Creative artists are epic always....must keep telling myself this.....also, angry at someone who needs to cut his losses and stop wasting time on something at which he will never be skilled.

The song that defines today: "The Tomb of the Primes" from the Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen score by Steve Jablonsky

I was just browsing Facebook the other day because I was bored out of my mind (ahhh summer.) when I came across a quote on one of my friends' wall.

"Imagination is the beginning of creation.  You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will." 

The very essence of being creative is that we create something out of nothing.  Creative artists--musicians, dancers, writers, and visual artists--are magicians.  Magicians who do real magic, not slight of hand parlor tricks, but really amazing things.  And during my year of feeling lost and boxed in in Boston, I lost that feeling and forgot my ability to create wonderful, magical things.  It sounds cheesy, but I really did forget who I was.

Because...I'm a musician.  And I sort of lost that momentarily.  Every once in a while, I'd fly back to Los Angeles on holiday and I'd reignite the flame that used to burn so brightly behind my eyes, but then I'd go back to Boston and it'd get snuffed out quicker than the Neanderthals when the Homo sapiens arose (bad analogy because the two species actually coexisted and interbred but I've got anthropology on the brain right now).  But now I'm back in Los Angeles for the summer and I'm remembering and rebuilding all that ability that I lost.  I wrote something, and I'm exercising my musical muscles again.  I had to help my brother write a piano piece (for fun.  UGH.), and in one day I remembered how arrogant my musicianship makes me.  For the first time in a very long time, I felt a compelling need to sneer at someone and say, "You don't know what it means to be a musician.  You don't know how much it takes to create, and to pull something out of the air and how to make other people enjoy it in the way that makes you happy." To my own brother! Which, once I think about it, isn't all that surprising because I've always looked down on his weird desire to copy me. 

I didn't do anything musical when I was in Boston.  I performed once, I sang an easy song in Chinese and I was "over-qualified" for the gig.  I felt like something was shriveling up and my skills were rusting--I felt disgusting because I wasn't as creative.  I became more robotic and scientific.  But at the same time, I became less arrogant and snobby.  Are creative and scientific mutually exclusive? That can't possibly be. But now that I'm back in the city I love and appreciate, my creative juices are flowing again and I feel as epic as Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein.  Perhaps I can work toward finding a balance between the creative and the scientific. 

In the mean time, I'm going to put as much effort into stopping myself from letting my brother know he doesn't have what it takes to write music and he should stop trying to be the "Composer Sibling." That was already taken.  >:(
(by me.)

There can only be one.

Book Review: Shanghai Girls by Lisa See

The song that defines today: "One Jump Ahead" from Aladdin

Where should I start with this review? I could go on and on about how Lisa See only furthers the Chinese stereotype.  I could also bluntly destroy her narrowness on the assumption that Shanghai Chinese are exactly like any other Chinese.  But really the thing about her book Shanghai Girls was the obvious window she was looking through into the Chinese culture and history.  She trivialized the Rape of Nanking, and used graphic imagery in most cases, which lead to the reader thinking of the Chinese characters not as humans, but as strange foreigners who will never belong in America.  Well, guess what, Ms. See.  You don't know what the hell you're talking about.  I was offended from the first page, when you portrayed the patriarch as a overly dominating figure.  Of course, it makes sense that you would portray him in that way because you're a white person, and you don't understand how our life works.  Then you make the characters of the daughters infuriatingly Mary-Sue..."beautiful girls."  Not to mention, Pearl gets a great husband.  A man with an iron fan, regardless of the fact that he was a rickshaw puller.   Then you make Joy a Commie.  That's an interesting, yet severely offensive, choice.  But I could forgive all that if you hadn't pulled the typical plot twist at the end, making Z.G. Joy's biological father.  Way to trivialize and otherize the Chinese through your white people glasses.  I can't even write a well-organized, coherent review of your work because it offend me so much. 
Rating: 3/10