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Art

Strike While the Iron is Hot

May 15, 2015May 18, 2015by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

It’s been in my head for quite some time to write a post with this title. Since I now have time to work on it, I am wondering just what it was I was wanted to say. Looks like I Waited Until the Iron Got Cold. Ha! Serves me right for not taking my own advice. Oh well, failure is just as illustrative as success. I shall carry on.

Okay, now that I have pondered it a bit, I can see that a lot of my ideas start with a word or phrase, something meaningful I can riff on. For example, a few years ago I was walking around an abandoned home in the desert of 29 Palms ruminating about how everything eventually goes out of existence when I thought, I should make a video called Extinct. Since I had a video camera with me, I filmed for about an hour, edited soon thereafter and now I have a short film on vimeo and youtube called Extinct.

https://vimeo.com/88217759

As I look at my creative output, I can see that the things I have accomplished are the things I acted on very quickly after having the idea. Thinking about projects is never a good omen for me. Leaping before looking works best creatively.

I am wondering what allows me to act impulsively, in a creative sense, and what throws up a road block.

Time is number one. I have to have at least a little of it. It’s hard to make that first move when work needs to come first. But if I have already made that first move, I can often fit the second, third, and fourth moves into the little crannies of space that open up throughout the day. I love when that happens. So why doesn’t it happen more? Because most of the heavy lifting does need time. Not a smidge or dab but a swath, some substantial amount to maneuver in. Magic doesn’t happen while multitasking.

Next is definition. To do something I have to know what I am doing. To create a video I need to shoot footage, edit footage, edit some more then post it. I’ve done it enough times to know what the process is and to keep going. But if the parameters change, indecision can paralyze the whole project. I think this is where I get stuck the most. For instance, I have finished a video, a piece I worked on for years and now it sits in a password protected vimeo site doing nothing. What’s the point of that? I want to share it but I told some people I was going to submit it to festivals first. So I have to figure out which festivals and how much money I want to spend applying, blah, blah, blah. Why do I have to submit it to festivals anyway? I really don’t know. Because it means I am serious? Am I serious? Are festivals serious? Which festivals are serious? Trying to answer that question leads me to asking what the purpose is, an existential quagmire that never leads to anything except a bad mood. I guess to know what I am doing it helps to have a handy why. And when I can’t find one, I stop moving forward.

That leads to the third obstacle, fear. Fear is imagining a bad outcome. I have a giant project that I got very hopped up about and did a ton of work on and then just up and quit. I didn’t even do myself the curtsey of telling myself I quit. But what else do you call it when you have done nothing in 2 years? In this case I did strike while the iron was hot. I struck a lot. But I didn’t Finish Before it Turns to Rust.

However, and this is a BIG HOWEVER, as in the whole point of the title, because I at least started that project, I could, if I wanted to, pick it back up. Once something comes into existence, however neglected and ill tended, it can be brought back to health and possibly grow to maturity. But if it never even exists, well, it never even exists. It won’t even get to go extinct. I did myself the service of starting a blog post with this title 8 months ago. There wasn’t much there but there was something. There were this sentence:

After years of evidence showing me which ideas went from attraction to intercourse to baby and which ones miscarried and which one never even kissed, I can conclude that for myself, if I don’t get to it right away, I am not going to get to it at all.

The password protected video I mentioned above has now been submitted to several festivals. In fact I interrupted the writing of this to finish that task as it was causing me too much cognitive dissonance not too – thank you blogging.

Art

Not What I Expected

March 31, 2015November 5, 2019by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl8 Comments

The son and husband got on a plane and left me alone in my own home for the first time in over a decade. I have been fantasizing about this scenerio during my motherhood years like other people fantasize about winning the lottery. Expectations ran high.

It will surprise no one that nothing hoped for has came to pass. The biggest culprit by far is a mojo eridicating cold that gets worse not better as the days wear on. It’s pretty hard to live the dream drowning in snot. I also have a significant amount of work. That’s why I am not traveling with the clan in the first place. Shouldn’t be a big deal. I like my work and it’s easier to work when alone. Let’s just say if all I wanted from this holiday was to work, I’d be yelling thank you Santa!

What were my hopes for this period? They are so ridiculously mundane how could their being dashed even register. I wanted to scrub and mop the kitchen floor. I wanted to get everything clean the way I do on the weekends and then enjoy it staying clean all week since nobody including me was going to use anything. If that went well, I thought I would neaten up a couple book shelves. Can you believe it? The fun I had planned! Last but not least, and way less modest, I was going to make some art. The kind you make when no one is bugging you and time is on your side. I don’t know what kind that is, I was curious to find out. I made some a long time ago and it was interesting.

What I have actually been doing is not cleaning anything, and I mean ANYTHING, including not washing out a frying pan soaking in water that had been used to sauté shrimp 5 days ago. The smell under that lid, I shudder. Poor Andy, do you think he will have to clean it when he gets back?

This is so not like me.

All of my meals have been either take out or almonds or coffee. I have watched quite a few episodes of Justified. I like Raylan. I like the way he smiles really friendly when he is mad. I want to try that.

Last night my throat hurt so I heated up some ginger tea, added the cayenne, honey and lemon like you do. You know what could take that drink to another level? Bourbon. It did. That’s my accomplishment, turing my home remedy into a cocktail. Cheers!

