Category: About

Categories
About

Facebook Fasting – experiment two

Today’s experiment was detached observance.  Sitting in a public place and observing without judgement.

I came to this by realizing somewhere between yesterday and today that as much as I wanted to read Thomas Pynchon’s V,  there were so many other books that I had not finished…and because I am not checking my FB account every five minutes, I opened the Kindle app on my phone and started to look for the Tao of Stress and picked up where I left off – at this exercise.  According to the book, to simplify one’s life one must first observe one’s self and it seems like the way into that is to just sit there and observe the rest of the world…and it seems to be true, my mind did open up…”flooded” is probably a better way to write it.  No, I did not have all the secrets of my universe revealed to me in ten simple minutes but you know I did get a shadow of an idea about how to change my LinkedIn profile…meaning that my work life is something I want to change.

I also was reminded of something I read the other day – “you can do anything but you can’t do everything.”  The first step today seems to be to accept the “flood” and then carefully consider what I want to do.

Categories
About

Facebook fasting – experiment one

I’m on Facebook more than most people. I’ve made and lost friends there, rekindled long-lost friendships. Near the beginning of the year I decided that Facebook’s value may mainly be limited to both meeting up with and at the very least getting on the phone with people….and that there was something about the public “wall” dynamic that perhaps I did not like…and there was certainly something about a little red number telling me that I needed to respond in some way…that the little number in my email at work and my Facebook account containing some little slice of some of my nearest and dearest were merging…at this point maybe burned out, I launched this larger experiment at approximately 7PM Tuesday…to avoid FB until Friday AM – for about 50 hours.

So many other things that I wanted to do – reading Thomas Pynchon’s V, studying for an IT test, calling an old friend I had not seen since 1993 – so many thing fragmented and left on the side of a road – a road that only seemed to be about multitasking other people…when multitasking itself seems more and more a fiction of self-promotion and not an actual thing that can be done. …and then the deeper reality – my goals of health, career, love, happiness, art all may be affected as well.

Art – I originally came to FB to share my art, photos, music. What a terrible way to short-circuit my creativity by falling victim to being a feedback or attention sponge … These are very natural things to be sure but I believe that my growth as an artist and a human has been affected. I’m convinced that even this rambling post is a result of such distraction.

…and how can I multitask people…? I want to know them, love them…I’m not sure that there is an electronic substitute for what I’m calling “the eyebrow” – long knowing that I’ve hated long phone calls, now I also know that I need to see people’s eyebrows move to know and love them, for real. I love each and every one of my FB friends as much as is possible within that medium but it sure is a lonely world…what a lonely medium. I’ve lost touch with “the eyebrow.”

How can I avoid all the editing I’ve ever done in my head if I use a medium that allows me to perfectly edit my thoughts and send them? How can I grow? And how can I fully believe in what only amounts to edited slices of other people’s lives – is this worse than not knowing them on FB?

Experiment one today was to simply smile at everyone on the subway and while waiting at Penn Station – no one smiled back, many were on their phones – that’s all OK, I’m not trying to rack up numbers like so many Facebook friends…I’ll keep on trying.

I love my Facebook friends but I do hope that can understand that I need to do this for myself…and I do hope that if they really don’t notice that I can handle that too…

Categories
About

My Creative Oozings

Due to work and other commitments over the past year or so, I can’t get myself in the recording mindset.  I can’t get relaxed or fertile enough with a nice span of free time ahead of me to get involved in any project at all.  Yet, the creative stuff still oozes out.

I should pause here to mention that my projects include not only music but photography, painting, electronics, circuit-bending, sculpting, drawing, web design, coding, my IT day job, hacking anything…even just pure sound…and computer and analog edits slash mixdowns slash remixes of all of these things and sharing these works online…and absorbing new influences and learning new things.

So what I can do now here today is share some of my way, my workflow – the software that I have been using to capture my creative oozings and ideas with the hope that these can be worked out (or simply released “as is”) later, snippets of lyrics, written chord progressions and concepts – even new band names & just pure stream-of-consciousness BS and not-so-BS outpouring and sketches – things that might lead to quick guitar demos, poems or something visual.

Overall, I like to have nice reliable ways to make these things “talk” to each other so of the following have exporting or connecting features.   I also appreciate a bare-bones design – no ads, no “likes”, no social This can be too distracting for me

750 Words – http://750wordscom – kinda based on “The Artist’s Way” without all the spiritual hoo-hah, this site allows you all day to write roughly three pages by the end of the day I can’t keep up with the daily routine but I did get a lot out of me – creative and other conflicts – when I did use it for roughly a month

Draft – http://draftincom – a nice version controlled unassuming notepad with some intelligent editing and versioning features – I’m writing on this right now

Pocket – http://getpocketcom – you can save bookmarked websites this way – sometimes I will see something inspirational that I will want to try or read later.  I can find inspiration from random sites much the same way that I used to walk around public libraries looking for a phrase or photo to remember and set me off to go back on my own and write about.  I usually don’t/can’t dig too deep into my influences – watching or reading something for a short time will usually cause my mind to drift into something I can then do with my own hands because I never really stop sythesizing how art makes me feel.  As a musician, I have not placed much value in “cover songs” – having learned almost none myself but I am also not fooling myself Everything creative is inspired by something as far as I am concerned

Google Drive – http://drivegooglecom – meshes nicely with Gmail and other Google things and Android and Windows. I tend to use this as a place to create new blank docs or spreadsheets of anything from random sentences to photos to lyrics to folders of more full fledged projects where all of these things are together.  When I folder starts to get full, I try to either get working on it or split it into different things.  I’m free to do anything I want here without investing too much time until the idea is at least something I want to try.  As it is, I’m very open to finishing almost anything just to see how it comes out – I try to keep all my old prejudices and rules at the door and just let it flow.

If This Then That – IFTTT – http://iftttcom – a great way to make  social media talk to each other (for instance I use this to broadcast photos I upload to Flickr over to a Facebook page, my Twitter feed (which in turn feeds my personal FB wall), my WordPress blog, my Tumblr) Caledars can be synced. Also, you can do some cool things like watch a weather feed and have it message your phone every morning when you are off to work.  It’s a simple, graceful little site that makes something that should be more complicated not so much – sure, some social media allows for connections to all social media but this bridges what you can do there, sometimes gives you a nicer looking choice.

Do It – http://doit.im – the heart of my internal scheduling system – the thing that tells me when to read another chapter of Pynchon, wash the bathroom floor, import another cassette into the computer, take my meds, get on the exercise bike and record a little bit of music every once in a while.