That which comes
filters through
the perceptions
and experiences that
determined the direction;
they
lie broken in
pieces,
scattered by the
wind;
the light
still shows knowing
that darkness
counters
with all it has.

If you’ve ever had a vision for change, doing something different, breaking with tradition, short term pain for long term gain, then you know that being a visionary (not as grandiose, as it sounds) initially, can be pretty lonely work. Nobody can see the vision in your mind, and when you have the vision in your waking thoughts day in and day out, it’s easy to take for granted that others don’t know what the vision is, or what it means to them, or hell, they might have no idea why you even have a vision.

The work of being a change agent, and trying to bring a vision to reality, while incredibly hard work, might even be secondary to spreading the vision; getting everybody on the same vision page, if you will.

People need to know what you have in mind, they need to know what you see, and appraise whether they see it the same way, and whether or not your vision is to their detriment or their benefit. It seems to me a lot of this happens unconsciously, but it happens.

Get your vision out there, because your vision is the glue that brings otherwise disjointed actions into context. And seeing things in a proper context, especially when things really need to change, can make all the difference. In fact, it might be just the thing that makes people take up your vision; only then have you really started.

Waking up with a headache is always a drag, but as I drink my coffee, trying to turn the trajectory of the day around, I can’t help but draw a parallel between the artist totally without inspiration who still needs to produce inspired work.

Part of the deal with being a artist, no matter what you’re chosen field or medium, when you have to perform you have to perform no matter how you feel, kind of makes me think of the old Aleve or Advil commercial and the slogan “when you haven’t got time for the pain”. Thing is, the artist doesn’t pull inspiration from intellect, or some mental place… that’s where the ideas come from; but inspiration and the creative impulse is visceral, and very much physiological, a feeling… so what do you do?

As any artist will tell you, when you get in this place you just have to do anything that will get your creativity going or anything different than might get you in a different headspace. I’ve found that often the best solution is any kind of physical activity; take a walk; do yoga or tai-chi, surf the Web, read a book, make some food, but whatever it is, take your mind off, as fully as you can, the fact that you’re not creating and you don’t feel like creating. I’ve found this to be supremely helpful and it’s one of those things where as you learn to understand yourself as an artist, eventually, you’ll know what works best and be able pull yourself together.

Betting on the muse and being a working artist is tough work because the landscape of our imagination and psyche is always changing, especially as we push the boundaries of our inner worlds.

Dark
shadows mercy
long and tall
in the night.
Where light
goes to hide when
the day is drained of
color…

The topic we’re talking about is curation, but this article hits an important point about whether we’re curating or broadcasting. Lately, as I try to find new and interesting music, I find myself continually at ECM Recordings. It’s properly curated, as a label should be. All things of the same ilk, all over the world are not being collected for display in the form of curation, but rather to curate is to pick the creme de la creme, the best. I could give a lot of examples where this was the case with music: Dischord Recordings, Thrill Jockey, Hearts of Space, Stax to name just a few and there were book publishing companies, too — Black Sparrow Press comes to mind. Of course, Jason Sloan and myself try to do this with Slobor Media, too… But this kind of curation was happening when media, particularly in the digital form, wasn’t ubiquitous and available everywhere. You’d think that now, more than ever we’d have excellently curated collections of like music, books, and things… but I haven’t found it.

I rely on the proprietary algorithms of Pandora, which hasn’t been great lately, I want to believe because they’ve cut out most indie artists at a time when an indie artist with a recording is the norm not the exception, and if the complaint were made that there’s too much shit, then I would say that it’s up to Pandora, with the Music Genome to curate this stuff in a meaningful way, and if they’re not then they’ll be catering zero sum to the masses… that’s a loser’s game… especially for something that’s supposed to be customizable…. ?

I look to the various mixes on SomaFM, and I love what they’re doing, but at times it feels like there are a bunch of mp3 files thrown into a directory and then played at random. I fault them not, because they’re much better than most and the obscure items that they put out there keep me interested, engaged and pursuing new recordings. Thanks to SomaFM for that.

Then there are others… I spend an inordinate amount of time scanning internet radio stations and public radio stations all over the world looking for that perfect mix of perfect sounds. That person/s doing a mix of music in a way that really speaks to me… what I find is a ton of syndication of usually homogenized drivel or local origination programming with zero forethought or curatorial oversight.

Suffice it to say, that I can’t find what I’m looking for and I’m definitely looking for others to help me find what I’m looking for, but I’m not having much luck. It just seems to me in this age, with so much media at our fingertips that we’re losing the ability to curate, collect and organize for the overall experience, or just don’t care to, which must have everything to do with the fact that the glut of media that’s available is only making the whole idea of curating for more than yourself an anachronistic idea that doesn’t have much merit when you click on your Pandora app or, good gravy, Apple’s Genius, which I’ve found to be anything but…

To this end, I will say that, for me, there is one stand-out… and that’s Stephen Hill and Steve Davis at Music from the Hearts of Space. Each week, more or less, they curate a bloody solid hour of music culled from all over the place… Much props to them for this work that they do. Interesting article on their process here.