And you know what, that must have helped. I’m not about being bitter and boiling in disappointment so I have a new goal for this “break” and I am well on my way to achieving it. I am going to turn Decaf into MY dog. He’s our family dog and he loves me already but his heart belongs to Andy who has deserved this as he feeds him and does all the late night dogs walks as well as most of the other walks. But now I have the upper hand. I am giving him cheese and letting him eat all the gross meat bits he can find in the park. He is sitting on my lap right now. In life you have got to roll with the punches, even when you thought you were going to smell the roses.

Art, Culture, Technology

Privacy vs. Internet Communication

February 3, 2015February 3, 2015by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl10 Comments

I am enmeshed in an ongoing mental dilemma regarding communication on the Internet. Is it okay for me to write a blog, post stuff on Facebook, comment on stuff on Facebook, share photos of my kid, let people see my art, etc. or should I maintain my privacy and by extension maintain control over unintended consequences?

Obviously, as you are reading this, I’ve made a decision to write, however, I still hotly contest that decision in my head everyday and with every post.

When I wrote anything in the past, it was almost only for an audience of one. I would write a letter or an email to “X”. I didn’t have to analyze very hard what was appropriate and inappropriate for “X” to know. I could filter almost unconsciously. Facebook has been a real conundrum in that when I go there to write, I am potentially addressing 100s of people. I can’t remember who they all are. I do know that they are a wide net of intimate and casual, professional, familial and past relationships. There is no obvious one size fits all writing style. To enjoy Facebook I have had to do two things: #1 – adopt and strictly follow a set of rules about what kind of content I can post and #2 – accept that I might be communicating with someone that I would rather I wasn’t, shrug my shoulders and think oh well. My rules are: Never post anything political, religious or contentious. But of course everything is political, religious or contentious to somebody which is why this is such a damn dilemma. I don’t want to get into it on Facebook. I don’t particularly want to get into it off of Facebook either, but if I do, at least I have the benefit of picking my conversational partner and getting into it in private.

You could say to me, jeez louise, just don’t post if you are so hung up. That’s reasonable. Or is it? Nobody has to do Facebook, right? Nobody had to try the Model T either, or use the first phone or get a computer or fly in the air but most eventually did. I want to be here now, participating in history, doing the stuff humans do. I want to see what it’s all about. What is interesting to me is not deciding to do it or not do it, but thinking about what it is. This is a sea change, all of us writing to each other in mass rather than privately one on one. It adds to and changes our persona. Before, perhaps, we had various personas, suitable for the occasion. Now we have an additional new virtual persona, suitable for everyone at any time and affecting the other personas since this new persona interacts with nearly everybody we know whether that interaction even registers in our consciousness. It’s bizarre, at least compared to the past. In the past, if you made a connection with another human, you probably knew about it.

My generation, and the ones on either side of me, resides in a pivotal moment in history. We will be the last people to know what it was like to have privacy. We existed before the Internet, iPhones, social media, digitized photos, emails, texts, search buttons and credit cards. As everything becomes digital, everything becomes public. Information used to be more material and therefore more stationary but now it’s digital, accruing, multiplying and permanent (at least as long as we have electricity). That changes how we communicate. If you don’t like it and want to opt out, you really can’t. You would just be an ant saying no to a rainstorm.

So we might as well get with it right? I value connection, nuance and specificity so on Facebook I try to post things that are in alignment with those values. As I have gotten used to posting on Facebook, I find I want to go a step further into public communication and share my thoughts in a more nuanced way on certain topics. Hence, this blog.

Because of the Internet, I now have the chance to do this new thing, communicate with everybody, or at least throw my virtual hat in the virtual ring with everybody else’s virtual hats. I don’t have to persuade anyone to post this for me. I can just put it out there. I can now join the ranks of those people who tell it like they see it. And all without being vetted by another. How modern.

The price of admission is random; I don’t have to pay until some arbitrary and unknown time. The price of admission may be getting hit with whatever pie someone wants to throw at me and knowing anyone who cares to see me get hit with that pie can, including my mom, my friends and you. Or maybe it’s not pie in my face at all, maybe it’s the quieter humiliation of the pie I baked, brought to the party and watched, as nobody even tasted. In my over active and anxiety riddled imagination I am worried I’ll get doxxed because I use the f-word when really it’s more likely that nobody will even know I said I was a feminist because they will be too busy paying attention to things that interest them more. If the first half of that sentence doesn’t make sense, google #gamergate. It has nothing to do with me except for freaking me out that online communication is dangerous.

In general I prefer the now to the past so it makes sense that when weighing the merits of anonymity vs. public persona, I am taking advantage of this new opportunity to shout to the rafters and write in a public forum. Meaning, I already tried being private, so why not now try this, just because I can? When in Rome and all that. I did it before when I started posting videos to YouTube 6 months after YouTube started. I don’t regret that at all, in fact I am very proud of my work there (https://www.youtube.com/eaglecrowowl). I had the same level of uncertainty and trepidation. You really can’t know if it’s a good idea until it’s too late. Mostly I feel a combination of nothing ventured, nothing gained and what the hell, it’s not like anyone is paying close attention. We are all going to die, and maybe sooner even then we think, and with that in mind, it just doesn’t seem like a big deal.

Does anybody else think about this shit?