Now more than ever, i see art affecting my life in subtle ways.  Art is affecting my consciousness deeper than just emotion though - that's the basic jist of it, but it's more than that.  Music does this the best for me, since it sits so well in the background while i do other things like talk, watch things, or read.  Depending on what kind of presence or taste a song has, i'll be more drawn to those cues in my brain.

i suppose for me to describe this i'm gonna have to show you what kinds of cues are opened up in my mind when emotion defines itself  - having shapes and forms, like a face, if you will. yeah, i'll use a face as an analogy. if the mood is sad, the face will be blue and sullen, like it's been put on ice and slowed down. if the mood is serene, the face will be more of a nature-inspired look, kind of like a face blooming into a flower with real nice greens and pinks. lastly if the mood is fucked up (angry or crazy) the face will be distorted and abstract (there are too many features i can get into here, i'll just leave it at that).

anyhow, to de-analogize this point, when i do these techniques i see the entire world that way, and i'll be subtly coaxed to see things as i think the creator of that peice of art would have as he created it. perhaps it's just an aftereffect of trying to get into art and pick up on deeper facts within songs.

the more i wrote this, the more oi realized it was probably just me, overusing my creativity as the songs affected me and passed through my emotions, then myself drawing on those emotions to make the forms and twist them back out into whatever i saw from reality. still, it made for some pretty nice trips. =]
 
i suppose this bit of writing is half awe and half praise - sometimes i love the things that come out when i'm listening to something.  i've got a real fine ear for music - as you might have picked up from listening to some of the stuff on my page, i like ambient music mostly.. soothing stuff that really sinks in down there, nice and slowly, to let you do whatever you're doing as it walks around the back parts of your mind.  some of this stuff, although minimalist, has some real flavor to it - because there's less to it, it's easier (when adapted) to pick up on subtle emotional cues, like a slight offset to a minor chord to induce a more intriguing flavor. sometimes when i'm listening to a peice of good music, i'll write something that i know i wouldn't have if i was writing in silence - something that isn't out of character so to speak, but just enough out of my normal repitoire that i wouldn't feel comfortable saying. a few times during writing i've marked a peice with what music i was listening to, just for the sake of knowing it's different for a reason. often times, after all the embarassment has passed over seeing it in print again and again, i'll think to myself, hey, it was pretty kewl after all.
 
 

the reason i said maybe it's just me is because i know i watched a hell of a lot of TV as a kid, and i know that when i use imaging techniques, images tend to morph themselves into images i've seen in some show or another.  i know then this is probably true for most of my generation; i wonder what it would have been like for a previous generation to imagine such things? probably just not as bound.. their minds probably had less creative imagery to work with, so more of it would have had to come from their creativity rather than memory.

i wonder if all this tv watching made me too impressionable and not clear-cut in my own ways to see above the affectance level of the art. still, should i crave this? i know a lot of times i want more from a song but don't have it, and here i have it staring me in the face with this.