8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: Part 5 – Embracing Nowhere

The inspired self and creativity as a path to connection and purpose in a complex universe. The soul of creativity.

Chapter List

  • Selfie Guy

    I took a walk with my new camera.

    I wrote about this about a week ago, having just bought a new action camera (an upgrade from the three similar models I’ve owned over the last decade and a half) I decided to give my vocal chops a test drive.

    So, I took a walk with my new camera. And the dog. And the rain. And a glowing mindset of finding a quiet place to make a selfie-video.

    I’m not sure if that’s the right term. I spun the camera around to face myself and tried to do some vocal word-craft based on a fifty word point form script I put together on my phone, doing my darnedest to record a coherent vlog-like video and do something I’ve never really done before: spin the camera around and put my face in the lens and not the viewfinder.

    A runner ran by once and gave me a sidelong glance.

    The path emerged from the woods alongside a freeway exit ramp and at least half a dozen guys each in their F150s turned their heads ninety degrees to offer a lingering stare at the dude and his selfie-stick so obviously talking to the camera.

    It’s a vulnerable thing this: becoming the performer in a one man production crew in your own neighbourhood when you’ve never done this sort of thing.

    I had been planning to make a whole series about this effort, but the time commitments of recording one of these every week, editing them, and then trying to write knowledgeably on the effort punched me in the face harder than if one of those truck dudes had pulled off to the side of the road to do it for me.

    Expertise is earned. I get that. But I think I may need to force this effort a little less.

  • 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.

  • Free Pics

    I give away a lot of my art and photography.

    I don’t often or consciously think of it like that, but in the moments when I am challenged on the value of what I make I also tend to get snagged on this little reality: I give a lot of it away for free and don’t think twice about it, either.

    There is a value proposition mixed in there, of course.

    Value comes from demand and demand is not automatic: that is to say, my photos, say, only have value if someone wants them and just because I take them doesn’t mean they automatically have a corresponding someone who wants them. 

    Value, in this way is a bit circular. You need to create the value by creating an audience, and you create an audience by lowering the value, often to zero, of your work so that the audience can have it, learn to love it, and eventually want to pay for it.

    At least, that’s one way.

    I’ve never consciously done that… but I have done it unconsciously. I have taken photos on my own time and motivation and become the guy that someone has said, yes please, here’s money, give us more. It really has worked that way. 

    But maybe you have to give a lot away first.

    And maybe too, you have to be okay with something you made having a value that is something other than  a cash transaction.

  • Biological Imperative

    Having a kid transition into adulthood in late 2025 and through 2026, this last year as I write this, has put a lot of perspective on my own life—as both a parent and as a creative soul endlessly seeking personal meaning through art and words.

    Kids are, often by a kind of cynical definition, a kind of legacy that demands a legacy.

    We parent for a million different reasons, but not the least among those reasons is the biological imperative to pass along a bit of ourselves.  That’s not selfishness or ego any more than it is the raw organic chemistry of life.

    And the physical passing of genes is the (relatively) easy part: simply having a kid, as difficult as that is for many, is step one in a lifelong process of a notion wrapped up in a word that often fails to do the effort justice: parenting.

    I reflect on these things and notice more and more each day that the Kid, for all her uniqueness, has embraced a kind of creative legacy from me: she dabbles in art, she writes about film, she plays with music, and she looks at the world through the same quirky lens that I tend to find distorts my perceptions of everything I see and do.

    This is modelling, sure. This is biased opportunities, of course. This is parenting, always.  But eighteen years of effort has also led to a kind of creative legacy of self that I have, probably as a side effect of just being open and transparent, have instilled on the next generation.

  • Avant Garde

    For a strange week in April my algorithm feed was full of videos, commentary and analysis about a curious French-Canadian music duo called Angine de poitrine [1] who, it seems, have washed ashore upon the cultural zeitgeist.

    Perhaps it is merely that my endless wanderings through the musicians internet have biased my perception and have only just momentarily shone a light on this thing and I am, as usual, a few steps behind in noticing. And certainly, I am in no good position to comment with meaning on the music itself, a microtonal eruption that has been described by others as noise, dissonance, or unlistenable. 

    I quite like it—and I bought an album and added it to my everyday playlist. I’m listening to it as I write this, in fact…

    Which is all for me to say that what I may be more qualified to comment on is the creative leap that such experimental projects embody. Angine de poitrine is the doing of something that I have merely being writing and thinking about: bending the rules, creating something unique, and experimenting outside of the traditional definition of marketable, sellable, commercial art.

    Succeeding, to boot.

    And while I’ll caveat that some of that aforementioned commentary I’ve seen on the duo has (unfairly, I think) framed the effort as merely a weird marketing gimmick, I would argue that such accusations miss the point entirely: that there is a tension in the heart of every true artist, trying to stand out and do something novel while simultaneously fitting in just enough to survive in a world that values standardization and commercial viability.

    Occasionally someone figures out that balance and it is a glorious cacophony.