8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: [20] Inside & Outside

Creativity and the philosophy of being of a creative person in your heart and soul.

Chapter List

  • Inside Outside

    What is creativity anyhow? I’ve been writing this blog for over eight months now and I don’t think I’ve actually sat down and written a proper definition—but is that even possible?

    Is it a good thing to be creative? Is it natural or purposeful—or maybe just an unserious pursuit?

    It’s curious though: my social media feed has picked up on the idea that I’m interested in the topic and so routinely it is peppered with bursts of commentary on creative lifestyles, both positive and negative. 

    And with many questions, I think maybe the negative jabs shine a brighter light on understanding the notion.

    Your results may vary, but my received negativity seems to shine through that little screen and mock the very idea of a middle aged guy trying to do art, learn an instrument, or write a novel. The universe, it often seems, finds the notion of artistic expression little more than a privileged extravagance for those less serious among us. 

    Why am I not feeding the gaping maw of capitalistic pursuit? Why am I not spending time earning or investing or consuming? Why am I telling stories and taking photos?

    None of this is a thing I can answer in one post, but I do know that creativity is not an idle excuse to avoid something “real” or “productive” but rather—and for most every self-defined creative person I know—foundational to who they are. It is who we are. It is the shape of our soul and the way we meet the world each day.

    All the rest of it is the mask we wear.

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

  • 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? 

  • Summer Break

    As much as I sometimes complain about the Monday evening drive—often through cold and snow— to our orchestra rehearsals all season, I do miss it when it pauses for the summer.

    About a ten days prior to writing this we had our end-of-the-season concert, our final show, and  (after a potluck dinner a few days later) wrapped the season.

    In the cadence of my creative musical soul I should have gone to rehearsal last night.

    There was no rehearsal.

    Again, we’re on summer break.

    When I was a kid creativity was an obligation. I would have rather parked in front of the television, or played video games or—honestly—just gone out and hung around with my friends. Being sent off to extra-curricular activities, even as few and scattered as those opportunities were for me, were disruptions to my life.

    A few decades pass by and here I am pondering how to fill the vacant summer months when the air is quieter and my creative contemporaries are off doing other things.

    I’ll get over it. I’ll find something to write or draw. I’ll find music to play on my own. I’ll prevail.

    But it does all make me realize how much I’ve internalized the creative twists and turns of my soul into the person who I think I want to be in this part of my life. Missing—craving—that creative community when it pauses is like a symptom for which the cure is just to keep making more stuff.

  • Sacred Flame

    People have often asked me what keeps me motivated to create?

    It never occurred to me until much later in my life that not everyone is driven by this insatiable curiosity to try to make stuff. I long took it for granted that the majority of the world just simply woke up each morning and considered their options to participate. That they looked at the myriad of activities that humanity has invented and honed over the millennia and thought what can I do with that…

    Really. 

    So, it was a bit of an existential shock to me, years ago now, to realize that some people—maybe even most people—are indifferent to such curiosity and likely could not care less if they were left alone and asked to go no further than enjoy the creative outputs of others.

    To that end I sometimes feel as if I have something of a token of humanity which I need to look after. Being one of those who not only can muster the energy and occasional skill to make interesting things, but being among the few who feel the urge to do so—well, that’s not a common thing, apparently.  There are millions of us, sure, but proportionally—it seems more rare than anyone wants to admit. 

    Maybe we can think of it as a kind of sacred flame. And if nothing else motivates me when I wake up in the morning, thinking that creating interesting things might just be my small but important role to play in the grand scheme of the universe is simultaneously a humbling and terrifying notion that brings me right back to my keyboard.