High Holy Mass of Contradictions

I’ve been getting creatively inspired a lot lately. I already talked about going to hear the Peter Plagens lecture at the Frist and how creatively inspiring that was, but then on Thursday night we went to the Société Anonyme show at the Frist with Brad and Jed, and Brad spent a good chunk of time explaining why “Tu m’” was, as he put it, the Rosetta Stone of modern art. So I listened and I looked hard at it, and I saw it. And I kept coming back to it as I circled the exhibit. I’d look at other pieces, the Mondrians and the Miros, and then I’d make my way back in front of the Duchamp piece that did begin to feel like the punchline to the whole show.

All day Friday, I kept thinking back to that piece. I’d be working on the budget at work, and I’d think about the genius of using a tool to say I don’t want to use this tool anymore. And I’d think about the shadows from the bottle brush, and how much there is going on in just that part of the work alone, not even to mention the rest of the composition.

I’m not a painter or any other kind of visual artist; I’m a writer. And lyrics are my primary medium. But looking at visual art can inspire me in ways music doesn’t reach. (I bet Randy at Ethos totally gets what I mean here.) It’s like rewiring my brain; all the lights seem brighter and the circuits seem faster. And I see dimensions of things I’d been blind to.

Whether that translates into more and better songwriting, I have yet to see. I’m writing here and there, but nothing yet has screamed epiphany. But even if it’s not about that, even if the net effect is just to reset my powers of observation and make me live a little more in the moment, hey, that’s powerful stuff, I’ll take it.

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art, creativity, songwriting

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

I’m so lame. I never got around to posting on Blog Action Day. But my excuse is that I’ve had a real roller coaster of a week. I went from, well, managing myself on Monday to having two direct reports on Wednesday, and that’s only part of it. So yeah, I really do think activism is important, I just didn’t take the arbitrarily designated day to talk about it. I wish I could link to my activism category, but I’ve been slow with this whole content import and re-tagging thing, so I’ve only gotten around to tagging one of my old posts with it. Oh well. There’s always next year.

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On Thursday evening, Karsten and I went to hear Peter Plagens give an art lecture at the Frist with our friends Brad and Jed, and I’m pretty sure we were all creatively inspired. It was awesome. He basically talked about the struggle to embrace the new once you’ve become comfortable and familiar with the not-so-new, but unlike that rather trite-sounding summary, he was articulate and witty and insightful.

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Speaking of embracing the new, I spent this morning working on updating the top-level honeybowtie.com site. I needed to replace a lot of the clunky tables, image-based text styling, and Dreamweaver-generated Javascript from oh-so-long-ago with a more adaptable CSS-based design. I’m not in love with how it looks yet, but it’s definitely a step in the direction I’m trying to go. The idea is to incorporate the blog and the rest of the site a bit more seamlessly, but I’m obviously not there yet.

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Karsten is spending the day working (and I’m occasionally collaborating with him) on a project we’ve been trying to get around to finishing for several months now. Between all the chaos of the house renovation, my day job, our flea and rat troubles, sick cats, and vacation, it’s been delayed a bit. So with any luck we’ll have a scratch demo recorded by tomorrow night, even if it’s only a chorus. The artist we’re communicating with about this song has been waiting long enough and we need to get this one wrapped. I’m also trying to round up some other song ideas she might be interested in, so I guess we have next weekend already planned, too.

***

This vodka and tonic is simply perfect. I am a bartending genius, I tell you.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

I need to remember that not only is a good workout healthy and stress-relieving, but it also always seems to leave me chock-full of good song ideas. Awesome.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

It's the last day of November, in case you hadn't noticed, and that means all November writing projects are pretty much at their end. In my case, that signals the end of my 30-songs-in-30-days "NaSoWriMo" challenge, which I have once again failed to complete. But I don't really care. All I'm really shooting for when I set about to do these things is to make myself write fast and get some ideas down, and I did do that.

I managed to draft 13 songs. I can't say I really finished even one. But that's OK. Because this was also a crazy-ass month. At work, we had a major scramble with a deadline of 11/30 (yep, that, too, is today!), and my weekly average number of hours shot way up. I've also been sick twice this month, including right now, which is why I'm not expecting to be able to churn out any more than I already have before tomorrow. And my current tummy troubles have me in a really bad mood and I'm finding it hard to concentrate on anything. So yeah, not the best conditions for creative writing.

