The internet-as-tower-of-babel metaphor has always been a good one, millions of voices shouting across each other. Blogging allows anyone to publish solipsistic drivel for a worldwide audience – please excuse me if I lapse a bit here. The shorthand went badly so I’m angry at myself.
Advance warning: this entry has me ranting for a bit and then builds up to a dark-secret confessional at the end which you really won’t want to know about. I just post for the sake of keeping everything transparent. I can’t handle secrets, which is maybe why I find the idea of writing shorthand – which people say must be cool as you can write ‘secret code’ – quite unappealing. Like learning a foreign language just for the swear words, kind of sterile. Communication is what matters. But in this case the entry is just me ranting to myself and you should pull out before the ending, WHICH IS MARKED IN CAPITALS.
The structure of the year since February has been divided into three main activities. There’s shorthand, the rest of the journalism course, and everything else in life. Or four if you count sleep. There’s enough time to do three of them. Unfortunately I can’t function without sleep (one reason for getting out of the film industry) so one of the others had to go. It’s not like I’ve been slack this year (well, maybe the odd day here and there). Some things I’ve done include writing a 9000-word book chapter on Wellington improvised music; performing in the Bomb the Space, Word, and Meatwaters festivals; applying to Creative NZ for funding to release a CD and tour the North Island; submitting a script to Radio NZ’s ‘Open Story Season’; getting my music distributed by Eclipse Records in America; and (re)starting the Ascension Band, with plans afoot to put on a Fringe show in February.
But it was either all that or shorthand (or maybe all that AND shorthand but not the rest of the course work, which would just be silly; or all that and shorthand and the rest of the coursework but no sleep… you get the idea). Focussing exclusively on the course and putting everything else on hold was not an option for me – although those who did take it are getting much better marks.
Or maybe I’m just coming up with an artifical rationalization and I really am lazy. Shorthand classes started off slow & boring and gradually gained momentum until they became fast & frustrating & highly stressful. And every day I could think of a dozen things I’d rather be doing than shorthand practice, so the odds were against it. I have picked up the theory though, and I can actually write shorthand – just not word for word at high speed.
The chief paradox/frustration in my life is that the creative activities which I do put a lot of effort into make absolutely, in fact less than, no money. I sell a disc every three months on average, which is far overtaken by the stream of discs that get sent off for review or traded or given to people who helped make the music. Or simply stolen - this has happened. Bloody filmmakers (not you Amy). The last gig I did was great fun but I didn’t get paid for it and my guitar lead went missing – so running at a loss. Now it's not that money is the motivation for making artwork - if it were surely I could find far better ways. Having a creative outlet is simply an innate psychological imperative, not too far behind breathing & food & all the other necessities. But it becomes a nuisance when it intrudes onto other things, and seeing some kind of return on it would at least give a sense of it being acknowledged. As I'm the one spending money on it it looks like mere self-gratification (or masturbation) whereas art is meant to be a form of communication, which is all about getting across to other people.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d taken up the saxophone at intermediate as I vaguely thought of, or done tertiary music study instead of something career-focussed (like a BA in Theatre & Film maybe… stop sniggering). I’d have some musicianship by now. On the other hand high school music classes are pretty uninspiring from what I’ve heard. I’m attracted to dissonance, looseness, the moments that sound a little bit ‘off’. It was Bob Dylan who got me started on the whole subject of music, and he was best known for being ‘that guy who can’t sing’. But he somehow gets away with it in a pop context, whereas having a style that’s mostly based on disruption & dissonance means I’m pretty unpalatable to most listeners. It’s hard enough for me to get a gig, let alone become popular.
I used to compare myself to Dylan, pacing myself against him. I got my first album finished at age 19 and it was all original material, whereas it took him until 21 and that was mostly folk covers. So I had a head start on him. But by age 22 he’d written some pretty significant songs, 23 he was accelerating wildly, traveling the world and breaking boundaries, and at 24 he’d changed the face of popular music. I haven’t done too badly, I’ve got a modest back catalogue by now, but I haven’t been able to do music fulltime or make a living from it. I wouldn’t even want to. I figured out last year that Dylan overtook me by moving to New York at 20, playing music fulltime, getting a major label to distribute his discs and a manager, and having a forceful personality. I’m in New Zealand, have a scattershot approach which has to include study & jobs & whatever, am a DIY guy languishing in obscurity, and am fairly quiet by nature. He had seven or eight albums by this point and was a multi-millionaire, I’ve got five which have all yet to reach triple-figure sales and am running at a loss – bah! Anyone who wants to manage me and/or distribute my albums please feel free to submit me a tender.
I’ve also got the ongoing problem that despite all my musical learning & development, I still basically can’t play for shit. There’s a theory that the essence of creativity is working within limitations – my limitations are technical ones so my creative work is about finding ways to get around them. I can function well within my own idiosyncratic ‘noisy’ (rather than ‘noise’ which is a recognized genre that I don’t fit into) sphere, and if something melodic is needed I can hopefully get someone else to play it. So maybe my role is to be the coordinator/organizer guy. Seems to be that way with the Ascension Band anyway. It’s a good role to have. Nigel’s the musical director, even though I came up with the overall structure of the piece we did… I’m rambling.
