8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

A
BLOG
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Mile Stone

    Once again I am going to pause and point out one of the core tenets of this blogging project: iteration and incremental work leads to interesting things.

    This post not only marks the end of July and the end of seven months of regular posting here, but the one hundred and fiftieth mini-essay.

    It is all that extra little bit impressive (to me, anyhow) because I also managed to take a week-long vacation where I was almost completely without usable internet for most of the trip and still managed to have set up this project to hum along without human intervention for the duration.

    Blah, blah, blah, whatever—you shrug.

    But here’s my whole point: I do stuff like this all the time. I learn new skills, I build crazy projects. I tackle huge efforts of fitness, art, or creativity. And then people wince and say something like—well, good for you but I could never find the time or energy or motivation.

    Incrementalism. That’s it. One little bit at a time. One piece each day. A few words. Ten minutes of practice. Pulling your attention away from the screen in your hand and putting it onto a keyboard or a pen or a musical instrument or… whatever. 

    Incrementalism. It leads to works of substance and beyond.

    Seven months ago I started typing a few words about the push behind creative life and at the heart of that was this silly example—which is now a blog with one hundred and fifty articles, and no plan to stop.

    Golf clap. Or start something for yourself today. And tomorrow. And the day after ad naseum. 

  • Undramatic Scapes

    We recently spent a week in the mountains. We hiked. We camped. We stood admiring broad vistas of indescribable beauty and grandiosity. 

    I took a lot of photos.

    No really: a lot of photos.

    And mixed in among the obvious well-metered shots of the mountain landscapes and epic sunsets, colourful wildflowers, and happenstance wildlife encounters, I also made sure that I took a lot of photos of the mundane. 

    I snapped shots of leaves, and moss and bark.

    I aimed my camera at interesting shadows.

    I photographed light pressing between cluttered stands of trees.

    I zoomed in on interesting textures in the stone and boulders and cliffs.

    I even stuck a camera into a gushing mountain stream and took images of the bubbles tracing over the rocks.

    While the other tourists were standing with their camera pointed out at the obvious vistas, I was the weird guy who did the same and then went to pointing it at the vegetation or the rocks, too.

    I have hinted previously at the value of finding beauty in the less obvious, and that story comes from seeing that beauty where others often forget to look for it… because none of those photos were unconscious or happenstance. I went there seeking to find an uncommon perspective.  Sure, some of it is far less dramatic than the monumental curves of a world class mountain range, but I might also argue that it’s no less interesting or important.

  • Saxo Phone

    I remember the day in the sixth grade when the band teacher from the junior high school came to our elementary school and assigned instruments: I was rocked to find out I got to learn to play the alto saxophone.  I don’t know how I landed it. It was the coveted beast of the band, and I had rolled a Natural 20.

    That was, hot damn! Forty years ago!

    I still have my original saxophone. It’s not a high quality instrument by any means, a simple student model Yamaha, but its my first and only. I’ve replaced the corks over the years and bought a new mouthpiece (apparently they go sour, who knew?) and it has (sadly) sat in a corner in the house idle for a very long time: decades. 

    I tell people in my orchestra (where I play the violin) that the saxophone was a stepping stone for my amateur musical career: I could read treble clef so I only needed to learn the instrument when I took up violin at forty, not learn to read music, too.

    It’s mostly the truth. 

    As it was my experiences during that era—in band and junior high school and keeping up with the practice required and a long list of other tween drama—soured me long before my mouthpiece went bad. It was a kind of low grade creative trauma and avoidance, and the thought of performing as a saxophonist has left me thinking I must harbour some residual subconscious vibes of aversion and recoil.  

    Even so, something compelled me the other day to pull the saxophone out of its case and ensure it was still playable.

    It needed a new neck strap, but otherwise (and to my surprise) together we could still make a few reasonable tunes emerge from this brass-hued beast.

    I don’t think I’m getting the band back together, but maybe I’ll keep a reed at the ready in case I decide to jazz up some musical therapy in my basement.

  • Summer Synth

    What does summer sound like?

    Oh sure, it seems obvious—ice cream trucks, and birds chirping in the trees, Vivaldi symphonies and sunshine bouncing off the asphalt—but I was sitting in the park recently and I had brought along my synth.

    Remember my synth? About a year and a half ago I bought an Arturia Microfreak digital synthesizer (not a sponsored mention, by the way) which at about the size of a laptop computer has twenty-five solid state keys and about thirty knobs & buttons for tweaking and tuning the sound envelope. It is not a keyboard or a piano, but rather a proper (albeit budget) synthesizer with powerful shaping tools, a matrix-based sound design engine, an LFO, arpeggiator, sequencer and—oh, the list goes on. It’s also pretty portable, so I can pop it in a backpack with a battery pack and some headphones and—yeah—go sit in the park and play music.

    I have about four hundred patches loaded into the memory banks, presets for interesting sound patterns and pads and leads and bass effects and even all variety of cosmic sound effects.

    I thought it would be easy to find a summery sound.

    Because I was, as mentioned, sitting there in the park with my synth and my headphones and making music for no one but myself and I wanted a summery vibe.

    Synths, and perhaps this was merely a factor of my synth and how I had it configured, seem very wintery: echoey and airy wisps of noise, hulking bass tones, crackling shivers, and creaking sine waves. I tuned through my options, scrolling the knob and seeking something with mood that matched the sun and the grass and the mosquitos flitting about in the same and I struggled. 

    A tinkling piano sound, a ringing lead that evoked a steel drum, or the croaking higher octaves of a patch named after a frog—I was close.

    Summer was all around, but I couldn’t put my finger on something that fit. What does summer sound like, after all? 

  • Young Restless

    I made the mistake of asking an AI chatbot for motivation the other day.

    When one leans into these sorts of modern tools for creative inspiration it is helpful to remember that they are the strangest sorts of things often juxtaposing unearned flattery with inhumanly blunt criticism. Grain of salt on standby.

    My curiosity was with a very human problem for which I knew the answer but I figured an all-knowing resource-consuming generative search tool might come up with something unique to say: why do I so often run out of steam on new projects?

    The joys of starting a new hobby, tackling a new challenge, or learning a new skill are often gloriously rewarding.

    And when we were young, damn, everything was new and interesting.

    I’m wheeling in on fifty this year and I find that the joy of newness is not only something I crave, but an energy and vibe that tanks likes a bad metaphor with the lifespan of an ice cream treat in the sunshine.

    The AI knew why just as well as I did: some mix of psychology and endorphins and reward stimuli in the primal parts of my woefully organic brain. 

    Fixing the issue is a bigger challenge than just asking a bot, though, and I think it might help to spend some time getting my own very human brain around the problem.

    Under the category of Young & Restless I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.