So it's over, and the count is 13 songs in 30 days, sort of. There might even be a few ideas worth going back and polishing up, which is a bonus because I was really just thinking of this as an exercise. Maybe I'll try the challenge again in a few months when it's not looking to be a crazy month at the day job and I've loaded up on multivitamins and echinacea.

In the meantime, the month of December is usually a wash for songwriting. Too many weekend activities, too much commotion, not even time to sit idly with my laptop, my guitar, and a cup of coffee and mull over an idea until I find just the right thing to say. So this is probably pretty much it until January. But I'm pretty satisfied with where things stand, so I'll be happy to take a break and then get back into it come the new year.

Hope everyone else who participated in a writing challenge this month got something good out of it!

A propos of my earlier post today, I've been working on a song this evening inspired by both the Shawn Colvin song "One Small Year" and the eulogy I gave for my dad's funeral. Of the four songs I've written so far this month for NaSoWriMo, I'm liking this one the best.

It's funny, but I've already written several songs that were variations on that eulogy, so you might think I'd have gotten it all out of my system by now. When I was really young, I remember reading an interview with Daryl Hall in which he said a lot of his songs over the years had been about the same thing over and over, and he would often use incredibly similar wording, just trying to exorcise his demons. I remember noticing that in his songs after that, and wondering each time I listened to his music if he finally wrote it to his satisfaction and relief.

I don't know if you know it when it happens because the inspired genius of your own words catches you by surprise, or if it takes a while for the realization to sink in that those demons aren't haunting you anymore, or what. I'm OK with the idea that I may have to write about 2005 for a long, long time before I finally get it right, but I sure wouldn't object to stumbling across just the right wording here tonight, either.

In case you were following the "discussion," Mark at This Guy Falls Down posted an update and clarified his thoughts on "form vs. function" or "form vs. formula," recommending my post, and retracting a bit of what he wrote the other day.

He also cites a book he's reading called Creating by Robert Fritz and says he's loving it. So out of curiosity and respect for his opinion, I'm adding that to my library holds right now.

Sometimes the internet can be a very cool place.

Mark at This Guy Falls Down has some musings on songwriting and his “songwriting hacks” series (which can be found by riffling through the Creative Process category on his blog archives).

I just don’t think participating in the creative process is an area where you can find a clever workaround. The creative process is not one to be manipulated. I guess it works, if all you want to do is be a “hack”.

Now, I have a lot of respect for Mark, but hey, I’m willing to go toe-to-toe with a Grammy winner. Because I do think there are ways to manipulate the creative process, and I don’t think it necessarily makes the creator a “hack.”

Besides, most of what Mark wrote about in the “hacks” series weren’t manipulations to the songwriting process, but guidelines to make the process easier. Saying that you should read good material to be able to write well is hardly a controversial idea, as writing advice goes. Saying that you should work on one song at a time is a matter of preference and experience (I don’t write as well unless I can flit back and forth between multiple songs in progress). Of course, Mark did say at the beginning of the series that he was taking liberties with the word “hack” anyway:

I’m hoping to share some advice I’ve picked up along the way as a musician, particularly as it pertains to songwriting. I call this advice “hacks”, even though that’s probably not the proper use of the term, simply because we’re on the Internet here and it seems appropriate.

But I guess I’m arguing that you could talk about songwriting “hacks” in a way that’s closer to the “clever or elegant solution to a difficult problem” meaning of the word. I’ve even talked about some of those kinds of things here over the years. There are scads of books written about songwriting technique, and some of them get awfully clever with the difficult problems they tackle.

Creativity is a fickle mistress. Taking a purist approach to songwriting and letting raw emotion drip from your pen is usually the best way to get to the heart of a feeling or an experience. That’s the art of it. But once you have the raw material, there are definitely tricks and techniques that comprise the craft of songwriting, and knowing a little of Mark’s music, I know that he’s very capable with those tools and techniques. And I’m pretty firm about advocating that craft in creativity is nothing to be ashamed of.

I also think it’s very natural to go through phases where we vacillate from a more purist approach to a more crafted approach to creating. As long as we keep creating, the balance seems to restore itself eventually.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

In talking about publishing content on the web, Rex Hammock quotes zefrank saying

A wise man once said (okay, it was zefrank and he said it yesterday) "Someone who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person who (hasn't done something because it isn't perfect and is) still dreaming of all the applause." He calls these unattempted ideas "brain crack" that people get addicted to and then sings a song with the F-word in its title to illustrate his point. In other words, it's not for everyone.

