Things!!!

To prove my point about lists, as mentioned in the last post, I did three things yesterday. Woo-hoo! Break out the champagne!

Seriously, though, it's a good strategy. Write approximately ten things on the whiteboard that I could possibly work on today. Strike them out when they're mostly done, erase them when they're totally done. Add stuff as it pops into my head. Pick whichever one I want. Notice that the list does not include things like "look at porn", "watch whatever is on TV", or "spend about 5 hours babbling on IRC".

I think I did burn myself out a little, but that's okay. The three things I did were:

• Play with snippets of Kim's voice in Praat, analyze them, think out how I am going to design a piece of software that makes her into a renderable instrument (I call it the Kimthesizer), primarily for backup accompaniments. Though I didn't tangibly move many molecules -- or sorry, these days we don't move whole molecules, just electrons -- I did fire off some productive synapses in the brain. I am getting closer to a real plan of attack.
• Lay down a new bass part for the middle "chase sequence" of an oldie-but-creepie, known to (and despised by) my old friends as Insomnic Hallucinations. That section of the song is still a bit of a mess, and now so is my left hand. Most of the track is from one of the first few takes. Then I decided to do a few billion more.
• Code a video effect for applying a median filter to a series of bitmaps. Unlike the median filter in your imaging software, it doesn't compare to surrounding pixels. Instead it compares to the same pixel in several consecutive frames. Gives a sort of mild "trail" effect.

It's already 3:30 PM and so far this day has been mundane for me. What three things can I do today? I'd better get up and start walking around so my brain wakes up. Every day is a gift. Don't keep throwing them away.

The almighty hour

I'm such an idiot. I keep telling myself I'm going to develop some time-management skills. But of course I never get around to this.

Think about it. Not enough time? Bullshit. What can I do in one hour?

I can do 15 complete takes of any instrumental part on a four-minute song. Okay, tack on another hour for hooking things up, adjusting the sound, and fiddling around with minor rewrites between takes. Maybe there's a tricky bit that needs still another half hour to punch in correctly. Maybe all the takes are lame and I decide I'm going to sequence it instead, so what? Did I miss out on something during that time?

To follow that one up, I can whip up a rough sequence in Cakewalk. Or I can clean up an existing one. Or I can transfer a completed MIDI to audio and bring it into the rest of the song. Or I can edit and clean up tracks for one of the several dozen remixes sitting in limbo on my hard drive. I still have stuff on ADATs and even the quarter inch reels to transfer to the computer, for that matter.

Or I can start sampling a new instrument, maybe the guitar, or my voice, or various glass and metal objects around the apartment, to make new instruments on the computer. Or start searching for and collecting sound effects from the net.

I can get the bulk of one of my programming ideas into actual code. It probably won't work the way I want it to right away, but it's always a good learning experience. Tack on another hour (or seven) for tracking down that stupid elusive logistic error, or even a typo that magically makes total sense to the compiler and therefore none to me.

I can hack out a rough storyboard for my animation. It doesn't have to be final; just something. I can scan in and clean up more of my drawings. I can do lip sync charts for any of my recorded songs.

My three-way relationship with creativity and time isn't rocket surgery (ha ha, you thought I was going to say "science"). Basically, if I start, I keep going. So there's that part of it; if I don't start in the early part of whatever block of free time, I get lulled into wasting the rest of that block of time.

It's very hard for me to shift gears.

And that's important not just when I'm coming into free time, but when I'm coming into the diminishing-returns stage of actual creative work. If I manage to kick myself early on and get started on something, that will be the only thing I do that day. Which is why the whole "what can I do in an hour" question is so important. Most of these things that I could do in an hour, I start doing at the beginning of a free block of several hours, and keep pounding on for the entire block.

And of course I don't want to short-change a task, especially if I'm in "the zone". It's key to differentiate between the zone and a rut. It's not as glaring as you would think. Not for me, anyway.

