New Year Resolutions are not really me. When you have a flitting attention span, terrible time management and a tendency to attempt too many simultaneous tasks, the whole resolution process is doomed to failure. I made a couple last year and the year before, but I recall neither what they were nor how long I managed to keep them. Oh wait… I can make an educated guess at one of them being an intention to write a lot more music. Yeah, right.
However, the medium of the weblog is perfect for all this terribly middle class lifestyle angst drivel, and being serious for the briefest of moments, I do quite like the idea of turning my brain down to a slow simmer setting and Taking Stock of Things. What’s more, this is the 200th entry in this blog, so it’s an appropriate time for such thoughts. No actual resolutions here, but I can at least use my experience of 2004 as a source of ideas for 2005…
Music
I’ve noticed a worrying (and increasing) tendency during 2004. I’ve become quite hesitant and stilted in my creative approach, as if I’m trying too hard to make the sort of music I think I *ought* to be making, rather than just allowing each idea to find its own natural conclusion. It’s understandable; I’ve had less time to compose and record this year, so I think I’m subconsciously afraid of “wasting” my sessions. The ironic result, of course, is that I’ve ended up wasting lots of time perservering with dreary, uninspiring ideas. It’s clear what I have to do in 2005…
Technically, I’m feeling quite positive about my guitar playing at the moment. There’s tons of stuff I can’t do, but I’m pretty comfortable (especially in a recording environment) with the requirements of my own music. To keep things ticking over, Jack Zucker’s Sheets of Sound is going to come in useful this year, I think.
As far as other people’s music is concerned, my biggest discovery of 2004 was early church music. I’d originally intended to spend a few months working my way through the entire history of (“classical”) music in an attempt to fill in some rather large gaps in my knowledge, but I was so touched by the crystalline beauty of so much of the earliest polyphonic music (particularly Perotin) I ended up exploring the medieval period in more detail. I’ll be continuing with my chronological quest in 2005, but I intend to listen to a lot more medieval and renaissance choral music.
Literature
I’ve kept a list of every book I’ve read (fiction and biography, anyway) since 1991, so I can see patterns emerging in my reading habits. There’s been a general decline in the amount I read ever since I discovered the Internet, and I can’t use Ebooks as an excuse, because I don’t really like reading anything more intensive than blogs or news items from a screen. I’ve been improving since my literary low point of 2000/01, but I still want to read a lot more in 2005.
Just in case you’re interested, these are the books I read last year…
One Hit Wonderland – Tony Hawks; Life of Pi – Yann Martell; Captain Beefheart (biography) – Mike Barnes; Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier; The Pickwick Papers – Charles Dickens; Free Lunch – David Smith; Brighton Rock – Graham Greene; Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky; A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Oblomov – Goncharov; Riding the Iron Rooster – Paul Theroux; Eugene Onegin – Alexander Pushkin; Motorcycle Diaries – Che Guevara; Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
I definitely intend to continue with my crash course in Russian literature, and while I don’t want to go overboard with the 19th century English novel, there’s plenty of important stuff I still need to read from that period. I discovered Neal Stephenson in 2003, but didn’t get round to reading more of his work last year, so there’s another task for 2005, along with Jon Courtenay Grimwood (on Rick’s recommendation).
Health and stuff
I’m very lucky in this respect. I can eat like a pig but still remain fairly skinny and I only get a full-blown cold once every year or two, with nothing much besides, so thank the deity who deals with that sort of stuff. No biscuit, however, to the deity who deals with backache. The dodgy back I’ve had for about three months (a sacro-iliac problem, creating sciatic pain and a very tight hamstring) is *slowly* improving. Acupuncture has done a lot more good than chiropractic/osteopathic treatment, but I’ll be joining a gym and strengthening the weakened muscles to prevent it happening again.
Life at home
Sometime last year, I suddenly came to the conclusion that I wanted to get a little beehive and keep bees. I’ll almost certainly be looking into this very soon… I’ll keep you posted. I like bees.
If you’re about to buy a house, I have a simple piece of advice for you. Buy one that is either (a) already perfect for your tastes and requirements or (b) in need of serious work before you can even bear to exist in it. We bought a house which was perfectly fine to live in, but needed several bits of work done to make it “just so”. Four years on, most of that work remains to be done… ;-)