To bring us full circle, there’s hardly any curating happening and what is happening is little more than broadcasting, and like a perpetual and symbiotic echo chamber, we’re only feasting on what we’ve already been feasting on only in smaller chunks. Here’s my personal beef with this: Historically, new creative directions and art have come from cross-cultural pollination without that we have nothing new coming into the fold and that which is new is catering to an even smaller fringe audience who’s been a seeker on the periphery looking for something different than everyone else, so the derivative shite seemingly self-perpetuates and the new, new stuff reaches a a very small niche audience… Thank goodness for that at least, but you’d think this proliferation of original music and it’s easy availability would expand the realm of possibility rather than diminish it… Curious. In any case,  I’ll see you out there friends and I’m looking forward to meeting some like-minds if only so we can think differently and try to support the idea of individual and original thought even if it doesn’t cater to the populace.

For the true artist, there’s no glamor to art, just hard work and satisfaction. There’s no divine inspiration, or superhuman qualities, as much as we’d like to believe that. Sure, some things come easier to some people, and some folks have a different way of seeing than ourselves, and all of this comes out in the creative work, but much like the saying, so flippantly used to reference artists with vision, who’ve done the hard work, “they’re ahead of their time…” Actually, they’re exactly in the time they’re in, and some folks just don’t get it, so it’s contextualized in a way that makes it more about the art and less about the incomprehensibility of the work.

The work is just that, and like work it’s also hard, stressful, frequently exhausting and often to the detriment of one’s mental or emotional well-being, sometime both.

But in that place where the artist lives, whether through process or product, the satisfaction of having done the good work, the right work, their own work, and their own thing is the only glamor, reward or external they’ll ever need. At least that’s what I’ve found to be the case.

A blur,
a distraction
a chance meeting
that came too late to
matter
and too early to be
significant.
That was what
made it linger.

I feel lucky as an artist working in song. I have the tools of words and music to create impressions and imagery; tell stories and illustrative vignettes. In fact, I would say a well-assembled recording is actually more like a series of chapters that tell the whole story of a book. The most interesting part is something that I found with poetry, where the words have their own personal meaning for folks, different than my intended meanings, different than the dictionary definitions of words and the music gives those words as a vessel for travel.

It’s exciting because with just your voice and a guitar, a piano or even just a stick and a can, you can give someone an experience, take them on a musical journey — bring them inside your world, or take them to another world, but ultimately give them an experience.

It’s the experience that I’ve always been after with music, words and writing. I want to provide an experience, something that enriches the lives of others, something that brings beauty or the pathway into beauty into people’s lives.

It’s everywhere, and the present observer is fortunate enough to see it in everything; I’m talking about beauty of course. However, there are those times when we’re somewhere that feels completely devoid, not just of natural beauty, but of even man-made beauty.

For starters, this is a state of mind, more than anything, because truly beauty is seemingly everywhere if you can just find it, but a question I’ve pondered at more than one employer when working as a graphic designer or content writer is where can I get inspiration when I don’t see beauty or inspiration in anything. I’ve talked about variations of this dilemma many times before, but what I’ve found is that there are a couple things that you can do.

Since we’re usually locked at a desk when this feeling kicks in and I’m sure that this feeling of not being free plays a significant part in the process, but if we assume this part can’t be helped, we can start with:

The “things that have inspired me” file. Everyone who has to be creative on demand should have one of these. Keep a file of the various things that have inspired you and made you feel creative. It will come in very handy. Sometimes, we can even borrow ideas right from these files and then use them or restructure them in a way that suits our needs… Or you can just steal ‘em outright, and say to hell with it… 100% originality can’t happen everyday, even if we want to believe otherwise…

There’s also what I call the Oblique Strategies approach, which is an allusion to set of cards developed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in the 1970s that has one ask various questions to change up their current thought process. This is a great tool and interesting process geared towards stimulating creative thought, but in my version, you don’t need the cards, you just focus on something, an object like a pencil, pen, a ceiling tile pattern or the pattern in the carpet until you no longer see the the object of your focus as the words that you associate with it and instead you begin to see something different, actually something that’s beyond the word and language you’ve assigned to it. This is a neat little exercise for breaking yourself out of a mindspace that’s devoid of wonder and beauty, because through this little meditation you’re put back in touch with that timeless space before things had names and a symbolic place in your psyche.

These are just a few ways I do it, and I’d love to hear about how other approach this.

The tide of a
still forever
washes over
what was and then
was no more.
The distance
between depth
and chance an unfolding
unseen.