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alcohol helps musical efforts
Sunday, January 14 2001
Today is my mother Hoagie's birthday. She was born in 1937, but I'm too lazy to do the math myself.
I'm gradually coming to realize something troubling about my place in the creative universe. I have a lot of skills and a lot of toys and a lot of interests, and yet I find myself feeling vaguely miserable because I only have time to do one thing very well. But I can't decide what that one thing will be, and so I end up doing nothing. Productivity and focus would come a whole lot easier if I had a more limited range of skills and capabilities. That was the case back a few short years ago; that's how I was able to crank out so damn many paintings. I could never put forth such a focused effort today. I have too many other things I want to be doing. A lot has been said about how computers unleash creativity, and that may very well be true. But by removing all limitations, we're left in a world increasingly without artifacts, resistance and even, dare I say, style. Without limits to channel our creativity, even the most creative minds are lost in a vast ocean of endless possibilities.
I actually recorded this tune a few days ago, but today I decided to make an MP3: "Lazy Days Are Not Your Problem." Lyrics buried in that song go as follows:
Weakness is no crime
But then you die
Having looked and found yet failed
You still survive.
Lazy days are not your problem
They are all mankind's
Are we set on outerspace
Or content to sit and die?
You keep distracting me
Teasing my desire
You keep rejecting me
And so I turn to fire
Lifting us up off the Earth
Higher and higher and higher.
It looks like I'm on something of a roll tonight. Here's something I recorded just now, firmly based on one of the first guitar patterns I taught myself back in something like 1991: "You Have Arrived." It's all about "the eighties and the nineties and the age of disgrace."
And that was my day. Interestingly, I've found that drinking alcohol (a depressant) helps concentration and motivation when working on music. Paradoxically, conventional attention deficit disorder medications (stimulants) do not facilitate musical focus at all, but do help when working on something like painting.
As I slept tonight, I had dreams about all sorts of interesting music I would soon be making. These dreams were no doubt encouraged by the Morsel I was quietly playing on my computer's CD player. Morsel is a local Ann Arbor, Michigan band and the CD actually belongs to Kim. I ran across it in my stuff the other day while looking for something else. It's pretty varied stuff, but it's all extremely good. In some of the songs you can find what I would venture to say is the best application (perhaps the only good application) of the didgeridoo I've ever heard in western music.
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