Titleofmagazine.com was hacked yesterday so the writing section will be down until I get that cleaned up.
Media Diet: City, Dollhouse, Duckling
Somebody went and made that New York By Elevated Public Transit video we’ve all collected scraps for. And a damn good job.
I would also submit for your consideration the unembeddable video for Can’t Stop Feeling. A sight gag that stays fresh for the whole 3 minutes.
>>Free dollhouse plans http://www.letsbuildadollhouse.com/
>>One of the greatest things to come out of the Occupy movement is a greater awareness among citizens of how their government works and what people’s rights are in regards to speech, assembly and public space. Notably, how those in power do their damnedest to ignore all those things. Here’s a fun little bit of home work: http://whownspace.blogspot.com/2011/12/occupy-department-of-buildings.html
>>Ugly Duckling Presse online chapbook archive http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/online-reading/
>>Projection mapping and sharpie of the sort of crystal/fractal/gridded mountains I paint obsessively. I need to get close to this and see it. Badly. http://www.creativeapplications.net/environment/eyjafjallajokull-vvvv-events-environment-inspiration/
>>Article on Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis http://www.gnosis.org/pkd.biography.html
>>”Welcome to the Official web page of The African Federation of Free States of Africa, also known as the African League for Peace and Prosperity. The Federation is an Alliance of Sovereign African States, it’s aims and purpose are to promote Democracy, Freedom and Peace in Africa.” Equatorial Africa divided by cultural groupings into potential, unrecognized states. http://www.africafederation.net/
Categories: brain mulch
Tags: africa, media diet, New York, Occupy, online reading, poetry, print, videos
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Bliptronic 5000′s Notes
I’ve had my Bliptronic 5000 for a few months now. Pretty fun little toy. I bought it to hack the thing but the tradeoff doesn’t seem to be worth it for my needs. Hooking it up to effects or just processing after it’s in the computer seems to do the trick. (a pitch bend wheel would be nice, though… maybe I’ll make a box that does just that)
Anyway, the one thing that hampered me in using it in any sort of song construction is that I didn’t know what the notes were. I am not gifted with the ability to jam. I may even be tone deaf. However, I did receive six years of mandatory music class so I know my way around those notes with their names and their sharps and the bippity boppity and so on. It’s just some other kind of math to me.
After the fact, I realized that it’s nearly impossible that someone hasn’t gone and posted this exact info already but that’s not how my brain works all the time. So I loaded a chromatic tuner onto my phone–gStrings Free– and cut a strip of sticker to label the rows of buttons down the side.
C to C, no sharps, no flats. Ya got 8 notes. Go forth and rock out.
Reading: Spaces of Banana Control
If the title alone doesn’t grab you, I don’t know what I can do for you.
Bushman Lives. You Sit.
I was motivated to check just now and it has been 7 months since I last bothered to get anything up on Title of Magazine. It’s a site that has shrunk to a popular Twitter feed, now run by my dear friend Adam Orbit. For a long time, Title was my excuse to sit in the manner described by my lifelong favorite author Daniel Pinkwater in the (radio?) essay “And Zen I Wrote”. To surmount the problem of not being able to get started writing, Pinkwater reduced the assignment to simply sitting at a desk for an hour. Just sitting was enough. An accomplishment. There would, of course, be pencil and paper nearby and he would invariably get bored enough to start fooling around with them and inadvertently some writing would get done. After awhile, this one hour assignment would become two hours and on until eventually his body had learned the chief skill of any writer: sitting still long enough to bilge out the words to the page.
I’d love to offer a quote but my bookshelf lacks a copy of Fishwhistle at the moment. (Wasn’t aware until now that there’s a Fishwhistle restaurant down in Maryland)
Anyway, Title was my head-clearing/sit down for a bit and get started exercise for the better part of two years until it started becoming its own sort of work. A weird little beast. Since then, I’ve been retooling the whole song and dance around the act of sitting down and writing–different tools, routines, motivations, little games. Which loops back to Pinkwater again…
He’s serializing another novel, Bushman Lives! It’s a nice little motivating brain snack to sit down and read a chapter then get down to work. Doesn’t always go like that, what with the bottomless well of distraction that is sitting down to a computer but it’s something.
