8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: just making stuff

Chapter List

  • Potency Peace

    The final chapter of this writing project needed something conclusive to say.

    As this post goes live, this collection has over two hundred entries about creativity and the creative journey. Some are pretty vapid, some others are so introspectively deep I honestly don’t know how I found the words.

    I think I can take a guess, though: flow and presence. Perseverance. And the rhythm of a project that goes on and on and on for, in this case, the better part of a year of near-daily writing.

    It’s been a long road so far and, as I pen the last formal explanation of my long list of chapters in this collection, it strikes me that I’ve probably found more from the effort of making it, writing, promoting it, and refining it over the last ten months as I suspect any other person will ever extract from it for themselves.

    That is the final lesson, I guess: that when everything else falls away and you just find the moments when creativity and inspiration and motivation collide… well, interesting things do happen. The effort of just trying is worth it. There is a fluidity of thought that emerges from a mind that gets into a pattern of creativity, sets out on an adventure to make something big and impossible, and does the work.

    There are nearly thirty chapters in this collection and they bounce across the spectrum of creative philosophizing, dabbling in the nuance of self to the perception of others past the complexity of commercial value and span the years of our lives as creators of things. I’ve dabbled in trying to explain each of them, and now we come to the last of it: what happens when we just find peace in what we are doing and let that be enough?

    This may be the last in a long list of explanatory posts but under the category of Potency & Peace I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Play Time Updated · v2

    In my continuing efforts to learn to properly make use of the eclectic collection of music equipment that has arrived in tiny boxes to my front door since the year began, I have been playing.

    Literally. Figuratively. Philosophically.

    Playing.

    Isn’t it funny how we use the word “play” to describe the art of making music… and then we also use the same word to describe the act of having fun un-driven by specific goal or focused purpose? Play. I have been playing in both senses, making music in my office-turned-music-studio and also having fun generating soundscapes and beats and little songs un-driven by any specific timeline or objective save learning the tools themselves. It is both kinds of play because I am playing music but I am also just playing, dabbling, engrossed in a pointless, unfocused effort.

    Kids play and we smile and say that’s just what kids are supposed to do.

    Musicians play and we queue up to buy expensive tickets to listen.

    Average people sitting in their basement play and we, all too often, ask why.

    Or worse, we frame it up as part of something with a goal or attached to an effort to better ourselves. We try to justify it. We try to make it into personal growth or an abstraction set within the structure of a bigger learning plan. We rake ourselves across the coals with value-based evaluation of the time, log minutes, write articles on obscure websites about how “playing the piano for twenty minutes a day made me better at business-to-business marketing, blah, blah…”

    At some point as we turned from children into adults play became a pejorative.

    Real men don’t play, they strategize, practice, gamble, or hone their skills, right? I’ve heard that one before. There’s serious work to be done, money to be made, networks to build and projects to milestone.

    Nearly every day, for at least the duration that it takes to lay down a three minute track on my recorder I just play, I string together all the pieces with all their snaking wired connections, and dive in without a plan. It usually takes me a few tries, but often I get a respectable starter loop going on the looper pedal, I lean into an effect, and I start adding layers and layers and layers. Each day I come up with something new and interesting, and each day I record it because… well, why not? 

    Look, my point isn’t some secret layer here. Playing doesn’t make you a better person any more than it makes you a worse one. It makes you just a person to flit and flounder through curiosity-driven noodling. It makes you simply human to dabble without structured goals. 

    But it is all nothing more than play. Just play.

    Not always. Not for everything.

    Maybe now and then, or even once a day.

    And that’s okay.

  • Last Make

    What if today was your last day to make something that would define you after you were gone?

    What would you make?

    Would you aim for perfection of quality by making something well that you knew you could make well? Or would you push yourself, not caring about potential imperfection, and want it to express your individuality in it’s flaws by showing people that you were striving to be better? It will say something about you whatever you choose, you know.

    Would you make something of value to others? Or would you make something of value to yourself? Would you stop caring about the marketability of that thing, or if it would get lots of clicks or if it had potential to bring in high sales? No really, I’m asking? I think some people would want their last craft to have a literal payoff even if they weren’t there to enjoy it, while others might feel that was selling out? 

    Would you make something that in the making also made you happy? Or would you seek out a final product that better defined you externally to others regardless of the enjoyment your would get from making it? Or is that the same thing? I think about it myself and I’m not sure if the things I do well for others are what make me the happiest.

    What would you make?

  • Fail Bots

    The algorithm does not care if you succeed and in fact may want you to fail.

    Have you heard of the algorithm? We toss that term around like it has a deep history and long roots into our culture, and in some ways it might, but the algorithm itself is our newest creative barrier and one designed for the very purpose of siphoning the worth from everything you make.

    In their unchecked wisdom, the architects of our modern global communications platforms realized two things. First, they understood that the firehose of random creativity that emerged from millions of people posting to the internet was more enchanting when churned into curated maelstrom. Second, they learned there was money to be made from turning the creative efforts of those millions into a commodity labeled with the soulless term “content.” To engineer this transformation of art into corporate value they birthed complex mechanizations to sort and shuffle, scrape, churn, prune, and cultivate, all if it extracting the worth of human creativity into a storm of placid, flaccid… ugh… content.

    If you participate, that is if you make “content” then you will feed the algorithm and for a while you will feel as if you have achieved success. But rather than nurture the soul as art and creativity is meant to do, you will only enslave yourself to that mechanism.

    On the other hand, if you make things that do not fit neatly into the digital slots and grooves of the algorithm, that system will almost certainly work against you. It wants you to fail because you give it no literal value.

    But know this: you give the rest of us that value instead.

    The algorithm wants you to fail, so prove it wrong.

  • Says Who

    Not many people are going to give you permission to make something… and bluntly, you shouldn’t need it.

    Don’t get me wrong, if it is dangerous or could hurt others—be that financially, morally, physically, or personally—then you should really reconsider your creative efforts.

    But if you are out there wanting to be the one who is creating, making, and sharing, and more so, are yearning for the art of making stuff because it might result in interesting, beautiful or wonderful results, then your permission-seeking mindset might turn out to be an unnecessary barrier holding you back.

    I write about these things, I spill affirmations of this sort, precisely because I have been a permission-seeker my whole life. I am old enough now that (mostly) when I catch myself seeking such permissions I have a stern internal monologue and give myself a good talking to about submitting to those behaviours. But I get it—because that notion digs into you like a relentless infection of spirit and you may never be rid of it. All you can really do it wake up every day and remind yourself that permission will never be given, nor should it even be required.

    And I’m not giving you permission here, though it might very much seem like it. 

    Rather I am writing this to nudge you towards dismissing the very need for it.