First of all, part of the value in writing this is keeping a link to that episode of the show, because it rocks. As a songwriter, "where the fuck do ideas come from?" is easily one of the most pertinent questions I could ever ask.

But I'm also writing this to mention the comment I left in Rex's blog, saying

I've been musing on this myself the past few days, having just the other day had a job interview where I spontaneously came up with this chestnut: "If you can't look back on stuff you did a year ago and see mistakes, that was probably a wasted year." (Incidentally, I got the job.)

Which is my way, I guess, of letting you all know: I have a new job. I start next week. More details later after I sign the relevant paperwork.

Just finished watching the movie Smoke. And I have a serious Three Buck Chuck buzz going on. So let's just see if I'm able to write what I'm thinking I want to say, shall we? :-)

The message is, storytelling is arbitrary. There are millions and millions and millions of stories, and they all run into one another and overlap, and you get to decide where to start and where to stop telling the story. It reminds me of something I always associate with vito_excalibur having said on The List a while back (but, vito, if you feel like revealing your source, I'd be intrigued) about how the difference between comedy and tragedy is where you stop telling the story. I love that.

Anyway, it's a good writer's movie. Or artist's movie. I love the concept piece they show Harvey Keitel's character having worked on for years: taking photos for five minutes at 8:00 AM every morning from the same location. I would love to see a collection of those photos.

I wish I could say more, but the buzz is making me want to get up and dance around the apartment, and I must obey the buzz. :-)

Rolling Stone magazine has put out a list of the "500 greatest songs of all time," although upon closer inspection they mean the 500 greatest rock 'n' roll songs of the rock 'n' roll era. But no matter: it's a cool list, made up of votes from 172 "rock stars and leading authorities."

Their #1 song? Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." Hey, I'm not gonna argue -- it's a fucking fantastic song -- but I do wonder if that particular song was subliminally advantaged in this particular race. :-)

But read about the song's genesis and recording, and you can't help but see rock 'n' roll genius at work. Dylan poured out pages upon pages of raw emotion that he later condensed into the lyrics of "Like a Rolling Stone." His insistance on how the recording should sound may have seemed startling and controversial to the musicians sitting there in that session with him, but clearly, he had a vision. Whatever he channeled within himself or without, he produced a masterwork.

I love reading material like this. I've read every book of interviews with songwriters and musicians that I can get my hands on, and they're always so very inspiring. What's particularly interesting to me is how many of them say they don't know where the song came from; that they must have drawn the inspiration from somewhere outside of them. Many make references to a collective consciousness or some mystic energy source that they feel they tap into now and then (especially through the use of intoxicants, no doubt). And quite a few admit to a tendency to create chaos in their lives because in times of peace, they're not inspired.

And after reading all this, I sometimes wonder if it takes that level of eccentricity to create works of creative genius. And if it does, I'm grateful for the people who have that talent and the ability to push boundaries. I have no desire to live a jagged, painful existence, even if it means producing the most inventive works of art possible. I'm not saying I'm satisfied with mediocrity, but I'd be thrilled to make as meaningful a contribution to music as I can within the bounds of living a happy, well-balanced, healthy life. And if that's being a sellout, show me the dotted line and I'll happily sign it.

I'm only finished with chapter one, but I could've recommended this book just for the introduction. "Why Didn't I Think of That: Think the Unthinkable and Achieve Creative Greatness" by Charles W. McCoy Jr. is one of those books that, even if it doesn't do what it claims to do -- i.e., get you thinking more perceptively and clearly -- it will still intrigue you with the anecdotes of good and bad thinking in action.

I'm especially engaged by this book because of the professional challenges I've faced over the past year and will continue to face. In designing software, one is always trying to find the new and better way of doing the same old thing. But here are some of the special challenges of the product I help design:
( Lengthy explanation of work challenges )
Back to the book. What McCoy does well is break down several types of critical thinking into further categories: asking the right questions, focusing on the pertinent facts, etc, etc. And he presents them in such a way as to build on each one with another.

Anyone could benefit from lessons like these. I'm certainly gaining some useful tools for analyzing my work challenges.