an ice carving, Mr. Lin’s expectancy for me to play washed through the atmosphere, even through the thick waves of my desolation.
Inhale, two three, four. I raised my bow up and brought it down dramatically. C, G, E, D. I began quietly, looking around behind my eyelids and imagining a crisp autumn day. A morning mist tinted the air grey over the path stretching through the woods. A trill of grace notes brought a whiff of fresh, fallen leaves and memories of my children, long grown up and starting families of their own. High, delicate legato sections rushed me past years upon years of experience. Tumbling scales grounded my old man-imagination and washed me over with nostalgia. From the distance, past this misty realm, came a sigh from the other side of the dim room.
“I need more emotion from you.”
I gripped my bow and clenched my toes, inhaling shakily. Wordlessly, I scrutinized the grain on my violin and each salty stain. There was still half an hour left in my lesson, and only one action I could take. So I played. Again and again, my teacher paused me. At times, Mr. Lin would offer gentle guidance on my technique, but I mostly found my heart fluttering with indignance as he commanded more old-man emotion from me, until finally, as the crickets raised their chorus in crescendo, I could pack my torture devices and head home under the weight of my mother’s disapproval.
“You need more emotion,” she parroted, face crinkling in the rearview mirror. Sure, I felt emotion, just never the right kind, or at the right time. And when I attempted to express myself through my violin during these lessons, I could never succeed.
One year later, the word “catharsis” slipped from my brother’s mouth and nestled itself in my mind. Mr. Lin moved away to teach at Juilliard, but left me with “The Meditation of Thais” to work on. A month later, I quit. As time dragged by, my violin, sitting out of tune by the fireplace, strengthened its silent siren song. Three years later, on one afternoon of a particularly taxing day, scratching my pen on my homework could no longer contain my anxieties. I unlatched the familiar black case and lifted the velvet shrouding my violin. The first piece I played was “Meditation.” The second was the dearly beloved violin etude by Mazas, Opus 36, Number 7. Each trill released tension in my heart, and on the lower melodies, my bow tore across the strings, releasing sonorous music. No longer did I have to stumble in shoes too worn, too large for me to wear properly. Standing tall on a foundation hammered down for years by my teacher, I could finally sculpt a tribute to myself from the myriad music scores at my disposal. Mr. Lin’s voice in my head reminded me not to imagine myself as an old man, but instead to channel my own frustrations, my joys, from just minutes ago to the beginning of my memory, through the delicate strings. Melodies reverberated through the wood of my violin and through the roots of my being. Catharsis.
Over the previous week, I had been practicing the piece as my mother loomed over me, attacking every stroke of my bow. A plethora of technical markings swarmed the expressivo neatly printed on the very first measure of my score. By the time of my lesson, I had reduced the soul of J.F. Mazas to nothing more than a handful of incoherent notes with no fancy techniques to mask the droning. Standing flush with the white brick wall, I stared into the wine-red carpet below me as my teacher sat across the tiny room in his imperial black office chair with my mother, who leaned back on a worn leather sofa, shielded from my distress by a coffee table strewn over with magazines, recording the lesson from behind the camcorder as always. Mr. Lin kept his eyes closed and restored himself to his usual position, both arms on the armrests, waiting for me to implement his directions in the next playthrough. Had I not feared for a future filled with a fusillade of my mom’s criticism, I would have thrown my hands up in defeat, violin and all. Yet, though he sat like an ice carving, Mr. Lin’s expectancy for me to play washed through the atmosphere, even through the thick waves of my desolation.
Inhale, two three, four. I raised my bow up and brought it down dramatically. C, G, E, D. I began quietly, looking around behind my eyelids and imagining a crisp autumn day. A morning mist tinted the air grey over the path stretching through the woods. A trill of grace notes brought a whiff of fresh, fallen leaves and memories of my children, long grown up and starting families of their own. High, delicate legato sections rushed me past years upon years of experience. Tumbling scales grounded my old man-imagination and washed me over with nostalgia. From the distance, past this misty realm, came a sigh from the other side of the dim room.
“I need more emotion from you.”
