Category Archives: creativity - Page 13

feasting

Posted by on September 10, 2009 No comments

The week has passed with Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast on the nightstand. I find myself going back to books about the early 20th century and the Americans who flocked to Europe when fall comes. Those writers and their romantic expatriate lives in the smokey, booze filled cafes in Paris are enough to make anyone pine for a time in which he did not and could not live. On this reading, one of dozens, the book speaks to me differently. I find myself wondering “how does the math work out?”

What a horrible thing to think while reading about Hemingway’s days spent working in and wandering around Paris at a cultural flashpoint. But it’s where my mind goes. How did he pay for all of it? There is mention of journalism and all of its sordidness. There was the selling of some stories. But how did it work? I’m sure I don’t know and just as certain that there is probably a piece out there that would tell me with little effort on my part but instead I close my eyes before bed and wonder how I would do what he did. At the time, he had a wife and son and so do I. Too much logistics and not enough inspiration.

This wasn’t why I picked up the book. The desire was to draw parallels between his way of working and mine. To try and find an appreciation for a man whose method and ethos I prize but whose work I have never been able to love. It’s something I come back to every now and again in the hopes that I might be able to make it work. I can feel the failure already, but reading it is its own reward. It’s wonderful to crawl inside someone else’s mind and watch their life unfold. Memoirs of artists are fascinating because of that explanation. It’s a window into the why and the how of the what.

shiny

Paying for my overpriced cup of burnt coffee with the recharged gift card that I use to maintain my lunchtime coffee and sanity budget, I think about the “coffice” culture that has come along with the advent of portable computing. I remember studying in coffee shops and even sleeping in them occasionally in school, but with the arrival of the laptop and the ubiquitous corporate coffee, complete with wifi, the illusion of the cafe culture is almost a caricature of what I imagine those writers lived. But it’s a pale imitation to my mind. Patrons interact rarely. The tables for two usually seat one person and a bag. Faces lit by web browsers, email, and millions of social networking toys rarely glance at one another. I think of Hemingway laughing aloud at a memory and being looked at by the waiter. I wonder how often he engaged in conversation with other patrons. Or did he simply stick his face in his notebook or newspaper? I would like to think that we’re not all that far apart, but a nagging feeling tells me that I’m a far cry from some of those ideals though I may be closer to some.

There’s a wanderlust that comes when I read Hemingway. I wish from time to time that I could break out and roam the way he did and force the math to work. Grab my wife and son and rush off to Europe to be in the center of it all. Not that there is a center anymore. At least not like there was then. And it’s that kind of a center that I would like to experience at some point in my life. But I’m content as long as the work is getting done. My studio may only be a spare bedroom, but all things considered, I’ll take it over Paris.

An eighth song was added to my collection last night. I’m sorry to say that I’m getting quite attached to these songs and the way they flow together. I hope that someone enjoys them as much as I do, even if it’s not in the same way. The week of October 12th is the most likely release date.

sounds lost and found

Posted by on September 9, 2009 No comments

1959 was a year for jazz that’s easy to remember. The albums that came out are among the best produced in the history of recorded music. Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis. Time Out by Dave Brubeck. Coltrane’s Giant Steps and Mingus Ah Um (by Charles Mingus). And the one that made the least sense to me when I first heard it, The Shape of Jazz to Come by Ornette Coleman.

The first time I came across The Shape of Jazz to Come was in college when it was loaned to me by a buddy of mine. This guy was a little too hip for his own good, but being the pretentious young composer I was, I took it from him and tried to choke it down. This is not the kind of music that one listens to while doing something else. Music like this requires a monastic stillness of mind and complete focus of the type I didn’t know existed then. As a result, I returned it graciously and went about my business.

It was years later when I was living in New York City that it made sense. Working four jobs and going to school full time doesn’t make for much of a social life. Most of my days and nights blurred together and were lived within the confines of my head. My days ran around the clock and sleeping wasn’t something that I did as often as I should have, so some of my walks between various jobs and school (I didn’t have enough money for public transportation) were made while only half awake. One of the benefits of this was the mental idle time that allowed me to think through things without being interrrupted. It was the kind of sleep walking that you can only do on that island.

i don't get it

In that half-sleep I could hear the sound of the crowd. Traffic. Pedestrians. Horns. Sirens. Truck brakes discharging. Metal trashcans. Music blaring from apartment windows. Doors slamming. The omnipresent footsteps. The sounds buzzed and slowly blurred into one another. There was no rhythm or harmony, but the sound moved forward. There was a destination that was always just over the horizon and never closer.

