Taking on the new year

Last takeout, 2011

                                                                         

It has been a while since my last blog entry. With the holidays, magazines to edit, music to make, meetings to attend, work and research not to mention another batch of proposal writing, its been a hectic sometimes manic 3-4 weeks. I have also been cigarette and alcohol free since the Jan 1st 2012 and while the alcohol is no issue, the cigarette cravings are ravaging my senses and making me utterly impossible with emotional control. So, a lot more drama then I'm used to in the past week. Its almost like turning back in to a teenager. Uncontrollable urges, rage, confusion and well anything you can think of including total body image craziness and fear that I am in short, a talentless loser. Insane how a little puff of smoke has been a shield in a way. I know it is stupid, but hey that’s what it feels like at the moment.

I have however managed to get a lot of work done, the need to be busy constantly to forget about smoking is definitely like an upper. Eevi and I met up before her trip to Argentina to make some final decisions about the community project we will be doing in the summer in Eno. This means a lot of ground work which needs to get done in the next two months. I will be primarily in charge of getting the people together, sorting out timetables with everyone and doing the preliminary proposal to finance the project which Eevi will then edit, do some mock-ups of what the works might look like and well hopefully, Bobs your uncle and we get funding.

After our meeting where I discussed meeting my mothers uncle, Antti. He is 80 and grew up in Lumivaara on Lake Ladoga (Laatokka) in the republic of Karelia. I began envisioning how the documentary will flow, it is very exciting to get some coherent storyline in to my head and on paper something which has the bones to build meat on. Antti (my great uncle) has a vast amount of photographs from the little island on Ladoga from before the evacuation in to mainland Finland during the war and more stories. It is nice to meet a part of my family which seems to be as interested in storytelling as I am. Antti and his wife Mailis have invited me to their house in Turku for a weekend to look through the photographs, to interview them freely, to ask anything I want and to get to know my somewhat estranged relatives (my grandmother died before I was born and we didn't see much of Antti and his family).

I am having some difficulty in finding video camera equipment good quality enough to rent at a reasonable price and am starting to think that it will in fact be easier, cheaper and also practical for me to buy an HD camera which I can then use for other projects as well. Sound equipment I have found but I do feel I need to find a better quality microphone still. I should be able to rent this through MUU ry.

I sang my second lament in the sauna on Christmas day. It was about the past year and everything that has happened. It felt invigorating, empowering and like the wood that surrounded me hugged and somehow melded with me, forgave me. My next meeting with the members of Äänellä Itkijät ry is on January 22^nd. I hope to be able to better commune with individual members and also to suggest an idea I’ve been brewing for a few weeks now on how to approach the recording process. It would be a way to surround-sound the voices and potentially harmonise the laments be they of the same thing or different.