I'd like to change my habits on this, though I don't really know the best ways to make those changes last; maybe it's just a matter of practicing a lot and getting into the habit. But I'd like to become a person who does maybe three things in those five or six hours, instead of just one thing. Certainly, exceptions can be made when I'm on a roll. But as it is now, doing more than one thing a day is the exception, and it shouldn't be.

I'll say one thing. Some people regard writing lists as a form of procrastination. This has not been my experience. I'm propelled by writing things down, even writing in this journal. It's the first step to making something tangible. But so is any first step. What a list does for me is allows me to mentally "put away" the cloud of other ideas that are all clamoring for my attention. Seriously, I often feel weighted down by an overabundance of ideas. Sometimes I'll have all these things I want to do, and each time I start to get serious about working on one, another will smoosh its face against the window and say "me me me", and eventually the only way I can silence it all is to put them all off. Putting them all on paper, or erasable whiteboard, or a blog, lets me feel like they're not being neglected when I focus in on just one.

Incidentally, this weekend and the few days prior, I have not done anything specifically for the Slab of Clay film. What I have been wasting many a good hour on is code for a graphic effect to create an animated reflection on a pair of mirror shades for my Tour Guide character, who doesn't even appear in that song. And I'm still not happy with the effect I'm getting. This is why I should, at the very least, be multitasking. These are hours of my life passing by!

Selfish video

I've always regretted not getting much of a visual document of myself playing the music on my recordings. So when I do this bass line, I'm going to set up a camera.

I don't generally insist on making everything I do "real" ... for the most part, it's low on my list of priorities. The definition of "real" in art is constantly shifting anyway. But for this, I want it to be real. I want to have actual footage of me playing the actual take that makes it into the final mix. I'm going to try to get one complete take that's as perfect as possible without requiring me to patch anything up afterwards, so I can watch it and say "there, that's me playing the bass part that's in the final mix" without (m)any disclaimers.

I'll be in front of the large living room window, shot framed such that I could just as well be outdoors. I hope a bird or a squirrel or something comes into the shot when I'm doing the winning take.

Last time I videotaped myself playing a song was Lice Blue Hue, and that was just guitar and voice, no overdubs. I think I did over a dozen takes before I got one I liked. I refused to edit, punch anything in, whatever, because I wanted for once to capture an actual performance. This will be kind of like that except that it is an overdub, and it will just be the bass part. The video recording of this obviously won't be the official film for the song, though I may drop bits of it in here and there. I will, however, preserve it in full just to have it.

One big problem in the past, not only with Slab, but with anything else on the rock opera, is that I haven't injected much of my real life into it. I think my recordings got more interesting when I started doing that. I would have never thought to "perform" Slab ... it's always been a thing of, oh, that song can't actually be performed, it's not that kind of song, it has to be surreal in order to work, blah blah blah. I think seeing myself play the bass part, as a human being with a face, will force me to change the way I feel about it.

I don't even know how I'd classify the song. If you ignore the chord progression and just focus on the style, what is it? Sort of, uh, '80s synth rock meets circus music?

Leap of faith, get away from the noise

I need to write a little closer to daily, but I think what I've written so far has already helped me stay on track. It's a sort of "leap of faith" that I'm setting out to systematically make this short animated film and break me out of my rut (of just being a musican that can't manage to hold people's attention over all the noise, more on that below) -- faith in the sense that I have to put in a good stretch of unacknowledged work, stay on a single project (don't jump around), and basically be in isolation, i.e. no feedback until I'm much much further along and have something impressive to show off. I'm kind of seeing it as going into a long tunnel. But I feel good about it.