I gripped my bow and clenched my toes, inhaling shakily. Wordlessly, I scrutinized the grain on my violin and each salty stain. There was still half an hour left in my lesson, and only one action I could take. So I played. Again and again, my teacher paused me. At times, Mr. Lin would offer gentle guidance on my technique, but I mostly found my heart fluttering with indignance as he commanded more old-man emotion from me, until finally, as the crickets raised their chorus in crescendo, I could pack my torture devices and head home under the weight of my mother’s disapproval.
“You need more emotion,” she parroted, face crinkling in the rearview mirror. Sure, I felt emotion, just never the right kind, or at the right time. And when I attempted to express myself through my violin during these lessons, I could never succeed.
One year later, the word “catharsis” slipped from my brother’s mouth and nestled itself in my mind. Mr. Lin moved away to teach at Juilliard, but left me with “The Meditation of Thais” to work on. A month later, I quit. As time dragged by, my violin, sitting out of tune by the fireplace, strengthened its silent siren song. Three years later, on one afternoon of a particularly taxing day, scratching my pen on my homework could no longer contain my anxieties. I unlatched the familiar black case and lifted the velvet shrouding my violin. The first piece I played was “Meditation.” The second was the dearly beloved violin etude by Mazas, Opus 36, Number 7. Each trill released tension in my heart, and on the lower melodies, my bow tore across the strings, releasing sonorous music. No longer did I have to stumble in shoes too worn, too large for me to wear properly. Standing tall on a foundation hammered down for years by my teacher, I could finally sculpt a tribute to myself from the myriad music scores at my disposal. Mr. Lin’s voice in my head reminded me not to imagine myself as an old man, but instead to channel my own frustrations, my joys, from just minutes ago to the beginning of my memory, through the delicate strings. Melodies reverberated through the wood of my violin and through the roots of my being. Catharsis.
Sunday, September 29, 2019
skies and stars
It's early autumn and the skies darken earlier
Days ago it was pitch-black at seven in the afternoon
But today
It's eight
And the sky's a dull slate grey
Splotched with patches of deep navy ink
And—
Strange—
Dots of light dusty periwinkle?
Where the light shines from, I can't be certain
No moon in sight confirms my suspicions
Half the sky is a black, rust-brown
The other half, a deep dark blue
Today
Days ago it was pitch-black at seven in the afternoon
But today
It's eight
And the sky's a dull slate grey
Splotched with patches of deep navy ink
And—
Strange—
Dots of light dusty periwinkle?
Where the light shines from, I can't be certain
No moon in sight confirms my suspicions
Half the sky is a black, rust-brown
The other half, a deep dark blue
Today
It's eight
On a early-middle autumn day
On a early-middle autumn day
Darker than before
But my sky
My sky is brighter than at the beginning of this fall.
But my sky
My sky is brighter than at the beginning of this fall.
Sunday, September 15, 2019
Billie Jeans: Social media and the cycle of fashion
(A bit different. Wrote this a while ago for another publication but it was never published and much too well-sourced to go to waste.)
Fashion and culture are interwoven with each other — widespread fashion is a harbinger of change in culture, yet culture also sways fashion. Think Stranger Things or Riverdale and the increase of 80s-inspired fashion trends such as jewel-toned, color-blocked anoraks, oversized tops and sometimes, in high fashion, shoulder pads.
High-waisted pants and statement sunglasses reminiscent of the 80s and 90s inundate today’s fashion, especially on the streets. Chokers, ranging from plastic to leather and velvet, found their places in numerous outfits on Instagram in 2017 and continue to linger as a go-to accessory in more alternative styles.
“I think it's reciprocal, and I don't really think you can point to the arrows really going in one direction. [Fashion designers] are very aware of cultural influences in the current moment, but also for art and music, they look at the past,” New York University professor and fashion historian Nancy Deihl said. “I also think that fashion has the power to be the image of a certain time period [...] it often reflects changes as well — what we call a zeitgeist.”
Styles fade in and out of fashion, and certain staples of specific time periods become muses for newer decades, but what exactly decides when such trends make a comeback? The cycle of nostalgia, a concept that says that every 20 to 40 years, depending on the source, an old trend returns, may not be so exact.
“When we talk about trends, we talk about macro-trends, so large, long-term trends [...] And then there are the micro trends — short lived, some people call them fads — the things that are far less predictable. When we talk about the return of specific fashion items, it's more of a short term,” trend forecaster and brand curator at Los Angeles’s TREND Company Roberta Panzanelli said. “It's not as predictable as the long term trend of being environmentally conscious, or being less regulated by gender norms. Other social issues like recent movements, the women's movement, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter — those things are the influencers of trends.”