11/14/11
Not a whole lot of actual goddamn writing got done this weekend. More like digging around in what I had, getting reacquainted with some dirty corners of the narrative. Still, it’s work that needed to be done.
Googled up a solution to the Automator issue. Roughly: http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/ss/Automate-Opening-Multiple-Applications-And-Folders_2.htm Now to add that to the netbook so I can jump right into it.
Speaking of the Netbook, I’ve been taking it to work with me for the long commutes, especially the ferry. Fits about the same as a hardcover book so why not. Well, aside from needing to get through two hardcovers I’m trying to read right now. 1491 and American Gods.
Covered my desktop with paper so as to better write notes, inventories and to-dos. Looks the classier side of schizophrenic.
An idea that sprung upon me today: exploit the monkey-see/monkey-do wiring in the brain (mirroring neurons) by watching videos of behavior I want to emulate. Like sitting down at a desk and grinding it out. Rasterbated up a door sized image of Daniel Pinkwater at his typewriter. Not action packed enough, I think. Only found an active shot of Bukowski at his typewriter but a lifesize Bukowski in your room is a bit rough to look at every day, regardless of my admiration for his poems. Might be a cool idea for a project: taking portraits or videos of writers I admire at work, or even pretending to be.
Next up: assignments. Some sort of system for breaking down the tasks of filling out the first third of the novel and fleshing out some pieces that are sorta just assumed and left hanging. The Real Work of It.
Also: need more red wine. For motivation.
Also: get the website going. Use automation process for creating instant header images for posts from randoms craps I’ve got lying around. Crop, expand, filter, B&W then upload and open WordPress. Make it effortless and you might actually do it.
Categories: howsyourwritinglife
Tags: Automator, Daniel Pinkwater, novel, rasterbator, tools, writing
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11/11/2011
Worked (still working, actually) on the damn novel today for a few solid hours. Experimented with the sitting in a cafe full of other people typing on laptops thing. Went fairly well. This occurred at Cafe Grumpy in Greenpoint. Pretty good ambiance. What it’s got over the library is better hours of operation, no children and an obligation to be constantly pouring caffeine down my gullet as the price of being there.
Mostly a meta day. Organizing notes, putting already written pieces together and stitching them together with words. Did a massive overhaul of where everything sits, creating a good number more folders. The idea is to make it seem less like a big heap of gibberish and more like a clean streamlined process, like on cooking shows where they have all their ingredients pre-chopped and sitting in nice neat bowls, ready for the pan.
The new major categories that everything is filed in are:
+ A NewOrg (the actual novel, separated into files that roughly correspond to unequal sized chapters)
+ Acts and Threads (writing not yet organized into chapters but split into where it generally fits in the narrative, chronologically or thematically. both reference and holding tank for writing that will get pasted into chapters)
+ Characters (writing/notes specifically about one character or another. both reference and holding tank for writing that will get pasted into chapters)
+ META Things (inside baseball. talk about themes, design, marketing, to-dos, schedules, etc. no words that will actually turn up in the finished text.)
+ Notes and Components (writing that has yet to find a home, scraps of dialog, mulch for creating something)
+ Previous Schemas (obsolete means of organization. Scrivener files, old chapter systems, archives)
+ Tangents and Research (background material, things to consult, media diet)
To take it to the next level, I think I’m going to define the sort of files I like to have open and at the ready when I’m writing and whip up a macro to open them all at one go. I’m familiar with doing that on Windows but I’m still Automator illiterate, despite using Macs since ’04. Time to fix that.
AUTOMATION FURY!
Alright, time to actually write something, instead of just shoving at all around.
Categories: howsyourwritinglife
Tags: Automator, novel, organization, process, writing
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