I went to House of Guitars today for new bass strings just for Slab. Yeah, I decided to go all out on this remix, cough up the $20 and not just boil my old strings in water a fourth or fifth time. It's kind of funny, at HoG there is a large cinderblock wall covered end-to-end and top-to-bottom with autographs. A sign in front of it says:

WALL OF ROCK STAR AUTOGRAPHS
DO NOT WRITE ON THIS WALL

I know enough about Aristotelean logic to know that translates into "YOU ARE NOT A ROCK STAR". And I kind of feel like screaming at everybody there, of course you're not a rock star, you're in a sea of noise where no one can hear you. Look at all this noise ... you're putting your flyers up on walls covered with flyers for other bands, putting your CDs in stores where there are thousands of other CDs, submitting them to record companies that get thousands of demos a day, putting your band's website on an internet with millions of other bands ... that's called noise, don't you get it? If you want to make a dent in the world, you have to get away from the noise.

Madame Brainstorm

Been thinking a little more about the dominatrix thing. It's amusing to me, only because I know people who actually are into kinky stuff, and I'm not. I just want my presentation to have some impact. There certainly won't be any shortage of source idea material out there for the costume design.

It's important to note that this is not how the female naturally presents herself, but the male is forcing her into the role. I don't know how I would show that. There won't be any explicit nudity, I've decided that (though it can always be a little risqué, and hopefully sexy), so he probably won't be dressing her up outright. Maybe somehow he could "capture" the reality that he's in into a malleable medium, so that he's working with a drawing, or cutting/ripping things out of the books and magazines around him and somehow applying them to his fantasy of her. Hell, maybe even break down and incorporate clay into this after all.

Keep in mind, though, even though he's applying this fantasy to her, she is still actually there. He's not just sitting there thinking about this. So there has to be resistance from her, and something for her to be resisting, even if the leather is imaginary.

The lyrics are, on the surface, about him changing himself (until the last line), but what he's really trying to do is change her. And not only that, but he's trying to force her to be his master, which doesn't make any sense. And that's the point. This isn't just about male-female, this is about other kinds of relationships too; about wanting so desperately to be led that you shove someone else against their will into a role of power over you.

I should probably set a deadline for the storyboard itself.

Fifth member of the band

I have to get used to the idea that it's my blog, it's free, and no one can complain if I pop in to jot down short thoughts as they pop into my head. Here's one such short thought:

What am I about that's different? I think I'm about bringing the computer into the band -- not as an additional instrument -- but as a fifth member of the band.

And yes, this can cause friction with some of the other members of the band. Which probably explains in hindsight why they've all been absent from the rehearsals and gigs for over fifteen years now....

(Literal translation: the generative process, which apparently threatens some artists, has been part of my act for much longer than my recent exploration of proper coding. Also, in a literal sense, it's me that hasn't been on the stage lately -- but we all have to define for ourselves where the "stage" -- like the frame -- really begins and ends.)

Oh, I can come in here for four dollars?

What happens?

Well, what does happen in this oh-so-important mini-film that I absolutely have to start and finish this year?

If I'm overflowing with ideas in one medium, and failing to come up with much of anything for another, shouldn't I be focusing my energy on the former of the two? Maybe, maybe not. I'm actually optimistic about the "not". Reason being, activity breeds ideas, and ideas breed more ideas. The reason I have more musical ideas than storyboard ideas is because I've done more music than storyboarding. It would follow that if I began work on anything, I would come up with more ideas related to whatever I was doing.

It probably wouldn't hurt to dump whatever I have onto the table. Quick! Force it out! This is just a starting point. Don't worry, hardly anyone is reading this yet.

Okay. Protag is sort of intoxicated, chasing female around in a secret library. They just met like ten minutes ago, they weren't supposed to meet at all. She tells him she's already engaged to someone. He is desperate, expresses that he's willing to do/be anything she wants to get her to change her plans. If there's a kind of underlying theme, it's that he's someone who has always been controlled and repressed, so his idea of what he wants from her is something of a ... I guess, um ... submissive and dominant kind of thing ... hmm ... I'm not really ... well I wasn't really ... thinking of BDSM ... but that would be a touch more visual, wouldn't it?