Recently, chokers, colored hair, and other staples of 90s grunge returned to mainstream fashion. Last year, with the popularity of the Netflix series Stranger Things, the 80s returning with a mass modern reboot. Through the years, recurring themes of the 70s flit from musical festivals to regular streetwear in its flowy, floral, bohemian style.
Even after identifying these distinctions of when trends rose and fell, it is hard to pinpoint when exactly a reboot went out of fashion. For example, grunge elements of the 90s such as oversized and distressed clothing are highly popular in streetwear, but they blend with 70s and 80s trends as well.
“If we think about fashion history as [the board game] Candy Land, you can get from the 1920s straight to the 1960s rather than going through the other decades,” Deihl said. “We, going backwards, can do the same thing. We can just, in our travels, grab a sleeve from there or bring back a high-waisted pants from there or look at platform shoes from there. There are all these different pieces that are available to us, kind of like the history is this big, gigantic thrift shop, and we can go shopping without any pre-determined shopping list, just based on whatever appeals to us.”
The rise of the internet has greatly sped up the spread of fashion and the changing of trends.
“People have always been curious, always wanting to know about the latest fashion somewhere else [...], but then, it was restricted to those who could, and it was slower,” Panzanelli said. “Today, it is far faster, and it involves a lot many more people. In a sense, a lot has changed, and nothing. The mechanism has not changed. What has changed is the scope and the speed.”
From music videos to webstars, the internet has created a new platform for fashion inspiration.
“I get my inspiration from the music videos I watch,” Outlit Apparel co-founder Gina Partridge said.
Instead of one trusted source, individuals turn to other individuals on their favored sharing platforms.
“The mediating influence of, for example, fashion editors is just not as strong anymore ... A lot of my research has to do with going into old fashion magazines, and really, they were Bibles. There was a lot more authority coming from the fashion press,” Deihl said.
For many today, finding fashion influence online, especially on Instagram, is now the norm.
Rather than having a board of editors deciding the next season’s trends, social media has centered the power of setting trends in the hands of individuals.
“Having the confidence of trying something new is an integral part of creating a new fashion trend because no matter how bad it looks, if you wear it with confidence and strut with pride, people will start doing it too,” high school student Jai Bahri, who is new to finding his own style, said.
Now, especially with the option to create a business profile, social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are tailoring their interface to cater more to online shopping.
Especially with the added speed of spreading trends, the exact future of fashion continues to be unpredictable, even with trend forecasting services, which focus more on the bigger picture.
“If you talk about taste, fashion is part of our taste. Taste is very difficult to analyze, and that's why I love trend forecasting, because it's about the general state of the culture. It's not about one thing only,” Panzanelli said. “I don't know where it's going. I don't think you can really predict that. This is a very fascinating and incredibly frustrating thing about trend forecasting. Some things catch on, and some things don't.”
Fashion and culture are interwoven with each other — widespread fashion is a harbinger of change in culture, yet culture also sways fashion. Think Stranger Things or Riverdale and the increase of 80s-inspired fashion trends such as jewel-toned, color-blocked anoraks, oversized tops and sometimes, in high fashion, shoulder pads.
High-waisted pants and statement sunglasses reminiscent of the 80s and 90s inundate today’s fashion, especially on the streets. Chokers, ranging from plastic to leather and velvet, found their places in numerous outfits on Instagram in 2017 and continue to linger as a go-to accessory in more alternative styles.
“I think it's reciprocal, and I don't really think you can point to the arrows really going in one direction. [Fashion designers] are very aware of cultural influences in the current moment, but also for art and music, they look at the past,” New York University professor and fashion historian Nancy Deihl said. “I also think that fashion has the power to be the image of a certain time period [...] it often reflects changes as well — what we call a zeitgeist.”
Styles fade in and out of fashion, and certain staples of specific time periods become muses for newer decades, but what exactly decides when such trends make a comeback? The cycle of nostalgia, a concept that says that every 20 to 40 years, depending on the source, an old trend returns, may not be so exact.
