Category Archives: creativity - Page 18

creativity and notebooks

Posted by on February 4, 2009 No comments

i’m not a fan of the GTD method. the idea of stuffing my life into three bins and forcing myself to deal with items through an algorithm seems silly to me. it works for a lot of folks, but that’s them. personally, i work on a very simple set of rules. if i’m at work and something comes up, i take care of it immediately. this is due to the fact that sleeping will likely remove the task from my memory. with my creative work it’s a little different.

i have roughly 100 notebooks lying around. i’m no johnny come lately to the moleskine notebook. i’ve been using them for years to keep track of my progress with my creative work. there are several flavors. there are journals which are meant to be places where i dump my brain. it isn’t the kind of writing that i want to have read and it had best not be during my lifetime. that’s my head in there people. stay clear. then there are notebooks. i treat those like a free form list. i block of each day with a line and run down it adding things like “call the doctor” or “think about strings and tin cans.” all ideas are the same and they get reviewed weekly. if something is really important, i will put it at the back of the notebook where i keep the TODO list. it seems wanky. it probably is.

but for most of my journaling needs, i use software. i was addicted to journler for almost two years after moving away from notebook by circus ponies. journler was/is pretty keen but i fear for it. it isn’t open source and the developer could pull the plug any time. so i have gone back to notebook. no, it’s not open source either but it isn’t a solo developer who appears to be burning out. this change is both good and bad. it’s nice to have a new piece of software to screw around with and it’s neat to shake up my routine now and again, but it’s shaking up my routine. i’ve mentioned about 1,000 times that i don’t have much time available for the creative work i do so mucking it up with a new piece of brain dump software creates danger and opportunity.

in any case, digital notebooks are nice because i can dump in all kinds of media clips. web pages can be copied and pasted. it can house PDFs and the other miscellaneous junk that i dump into my “hey this might be useful” bin.

so that’s that. i have new software. this does not excuse my lack of a sketch this week. the fact is, i have a sketch out to a friend of mine for some collaboration. more on that later. in the mean time, i am mixing and re-mixing earlier recordings to see what i’ve got now that i’ve been sitting on the stuff for a while. i’m enjoying it. some of the stuff that i thought sucked really doesn’t and some things that i thought were great haven’t aged well.

more music soon.

also, we should all sit back and see if kevlar updates his blog this week or fails miserably again as a member of the web 2.0 content generation online community. insert tag cloud here.

whispering

Posted by on January 27, 2009 No comments

things are moving briskly around here and lately it’s been all about quantity. the inner critic has been pretty quiet and that is likely what has been pushing my process along. a critical ear deep inside is a very useful thing but it gets in the way of doing the work. sometimes it’s better to slap something together and think about it later. all of the recordings and songs that i put together become ipod fodder the next day. putting them online puts me in a position to get some feedback and more importantly, motivates me to continue posting.

keeping the momentum is the hardest part.

the piece that i finished up tonight features the badly mangled voice of my good friend Amy. i don’t think that she has anything web-ish that she’d want to have linked (let me know if i’m wrong) but if she did, i would! i don’t think that you’ll hear it when you listen to this, but her voice brings a cadence and a color to this very static almost wind chime-like backdrop. it doesn’t really matter if you hear it. what’s important is that it pushed things along for me. check it out in the link below.

heavy nerd content ahead. you were warned.

today i did something pretty significant in my nerd life: i dumped my subscription to the linux audio users mailing list. the fact is, though i was an ardent supporter of gnu/linux and all of its promise, i don’t have time for it. i have learned the hard lesson that with gnu/linux and the audio software that runs on it you may not pay in money but you do pay in time. right now, i have no time. in fact, it’s been almost three years since i last fired up my debian box for any reason.

i have a full time job that doesn’t relate to my creative work. i have a wonderful family. i have a thousand things to do and one and a half hours a day to create when conditions are perfect. my laptop (yes, it has to be a laptop) has from the time i lift the lid to the time i put my fingers on the keyboard to be awake and functional. as i am launching my software, it needs to be finding the nearest network connection and negotiating my connectivity without any need for my intervention. when i plug in a peripheral, it needs to find it and make it useful immediately. and when i’m done i will close its lid and it had better suspend itself and be ready when i open it next time. sounds like a mac to me.

there is a lot to be said for gnu/linux and i will continue to push it as a great server solution, but for the composer on the go with little to no time for continuing education and system maintenance, it’s just not going to work out. keep up the good work and thanks for the memories!

thus endeth the nerding.

if you have some time, please take a listen to my latest and drop me a line on facebook or twitter or comment either here or in an email. i love the feedback!

white whisper

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white whisper by j.c. wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at othertime.com.
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reading: the creative habit

Posted by on January 16, 2009 1 comment

i just finished twyla tharp’s the creative habit and sady i’m just not feeling it. i should be fair and say that, for the record, i don’t much care for books about creativity and how to improve one’s process. most of the books by big names don’t actually give solid tips and pointers but instead focus on how the author works. from time to time there is a nugget of wisdom tucked away in there that makes for a useful addition to one’s creative tool chest but more often than not it’s a collection of personal quirks that seem to work for the person talking about it. something like…

did you know that when i sit down to compose i make sure that my coffee mug is to my left so that i have maximum movement available to my right hand with which i hold my pen? did you care? will that help you?

another fine point is that talking about the creative process generally sucks. it’s all about telling other people about how you work. creative processes are very personal and no creative person really cares about any one else’s more than talking about his own. what i’m trying to say is that when someone brings up the topic of the creative process it’s to allow that person to go on and on about their personal method. and that is pretty sucky conversation material. it’s more like dueling monologues.

i know that the intent of these books and the reason that people buy them is to find that one little trick that can be transferred as if a way of doing creative work could really be stolen. i liken this to the GTD method of organizing tasks. at the end of the day you can use all of the note cards and folder tricks in the world but it all boils down to “do the work.” don’t make excuses. don’t copy someone else’s rituals. simply start where you need to start and end when you’re done.

the master luthier wayne henderson says that he builds a guitar by taking some wood and carving away the parts that aren’t a guitar. that? that’s a great discussion of a creative process. he does the work. does it get simpler than that?

the creative habit isn’t a bad example of creativity books. it feels to me like all of the others. maybe i’m put off by the discussion of famous people. or that the examples in the book are recycled so frequently. yes, we all know that mozart and bach were geniuses. great. leonardo was cool too. the half-hearted attempts to make the book relevant to the business types who read this kind of book to gain an edge and get out of their well worn section of barnes & noble were sad. again, i’ve seen that done elsewhere but here it really stood out. painfully so.

i wanted to like this book. people i generally trust to filter this kind of thing for me really enjoyed it and seemed to take a lot away from it. it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that i’m thick and didn’t get it. but i didn’t. get it, that is.