But yeah, anyway. Chief paradox. The art doesn’t make money, and art and ‘real life’ (for want of a better word – meaningless phrase really) get in the way of each other. I’m interested in theories of creativity – hopefully an excess of theory doesn’t interfere with my ability to actually create – hence as much time is spent writing about the music as actually playing it (or maybe it’s just having a blog outlet). Creation is something to do with energy and letting it flow. When the qi flows, everything feels totally easy and natural. Tension creates blockages – it’s hard to do anything creative when stressed out or depressed or wallowing in self-pity.
It seems like the people who excel at anything do so because of single-minded dedication, doing one thing fulltime, and beyond what most people would handle. Whereas maybe I've made a mistake in spreading myself too thin, trying to do several things without mastering any of them. That's even one of the things that attracted me to journalism - the chance to not be a specialist in one field but to learn a bit of everything. But even journalism's too narrow a field, I want to be a novelist and a musician and a conservationist as well. I'm thinking of going the teaching-English-in-Asia route next year but maybe that's just another excuse for me to shift tack and avoid committing to something yet again? I very much doubt I'd do it for a career.
This was going to be (even) more of a rant about shorthand. I may well have just flushed my course fees and a year’s hard study down the toilet. The writing practice, and getting most of it published has been good. The general broadening of horizons, political awareness and knowledge of how cities and communities work has been good. The shorthand has been horrible. And I don’t feel like I know the people on the course well enough to be long-term friends, which is a pity. On some perverse psychological level I suspect I may have 'chosen to fail' to punish myself (see below, or preferably don't). I'm not the only one who didn't get it but we are in a minority.
My memory of 1999 to mid-2002 is starting to grow dim. Before that I was in New Plymouth so it’s a different part of life. Mid-2002 on seems to have a kind of narrative of its own, a ‘growing up’ or disillusionment period. Which is not to say it was all or even mostly bad – parts have been excellent.
Continued rambling – abandon structure / linear argument.
One thing that's made 2004 distinctive is the state of my two index fingers. There's a scar on my left one from where I accidentally cut it with a (surprisingly sharp) kitchen knife in February. And my right one has had a wart on the side. But just in the last week or two the wart's been going away by itself. Odd how it coincides with me moving out of one phase of existence into different territory. My new physical defect is bleeding gums, I must put greater effort into brushing my teeth.
Couple of dreams recently: one about sitting with a group of high school classical musicians waiting to go on stage. I had a huge guitar the size of a double-bass and didn't know any of the music. Was I supposed to 'improvise' along? Then another dream about overloaded electrical wiring giving off smoke, which somehow turned into smoking pot with a couple of guys I knew a few years ago. I haven't smoked pot for a while, in fact I wouldn't know where to get it now. The last time I had a puff on a joint was the one time that writing shorthand's felt remotely natural (though admittedly I was writing slowly). Hmm...
WARNING: DARK SECRET AHEAD, SENSITIVE READERS STOP READING NOW
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Tying together the qi and disillusionment threads somehow – a big disappointment I’ve had was in the first couple of days of January. I was at the Visionz festival, a fairly low-key New Year’s. Nothing stood out musically (except maybe a Celtic violinist on the last day), and some of it was kind of lame. But for chilling out, friendly people, good weather, being outdoors it was perfect. At the time I had this creeping/crawling/horror/death feeling in the back of my mind – long-term readers will recall that last October (just about on the anniversary now, maybe I picked up a bad vibe from it) I had an utterly insane unprotected sexual encounter with a transsexual prostitute and had to spend three months waiting to find out if I’d caught hepatitis or HIV. Fortunately it turned out that I got off with a warning. But in January I was still waiting, and all I could do was attempt to stay calm and enjoy the simple pleasures of being outdoors while I waited til February. There were yoga nidra classes at Visionz, which teach the art of relaxation. I greatly enjoyed them, and felt some of my accumulated tension from 2003 (a difficult year) melt away.
However the yoga wasn’t enough to prevent me from committing an atrocity. To cut a long story short I met a friendly willing girl and had sex with her in a tent on the beach at Abel Tasman national park. I made sure to use a condom, but it broke and that was no excuse anyway. What I did was monstrous, going beyond insanity into outright evil.
I’m not trying to justify it because I can’t, although thankfully there was no disease to spread and I did discover later that she had a boyfriend who she hadn’t told me about. So neither of us should have let it happen. Two wrongs don’t make a right though. Bad karma was generated. I started this weblog to put up the awful truth about the initial prostitute encounter - and whatever else I might do, for the sake of keeping my life totally transparent - but chickened out about posting this extra wrinkle. Anyway there it is. I’m not proud. That is the worst thing I’ve done I promise (OK OK, one more that I still feel guilty about: at an early age telling my babysitter for no reason that she was ugly and I hated her – must have been horrible for her). And I failed shorthand, so I’m at a bit of a low ebb right now. Hopefully rock bottom for this year – the consolation of which is, of course, from here on things can only get better.