“When we talk about trends, we talk about macro-trends, so large, long-term trends [...] And then there are the micro trends — short lived, some people call them fads — the things that are far less predictable. When we talk about the return of specific fashion items, it's more of a short term,” trend forecaster and brand curator at Los Angeles’s TREND Company Roberta Panzanelli said. “It's not as predictable as the long term trend of being environmentally conscious, or being less regulated by gender norms. Other social issues like recent movements, the women's movement, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter — those things are the influencers of trends.”
Recently, chokers, colored hair, and other staples of 90s grunge returned to mainstream fashion. Last year, with the popularity of the Netflix series Stranger Things, the 80s returning with a mass modern reboot. Through the years, recurring themes of the 70s flit from musical festivals to regular streetwear in its flowy, floral, bohemian style.
Even after identifying these distinctions of when trends rose and fell, it is hard to pinpoint when exactly a reboot went out of fashion. For example, grunge elements of the 90s such as oversized and distressed clothing are highly popular in streetwear, but they blend with 70s and 80s trends as well.
“If we think about fashion history as [the board game] Candy Land, you can get from the 1920s straight to the 1960s rather than going through the other decades,” Deihl said. “We, going backwards, can do the same thing. We can just, in our travels, grab a sleeve from there or bring back a high-waisted pants from there or look at platform shoes from there. There are all these different pieces that are available to us, kind of like the history is this big, gigantic thrift shop, and we can go shopping without any pre-determined shopping list, just based on whatever appeals to us.”
The rise of the internet has greatly sped up the spread of fashion and the changing of trends.
“People have always been curious, always wanting to know about the latest fashion somewhere else [...], but then, it was restricted to those who could, and it was slower,” Panzanelli said. “Today, it is far faster, and it involves a lot many more people. In a sense, a lot has changed, and nothing. The mechanism has not changed. What has changed is the scope and the speed.”
From music videos to webstars, the internet has created a new platform for fashion inspiration.
“I get my inspiration from the music videos I watch,” Outlit Apparel co-founder Gina Partridge said.
Instead of one trusted source, individuals turn to other individuals on their favored sharing platforms.
“The mediating influence of, for example, fashion editors is just not as strong anymore ... A lot of my research has to do with going into old fashion magazines, and really, they were Bibles. There was a lot more authority coming from the fashion press,” Deihl said.
For many today, finding fashion influence online, especially on Instagram, is now the norm.
Rather than having a board of editors deciding the next season’s trends, social media has centered the power of setting trends in the hands of individuals.
“Having the confidence of trying something new is an integral part of creating a new fashion trend because no matter how bad it looks, if you wear it with confidence and strut with pride, people will start doing it too,” high school student Jai Bahri, who is new to finding his own style, said.
Now, especially with the option to create a business profile, social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are tailoring their interface to cater more to online shopping.
Especially with the added speed of spreading trends, the exact future of fashion continues to be unpredictable, even with trend forecasting services, which focus more on the bigger picture.
“If you talk about taste, fashion is part of our taste. Taste is very difficult to analyze, and that's why I love trend forecasting, because it's about the general state of the culture. It's not about one thing only,” Panzanelli said. “I don't know where it's going. I don't think you can really predict that. This is a very fascinating and incredibly frustrating thing about trend forecasting. Some things catch on, and some things don't.”
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
deserts
from across the arid expanse, I watched you abandon me.
the sea of soft sand rippled like the corduroy you wore.
your caramel kiss lingered, cloyingly sweet...
on my parched lips.
nothing and everything was between us --
porcelain bones
baked pale by the scorching sun
staunch, stolid sentinels
suited with spines
serpents, coiled and ready to strike
venom-doused fangs bared for defense
dwarfish shrikes
devouring impaled victims
and a vast emptiness
swirling with stinging sand,
bitter --
awakened by my disillusionment.
the sea of soft sand rippled like the corduroy you wore.
your caramel kiss lingered, cloyingly sweet...
on my parched lips.
nothing and everything was between us --
porcelain bones
baked pale by the scorching sun
staunch, stolid sentinels
suited with spines
serpents, coiled and ready to strike
venom-doused fangs bared for defense
dwarfish shrikes
devouring impaled victims
and a vast emptiness
swirling with stinging sand,
bitter --
awakened by my disillusionment.