8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: September Sparks

Chapter List

  • Photographic Oddity

    I’ve written a few times about the black and white photography that accompanies the posts on this blog.  What I haven’t mentioned as often is the shades of vulnerability I encounter in that act of taking such non-traditional photos in public.

    Let’s define something: I think of a traditional photo as something that someone out in the wilds of a public space might expect one to take a photo of, like say, a scenic view, a bit of shapely architecture, a group of people, an animal, flowers, or some kind of public performance. Everyone takes pics of these things. They are quote… normal.

    A non-traditional photo is something else that usually falls outside of that category: say, snapping pics of a crack in the pavement, a macro of the textured bark on a tree, a storm drain cover, a street sign, one’s own feet, or even the whorls of clouds in the sky. Not everyone points their camera at these sorts of things. They are, um… less normal.

    My black and white photography tends to stray almost exclusively into the non-traditional realm.

    And having partaken in increasingly frequent acts of non-traditional photography over the last few months, I have noticed that with every click of the shutter I have been putting myself into a weird sort of public performance and place and vulnerability.

    I stopped while walking through Paris in August (when we were there on vacation) pausing to point my camera at a mailbox. Parisians who for the most part went about their lives indifferent to my existence on that trip, instead turned their heads and payed a bit more attention to my non-traditional moment of photography.

    It draws more attention to take odd photos than to take photos of things people expect to take photos of. People’s heads turn. There is a moment of “what’s that guy doing?” and then they move on… but still a moment.

    It didn’t bother me, of course.

    It was just a curiosity of consideration, and I couldn’t help but ponder what was going through the minds of commuting Parisians as some curious Canadian snapped serious pics of the relatively mundane in an otherwise massively photogenic city like that.

    I was a standout, an oddity, and temporarily creatively vulnerable to something I can’t quite put my finger on.

  • Rights Wrongs

    This blog is coming at you from nowhere. It says so, right in the title. A blog from nowhere. And sometimes it literally feels that way.

    Plonk right in backish-middle of my topic list I need to surface a challenge that defines much of my creative existence. I am certainly not alone in feeling this way, but it really is the problem of being in the middle of nowhere.

    I have a small, loyal audience of friends who seem to enjoy what I make, and for many people who make stuff that would be enough: the ability to share your art with the people you love, the practice of writing for close confidants, or performing for local enthusiasts who smile when you play or act or sing… it is all right.

    But nearly every artist would be lying to you if they were to say they don’t feel the indifference of the larger world with every note, every keystroke, every bit of ink scratched onto the page.

    Creativity, after all, is an expression of who we are and part of me—as I suspect a part of many who create anything worthy of the thought—crave to express that to a bigger world, to bridge across culture and politics, to link arms right through language barriers, and to muddle our souls with humans living in nowheres on the far other side of the planet.

    Being from nowhere forces one to look across the gaps of heart and hands and ask how we can bridge that gap and cure the indifference.

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

  • Worth It

    We’ve all done it. We all should do it, at least occasionally. I do it ever few months, in fact.

    I Googled myself.

    For years, the result has been a modest list of links, many to my own websites, but often to a variety of articles from old jobs and public feeds from old accounts. It’s been a trip down memory lane.

    When I Googled myself the other day, though: I was greeted with an AI summary of my digital footprint, and a generated outline of who the search algorithm thought I was as a person.

    It wasn’t completely wrong, but it wasn’t a hundred percent accurate, either.

    As a guy who spends his free time in the pursuit of creative public expression I gotta admit: I’m a little frustrated that all the work I’ve put into building profile and connections online in the last twenty years has amounted to a couple paragraphs in an LLM.

    Search and social, after all, were the bridges between the stuff I was putting out there and the rest of the universe—but lately, not too many people are crossing it.

    “Keep making stuff.” I tell myself. “People will find it. And if it entertains just one person, inspires one other human to keep the spark alive… maybe it was worth it. Right?”

    This is a cross post from Of Poets & Processors.

  • Curry Surprises

    We recently returned from a mini family vacation to France. And yes it was a long list of the lovely things you are probably thinking, including the food.

    Oh, the food.

    France is bursting with great food. Cheeses and breads and wines and it often seems like a pastry shop on every corner, and could we have tried it all in our short visit we just might have.

    It did get me thinking about cooking, of course. We cook at home a lot—a creative outlet of its own sort, yes—and we do that not only because it is the more economical and healthy choice, but because we love to do it. Too, it’s a family tradition, of sorts.

    All that said, I started my home cooking career late. I moved away from home having learned how to fry an egg and heat some pasta sauce from a jar, and maybe grill up a cheese sandwich if I was brave.  But realistically, at twenty, I was very much a beginner.

    Beginners in the fine art of cooking can find themselves with many outcomes, but if one wants to eat on a student’s budget the one outcome that cannot afford to manifest is surrender: you just gotta keep trying.

    My wife uses it as a punchline now, but one of my early beginner experiments in cooking as a broke student was a dish I affectionately called Curry Surprise—a mix of ground beef, pasta, cheddar cheese, curry paste and a few other add-ins—that was a weekly staple in my campus housing kitchen. It was pretty terrible. But it was better than another bowl of macaroni and cheese from a box.

    These days we cook elaborate pasta dishes, grill amazing sandwiches made from homemade sourdough, and dine on a long list of honed and practiced recipes. 

    But once, long ago, we were beginners and we played with terrible ideas that literally nourished us and taught us how to break away from instant meals and ever more deeply enjoy amazing foods at home or abroad.

  • Just Sounds

    In my rollercoaster relationship with corporate social media I have gone through a variety of phases, one big one being the tipping point of frustration that caused me to start building my own version of Instagram.

    That bit of code was never meant for the big time, but rather simply as a place where I could post a gallery of photos without being beholden to algorithms, account signups, and cloudy terms and conditions that gave up permission for my pictures to mega-corporations.

    The thing about making your own software, though, is that you can add features in that no other platform might attempt to include.  For me, one of those quirky features is the ability to post a sound recording and attach it to any post.

    The feature was nothing too complex: simply the ability to upload a few seconds or a minute of sound to a post and have it appear right there between the text and the image. 

    I actually set it up so that the quick button on my phone is now used to trigger the voice recorder, so if I find that I’m taking photos and the ambient noise is interesting I’ll click that button next, grab a minute of sound, and then add it to the post.

    The result is that more and more, as much as I’m out snapping pictures, I find I am also clipping sounds from the world around me—and then uploading those clips to my little “gram” site. 

    It makes the little photo archive I’ve created a bit richer and bit more multi-sensory, and scrolling back through my own history of posts a curious and enjoyable sensory experience that is greater than the sum of its parts, even from just sounds.