On a rainy day, the sound of my boots on the pavement added a pulse to this unstoppable wave of sound. To my mind then it felt like adding a backbeat to Stockhausen. That made me think of Coleman. New York City is its own free jazz. I have lived in other cities since but have never managed to recapture that sound. On my way into work this morning, it dawned on me that this was the thinking behind the collection of pieces I’m working on right now.

Each of the tracks is very ambient and contains what sounds like background noise. Part of that stems from a happy accident I had while reviewing some recordings at the cafe a couple of weeks ago. I had an enabled track in Logic and while I thought I was listening, I was actually recording. What came from that was a highly effected recording of the cafe noise around me blurred behind two dueling guitars. Magic like that needs to be captured.

And now I’m adding the pulse. The final product will likely be tracks that will fail miserably in a car or on a home stereo. The only way to hear them, really hear them, will be through headphones (aka the audiophile’s bane). Today I’m embracing that limitation and taking it to its logical conclusion, whatever that may be.

I guess part of me is still back on that street with the percussive puddles under my feet and the sound of a million lives going on around my head.

studio improvements

Posted by on September 7, 2009 No comments

There are so many places to look for information on productivity online that it feels like there is a system for everything. There are studies to tell me that keeping a TODO list will save me time and all manner of strategies for keeping my email inbox empty. I can find applications that make mind maps and transform them into lists of actions and will manage my projects from conception to implementation. It’s all so very attractive because I have a strict and regimented limit on my creative time. But no matter how much time I spend with this “productivity porn” I come back to the fact that it takes very little to keep me on track and though the items are few, they are required. A windfall and some minor changes have highlighted what a difference a few minor changes can make.

My dad and stepmom are preparing for a move across town (as opposed to across the country) and as is their custom, they are lightening their load before they go. They’re pretty freakin’ organized and as a result any item without a clear function or reason for its existence is purged. In this iteration I acquired a chunk of a very nice sectional desk for my studio. There’s a corner piece and a bullnose table that connects to it. This addition has taken dead space in my studio and made it usable. It has also replaced a simple folding table with something that looks much more professional. It has, in the parlance of our home, reduced the hobo factor.

With the new desk in place, I started to see the need to get organized and clear out some stuff that had lost its purpose. I had a lot of old tech gear in the closet that was doing nothing but taking up space. There were cables and notebooks and widgets that were collecting dust and following me from house to house. It all had to go and once that process started, it was impossible to stop.

tick...tock...tick...tock...

There were some suboptimal features to my studio that were addressed with a small investment of time and money. The blinds on the window didn’t go up or down properly. I got new miniblinds. My closet had no door. I hung one. The shelves were loaded with sentimental toys and gadgets. I gave them to the boy. The windowsill was covered with tools. I put them in the closet (and closed the door!). Anything that brought a sense clutter or detracted from the appearance of the room was either pitched or removed from sight.

[Note: I put very little in the trash. Most of this stuff will be going to charitable organizations after our neighborhood garage sale. Just sayin’ that I’m doing my best to be a good hippie!]

The result of all of this is that my studio looks far more professional. There are still plenty of personal knicknacks, photographs, and things that inspire me, but the clutter is gone. There is a sense of calm when I enter the room. I’m finding that this is a requirement for my sustained creative work. With fewer distractions it’s easier for me to remember why it is that I’m in there and to get down to business. In short, the room expresses its purpose. It’s also far more inviting; like having a creative oasis next to the guest bathroom.

There is very little time in my day for creative work. In order to be happy, I have to squeeze everything I can from every second that I’m in there with the door closed because when the door swings shut, the timer starts. All obstacles need to be cleared before that golden hour and the environment needs to be as close to perfect as I can get it because I know that I won’t be.

Future improvements involve putting candles in the weird monkey candelabra and shifting some of the things that are hung on the walls. Orderly doesn’t mean less fun or lacking in ambience. In fact, things like keeping the lights low and having something to play with while I listen are just as important as a clean work surface or a tuned guitar. Now that the retooling of the room is complete, the fine tuning can begin.

journals

Posted by on September 4, 2009 No comments

I have kept journals for a very, very long time. I think it started in high school and tracks with my progress as a composer. I lacked the tools and talent to create the music that I imagined, so I wrote it out in prose and symbols. It wasn’t musical notiation in the traditional sense. There were lines and shapes. The visualization of imagined sounds. Much later I would study the notation of electronic music and see that I wasn’t alone. We rarely are.

My habit seems to be journaling more when I am composing less. It’s almost like switching muscle groups after a particularly rough workout. When the sounds aren’t coming, the words are. But as soon as the music returns, the journaling drops away. Since most of my journal entries during these musical dry spells are me moaning about how little I am producing I can only deduce that it’s a crutch of sorts to fill the idle time my mind and hands are having thrust upon them. It’s interesting that I’m posting as much on this blog as I am as I’ve been particularly productive lately.

It seems to me that journaling is an often ignored artform. There seems to be something of a resurgance in the popularity of journaling and there are many, many articles about how and why to journal floating around out there right now. There are the art journals that encourage us to scribble. Morning page journals that are set to wake up the creative mind and slowly brings us up to speed for the day. There are journals for tracking our habits. I prefer to keep all of these activities in the same place. I want a document.

lines

I admit that I am more than mildly obsessed with documenting my creative work. This goes back to my first experiences with playing the guitar. Even at the age of 15 I could see that traditional notation left out a lot of information about how something was intended to be played. Yet recordings are subjective and leave out whatever plan there was for the performance. It’s only by combining the two that we get anything close to a complete story. As an avid improvisor, it’s often difficult to record something during my Monday night session and get back into it on Wednesday because I might not remember what my plan was. What key was this in? What tuning did I use? So there is an impetus to document these things simply for my personal information. But there’s more to it than that.

There’s always more to it.

My brother is a brilliant artist. He takes photographs, draws, paints, and pushes computers to do crazy things with images. His final product is a document. More importantly, it’s something someone could hang on the wall. Each of our parents has something on the wall that he made. It’s very difficult to put up a recording and it doesn’t make much sense to hang a score. And the score isn’t the music. I’m not saying that there is a sibling rivalry to this day over who has more of their creative garbage on mom or dad’s walls, but it was the first time I really noticed that the musical process produces few physical artifacts and saw the deficiencies of what documents are produced.

In writing this blog, I’d like to be able to bring people into what I do. My end game here is to develop a small audience of maybe 100 people to listen to what I do in any way they choose. After all, music is nothing without someone to hear it. But the question is, how does one showcase something that is developing when scraps and pieces of recordings and bits of paper don’t really mean anything? A painting in process is one thing. A score in progress is quite another. Or is it? Maybe a nightly dump of everything that was done over the course of a session would be an interesting thing. And maybe it would be a silly pile of flawed recordings and pictures of indecipherable notes. The project I’m working on right now doesn’t lend itself to this, but an experiment/exercise might be in order.

sunset with heavy reverb

Posted by on September 2, 2009 No comments

The past two nights have been all about the tools. A new version of Logic would mean plenty of exploration even if this weren’t such a guitar heavy release. What’s killing me is that all of the features that were added are aimed straight at me. I can sit for hours and tweak this parameter or that and get totally lost in the sounds of my guitar. It’s a sensation that is loaded down with heavy memories.

When I was in high school, I managed to save up enough money to purchase a new Fender Stratocaster (American, thankyouverymuch!). It’s black with a white pickguard and a rosewood fretboard. Note the verb tense of that last sentence. It’s still in my studio and will be until the unthinkable comes to pass. In fact, changing out the pickups and electronics is on my winter to do list. That guitar was a turning point for me. It opened up a world of sounds. At the time, I had access to an early 70s vintage Fender Twin amp with the old spring reverb unit. My mom worked, so in the winter when the sun was setting early, I would sit in the basement after school with the last light of the day streaming through the window and play until my fingers hurt or I heard the garage door go up.

green treasure?

Technically, things were much simpler then. I had so few stomp boxes (maybe two?) and the amp itself had little more than EQ, poor grounding, and that reverb unit. But the sounds I could make were astonishing to me even then. There was such subtlety in the range of every pot on the amp. The differences between levels on different pickup settings. The art of blending them together. Searching for my sound was deep research; a mission.

That’s where I ended up last night. There’s the cute ability in Logic now to lay out a pedal board with all sorts of festively designed interfaces. It’s intuitive, quick, and as addictive as having all of those boxes on the floor at my feet. I sat and twisted this knob and that, always listening for the shifts in balance and tone. For that breaking point where the sound comes together and becomes the physical manifestation of my imagination. But rather than hit record and do something that would move the current track forward, I sat and played for a good hour. Not a bit was recorded. This is why I’ll likely stay the hell away from Mainstage. I could get lost in there!

It was beautiful. The guitar was sounding good as the sun went down. I forgot to turn on the lights and when I looked up, time was gone, it was dark, and everything felt right. It reminded me that those are the moments that encouraged me to become a musician. It was never the time spent on stage or performing in any capacity. It was the time alone in the studio. The meditative nature of practicing. Living in the sound and allowing the moment to be whatever it turned out to be. It’s not the kind of thing that can be shared, I don’t think. That’s sad on the one hand, but on the other, we have to admit that some of the great moments of life are spent discovering things in some kind of isolation. That flow should be embraced and celebrated.